Pujol’s family was caught up in the chaos. His sister and mother were arrested as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ because their names were on a parish list for a visit to the monastery at nearby Montserrat. Anti-clerical fever was at its height, and they were only saved by a friend in the anarchist trade union, who managed to get them released. Their jailers never found out that during those first few days of the conflict, Mercedes had been hiding other Catholics in her home, including a priest called Celedonio. He would later play an important role in Pujol’s story.
Meanwhile, Pujol’s brother Joaquín was press-ganged into the army to defend the Republic against the rebels. He managed to escape from the front, crossing a great distance almost naked through the snow before finding refuge with family members in the Pyrenees. The experience took a heavy toll, and years later Pujol would blame it for his brother’s death at the age of sixty-two.
Elena, Pujol’s younger sister, was even less fortunate. Her boyfriend was arrested by the city’s revolutionaries as a suspected Franco sympathiser, taken to the hills nearby and shot.
During these difficult first few days and weeks, Pujol remained in his fiancée’s house, not daring to walk out into the street, too frightened to try to get out of the city, where the danger was greatest. Patrols and checkpoints were everywhere on the lookout for ‘fifth columnists’ – a phrase recently coined by one of the rebel generals – and he lacked any forged paperwork that might aid his escape.
The weeks turned into months. He could not appear at the window, or speak in a loud voice for fear of being heard by the neighbours. Whenever anyone knocked at the door he had to hide in a back room.
Shortly before Christmas armed men burst into the flat. Pujol was in the kitchen breaking nuts with a hammer, but he heard the noise as the militiamen began their search. As things turned out, they were not looking for him, but for valuables left in safekeeping with his host family by others who had fled the city. Someone – they did not know who – had tipped the authorities off. It did not take long for the search party to find what it was looking for – gold and jewels stuffed inside a door frame. But as the men passed through each room in the flat, they also discovered Pujol with the hammer in his hand. Along with Margarita’s father and brother, he was whisked away.
Pujol was relatively fortunate that his destination that night was the Police headquarters on the Vía Laietana. It offered some minor guarantee: had he been taken to one of the less formal ‘police’ stations – chekas, they were referred to, after the kangaroo courts of the Russian Revolution – he might well have been killed out of hand. As it was, he was placed on his own in a dark cell, unsure if these moments were to be his last.
He remained there for a week. Then one night, in the early hours, his cell door was opened and he was asked to step out. A mysterious man took him through a labyrinth of empty offices to a small side door which opened out into the street, thrust a piece of paper in his hand with an address on it, and sent him on his way.
Confused and frightened, Pujol set off. It was cold, but thankfully he only had a short distance to go: the address scribbled on the piece of paper was in the Barri Gòtic, the medieval part of the city between the Cathedral and the port. Arriving at a little street just behind the Town Hall, not sure what he was letting himself in for, he walked up the stairs in the dark and knocked softly. A woman opened and silently let him in.
Pujol discovered later that he had been helped by an organisation called Socorro Blanco, a secret Catholic group operating in Republican territory which rescued people who had fallen foul of the authorities. Fearful for his safety in prison as a draft-dodger, Margarita had got in touch with them and they had made efforts to get Pujol freed, using one of their operatives – a woman posing as a ‘revolutionary’ who was having an affair with an officer at the police station.
All this would become clear later. For now he was in hiding again, living in the home of a taxi driver who had been forced to drive soldiers to the Aragón front. His wife and nine-year-old boy offered Pujol what security they could. Again Pujol was reduced to silence, to living inside, never showing his face at a window. Conversations, for example when the taxi driver returned with news from the front, could only take place with the radio on, drowning out any sound of his voice that might be picked up by neighbours.
Months passed. In the mornings the wife went out in search of food, leaving Pujol with her little boy.
One day, while she was gone, the police raided the flat. In the seconds before they managed to get inside, Pujol indicated to the boy that he was going to hide under his bed.
The boy showed the police around with unusual sangfroid, telling them that his mother was out and that his father was at the front fighting the rebels. The policemen looked carefully in each room, finding nothing. When they were about to enter the room where Pujol was hiding, the boy himself opened the door for them, switched on the light and declared it was his own room. At which point the policemen turned and left. Pujol had been saved once again.
He was so grateful that for the next few months he did his best to teach the little boy whatever he could: the schools had closed and his education had suffered. It was a new form of stimulus for Pujol as well, helping to pass the time. But life in the city was getting worse: it was being bombed by the Francoists and the queues for food were getting longer. By the middle of 1937 the taxi driver’s family could stand no more, and decided to leave the flat to stay with relatives out of town.
Pujol was on his own. Socorro Blanco organised thrice-weekly visits to bring him food, but now, with no company at all, Pujol was forced to live in a blackened silence, unable to turn on the lights or make a sound of any kind. He became depressed and withdrawn and his health started to deteriorate. The visits became less frequent, the food rations smaller and smaller. He lost a lot of his hair and over 20 kilos in weight, looking more like a man in his late forties than his mid-twenties.
He knew that he could not remain like this indefinitely. By now it was early 1938 and he had been in the flat for over a year. Fearing for his physical and mental health, he decided that he had to get out. Again, Socorro Blanco helped, providing false identity papers which made him out to be a man too old for military service.
When he stepped out into the street, not only had the city changed thanks to the bombs and revolutions, but so had he. He had been in self-imposed captivity for a year and a half. Through a contact in the Socialist trade union, the UGT, he got a job running a chicken farm in San Juan de las Abadesas, in northern Catalonia, near the border with France. It seemed a perfect place from which to complete his escape.
Slowly he got his strength back, taking long walks once his daily work was done, calculating how far he would have to go to get across the border. Once his preparations were finished, however, and he was about to leave, another group of would-be escapees were involved in a shoot-out near the border with police, and several were killed. As a result, patrols in the area were intensified: just as it had opened, the door to freedom had been closed again.
With the route to France now cut off, Pujol had to think of other ways to get out of Republican Spain. The farm was not a success and made no money, owing to a lack of investment from the union. After a number of arguments over the running of the place, Pujol handed in his resignation and weeks later was back in Barcelona. This time it seemed there was only one way out: to join the Republican army and try to cross over to the Francoist side at the front line.
He decided to chance it and presented himself at a recruitment centre. It was ironic that after so long he should volunteer to join up in the very army he had been trying to stay out of. Yet with his false identity and older appearance, he was greeted with open arms. It was the spring of 1938 and the Republican side was clearly losing the Civil War. Pujol was given basic, two-week infantry training and sent to the front, near the town of Flix on the River Ebro.
Life in the infantry did not appeal to him, and he was determined not to beco
me ‘cannon fodder’, so he lied to his officers, telling them that he knew about telegraphy and Morse code. He was duly sent to a signals unit attached to the International Brigades, but his ignorance about the job was all too evident and eventually he was ordered to lay cables between the trenches and the command post. Finally, his unit was sent to the front line, relieving a force that had lost 50 per cent of its men, largely through desertions to the other side. Morale on the Republican side was low, not helped by the fact that all they had to eat, for every meal of every day, was lentil stew. At night, Francoist troops would call out mouth-watering details of the food that they enjoyed on their side, encouraging the Republican soldiers to try to cross the lines.
Pujol did not need any persuading – that was precisely why he was there. Soon he discovered that others were thinking of attempting the same thing. It was risky. If they failed and were caught they would be shot. On one occasion the company’s barber was executed in front of the entire battalion for an unsuccessful escape attempt. This was the only dead man that Pujol saw in the entire Civil War.
The Francoist lines lay 200 metres away across a valley with a stream running at the bottom. One clear evening, Pujol, ‘starving and disenchanted with life’, decided to make a run for it. Later he would claim it was the craziest thing that he ever did.
Just as he was leaving his trench to head out across no-man’s-land, armed with a couple of hand grenades, two of his colleagues jumped out of their position to escape as well, causing a small landslide of stones. The sentries were alerted by the noise. Pujol hesitated for a moment, but this was, he told himself, his only chance, and he set off with the patrol hot on his heels. At the bottom of the valley he hid in a patch of pine trees, but quickly became disoriented. Once the patrol had gone, he started heading up a hill, thinking he was inching towards the Francoist side, only to discover that he was going the wrong way – back to the Republican positions.
‘Halt!’ came a cry.
‘Don’t shoot,’ Pujol replied coolly. ‘I’m a Republican passing over to the other side.’
Shots rang out. Realising his mistake, Pujol raced once again into the valley, while the patrol rushed down to try to root him out.
Sneaking through the pine groves, he reached a stream, where he lay down in a reed bed, covering himself as best he could with leaves. The patrol came very close, pushing at the undergrowth with their rifle butts. At one point they stopped for a smoke. The full moon appeared from behind a cloud and Pujol could see their silhouettes, only metres away from him.
He started a silent prayer, calling out to the Virgen del Pilar, the Madonna of the Pillar, to save him. He would, he said, pay homage to her in the cathedral of Zaragoza if she saved him then. He clung to the two grenades he had brought with him, wondering if he would have to use them. Just at that moment, the moon was clouded over again, the night became darker, and the patrol moved away.
Pujol stayed where he was for a while, and shortly afterwards the Francoists began their usual banter, calling out to the Republicans on the other side. Pujol decided to use their voices to orient himself, and he got up out of the river bed, took his boots off so that the sound of his footsteps would not give him away, and started the long climb up the slope to the other side. Eventually he made it and, exhausted and suffering from his shredded feet, he was hauled over into their trenches, almost passing out with fright. ‘Don’t worry now,’ he heard them say as he made a final effort to reach them.
Bleeding and hungry, he had crossed the lines successfully. He spent the next couple of days in the Francoist trenches eating as much as he could.
Yet if he thought that his life was about to improve having finally made it out of Republican territory, two years since the Civil War had begun, he was sorely mistaken. Long, tiring interrogations soon began, before he was finally sent off in a goods train to Zaragoza along with other ex-Republican soldiers. From there they were taken to a Francoist concentration camp in Deusto, in the Basque Country. Once again, Pujol, as a former Republican soldier, found himself a prisoner.
The camp had been the university building, yet conditions were harsh. Lice had infested the place, while the men had to sleep on the bare floorboards of the lecture halls. During the day, they congregated around a fountain in the campus, which was the only place they could wash. To pass the time, some of the men would conduct lice races, betting their rations on the result. Pujol had not eaten properly for a long time, and he found that he could not hold down his food. For a while he was put in the infirmary, where he was given a diet of milk and broth to help his digestive tract recover.
By now he had gained some experience in survival: he sold a Parker fountain pen that he had managed to keep hold of, and with the money bought himself a cheaper pen, some paper and stamps. With these he wrote to every family member and friend that he could think of, asking for help. Some answered, others even with small amounts of money, but the response was not enough to get him out.
But help did finally come. Celedonio, the priest whom his mother had sheltered in Barcelona at the start of the war, had managed to get across to Francoist territory and was now the head of a hospital in Palencia, near Salamanca. He travelled to see Pujol in Deusto, insisting to his captors that Pujol was honest, apolitical and Catholic. He then went one step further and called in at the Francoist capital, Burgos, on his way back to Palencia, where he personally vouched for his family friend and made such a noise that within three days he was released from the concentration camp.
At first Pujol was sent to Celedonio’s hospital to recover for a week. By now he was suffering from acute bronchitis, yet he was still obliged to join the Francoist army. In Burgos he enlisted, this time under his own name and giving his true age.
It seemed as though his problems might finally be over. Living the life of a junior officer in the conservative, traditional city of Burgos, he made friends and found a new girlfriend, despite struggling to get by on only one-third-pay. Then one day in December, at a victory celebration after the Francoists had won the Battle of the Ebro, Pujol was caught by his commanding officer exchanging his soldier’s cap with a Carlist militiaman’s red beret. The officer was infuriated – such an act was strictly forbidden. Summoning Pujol to his office the next morning, he struck him hard across the face, ripped the braid off his uniform and sent him down to the cells.
Pujol was incarcerated once again, and soon he found himself being sent with other soldiers to the front lines in Aragón. The Civil War was about to end, yet Pujol was in danger of becoming one of its last casualties.
When he got a chance, he called his girlfriend in Burgos, asking her to pull strings: she worked in the Ministry of War and was friends with an influential general. The plan worked. Three weeks later Pujol was called back from the front and reinstated as a junior officer, working with telegrams and communiqués inside the Francoist General Headquarters. It seemed that finally, after so many years of hardship, he could relax. Pujol lived out the last weeks of the Civil War in Burgos, staying at the Condestable Hotel. There, two days before it ended, he met another young woman, a beautiful and seductive black-haired Galician who had a nursing job. Araceli González would later become his wife.
Curiously, at that time Kim Philby was also in Burgos. Accredited to the Francoist side, he was The Times’s correspondent in the Civil War, and had already been secretly recruited by the Soviets. By now it was early 1939; the Civil War ended on 1 April. Three years later, Philby would be leading attempts from within MI6’s Section V to find a man who had also been a regular face at Franco’s GHQ. Did he and Pujol ever meet in Spain? There is no evidence to the fact, yet the coincidence is curious enough for one Spanish writer, Rafael Fraguas, to conclude that Philby and Pujol did get to know each other during this time.
Did Philby even recruit Pujol as a Soviet agent, as Fraguas suggests? This is a conspiracy too far, one that turns Pujol, history’s greatest double agent, into a triple agent, who was secretly working for Mosco
w all along.
Fraguas’s theory is based on conjecture and nothing has emerged from the Russian archives or anywhere else to support the idea.
But the temptation to speculate about Pujol and his motives is understandable, because little in his story is either simple or straightforward.
6
Spain and Portugal, 1939–41
THE CIVIL WAR was over and Pujol had survived, proud of the fact that despite serving in both armies, he had not fired a single shot in battle. Yet Spain was in a desperate situation. To this day, the post-war years – La Posguerra – hold a place in popular Spanish consciousness as an emblematic time of want and suffering.
Pujol was still a Catholic, but if he had had any idealised notions about what life would be like on the Francoist side, these were quickly undermined. Now the war was over, he suffered much less than many of his fellow countrymen thanks to his position as a demobbed junior officer from the winning side. Yet attempts by friends and colleagues to get him to join the Falange, the Spanish fascist party, were met with firm refusals. He reacted to the ideology of Franco’s Spain as he had to that of ‘Red’ Barcelona: he wanted nothing to do with it: it clashed with the ideas of liberalism and tolerance handed down by his father.
More important than the matter of party membership, however, was that of making a living. Answering an advert in a newspaper, he got the job of manager of the Majestic Hotel, in the upmarket Castellana district of Madrid. The best days of the hotel were behind it by this point, however. Owned by a Gypsy woman called Señora Melero, it had enjoyed something of a reputation during the 1920s and 1930s, but had been used as lodgings for the International Brigades during the Civil War, and had become almost a ruin, a far cry from the ‘majesty’ of its name. There was little that Pujol could do to help it recover its former glory: rationing and austerity severely curtailed his efforts.
The Spy with 29 Names Page 6
