Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  Had Pujol and the others been found by an irregular posse of full-blooded radicals, they would most likely have been “taken for a stroll” and executed. But luck was with them: the somber group was brought instead to the local police station, which meant they were in the hands of more moderate Republicans. Pujol breathed a sigh of relief—which quickly evaporated when he was accused of being a deserter. “I was petrified, fearing that I might have to pay with my life,” he recalled. The young lieutenant was taken to the dungeon below the station and locked in a dark, cold cell.

  Day after day, as his warders brought his meals, Pujol could only sit in the gloom and listen to the voices of his jailers and fellow inmates. Every day the door to his cell would be opened and a police officer would sit down and interrogate him. “I kept assuring [them] I had only been in the house because I was engaged to the eldest daughter, but they continued to question me remorselessly.” The war was growing even more savage, with atrocities and mass killings on both sides. The execution of a suspected Nationalist sympathizer would barely be noticed.

  After a week in the jail, in the middle of a freezing night, Pujol awoke with a start. The cell door had swung open and a man he’d never seen before was standing in the dim light. The man whispered for him to get up and come with him. Pujol, half asleep, stumbled after the stranger as he led the prisoner through a bewildering series of hallways and offices in the predawn darkness. Pujol now realized that the man was no policeman; Pujol had unwittingly become part of a jailbreak. At every turn he feared running into a Republican militiaman in one of their mismatched uniforms. A deserter might catch a break, but a deserter-cum-escapee was certain to be shot. Finally, the stranger reached ahead and pushed open a small door, and Pujol felt a rush of cold air against his face. The man handed him a piece of paper and pointed toward the starlit road.

  His fiancée, the pious and prudish Margarita, whom he wasn’t even sure he loved, had saved his skin. She’d contacted a secret Catholic organization called the Socorro Blanco (White Aid), which ran a kind of Francoist underground railroad for fugitives. But now Pujol was on the streets of Barcelona, a hunted man without the identification needed to pass the Republican checkpoints. He looked at the address on the paper and began walking quickly, keeping a sharp eye out for the barricades behind which soldiers stood guard around the clock. The dizzying fall from the dreamy existence of his childhood was nearly complete. “I had … become a criminal.”

  The address led him to the Gothic Quarter, one of Barcelona’s tough and dirty working-class neighborhoods. Pujol climbed the stairs of the apartment building listed on the paper, not daring to turn on the hallway light. Feeling his way forward in the dark, he touched the smooth surface of a wooden door and knocked gently. He heard footsteps. A woman slowly opened the door. Without a word, she gestured him inside. The flat was a Socorro Blanco safe house occupied by a taxi driver, his wife and their bright-eyed nine-year-old son. Pujol was safe for the time being.

  Unable to get word to his family, Pujol spent his days in the cramped apartment, often hungry, as food in Barcelona was becoming increasingly scarce. When Pujol had to speak to his protectors, they would turn up the radio to muffle the conversation. Otherwise, he lived in silence. He helped the boy with his math and history lessons—the schools in Barcelona had closed during the war—by whispering his corrections in the nine-year-old’s ear. Outside, he could glimpse fathers and mothers lining up for food and could feel the impact as bombs thudded into nearby houses. At night, Pujol had difficulty sleeping, his vivid imagination serving up nightmares in which a sudden knock on the door was followed by arrest and a firing squad.

  The only relief from the boredom were moments of unexpected terror. One day, when he was whiling away the time with the taxi driver’s son, with the parents away, the knock on the door finally came. “Policía,” a voice shouted. Pujol silently pointed to the boy’s bedroom, and the boy nodded. As he hid himself, Pujol heard the child open the front door and inform the policemen that his mother was shopping and his father was out fighting the fascists. The boy invited the men in and casually showed them the apartment as they asked detailed questions. When he came to the room where Pujol lay hiding under the bed, the boy flung the door open, hit the light switch and in a bored voice announced that this was where he slept. The police nodded and passed by.

  After months of this precarious existence, in the summer of 1937 the taxi driver took his family to live in a small village in Lleida, in western Catalonia. Pujol was left alone. He had to strain to be completely quiet, as the neighbors believed the apartment had been left empty—no radio, no clattering of dishes, no singing to pass the time. When he walked across the floor, he shuffled to keep the noise down. The apartment windows were kept shut even during the blazingly hot Barcelona summer, so Pujol roasted; when winter came, his teeth chattered with cold. He couldn’t turn on a lamp, afraid the glow from behind the drawn curtains would be seen from the street. Pujol’s eyes, like those of a nocturnal animal, became sensitive to bright light. Only the surreptitious visits of a girl from the Socorro Blanco with packages of food under her arm broke the monotony and kept him from starvation. She came every three days, but as the weeks passed the time between visits stretched longer and longer.

  Pujol was a naturally buoyant person, a lover of life, but in time he fell into a deep depression. He lost nearly fifty pounds, and his skin grew pale from lack of sunlight. “I began to look like a decrepit old man of forty, even though I was only twenty-five. I became desperate and knew I could not hold out much longer.” Pujol asked the volunteer to get him fake papers so that he could walk the streets again, and after a long delay she came back with a forged ID showing he was too old for the army. It wasn’t a difficult thing to pull off: Pujol had aged so much that his appearance matched the fake details.

  The fugitive walked out into the streets of Barcelona and at first failed to recognize his native city, with its burned-out husks of buildings and its citizens in rags. Distraught over the reports of fresh bloodshed coming over the radio daily, he decided it was time to leave Spain. “The years of enclosure and persecution shaped my personality and most of my dreams were dashed and destroyed. The bitterness of so many hours of dejection and woe, deprivations, deceptions … made my spirit into a rebel one, more disobedient and obstinate.” In order to plan an escape over the border, he first found work managing a chicken farm in Girona in the northeast, not far from France. He nodded as his neighbors repeated the latest Republican slogans; he was an undercover pacifist, unattached to either side, already learning how to be a kind of double agent in his own country. In his free time, Pujol went for long walks in the hills to build up his strength for the ordeals ahead, carefully noting the distances in a small notebook. He was walking thirteen miles a day, then twenty, until one day he arrived back in Girona and realized he’d hiked forty miles, all the way to the top of Mount Puigmal, from which he could see the French border. His health slowly returned.

  There was one problem with his escape plan: border guards had recently shot and killed a number of fugitives. Pujol contemplated fleeing but soon changed his mind. Instead, he decided to go over to the Nationalist side, where he hoped he’d “be left alone to live my own life.” To do that, he first had to rejoin the Republicans, go through training, get his commission and be sent to the front. Only then could he make a run for the enemy lines. Even to begin the ruse, Pujol had to deceive. Using a false name and forged papers, he went to the barracks in Las Atarazanas and signed up for the army. The Republican officers cheered his selflessness; Pujol’s fake ID showed that he was past the age for compulsory service, but here he was, a diehard volunteering for the cause.

  After two weeks of bare-bones training, Pujol was sent to Montblanc, near the Ebro River. The war, and the Nationalist army, was only a few miles away. Pujol volunteered as a signals officer and was sent to the front as part of one of the International Brigades made famous by Hemingway and Orwell. The appeal of th
e war had faded for the Europeans and Americans, however, and Pujol found himself among fellow Catalans, often shooting at their cousins and uncles a few hundred yards away across a hilly landscape cut into zigzag trenches and pitted with bomb craters. The casualty rate was over 50 percent.

  Though he’d claimed to be experienced in signals, the new recruit didn’t know Morse code or semaphore. Instead of sending messages, he was ordered to lay telephone cables from the rear command areas to the front lines. On the northern bank of the Ebro, he ducked as a rebel bomber screamed overhead and dropped explosives on a Republican pontoon, which was being used to ferry combatants across the river. “The bombs hissed as they descended, thunderous explosions followed and the air was filled with millions of splinters as huge columns of water gushed upward.”

  Pujol took up his position in a trench cut into a slope of the Sierra de la Fatarella and listened to the voices of the Nationalist troops as they called through their megaphones, mocking the half-starved enemy, asking them if they were eating lentils again. That was the only Republican meal: lentils, perhaps with a trace of lard or a bit of pork. Desertion was rife. The punishment, if you were caught, was death. One day, Pujol watched as the company barber, who’d been caught trying to sneak over to Franco’s lines, was stood up in front of the battalion and shot. His corpse was left to rot in the sun as a warning to the other men. Pujol decided to risk an escape anyway.

  Walking the front line, checking the telephone cables for breaks or cuts, Pujol kept an eye on the no man’s land between the trenches. He could see the helmets of the Francoists outlined against the setting sun. He listened to the chatter from the other side, trying to zero in on the trench closest to the Republican lines. Finally, one evening early in the new year of 1938, he picked up two hand grenades and steeled himself for “the craziest act I ever did in my long and adventurous existence.” Two other ragged and starving Republicans had agreed to go across with him. They waited for the right moment.

  The sky was clear and a full moon lit up the battlefield. At around 7 p.m., the three men crouching in their trench turned to each other and nodded. As Pujol adjusted his gear one final time, the other two, their nerves frayed to the breaking point, startled him by jumping out of the trench and dashing wildly down the hillside, sending a small avalanche of rocks and pebbles ahead of them. A sentry called out. Pujol wasn’t yet out of the trench and already his cover was blown. Prepared to die to escape an army he’d grown to hate, he climbed the trench wall and pitched himself into no man’s land.

  Stumbling down the hill in the half darkness, Pujol heard a patrol take up the chase behind him. He made it down the slope and crossed the river at the foot of the mountain, then angled toward a stand of pine trees that offered cover from the bright moonlight. Once he reached the trees, however, he became disoriented and began running uphill, before realizing he was ascending the same small mountain he’d just scrambled down. He was panicking, heading straight back to the Republican lines and certain death.

  Bullets cut through the night air around him. Pujol reversed course as tiny geysers of dirt spattered against his wool pants. He sped up, taking giant steps, half running and half falling down the hill toward a patch of reeds that lay at the bottom. When he reached the stand, he rolled into the reeds and out of the moonlight as the patrol nipped at his heels. Panting, he tried to control his breathing as the soldiers beat the grass with their guns, hoping to flush him out. Their voices, angry and frustrated, grew closer. “There were six of them. I lay there shaking in fear and covered with sweat,” he later wrote. He began to pray to the Virgin Mary to keep him hidden.

  Pujol felt the cool metal of the grenades in his sweating palms. If he pulled the pins and lobbed the grenades at the voices, he’d be free. But he was lying in this dirt because he despised bloodshed. He couldn’t do it. After a tense fifteen minutes, he dashed up the opposite hill—the correct one this time—to a nearby stand of trees. He found a narrow ditch just wide enough to hide a man. He lay down in it, covering himself with leaves and twigs. The voices of the patrol, close by, soon stopped; the men were taking a cigarette break. Pujol peered through the leaves and saw the silhouettes of their faces against the sky.

  The Francoists began their nightly banter, their mocking voices floating over the reed bed. “Hey, Reds, what’ve they given you to eat today?” A rain cloud passed in front of the moon, sending a shadow over the battlefield. Pujol placed his two grenades on dry ground and slowly reached down to untie his boots, listening for any change in the soldier’s voices, any hint they’d heard him stirring. Now his boots were off and he could tiptoe silently. He crouched down, making his way through the reed bed and out the other side.

  His bare feet gripped the loose gravel of the hillside as he raced uphill and threw himself over two stone walls, using the shouts of the Nationalists as his beacon. His heart racing, he suddenly heard a voice that seemed impossibly close to him. “We’re coming to you,” the man said. Pujol nearly fainted, thinking the patrol had caught him—but it was one of his fellow escapees. He had made it across.

  Once they were safely behind Nationalist lines, Pujol and the other two fugitives were presented with plates piled with food. They ate until their stomachs hurt. Stone-faced interrogators put them through “endless hours” of questioning: Where were the Republican positions? What was morale like? Next, the men were sent on a supply train back to Zaragoza, where they were herded into the concentration camp at the University of Deusto, in the Basque province.

  Pujol had risked his life for freedom. Now he found himself dressed in filthy rags like all his fellow prisoners, watching lice races in the camp barracks, complete with betting and cheering sections for each contestant. He slept on the hard wooden floor, his days ruled over by abusive guards. He fell ill and was brought, vomiting, to the camp’s infirmary. His dream of liberty, like all the others, had gone up in bitter smoke.

  Pujol had only one thing of value left, a beautiful and expensive fountain pen, a reminder of his past as a child of Barcelona’s upper class. He sold the pen to a soldier and, with the proceeds, bought a much cheaper pen, some writing paper and stamps. Pujol wrote to everyone he knew, relatives and distant acquaintances that he remembered from his boyhood. Finally, a kindhearted family friend, a brother superior of the order of San Juan de Dios, the Catholic mission his father had supported, showed up at the camp to berate the Nationalists and secure his release. Again his long-suffering family had come to the rescue of their luckless son.

  Pujol was taken to Palencia and then on to a hospital in the city of Burgos, where he was diagnosed with acute bronchitis and sent to the wards. At last he could enjoy small pleasures, such as sleeping in a clean bed and playing cards with his fellow patients as the daughters of the best families of Burgos cared for them. One especially caught his eye, a dark beauty named Araceli, who worked as a nurse and whom he later ran into at the Hotel Condestable. The hotel had one other guest that would have an impact on Pujol’s life: Kim Philby, war correspondent for the London Times, Russian spy and future head of the Spanish section of MI6.

  The Civil War ended on April 1, 1939, with General Francisco Franco taking control of a broken, hate-addled nation.

  Pujol was in as bad shape as his country. “Years of hiding and persecution had made me bitter; my dreams had been shattered; my life seemed to have been nothing but disappointments and privations; I hated being a soldier and longed to escape to a new life.” He received his discharge from the army but refused to join the Spanish Phalanx of the Assemblies of the Nationalist Syndicalist Offensive, also known as the Falange, the party headed by General Franco. Doing so would have greased the wheels for Pujol in business and social life, but by now he despised the fascists as much as he had the communists.

  The war had remade Juan Pujol. It had eaten up his youth, left him physically wasted, mocked his ideals, disillusioned and humiliated him, reduced him to a pale ghost. His family fortune was gone and his beloved country was
in ruins. He’d lost most of his hair. He looked far older than he was. He had no medals or war service with which to kick off a brilliant career.

  But the conflict had given as well as taken. He found himself walking the streets of a blasted, mourning Madrid no longer willing to settle for an anonymous life as a chicken farmer in the back reaches of the capital. Instead of grandiose dreams, he now had something more world-ready: a survivor’s wit sharpened to a razor’s edge. He’d learned how to talk his way past firing squads and to convince people of whatever he wanted to convince them. He wasn’t the hero he’d wanted to be; he was far from being his noble father. “I am only his shadow,” he would later write. But he was a far tougher man than he’d been a few years before. It was as if the stuff of his fantasies had been brutally reprocessed into a working knowledge of how human beings functioned under pressure.

  Even more importantly, Pujol realized that playing it safe had gotten him nowhere. Why remain a chicken farmer when the world was being turned upside down? He was willing to risk things again —everything, if necessary. And he’d found someone who was just as eager to take the plunge with him.

  3. Araceli

  ARACELI GONZÁLEZ CARBALLO, the dark stunner of a nurse that Pujol had met in the Hotel Condestable, was a dreamer like Pujol. Growing up, her mother nicknamed her Antoñita la Fantástica, after the fictional character in a series of popular children’s books starring a Madrid girl who traveled the world chasing adventure and who, as one reader put it, “symbolized extravagance and almost a hint of madness.”