Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  From the Hotel Majestic, he phoned the German embassy. Pujol would tell two versions of what happened next, differing in mostly minor details but focused on the same Abwehr agent. In the first version, a man with a guttural voice, speaking bad Spanish, answered. Pujol, not messing around, asked to be connected to the military attaché. He gave the man some high-flown rhetoric about serving the masters of the “New Europe.” The man asked him to call back the next day. Pujol hung up, pleased, and the next day the man told him to meet a member of the embassy staff the following afternoon at 4:30 at the Café Lyon in Calle Alcalá. This man was described as fair-haired with blue eyes, and he’d be dressed in a light suit and carrying a raincoat over his arm, sitting at one of the tables at the far end of the café. His name was Federico. The voice asked what Pujol looked like and what he’d be wearing the next day. Pujol happily gave him the details and hung up. “My contact with the Germans had started.” (In the second version, the Federico meeting did not happen quite so fast.)

  Pujol was excited but nervous. Going to the British embassy and playing mysterious was dangerous enough, but the Abwehr in Madrid represented an entirely new level of the game. The German embassy in Madrid was a hive of Nazi intelligence; it employed 391 people, 220 of whom were full-time Abwehr officers, split into sections for espionage, counterespionage and sabotage. These officers directed 1,500 agents spread all over Spain, who in turn had their own informers and subagents. The communications of this gargantuan network kept a staff of 34 radio operators busy around the clock sending coded messages to Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, by way of Paris. The Abwehr apparatus in Spain was directed with the knowledge and approval of Franco, who was well aware that Spain was honeycombed with Nazi spies. “All classes were represented, from Cabinet Ministers to unnamed stewards of cargo ships,” reported a wartime memo. The embassy had its own wireless station, complete with a state-of-the-art radio tower. In walking into the embassy, Pujol was twitching the tail of a large and quite lethal animal.

  Federico, the man Pujol was going to meet that day, was a twenty-seven-year-old Abwehr officer named Friedrich Knappe-Ratey (the Germans often practiced the standard spy protocol of assigning a cover name that was close to one’s original name, so that the agent would instinctively respond to it). He was the son of a German father, an importer of electronics, including the first x-ray machine to be used in Spain. Knappe-Ratey had grown up in luxury, attended the best Spanish schools and even visited the country homes of the Spanish king Alfonso XIII. His MI5 file described him as “slight but rather athletic … hair fair, curly and brushed-back … well-dressed, appears to be a sportsman … rather Jewish in appearance … usually wears light gloves … placid, not communicative, wears a ring that he fingers continuously.” Inside the Abwehr, he was an agent-runner who recruited and trained spies for a living. He himself was trained to spot fakes and ferret out lies, the first task of any Abwehr agent who dealt with “walkins” such as Juan Pujol.

  Pujol arrived on time, spotted Federico at a table and walked over slowly, not wanting to appear overeager, all the while regarding the German with a casual smile. (In the second version Pujol later told, he met a different officer at his rendezvous and wasn’t introduced to Federico until several weeks later.) When he sat down, he introduced himself as Mr. Lopez (the equivalent of an American calling himself Mr. Smith) and was met with a cold nod. Federico was giving nothing away; he immediately asked what the young Spaniard wanted. He regarded Pujol with his piercing blue eyes and a chilly expression. The walk-in had to convince the spy-runner, not vice versa.

  Pujol became animated and gestured wildly, proclaiming his hatred of the Allies. He spoke extravagantly of the Third Reich and his adulation of Hitler. Pujol was carried away with the character he was playing, what MI5 would later call a “hot Nazi.” Yet after another prediction of an “extraordinarily magnificent” victory, Pujol happened to glance at Federico and his heart nearly stopped. “It dawned on me that I wasn’t making such a good impression on him as I’d first imagined.” Federico drily asked him what exactly he proposed to do for the Nazis. Pujol fired off a list of fictitious diplomats and government officials he was supposedly friends with, “a thousand foolish things” spilling out of his brain. It was the start of a long parade of fabrications. Federico may have rolled his eyes, but he was intrigued enough to give the voluble Spaniard a second rendezvous two days later, at the Cervecería de Correos, opposite the Ministry of Communications.

  Pujol said goodbye and strolled back to the hotel along the busy Madrid streets. He’d been making things up as he went along, but he’d clearly achieved something: he’d slipped into the character of an excitable maniac, a kind of cliché of the passionate Spaniard. And Federico had bought his new self. “It’s something you have to know,” Pujol told himself. “How to catch their confidence.”

  What’s remarkable about Pujol’s performance is that this was not the man that his friends and family described before or after. In real life, he was witty and genial. This “Mr. Lopez” was completely different, a veritable tornado. The most convincing explanation of how Pujol transformed himself lies with his new wife of under a year. It was Araceli who possessed the category-5 personality, the outsized gestures and the exuberance. It was as if Pujol had borrowed her persona for an afternoon and walked it around Madrid.

  For the next two days, Pujol pottered around the hotel, “dreaming up new rigamaroles about Nazism.” He knew he’d won only a partial victory: he’d convinced Federico that he was a virulent Hitlerite, but he hadn’t told him how he could help the Germans win the war. That was the hard part: he had nothing concrete to offer the Abwehr man. He’d have to bluff his way forward, counting on his extraordinary ability to improvise.

  When Pujol showed up at the cervecería for the next meeting, he picked out Federico sitting at a table. Instantly, he knew things had gone well back at the embassy: Federico was friendlier this time, greeting him with a warm smile. But when Pujol sat down, Federico told him that the Germans weren’t interested in his proposal. Madrid was crawling with German agents; they didn’t need another Spaniard informing on the informers. What they were really looking for was people who could go abroad and dig up military information on the Allies. Pujol mentioned the fact that he had a passport, which immediately placed him ahead of most other conspirators in the capital. If the Germans could get him a visa to travel to, say, England, he could pose as a newspaper correspondent and become an Abwehr mole in London.

  Federico sat back and considered this, but didn’t bite. Pujol desperately tried to come up with another idea, and one that he’d been turning over since the previous meeting popped into his mind—currency smuggling. Out came the next major fabrication. He began to spin out the details of a potential caper that could get him not just to Lisbon but beyond, into the heart of the enemy. He called it the Dalamal Operation.

  Pujol claimed to know a Spanish secret agent who was tracking a man named Dalamal—no such person existed, of course—a Brit desperately trying to convert 5 million pesetas into pounds sterling. The Franco government was then desperate for foreign currency and had offered to cut through any red tape for Spaniards who were able to negotiate deals that would bring British pounds or French francs back into the country. This had opened up one of the few legal ways of leaving Spain. If the Germans could get the Seguridad to issue Pujol a visa, he would fly to London under the cover of being a currency smuggler, track down Dalamal and commence spying for the Abwehr. But Federico shot him down, calling the idea “complicated and absurd.”

  Pujol was stuck. He tried the British embassy again, asking for a visa, and was turned down. When he phoned the Germans to tell them the news, his contact said simply, “We know about your visit to the Consulate. We had you followed.” He hung up the phone, chilled that he was now under surveillance.

  Finally, a few days later, Pujol met with Federico and the German handed him 1,000 pesetas (about $1,500 today) and told him his first missio
n was to go to Lisbon, where he should obtain an exit visa. The cash was the first tangible evidence Pujol had received that he’d fooled the Germans. Pujol took the money and left for Lisbon alone on April 26, 1941.

  4. The White City

  LISBON WAS THEN KNOWN as “the capital of espionage,” a vast open market for illicit information, casual betrayal, currency smuggling, drugs, murder and deception. Portugal was neutral in the conflict, and Lisbon’s airport was the only one in Europe that still maintained flights to both Berlin and London, making it the last stop before freedom for the one million refugees—including Peggy Guggenheim, Marc Chagall and Arthur Koestler—who passed through it during the war. Men, women and children from all over occupied Europe—Polish counts, Belgian millionaires, Bulgarian adventurers and Jews from every quarter of the new Reich—had washed up in Lisbon, where they mixed uneasily with a floating population of black marketeers, prostitutes, informants and double agents. Many of the refugees had no visas to travel onward, and they’d spent fortunes just getting to Portugal, trading in the family silver and selling their wives’ engagement rings and diamond brooches to last another week or two. The only valuable left to them, the real currency of the capital, was information. “Everybody is a spy in Lisbon,” says a character in Robert Wilson’s World War II novel, A Small Death in Lisbon. “Anybody with ears to overhear can make a living.”

  On the shadowy boulevards of the White City, famous for its bone-colored buildings, intelligence was bought and sold and the corpses of unlucky double agents were discovered when the deals went sour. Ten miles north of the city, in the resort town of Estoril, the jewel of the “Coast of Kings,” secret agents from both sides drank and dueled. Each side had its own watering hole in the glamorous town: MI6 and American OSS officers frequented the five-star Hotel Palacio, whose bartender reportedly made the best Manhattan in all of Europe and whose maids were said to be part-time employees of one spy agency or another (one American visitor compared the place to the Mayo Clinic, because the face of every guest reflected some deep inner worry); the Abwehr favored the nearby Hotel Atlântico.

  The place where they all met in the evenings, the nerve center for generalized espionage, was the Estoril Casino. Graham Greene, then working the Lisbon desk for MI6, gathered material here for his spy novels, including Our Man in Havana, which was inspired by Pujol’s life. Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, gambled away his escudos while helping to plan Operation Golden Eye for British naval intelligence. Fleming believed that the man who’d cleaned him out at chemin de fer was the “chief German agent” in Lisbon. His drinking buddies disagreed, remembering only stolid Portuguese businessmen at the table that night. Nevertheless, Fleming would use the incident as the inspiration for Casino Royale, the first 007 novel.

  Even the gaming tables were part of the spy game. The playboy and Allied double agent Dusko Popov, code-named Tricycle, used the Estoril to arrange meet-ups. Believing he was being watched, and unwilling to book appointments in plain English, Popov would follow his gorgeous blond secretary into the casino and head straight to the roulette table. “She … would play three times, the numbers indicating consecutively the date, hour and minute of our rendezvous.” The spy moll would place her chips on one of two numbers, zero or 36. Zero meant the pickup would occur in Lisbon, 36 meant their usual spot in Estoril. “It was an expensive code,” Popov remarked drily.

  Juan Pujol arrived in Lisbon, found a room at the less-than-glamorous Hotel Suíço Atlântico, chosen for its proximity to the Spanish embassy and consulate, and immediately went to apply for a British visa. Still an amateur, he thought things would be just that easy. But the consulate told him to go back to Madrid and apply there. Pujol pleaded and stormed, but to no avail; he was just one of thousands of people trying to get out of Lisbon. Disappointed, he left and joined the hollow-eyed scrum of refugees aimlessly wandering the streets, hoping to meet the right connection to get them to the free world.

  Days went by. Pujol drank in the hotel bars, hoping to buttonhole a Spanish diplomat, looking for an edge, an opening, while his Portuguese escudos ebbed away. His hopes rose when he met an agent for the Spanish security agency, the Seguridad, who was attached to the Lisbon embassy, a man named Varela, but nothing resulted from the brief encounter. Araceli, now pregnant, was waiting back in Madrid, trusting her husband would find a way for them to flee to England. “I was getting desperate,” he remembered.

  Hope arrived in the form of a fellow Spaniard. The hotel manager introduced Pujol to a friend, Señor Souza, a pudgy Galician who gave off the self-confident glow of a comfortable, well-connected man. On one of their excursions to Estoril, Señor Souza produced with a flourish a document that proved more than interesting to Pujol. It was a diplomatic visa from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, embossed with Spain’s coat of arms, stamped and signed in the indecipherable scrawl of a high official. Even better, in Pujol’s eyes, the foreign minister had typed a personal note on the visa asking that every courtesy and assistance be granted to the bearer. Souza was planning to use the visa to take the Pan Am hydroplane whose whine could be heard every day in Lisbon harbor as it set off for South America, where he would undertake a special mission to Argentina on behalf of the Spanish government. Every other person in Lisbon wanted on that plane, but Souza had the document to claim a seat.

  Pujol’s eyes grew large. “I resolved to become better acquainted with the owner of such a magnificent document.” He began to charm Señor Souza as they ducked into amusement parks and the nightclubs and cabarets of Rua Augusta, stopping at cafés to refresh themselves with coffee and to hear Portuguese fado, the national music. By the time they rolled back to the hotel, the sun was beginning to light the horizon beyond the sea. Pujol was an excellent companion, half genuine and half mercenary, and to repay Señor Souza for the meals they’d enjoyed, he invited the older man along for a week of gambling and sea breezes at the Casino Estoril. A makeshift plan was already taking shape in his mind.

  Pujol was down to his last chance. Either he would pull in this big fish or his espionage career would likely be over before it had really begun. As he got ready for the trip, Pujol borrowed a camera and packed it in his luggage. Then he and Souza took the train to the resort town and, to save money, took a single room at the Monte Estoril Hotel, three blocks from the casino. Pujol chipped in the rest of his bankroll, Souza did the same, and they hit the roulette tables. Their luck was running high when one afternoon Pujol began to complain of stomach cramps. He patted Souza on the shoulder and told him to keep playing, as the Galician had a hot hand. Souza nodded, thinking nothing of it. Pujol made his way back to the hotel, slipped into the room, pulled out the camera and found Souza’s visa secreted in a compartment of the man’s luggage. A few minutes later, he strolled out of the hotel, close-up shots of the document now stored on the film tucked in his suitcase.

  A few days later, Señor Souza was preparing for his trip to South America and Pujol was back in Lisbon, standing in an engraver’s shop. He held a crisp photograph of the visa with the Spanish seal carefully trimmed off. He asked the engraver to make a steel photographic plate of the image, and several hours later he was on his way, plate in hand, to 7 Rua Condessa do Rio, which housed an old printing firm. Pujol announced that he was an employee of the Spanish chancery, the Office of Public Records. He handed over the plate and the photograph and said he required two hundred copies of the visa as soon as possible. Pujol’s confidence, and his natural instinct for the con—who would order two hundred copies if he only wanted one for himself?—allowed for no questions. The visas were printed, Pujol disposed of all but a dozen of them, and he was soon on his way to an office supply store. He told the workers there that the rubber stamp shown in the photo had been used so often that the imprint was beginning to blur. Could they make him an exact replacement? They could.

  Next, Pujol stopped into a photography shop, posed for a head shot, cut copies of the picture to size, pasted them on the documents a
nd signed his name. He now held in his hands something only a few of the tens of thousands of refugees in Lisbon could boast: a Spanish visa. It could take him anywhere in the world. Men would kill for that document. In a few short months, he’d gone from a bumbling amateur to an operative of the first rank. And he was completely self-taught.

  He returned to Madrid, to Araceli and their new baby boy, Juan. The young family moved out of the crumbling Hotel Majestic into a small bed-and-breakfast on the bustling commercial street called Gran Via. Pujol knew that he was exposing his family more with each step along the dark path of espionage. “I was fully aware of the risks I was running and always had a lurking fear that my operation would collapse.” But he pushed on. Pujol called Federico at the German embassy and arranged a rendezvous.

  The meet was at the Café Negresco, not far from the Puerta del Sol, one of the ancient gateways of the old walled city where centuries before couriers from distant countries would arrive on secret missions. Pujol sat down opposite Federico and began to weave a rich fabrication concerning the “Dalamal Operation,” complete with currency smugglers named the Zulueta brothers (two very real, “picaresque” Basque-Cuban adventurers and police snitches he’d met at the Hotel Majestic), a surprise offer from the Bank of Spain’s Foreign Exchange Police section, thousands of pesetas and pounds changed one for the other … It went on and on. Federico’s mind must have whirled as Pujol regaled him with a highly detailed account of his adventures. Here the fledgling spy used a technique that would become one of his hallmarks: basing his fabulous tales in grains of truth, sprinkled like a bright trail through the lies. From now on, Pujol would always prefer to have his fantasies rooted in reality.

  The nugget here was Varela, the real-life Seguridad agent whom Pujol had met briefly during his first days in Lisbon. Now Varela, instead of being a passing acquaintance, became the brains behind the Dalamal Operation. It was he who was secretly trying to exchange huge amounts of pesetas for British pounds, most likely on behalf of the Spanish government, which was starved for foreign currency. And it was Varela who was trying to get Pujol a diplomatic visa so he could go to London. Pujol had stashed the fake diplomatic visa back at the bed-and-breakfast, his hole card kept hidden for the right moment.