Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  Federico bit. “He was becoming increasingly interested and spent hours advising and training me.” In the next days and weeks, the spy and his runner met all over Madrid: the aquarium, the Café Calatrava, the Maison Doré. In the meantime, the Abwehr had its agents confirm that Señor Varela was a real person and worked as the head of security at the embassy. Pujol’s contact, who’d actually never heard of him, checked out.

  This went on for a month. Pujol must have been aching to dazzle Federico with the visa, but his patience was sublime. At one meeting, Federico told him his bosses at the embassy were very interested in his work, so long as what he’d been telling them was true. But he confided he’d recently been burned by an “agent” who’d absconded with the money Federico had given him. For the first time, Pujol realized that men like Federico had skin in the game, too: one more failure and the Abwehr agent could be sent to the front lines. “He did not wish … to be caught a second time.” Pujol sensed an opening.

  With Federico pressing for more, Pujol called up a man he’d met in Lisbon, a Spaniard named Dionisio Fernández. He told Dionisio that he wanted to return to Lisbon to meet a lover he’d met there (another lie), but his wife, as wives tended to be, was suspicious. Could Dionisio impersonate a business contact and send him a telegram requesting his presence in Lisbon?

  Pujol was a very likable man, and his friends, even instant ones like Dionisio, always seemed ready to do him favors. The telegram soon arrived in Madrid: “You must return urgently. The matter is closed.”

  It was signed with the fake businessman’s name that Pujol had given his friend: “Varela.”

  Pujol met Federico and handed over the telegram. Federico scanned the contents—surely noticing that it had been sent from Lisbon—and stuffed the piece of paper in his pocket. He asked for a meeting the next day. The process was accelerating. The next afternoon, Federico slipped Pujol 500 pesetas and told him to go to Lisbon and finalize the Varela affair. He also gave him a contact name in case he should need more money when in Portugal.

  Pujol headed back to Lisbon, booked a hotel room and stayed as far away from the real Varela as he could. He called up Federico’s contact to ask for more money, confirming to the Abwehr that he’d actually been in Lisbon. Then he headed back to Spain, met with the German spy-runner, confirmed that everything had gone well and told him the Spanish Seguridad was making all the necessary arrangements for him to work under Varela on the fake Dalamal Operation. He should have the documents soon.

  It was time for Pujol to spring the trap.

  Early the next morning, Pujol made a few calls, then phoned Federico, his voice charged with excitement. He demanded a meeting at a café across from the Seguridad building, not in a few days but now. “Alarmed and furious,” Federico probably assumed that the crazy Spaniard had blown the Varela affair and was on the run. He agreed to meet Pujol in five minutes at the café. When Pujol walked in, he found Federico waiting impatiently. The diminutive spy sat down, nodded and said he had only a second to spare. In a low voice, Pujol calmly told the German agent what was going to happen next. In two minutes, he told Federico, I’m going to get up and walk forty feet over to the Seguridad ministry, where a government messenger and car are waiting. They will take me to the Foreign Office, where the special diplomatic visa I’m carrying in my pocket will be stamped and sent on to Lisbon by diplomatic courier. I will travel to Lisbon and pick up the visa in person. From Lisbon, I will travel on to England, and there I will begin my career as a German spy.

  Federico gaped. Pujol now said that he wanted to show Federico the document, to dispel once and for all any doubts the Abwehr had about him. Looking around with exaggerated caution, he slid something out of his pocket and passed it under the table. Federico glanced down at the heavily embossed piece of paper and, after a second, nodded. Pujol slid the document back and put it in his lapel pocket. “Greatly impressed,” Federico slapped Pujol on the back and congratulated him on his coup.

  Pujol smiled and, as if he were the teacher and Federico the beginner, whispered that it wasn’t safe for them to exit the café together. He would leave first. He said goodbye, got up and walked across toward the doors of the Seguridad ministry. There was indeed a young man waiting there, just as Pujol had said, scanning the crowd and intently looking for someone. The man wasn’t a special messenger of the Franco government, of course; he was the son of the owner of the bed-and-breakfast where Pujol and Araceli were staying. One of the phone calls Pujol had made that morning was to this young man, who agreed to meet his guest in front of the building. For what purpose, he had no idea. Pujol’s next call had been to a car service, which at his request had sent one of its vehicles to the ministry. It was now idling in front of the Seguridad’s doors. Pujol greeted the hotelkeeper’s son, they got into the car, and Pujol, in a loud voice that carried all the way to the interior of the café, called out, “Foreign Office.” The driver nodded and they drove off.

  Through the café window Federico watched the car motor away. In his mind, Pujol was now officially a secret agent of the Third Reich. “[He’d] swallowed the story hook, line and sinker,” Pujol gloated. The spy even got Federico to send a telegram to the real Varela: “In a few days I’ll depart for Lisbon. Signed, Juan.”

  Pujol was a modest man; he never bragged about what he was about to do. But returning home that night, he must have been brimming with pride. He’d done it. His life to that point had been one misadventure after another, some of them nearly fatal. His family had long regarded him as a lost cause, beloved but a little mad. The Marist Fathers at his school had thought him a dunce with anger issues. But now he’d bamboozled the Abwehr and was about to take Araceli to London, the center of Western civilization, to help save the world from “that psychopath” Hitler.

  He was not yet a double agent, but he was fully a spy, and he had gotten himself out of Spain, ready to audition for the British.

  “No conquest conquered me,” he said. “And no defeat defeated me.”

  It was late spring, 1941. By this point in the war, Hitler had taken Poland, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Austria. Greece and Yugoslavia were tottering and about to fall. A triumphant Hitler had promenaded through Paris the summer before. German U-boats were attacking merchant ships in the Atlantic, massive Luftwaffe raids were targeting Coventry and central London, and Rommel and his Afrika Korps were sweeping across North Africa. FDR had signed the Lend-Lease Act but America was still neutral, while Italy and Japan had allied themselves with the Third Reich and Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler. In Germany, the program of euthanasia of the sick and disabled was more than a year old. Kristallnacht had occurred over two years before, and the first experimental use of poisonous gas at Auschwitz was now four months away.

  5. The Game

  WITH A FLURRY OF THEATRICS—more meetings, another fake telegram—Pujol prepared to start his career as an Abwehr spy. Now that the Germans were convinced of the Spaniard’s bona fides, they rushed to bring him up to speed. Federico trained Pujol in secret writing and handed over four questionnaires detailing what the Nazis needed to know about England’s war plans and preparations. Pujol memorized parts of the document and was then given a miniaturized copy he could carry to England. The questions ranged from the highly technical to the broadly strategic: “In what stage of construction is the aircraft carrier Indefatigable? What is thought of the possibilities of success of a German invasion? What measures are being taken against such an eventuality?” Pujol was given the code name Alaric, and his network was termed Arabel. Federico devoted all his working hours to training his new recruit, even taking him home to his apartment, at 73 Viriato Street, to teach him the art of ciphers.

  “Why he had such blind faith in me I do not know,” Pujol would write later. He was being too modest. His performance had been precise and convincing. He’d taken control of the game away from the much more experienced Federico. He’d intuited what
the Germans wanted and how they would best be seduced. He hadn’t ham-handedly presented them his scheme on a platter all at once; he’d made them work for it. He had charmed Federico, enticed him with his daring, then frightened him half to death with the phone call out of the blue demanding a meeting. As a finale, he’d stage-managed the ultimate reveal in the café with the eye of a Hollywood director. “With the British he was British, with the Germans he was German,” a journalist who met him much later on would say. Actually the opposite was true. Pujol created a completely original character, stuck to it until death and pulled less confident operatives toward his creation. But he understood the Germans like a German and the British like a Brit.

  Federico was so taken with his new agent that he passed along the name of a German spy already working in London: Luis Calvo, a well-known newspaper correspondent. Perhaps the spy-runner was courting Pujol, trying to impress him with the Abwehr’s extensive network in England. Or perhaps he was just talking shop. But instead of being impressed, Pujol erupted: he didn’t want to know the names of any of their operatives, he roared, and how dare Federico offer him one? If they unmasked Calvo so easily, he snapped, did that mean they’d “out” Pujol to the next agent who came along? How dare he risk his spies’ lives like that!

  Federico, his future now partially invested in this fiery Spaniard, had to sit there and take the tongue-lashing. After all, Pujol was right. It was bad form in the spy world to give away an agent’s real name to another agent unless absolutely necessary; it endangered both spies. Pujol didn’t learn this from an espionage manual, he intuited it on the spot. He wasn’t just thinking like a German, he was thinking like the spy-runner Federico wished he was.

  For the last meeting, Federico had a surprise. His boss, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, showed up to see Pujol off. Kühlenthal’s MI5 file described him in detail: “Oval face … fleshy. Boneless cheeks. Fresh complexion, high color on cheekbones. Curved, hawklike nose. Searching grey eyes.” He was a regular in Madrid cafés and cervecerías, where he was known as Don Pablo.

  Kühlenthal handed Pujol several bottles of secret ink, ciphering codes to encrypt his first messages, a list of cover addresses to send them to and $3,000 in cash, the equivalent of about $44,000 today. The Abwehr was rich and not afraid to spend on good prospects. Kühlenthal shook Pujol’s hand and gave him his marching orders: don’t underestimate the British, be patient, don’t expect a quick Nazi victory. Above all, try to develop a set of subagents who can be left behind like sleepers if you’re forced to leave England.

  With that, Pujol gathered up his young family and, in July 1941, headed to Lisbon to practice “my own bizarre form of espionage.”

  To get by the border controls, Pujol rolled up most of the $3,000 into a rubber sheath and inserted it into a half-empty tube of toothpaste. The rest went into a can of shaving cream. As he made his way to Portugal, he imagined he was carrying the keys to the kingdom, that the bottles of secret ink stashed in his luggage, the money and the secret codes would be enough to get him hired by the British as a double agent and whisked off to London. “[He] had no idea of the adventures and experiences which were to envelop him,” recalled MI5’s Tommy Harris.

  After arriving in the Portuguese capital, Pujol rented a room from a poor fisherman in the Cascais district, outside Lisbon, and headed straight to the British embassy, making sure that he wasn’t being tailed. “What follows may seem unbelievable but it is true,” Pujol would write years later. “After all that I had done, all that I had gone through, all the subterfuges I’d invented, the deceptions and the chicanery, the tension and the strain … I was no further forward than I had been when I made my first attempt.” The British turned him down flat. Again. For the third time. And the rejection forced Pujol deeper and deeper into a game he didn’t fully understand. He couldn’t just impersonate a spy anymore. He’d have to become one.

  But he would have to do it from offstage, faking all the way. Pujol bought a map of England, a Baedeker tourist guide to the country and a copy of Bradshaw’s railway timetables. He had never been in England in his entire life; now he had to convince his handlers that he lived there. He also got back in touch with the Spanish friend, Dionisio Fernández, who’d sent the fake telegram from Varela that said he was in Lisbon to carry on the affair with his mistress. Could he use Fernández’s name to rent a post office box to receive letters from the woman without his wife finding out? Fernández agreed.

  On July 19, Pujol sent his first message to the Germans in Madrid, pretending that he’d arrived in England. The “cover” letter in black ink was filled with the first impressions of a “passionate Catalan democrat” who’d fled to Britain to escape Franco. Between the lines, in invisible ink, Pujol carefully wrote out the real message: he’d made it safely to the British Isles and on the way had met a pilot with the Dutch airline KLM who’d agreed, after much persuading, to carry letters from London to Lisbon, to avoid the British censors. (This would later amaze Pujol’s handlers in London, because the chief pilot on that route was a real English spy. Pujol didn’t know this; it was a lucky fabrication.) There the pilot would mail the letters, which would have a Portuguese postmark, on to Madrid. The Abwehr could respond to the same poste restante address, and the messages would be ferried back to London by the pilot. The imaginary pilot thus became the first of the subagents that would soon pour forth from Pujol’s brain.

  Pujol waited anxiously for the response. Ten days later, a letter from Federico arrived at the poste restante box: “The method of communication is good and the letter developed well. We await with interest further news … Kindest regards and good luck.”

  The Germans had bought his KLM story. “I had become a real German spy.” Now he could pretend to be in London while in reality living in Estoril, where he’d just moved from the fisherman’s shack to a proper house, along with Araceli and his baby son.

  There was, of course, one overriding problem with the plan: Pujol knew next to nothing about the country he was supposed to be living in. He didn’t speak a word of English and was unfamiliar with its currency, its culture, its terminology, not to mention its regiments, army groups and the types of ships its merchant navy favored. How could he compose convincing reports about a place that was as distant and strange to him as the North Pole?

  As he struggled to figure this out, the farce with the English continued. Pujol went to the British embassy in Lisbon and told the assistant to the military attaché everything: the secret ink, the Abwehr questionnaires, the names and descriptions of Federico and Kühlenthal. He wanted to make a deal, and fast. With Lisbon swarming with German spies, and with the Abwehr expecting precise reports about the Allied war effort, time was against him. If the Brits would get him to America—his new escape hatch—he’d happily turn over everything. It was his fourth approach to the British.

  The assistant told Pujol an official would meet with him the next day at the English bar inside the Estoril Casino at 7 p.m. to discuss the proposal in detail. The following evening Pujol arrived at the bar and waited, nervously sipping a drink as the minutes passed. The promised official never showed. Pujol went back to the embassy the next day, found the assistant and demanded an explanation. The man palmed Pujol off by claiming he’d been unable to contact the official. The farce was now complete: the Nazis he despised were enamored of him, and the Allies for whom he was willing to risk his life regarded him as a nuisance. “Why, I kept on asking myself, was the enemy proving to be so helpful while those whom I wanted to be my friends were being so implacable?” Pujol stormed out of the embassy.

  The spy needed more ammunition to get on that flight to London. He called on the real Varela, head of security at the Spanish embassy. Varela immediately demanded to know the meaning of a telegram that Federico had sent him days earlier, announcing Pujol’s arrival in Portugal. Who the hell was Pujol to telegram him? The spy quickly charmed Varela out of his anger and patiently explained that he was a currency smuggler working on some
thing called the Dalamal Operation. Varela calmed down and listened, but told Pujol nothing could be done about the scheme unless the real Dalamal (who didn’t exist) came to Spain. Pujol was crushed—teaming up with Varela on a real operation would have boosted his credibility with the Germans—but at least, should an Abwehr agent phone the security official and ask about a Spanish spy named Pujol, Varela would confirm they were in touch.

  With very few tools at hand, Pujol fell back on the one thing that had never failed him: his imagination. He began to dream up the team of subagents that Kühlenthal, the Abwehr chief in Madrid, had demanded. Not only would these imaginary people be able to feed him information from sources he didn’t have access to himself, they could also take the fall if the information proved incorrect. First up was “Carvalho,” a Portuguese with Nazi sympathies who lived near the Bristol Channel, an important shipping lane in southwest England. He could report on convoys and tankers steaming through the local waters and the shoreline defenses. (The fake spy’s name was a silent tribute to Araceli, whose last name was Carbollo.) Pujol also recruited “William Gerbers,” an imaginary Swiss national who could keep an eye on Liverpool. The spy’s second letter to the Germans detailed these minor coups, as well as the news that the BBC in London had offered him a job as a freelance translator.

  Pujol wrote the letters in a bombastic, florid style that the historian Thaddeus Holt once called the “verbal equivalent of the extravagant confections of Antonio Gaudí.” It’s an apt description. “I do not wish to end this letter,” Pujol wrote at one point, “without sending a Viva Victorioso for our brave troops who fight in Russia, annihilating the Bolshevic [sic] beast.” Not only did the style match the personality he’d created, but it had the advantage of taking up a lot of pages without conveying too much information. Any mistake could have cost him dearly, so as he sat in his house in Lisbon he concentrated on “recruiting” agents and wrote only one letter each month, sticking close to the theories of espionage that he’d developed over the past few weeks. “I tried hard to introduce new information gradually and to be cautious when I mentioned the new contacts I had recruited to help me.” He made the information hard to come by, describing “in detail how I had grappled with a whole string of obstacles.” His methods would have been well known to any mystery writer or con man—ground every revelation in lived experience, let the mark come to the con, not vice versa—but Pujol had to work them out on his own.