Agent Garbo by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online

fresh wallpaper. He walked the shabby halls growing more and more depressed. He’d found a tenuous foothold in the dark city, but he refused to settle in. “Francoist Madrid was too small for himand Araceli,” said a Spanish journalist. “They were looking beyond the horizon.” It was easier said than done, however: getting a passport in 1939 Madrid was a nearly impossible task, requiring luck and connections in high places.
     
    On September 1, 1939, German panzers rolled over the Polish border. World War II had begun. For Pujol, Hitler was “a maniac, an inhuman brute.”He was shocked by the suffering of the Polish people as the Nazi SS swept through town after town, executing resisters. “My humanist convictionswould not allow me to turn a blind eye to the enormous suffering that was being unleashed by this psychopath.”
    Pujol had stayed on the sidelines in the Spanish Civil War, with its multiple factions and brutal extremes, but this was different: one side was evil and one was good. Everything he held dear—humanism, tolerance, freedom—lay with the Allies. He threw his allegiance to them and never wavered in his loyalty.
    But what could Pujol do? He was a hotel manager, an ex–chicken farmer and a committed pacifist. He had very little money. There were no openings for men like him in the Allied ranks, and besides, he was trapped in Madrid. Pujol stewed in the wrecked Hotel Majestic, listening obsessively to the radio, whispering to friends about the Nazis and suffering what sounds like mild symptoms of post-traumatic stress: “I would be tormentedby odd pieces of information and graphic details which merged in my imagination into a confused and horrible nightmare.” By 1940, the news on the wireless got darker and darker. In April, Denmark and Norway fell. The next month it was the turn of Belgium, Holland and France. On May 26, the tragedy at Dunkirk unfolded. On June 10, Italy entered the war on the German side. Two weeks later, Pétain surrendered in the name of France. Hitler seemed unstoppable.
    The only relief was his marriage to his beloved Araceli in April 1940, in Madrid. Otherwise, Pujol listened, brooded and plotted, both his despair and his convictions growing stronger as the days passed.
    After months of talking with Araceli, Pujol decided he had to find a way to volunteer for the Allies. Perhaps he could go to London and work for the BBC, write and produce shows in Castilian on freedom and politics. Or something. The details were vague. But he desperately wanted to be part of the fight.
    There was more to it. Perhaps Pujol wanted to prove himself worthy of this vibrant woman on his arm. Perhaps he realized that life as a hotel manager wouldn’t hold Araceli for long, that she deserved—no, required—something altogether more rare and dramatic. Certainly she’d given him a shot of confidence.
    The lure of espionage spoke to some of the deepest and earliest desires within Pujol: it promised to give his imagination a chance to run riot in the world, and at long last answer the echoes of his father’s entreaties— do good, believe in your fellow human being. He’d tried to be a dutiful son, but he had no talent for business and he’d been a farce as a soldier. Spying would allow him to honor his father and at the same time declare his own rather eccentric personality, which happened to find great joy in the thought of tricking fascists.
    How exactly he came upon the scheme that would turn him into one of the war’s great double agents is somewhat mysterious. There was no master plan. “If a Pythian oraclehad foretold the checkered existence that lay before me,” he said later, “I would have sneered sarcastically at the soothsayer, so little intention did I have of behaving the way I actually did.” But the germ of the idea came with news reports from Hitler’s Germany. Pujol was always listening to the BBC or paging slowly through a Spanish newspaper, then rushing off to the