Agent Garbo by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online Page A

local café to argue about what he’d just read. And he kept hearing phrases that chilled him: “Aryan race,” “superior being.”Gradually Pujol came to believe that the “diabolical dogmas” that had come to rule Spain were going to be implemented in Germany. Spanish censors attempted to withhold all news of concentration camps and “extermination through work,” but word leaked out. And Pujol decided he had to act. “I must do something, something practical,”he said. “I must make my contribution toward the good of humanity.”
    Step one: leave Spain. A little caper over the Portuguese border gave Pujol a shot at the passport he’d need to get to Allied territory. A guest at the Majestic who called himself the Duke of Torre knew of two elderly pro-Franco princesses who craved a supply of whisky, then unobtainable in Madrid. “They considered such a drink essential,given their social position and entertaining commitments.” Pujol looked the capable type. Could he get them a case of good Scotch? Pujol told the Duke and the spinsters to find him a passport and a visa, and the deal was as good as done. The trio of Francoists soon acquired the documents, so Pujol drove his two elderly coconspirators and the Duke over the Portuguese border, bought six bottles of Scotch on the black market and wheeled home in high spirits, the contraband tucked safely in the trunk. The passport was Pujol’s reward for the jaunt. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of Madrileños trying to become informers or spies who would have looked at the document with barely disguised envy.
    But what to do with it? In his room at the hotel, Pujol felt twenty-odd years of frustration well up within him. He wanted to take a stand for a world he’d witnessed only in the novels he’d read and in the stories told by his father so many years ago, walking by the seashore: “We were just fighting for the right to survive. And we had to feed our optimism in order to live. I yearned for justice.From the medley of tangled ideas and fantasies going around and around in my head, a plan slowly began to take shape.”
    Pujol was ready to take the next step. He possessed a talent that hadn’t fit anywhere before—not in the peacetime economy of northern Spain, not in the ranks of two very different armies. But perhaps in espionage he would finally find his purpose.
    He’d decided he would use his riotous and unrivaled imagination to help defeat the Third Reich.
     
    On a cold day in January 1941, Juan Pujol walked into the British embassy in Madrid and volunteered his services.
    “Your services of what? ”was the response.
    Pujol couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. (In fact, even he didn’t know what he was offering. “I must confess that my plans were fairly confused.”) His original idea had been to offer to produce radio programs for the BBC. But his ambition had outrun his brain. He only repeated his request and stood there, shoulders thrown back, his warm hazel eyes burning with intensity. It became a game for the embassy staff, as the Spaniard was handed on from receptionist to secretary to clerk to minor official. Finally, having got no further than the embassy’s lowest rungs, Pujol was told to write down exactly what he proposed to do for England, and was shown the door.
    Pujol was green, but he wasn’t that green. Madrid was practically a suburb of Berlin in 1941, the papers full of pro-German slogans and the cafés crowded with German agents and their local informants. Even to write down some nonsense about the BBC would mean risking his life. He was beginning to believe that espionage, not a radio show, was the best way he could serve the cause. There was only one problem: he didn’t know anything about espionage. Yet he did not give up, and he was not alone. Araceli tried next. She went to the embassy with an enigmatic offer of getting information for the Allies. She was turned down flat.
    These refusals didn’t reflect on the