Agent Garbo by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online Page B

Pujols’ skills as potential spies. Instead, they reflected a complex political reality the couple knew nothing about. The British ambassador to Spain in 1940 was Sir Samuel Hoare, an Oxonian and longtime Conservative politician who had once—as an officer in MI6—recruited the young Benito Mussolini during World War I. The future Il Ducewas then the thirty-four-year-old editor of an influential and virulently right-wing newspaper. England was eager to keep Italy on the side of the Allies, so it paid Mussolini the princely sum of 100 pounds a week ($9,300 in today’s dollars) to publish fiery editorials against the Germans. Mussolini’s controller, Sir Samuel, later became an establishment politician who saw plenty of skullduggery as he waded through various international skirmishes between the wars. He knew espionage, and he wasn’t necessarily opposed to it. But his mandate in 1941 was to keep neutral Spain out of the war. So Sir Samuel passed the word to the Madrid head of MI6, a man named Hamilton-Stokes: he would tolerate no incidents or spy capers under his watch. Pujol and Araceli had been turned down as a matter of policy, not because of the merits of their offer.
    Unaware of the backstory, Pujol was downcast. But the stubbornness that had always been part of his nature took over. He’d decided by now that he would present himself to the British as a potential double agent. This was even crazier than his previous offer to spy. He didn’t know anything about espionage, and he knew even less about Germany’s spy service, the Abwehr. But he knew he needed material to offer the British, something concrete he could carry in his pocket and produce with a flourish at the right moment. So he decided to offer his services to the Germans first, gather what nuggets of intelligence he could, then present them to the British embassy.
    As a gambit, doublecrossing the Germans was exponentially more dangerous than Pujol’s first idea. But a man whose first nickname was Bullet didn’t give up easily.
    In their room at the crumbling hotel, Pujol and Araceli worked up a plan, going over and over the details and reworking the approach. They quickly realized they needed to learn more about the Germans, to do what would later be called “oppo research”: find out what the enemy was thinking. “Out of amour-propre, I decided to prepare the ground more carefully,” he said. Here Pujol did something that was to be vital to his remarkable rise: he tried to think like a German. “In order to offer myself to the Nazis,I first studied their doctrines.” What did they want, how did they carry themselves, how did they speak, what would intrigue them? Pujol was doing more than studying some dog-eared Nazi tracts about land in the East and Aryan strongmen; he was doing what a good actor does. Learning his character, becoming the role.
    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 Germanshad started.” (In the second version, the Federico meeting did not happen quite so fast.)
    Pujol was excited