That couldn’t last forever, though. Sooner or later he’d have to come up with some actual information. So in his third letter, postmarked in October 1941, he began to add some red meat to his reports: His subagent William Gerbers had spotted a convoy of five Allied ships leaving Liverpool, headed for Malta. That Mediterranean island, rich in Christian history, was a vital link in the British defenses, key to the Allied campaign in North Africa. Over a two-year period beginning in 1940, the Luftwaffe carpet-bombed the small island with 3,000 raids; in February 1942 alone, more than 1,000 tons of bombs would be dropped on the rocky outpost. German destroyers and cruisers regularly laid siege to the Allied tankers and freighters hoping to resupply the station. The news that a major convoy was on its way to the battered island would be of great interest to the Third Reich’s war planners.
Despite this phony coup, Pujol was increasingly like a rat in a maze, looking for the exit. He traveled back to Madrid to try the British embassy again for a fifth attempt, showing one of the staffers the miniaturized questionnaires that Kühlenthal had handed to him, but the official sent him away. After this latest rebuff, Pujol was convinced his luck was going to run out, and soon.
Meanwhile, Federico was peppering him with fresh demands: “Try to find out the details of the formation of a new expeditionary force of several divisions: Where are they destined for, the Middle East or Far East?” “Try to get an agent into northern Ireland at the arrival port of American shipments. Ireland is very interesting and important.” The Abwehr also asked him to obtain a series of pamphlets from the Institute of Statistics in Oxford, a way not only to get much-needed information but also to confirm that Pujol was indeed living in England. The last request was easier than it sounded. The spy simply went to the British Propaganda Office in Lisbon, claimed to be a “student of statistics” and asked a clerk to send for the publications. But the dozens of other inquiries were harder to answer from Lisbon. Pujol would have to improvise.
The spy began to scour the city for usable information. An advertisement in a Portuguese paper gave him a few facts about a British naval firm. A French newspaper had a small article on infantile paralysis and food rationing. A telephone directory yielded the name of a British company. Pujol rifled through the Blue Book, published by the Office of National Statistics, for the text of Churchill’s speeches, and sent Federico the best bits. When he went to a Lisbon cinema to relax for a couple of hours (the movie itch was still with him), he watched a newsreel before the main feature that included a few seconds’ footage of a Canadian warship called Esquimalt. Pujol sat up in his chair, instantly alert. His next report included a detailed description of the ship, including his completely made-up descriptions of its capabilities. A sketch of a “very secret apparatus which had been copied from plans” by his “subagent No. 3” had in fact been copied down by Pujol, standing in front of a Lisbon shop window that featured a picture of an Allied commando barge. Pujol scribbled out a quick drawing, which he refined later, then added an avalanche of false data on how long and wide the barge was and what armaments it carried, and for good measure he sent along a fake eyewitness report on how the thing maneuvered on water. Even a British propaganda leaflet—whether dropped from the sky or handed out by pro-Allied sympathizers—was turned into a lengthy report: “R.A.F. Pilot School situated near Sandwich, the camp is camouflaged and also used as a landing ground for coastal defense plans. It is on the right bank of the river Stour … just by the cross roads of the main roads leading to Ramsgate and Sandwich.” Other things he just made up out of whole cloth, including enormous “amphibious tanks” he’d seen maneuvering on Lake Windermere.
Pujol was like a rag-and-bone man wandering the streets of Lisbon. Nothing was wasted.
But how to get the letters to the Germans? He didn’t want to overplay the fake KLM pilot who was supposedly acting as his courier. Instead, Pujol went to a local detective agency, hired a man to impersonate the phony subagent named Gerbers, booked him a hotel room in Lisbon and had the Germans come knock on the door and collect the materials.
Despite their sketchy origins, many of his reports were quite convincing. When Tommy Harris later revealed to British intelligence that Pujol had made up most of his messages, the analysts there refused to believe Pujol had never set foot in England. His letters were so detailed and persuasive, so accurately rendered, that it seemed impossible that he was relying only on his wits. He’d convinced the British he was lurking in their cities when he was really a thousand miles away.
Federico’s letters made it clear that the Germans were studying his reports closely. When he made the inevitable mistake, the Abwehr agent pounced: “You refer by number to the infantry regiment which you saw in Guilford but infantry regiments don’t have numbers, they are known by names. Your report is therefore useless … I await your clarification!”
Pujol instinctively knew that he couldn’t let the Germans speak to him that way. He shot back: “I am surprised at your announcement regarding the numbering of Regiments … Have you never heard of the organizations which are known as the War Office and the General Staff? Nearly a year ago these organizations, in order to avoid espionage, have referred to fighting units by numbers … I am in possession of proof of what I am now stating and of the orders which have been issued, one of which I came by during my travels.” Would the Germans like to see the actual orders?
It was a bluff, of course. Pujol didn’t have the orders and in fact the Germans were right: the English used names, not numbers, to identify their regiments. If the Abwehr demanded to see the documents, Pujol was finished. But the spy instinctively seemed to know how to play his German handlers. A few weeks later, after Pujol sent more folderol backing up his statements (but not the imaginary “orders”), Federico wrote back: “It is unnecessary for you to send us proof in evidence since we have absolute trust in you … I repeat that we here are most satisfied with your collaboration.”
The secret to playing his handlers was calculating how badly they needed him. The counterattack had worked perfectly. Like a mistress furious that she’d been accused of cheating, Pujol had struck back at exactly the right moment, binding the Germans closer to him. He wouldn’t be questioned; if they didn’t trust him, he’d leave. MI5’s Tommy Harris later shook his head at his agent’s brass: “It can be said that from this point onwards it became evident that the Germans did not want to lose [Pujol] at any cost.”
A few groaners passed without comment. “There are men here,” Pujol wrote in a report “from” Glasgow, “that will do anything for a liter of wine.” Anyone who’d really been to Scotland would have known that ale or whisky was the only thing longshoremen drank. He made glaring mistakes with English currency; he was copying amounts in pence and shillings from a railway guide, but he didn’t know how to convert one into the other.
To further bamboozle the Germans, Pujol sent Araceli to meet with Federico, with a personal letter he’d written her. Araceli told the German officer that she suspected her husband was having an affair. “She became highly excited and said that she was convinced that her husband had run off with a woman and that Federico was an accomplice in his escapade.” Federico revealed that her husband was in fact in England on a special mission for the Third Reich. Araceli screamed that Juanito was sure to be picked up by the British and shot. (Of course, she knew full well that Pujol was in Lisbon and in no danger.) Desperate to get this woman out of his office, Federico offered her a job in the German embassy. When that failed, he tried money—enough pesetas to stay in a five-star Madrid hotel. Araceli wouldn’t be bought off, however, and to make her point about the danger her husband was in, she gave Federico a picture of the baby Juan to forward to Pujol, who would, she said melodramatically, probably never see his child again.
It had been a bravura performance. In his next letter, Federico gave Pujol a full report on the encounter, then added a line asking Pujol to please not send any more letters via his wife.
Back in Lisbon,
the strain was getting to Pujol. His letters to Federico were now full of complaints of lack of money and correspondence. To Araceli, then in Madrid, he wrote: “Talk to me about the baby, for God knows how I long to see him, and hug him. I shall perhaps find him grown up into a man smoking a large Havana cigar.” Even a minimally venal spy would probably have thrown in the towel and gone to work for the Germans by this point. But the thought apparently never crossed Pujol’s mind; he wasn’t some chancer looking to make a mint and take the hydroplane to Argentina. He really wanted to save the world.
But the spy also had a young family, and every visit to the British embassy increased the chance they would all end up in a concentration camp. In the opinion of one MI5 officer, at this point “[Pujol’s] existence was precarious in the extreme. He remained permanently poised on the edge of a precipice over which some blunder or other must, as it seemed, soon impel him.” The Abwehr’s replies to his messages were not as enthusiastic as he’d hoped for, and they’d refused to supply him with more cash for living expenses after the original $3,000 had run out. Instead, they’d send him a grudging $50 here or $100 there. His star was clearly fading. “The farce was coming to an end.” Pujol began looking into emigrating to Brazil.
The mission that had begun in his Tom Mix daydreams appeared to have run its course. But Pujol hadn’t factored in one thing: the determination of Araceli González Carballo Pujol.
It was Araceli who sensed her husband’s deepening pessimism and decided to do something about it. Having joined Pujol in Lisbon, she now put on her best outfit and made her way to the American embassy. We can imagine her dressed in her finest coat, aglitter with whatever jewels she’d brought from Lugo, marching into the rather grand embassy building and demanding to speak to someone of real influence. Araceli was not a woman to be denied. She was ushered into the naval attaché’s office—far better than Pujol had done in his many tries at the British embassy—and almost immediately began to get results in a series of meetings with an attaché named Rousseau. “[She] mystified the American and … whetted his appetite.” She also demanded $200,000 for the secrets she was about to reveal. It was an outrageous figure, but it was meant to be: Rousseau sat up in his chair and took notice of this commanding woman.
To convince the American that she and Pujol were real spies, Araceli felt she had to give Rousseau some proof of what they could do for his country. At their next meeting, she brought a letter written in French. Araceli didn’t speak French, something Rousseau knew. In order to get the letter, she’d asked a friend to write out an innocuous telegram that she said her husband, a writer, wanted to send to his agent. The original letter read: “LeClerc Fils of Paris reports that both he and his Madrid agents are awaiting your orders as they now have everything ready to commence publication in all the agreed journals at a moment’s notice.”
The friend wrote out the text. Araceli took it and substituted some key words. The harmless “LeClerc Fils” became “Agent 172 of Chicago,” “publication” became “sabotage,” “Madrid” morphed into “Detroit,” and “journals” was changed to “factories.” When she was done, the letter read: “Agent 172 of Chicago reports that both he and his Detroit agents are awaiting your orders as they now have everything ready to commence sabotage in all the agreed factories at a moment’s notice.”
At the meeting with Rousseau, Araceli produced the letter with the message written in invisible ink, saying it was a secret communication from a man staying at her boarding house who she believed to be a German spy. She then whipped out a bottle of secret ink developer—Rousseau’s eyes must have gone wide at that—and spread it across the page. The sinister message appeared. The American bent over to read it and immediately agreed to put her in touch with the British.
But there was a footnote that Pujol never learned about. He probably went to his grave unaware of what had really happened in that embassy in Lisbon. Araceli had been far more creative—and self-sacrificing—than he knew.
Rousseau set up a meeting with a British MI6 officer in Lisbon so that Araceli could tell her story. She brought along the miniaturized questionnaires and the secret ink bottles, but before she could take them out of her handbag the MI6 man—who took her for another adventuress hoping to get out of Lisbon by hook or by crook—made it clear that he doubted her integrity. Offended, she stood up to leave, and the Brit took 20 escudos from his pocket and threw it on the table. “Here you are. Take this for your trouble and your fare.” He was calling this well-bred society girl from Lugo a hustler.
In her family, Araceli was famous for her ferocity. “She never stepped back —even when she was getting ready to sprint ahead” is how her daughter put it. Now a foreigner she’d never previously met had just paid her, a possible descendant of King Alfonso XI, one of the gravest insults imaginable. God knows what would happen if she told her husband. Harris wrote: “There is no doubt that had he learnt about this incident at the time the case would have been irrevocably lost.” Pujol would probably have given the officer a beating. In the accounts of the meeting in the MI5 files, one can almost feel the blood rise to Araceli’s face as she absorbed the insult.
Somehow she kept her cool. Rousseau quickly apologized for the officer’s rudeness, and Araceli revealed that the “German spy” was actually her husband.
The improvisation of the “Agent 172” letter was a brilliant stroke, but then Araceli was a highly intelligent woman. Yet it’s the self-restraint—not something that came easily to Araceli—that impresses the most. It’s hard not to see it as an act of love for her husband, an offering to their shared mission.
6. The Snakepit
ST. ALBANS, TWENTY MILES outside London, was a typically English market town, solid and prosperous, a place of meadows and old manor houses of red brick. It was filled with quaint inns, as St. Albans had been the first coach stop on the road out of London since the Tudor era. At night, one could hardly hear the incendiary bombs falling on the capital to the south, only crickets and tree frogs.
But the sleepy suburb had once been the site of defiance and ancient gore, home to the Catuvellauni, a warlike British tribe that emerged before the birth of Christ. The Catuvellauni are believed to have led the first resistance against the armies of Julius Caesar, as they swept up from Rome, in 54 B.C. The town was renamed for Britain’s first Christian martyr, St. Alban, who was beheaded by the Romans in an anti-Christian purge that swept England in A.D. 308.
Now, centuries later, St. Albans was again playing an important wartime role, one rooted not in violence but in cerebral conflict. In the fall of 1941, along with evacuated children arriving daily from London in airless buffet cars, holding hands as the train exhaled a final gust of steam and they stepped to the platform to meet their new foster parents, other passengers, young men in suits and dark hats, were met as soon as they disembarked and were whisked off in civilian cars. The men were offered a cigarette and taken to a brick estate that lay at the end of a private gravel driveway hidden behind tall hedgerows. It was an old Edwardian mansion called Glenalmond, now converted into a warren of small offices. Early in the war it had been quietly taken over by Section V of MI6. And it was here, in subsection (d), responsible for Iberia and the Spanish-speaking countries, that the intelligence officer Desmond Bristow, who would soon lead the debriefing of Juan Pujol, found himself on a crisp October day.
Desmond Bristow was a tough-minded young man who knew Spain and Spaniards intimately. Though born in Manchester, the son of a mining engineer, he’d been raised in Sotiel Coronada, in the southern Iberian countryside, before going up to Cambridge to study French and Spanish. Or to feign study—he’d been a terrible student. Instead of excelling academically, Bristow captained the famous Cambridge rowing team, and game for anything, once set fire to himself with gas before leaping into the river Cam to raise money for war veterans on Poppy Day. At twenty-two, the adventerous Bristow had found himself “bored” and “broke” in the winter of 1940 and so walked to the sandbag
ged War Office in Westminster and volunteered to fight the Nazis.
Bristow had come to the intelligence services after seeing something he would never forget. He’d originally been inducted into the British army as a private. One day after a series of grueling infantry drills, he’d found himself at Oxford Station on his way to see his girlfriend, Betty. As he waited, a special carriage heaved in on another track, and the eyes of those in the crowded station turned to watch as the car wheezed to a stop. In its windows were men with no arms or half their faces gone. “I watched in horror as hundreds of young men like myself limped, hobbled on crutches, or were carried on stretchers, with arms or legs missing and bloody bandages around their faces and eyes.” The train had come from Dunkirk, where the British Expeditionary Force had just escaped after a chaotic retreat from France.
The sight made it clear that England was losing the war, and convinced Bristow with equal force that he wanted out of the infantry. He quickly transferred to the intelligence services. Nearly two years later he found himself in MI6, using his fluency in Spanish. Instead of killing German soldiers, he devoted himself to catching spies.
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