The Spy with 29 Names (8 page)

Pujol was on his own. Socorro Blanco organised thrice-weekly visits to bring him food, but now, with no company at all, Pujol was forced to live in a blackened silence, unable to turn on the lights or make a sound of any kind. He became depressed and withdrawn and his health started to deteriorate. The visits became less frequent, the food rations smaller and smaller. He lost a lot of his hair and over 20 kilos in weight, looking more like a man in his late forties than his mid-twenties.

He knew that he could not remain like this indefinitely. By now it was early 1938 and he had been in the flat for over a year. Fearing for his physical and mental health, he decided that he had to get out. Again, Socorro Blanco helped, providing false identity papers which made him out to be a man too old for military service.

When he stepped out into the street, not only had the city changed thanks to the bombs and revolutions, but so had he. He had been in self-imposed captivity for a year and a half. Through a contact in the Socialist trade union, the UGT, he got a job running a chicken farm in San Juan de las Abadesas, in northern Catalonia, near the border with France. It seemed a perfect place from which to complete his escape.

Slowly he got his strength back, taking long walks once his daily work was done, calculating how far he would have to go to get across the border. Once his preparations were finished, however, and he was about to leave, another group of would-be escapees were involved in a shoot-out near the border with police, and several were killed. As a result, patrols in the area were intensified: just as it had opened, the door to freedom had been closed again.

With the route to France now cut off, Pujol had to think of other ways to get out of Republican Spain. The farm was not a success and made no money, owing to a lack of investment from the union. After a number of arguments over the running of the place, Pujol handed in his resignation and weeks later was back in Barcelona. This time it seemed there was only one way out: to join the Republican army and try to cross over to the Francoist side at the front line.

He decided to chance it and presented himself at a recruitment centre. It was ironic that after so long he should volunteer to join up in the very army he had been trying to stay out of. Yet with his false identity and older appearance, he was greeted with open arms. It was the spring of 1938 and the Republican side was clearly losing the Civil War. Pujol was given basic, two-week infantry training and sent to the front, near the town of Flix on the River Ebro.

Life in the infantry did not appeal to him, and he was determined not to become ‘cannon fodder’, so he lied to his officers, telling them that he knew about telegraphy and Morse code. He was duly sent to a signals unit attached to the International Brigades, but his ignorance about the job was all too evident and eventually he was ordered to lay cables between the trenches and the command post. Finally, his unit was sent to the front line, relieving a force that had lost 50 per cent of its men, largely through desertions to the other side. Morale on the Republican side was low, not helped by the fact that all they had to eat, for every meal of every day, was lentil stew. At night, Francoist troops would call out mouth-watering details of the food that they enjoyed on their side, encouraging the Republican soldiers to try to cross the lines.

Pujol did not need any persuading – that was precisely why he was there. Soon he discovered that others were thinking of attempting the same thing. It was risky. If they failed and were caught they would be shot. On one occasion the company’s barber was executed in front of the entire battalion for an unsuccessful escape attempt. This was the only dead man that Pujol saw in the entire Civil War.

The Francoist lines lay 200 metres away across a valley with a stream running at the bottom. One clear evening, Pujol, ‘starving and disenchanted with life’, decided to make a run for it. Later he would claim it was the craziest thing that he ever did.

Just as he was leaving his trench to head out across no-man’s-land, armed with a couple of hand grenades, two of his colleagues jumped out of their position to escape as well, causing a small landslide of stones. The sentries were alerted by the noise. Pujol hesitated for a moment, but this was, he told himself, his only chance, and he set off with the patrol hot on his heels. At the bottom of the valley he hid in a patch of pine trees, but quickly became disoriented. Once
the patrol had gone, he started heading up a hill, thinking he was inching towards the Francoist side, only to discover that he was going the wrong way – back to the Republican positions.

‘Halt!’ came a cry.

‘Don’t shoot,’ Pujol replied coolly. ‘I’m a Republican passing over to the other side.’

Shots rang out. Realising his mistake, Pujol raced once again into the valley, while the patrol rushed down to try to root him out.

Sneaking through the pine groves, he reached a stream, where he lay down in a reed bed, covering himself as best he could with leaves. The patrol came very close, pushing at the undergrowth with their rifle butts. At one point they stopped for a smoke. The full moon appeared from behind a cloud and Pujol could see their silhouettes, only metres away from him.

He started a silent prayer, calling out to the Virgen del Pilar, the Madonna of the Pillar, to save him. He would, he said, pay homage to her in the cathedral of Zaragoza if she saved him then. He clung to the two grenades he had brought with him, wondering if he would have to use them. Just at that moment, the moon was clouded over again, the night became darker, and the patrol moved away.

Pujol stayed where he was for a while, and shortly afterwards the Francoists began their usual banter, calling out to the Republicans on the other side. Pujol decided to use their voices to orient himself, and he got up out of the river bed, took his boots off so that the sound of his footsteps would not give him away, and started the long climb up the slope to the other side. Eventually he made it and, exhausted and suffering from his shredded feet, he was hauled over into their trenches, almost passing out with fright. ‘Don’t worry now,’ he heard them say as he made a final effort to reach them.

Bleeding and hungry, he had crossed the lines successfully. He spent the next couple of days in the Francoist trenches eating as much as he could.

Yet if he thought that his life was about to improve having finally made it out of Republican territory, two years since the Civil War had begun, he was sorely mistaken. Long, tiring interrogations soon began, before he was finally sent off in a goods train to Zaragoza along with other ex-Republican soldiers. From there they were taken to a Francoist concentration camp in Deusto, in the Basque Country.
Once again, Pujol, as a former Republican soldier, found himself a prisoner.

The camp had been the university building, yet conditions were harsh. Lice had infested the place, while the men had to sleep on the bare floorboards of the lecture halls. During the day, they congregated around a fountain in the campus, which was the only place they could wash. To pass the time, some of the men would conduct lice races, betting their rations on the result. Pujol had not eaten properly for a long time, and he found that he could not hold down his food. For a while he was put in the infirmary, where he was given a diet of milk and broth to help his digestive tract recover.

By now he had gained some experience in survival: he sold a Parker fountain pen that he had managed to keep hold of, and with the money bought himself a cheaper pen, some paper and stamps. With these he wrote to every family member and friend that he could think of, asking for help. Some answered, others even with small amounts of money, but the response was not enough to get him out.

But help did finally come. Celedonio, the priest whom his mother had sheltered in Barcelona at the start of the war, had managed to get across to Francoist territory and was now the head of a hospital in Palencia, near Salamanca. He travelled to see Pujol in Deusto, insisting to his captors that Pujol was honest, apolitical and Catholic. He then went one step further and called in at the Francoist capital, Burgos, on his way back to Palencia, where he personally vouched for his family friend and made such a noise that within three days he was released from the concentration camp.

At first Pujol was sent to Celedonio’s hospital to recover for a week. By now he was suffering from acute bronchitis, yet he was still obliged to join the Francoist army. In Burgos he enlisted, this time under his own name and giving his true age.

It seemed as though his problems might finally be over. Living the life of a junior officer in the conservative, traditional city of Burgos, he made friends and found a new girlfriend, despite struggling to get by on only one-third-pay. Then one day in December, at a victory celebration after the Francoists had won the Battle of the Ebro, Pujol was caught by his commanding officer exchanging his soldier’s cap with a Carlist militiaman’s red beret. The officer was infuriated – such an act was strictly forbidden. Summoning Pujol to his office the next
morning, he struck him hard across the face, ripped the braid off his uniform and sent him down to the cells.

Pujol was incarcerated once again, and soon he found himself being sent with other soldiers to the front lines in Aragón. The Civil War was about to end, yet Pujol was in danger of becoming one of its last casualties.

When he got a chance, he called his girlfriend in Burgos, asking her to pull strings: she worked in the Ministry of War and was friends with an influential general. The plan worked. Three weeks later Pujol was called back from the front and reinstated as a junior officer, working with telegrams and communiqués inside the Francoist General Headquarters. It seemed that finally, after so many years of hardship, he could relax. Pujol lived out the last weeks of the Civil War in Burgos, staying at the Condestable Hotel. There, two days before it ended, he met another young woman, a beautiful and seductive black-haired Galician who had a nursing job. Araceli González would later become his wife.

Curiously, at that time Kim Philby was also in Burgos. Accredited to the Francoist side, he was
The Times
’s correspondent in the Civil War, and had already been secretly recruited by the Soviets. By now it was early 1939; the Civil War ended on 1 April. Three years later, Philby would be leading attempts from within MI6’s Section V to find a man who had also been a regular face at Franco’s GHQ. Did he and Pujol ever meet in Spain? There is no evidence to the fact, yet the coincidence is curious enough for one Spanish writer, Rafael Fraguas, to conclude that Philby and Pujol did get to know each other during this time.

Did Philby even recruit Pujol as a Soviet agent, as Fraguas suggests? This is a conspiracy too far, one that turns Pujol, history’s greatest double agent, into a
triple
agent, who was secretly working for Moscow all along.

Fraguas’s theory is based on conjecture and nothing has emerged from the Russian archives or anywhere else to support the idea.

But the temptation to speculate about Pujol and his motives is understandable, because little in his story is either simple or straightforward.

THE CIVIL WAR
was over and Pujol had survived, proud of the fact that despite serving in both armies, he had not fired a single shot in battle. Yet Spain was in a desperate situation. To this day, the post-war years – La Posguerra – hold a place in popular Spanish consciousness as an emblematic time of want and suffering.

Pujol was still a Catholic, but if he had had any idealised notions about what life would be like on the Francoist side, these were quickly undermined. Now the war was over, he suffered much less than many of his fellow countrymen thanks to his position as a demobbed junior officer from the winning side. Yet attempts by friends and colleagues to get him to join the Falange, the Spanish fascist party, were met with firm refusals. He reacted to the ideology of Franco’s Spain as he had to that of ‘Red’ Barcelona: he wanted nothing to do with it: it clashed with the ideas of liberalism and tolerance handed down by his father.

More important than the matter of party membership, however, was that of making a living. Answering an advert in a newspaper, he got the job of manager of the Majestic Hotel, in the upmarket Castellana district of Madrid. The best days of the hotel were behind it by this point, however. Owned by a Gypsy woman called Señora Melero, it had enjoyed something of a reputation during the 1920s and 1930s, but had been used as lodgings for the International Brigades during the Civil War, and had become almost a ruin, a far cry from
the ‘majesty’ of its name. There was little that Pujol could do to help it recover its former glory: rationing and austerity severely curtailed his efforts.

Pujol was never a man to give up – something that he demonstrated time and again in the face of setbacks and disasters – and around this time the idea began to form in his mind of a better life, of getting out of post-war, Francoist Spain and moving to a country more suited to his ideas: Britain and the United States both appealed.

He started listening to the Spanish-language broadcasts from the BBC, to hear what the British had to say about Hitler and the Germans. Through the BBC he heard about the beginning of the new world war. That in itself was unusual. Spain is not, in general, a country of Anglophiles – the exploits of ‘the pirate Drake’ and humiliation over Gibraltar can still rankle even today. In the early 1940s, when Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were the country’s closest friends, to have a pro-British attitude was even stranger. Yet a desire for freedom and democracy were such a part of Pujol’s character, having been passed down from an early age by his father, that an image of Britain became a beacon for the political ideas that he valued.

In April 1940 he married Araceli, the ambitious Galician beauty he had met in Burgos. By now Pujol was making some progress in his plans to leave the country. It was very difficult to get a passport – the Francoist authorities demanded good reasons, or good contacts, before handing over such documents to ordinary citizens. An opportunity for Pujol arose, however, from an unlikely quarter: a young guest at the hotel called Enrique who styled himself the Duke of La Torre de Santo Domingo, was friendly with a couple of aristocratic ladies in the city who were known as ‘the Princesses of Borbón’. These grandes dames had been complaining about the difficulty of getting any Scotch in Spain, and how important it was for them, in their position, to have a few bottles at home for entertaining. The ‘Duke’ turned to Pujol, who saw his chance and came up with a plan: if they could get him a passport, he could take them all to Portugal to pick up some whisky. Within days the passport was in his hands. With Pujol at the wheel, the ‘Duke’ and his friends drove to Évora, just over the border from Badajoz, loaded the car up, and headed back. Impressed by the ladies’ titles, the border guards did not even search the car as they passed back into Spain.