My 'Nonfiction Spy Thriller' tentatively titled: Agent Garbo: The Spy Who Fooled Hitler
Chapter One is 99% done. Chapter Two is 99% done. Chapter Three is 99% done. Chapter Four is 99% done. Chapter Five is 57% done. By reading any of it you agree to purchase at least one copy once it is published.
C1P1Juan Pujol García was born in Barcelona, Spain, on February 14, 1912, the third of four children of an educated and well-to-do Catalan family. The city his family called home was, in the early twentieth century, at war with itself, a mosaic of contradictions, a place of elegant, modern avenues built over the fault lines of ancient, violent grievances. It was the proud and industrious heart of Catalonia, a region that spoke its own language and held its own dreams of autonomy from the central authority of Madrid. The city’s new Eixample district, where the Pujol family lived, was a symbol of this forward-looking confidence—a clean grid of bourgeois apartment blocks designed to impose order on restless souls.
C1P2This was the Barcelona of Modernisme, the exuberant architectural style that had become a declaration of Catalan identity. The fantastical buildings of Antoni Gaudí weren't just structures; they were monuments of disobedience, physical manifestations of rebellion. This defiance thrived in places like café Els Quatre Gats, a hub for intellectuals and artists such as Pablo Picasso. But for every elegant façade on the Passeig de Gràcia, there was a factory in the industrial suburbs churning out smoke and a slum like the Barri Xinès churning out revolutionaries. The city was a laboratory for every new and dangerous idea sweeping Europe, a place where the violent street battles between labor unions and employer-hired gunmen, known as pistolerismo, had been a fact of life for decades.
C1P3Anarchism, embodied by the powerful Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), wasn’t a fringe theory but a dominant force in the city’s life. For hundreds of thousands of Barcelonans, it wasn’t simply a political affiliation but a worldview: the government in Madrid was an illegitimate occupying force, the police were a gang of thugs, private property was a form of theft, and the Church was an instrument of oppression. The CNT advocated for anarcho-syndicalism, a new ideology that sought to replace the state entirely with a society run by worker-controlled collectives. Its black-and-red flags were everywhere, a symbol of its readiness to ignite a revolution at a moment’s notice. This was a direct and existential threat to a bourgeois family like the Pujols.
C1P4Somehow, in this volatile world, the Pujol family had carved out a life of reasoned comfort. Juan’s father, Joan Pujol, owned a successful dye factory, adding color and vibrancy to the region’s renowned textiles. A man of the nineteenth-century liberal tradition, he believed in progress, democracy, and a secular education. He held a deep contempt for all forms of fanaticism, seeing little difference between the rigid dogma of the Catholic Church and the violent absolutism of the rising political movements. In a move that would later seem fitting, he named his son Juan after a hero in the popular play Don Juan Tenorio. The Pujol home on Carrer de Muntaner, managed by his mother, Ana García, was an island of this belief system. The dinner table was a forum for intellectual debate, the bookshelves were filled with works of culture, and the four Pujol children were taught one primary lesson: the life and conscience of an individual are more sacred than any ideology.the bookshelves brimmed with works of culture, and the four Pujol children were taught one enduring lesson: the life and conscience of an individual were more sacred than any ideology.
C1P5But Juan wasn't built for the world of industry and clear-cut debate his father envisioned. Even as a child, he stood at a distance from the world, watching it unfold with a certain hyper-awareness that shaped his understanding. His social world was largely the one he shared with his three siblings. This wasn't the disposition of a lonely child, but of a deeply introverted one, a child more engaged with the inner workings of his own mind than with the boisterous games of others. While others played, he watched, noticing the subtle hierarchies and alliances. During his lessons at the Valero School, his mind was elsewhere, deconstructing the small dramas of the classroom, filing away the tics and tells of his teachers and classmates. His academic performance was unremarkable because his real education was outside the curriculum. He was a student of human nature, a collector of the minutiae of behavior, a boy learning the difference between what people said and what they meant.
C1P6All too soon and without warning, the steady hand that had guided the Pujol family was gone. Juan’s father, Joan Pujol, died in 1931 from a severe stomach illness, just as the new Republic was born. Without its founder’s leadership, the family’s once-prosperous dye factory began to falter. The global depression that had begun in 1929 reached Spain, cutting off trade and deepening the country’s hardship. The comfortable world Juan had always known was crumbling, leaving him not only without his moral anchor but also adrift financially. For the first time, he was forced to navigate a world for which he was uniquely ill-equipped.
C1P7Juan’s ventures into the working world were a string of failures that, in retrospect, could be seen as a form of training. As a teenager, he worked in the office of a British-owned company, where he experienced the city’s contradictions daily. Inside was the rational world of commerce and order, while outside the streets seethed with opposing, revolutionary forces. His apprenticeship at a local hardware store ended over a broken clock. The owner claimed it was right twice a day. Juan disagreed — a broken machine, he said, was never right. The argument sealed his fate there. His true calling, he believed, was the cinema. He took over management of the Teatro Royal, a local picture palace. A popular form of entertainment during the era, these theaters were often used by anarchists and other political groups for passionate, sometimes violent rallies. In the flickering dark of a movie theater, he discovered a world that rewarded illusion. For the first time, his unique talents found an outlet. He wasn’t merely showing films; he was selling fantasies. He learned the art of promotion and publicity, how to sell a story before the customer even walked in the door. He was studying the mechanics of deception on a grand scale. The business ultimately failed, but the education was priceless.
C1P8In his final attempt at a conventional life, Juan enrolled in the Royal Poultry School in the Spanish coastal town of Arenys de Mar. He threw himself into a world of cycles, growth, and tangible results. He would be a chicken farmer. While he was there, the school faced a mysterious plague that was killing the chickens, and none of the instructors could determine the cause. Juan, rather than studying the birds themselves, observed their environment. He noticed the lizards were attracted to the chicken feed, and that the chickens, in turn, were eating the lizards. He hypothesized the lizards were toxic to the fowl. He built a small, lizard-proof fence around the feeding troughs. The plague of deaths immediately stopped. It was an early sign of a mind wired to solve a problem by looking at it from an unconventional point of view.
C1P9His dreams of poultry farming officially ended in the summer of 1936 when he was forced into service with a Republican unit. In the chaos of the revolution that had taken over Barcelona, militias went door-to-door and gathered up any able-bodied men they could find. Juan's agricultural experience made him an asset. He was put in charge of a small dairy farm that was vital for supplying milk. He worked hard to make it productive, only to see his efforts undermined by the farm’s political committee, who cared more about imposing a new social order than feeding the people. The demands of the conflict eventually reassigned him to a more dangerous post in a cavalry unit. The Republican army was a confusing mix of different factions, each with its own uniforms, flags, and command structures, making discipline difficult and cooperation rare. He was supposed to fight for a cause he no longer recognized in an army that was often little more than an armed mob. Each day brought a lesson in cruelty and incompetence in the service of an idea.
C1P10The war had grown beyond Spain’s borders, becoming a testing ground for the greater conflict to come. Adolf Hitler’s Germany dispatched the Condor Legion—a Luftwaffe expeditionary force of bombers, fighters, and support personnel—to aid Franco. Under commanders like Wolfram von Richthofen, they used Spain’s towns and cities to practice their Blitzkrieg tactics. The German dive bombers that would later terrorize Warsaw and London first honed their techniques over Guernica and Durango. From the south, Mussolini’s Italy sent the Corpo Truppe Volontarie, some 50,000 ground troops. The Nationalists had formidable and committed allies.
C1P11The Republic, by contrast, was largely abandoned. The democracies of Britain and France championed a policy of non-intervention. Formalized through a London-based committee, this policy became a cynical farce, effectively imposing an embargo on the internationally recognized Republican government while ignoring the steady stream of aid flowing to Franco from Germany and Italy. Still, the Republic drew thousands of volunteers to the International Brigades—anti-fascists from more than fifty countries, including some 2,800 Americans of the Lincoln Battalion who traveled to Spain in defiance of U.S. neutrality laws.
C1P12After his first taste of service in a Republican cavalry unit in 1938, Juan deserted, disgusted by what he had seen. He went into hiding in Barcelona at the home of his then-girlfriend’s family, but a city-wide sweep by Republican authorities looking for draft-dodgers soon discovered him. He was arrested and held for a week in a makeshift prison inside what had once been a convent. The Republican army, desperate for manpower, chose not to execute him for desertion. Instead, they handed him a new uniform and forced him back into service. His new posting was a death sentence: a front-line unit tasked with clearing minefields. Escape was the only option, but doing so required an official leave pass, a document impossible for a man in his position to obtain. It was here that his unique mind, the mind of an observer, came into play. He couldn't acquire a pass, so he would have to create one. The penalty for forgery, like desertion, was death.
C1P13Relying on his sharp memory, he recalled the design of other soldiers’ passes. He visualized the layout, the required signatures, and the most crucial detail: the official purple-inked stamp. He had no access to such a stamp, but he had found a small indelible pencil with violet markings that became permanent when wet. In secret, he spent hours perfecting the stamp’s intricate design, drawing it freehand again and again until it was convincing.
C1P14The document alone wasn't enough. He knew the crude counterfeit wouldn't withstand close scrutiny, so he made sure it didn't receive any. Approaching the sentry post, he presented the document with an unshakable, almost bored confidence. Before the guard could examine it, Juan asked for a light for his cigarette, complained about the food, anything to divert attention. Disarmed by the performance, the guard gave the document a cursory glance, stamped it, and waved him through. In that moment, Juan learned more than how to forge a document. He learned how to be invisible in plain sight, how to lie with his entire being, and how to manipulate the very systems designed to control him. Even the strictest bureaucracy had cracks, even an army at war, and a convincing performance was the perfect way to slip through them.
C1P15In a desperate gamble, Juan defected to the Nationalist side, discovering not salvation but a more organized form of tyranny. The chaos of the Republic was replaced by the cold, monolithic cruelty of fascism. This wasn't the random terror of the mob, but the bureaucratic terror of lists and firing squads. After seizing a town, Nationalist forces carried out methodical purges, executing thousands of teachers, union leaders, and intellectuals, often relying on lists from local sympathizers. As a Catalan, Juan faced a regime determined to erase his family's identity, banning his native language in schools and even on tombstones. He had to learn a new performance. He pretended to have an intense piety, attending mass and offering the fascist salute—the famous gesture the Nazis would borrow from Mussolini's Italy. He wore the mask of a loyal Nationalist while his mind was a cold, detached instrument, analyzing the mechanics of this new totalitarian machine.
C1P16When the war ended in 1939, Franco and his Nationalists had won, Spain lay in ruins, and Juan was the graduate of a brutal education. He had seen the true nature of the twentieth century’s new ideological movements from the inside, and he had come to a simple, damning conclusion: they were the same. Both fascism and communism were engines of lies, fueled by hate, and built upon the destruction of the individual. This wasn't a lesson from his father’s politics. It was a truth he had paid for with three years of his life. Juan no longer had any use for ideologies or political parties, his only conviction would be for liberty and basic human dignity.
C2P1Juan fled to Madrid, seeking the anonymity of the capital. But the Madrid of 1940 offered little comfort. The war had left its mark, with bullet holes and bomb damage visible on nearly every remaining structure. The city was wounded and governed by fear as the brutal Francoist regime consolidated its power. Most writers and artists had been killed or driven into exile. The national anthem, with its new lyrics, played frequently, while the black-and-red symbol of the Falange Party covered nearly every wall. People glanced over their shoulders at every corner. Conversations cut off abruptly whenever secret police walked by. Uniformed German Abwehr and Gestapo agents moved openly in the cafés and lavish hotels, the Hotel Ritz in particular. Outside, long, silent queues for rationed food stretched down the streets. The official ration card, the cartilla de racionamiento, offered too few calories, leaving survival for most dependent on the black market, or estraperlo.
C2P2In Madrid, words themselves had become dangerous. Censorship was nearly total. Regional languages were forbidden. Textbooks were rewritten to enforce National-Catholic dogma and loyalty to the regime. Laws such as the 1939 Political Responsibilities Act and the Law of State Security made even private thoughts or past affiliations punishable. Public newspapers were filled with articles praising Franco and demonizing his enemies. Uniformed Falangists patrolled public squares, factories, and schools, a living reminder that no corner of life was untouched by the state.
C2P3Juan took a position managing a small hotel in Madrid, a job that offered him a window into the city's underworld. The lobby served as a neutral ground where diplomats, journalists, and military attaches from every country moved freely. Spain’s official neutrality meant that the exchange of high-grade goods—primarily the strategic mineral tungsten, or wolfram, critical for German armaments—often passed through the hotel’s doors. His work required him to deal with every guest, giving him an intimate view into their behaviors. He learned to read the unspoken tells of men who weren't what they seemed: the way a man's eyes shifted when a beautiful woman walked by, the casual air of someone carrying a secret, the false confidence of a nervous man.
C2P4In a world of deception, Juan found something real: Araceli González Carballo—brilliant, beautiful, poised, and immediately drawn to his calm composure. She was a Galician from the affluent province of Lugo, and their connection had begun years earlier, in 1938, when they met in the Nationalist capital of Burgos. Her work as a governess for a noble family gave her access to the private words and guarded opinions of the regime’s supporters. The daughter of a pro-Franco army officer, she had defied the narrow path expected of women in Franco’s Spain, where the Falange’s Sección Femenina taught obedience and domestic servitude. For a woman of her station, life was meant either for marriage or motherhood. Araceli had a spirited determination and a moral clarity that had somehow survived the war intact.
C2P5As a nurse during the last brutal days of the Spanish Civil War, Araceli treated the wounded soldiers and civilians caught in the street fighting. She tended to men from every allegiance with the same calm precision, never speaking of the politics that had brought them to her ward. The horrors she witnessed taught her everything she needed to know about fanaticism. A profound duty to stand against it took hold, simply to protect herself and those she loved. Her experience taught her that survival required patience, attention to detail, and a resilience not taught in polite society. Unlike Juan, who was an idealist shaped by disgust, she was a pragmatist by experience.
C2P6Juan was deeply in love, finding in Araceli a steady counterbalance to his restless mind. Their decision to marry in 1940 was more than a personal milestone. They made it an act of defiance by refusing a state-sanctioned ceremony, leaving behind no official record. Their quiet union became a statement of intent. In a city defined by public dogma and state-enforced ideology, their marriage was a small republic of trust and hope. Such trust was a rare commodity in Franco’s Spain where informers were rewarded and even family members and neighbors learned to fear one another.
C2P7In 1941, as the shadow of World War II darkened Europe, Juan and Araceli had a son, also named Juan. Holding the boy in his arms, Juan's abstract concepts of freedom and decency were no longer abstract. They were tied to this tiny, innocent life. He recalled his father, who had instilled in him a hatred for fanatics and who would never meet his grandson. Juan had heard the stories of people who were disappearing without explanation, and the thought of his child being threatened was too much. The frustrated impulse to act sharpened into a deep, defining obligation.
C2P8The decision crystallized over many months, unfolding in a series of quiet conversations held late at night in their dimly lit apartment. In a city where the state controlled every broadcast, where even listening to the BBC was treated as treason, the only truth came in whispers. They debated the risks, which were total. They debated their chances of success, which were slim at best. They weighed the safety of their anonymous life against the moral imperative to act. Juan laid out his case: he knew how these people thought, how they lied, and how they could be deceived. Araceli, in turn, transformed his vision into a feasible plan. Historical accounts describe her as the catalyst, the one who pushed him from contemplation to action, fully aware that a single misstep could cost them everything.
C2P9One cold evening in early 1941, the talking stopped. There was no grand declaration. There was only a quiet, mutual understanding that a line had been crossed. There, in a small apartment in a frightened city, an ordinary man and woman chose to go to war. They didn't know how or whom to contact. They knew only that they would act, and in doing so, they sealed their fate, setting in motion a course of events that would alter the history of World War II.
C3P1Juan Pujol and his wife, Araceli González, were stepping into a world for which they had no training, armed only with conviction and nerve. Their conflict would be fought not with rifles, but with whispers, ink, and imagination. Their first target was the British Embassy in Madrid, a fortress of suspicion in a city teeming with German agents. To become a spy for Britain, Pujol would have to convince British intelligence that he was worth the risk.
C3P2It was a disastrous start. In late 1940 and early 1941, this former poultry farmer approached the British embassy. He did so at a time when Britain was a nation under siege, still reeling from the Battle of Britain and enduring the nightly terror of the Blitz. The embassy staff were overworked, exhausted, and deeply paranoid about provocateurs. In their eyes, Pujol wasn't a potential asset; he was a liability and was politely but firmly shown the door. He tried again, then a third time, each attempt meeting the same wall of British skepticism.
C3P3Frustration hardened into a cold resolve. If the British wouldn’t open the door, he would break in from the other side. A dangerous and implausible plan took shape: he would first become a spy for the Germans, posing as a fascist zealot eager to spy on Britain. He would invent a network of phantom agents across England, feeding Berlin a steady stream of disinformation. Once he had proven his worth to the enemy, he would deliver himself to the British as a double agent, built and paid for by Berlin.
C3P4Before he could begin, he needed the means to move freely through Europe and across borders without being stopped. This required a diplomatic passport, a rare and coveted document in wartime Spain. Through discreet contacts, Pujol acquired six hard-to-find bottles of Scotch whisky to trade with the Duke of Torre, a senior Franco official. The Duke needed the liquor for two pro-Franco princesses of the exiled royal family, who were unable to find Scotch in the war-torn country. From this quiet, almost mundane transaction, Juan Pujol secured his diplomatic passport, the key that would launch one of the most audacious spy games of the war.
C3P5His new target was the Madrid station of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Housed within the German Embassy, this station—known as a Kriegsorganisation, or KOSt—was the nerve center for Nazi operations in Spain. The Madrid KOSt was notoriously sloppy. Its leadership, under pressure from Berlin, valued ideological zeal over operational skill. This bureaucratic laziness was a weakness Pujol would exploit. Calling on his gift for performance, he crafted a new persona. He wasn’t merely a sympathizer. He was a devoted Falangist, someone who spoke passionately of the New Order and fumed at Franco’s cowardly neutrality.
C3P6His performance was superb. In a smoky Madrid café, he made contact with an Abwehr officer named Friedrich Knappe-Ratey, who saw in Pujol the perfect recruit: an ideologically motivated Spaniard with a government job, which Pujol had fabricated, and an unstamped passport that allowed him to travel to Britain. After several meetings, the Abwehr formally recruited him in the autumn of 1941. He became Agent A.382, codenamed Alaric—after the Visigoth who once famously sacked Rome in 410 AD. His training was minimal, unlike the rigorous formal schooling a typical spy would receive. He was given a single bottle of secret ink and a simple cipher. The code was so primitive that British cryptanalysts would solve it at a glance. When his handlers finally demanded a face-to-face meeting with a German contact, Pujol, adept at making excuses, claimed he had an embarrassing stomach bug that made it impossible for him to leave his home. The Germans, all too thrilled by the intelligence reports from a man they believed to be on the ground in London, told him to prioritize his health.
C3P7But Pujol never went to London. Instead, he and Araceli moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where their new life together began in a small, cheap room. The comfort Araceli had known in Spain was now a memory. They were a family of three, and the presence of their infant son made Araceli's isolation and the threat of discovery feel all the more real. Funds from their German contact were dwindling quickly in a city that was a hub of spies, with the glamorous Hotel Palácio Estoril a notorious haunt for agents from both sides. The air hummed with the sound of streetcars and the murmur of a dozen different languages. From their window, Pujol observed the tense handshakes and subtle exchanges below, each one a reminder of the deadly game he was now playing. From this cramped room, he built an empire of lies using only a 1938 Blue Guide to Great Britain, a tourist map, a Portuguese-English dictionary, and an old railway timetable. He had no access to British secrets, so when the Germans asked for phone numbers of British government offices, he scoured a Spanish phone book for names, giving them plausible British titles such as "Undersecretary" or "Director". The Germans believed it all. Because his cover placed him in London, Araceli walked the streets alone, carrying his letters to the post office. Her heart raced at the thought that a single mistake could summon the notoriously efficient Portuguese secret police to their door.
C3P8A capstone of Pujol's work was his ghost army of 27 sub-agents. He created an elaborate intelligence network out of nothing. There was a KLM pilot providing intelligence on Allied flights; a fanatical Welshman in Swansea who led a fictitious fascist group called the "Aryan Brothers of the World Order"; a surly waiter from Gibraltar who was always demanding more money; and a Venezuelan student in Glasgow reporting on ship movements from the River Clyde. The joke was that the student's reports were always late because, as Pujol explained, the student was lazy and easily distracted.
C3P9His imaginary army took on a life of its own. Pujol invented a dockworker named Dick, who supposedly worked for a nonexistent shipping company in Britain and commanded his own “sub-sub-agents” in Liverpool. When Pujol reported that one of these imaginary men had died, the Germans solemnly sent funds to cover the funeral. He once claimed his entire network was suffering from an epidemic of appendicitis. In another excuse for missing reports, he wrote that one of his agents had broken his bottle of invisible ink in the mail, prompting the Germans to send money for a replacement. Araceli acted as a second opinion, scrutinizing details and providing a final check on everything. Pujol created the illusion of a sprawling, continent-wide intelligence network under his sole command. The letters he sent to Madrid were written painstakingly in invisible ink between the lines of seemingly innocuous business correspondence. The Germans were thrilled with the breadth and depth of "Alaric's" network, praised his diligence, and even included one of his fabricated reports in a leaflet for a German naval recruitment drive as an example of a successful intelligence operation. Believing they were funding a massive spy network, the Germans funneled him roughly $340,000 in today’s money over the course of the war. Pujol, in reality, used this money to support himself and his family in Lisbon.
C3P10Meanwhile, 350 miles away in London, an entirely different picture was forming. At Bletchley Park, the guarded heart of British code-breaking, a small team led by the veteran cryptanalyst Dilly Knox, largely staffed by women, had achieved a quiet triumph. While Alan Turing’s group tackled the far more complex Naval Enigma, Knox’s ISK section—or “Intelligence Services Knox”—cracked the version used by the Abwehr. As the decrypted stream of messages, codenamed “ISOS,” began to flow in, a name kept appearing: Alaric. The Germans spoke of him with admiration, describing a brilliant agent at the center of an extensive network in Britain. The revelation sent ripples of alarm through MI5. Convinced they had an enemy spy operating under their noses, British intelligence launched a nationwide hunt for a man who, unbeknownst to them, didn’t exist.
C3P11The case fell to Section B1A, the MI5 department responsible for the top-secret "Double-Cross System," the program designed to control every German agent operating in Britain. It was co-managed by Tomás “Tommy” Harris, an astute, Spanish-speaking officer, and his colleague Cyril Mills. Harris was the flamboyant, art-loving creative force of the partnership, while Mills was cautious and methodical. Together, they made an unlikely but remarkably effective team. Harris had a forensic eye for forgery, honed at his father’s respected Lionel Harris art dealership, a cover that trained him to spot even the most formidable counterfeit. He applied this skill to the growing file of Alaric’s intercepted reports. At first, he was impressed, but soon small inconsistencies began to surface—details that didn’t quite fit. In one message, Alaric’s supposed agent in Glasgow claimed that dockworkers there would “do anything for a liter of wine.” Harris smiled. A Scotsman, he knew, was tempted by many things, but a liter of wine wasn’t one of them. It was a Spaniard's assumption about a Scotsman's vice. The errors multiplied. Alaric’s expense reports revealed an unfamiliarity with British currency, and his reports on troop movements in Liverpool ignored the tide, an error no true dockworker could have made in a port where every schedule depends on when ships enter and leave. The dawning realization in the offices of MI5 was staggering: their master spy wasn’t in Britain at all. He was a freelancer, sitting somewhere abroad—most likely Lisbon—and fabricating his entire network. He wasn’t trying to help the Germans. He was trying to get the attention of the British. The manhunt was called off, replaced by an urgent new mission.
C3P12As the days passed in Lisbon, the confinement was wearing Araceli down. Each day felt heavier than the last—the silence, the secrecy, the endless waiting. The money from the Germans was almost gone. A woman raised in comfort and civility now found herself in a shabby Lisbon room, afraid to step outside, tending to a child in a foreign country and listening for footsteps in the hall. Every sound carried the same dread: that a single mistake would bring the secret police to the door. She convinced herself the British would never give her husband his chance. So Araceli took matters into her own hands. Without telling Juan, she went to the U.S. Naval Attaché’s office in Lisbon. She confessed to an American officer, Lieutenant Patrick Demorest, that her husband was a German spy who wanted to switch sides. The American, recognizing the potential, alerted his British counterparts. A few days later, a letter arrived at Pujol’s hotel with precise instructions for a meeting with Tomás Harris. The game was about to change.
C4P1Tomás Harris arrived in Lisbon in the spring of 1942, sent by MI5 to investigate the mysterious agent known to the Germans as “Alaric.” Raised in a wealthy family, he had spent his youth between London and Madrid, fluent in both languages and temperaments. From his early work in art dealing, he had learned early to distinguish the authentic from the false, a skill he now applied to MI5’s Double-Cross System. Alongside him was Cyril Mills, his quieter and more cautious partner, who shared Harris’s doubts about the strange reports from “Alaric.” Together, they came to Lisbon to determine whether the man behind the legend actually existed.
C4P2The meeting took place in a quiet café off a side street, the kind of place where a person can be watched but not overheard. Pujol came alone, leaving Araceli anxiously waiting in their hotel room. He told Harris everything: the failed approaches to the British, the fabricated reports to the Germans, the imaginary agents he had drawn from guidebooks. He even admitted to the “liters of wine” error. Harris listened intently, his expression unreadable. He wasn’t looking for perfection. He was looking for a flaw that would expose Pujol as a German plant. He found none. What he discovered instead was a man of rare patience and imagination, desperate to be believed. Harris, according to official records, was absolutely captivated, telling his superiors that Pujol possessed an “unusually imaginative brain.” He noted that Pujol’s network was unnecessarily sprawling—too many agents to manage, too many moving parts. Fewer agents would be easier to control and far less problematic. Harris corrected Pujol on minor details as well, pointing out that he repeatedly referred to the country as "England" rather than "Britain," explaining that Britain was the island of England, Scotland, and Wales, and the country itself was the United Kingdom.
C4P3As the conversation went on, Pujol felt the balance shift. He had leverage now. He made it clear he wouldn’t go to London unless Araceli and their young son were brought safely with him. This wasn’t a bluff. He was a father now, and their safety was paramount. In that moment, the lesson from his father echoed in his mind: the value of a single life outweighed any mission, any ideology, any war.
C4P4The negotiation unfolded with careful calculation. Harris was struck by Pujol’s audacity and insight, a man who had made the war his own private battlefield and who understood the enemy like few could. Harris agreed to all of his conditions. Pujol and his family would reach London in secret, and Harris would be their handler. The British now had him, but so did the Germans. The Abwehr, driven by a ruthless new mission from Berlin, was closing in. They had to act quickly before Pujol was drawn into a mission beyond his control.
C4P5In April 1942, under the cover of darkness and new identities, Pujol, Araceli, and their young son boarded a small freighter bound for Britain. The Atlantic crossing was fraught with danger. The British, wary of U-boat attacks, had to route the ship through a series of convoy routes. For Araceli, the voyage was a waking nightmare, each creak of the hull sounding like the approach of a torpedo. For Pujol, it was a test of resolve, a moment to steady himself for the life that awaited on the other side. They reached Liverpool unharmed. The city, a major port with a sizable Spanish-speaking community, offered a natural disguise for their arrival. MI5 moved them to a safe house in Hendon, a quiet suburb of North London, and gave them new identities: Pujol became José García, Araceli became Julia, and their son remained Juan.
C4P6Araceli’s London life was cold, gray, and isolating. Expecting their second child, her homesickness and fear grew heavier each day. In her own words, she loathed the drizzle and the British diet: “Too much macaroni, too many potatoes, and not enough fish.” MI5 kept her from speaking with other Spaniards, fearing any slip could compromise the mission. Alone and anxious, her despair was no longer private. It had become a threat to the operation.
C4P7Pujol met his British colleagues. He was no longer “Alaric,” the German agent he had portrayed. He had become an official double agent in the British Double-Cross System. The British complimented his acting abilities by giving him the codename Garbo, after the actress Greta Garbo, known for her line, “I want to be left alone.” A year spent alone with his inventions had ended. He was now part of a team, a father, and a man whose imagination had rewritten the rules of espionage.
