Operation Garbo by Juan Pujol Garcia

was running and always had a lurking fear that my whole operation would suddenly collapse, but as I seemed to have managed so far without raising any suspicions, I carried on with my plan to return to Madrid. I was just trying to decide how I would smuggle in the wad of visa forms with their official-looking seals when I received a summons to the Spanish consulate.
    It was only three weeks since my contretemps there, so I was very surprised when one of the consular officials greeted me with: ‘What influential people have you been stirring up, Señor Pujol? Who are your friends in high places?’ As he said this, he handed me a telegram from Madrid, which asked that I be granted visas for Europe, excluding Russia, and the whole of America, except for Mexico. It was signed Colonel Beigbeder, Minister for Foreign Affairs. It was indeed a shock, for it was much more than I had ever dreamed of getting, and with this and my Lisbon residency permit I need no longer worry about a few sheets of embossed and rubber-stamped paper. However, I held on to them because, as the popular Spanish saying has it, a mouse is lost if he only has one means of escape, for if he fails to reach it, that’s the end.
    I returned to Madrid in the early spring of 1941 and put up at a small bed-and-breakfast lodging house on the Gran Via. More enthusiastic than ever, I was ready for action. I telephoned Federico and arranged to meet him at the Café Negresco near the Bank of Spain on the way to the Puerta del Sol.
    The meeting was much longer and more fruitful than either of the others had been. I began by telling him that I had beento Portugal instead of Barcelona, and then invented a long, fictitious story about my friends the Zulueta brothers; through them, I said, I had been approached by the Bank of Spain’s Foreign Exchange Police section and asked to go to Portugal on their behalf to contact a man who wished to buy pesetas in exchange for escudos. I said that I had monitored the transaction and brought the escudos into Spain, while the pesetas were to be handed over to the Portuguese man’s trusted contact in Madrid. Interspersing lies with the truth, I explained to Federico that my main interest in the transaction had been to get to Lisbon in order to become a resident there and so gain a resident’s visa, both of which I had accomplished. I hoped this proved to him that I was able to move both in and out of Spain.
    We then started to talk about the possibility of my taking up residence in Britain and I told him how easy that would be for me now that I had a new passport with a valid visa; all I needed was a motive for being there, such as a job as correspondent for a Spanish newspaper or magazine. He agreed to study my suggestions in depth and we made a new appointment to meet at a later date. In the end we had more than five interviews.
    However, it was clear from these interviews that I would have great difficulty in becoming the British correspondent of a Spanish newspaper: most papers already had people accredited to London as it was the nerve centre for Allied news. I decided I would have to think up some other idea.
    Frederico seemed to be utterly convinced by my Portuguese stories, so I decided to explore this seam in greater depth. As I have already explained, many people at this time were involved in dubious currency deals which creamed off the escudo at the expense of the peseta, so I decided to tell Federico that, as I was already an old hand at catching such people, I had offered to go to Britain for the Zulueta brothers in order to hunt down those gullible and naive enough to carry out such deals. I said that I was waiting for their answer and asked him what missionthe Abwehr would entrust me with if my deal with the Zuluetas came off and they sent me to England.
    More meetings followed; I think I visited more cafés at this time than during the whole of the rest of my life. If I wasn’t meeting Federico in the Aquarium, it was