Operation Garbo by Juan Pujol Garcia Page A

at Calatravas or the Maison Doré, or one of the many other cafés in the centre of town. He was becoming increasingly interested and spent hours advising and training me. After a month, however, it was clear that I was the one making the running.
    As I was anxious to speed things up and finalise our deal, I told Federico that I had an important document to show him. We were sitting in a café so, feigning extreme caution, I slid a piece of paper out of my pocket and pushed it toward him under the table, making sure that no one else in the café saw it. It was one of the bits of paper I had had specially printed in Lisbon, now filled in with my name and giving me a diplomatic assignment to travel to London on a special mission for the commercial administrative department. I let Federico have a quick glance at it, then folded it up and put it back in my pocket. I asked him to keep my mission a secret as it was confidential and the government did not want anyone else to get involved. Finally, I told him that I was expecting to leave in about ten days’ time. Federico swallowed the story, hook, line and sinker.
    Looking back on this period of my life and analyzing the steps I took, I cannot but reflect that I was playing an extremely complicated and dangerous role. Either I was a great actor, as one of MI5’s officers, Cyril Mills (known to me as Mr Grey), later suggested, or Federico was exceptionally naive. But I don’t think Federico was on his own; he must have had encouragement and support from people high up in the German Secret Service. I was personally convinced at the time that he had recruited me on the advice of his superiors; I am equally convinced that, intoxicated by my verbosity, he personally fought for all my suggestions, projects and plans and warmly recommended them to his superiors. But why he had such blind faith in meI do not know. Whatever the truth of the matter, a few weeks after our first meeting, he brought me a bottle of invisible ink, some secret codes and the sum of $3,000, making sure that I had them in good time before I left for Britain. Then he briefed me about the kind of reports they expected me to send them.
    Now that I had the invisible ink and the codes, I realised that it was dangerous for me to remain in Spain as any unexpected chance meeting could easily expose me. At first I thought of going to the British embassy in Madrid and showing them my new acquisitions to prove to them how wrong they’d been to brush me off, for I had no doubt whatsoever that these secret items would make it absolutely clear to the British that I had a valuable contribution to make to the democratic cause. But I was afraid of meeting someone I knew at the embassy, where so many of the staff were Spaniards. How could I be sure that the Germans had not planted an informer inside the British embassy?
    In July 1941 I left Spain for Portugal, temporarily renting a room in Cascais from a poor fisherman and his wife. Later, I moved to a house in Estoril so that I could be more independent , but kept moving around so that I could not be traced, for it should not be forgotten that in those days Lisbon was the nerve centre for European espionage and counter-espionage: British, French, American, Italian and, of course, German intelligence agents were everywhere. Taking the most careful precautions, I now tried to contact the British again through their Lisbon embassy.
    What follows may seem unbelievable but it is true. All my attempts to hand over my valuable new acquisitions, my ink and my codes, failed; I was quite unable to reach anyone of importance whom I felt I could trust at the British embassy. After all that I had done, all that I had gone through, all the subterfuges I’d invented, the deceptions and the chicanery, the tension and the strain, let alone all the time I had spent, I was no further forward than I had been when I made my first attempt.It seemed utterly incredible and was the most bitter