Operation Garbo (6 page)

The civil war was over, reputedly leaving behind a million dead, innumerable cities destroyed, a ruined economy and a long trail of suffering and desolation. Larra’s words, written a century before, seemed apposite: ‘Here lies half of Spain, killed by the other half.’ Life in Madrid that hot summer of 1939 was tough: food was scarce, the black market was booming, prices were extortionate and I did not have a job. However, I had got to know a woman of gypsy extraction called Señora Melero, owner of the Hotel Majestic in Calle Velázquez, who was advertising for a manager. Although the hotel had been taken over by the International Brigade during the Nationalists’ siege of Madrid and was in a pitiable state as a result, with its central heating system completely shattered, I took the job. A young Spanish aristocrat, calling himself Enrique, Duke of La Torre, gave me a reference. He seemed to be on Christian-name terms with two ageing ladies whom he called aunts and
pompously
alluded to as princesses of Bourbon, but in truth I never discovered who he really was.

My life in Madrid as a hotel manager began peacefully enough, apart from the odd difficulty inevitable in such a job. But as the days wore on, the problems increased, particularly structural ones as there was no money for repairs, nor the necessary capital to bring the hotel up to even the most basic standard of comfort and elegance. Nor were there enough adequately trained staff because of the war: many were still
in uniform, others were stranded far from their homes. All the responsible, skilled workers already seemed to have jobs; those who came my way were either irresponsible or lacked the qualities needed for working in a three-star hotel. The truth was it didn’t even deserve one star, let alone the name Majestic, for the lack of central heating in the winter made the nights unbearable. All I could do was sort out daily problems as and when they arose, with varying degrees of success.

But there were greater problems than those posed by the hotel which made me far more upset. On 3 September 1939 England had declared war on Germany. The contest had been foreseen but, like the wavering flame of an oil lamp, there had been a glimmer of hope that peace might prevail. It was a tug of war between the democracies on one hand and the Axis on the other. The future for Spain looked gloomy; to sit around a table with either Hitler or Mussolini would be like trying to plough sand. Both dictators seemed to be driven by the spirit of revenge, especially the one ruling the Germany of his dreams. I could see another catastrophe looming over the horizon and thought more than once about leaving Spain where hatred, and thirst for vengeance between victor and vanquished, was rife. When the chance presented itself, I seized it avidly.

It was extremely difficult in those days to get hold of a
passport
unless one could produce an excellent reason. One day, the Duke of La Torre, whom I now called Enrique, told me that his aunts were upset because they were unable to buy any Scotch whisky in Madrid and they considered such a drink essential, given their social position and entertaining commitments. So I suggested to him that since these princesses must wield
considerable
influence, it was surely possible for them to purchase the whisky abroad. All they needed to do was to get hold of some passports and head for Portugal; if they crossed the border at Estremadura and continued to Évora, they would be able to buy as many bottles there as they liked. ‘Rest assured,’ I told him, ‘if we accompany your aunts, there’ll be no problems.’
And that is how I managed to lay my hands on a document which at the time was nearly impossible to obtain. Even if my new passport was only valid for Portugal, it had great
possibilities
for the future.

With four of these documents in our possession, we left for Portugal in their car, with me acting as chauffeur. When we got to the border I produced the two princesses’ passports and the guards leapt to attention. They raised no objections to our crossing, especially when I told them that we were only going as far as Évora. We bought half a dozen bottles of good Scotch and put them in the boot; the customs police didn’t even search the car at the frontier on the way back.

I was really pleased with my brand new passport, although I soon learned that it was one thing to have a passport and quite another to obtain an exit visa, which was only issued in exceptional circumstances.

The first months of the Second World War saw Poland overrun despite heroic resistance. But what could that country have done before the might of Germany and Russia when these two had signed a secret pact first and then proceeded to carve up Poland between them? In April 1940 Germany invaded Norway and Denmark, and in May unleashed a lightning
offensive
on Holland and Belgium. The impregnable Maginot line was then outflanked and taken from the rear. Over a quarter of a million members of the British Expeditionary Force were pushed back to Dunkirk, from where most managed to escape across the Channel. England accepted the defeat with fortitude and became temporarily passive before a seemingly invincible enemy spreading its Nazi doctrine right across Europe.

I
f a Pythian oracle had foretold the chequered existence that lay before me, I would have sneered sarcastically at the
soothsayer
, so little intention did I have of behaving in the way I actually did.

When I was a boy, I had considered war to be an inexorable scourge, a cruel and severe punishment sent by a relentless and harsh providence for our sins. But I found it difficult to continue to hold this view after I had been through the
vicissitudes
of our civil war when some people, in the name of the fatherland and of freedom, had wilfully imposed their views on us; we had been forced to submit to the diabolical dogmas of the perpetrators, who were themselves devilish creatures, able instigators of a new apocalypse.

Now I began to hear words like ‘aryan’, ‘race’ and ‘superior being’ on the radio and also saw them printed in newspapers and magazines. Such words had meant nothing to me up till now but I soon learned that, under cover of notions such as these, ordinary citizens in Germany were being harassed,
citizens
whose only crime was either not being aryan or children of the race, or who refused to believe in the cult of a
superior
being. Now the Germans were being forced to submit to diabolical dogmas just as we had been during our civil war; only it seemed that in Germany these things were being done in order to furnish Germany with new and wider frontiers. The
artful tricks devised by the German leaders to bamboozle their population never ceased to amaze me, lacking as they did any moral, ethical or even rational sense. Those Germans who were subject to such doctrinaire propaganda were obviously not as much to blame for what happened later as those who preached such a socialist policy. It was a brand of socialism where the owner did not have his cow requisitioned, just milked dry.

The people, the great masses, followed their idol in raptures of frenzy. Using a variety of arguments, he continued to harangue them and to demand their submission. What a farce!

The March 1933 elections had given Hitler power; the contest, his contest, his
Mein Kampf
, was inaugurated the day he masterminded the burning of the Reichstag, for which he blamed his enemies, especially the communists and other extreme Left groups. What started as a witch-hunt ended in the extermination of whole peoples. To confuse matters even more, Hitler decided to change Anton Drexler’s German Workers’ Party into the German Nationalist–Socialist Workers’ Party, whose members went on to proclaim themselves Nazis. Here was a poisonous potion indeed.

Socialism is a word used too lightly today. The concept was first introduced by those who pioneered social reform; people nowadays classed as Utopian socialists. They attempted to outline the ideal society, appealing for justice, ethics and a rejection of capitalism in order to bring about their ideal. They were thinkers like Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and Pierre Leroux, who was the first one to use the word ‘socialism’ in 1832. But these idealists failed, ruining their financial backers. It wasn’t until there was a break between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, around 1848, that Marx and Engels propounded systematic modern socialism, the one we now call Marxist. Even since then, various socialist tenets have taken root in different countries. A great many people have yearned to make the word their own, hoping to attract the huge dispossessed masses who long for a better life which they feel
they have been denied. Some call themselves social democrats, others Christian socialists, and those who are attached to the communists declare themselves to be Marxist socialists. Some just call themselves socialists, while there are those who borrow the name of the doctrine but succeed in distorting it to such a degree that only the name prevails. The Germans called it National Socialism; the Italian Fascist movement was defined as ‘political, social, corporate and hierarchical’; Portugal’s Corporativismo was described as a ‘method of collegiate
political
and social unity where the body politic intervenes in a
qualitative
, but not quantitative, manner in the policy of the nation’, a rule defended by António de Oliveira Salazar.

The Spaniards, not to be outdone, proclaimed themselves falangistas, from phalanx, thereby creating for themselves a party as full of long-winded words in its definition as it was devoid of coordinating principles. Its name was as allegorical as it was contradictory. It was a monster of a name: Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva
Nacional-Sindicalista
, the last stretch being abbreviated by its followers to JONS. Some socialist winds even reached America, initiating such parties as Acción Democrática in Venezuela and APRA, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, founded by Haya de la Torre in Peru in 1924. In Argentina, Perón’s
followers
too laid claim to socialism, underlining their claim by calling themselves ‘The Ragged’. I could go on naming the various branches and twigs of what is a very old notion, but I won’t; I will just point out the curious fact that all these systems have both very strong dictatorial and liberal connotations within their different theories. The term socialism has been borrowed by dictators and democrats alike, which has resulted in
definitions
as complex and various as the night is from the day.

Two dogmatic and important politicians of this century took up socialism and transformed it into Nazism and
communism
. Both systems were implanted at the expense of countless victims. The first ended with the death of its leader at the end
of a war which he himself had brought about; the other still prevails, hovering over the whole world, still dreaming of an empire of submissive nations subject to its power and
authority
. I do not mean to offend anyone who might profess these ideas as, above all, I am a man who loves democracy, which makes me respect, even if I do not share, these doctrines of theirs. I have friends who are communists; others who are anarchist in their outlook; yet other friends of mine support right-wing dictatorships which are such common phenomena in South America. ‘Each one to his own taste,’ I say. It is their choice. I too have my own ideas, many of which people will not share. Am I the odd one out? Am I wrong or are they?

Let us return to history. Concentration camps for political prisoners started in Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. At first they were meant to re-educate or eliminate
anti-Nazi
Germans, that is to say, they were for communists, social democrats, Jews, Catholics and Protestants. After the
occupation
of Poland, which sparked off the declaration of war in 1939, camps of this type proliferated. Thousands of Poles and people from other countries occupied by the Nazis began to fill these camps, creating a huge reserve of servile workers for the German war machine. To use an expression coined at the Nuremberg Trials, it was ‘extermination through work’, with inmates working shifts of up to twelve hours and more a day sustained by scant nourishment and little rest. Soon the Nazis systematically began to exterminate and eliminate the so-called inferior races: Jews, gypsies, Slavs and, to a lesser extent, Latins and Arabs. They became fuel for the camp crematoria.

In Spain few knew of these horrors. But, despite censorship, word eventually spread about the horrifying deeds perpetrated by those butchers who carried out the orders of their superior officers in Himmler’s SS. Their monstrous behaviour was such that even those who had admired the German Kondor Legion in the civil war were stunned by the appalling information that was seeping through.

My humanist convictions would not allow me to turn a blind eye to the enormous suffering that was being unleashed by this psychopath Hitler and his band of acolytes, the very same people who had murdered Röhm and other political adversaries on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

But what could I do to arrest such excess? Little, very little, in fact practically nothing except to talk
sotto voce
about the terrible crisis already hanging over humanity. In my hours of loneliness I would be tormented by odd pieces of
information
and graphic details, which merged in my imagination into a confused and horrible nightmare. Unable to express my
feelings
, I yearned for justice. From the medley of tangled ideas and fantasies going around and around in my head, a plan slowly began to take shape. I must do something, something practical; I must make my contribution toward the good of humanity.

One January day in 1941 I presented myself without further ado at the British embassy in Madrid, Britain being the only European country to have preserved her independence and to be challenging the Germans in a war that was clearly going to be long and bloody. On arrival, I asked for an interview with one of the diplomatic attachés as I had something I wished to reveal. The man at the reception desk, a Spaniard, asked me exactly what it was I wanted to talk about. As my replies were somewhat vague, he handed me on to one of the secretaries in reception.

It is always difficult, not to say impossible, for a stranger to speak to a senior official in an embassy of an important country, but much more so when war is raging, as it was for the British, although Spain, of course, was neutral. And so I was sent from receptionist to secretary, from clerk to minor official, each one of whom expressed an interest in finding out or getting me to clarify exactly what it was I wanted to say in the confidential interview I sought. Finally, one of them said that the staff at the Foreign Office were far too busy to comply with requests for interviews like the one I was after. If I believed
what I had to say was of crucial importance, then I could put it in writing, giving a detailed account of my motives.

Although a newcomer to these pursuits, I wasn’t so naive as to think that it would be a good idea to put down my intentions in writing, even if they were none other than to put myself at the disposal of British Intelligence. I wanted to work for them, to supply them with confidential information which would be of interest to the Allied cause, politically or militarily, data which I hoped I would be able to obtain.

I must confess that my plans were fairly confused. I intended to go on living in Madrid while I made use of contacts and acquaintances who did not yet exist but were still just figments of my imagination. I was well aware that my ideas lacked
clarity
and that it would be difficult to make headway while my suggestions were so hazy, so I started to look around for
helpful
contacts and kept an eye open for any jobs which might eventually turn out to be useful, such as an opening in
journalism
or the chance of becoming one of those who kept watch on Nazi supporters.

No one at the British embassy seemed interested in me, so out of
amour-propre
I decided to prepare the ground more
carefully
before I approached them again; clearly, I must be much more specific about exactly what I was going to do and how it would adapt itself to the end I had in mind: helping the Allies.

I decided to attempt to sound out the opposite side, but using a different approach to the one I had tried with the British, which had ended in rejection. Bit by bit, I worked out my plan of attack until I thought it was good enough. I did not ask anyone else’s advice.

In order to offer myself to the Nazis, I first studied their doctrines, then I telephoned the German embassy and asked if I could talk to the military attaché as I wanted to ask him to put someone in touch with me as soon as possible, because I was willing to offer my services to the Axis cause and to that of the ‘New Europe’. They suggested I ring back the next day, when
they would give me an answer. The person at the other end of the line spoke slowly in a firm, guttural voice, in far from perfect Spanish. However, he had sounded hopeful, so maybe I would be able to speak to someone who had the power to make decisions.

I rang back the next day at about the same time. After a pause, I heard that same guttural voice that had spoken to me before. The voice told me that a fair-haired gentleman with blue eyes, dressed in a light suit and carrying a raincoat over his arm, would be sitting waiting for me at one of the tables at the far end of the Café Lyon at 4.30 p.m. next day. He said that the man would be called Federico and asked for details of what I would be wearing for the rendezvous and for a brief description of what I looked like. He then asked my name, which I gave him, and rang off. My contact with the Germans had started.

I went to the café in Calle Alcalá at the appointed time and found a young German sitting alone at a table who identified himself as Federico. His Spanish was fluent, without a trace of a foreign accent. Harbouring real hopes that my plan would succeed, I began to make use of my gift of gab and ranted away as befitted a staunch Nazi and Francoist. At first I seemed to be holding the man’s attention, although he did not show much interest in my fervour for the Führer and the Third Reich, even if he was glad to know I was enthusiastic. After a bit it dawned on me that I wasn’t making such a good impression on him as I’d first imagined, for he kept asking me what exactly it was I thought I could contribute toward the success of the war. He was clearly proud of Germany’s victorious advance, although every now and then he would stress that many hard and bloody days lay ahead. I tried to minimise the problems, repeatedly emphasising that what had already been achieved was
extraordinarily
magnificent and that victory lay inevitably with ‘our’ side. But he continued to try to pin me down, to make me explain exactly why I had requested the interview, so I told him that I was at the complete disposal of his superiors for anything
they wanted – I could work in the embassy and make contacts for them with people with access to information. I told him a thousand foolish things, such as that I had friends in
official
and diplomatic circles, and then I poured out more empty verbiage about National Socialism. At the end, he told me that he would have to talk to his superiors and would come back with an answer in two days. He gave me a new rendezvous: next time it was to be the Cervecería de Correos beer house near Café Lyon, still in the Calle Alcalá but opposite the Ministry of Communications.