www.voicesofwar.co.uk
Pujol was a master of invention, and his numerous jobs during his youth no
doubt gave him a varied base of information to create new identities. He
settled on the role as a pro-Nazi Spanish government agent and managed
to obtain a fake Spanish diplomatic passport by convincing a printer he
was actually an ofcial. Having established his back story, he made contact
with an Abwehr agent in Madrid Friedrich Knappe Ratey (codename
Frederico). He was welcomed as an agent and after some speedy training
was sent to Britain with a codebook, £600 in his pocket and instructions to
create a network of agents willing to betray their home country. Instead he
moved to Lisbon and created bogus reports about Britain from a variety
of public sources, including a tourist guide to Britain, train timetables to
calculate his faked journeys, cinema newsreels and magazine adverts.
Pujol’s unfamiliarity with British currency used in Britain could have caused
an issue - Britain’s unit of currency (pound sterling), was subdivided into
20 shillings, each having twelve pence. Pujol was unable to calculate his
expenses using this system so just listed them, saying he would send a
total later.
Although the information would not
have withstood close examination,
Pujol soon established himself as
trustworthy. He began inventing
ctitious sub-agents who could be
blamed for false information and
mistakes. Because he had never
actually been to the UK, he made
several mistakes, such as claiming
“...little were the Germans to know that
the small meek young Spaniard who
then approached them volunteering to
go to London to engage in espionage
on their behalf would turn out to be
a British agent. Still less were they to
discover that the network which they
instructed him to build up in the UK
was to be composed of 27 characters
who were nothing more than a figment
of the imagination.”
Thomas Harris, MI5 case ofcer