The Verdict of Military History
Of the three impostors, Juan Pujol Garcíahas been treated most kindly by history, largely because his story belongs to military history, and he did manage to get himself — after some maneuvering — on the correct side of World War II, which is to say, on the winning side.
If he had finished the war in his initial role as a spy for the Germans — albeit a phony one — he would have joined the large, and largely anonymous, group of small-time almost-heroes, the passive not-quite resistance: those who worked for the Nazis but did their jobs as badly as possible without being discovered.
His behavior during the Spanish Civil War reveals him to be a picaresque character, loyal only to an inner compass, so much so that he would deserve to be branded (from the military point of view) as a coward. In the end, working for the British, he showed himself to be a master con man, a genius of deception. His greatest achievement was a work of fiction: his network of 22 (or 27) fake spies.
It seems he gave each invented agent just enough detail, just enough personality, and just enough propensity to be difficult to convince the Germans that they were dealing with as many as 28 independent and slightly troublesome sources, all the while forgetting that all contact with the network was channeled through just one man. His reports must have varied just enough so that the Germans needed to compile them, compare them and sift the signal from the noise until they deduced the reality — the false reality — that Pujol and the British wanted uncovered. Then, since they had solved the riddle themselves, the Germans would be committed to their conclusions, even to the point of keeping their tanks near Calais, to defend against the great invasion they still believed was coming, weeks after the Normandy invasion.
In certain respects, his achievement was similar to what a novelist achieves: the brilliant construction of a large, complex and artificial world. But novelists, like other artists, are not trying to deceive (at least, not beyond the moment of reading and imagining); what the novelist wants is to entertain, enchant or enlighten. Pujol, on the other hand, was a liar, not an artist. To be exact, his statements were lies according to the definition of lying as sin, the old and still instructive three-part standard of the Catholic confessional:
- what Pujol said was false;
- he knew it to be false;
- and he said it with the intent to deceive.
With great intent to deceive. However, we who live in the post-Nazi world say that he was justified in his lies, because he was working in a corner of our moral universe in which deceitful and deliberate lying is permitted, even celebrated: wartime intelligence. When the other side is worse than ours (and especially after we have won), we categorize any lie told for the sake of victory as an heroic act.
