Luke Ford

Washington Post:

But, as newly declassified British documents at Britain’s National Archives reveal, it could have gone horribly wrong had Pujol’s then-wife had her way. Reports kept by MI5, Britain’s domestic counterintelligence agency, indicated that, by mid-1943, Araceli Gonzalez was getting increasingly exasperated with life in London, homesick for Spain and her mother and eager to quit ol’ Blighty.

“I don’t want to live five minutes longer with my husband,” she is documented shouting at Pujol’s MI5 case officer, Tomas Harris. “Even if they kill me I am going to the Spanish Embassy.” Had she done so, British authorities feared, Pujol’s mission would be totally compromised. Spain’s fascist government, while technically a nonbelligerent during World War II, had obvious ties to the Axis powers.

The newly declassified documents show how Pujol and his British handlers managed to subdue his wife’s protestations through coercion and deception. The language used to describe Gonzalez’s demeanor is unkind. She was 23, living in a tiny flat in gray and war-ravaged London, spoke little to no English, and was coping with a newborn while her husband was gone most hours of the day.

“She is a highly emotional and neurotic woman and therefore I have never definitely disillusioned her in her hopes that she might be allowed to see her mother before the termination of the war,” Harris wrote. Other documents indicate that British officials attempted to calm Gonzalez with a present of silk stockings, which were in short supply during wartime.

They placed a watch on the Spanish Embassy to intercept her if she attempted to reach it. And then they cooked up a hoax with the willing participation of her husband, who pretended to be arrested by the British as a consequence of the security threat his wife posed. He was only “released” after Gonzalez issued a statement under British supervision that she would “not do anything in future to jeopardize the work being done by her husband or cause embarrassment” to the British intelligence services.

According to notes made by Harris, she was scolded dismissively by an MI5 lawyer: “He reminded her that he had no time to waste with tiresome people and that if her name was ever mentioned to him again, he would simply direct that she should be locked up,” the case officer wrote. “She returned home very chastened to await husband’s arrival.”