Lisbon is a history of how Portugal’s president-dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar carefully navigated between his own Scylla and Charybdis, attempting to keep Portugal out of the Second World War despite its longstanding alliance with England, and the fact that Franco next door would might be delighted to unify Iberia with some nudging from the Nasties in Berlin. This wasn’t simply a question of picking teams: both the Allies and Germany had reasons for wanting their reins around Portugal’s head. The Germans needed tungsten that Portugal had in great supply, and the Allies saw control or use of the Azores as vital for projecting force. Salazar appears to have ably threaded the needle, not allowing the Allies to begin using the Azores until after the war’s midpoint when Hitler was spilling so much blood from the Baltic to Africa that he had to accept it as a fait accompli. (He also helped convince Franco that keeping Iberia out of the war was a better option for both nations.) Other issues that come up in this history are Portugal’s role in allowing refugees to escape Festung Europa, and its acceptance of Nazi gold, some of which was payment for tungsten but some of which was being evacuated out of the Reich and was stolen from Hitler’s victims. This is definitely a ‘serious’ title about 1940s foreign policy, not a sexy spy story despite the amount of espionage that went on. As an American whose knowledge of Portugal is limited to the Age of Discovery, learning about Salazar and his “New State” was also interesting.

Quotes:

Such was the concentration that Salazar devoted to steering Portugal through the war that, in addition to serving as prime minister for the duration of the war, he also served as minister of foreign affairs, minister of war, minister of the interior, and for the first part of the war, minister of finance. Salazar viewed it as his personal mission, and challenge, to prevent Portugal from being dragged into the war and repeating the mistakes of World War I.

The Germans sent him on his way in July 1941, but Pujol still got only as
far as Lisbon. Here he approached the British embassy again, but without
luck. Still based in Lisbon, Pujol pretended to be in Britain by creating a
fictitious set of characters and locations, and dispatched a mass of
misinformation to his Abwehr handlers.[….] From a German perspective, Pujol had seemingly become one of their most successful agents, running a network of some twenty-seven subagents, none of whom actually existed. In the three years in which GARBO was operative he sent some 1,399 messages and 423 letters to his extremely satisfied German handlers back in Madrid. His prose was never dull: He wrote with brio, always keen to seemingly praise the Germans and to attack the Jews wherever possible. The success of Pujol’s double life and value to the Allies is confirmed by the fact that he remains one of the few agents to be decorated by both sides in the war.