GARBO: THE SPY WHO WAS HONORED BY THE BRITISH . . . AND THE GERMANS

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Garbo was the British codename of Juan Pujol García (February 14, 1912, Barcelona – October 10, 1988, Caracas), a double-agent who played a key role in the success of D-Day towards the end of World War II. The false information Pujol supplied to the German command helped persuade Hitler that the main attack would come later, resulting in his decision to hold back troops from the area around the D-Day landings.

Pujol was a Catalan who had developed a detestation of Nazi Germany after his experience of Fascism in Spain. He decided around 1940 that he must make a contribution to the war by helping Britain, Germany's only remaining adversary.

His wife made the first approach to the British but they showed no interest in employing him as a spy. So he resolved to establish himself as a German agent before approaching the British again to offer his services as a double-agent.

Operating initially in Lisbon, he pretended to the Germans that he was in Britain. He fabricated reports about shipping movements, successfully convincing them from information gleaned from the library in Lisbon and from newsreel reports he saw in cinemas. He claimed to be travelling around Britain and submitted his travel expenses based on fares listed in a British railway guide. A slight difficulty was that he did not understand the pre-decimal system of currency used in Britain, expressed in pounds, shillings and pence and was unable to add up the total. Instead he simply itemised the costs and said he would send the total later.

Eventually, he again made contact with British intelligence, and again offered his services. This time he was accepted.

Pujol reached Britain in the spring of 1942, and operated as a double agent under the aegis of the XX Committee. He pretended to have recruited a large network of agents, including a number of influential people with 'inside' information.

On occasions he had to fabricate reasons why his agents had failed to report easily available information that the Germans would eventually know about. For example, he reported that his (fabricated) Liverpool agent had fallen ill just before a major fleet movement from that port on the west coast of England. The illness meant that the agent was unable to warn the Germans of the event. To support the story of the illness, the "agent" eventually "died" and a notice was placed in the local newspaper as further evidence to convince the Germans, who were also persuaded to pay a pension to the agent's "widow".

The information supplied by Pujol to the Germans was orchestrated by his British handlers and included a certain amount of genuine events, in order to make the reports appear more convincing. Sometimes, this was achieved by sending genuine information but artificially delaying its arrival until the information would be harmless. For example, a letter might be postmarked with a date before some planned troop movements, but its delivery delayed until after the Germans would already have discovered the information for themselves. The Germans paid Garbo (or Arabel, as they called him) a large amount of money to support his network of agents, which at one point totalled 27 fabricated characters.

Garbo has the distinction of being one of the few people during World War II to receive decorations from both sides, gaining both an Iron Cross from the Germans and an MBE from the British.

Garbo's misinformation was part of Operation Fortitude, the effort that successfully convinced Adolf Hitler and many of the German high command to believe that the main Allied invasion was going to occur at the Pas de Calais, 150 miles east of Normandy, and that the Normandy landings were a feint designed to draw German forces away from the Pas de Calais.

After the war Pujol moved to Venezuela, where he lived in anonymity. He died in Caracas in 1988.