In the darkest days of World War II, a Spanish chicken farmer decided he needed to do something for the good of humanity. Despite having zero espionage experience and being rejected by British intelligence multiple times, he successfully infiltrated Nazi Germany’s spy network.
Juan Pujol García did not just survive as a double agent, he built an entirely fabricated network of spies, successfully diverted German forces away from Normandy on D-Day, and became one of the only people to receive military decorations from both the Allies and the Axis.
The Self-Made Spy
After experiencing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, Pujol developed a deep loathing for both fascism and communism. In 1941, he approached the British Embassy in Madrid, offering his services as a spy. They refused him. Undeterred, Pujol decided he would simply have to prove his worth by getting the Germans to hire him first. He created a false identity as a fanatically pro-Nazi Spanish official and contacted the German Abwehr.
The Germans accepted him, gave him a crash course in espionage, and ordered him to recruit agents in Britain. Instead of traveling to London, Pujol went to Lisbon. Armed with only a tourist guide, a railway timetable, and cinema newsreels, he began writing credible intelligence reports about Britain. His reports were so convincing that the British intercepted them and launched a massive spy hunt to find the German mole operating in their country.
Operation Garbo and the Phantom Army
When the British finally realized the truth, they quickly recruited him and moved him to London under the codename “Garbo.” Partnering with MI5 officer Tomás Harris, Pujol expanded his phantom network. Over the course of the war, he invented 27 distinct sub-agents, including an agent in Liverpool who conveniently “died” before he could report crucial fleet movements. The Germans were so convinced that they even paid a pension to the imaginary agent’s “widow.”
Pujol’s masterpiece of deception occurred during Operation Fortitude, the plan to conceal the D-Day landings. Garbo convinced the German High Command that a massive, fictitious army led by General George Patton was stationed in southeast Britain, preparing to attack the Pas de Calais.
A Decorated Hero in Hiding
On June 9, 1944, three days after the Allied forces landed in Normandy, Garbo sent a message directly to Hitler’s high command. He insisted the Normandy landings were merely a diversion and that the main attack was still coming at Calais. The Germans believed him so completely that they held back crucial divisions at Calais, refusing to send them to defend Normandy.
For his services, the Germans awarded Pujol the Iron Cross. Months later, King George VI awarded him an MBE. Fearing Nazi reprisals after the war, Pujol faked his own death from malaria in Angola in 1949 and vanished to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a bookstore until he was finally tracked down in 1984.