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"Garbo", the Spanish who made D-Day possible

Louis

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Juan Pujol Garcia lived a lie that helped win WW2. He was a double agent for the British, performing so well that they nicknamed him for the enigmatic actress Greta Garbo. (Also was "Alaric" to his German handlers)...

The man was not a former soldier. He had been neither a military nor a government official for the Allies, and he had no connection with this part of northern France. In fact, the man was a failed poultry farmer who had been born in Barcelona in 1912. When he first offered his spying services to British military intelligence he was turned down, three times.

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Undeterred, Pujol won over the Germans instead, posing as a zealous pro-Nazi Spanish government official based in Lisbon, where he invented a network of fictitious agents in Britain feeding fake information to Germany that entirely conned the Nazi authorities.

The success of his misinformation campaign finally convinced British intelligence to take him on and Garbo moved to the UK and continued with his efforts at misleading the Germans along.

So successful was Garbo's manipulation of both fake and real information that the Germans ended up financing a network of 27 fictitious agents, and even stopped recruiting spies in the UK. In fact, Pujol was awarded the Iron Cross for his "services" to the German war effort.

Yet, Pujol was no true friend to the Nazi regime. A consequence of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War was that he developed an abiding distaste for both communism and fascism, leading him to volunteer to serve the British, the only one of their spies to do so.

For his effectiveness and loyalty, the British made Garbo a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), and when the Allies began preparing for D-Day, they turned to Pujol for help.

While the Germans had got wind of the plans for Operation Overlord, Garbo distracted them with Operation Fortitude, a deception campaign in which the Spanish spy convinced the Nazis that the main attack would be at Pas de Calais.

Garbo got to work, sending the Germans over 500 radio messages between January 1944 and D-Day. That split the German forces and prevented them from reinforcing their defences in Normandy where the actual invasion was set to take place.

So the Garbo's manipulation of the Germans played a major role, not only in ensuring the Allies took back western Europe, but that the figure of 120,000 Allied casualties was not much higher.

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After the war, Garbo avoided Nazi reprisals by faking his death and moving to Venezuela, where he ran a small business. It was only thanks to detective work done by a former British politician and writer, Rupert Allason (70), that the world was reacquainted with this unlikely hero.

In 1984, Pujol was received by Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace and was reunited with former British intelligence officers he had worked with during the war.
He died on 1988 in Caracas.

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I've read several books about this guy. I just loved the way he created a totally fake network from Spain off his own bat. But if the Germans had twigged he would have been dogmeat. His reports said things like "You can buy information from Glasgow sailors with a bottle of red wine" He'd obviously never been to Glasgow! The British were running around trying to find his imaginary spies before they recruited him. Anyway, an unsung hero.
 
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