Juan Pujol Garcia

Juan Pujol García was born in Barcelona, Spain on February 14, 1912. He was the son of a Catalan industrialist who owned a dye factory. He studied at the Royal Poultry School of Arenys de Mar, where he received the only degree he obtained during his youth. He developed a loathing of political extremism of all sorts during the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought on both sides. He decided to become a spy for Britain as a way to do something "for the good of humanity". Pujol and his first wife Araceli contacted the British Embassy in Madrid, which rejected his offers. Undeterred, he created a false identity as a fanatically pro-Nazi Spanish government official and successfully became a German agent. He was instructed to travel to Britain and recruit additional agents; instead he moved to Lisbon and created bogus reports about Britain from a variety of public sources, including a tourist guide to Britain, train timetables, cinema newsreels, and magazine advertisements. ¹ Although the information he provided would not have withstood close examination, Pujol soon established himself as a trustworthy agent. He began inventing fictitious sub-agents who could be blamed for false information and mistakes. The Allies finally accepted Pujol when the Germans spent considerable resources attempting to hunt down a fictitious convoy. ¹ Following interviews by Desmond Bristow of Section V MI6 Iberian Section, Juan Pujol was taken on. The family were moved to Britain and Pujol was given the codename "Garbo" by the British; their German counterparts codenamed him Alaric and referred to his non-existent spy network as "Arabal". ¹ Pujol and his handler Tomás Harris spent the rest of the war expanding the fictitious network, communicating to the German handlers at first by letters, and later by radio. Eventually the Germans were funding a network of 27 agents, all fictitious. Pujol had a key role in the success of Operation Fortitude, the deception operation intended to mislead the Germans about the timing, location and scale of the invasion of Normandy in 1944. The false information Pujol supplied helped persuade the Germans that the main attack would be in the Pas de Calais, so that they kept large forces there before and even after the invasion. ¹ Pujol was the only participant of World War II decorated by both sides: he was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) by King George VI and received the Iron Cross from Adolf Hitler. ¹ After the war, Pujol moved to Venezuela with his second wife Carmen Cilia Álvarez and their three children. He faked his own death in 1949 and lived in anonymity until he was discovered by an investigative journalist in 1984. He then travelled to Normandy to tour the beaches and pay his respects to the dead on the 40th anniversary of D-Day. He died in Caracas on October 10, 1988 and is buried in Choroní, a town by the Caribbean Sea. ¹