Juan Pujol García

Juan Pujol García (14 February 1912 – 10 October 1988), also known as Joan Pujol i García, was a Spanish spy who acted as a double agent loyal to Great Britain against Nazi Germany during World War II, when he relocated to Britain to carry out fictitious spying activities for the Germans.

He was given the codename Garbo by the British; their German counterparts codenamed him Alaric and referred to his non-existent spy network as "Arabal".

After developing a loathing of political extremism of all sorts during the Spanish Civil War, Pujol decided to become a spy for Britain as a way to do something "for the good of humanity".

Pujol and his wife contacted the British Embassy in Madrid, which rejected his offer.

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.

Although the information 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 expended considerable resources attempting to hunt down a fictitious convoy.

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 code name "Garbo".

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.

His father died a few months after the Second Republic's establishment in 1931, while Pujol was completing his education as a poultry farmer.

Pujol's father left his family well-provided for, until his father's factory was taken over by the workers in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War.

In 1931, Pujol did his six months of compulsory military service in a cavalry unit, the 7th Regiment of Light Artillery.

He knew he was unsuited for a military career, hating horse-riding and claiming to lack the "essential qualities of loyalty, generosity, and honor".

Pujol was managing a poultry farm north of Barcelona in 1936 when the Spanish Civil War began.

His sister Elena's fiancé was taken by Republican forces.

Later, she and his mother were arrested and charged with being counter-revolutionaries.

A relative in a trade union was able to rescue them from captivity.

He was called up for military service on the Republican side (in opposition to Francisco Franco's Nationalists), but opposed the Republican government due to their treatment of his family.

He hid at his girlfriend's home until he was captured in a police raid and imprisoned for a week, before being freed via the Traditionalist resistance group Socorro Blanco.

They hid him until they could produce fake identity papers that showed him to be too old for military service.

He started managing a poultry farm that had been requisitioned by the local Republican government, but it was not economically viable.

The experience with rule by committee intensified his antipathy towards Communism.

He re-joined the Republican military using his false papers, with the intention to desert as soon as possible, volunteering to lay telegraph cables near the front line.

He managed to desert to the Nationalist side during the Battle of the Ebro in September 1938.

However, he was equally ill-treated by the Nationalist side, disliking their fascist influences and being struck and imprisoned by his colonel upon Pujol's expressing sympathy with the monarchy.

His experience with both sides left him with a deep loathing of both fascism and Communism, and by extension Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

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.

Pujol had the distinction of receiving military decorations from both sides of the war – being awarded the Iron Cross and becoming a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

Pujol was born in Barcelona to Joan Pujol, a Catalan who owned a cotton factory, and Mercedes García Guijarro, from the Andalusian town of Motril in the Province of Granada.

The third of four children, Pujol was sent at age seven to the Valldemia boarding school run by the Marist Brothers in Mataró, 20 mi from Barcelona; he remained there for the next four years.

The students were only allowed out of the school on Sundays if they had a visitor, so his father made the trip every week.

His mother came from a strict Roman Catholic family and took Communion every day, but his father was much more secular and had liberal political beliefs.

At age thirteen, he was transferred to a school in Barcelona run by his father's card-playing friend Monsignor Josep, where he remained for three years.

After an argument with a teacher, he decided that he no longer wished to remain at the school, and became an apprentice at a hardware store.

Pujol engaged in a variety of occupations prior to and after the Spanish Civil War, such as studying animal husbandry at the Royal Poultry School in Arenys de Mar and managing various businesses, including a cinema.