Juan Pujol García

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, 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 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. 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. == 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, He was proud that he had managed to serve both sides without firing a single bullet for either. == World War II ==

Independent spying In 1940, during the early stages of World War II, Pujol decided that he must make a contribution "for the good of humanity" by helping Britain, which was at the time Germany's only adversary. He contacted Friedrich Knappe-Ratey, an agent in Madrid, codenamed "Frederico". The accepted Pujol and gave him a crash course in espionage (including secret writing), a bottle of invisible ink, a codebook, and £600 for expenses. His instructions were to move to Britain and recruit a network of British agents. He claimed to be travelling around Britain and submitted his travel expenses based on fares listed in a British railway guide. Pujol's unfamiliarity with the non-decimal system of currency used in Britain at the time was a slight difficulty. At this time Great Britain's unit of currency, the pound sterling, was subdivided into 20 shillings, each having twelve pence. Pujol was unable to total his expenses in this complex system, so simply itemised them, and said that he would send the total later. During this time he created an extensive network of fictitious sub-agents living in different parts of Britain. Because he had never actually visited the UK, he made several mistakes, such as claiming that his alleged contact in Glasgow "would do anything for a litre of wine", unaware of Scottish drinking habits or that the UK did not use the metric system. approached the United States after it had entered the war, contacting U.S. Navy Lieutenant Patrick Demorest in the naval attache's office in Lisbon, who recognised Pujol's potential. Mills passed his case over to the Spanish-speaking officer Harris. On occasion, he had to invent 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, and so was unable to report the event. To support this story, the agent eventually "died" and an obituary was placed in the local newspaper as further evidence to convince the Germans. The Germans were also persuaded to pay a pension to the agent's "widow". For radio communication, "Alaric" needed the strongest hand encryption the Germans had. The Germans provided Garbo with this system, which was in turn supplied to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Garbo's encrypted messages were to be received in Madrid, manually decrypted, and re-encrypted with an Enigma machine for retransmission to Berlin. Having both the original text and the Enigma-encoded intercept of it, the codebreakers had the best possible source material for a chosen-plaintext attack on the Germans' Enigma key. Operation Fortitude In January 1944, the Germans told Pujol that they believed a large-scale invasion in Europe was imminent and asked to be kept informed. This invasion was Operation Overlord, and Pujol played a leading role in Operation Fortitude, the deception campaign to conceal Overlord. He sent over 500 radio messages between January 1944 and D-Day, at times more than twenty messages per day. During planning for the Normandy beach invasion, the Allies decided that it was vitally important that the German leaders be misled into believing that the landing would happen at the Strait of Dover. OKW accepted Garbo's reports so completely that they kept two armoured divisions and 19 infantry divisions in the Pas de Calais waiting for a second invasion through July and August 1944. The German Commander-in-Chief in the west, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, refused to allow General Erwin Rommel to move these divisions to Normandy. In late June, Garbo was instructed by the Germans to report on the falling of V-1 flying bombs. Finding no way of giving false information without arousing suspicion, and being unwilling to give correct information, Harris arranged for Garbo to be "arrested." He returned to duty a few days later, now having a "need" to avoid London and forwarded an "official" letter of apology from the Home Secretary for his unlawful detention. The Germans paid Pujol US$340,000 () over the course of the war to support his network of agents. == Honours ==

As Alaric, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class on 29 July 1944 for his services to the German war effort. The award was normally reserved for front-line fighting men and required Hitler's personal authorisation. The Iron Cross was presented via radio. The Nazis never realised they had been fooled, and thus Pujolalong with Eddie Chapman, another double agentearned the distinction of being one of the few to receive decorations from both sides during World War II. == After the war ==

After the Second World War, Pujol feared reprisals from surviving Nazis. With the help of MI5, Pujol travelled to Angola and faked his death from malaria in 1949. They collaborated on his autobiography Operation Garbo, published in 1985. At Allason's urging, Pujol travelled to London and was received by Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace, in an unusually long audience. After that he visited the Special Forces Club and was reunited with a group of his former colleagues, including T. A. Robertson, Roger Fleetwood Hesketh, Cyril Mills and Desmond Bristow. On the 40th anniversary of D-Day, 6 June 1984, Pujol travelled to Normandy to tour the beaches and pay his respects to the dead. ==Death==

Pujol died of a stroke in Caracas in 1988, aged 74. a town inside Henri Pittier National Park by the Caribbean Sea. == Network of fictitious agents ==

Each of Pujol's fictitious agents was tasked with recruiting additional sub-agents. ==Popular culture==

Literature and music • The Counterfeit Spy (1971), by the British journalist Sefton Delmer; Pujol's name was changed to "Jorge Antonio" in order to protect his surviving family. • The Eldorado Network (1979), by the British novelist Derek Robinson, published six years before Nigel West's non-fiction account. • Overlord, Underhand (2013), by the American author Robert P. Wells, a fictionalised retelling of the story of Juan Pujol (Agent Garbo), double agent with MI5, from the Spanish Civil War to 1944; • Quicksand (1971), a song by David Bowie on the Hunky Dory album, makes reference to him ("I'm the twisted name on Garbo's eyes"). Film and television • Garbo: The Spy (). Documentary film, directed by Edmon Roch. Production: Ikiru Films, Colose Producciones, Centuria Films, Spain 2009. • The Man Who Fooled the Nazis. 90-minute Spanish documentary retitled and narrated in English, shown as part of the Storyville series, first shown on BBC Four, 22 February 2011. • Secret D-DayUS television, 1998Garbo was portrayed by French actor Sam Spiegel. • Garbo - Master of Deception. 1992 Columbia House and A&E 30-minute documentary. Feature films telling Garbo's story have been attempted on several occasions, but none have reached production to date. == See also ==