Barcelona 1939. Amidst the ruins of the Spanish Civil War, a man finds himself standing at a crossroads. The brutality of the conflict in his own country has left him disillusioned, and the ominous specter of Nazi Germany looms large over Europe. He can continue to run and to hide, or he can face his enemy dead on and fight against tyranny.
Armed with nothing more than his wits and imagination, Juan Pujol Garcia embarks on a remarkable journey that would transform him from a chicken farmer and a failed businessman into a self-made spy. Using his elaborate network of fictional sub-agents, he has the Nazis hanging on his every word. As the Allies meticulously plan the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of Europe, he becomes their secret weapon, arguably the most successful double agent in all recorded history.
This is the true story of the brilliant, eccentric Agent Garbo, the myth, the spy, the legend. You may be interested to know that I am now posting my spy stories as a podcast called Heroes and Traitors with Philip Thompson. These episodes will be made available for listening on the podcast player of your choice.
Please see the link in the description block for more information. Born on Valentine's Day 1912 to a wealthy upper-class family in Barcelona, Juan Pujol Gossier always had a vivid imagination. As a young boy, he would lose himself in his daydreams, on one occasion riding his bicycle through a classroom window as he was too preoccupied with the fantasy playing out in his head. As an unmanageable seven-year-old boy who had been sent off to boarding school, he had no interest in his schoolwork or the strict discipline imposed by his schoolmasters.
Pujol grew into an athletic, charming young man. He loved poetry, the outdoors, and sweet-talking the local girls. To his family's disappointment, however, young Pujol dropped out of boarding school at age 15. He took up an apprenticeship at a hardware store where he worked for the next few years, and in his early 20s, he enrolled in an academy where he became a certified chicken farmer.
In 1931, at age 21, Juan Pujol completed six months compulsory military service as an officer in Spain's 7th Light Artillery Regiment. He hated every minute of it, saying later that he lacked the essential qualities of loyalty, generosity and honor to be a good member of the military. He was a humanist and a dreamer, his pacifism detesting any and all forms of violence. After leaving the military behind him, he attempted to enter the world of business, buying a series of movie theaters. Each of these ventures failed more miserably than the one before, and thus in 1935 at age 24 he returned to his life on the chicken farm.
He was also engaged to be married to young Marguerite, a devout Catholic woman who, although being very kind to Pujol, was unable to ever truly win his heart. Juan Pujol must have thought at this point that he would simply settle into a humdrum, unremarkable existence. However, as 1936 dawned, Spain was headed inevitably towards political turmoil.
Five years earlier, in 1931, King Alfonso XIII fled the country, leaving a power vacuum in his wake that was filled by communist and fascist groups eager to seize power and impose their ideology. Unrest, violence, and instability plunged Spain into a civil war on the 17th of July 1936. Spanish bull rings became the public square for political executions and bodies began to litter the streets. Pujol was dismayed when he was called up for military service by the Soviet-backed Republicans, his compulsory military service still fresh in his mind. Having no taste for what he considered a fratricidal conflict, he dodged the draft by hiding at his fiancée's house. While he was laying low, Pujol's mother, sister, and her fiancée were captured by the Republican army and charged with being counter-revolutionaries.
Things for Pujol then went from bad to worse. shortly before Christmas in 1936 when he was discovered in his hideout during a police raid and was taken into custody at the local police station. He stayed there for just a week, being freed in a daring prison break by a local resistance group known as the Socorro Blanco. It was his fiancee Marguerite who had made possible his escape.
She also had connections with the right people to provide her beloved Pujol with a safe house in Barcelona. There he lived for a full year, hiding from both sides in the civil war. The flat he lived in was owned by a taxi driver and was situated in a middle class area.
By the summer of 1937, the taxi driver left with his family, leaving Pujol in total isolation. His only contact with other humans was when a local girl brought him food and supplies and the hushed conversations he had with his protectors over a radio. As the weeks dragged on, Pujol was growing depressed and emaciated.
His isolated living conditions in a small apartment were taking their toll on both his physical and mental health. He knew that he had to escape Barcelona and planned to leave war-torn Spain altogether. Through a contact in the resistance network, Pujol managed to obtain forged identity papers that showed him to be too old for military service. He quickly realized, however, that the only way that he would be able to cross borders was to do the very thing that he had been hiding from for months.
Pujol joined the republican army and was sent to the front lines of battle near Mont Blanc. One night in 1938, under the cover of darkness, he and two others fled their posts and crossed enemy lines by entering the nationalist camp. The deserting soldiers were promptly taken as prisoners of war and put into a concentration camp in the Basque province. After some weeks in captivity, one of the many letters he sent out to family and friends was answered, having come from a wealthy background.
A family friend with the right contacts was able to negotiate for his release. In extreme poor health, Pujol was taken to a hospital in the city of Burgos to regain his strength. One day during his convalescence, a young nurse walked into his ward.
Pujol was immediately infatuated by the dark-haired beauty. Their casual conversations soon turned more serious and they fell in love. Araceli Gonzalez-Carbello was very much like her beloved, a dreamer and an adventurer.
But Arateli's dreams were, unlike Pujol's, centered around fine clothes and a glamorous lifestyle. She was described as fiercely intelligent, adventurous, dramatic, and a bit vain. The Spanish Civil War ended on the 1st of April 1939 with General Francisco Franco seizing power of a crippled and crumbling Spain. Juan Pujol and his young fiance Araceli did their best to settle in the battered shell of the city of Madrid. Desperate to earn an income, Pujol became the manager of a three-star hotel called the Majestic.
The war had seen the once popular hotel fall into decline and Pujol's ambition to restore the hotel to its former glory was in vain. If nothing else, His job at the failing hotel offered him the opportunity to meet a wide array of people and personalities. When the Spanish Duke of Torre came to stay at the Majestic, Pujol struck up a conversation.
Pujol learned that the Duke's elderly pro-Franco aunts were complaining about their inability to get hold of any scotch in the wartime conditions. Seizing the opportunity, Pujol propositioned the Duke as follows. If he could be provided with a passport that allowed him to exit Spain and travel to Portugal, Pujol knew a man who could supply the Duke's thirsty aunts with enough of their coveted scotch to keep dehydration at bay.
The Duke gratefully accepted what he considered to be an excellent plan, and soon Pujol was issued with a passport. Thus, for simply guiding the Franco-royals through Portugal in search of six bottles of liquid gold, Pujol had earned for himself something of far greater value, a means to leave war-torn Spain. The world outside of Spain was, however, hardly faring any better. In September of 1939, Britain declared war on Germany after the Nazis began their march through Europe. As the fighting continued, Pujol started to hear rumors about the concentration camps popping up across Europe and the evils that were going on inside.
He was incensed. My humanist convictions would not allow me to turn a blind eye to the enormous suffering that was being unleashed by this psychopath." These were words he wrote many decades later when reflecting on his life's journey. Juan Pujol was a man with progressive ideals. These were instilled in him by his father. Human dignity, liberty and the value of the individual were to him paramount. He hated any form of extremism and considered Hitler to be a demon. In his own words, he wanted to start a personal war with the Führer. By January of 1941, Pujol felt compelled to do whatever he could to fight the Nazis and contribute towards the good of humanity. He wanted to do something practical. but knowing that he was no good as a soldier, decided to do the next best thing. He marched bold as brass into the British embassy in Madrid to offer his services. Services of what, was probably the reaction he received. Three times Pujol was rebuffed. An eccentric Spanish chicken farmer who barely spoke a word of English was hardly the sort to rank highly on MI5's list of potential recruits. Spain was also officially neutral in the war. and MI5 didn't want to risk the fallout if discovered to be running a Spanish agent. Yet Pujol's enthusiasm and persistence was not to be dulled. He set his sights on proving to the British that he could be of some use to the war effort. Naturally, he decided the best way to achieve this was to become a spy for the very organization he hated, the Nazis. He knew nothing about espionage and even less about the Abwehr and how it functioned. He knew that he would have to learn to play a role, that of the devoted Nazi committed to Hitler's vision for the new Europe. After exposing himself to as much propaganda and Nazi doctrine as he could lay his hands on, he called the German embassy in Madrid from the hotel telephone and asked to speak to the military attache. After giving his best pro-Nazi spiel, he was surprised when the person on the other end of the telephone said somebody would soon call him. When he received a call back the following day, he was told to present himself at a nearby cafe the following afternoon at 4.30pm. Hitler hated spies and the dirty game of espionage. He had very few assets in Britain and those the Germans had recruited ended up being turned by the British into double agents. It seemed thus that the Abwehr were less picky in choosing their agents and decided to give Pujol a shot. It was at the meeting at Cafe Leon that Pujol was introduced to a fair-haired, blue-eyed Abwehr agent codenamed Federico. This was the man who would go on to become his German handler. Juan Pujol again spun his tale of love and devotion to Hitler and his new order. He also said that he had a great many diplomatic connections, which he could put to good use to further the Nazi cause. Federico was impressed and decided to schedule a second meeting at a beer house. It was at the second meeting that Pujol was formally recruited by the Abwehr, being codenamed Arabelle, from the Latin meaning, ironically as it would prove for the Germans, prayerful or answered prayer. Pujol's first assignment as Agent Arabelle was to head to Lisbon, the veritable capital of espionage, which he did on the 26th of April 1941 leaving behind his pregnant wife Aratheli. There he was to obtain for himself an exit visa to allow his onward travel to England. This was, however, easier said than done, with Pujol's request through official channels being refused by the consulate officials. Pujol spent days drinking in hotel bars, becoming increasingly desperate. He couldn't return to Madrid empty-handed. He felt he had no choice but to complete his mandate and prove his bona fides to the Germans. For a man like Juan Pujol, fate was bound to intervene. One day he was introduced by the hotel manager to a man named Señor Salsa. A fellow Spaniard, Pujol didn't think much of the man until during a trip to Estoril, he brought out with a flourish a diplomatic visa issued by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Pujol had to contain his excitement upon seeing the document, which would be his ticket not only to England, but also to gain the trust of his Abwehr handler. He immediately began to charm the man, taking him on trips to amusement parks, cafes, and nightclubs. When he invited Senor Sousa on a week-long gambling trip to the Casino Estoril, Pujol feigned sickness as an excuse to return to their hotel room. He implored his companion to go on. He would catch him up soon enough. Once back in the hotel room, Juan Pujol pulled out the camera he had packed found the diplomatic visa in Senor Sousa's bag and quickly took as many photographs as time would permit. With the original visa safely back in its place, Pujol rejoined his new friend at the casino. As soon as the trip was over, Pujol got to work creating a forgery. The con was on, Pujol managing to convince an engraver, a printing shop and an office supply company to aid him in creating his forged masterpiece. When all was said and done, Juan Pujol held in his hands a passport that allowed him to travel around wartime Europe with comparative ease. He returned triumphantly to Madrid. confident that his success would prove to the Germans just how useful he could be. He continued to meet with Federico, spinning a tale of how he knew a man in Britain that was looking to convert 5 million pesetas into pound sterling. If he played his cards right, Pujol said that he could broker a currency deal with the man. Spain was desperate for foreign currency and this sounded like a good excuse to send Pujol to Britain to spy. When Pujol revealed his trump card, the forged diplomatic visa, the deal was done. Juan Pujol, agent Arabelle, was given 3,000 US dollars in cash, cipher codes, and bottles of invisible ink. In July of 1941, he was told to pack his bags and make his way along with his family to England post-haste. His mission? Build up a network of spies in Britain, and start feeding back military intelligence to the germans pujol's first stop on his journey was lisbon he thought surely that with all that he had worked for and achieved the british would welcome him with open arms and whisk him away to london but alas his services were again flatly refused when he presented himself at the british consulate although dejected he felt too far deep into his dangerous game to give up He decided it was time to stop impersonating a spy and to become one for real. In Lisbon, he bought for himself a map of England, a tourist guidebook, and got his hands on a copy of British railway timetables. On the 19th of July 1941, he sent a telegram back to the Abwehr in Madrid in order to convince his handlers that he had made it to England and was making headway in his mission. He even said that he had met a pilot for Dutch airline KLM who had agreed to courier his letters from England to Lisbon which explained the Portuguese postmarks on his correspondence. Coming up with detailed backstories for what became as many as 27 non-existent spies. He crafted detailed reports of British Army, Air Force and Navy movements writing in a bombastic florid style. turning the most innocuous of information into a compelling narrative. He gleaned the information that went into his stories from nothing more than his maps, propaganda flyers, cinema newsreels, and bits and pieces of information that he picked up from people on the street. He attributed the intelligence he was making up to his network of sub-agents scattered across the United Kingdom. He took credit when he guessed something close to the truth and blamed it on one of his pretend sources when he didn't. In October of 1941, Pujol sent his third letter to the Abwehr. In it, he said that a sub-agent, one William Gerbers, had observed an armada of five British ships leaving Liverpool, heading for the island of Malta. The small British Crown colony was a key link in British defences and of strategic importance in the Allied North African campaign. Pujol's fabricated tip-off caused German high command to redirect its aircraft and naval forces to defend against an attack which never materialized. On another occasion, Pujol reported that a major British armada was leaving from Wales. This time, German U-boats and Italian planes were scrambled to intercept the non-existent armada, wasting valuable time and resources for the Germans. Pujol knew, however, that he couldn't keep up his ruse forever. If all he provided to the Germans proved to be false, he would soon be abandoned or worse. Federico was applying ever-increasing pressure for him to produce more valuable intelligence. Yes, a tip-off about the location of an RAF pilot school near Sandwich, or a British ship spotted in a dry dock being equipped with a new prototype weapon was interesting to the Germans. It didn't advance their war effort or provide any real strategic advantage. provide the details of a new expeditionary force, recruit an agent in Northern Ireland, and obtain copies of specific pamphlets issued by the Institute of Statistics in Oxford were just a few of the items on Pujol's to-do list. Feeling like a rat lost in a maze and having no first-hand experience of actually living in Great Britain, he was also making mistakes. In one of his reports, he wrote that men from Glasgow would do anything for a litre of wine, not being aware that whiskey was the only drink of choice in Scotland. He also made mistakes when speaking of British currency, quoting figures using only shillings and pence when he should have been referring to pound sterling. These may sound like minor details, but an astute German intelligence officer poring over every jot and tittle of what Pujol wrote may soon have noticed. Another problem was that the money was drying up. Pujol was by no means a spendthrift, but he had burned through the 3000 US dollars given to him at the outset and was being sent only measly allowances, barely enough to keep a roof above his head and food on his plate. For a fifth time Pujol approached the British consulate, this time in Lisbon, to offer his services as a double agent. For a fifth time he was refused. Pujol's wife Araceli was sensing her husband's panic and was herself starting to feel desperate. She thus took it upon herself to do whatever she could to convince the British they were making a mistake. Araceli, in a moment of ingenuity, convinced an acquaintance to write out what seemed a harmless note for her in French. Araceli then wrote the text in invisible ink, substituting words to make it read as if one of Pujol's agents was providing key intelligence about a planned sabotage attack. She marched up to the American embassy and managed to meet with the naval attache whom she showed the note. She said that she knew the source of this information, which just so happened to be her husband. This was enough to convince the Americans to put her in touch with MI6. Juan Pujol Garcia was finally a blip on British radars. While all of this was going on, the British had been intercepting and deciphering telegrams sent from Lisbon by a mysterious agent Arabelle to the Abwehr in Madrid. These messages read like intelligence reports from a spy within allied ranks. Hairs at MI6 were set running when a dossier containing the decoded messages was handed to its subsection head of counterintelligence. The mysterious agent's reports were so meticulously detailed that MI6 was suddenly convinced that they were dealing with a genuine spy. What confounded the British however was that the information being leaked was not very accurate and some of it was downright absurd. The messages were however near enough the truth that MR6 began to scramble to identify the agent Arable. What perhaps finally convinced the British that Arable was no simple conman was how the Germans reacted to his messages, diverting large forces in response to his tip-offs which were written in the most convincing prosaic style yet were almost entirely made up. After sending out inquiries all across its intelligence networks in Europe, British intelligence received a telegram from MI6 in Lisbon advising that a man by the name of Juan Pujol had approached the American naval attache in Madrid to offer his services as a spy for the allies in London. The Spaniard having made this very peculiar offer had also mentioned that he was feeding disinformation to the Abwehr from Portugal. As soon as MI6 had confirmed Juan Pujol to be Agent Arabelle, it was decided to smuggle him to England via Gibraltar. In April of 1942, and leaving his wife and young son behind, Pujol secretly boarded a British merchant ship bound for the United Kingdom. Upon arrival, Pujol was whisked off to a North London safe house where he was debriefed by his future case officer, Tommy Harris. As enticed as they were by the prospect of recruiting a man out of whose hand the Abwehr greedily ate, MI5 proceeded with caution, wary of the possibility of Pujol being a Nazi triple agent. When asked about what motivated him to spy for the Allies, Pujol recounted a tale about his brother, Yakin, who had gone to France and had seen the Gestapo pull people from a farmhouse and execute them by the side of the road. Pujol said that when his brother told him the story, he decided then and there that he had to do something. This proved a lie. While he did have an older brother named Joaquin, he had never left Spain, let alone travelled to France. Nevertheless, after passing muster, Juan Pujol finally realised his life's ambition. He was recruited into MI5 and, likening his acting ability to that of the famed actress, was codenamed Garbo. Juan Pujol was brought into the double cross system, a counter-espionage and deception operation chaired by Oxford historian and sportsman John Cecil Masterman. The double cross system was coordinated by the 20 committee and was created to run double agents who fed disinformation to the Germans. MI5 was careful not to run agent Garbo too hard too soon. Aside from still being a little cautious over the possibility of Pujol being a triple agent, they also felt it wise to undertake some build-up, that is, that period during which an agent builds confidence with the other side. Agent Garbo passed on chicken feed to the Abwehr, that is, true but not very useful information, mostly about battalion movements that the British felt comfortable to pass on to the enemy. Pujol continued to expand his network of fake agents from a traveling salesman to an Indian poet and even an employee at Britain's ministry of war. His sparring grew to number 27 non-existent characters each with detailed backstories and unique personas. The Nazis even paid the salaries of all these fake agents handing over as much as 340,000 US dollars to Pujol to distribute among his network. to keep his operation running smoothly. Agent Garbo was incredibly relieved to now be working for the British, which meant that he no longer had to invent the intelligence he fed back to the Germans. He knew nevertheless that he was still playing an incredibly dangerous game. He had to concoct excuses for when he failed to report on military matters his German handlers believed he would have access to. For example, When he didn't report on major movements of the British naval fleet, he said that his sub-agent had fallen ill and subsequently died. To give the story an air of plausibility, the British published an obituary for the non-existent dead agent, even paying, at least according to state records, a state pension to his equally non-existent widow. Pujol's first big coup as a bona fide British spy concerned the Allied campaign in North Africa. Both the 20 committee and Garbo himself knew that they couldn't get away forever with peddling falsehoods to the Germans. To stay in the Nazis good graces, Garbo needed to provide genuinely good intel. Pujol and MI5 thus devised an ingenious plan. It was decided that agent Garbo would leak the true details of Operation Torch, being the planned Anglo-American invasion of North Africa to the Nazis. This would, in theory, have jeopardized the entirety of the Allies war efforts and cost many Allied lives. However, there was a catch. On the 1st of November 1942, Garbo typed out a coded letter in which he warned the Germans that Allied forces were planning to attack at Algiers and Casablanca. He immediately dispatched the letter in the post. This meant that his letter was both dated and postmarked. one week prior to the start of Operation Torch. MI5, however, made sure that the letter was delayed as it proceeded through the British censors. On the 8th of November 1942, Allied forces stormed the beaches across Morocco and Algeria as Operation Torch got underway. The following day, on the 9th of November 1942, Pujol's German handler Federico held in his hand his agent's letter. Although bitterly disappointed that it had arrived a day late, he and Nazi high command believed that their agent Erebel truly was an oracle. Indeed, they considered him as strong as a 45,000 man army. They wrote back praising their agent for the information he had provided, even apologizing that it was received just too late. In a show of gratitude and their confidence, Pujol was sent more vials of invisible ink by the Germans. along with two new ciphers. Agent Garbo was firmly entrenched as a trusted agent for the Nazis and he was soon to be given his greatest mission yet. While Pujol was flying high as a British double agent, things were not going so well for him on the home front. In early 1942 and shortly after Pujol's recruitment as a British spy, his wife Aratheli and young son were relocated to join him in London. Araceli was even less conversant in English than her husband and, being made subject to MI5's tight limitations on her freedoms, found herself isolated in a foreign country. Aratheli only rarely spent time with her husband, with Juan Pujol spending long days and nights working at MI5's headquarters on German Street. Also, the bland British wartime diet, characterized, as Aratheli said, by too much macaroni, too many potatoes, and not enough fish, left much to be desired. Aratheli felt trapped in her small London apartment. She had already proved her own worth as her husband's partner in espionage, and resented being excluded from his exciting and important work. As 1943 progressed, Aratelli's dissatisfaction intensified, leading to erratic behavior driven by homesickness and a strong desire to return to Spain. Pujol's handler, Tommy Harris, began to notice Aratelli's seemingly unbalanced mental state. Things came to a head when on the 21st of June 1943, Pujol and Araceli got into an explosive argument. Araceli threatened that if she were not allowed to return immediately to Spain, she would expose her husband to the Spanish embassy. The stakes were too high for this to be allowed to happen and the echo of Araceli's threat was heard all the way to the top of MI5 and beyond to the desk of Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself. Despite MI5's best efforts, Araceli was not to be placated by gifts or reasoning. Agent Garbo's best weapon was deception and unfortunately he was compelled to use it against his very own wife. Pujol and MI5 agreed to carry out a ruse. An MI5 agent visited Araceli telling her that her husband had been arrested and that he had been sent to collect a set of pajamas and a toothbrush. Arrested? Why? she asked. It was then explained to her that Pujol had been deactivated as an agent because of her threats. When this news was broken to Pujol, in a fit of anger he attacked an MI5 agent and thus found himself in jail. Araceli refused to cooperate and went on a rampage. She called Tommy Harris in anger and then Pujol's wireless operator, Charles Haynes. She insisted that he be at her London home within the next 30 minutes. Haynes rushed over to the Garcia home where he found Araceli lying on the floor in a staged suicide attempt. She had opened all the gas taps and shut herself up in the home. Araceli was then taken to Camp 20, a British interrogation centre in south-west London used to house captured German agents. After a brief conversation with her husband, who was dressed in prisoner's clothes, she was sent home and told to await the outcome of his fate. Pujol returned home the next day, telling Araceli that the British had taken mercy on him and would allow him to continue working as a double agent on condition that there would be no more trouble. Although it was partly of his own making, Pujol was shaken by the distasteful episode and never spoke or wrote about it again. Having to set aside the tumult of his personal life, the war continued on unabated as 1943 marched on. Juan Pujol was preparing for his biggest deception yet, and one which would help to secure the allied victory in WW2. At that stage of the war, the English countryside had become a bustling hub of military activity in preparation for Operation Overlord. Military personnel, planes, jeeps and tents filled the rural roads. This of course had not gone unnoticed by German reconnaissance. The key to the success of the invasion was surprise. If the allied armies hoped to break through Hitler's seemingly impenetrable Atlantic wall, they needed German forces distracted elsewhere. Operation Fortitude was the allies answer, with Agent Garbo being prepped to play a key role in the allies series of interlocking and ever more elaborate deception operations. Pujol's mission was to deceive the German forces into believing that the invasion would take place at the Pas de Calais, a location 200 miles north of the actual target, Normandy. If successful, this strategy would ensure that the bulk of Nazi troops were positioned far from where the real action would unfold. Garbo was not the only double agent involved in this grand operation. The 20 committee was running a handful of spies, who had embedded themselves within the Abwehr and who were sending similar disinformation to the Nazis. To orchestrate this grand illusion, Garbo had to convince the Nazis that a fictional million man army called the First United States Army Group was gathering in southeastern England. This elaborate ruse involved lifelike inflatable tanks and ships dotting harbors and fields, fake hospitals springing up, dummy wooden aircraft being constructed, and even a sham oil facility near Dover complete with dust-enhancing wind machines borrowed from film studios. The media played its part too, with staged photographs and fabricated letters from frustrated locals adding to the spectacle. General George Patton himself was seen rallying these imaginary forces across southeastern England to bolster the illusion. Garbo's fictitious sub-agents dispatched reports on all these military preparations. These maneuvers left Hitler and Nazi high command feeling ever more anxious. For months Hitler believed the invasion would start at Pas de Calais, but as time dragged on he became more and more focused on Normandy and Brittany as the likely targets. Garbo intended to reverse Hitler's thinking. By 1944, Garbo's intelligence and the strategic bombings near Calais by the Allies, leaving Normandy virtually unscathed, had thoroughly bewildered the German high command, convincing them that the Pas de Calais was indeed the target. Thanks to Agent Garbo and others like him, Hitler chose to hold back 250,000 troops in Scandinavia to defend against an attack in Norway. The culmination of the ruse came on the 6th of June 1944 when allied forces landed at Normandy's Omaha beach. The German 7th army were caught off guard and at low readiness, thinking that the poor weather conditions meant that no attack would come that day. Even General Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox himself, was back in Germany that day celebrating his wife's birthday. Even as allied troops poured onto the beaches of Normandy, Berlin's high command hesitated to awaken Hitler from his sleep, convinced that the real assault by a much larger force would come at Calais. For two days following D-Day, German command remained deceived, waiting for an attack from the non-existent FUSAG and the opening of the real second front. It wasn't until 9 June that a desperate plea from General Gerd von Rundstedt moved Hitler to deploy the fearsome Nazi panzer divisions. However, Garbo transmitted a crucial message on this day reinforcing the diversion at Normandy and suggesting that a major offensive would still target Calais. This message reached Hitler's desk and demonstrating how much faith the Nazis had in Garbo led to a critical halt by Hitler of German armored divisions en route to Normandy. This was a moment that shifted the tide of the invasion saving countless allied lives and securing a strategic foothold in Europe. Even by December 22 German divisions still lingered at Pas de Calais in anticipation of FUSAG's phantom assault. In fact there were then even more forces in the Pas de Calais than there had been before the Normandy invasion had even begun. The key to the work done by Agent Garbo and other brave double agents like him was the fact that it was not only on D-Day itself that the Germans were fooled, it was during D-Day plus one, D-Day plus two, D-Day plus three and so on. when reinforcements were continuously delayed that made all the difference. By August of 1944, Allied troops and French resistance fighters were gearing up for the Battle of Paris and the Soviets were pressing in on the Nazis from the east. Agent Garbo's career in intelligence was nearing its end. German intelligence agents were turning themselves into the Allies in droves as the Third Reich crumbled. Juan Pujol had continued to operate as a double agent long after D-Day, playing a key role in ensuring that German bomb attacks using their powerful V1 rockets missed their intended targets in London. With the Nazis all but dismantled, the British considered running Garbo as a double agent against the new foe rising in the east, the Soviet Union. But it was decided that this was too dangerous. Pujol was terrified that his identity would eventually be uncovered and there were enough Germans about who would have considered him a traitor. and meant to do him harm. Juan Pujol Garcia had emerged victorious in his personal war against Hitler. On the 29th of July 1944, in a twist of irony, Pujol received a message from the Abwehr to let him know that he would receive the Iron Cross, Germany's highest military honor, reserved usually only for front line soldiers. Shortly before Christmas in 1944, Pujol was also honored by the British in a secret ceremony in which he was named a member of the Order of the British Empire. This made Juan Pujol Garcia the only individual decorated by both sides in World War II. Agent Garbo continued to communicate with the Germans right up to the end of the war. When jubilant crowds poured out onto the streets on Piccadilly Circus and Regent Street on the 8th of May 1945, Pujol sent his final message to the Germans to tell them that he was fleeing to South America. In June of 1945, Juan Pujol traveled to the United States with his best friend in MI5 and former handler Tommy Harris. There they met with FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, who, to Pujol's surprise, did not try and recruit him. The Americans were in awe of what Garbo had achieved and provided him with much-needed documents to allow his travel to South America. After his brief time in the US, Pujol went on a tour of South America in search of a new home for him and his family. He settled on Venezuela, seeing a country with a prosperous, democratic future. Before settling down and for his final flourish, Agent Garbo traveled back to Madrid where he met with former Abwehr members, including his old handler Federico. If nothing else, the manner in which he was received by the then defeated Germans, including payment of a sizable reward for his efforts for the Reich, proved that his deception was believed until the very end. Pujol then returned to a quieter, more routine way of living starting his new life in Venezuela teaching English to local employees of the Shell Oil Company and later opening a stationery shop. Juan's marriage to Araceli unfortunately did not survive the war. Although she joined him in Venezuela and bore him another daughter, their relationship could not be salvaged. Araceli returned to Spain with their children in 1948. The following year, and to protect him from possible reprisals, MI5 had spread a rumor that Pujol had died in Angola after contracting malaria. This story was spread far and wide, relayed even to Araceli and her children who sadly were left to believe that their husband and father was dead. For more than three decades Juan Pujol lived peacefully in Venezuela, far removed from the danger, intrigue and heroics of his former life. He remarried and had three more children with his second wife Carmen Celia. His anonymity was however shattered when author and British intelligence historian Nigel West tracked him down in South America shortly before the 40th anniversary of the D-Day landings. West was adamant that Pujol should travel to Great Britain to be honoured by the Duke of Edinburgh, husband to Queen Elizabeth II. Reluctant, But believing that after so long any Nazi sympathizer who meant him harm was either too old or dead, Agent Garbo finally broke cover and returned to England. There he was formally awarded his MBE which had been given to him in secret so many years earlier. Juan Pujol also traveled to France where he faced an emotional reunion with former MI5 colleagues and military veterans at Omaha Beach where thousands of visitors swarmed the beaches to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the D-Day landings. There the diminutive Spaniard was celebrated as a hero, including by many of those he had helped save decades earlier. Juan Pujol Garcia, the man who had hoped to fade into obscurity, now had his face plastered across the front pages of newspapers from the United Kingdom to continental Europe. News soon spread to Spain where his long lost family were shocked to learn that their husband and father had not died in Angola but was very much alive. Pujol had a poignant reunion with his family at Barcelona's Hotel Majestic where the family spent a few hours together. After returning to Venezuela, Pujol would write long, heartfelt letters to his family filled with love and regret for the lost decades. Four years later, on the 10th of October 1988, Juan Pujol suffered a stroke and died later that day. He was buried in a Venezuelan National Park Cemetery. His tombstone, among many others in the overgrown graveyard, reads simply, remembered by his wife, children and grandchildren. While the success of the Allied victory in World War 2 can never be pinned on one single individual, there can be no reckoning of the number of Allied servicemen and civilians alike that were saved by Juan Pujol's actions. For this he has been referred to as the most successful double agent in history and the spy who defeated Hitler. However true these monikers may be, they wouldn't have mattered to Agent Garbo. Agent Garbo was among the few spies in history who can claim to have undertaken their work with pure motives. Juan Pujol Garcia was a man driven by idealism and a hope for a better future.