DOUBLE AGENT
Juan Pujol Garcia, also known as agent Garbo, was one of the most famous Spanish spies and double agents during World War II. Pujol was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and he hated totalitarianism. Therefore, just when World War II broke out, he volunteered to work for the British as a spy against Germany. He was determined to do it but, to his disappointment, British MI5 Intelligence officers refused to accept him for the job. So Pujol started working on his own. Pretending to be a Spanish official who worked in London, he made contact with Nazi officials in Madrid and told them that he was interested in spying on Britain for the Third Reich. He started sending the Nazis reports that they thought were from London. Actually they were from Madrid. Soon, Pujol became a double agent whom Britain didn’t even know it had.
Pujol sent the Germans plenty of false reports, and to make them more realistic he added lots of factual information. Stephan Talty, the author of Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day says that “he gathered these sorts of facts from encyclopaedias, from press advertisements or street posters”. The British were really impressed when they later read Pujol’s reports.
Of course, as he lacked professional training, Pujol made mistakes. Once he told Germans that during his visit to Scotland, he managed to recruit men who “would do anything for a litre of wine.” The Nazis didn’t catch that he should have said “beer” or “whisky”. Everybody knows that Scotland’s wine is undrinkable. That amateur mistake could have cost him life, but Pujol got away with it. Finally, in 1942, Pujol again approached British Intelligence officials about becoming a double agent. This time they agreed and brought him to London to work for MI5.
Throughout the war the Germans thought of Pujol as their important spy. They never discovered he was a double agent, despite the fact that lots of his reports were incorrect. The Germans probably believed that no one could really fake so much information and so many different characters. In his book Talty says that Pujol told Germans that he had recruited 27 spies to gather information for him. The Germans were convinced that if they eliminated Pujol, they would lose the whole network of spies working for them. In his most famous report, Pujol told the Nazis that the news about a planned invasion of Normandy was fake. This wasn’t true, of course, and as a result the Nazis were unprepared for the Allies’ D-Day invasion.
After 1945, Pujol continued to work for MI5 to investigate whether Germany had any plans to restart the Fourth Reich. When he finally finished his career, he felt he had to get out of Europe. He wanted to be far away from his war memories and he moved to Venezuela. But as many former Nazis had also chosen Venezuela as a place of escape, Pujol decided it would be safer for him if everybody thought he was dead. He decided to fake his death. In 1948, he asked Tommy Harris, his handler at MI5, to tell everyone that he had died of malaria. Harris spread that news and Pujol was announced dead.
Pujol kept his secret for forty years. He finally came out of hiding in the 1980s. He returned to Europe and reconnected with his family. He died a second — and final — time in 1988. Talty says that Pujol didn’t have to fake his death for such a long time. In the 60s the Nazis were no longer interested in taking revenge on their enemies so Pujol would have been safe. Talty argues that Pujol just felt embarrassed that he could not make a successful career for himself after the war, and that is why he did not reveal himself.
History shows that people become spies mainly for two reasons. They are either trapped into becoming agents or get lots of money for their work. Neither is true about Pujol. He did it strictly out of idealism. He believed every man was obliged to fight in the war. Many people say that spying let him use his acting skills. After all, it was a challenging and exciting role.