Agent Garbo: The Spy That Lied About D-Day & Fooled The Nazis

Juan Pujol Garcia was one determined man. Ultimately known as Agent Garbo and celebrated for the big swings he took during World War II, his journey may have taken a different turn had he given up at the first sign of rejection.

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As a Spanish Civil War veteran, Juan Pujol Garcia had a hatred for totalitarianism. So when Hitler came along, all he wanted was to foil his plans. He approached the British war effort to sign on as a spy but was turned down due to a lack of connections or credentials.

Not to be deterred by this rejection, he decided to play the long game. He approached Nazi officials under the guise of being a Spanish official and told them he wanted to spy on Britain on their behalf. 

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He started sending them false information which they thought was coming directly from British intelligence. The nazis believed the information came from London when Pujol worked from Lisbon and Madrid. 

While the information was false, it was littered with just enough facts to provide his reports credibility. He continued with the British unaware of his work on their behalf.

Stephan Talty, the author of his biography said, “He was really gathering these sort of factoids from different encyclopedias, and even from advertisements he saw and placards he saw in the street. So he was a complete amateur, but he was able to sort of built up enough of a portfolio to finally approach the British.”

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In 1942, Pujol decided to approach the British once more, letting them in on his intricate web of lies. The British had already caught on to a secret individual that had been feeding lies to the nazis on their behalf but did not quite know who it was. Upon his revelation, he was brought into the MI5.

Pujol really allowed himself to shine at this point. He fabricated a network of sub-spies that he procured money for, from the Nazis. He also orchestrated the death of one such spy and convinced them to start paying out a pension to this non-existent spy’s grieving widow. 

While the Germans were often fed false or delayed information, they feared that letting Pujol go would lead to losing a network rather than just a singular spy.

He soon became known as ‘Agent Garbo’ after Greta Garbo in the MI5 ranks due to his sheer acting talent.

In what would be his biggest play ever, he convinced them that the information the Germans had received of an invasion of Normandy was fake. This meant that the Nazis were wholly unprepared for the D-Day invasion.

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When the war finally ended in 1945, he continued to work with MI5 to ensure no factions of the Third Reich were resurrected. 

He then chose to move to Venezuela to escape his memories of the war and start anew. Unfortunately, many Nazis had the same thought.

He reached out to his old handler in the MI5 in 1948 and decided to take on his biggest acting role yet. To be dead. 

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Tommy Harris, his handler, spread the news that Pujol had succumbed to Malaria in Angola. This news also reached his wife and children. Pujol changed his look while in Venezuela and started anew.

His secret was kept until the 1980s when a British writer took an interest in his life and deduced that Agent Garbo may not be as dead as everyone thought. The writer Nigel West managed to track him down upon which Pujol confessed to his existence.

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He finally returned to Europe and reunited with his children in Europe and his ex-wife. He finally died for real in 1988 but went down in history as one of the best spies of MI5.