Juan Pujol García was a Catalan chicken farmer who despised both fascism and communism. After the Spanish Civil War, he decided he would help the Allies defeat Hitler — the problem was that nobody wanted him. He approached British intelligence three times and was rejected each time.

So he took matters into his own hands. He approached the Germans, offered his services as a spy, and was accepted. The Abwehr gave him invisible ink and money and told him to go to Britain and recruit a network of sub-agents.

The Fictional Network

Pujol never went to Britain. He went to Lisbon and began fabricating intelligence reports using tourist guides, newsreels, and a map of England. He invented 27 sub-agents — each with distinct personalities, occupations, and quirks. One was a Welshman who hated the English. Another was a Venezuelan student in Glasgow. A third was a Greek sailor who traveled shipping routes.

His reports were so convincing that the Germans believed them — even when they contained obvious errors (he once described men in Glasgow "willing to do anything for a litre of wine," apparently unaware of Scottish drinking preferences). The Germans created an entire department to manage his fictional network's output.

D-Day Deception

MI5 eventually discovered what Pujol was doing and brought him to London, where he was given the codename GARBO. Working with handler Tomás Harris, Pujol fed the Germans carefully crafted disinformation that was critical to the success of D-Day.

In his most crucial message, sent just after midnight on June 6, 1944, Pujol told his German handlers that the Normandy landings were a diversion and that the real invasion would target the Pas-de-Calais. Hitler believed it so completely that he held two Panzer divisions in reserve for seven weeks, waiting for the "real" invasion that never came.

Pujol received both the Iron Cross from Germany (for his "exceptional service" to the Reich) and the MBE from Britain (for his role in the D-Day deception). He is believed to be the only person in history to have received decorations from both sides in the same war.

After the war, he faked his own death and moved to Venezuela, where he ran a bookshop until he was rediscovered by historians in the 1980s.