The Unbelievable True Story of History's Greatest Double Agent

# Juan Pujol García: The Spy Who Never Was

Juan Pujol García was born in 1912 and died in 1988, a span of years that places him firmly in the 20th century, well after the Spanish Armada and centuries too late to have been part of it. He is not the first man to walk on the moon either, though that fact is less surprising given the timeline. What he is, however, is one of the most extraordinary double agents of the Second World War. Three times, the British intelligence services turned him down when he offered his services as a spy. Undeterred, he took matters into his own hands and did something far more audacious: he began spying for the Germans, pretending to be one of their most valuable assets, while in reality feeding them nothing but carefully constructed fiction.

Born in Barcelona to a well-to-do Catalan cotton factory owner and an Andalusian mother from Motril, Pujol's early life was comfortably middle-class until the Spanish Civil War disrupted everything. His mother came from a strict Roman Catholic family where daily Communion was routine, while his father was more secular with liberal political leanings—a tension that perhaps shaped Pujol's later aversion to ideological extremes. At seven, he was sent to the Valldemia boarding school run by the Marist Brothers in Mataró, where students were only permitted outside on Sundays with a visitor. His devoted father made the twenty-mile journey every week without fail, a small detail that speaks to the family's closeness before political chaos tore Spain apart. By thirteen, Pujol had transferred to a school run by his father's card-playing friend, Monsignor Josep, but after a disagreement with a teacher, he abandoned formal education entirely to become an apprentice at a hardware store. His varied pre-war occupations included studying animal husbandry at the Royal Poultry School in Arenys de Mar and managing a cinema—skills that would prove unexpectedly useful in constructing his elaborate spy narratives.

Pujol's childhood fascination with deception began early, though not in the dramatic fashion one might expect of a future master spy. As a boy at Valldemia boarding school, he discovered that if he claimed to have a stomachache, the stern Marist Brothers would grant him permission to visit the infirmary—where the kindly nun kept a hidden stash of Catalan sweets. What started as a simple ruse to satisfy a sweet tooth evolved into an intricate system of coded signals with classmates, using the position of books on shelves to indicate which boys would feign illness on which days. This early apprenticeship in deception, he would later admit with a chuckle, taught him the cardinal rule of successful lying: always build your fiction on a foundation of truth. The stomachaches were real sometimes, the infirmary existed, and so did the nun's secret candy supply—only the timing and frequency required creative adjustment.

His experience with the Spanish Civil War, which he described as "a theater production where everyone forgot their lines but kept shooting anyway," shaped his understanding of how institutions crumble when trust evaporates. When Republican forces seized his father's cotton factory, they didn't merely take ownership—they instituted a committee to run it, with disastrous results. Pujol watched as well-meaning but unqualified workers argued over production schedules while inventory disappeared through what he politely termed "creative accounting." The Nationalists, when he eventually deserted to their side, proved equally incompetent in their own way, with officers more concerned with displaying their fascist credentials than managing supply chains. This dual disillusionment didn't just make him apolitical; it made him recognize that all bureaucracies, regardless of ideology, share the same vulnerability: they believe what they want to believe, especially when it confirms their existing worldview. This insight would later prove invaluable when constructing reports for his German handlers, who were only too happy to accept intelligence that aligned with their preconceptions about British military capabilities.

Pujol created an elaborate persona: a fervently pro-Nazi Spanish official with business interests in London. He had never been to Britain, but that didn't stop him. From Lisbon, Portugal, where he relocated, he began sending detailed reports to his German handlers. These reports emerged from imagination, supported by tourist guidebooks and British newsreels shown in cinemas, rather than from actual espionage. The Nazis, already predisposed to believe in the existence of a loyal Spanish informant, accepted his intelligence without question. He described troop movements, supply routes, and military installations, all entirely fabricated. The irony was that much of what he reported could be verified through public sources. He wasn't lying about things the Germans couldn't check; he was confirming what they already saw in newsreels, but doing so with the authority of an on-the-ground agent. This gave his reports an air of credibility that was nearly impossible to dispute. His one notable slip-up came when he claimed his alleged Glasgow contact "would do anything for a litre of wine," unaware that Scotland neither used the metric system nor shared such drinking habits—a mistake that went unnoticed by his German handlers, who were too eager to believe their star informant.

As his reputation grew, so did his operational budget. The Germans began reimbursing him for expenses, which introduced a minor but telling problem: Pujol didn't understand the British currency system. He had never been to the UK and was unfamiliar with pounds, shillings, and pence. His expense claims, while creative, contained subtle errors in formatting and conversion. Yet even this didn't raise suspicion. The Germans were so convinced of his authenticity that they overlooked the inconsistencies, attributing them perhaps to the chaos of wartime logistics. The reports themselves were so convincingly detailed that British intelligence, upon intercepting them through the Ultra decryption program, launched a full-scale investigation to uncover this mysterious agent operating within their borders. MI5 scrambled to find the spy they believed was deeply embedded in Britain, unaware that he had never set foot in the country. The British counter-intelligence service wasted considerable resources hunting down this phantom agent, only to discover he was operating from Lisbon, crafting his entire operation from the Hotel Palácio in Estoril using nothing more than tourist guides, train timetables, and magazine advertisements.

Eventually, the British did bring Pujol into the fold, not because they had caught him, but because they recognized the value of turning him. Once relocated to Britain, he was given a code name. It was initially "Agent Bovril," a reference to a quintessentially British drink, though this was later changed to "Garbo," after the reclusive film star Greta Garbo. The name suited him. He operated in the shadows, crafting a network of fictional sub-agents, 27 in total, each with their own backstories, personalities, and reporting rhythms. The mechanics of Pujol's deception operation were as ingenious as they were absurd. When creating his network of 27 fictional agents, he developed a color-coded system for tracking their supposed movements and reporting schedules, using nothing more sophisticated than colored pins on a map of Britain pinned to the wall of his London safe house. Each pin represented an agent, and its position indicated their current "location." When an agent needed to "travel" for operational reasons, Pujol would move the pin accordingly, then consult railway timetables to calculate plausible journey times. His handler Tomás Harris recalled watching Pujol spend an entire afternoon calculating the precise moment a fictional agent in Manchester would have needed to board a train to arrive in London by 3:17 p.m., complete with appropriate platform changes at Crewe and Birmingham. The Germans never questioned why his reports contained such granular detail—it was precisely this obsessive attention to mundane logistics that made his fiction feel authentic.

The people he described were fabrications, personas sustained through letters, radio messages, and expense claims. Among them were "Agent 1," a KLM steward who resigned in 1943; "Agent 2," William Gerbers, a Swiss-German businessman who died in Bootle in 1942; "Agent 3," "Benedict," a Venezuelan student in Glasgow; and "Agent 4," "Chamillus," a Gibraltarian NAAFI waiter based in Chislehurst. When one of his fictional agents supposedly fell ill before a major fleet movement from Liverpool, Pujol didn't just let the story fade—he arranged for the agent to "die" and placed an obituary in the local newspaper, convincing the Germans to pay a pension to the agent's "widow." 

Pujol's understanding of German bureaucratic culture proved as valuable as his knowledge of British geography. He knew that German intelligence officers, shaped by a rigid hierarchical system, would see minor inconsistencies as signs of operational difficulties rather than as evidence of deception. When his fictional agent "Chamillus" failed to report on troop movements near Chislehurst, Pujol didn't simply claim the agent was unavailable—he crafted an elaborate explanation involving the agent's cousin being called up for military service, requiring the agent to travel to Birmingham for a family meeting, compounded by railway delays caused by Luftwaffe bombing raids. The Germans didn't just accept this explanation; they commended Pujol for maintaining communication channels under such difficult circumstances. As one German officer wrote in a intercepted message: "Your organizational skills under adversity demonstrate true Aryan spirit." The Germans paid for them all, funneling money directly to British intelligence, which received approximately $340,000 in US dollars over the course of the war. It was, in effect, a con so successful that the enemy funded it entirely.

The intelligence Pujol provided fell into three categories: complete fiction, genuine but outdated military information, and seemingly trivial details like football scores. The outdated intelligence was particularly clever. He would send accurate reports about troop movements or supply shipments, but deliberately delay them so they arrived too late to be of use. One notable example came in November 1942, just before the Operation Torch landings in North Africa, when Garbo's agent on the River Clyde reported that a convoy of troopships and warships had left port, painted in Mediterranean camouflage. While the letter was sent by airmail and postmarked before the landings, it was deliberately delayed by British Intelligence to arrive too late to be useful. The Germans responded: "We are sorry they arrived too late but your last reports were magnificent." Encouraged, they demanded faster transmission and better encryption, prompting them to send Pujol one of their most secure codebooks, the strongest they had at the time. Garbo's encrypted messages were to be received in Madrid, manually decrypted, and re-encrypted with an Enigma machine for retransmission to Berlin. 

Perhaps most remarkably, Pujol managed to turn the Germans' own security protocols against them. When they insisted on using increasingly complex encryption methods, he didn't resist—he embraced them enthusiastically, knowing that each new layer of security provided more material for Bletchley Park's codebreakers. He developed a habit of deliberately making minor errors in encryption that would be immediately noticeable to British cryptanalysts but invisible to the Germans, creating a subtle channel of communication with his true handlers. One particularly clever ruse involved inserting the phrase "weather report" at specific intervals in his messages—a signal to Bletchley Park that the following text contained particularly valuable intelligence. The Germans, believing this was merely Pujol's idiosyncratic writing style, never questioned why their star agent seemed so preoccupied with meteorological conditions in southern England. Having both the original text and the Enigma-encoded intercept of it, the codebreakers at Bletchley Park gained invaluable material for a chosen-plaintext attack on the Germans' Enigma key. The Germans, in their eagerness to support their star agent, had handed over a critical piece of their cryptographic infrastructure.

Pujol's most significant contribution came in the lead-up to D-Day. Operation Fortitude, the deception plan designed to mislead the Germans about the location of the Allied invasion, relied heavily on his network. He fed the Germans false intelligence suggesting that the main assault would come at Pas-de-Calais, not Normandy. To support this, the Allies deployed inflatable tanks, dummy landing craft, and fake radio traffic, all part of an elaborate theater of war designed to be visible from the air. Pujol's role was to confirm these deceptions with reports from his fictional agents. Between January and June 1944, he sent over 500 radio messages—sometimes more than twenty per day—building the illusion of a massive force gathering in southeast Britain. Part of the deception involved convincing the Germans that a fictitious formation, the First U.S. Army Group comprising 11 divisions (150,000 men) commanded by General George Patton, was stationed in Kent. On the night before the invasion, he sent a message at 3 a.m. detailing the imminent landing. The German radio operators did not respond until 8 a.m. Whether they were asleep, overwhelmed, or simply inefficient, the delay was fatal. By the time they acknowledged the message, the invasion was already underway. Pujol then sent a furious follow-up: "I cannot accept excuses or negligence. Were it not for my ideals I would abandon the work." The Germans, believing they had failed to act on timely intelligence, accepted the blame. The deception held so completely that they kept two armored divisions and 19 infantry divisions in the Pas de Calais waiting for a second invasion through July and August 1944. There were more German troops in the Pas de Calais region two months after the Normandy invasion than there had been on D-Day itself.

For his efforts, Pujol received honors from both sides. The British awarded him the MBE, which he wore proudly on November 25, 1944. The Germans, unaware of his true allegiance, awarded him the Iron Cross, Second Class, on July 29, 1944—a decoration normally reserved for front-line fighting men that required Hitler's personal authorization. The award was presented via radio communication during the war and later received in physical form from a former handler after hostilities ended. Accepting the medal was an act of necessity rather than pride. To refuse it would have risked exposure, and in the uncertain aftermath of the war, with rumors of hidden Nazi cells and lingering threats, Pujol feared reprisals. His experience with both sides of the Spanish Civil War—having served the Republicans only to desert to the Nationalists, and having been equally disillusioned by both—had left him with a deep loathing of political extremism of all sorts. He was proud that he had managed to serve both sides without firing a single bullet for either, and by World War II, he had decided to do something "for the good of humanity." The idea that the war might not truly be over, that some remnant of the Third Reich could resurface, was not far-fetched in the minds of those who had lived through it. For people like Pujol, the image of a single Nazi helmet emerging from the ground after the credits roll was more than a cinematic trope; it was a plausible scenario.

After the war, Pujol disappeared. In 1949, with the help of MI5, he faked his own death from malaria in Angola and assumed a new identity. He moved to Lagunillas, Venezuela, where he opened a bookshop and gift shop in relative anonymity. The books, one might imagine, were full of spies. His real name remained unknown to the public for decades. Even British intelligence referred to him by his code name. It wasn't until 1971 that a politician named Rupert Allason, writing under the pen name Nigel West, began searching for him, hoping to locate the man behind Garbo. Allason started with the Barcelona phone book, calling every listing under "J. García." Eventually, he reached Pujol's nephew, who confirmed the connection. The nephew, unlike a proper spy would have done, believed the inquiry and facilitated contact. Pujol agreed to return to Britain, where he was received by Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace in an unusually long audience. After that, he visit the Special Forces Club and reunite with former colleagues, including T.A. Robertson, Roger Fleetwood Hesketh, Cyril Mills, and Desmond Bristow, joking that plastic surgery in Venezuela had altered his appearance and voice. The suggestion that such surgery could completely transform someone's identity was met with skepticism, but the reunion was genuine.

He toured the beaches of Normandy, the very sites his deception had helped secure. On the 40th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1984, he returned to pay his respects to the dead. He brought with him a stack of expense forms, meticulously filled out for the fictional agents he had once commanded. The forms were handed to British intelligence, a final bureaucratic flourish to a career built on lies. The man who had nearly not been a British spy at all, rejected three times before taking matters into his own hands, had become one of the most effective intelligence assets of the war. His legacy lay in narrative mastery, in crafting a world so convincing that an entire enemy intelligence apparatus believed in it, rather than in battlefield heroics. The Germans paid him, promoted him, and decorated him, all while he worked for the other side. The British, who initially dismissed him, came to rely on him completely. He operated in the space between truth and fiction, where the most dangerous weapon was a well-told story, not a gun or a bomb. When he died in Caracas in 1988, the man known as Garbo left behind a record of deception so complete that even now, it reads like invention—a fitting end for someone who had spent his life constructing realities that others chose to believe.