#Secret agents in ww2 code

After an argument with a teacher, he decided that he no longer wished to remain at the school, and became an apprentice at a hardware store. At age thirteen, he was transferred to a school in Barcelona run by his father's card-playing friend Monsignor Josep, where he remained for three years. His mother came from a strict Roman Catholic family and took Communion every day, but his father was much more secular and had liberal political beliefs. The students were only allowed out of the school on Sundays if they had a visitor, so his father made the trip every week. The third of four children, Pujol was sent at age seven to the Valldemia boarding school run by the Marist Brothers in Mataró, twenty miles (32 km) from Barcelona he remained there for the next four years. Pujol was born in Barcelona to Joan Pujol, a Catalan who owned a cotton factory, and Mercedes García Guijarro, from the Andalusian town of Motril in the Province of Granada. Pujol had the distinction of receiving military decorations from both sides of the war – being awarded the Iron Cross and becoming a Member of the Order of the British Empire. The false information Pujol supplied helped persuade the Germans that the main attack would be in the Pas de Calais, so that they kept large forces there before and even after the invasion. Pujol had a key role in the success of Operation Fortitude, the deception operation intended to mislead the Germans about the timing, location and scale of the invasion of Normandy in 1944. Eventually the Germans were funding a network of 27 agents, all fictitious. Pujol and his handler Tomás Harris spent the rest of the war expanding the fictitious network, communicating to the German handlers at first by letters, and later by radio.

#Secret agents in ww2 code

The family were moved to Britain and Pujol was given the code name 'Garbo'. Following interviews by Desmond Bristow of Section V MI6 Iberian Section, Juan Pujol was taken on. The Allies finally accepted Pujol when the Germans spent considerable resources attempting to hunt down a fictitious convoy. He began inventing fictitious sub-agents who could be blamed for false information and mistakes. Īlthough the information would not have withstood close examination, Pujol soon established himself as a trustworthy agent. He was instructed to travel to Britain and recruit additional agents instead he moved to Lisbon and created bogus reports about Britain from a variety of public sources, including a tourist guide to Britain, train timetables, cinema newsreels, and magazine advertisements. Undeterred, he created a false identity as a fanatically pro-Nazi Spanish government official and successfully became a German agent. Pujol and his wife contacted the British Embassy in Madrid, which rejected his offers. Īfter developing a loathing of political extremism of all sorts during the Spanish Civil War, Pujol decided to become a spy for Britain as a way to do something 'for the good of humanity'. He was given the codename Garbo by the British their German counterparts codenamed him Alaric and referred to his non-existent spy network as 'Arabal'. Juan Pujol García MBE ( Spanish: 14 February 1912 – 10 October 1988), also known as Joan Pujol i García ( Catalan: ), was a Spanish spy who acted as a double agent loyal to Great Britain against Nazi Germany during World War II, when he relocated to Britain to carry out fictitious spying activities for the Germans. Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire