New documents desclasficados this Wednesday by the british government highlighted the importance of the double Spanish agent Joan Pujol, alias Garbo, who convinced the germans that the Normandy landing was going to be in another place.
Pujol was one of the most important agents of MI5, the british intelligence service, deceiving to Berlin with the establishment of a network of spies throughout the United Kingdom that existed only in his imagination.
The Hitler regime never discovered the deception and came to reward this barcelona with the Iron Cross, almost at the same time that condecoraban the british.
“Garbo” convinced the germans that the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944, was a maneuver of distraction , and that the bulk of the allied troops were going to come out in Europe for the Pas de Calais, much further to the northwest of France.
Pujol said in Berlin that “this attack was an operation of large-scale diversion for the purpose of establishing a solid bridgehead to attract the maximum number of German reserves and hold them there face to give a second blow with success”, narrated Tomas Harris, the agent in charge of advising Garbo, in an official report, 13 June 1944.
“gave reasons for the second assault was going to be in Pas de Calais”, added.
The importance of Pujol was known through the testimony of Harris and other protagonists of the time, but the official documents declassified on Wednesday to confirm and enlarge it.
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Pujol –apparently motivated by their hatred of fascism and communism gained in the Spanish Civil War– began his career by transmitting to the germans false information about the United Kingdom that invented living in Lisbon, although the germans had been encouraged to hire him when they visited at the embassy in Madrid because he assured them that he was going to settle in London.
That information, and your network of spies invented the first produced with “a tourist guide, a map of England and a few times of trains out of date”, according to a report by MI5, dated July 12, 1943.
“Fortunately, it has a simple style and sensational, great ingenuity and zeal, passionate and quixotic for his work”, the report added.
Pujol was born in Barcelona in 1912 to a middle class family. In the Spanish civil War (1936-1939) he got his first experience of a split. The conflict surprised him in the side republican but ended up defecting to the pro-franco.
he Cheated up his wife
Despite the fact that they rejected his services initially, the british saw that they could take advantage of Pujol and was hired as a double agent and he was transferred to London in April 1942.
But his wife, Araceli Gonzalez is not adapted to his new life in britain.
The June 21, 1943, the woman called to Harris threatening to abandon Pujol and go to the Spanish embassy in London to reveal the activities of her husband, unless the left to return to Spain. His anger is due to the fact that her husband refused to take her to a dinner to which I was going to go to diplomatic personnel.
The next day the threat of Araceli, an agent of the MI5 was to the family home where he found the woman “sitting in the kitchen with all the keys to open gas”.
Describing the woman as “highly sensitive and neurotic”, Harris described in a report as Pujol put together a plan to convince her that he had been arrested for his conduct.
The idea was to calm her down and avoid further outbursts.
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Araceli was carried even to a center mark to visit her husband allegedly prisoner, and two days after he apologized, pledging to “do anything” that would compromise the work of the spy.
After the war, Pujol moved to Angola and there has falsified his death, a resource of traditional intelligence services. He moved to Venezuela, where he started a new life and died in 1988, although before he returned to Spain and published his story in various interviews.
The british historian Christopher Andrew, the official biographer of MI5, described, on the occasion of the declassification of documents, such as “the double agent most important of the Second World War and possibly of the entire TWENTIETH century”.
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