202 • GARBO
GARBO.When Juan Pujol, motivated by his harrowing experiences in
the Spanish Civil War, offered his services to the British embassy in
Madrid in 1940, he was rebuffed. Dismayed by the rejection, Pujol
made a similar approach to the Germans, falsely claiming to be a
Nazi sympathizer. TheAbwehraccepted him at face value and
trained him to be a spy with the intention of dispatching him to En-
gland where Pujol alleged he had strong business connections.
Although he reported to his Abwehr controller that he had reached
London, Pujol in fact took up residence in Lisbon from where he
concocted some highly imaginative messages purportedly based on
his observations in England. This deception went unnoticed by the
Germans, eager for any intelligence from Britain, but it was spotted
byMI5, which was routinely tapping the enemy’s wireless commu-
nications. As the volume of German intercepts referring to the master
spy increased, the Security Service redoubled its efforts to trace the
agent in Britain.
While MI5 scoured the intercepted messages for clues to his iden-
tity, Pujol made a second attempt to join the Allies by visiting the
British embassy in Lisbon. Once again he was turned down, but the
American naval attache ́who interviewed him was impressed by the
Spaniard’s insistence that he had been enrolled as an Abwehr agent.
Signals were exchanged with London and the Security Service belat-
edly realized that the enigmatic spy codenamedarabelin the ene-
my’s wireless traffic was really an elaborate hoax.
In April 1942 Pujol was flown to Plymouth, together with his wife
and child, where they were met byCyril Mills. They were accommo-
dated at a house in North London recently vacated bymuttandjeff,
two of MI5’s stardouble agents, and contact was resumed with the
enemy. MI5 assigned Pujol the code namegarbo, because he was
‘‘the best actor in the world,’’ and introduced him toToma ́s Harris,
the head of MI5’s Spanish subsection. Harris and Pujol took to each
other instantly and together they created one of the most brilliantly
successful strategicdeceptionsof all time. Pujol stepped up his re-
ports to the enemy and developed a wholly fictitious network of 23
subagents who all submitted reports for onward transmission to Ma-
drid.
garbo’s presence in England neatly coincided with the start of a
lengthy and sophisticated campaign to persuade the Germans that the