rejection prompted his new plan of becoming an Abwehr agent,
which, he reasoned, would make him more attractive to the British.
Accepting him as an ardent Nazi sympathizer, Karl-Erich Kühlen-
thal, an Abwehr officer based in Madrid, oversaw his training as a
spy and instructed him to proceed to London, where, under the code
name arabel, he was to recruit his own network of agents. Kühlen-
thal never came to doubt Pujol’s authenticity.
After moving to Lisbon yet pretending to be in London, Pujol be-
gan to submit imaginatively conceived reports to Kühlenthal and his
staff. Only after MI5 became concerned about the volume of radio
traffic coming from this source and made further inquiries was Pujol
eventually accepted as a genuine agent. He was flown to England
in April 1942 and assigned to Tomàs Harris, head of MI5’s Span-
ish subsection. Because Pujol appeared to be “the greatest actor in
the world,” he received the code name garbo, and together the two
men created an even more elaborate deception. Through a fabricated
network of 27 subagents, some 2,000 messages were conveyed to the
Abwehr Kriegsorganisation in Madrid. The final one, sent in May
1945, noted that despite the shocking death of Adolf Hitler, the mem-
ory of “our dear chief” will continue to “guide us on our course.”
Pujol’s main contribution was to help divert attention away from
Normandy prior to the D-Day landings in June 1944 and encourage
the belief that the Allied troops would be arriving at Pas-de-Calais.
Remarkably too, he was awarded the Iron Cross (in absentia) by the
unsuspecting German government as well as the MBE (Member of
the Order of the British Empire) by the British. After the war, Pu-
jol chose to be resettled in Venezuela, where his identity remained
undisclosed until 1984. His account of his exploits—Operation
Garbo—also appeared in that year.PULLACH. The headquarters site of the Organisation Gehlen (OG)
and later the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Pullach is a town
south of Munich on the Isar River. The large compound includes
two earlier complexes: the Reichssiedlung Rudolf Hess, constructed
between 1936 and 1938, which contained well-appointed residences
for the Nazi Party elite; and the Führerhauptquartier Siegfried, a
wartime facility overseen by Martin Bormann and intended for the
emergency use of Adolf Hitler. Occupied by U.S. forces in the final
356 • PULLACH