Juan Pujol Garcia

“Agent Garbo”

Juan and Araceli

Sources:

https://www.mi5.gov.uk/agent-garbo

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/pujol.html

https://www.history.com/news/spy-double-agent-death-hoax-world-war-2

https://www.tfrohock.com/blog/2018/4/1/fieldnotes-juan-pujol-garcia

https://liberationroute.com/great-britain/biographies/j/juan-pujol-garcia-agent-garbo(Includes very cool documents and images)

Books:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19029448-operation-garbo

Today, we meet Juan Pujol Garcia . He was a spy. And this is his story.

Juan Miguel Guijarro was born in 1912 into an upper-middle class family in politically volatile Barcelona. His parents were well respected within the community and his father, a prominent businessman, raised his family to share his worldview of decency, liberty, critical thought, and that anyone who could, should try to make a difference in the world.

Despite his family’s every effort to tame him, Pujol was a wild child, or, according to his serious mother,  a very bad child-But he wasn’t really bad, he was just busy. Juan’s mind took him on crazy adventure that his body acted out. Some of these adventures left Juan bruised and scraped up but always happy-for in his imagination he always emerged the unlikely hero. The boy’s imagination knew no bounds-and although this distressed his conventional family, it was Juan’s imagination that would prove to be his greatest asset.

Juan’s mother spent his boyhood years trying to the fear of God in her boy and Juan’s father spent the days rolling his eyes and sighing but there was always a smile behind the sigh. In an effort to reform Juan, In efforts to reform Juan,  his parents sent him to Catholic boarding school at the age of seven.

Although attempts to create a disciplined life failed miserably, the 4 years in school did spark something for Juan…a love of history and languages. By the time Juan was a young man he spoke five languages; Spanish, Catalan, French, English and Portuguese.The increasing violence in Barcelona led Juan’s father to move the family outside of the city affording Juan the ability to live an existence of sweet talking girls, hiking, quoting poetry, and reading philosophy.

At the ripe old age of 15, Juan believed he had “arrived” and decided it was time to quit school. When he made this grandiose declaration to his father, his dad again sighed and told him if that was the case, it was also time Juan found himself a job. Juan Senior understood his boy and tried to build a fence around him, still letting him be himself. Often Juan felt his father was the only one who got him.

Juan quickly fast talked his way into a job and just as his father suspected would happen, rapidly got bored and quit.  During this time in his life, Juan found himself entangled in numerous and passionate love affairs, each taking a toll on his romantic heart.

Whenever, he would find himself in the depths of despair  his father would be the one to comfort him.

At 19, Juan woke up with serious pains in his stomach, which turned out to be appendicitis.  He developed a very serious infection from it that kept him in a highly feverish state.. Juan’s father never left his side.  Juan stated later than sometime between sleeping and hallucination he saw his father weeping- it was the only time he saw his dad cry.  After 3 hellish days of hallucinations, Juan pulled through. Yet, something happened to the young man after he battled his way back to the living, he emerged with a desire for the practical and decided, rather abruptly, to receive his education in chicken husbandry.

While seeking out his more conventional life, he also met and married a quiet devout girl named Marguerite that reminded him of his mother.

In 1933, Juan reported for his one year mandatory military service to the leftist Republican Government, but this really only gained him skill in saluting and horsemanship-and in that time he was really not exposed to the horrors of war.

However, the next year Juan experienced his first real, and most devastating tragedy.  His father’s unexpected death. Both he and his father had taken ill at the same time and because Juan was was still very frail and sick at his father’s passing, he was unable to attend services, which completely broke Juan’s tender heart..

Juan had always believed his father to be the perfect model of a man, He knew he wanted to do something successful like his father did, but couldn’t find that perfect “thing”.  He was just lost. He bought a couple of movie theatres and tried to make a go of that, but ended up selling them. He then tried his hand at owning a chicken farm. That too did not work out so well. Juan was a true visionary and was full of passion, but his practical side was not so well developed. Discouraged, Juan decided to adhere to the expected doldrums of married life to come and took a simple job as a salesman at a neighboring chicken farm,

Then, on July 17, 1936, the Spanish Civil War began.

And everything changed.

The violence humming in the streets of Barcelona now hit a crescendo. Cathedrals, buildings, and political headquarters were reduced to burning embers, priests were being hunted and murdered by radicals, strikes were being called by anti-fascist unions, and resources and food were incredibly scarce

Through all of the this Juan Pujol was incredibly conflicted. His father had taught him to love liberty, tolerance, religious freedom, and nothing about any of this made sense. Despite his desire for freedom, he hated the wild rhetoric of the communists and the anarchists.  

Juan Pujol watched helplessly as his father’s business and home was seized and ravaged  and his friends and neighbors took up arms against one another-and in that moment he began to passionately loathe war.

The chaos rocking Barcelona was Pujol’s first experience with espionage. The spy game at the time was savage but also wildly blown out of proportion.

Orwell, who fought in the Spanish civil war, described the environment with “A horrible atmosphere of suspicion had sprang up. People were infected with spy mania and were creeping round whispering everyone was a spy.”  Many were constantly accused of sabotage and many were killed based on mere accusations of treachery.

Not wanting to fight for either side, Juan ended up holding up in  his Marguerite’s family home. He couldn’t leave. He was forced to hide upon every sound. If he was captured a a deserter, his punishment would mean certain death.

Although Pujol tried to be vigilant, he was a man of unrelenting energy and sometimes he was louder than he realized. Around Christmas of 1936, he was cracking a nut a bit too intensely and drew enough attention that the police showed up and removed him at gunpoint.

Pujol was arrested for desertion-and soon he found himself in a cold, dungeon like cell. Just as he was beginning to accept his depressing fate, one night he was woken with a start and forced out of his cell only to find that he was focus of a prison break.

His wife, Marguerite, whom Juan had been having serious doubts about before the war made things so chaotic, had organized his escape through a secret Catholic organization called Socorro Blanco (The White Relief).

The organization members arranged for him to stay hidden with a network family for a while, where he was expected to stay silent and still, and this made him even more restless.

Eventually things got so violent in the area that the family abandoned their apartment and Pujol was forced to fend for himself, really for the first time in his life.

The flat had to appear as though no one lived there and the only interaction Pujol had with other humans were very sparse and hurried deliveries of food and supplies. Juan already possessed an overactive imagination.. It is very possible that this period in his life  formed the foundation that he built his army of spies on later in life.

Eventually Juan was able to move about again, but at 25 Pujol had become so stressed and sickly that he looked more like 45. Due to his change in appearance, Juan was able to obtain a fake ID.

At this time, border guards were killing fugitives so he decided to join up with the Republicans under a new name, but the fake ID made him appear too old for compulsory service. Because of his desire to serve, he was hailed as a hero for volunteering.

The respect his military peers afforded him gave him much more leeway in deciding on a job while in service.  Juan liked the idea of being a signals officer and after a mere two week training, he was sent to the front as part of one of the International brigades made famous by Orwell and Hemingway. . The casualty rate at the front was over 50 percent. Although Juan had claimed to to be experienced in signals, he really wasn’t at all. He didn’t know Morse Code or Semaphore, so instead of sending cables he was ordered to lay telephone cables from the rear command areas to the front. Well, he managed to be safe enough to defect to the Nationalist side during the Battle of the Ebro in 1938. But Juan found himself equally disgusted by the Nationalist side, and ended up being struck and imprisoned by his colonel after he expressed sympathy monarchy. While imprisoned, A kind priest who had known and respected Juan Sr. helped secure Pujol’s release.

Following captivity, the frail Juan was sent to the hospital where a young nurse named Araceli caught his eye. She too, noticed him right back. . And during his recovery- he suddenly no longer wanted to be married to Marguerite, and following a quick divorce  made it his new mission to get to know Araceli better. After regaining his health, he took a job working at the somewhat seedy Hotel Condestable. He ended up marrying the lovely but fiery Araceli, who worked with him at the hotel. It was at the Condestable  that Pujol met a very important guest, Kim Philby, war correspondent for the London Times, Russian spy and future head of the Spanish section of MI6.

While Juan was working at the hotel, the Civil War finally ended.

The war left a deep impact on Juan-he learned to have an intense mistrust for both communism and fascism.

In early WWII,  fascism took the starring role on a global stage and Juan Pujol, who had a true, intense desire to fight evil, felt his soul well up with a physical need to DO something.

In 1941, Juan Pujol Garcia approached intelligence officers at the British embassy in Madrid and  offered himself up as a spy. Officers interviewed him for a bit but quickly discovered the plain albeit, passionate little man in front of them had absolutely zero experience in military sabotage . They all but laughed poor Juan Pujol out of the office. But Juan, determined to be a man worthy of of his father’s name, would not be deterred.

Since Juan had served both sides of the Spanish War, he decided to use that to his benefit.. He went to the Germans and emphasized this very aspect of his service.

H crafted a story that he was a Nazi sympathizer in the Spanish government who travelled often to London — a pretty impressive lie given that Pujol could not speak English. Yet on the strength of a forged diplomatic passport, German intelligence officers bought Pujol’s story. We aren’t sure how he was able to, but we know he faked them.

The German agent interviewing Juan was impressed by the ingenuity it had to take to procure such documents and finally decided this man might just be effective at the game of sabotage.

The Germans paid for Juan’s intelligence training courses, granted him a stipend and the codename ‘Alaric’ after the Gothic chief who had sacked Rome. They were hoping this new agent could do the same with the British Empire.

The German recruiter sent Juan to London to set up a network of spies. Well, Juan, again, not knowing English, opted against London and set himself up in Lisbon instead.

Juan was under pressure to be convincing. The whole not living in Britain thing? Well, he mailed his letters from Lisbon but acted as if he had a pilot under his command who was secretly transporting the letters in hopes they wouldn’t be intercepted by the British.

Juan spent his days at the library, writing wordy letters to Germany and creating detailed reports seemingly out of thin air.  In truth, he was actually gathering his information from a Blue Guide to Great Britain, French newspapers, a Portuguese book on the British fleet, a French–English dictionary of military terminology, and a map of Britain.

The fake reports were so intensely believed that the British, upon intercepting the reports, launched a nationwide manhunt for the spy who had infiltrated their country. Eventually Juan had the Germans convinced he had recruited and was supervising a network of at least 27 spies, each with their own complicated backstory. Germany dubbed Juan Pujol’s spy network “Arabel”.

Although Germany was paying for fancy home in Lisbon, (where the Germans thought was London) Juan’s wife Araceli knew the situation was not sustainable. So she took herself to the British Embassy, without Juan knowing, to report on knowledge of a German spy. She was mostly ignored until finally, desperate, she admitted the spy was her husband and that he had only developed himself as a spy to offer himself up as a more valuable asset to Britain. She showed them proof that Juan was really the Arabel network.  British intelligence, whose interceptions noted Arabel, pondered the situation and found upon further examination, that Juan Pujol actually was the mastermind spy and spy network that had been eluding them.

British agents tracked down Pujol and when MI5 realized he had never set one foot in England yet had crafted an intricate bogus network of British spies, they immediately saw the potential power of utilizing Juan as an asset.

And what an asset he was.  By January of 1944, Juan Pujol Garcia had sent over 4,000 transmissions to Germany. The grateful Germans believed he had a network of 14 spies under him and eleven well placed contacts within London, one they even believed to be in the Ministry of Information.

At this time, John Masterman was the creator of the British Double-Cross system,

Yes-his name was Masterman and he headed up the double cross agents-it does seem a little serendipitous doesn’t it? Anyway, Masterman decided that Pujol needed to work for Britain and they brought him to London in 1942 where Pujol met Desmond Bristow and Tommy Harris, two other agents in the double cross system. Juan Pujol had transmitted so many messages to Germany and had been so detailed in his fakery that it took agent Bristow 8 days to interrogate him to determine that the amazing little man was telling the truth. After combing through every elaborate detail of Juan’s story, Bristow was convinced the man was earnest in his desire to work for Britain and…this is where the story gets even more amazing ..Bristow reported his positive assessment to his supervisor who happened to be none other than Kim Philby-the agent who had long ago frequented Juan Pujol’s shabby hotel.

Juan Pujol Garcia was given the codename Garbo, because he was the greatest actor that MI6 had ever encountered.

Juan’s first mission was Operation Torch. MI5 decided to give Juan accurate operational information but would sabotage the posts so they would always arrive just a wee bit late. It never occured to the Germans that it was their agent that was the problem. One of his case officers even wrote him “Your last reports were all magnificent, but we are just very sorry they arrived late”.

Agent Garbo and his fellow agent Harris played a key part in the D-Day deception. Pujol was to inform the the Germans that the opening phase of the invasion was underway as the airborne landings started, and four hours before the seaborne landings began.  Because of the immense success of his sabotage, Juan Pujol Garcia, the man whose mother bemoaned his inability to do anything right, earned the OBE, or Officer of the Order of the British Empire.  

Ironically, GARBO’s reputation among the Germans was enhanced by the whole D-Day affair. They blamed themselves for transmission failure, not Juan’s intelligence.  In 1944 he was informed that he had been awarded the Iron Cross by the Führer himself, for his “extraordinary services” to Germany.

Despite this, Juan was still very concerned of Germany’s revenge if they were to find out about him and by 1944 there was a reasonable danger of Pujol’s cover being blown.  And this meant that Pujol had to disappear completely  from London (only not really) so he told the Germans he was hiding out in Wales, along with the usual Pujol flair of extra details like the fact that he was staying with a stodgy Welch couple and their half-witted son.

MI5 pretended to execute another all-out manhunt for him. In order to maintain realism, police interrogated Araceli, which completely terrified her. Araceli had to proved to be such a loose cannon, most involved with the the missions felt she should be kept in the dark. MI5 files indicated that Araceli would embark on spirited rants and “adventures” that often compromised missions-and they felt that she would be capable of anything in the name of self preservation and getting what she believed her family was owed.  Although the two were eventually reunited, trust was so damaged between them they were really never able to recover.

All of Juan Pujol Garcia’s personal sacrifices were made worth it in 1945 when Germany surrendered. The elation on the faces of the Londoners around him gave Pujol a sense of accomplishment he had never really felt before. In that moment, he finally felt he was worthy to be his father’s son.

Later that year, Pujol embarked on a plane bound for Baltimore. J. Edgar Hoover himself demanded to shake the hand of the famed double agent Garbo. The Americans provided him with vital travel documents and Pujol flew to Cuba to establish the alibi that he had been smuggled from London to Havana. MI5 gave Juan half the money German Intelligence had paid him to spy on England and offered him even more of its own funds, which Pujol turned down. Pujol decided that he and his family, despite the tenuous relationship with Araceli, would fly to Venezuela. Then after that Juan moved to Caracus to begin a job selling famous Spanish works of art. The family tried to settle there but nothing worked out the way that it should have. Juan was accused and investigated for art fraud and Araceli caused controversy among the social elite. After a couple of years, Pujol was just done.

He moved the family to Valencia, where the former chicken famer, hearkened back to his youth and bought a farm, just a super advanced one that head and shoulders above all the other properties surrounding them. However, true to the theme of Pujol’s life, in 1948 protests swept the area and because he was now a wealthy landowner, Pujol’s estate was targeted and destroyed. That same year Araceli left, There are conflicting stories regarding the dissolution of the marriage. Some say that Pujol sent Araceli home for a visit and abandoned her there but Araceli’s family strongly rejects this narrative, saying that the decision was hers. She hated farm life and saw no future for herself in Spain.

No matter the reason, the separation was bitter and intense. In 1949 Araceli was given the official news from the British Embassy that Juan Pujol Garcia had perished of Malaria in Mozambique. No one knows exactly how she took the news, but being Araceli, she forged away through and eventually began to work in a souvenir shop owned by Jewish American Edward Kreisler, whom she ended up marrying. The two became Spanish high society and Araceli ended up hosting the likes of Charleston Heston, Sophia Loren, Frank Sinatra and Roger Moore, so despite her hardships…she did alright.

Pujol was buried by MI5 in 1949. Yet, not long after, a very content man was walking the streets of caracas. Yep, the death of Juan Pujol Garcia had been faked. When Araceli had left him, he was only 36 so he had just went about rebuilt his life. He met and married Carmen Cilia Alvarez, He started his new life by running a newsstand, and when that did not work out so well, he started working for Shell oil company teaching English to Venezuelan workers.Weirdly, just like Araceli, he also once found himself owner of a souvenir shop in a luxury hotel. Juan Pujol also had one last big business venture-operating a hotel, with cinema of course, but there were hardly any roads to the resort so, like many of his ventures, this one failed miserably. Through it all, Juan stayed Juan. No one knew the truth about him and only a few of his antics were known to his close family. Only a couple of times did his remarkable secret emerge, One of those times, Juan Jr. was dating a girl from Mississippi who’s stepfather was racist against Latinos. Juan Pujol decided to pay the man a visit and when he did, he leaned across the table and calmly recounted the story of saving D-day.

After reading about some of Masterman’s double intelligence work, British Intelligence historian Nigel West made it is his personal mission to find Agent Garbo. Eventually he found him and convinced Pujol to attend a meeting with other agents in 1984, the 40th Anniversary of D-day. Agent Garbo was greeted with amazement and disbelief. Despite publically coming forward, Juan was still very nervous about public exposure and its danger to his family. Over time he was finally able to to allow himself to live freely,

On October 10, 1988, Juan Pujol died of a stroke. He was buried in a simple cemetery with a simple inscription reading “Remembered by his wife, children, and grandchildren.

But Juan Pujol Garcia was anything but a simple man, and his ingenuity and sometimes crazy bravery will have him remembered all through history.

Juan Pujol was a man with some of the worst luck in the world, but when his luck turned, much of the fate of the world turned with it, and no matter what, he just kept going.

The life of Juan Pujol Garcia reminds us, Just as Harriet the Spy says….

“Life is a struggle-a good spy gets in there and fights.”

Sarah Emma Edmonds Seely

(Purported to be Sarah Emma Edmonds in disguise)

Emma’s Memoirs:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38497/38497-h/38497-h.htm

Various Sources:

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/sarah-emma-edmonds

https://www.unb.ca/nbmhp-database/york-county/soldiers-in-york-country/sarah-emma-edmonds-american-civil-war-veteran.php

https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/women/soldier-girl-the-emma-edmonds-story

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Emma_Edmonds#cite_note-Tsui_2006-3

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fse16

http://sites.rootsweb.com/~txseeduv/html/sarah.html

https://www.librarypoint.org/blogs/post/emma-edmonds/