by Peter Kross

In the predawn hours of June 6, 1944, the largest armada ever sent into war assaulted the coast of France at Normandy. A combined Allied force comprising more than 5,000 ships, 10,000 airplanes, and 200,000 men began the liberation of Europe, which culminated in the surrender of Germany almost one year later.

This story was first published in the March 2015 edition of Military Heritage. Order your subscription here!

Even as the Allied troops waded ashore against Fortress Europe, the high command of the German military still believed that the invasion was a feint and that the real invasion would come at the Pas de Calais, almost 150 miles northeast of Normandy, near the Straits of Dover.

For months, the Allied high command had fashioned an elaborate deception operation to fool the Germans into believing the invasion would take place at the Pas de Calais. One of the most valuable double agents the Allies had in their operation was a Spaniard named Juan Pujol Garcia, to whom the British assigned the code name Garbo. It is not a stretch of the imagination to say that if not for the inventive efforts of Garbo, the Battle of Normandy, and perhaps the outcome of the war, would have been in doubt.

Chicken Farmer To Double Agent

Juan Pujol Garcia was 30 years old when he began his career as a spy for the Allies. A chicken farmer who aspired to more lofty heights, he served a brief time in the Spanish Army in a cavalry regiment but found Army discipline not to his liking. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, he was called up for service but did not show up. Instead, he hid in the home of his girlfriend’s parents, was arrested, and escaped. He then got a job managing a poultry farm near the French border but soon left.

Garcia then joined the forces under Nationalist Francisco Franco, where he worked as a signal corps operator. His stay with Franco’s troops was short, as he deserted his post to cross into the Republican lines. He was put in jail, interrogated, and released after the war ended. He was sick of the Fascists and wanted to do his job as a patriot; the only way to do so was to offer his services to the British as a spy.

He then enlisted the help of his wife, Aracelli. In January 1941, Aracelli approached the British embassy in Madrid, offering her husband’s services. Her offer was refused. In his memoirs, Garcia wrote, “I decided to prepare the ground more carefully before I approached them again.” His next move was to go to the German embassy in Madrid and offer his services as a spy in either Lisbon or England. He met with Gustav Leisner, chief of the Abwehr (the German military intelligence organization). Leisner told Garcia that he was not interested in having him work in Lisbon, but if he could make his way to England, then he might be interested in having Garcia work as a German agent.

After a few days of instruction in the techniques of spying, Garcia was told not to engage in any espionage work in England; instead, he was to recruit agents and was given an accommodation address in Spain where he should send his secret messages. On July 12, the Garcia family left for Lisbon and then for England, or so the Germans believed. For nine months, Garbo lived in Lisbon and sent reports back to Germany. For a man who had never been to England before, Garbo did a fantastic job fooling the Abwehr into accepting his bogus information.

Garbo’s false data was so good that he received the following cable from the Abwehr: “Your activity and that of your information gave us a perfect idea of what is taking place over there; these reports, as you can imagine, have an incalculable value, and for that reason I beg of you to proceed with the greatest care so as not to endanger in these momentous times, either yourself or your organization.”

Joining up With MI6

By February 1942, MI6 (the British Secret Intelligence Service) had heard of Garbo even though he was not then an agent of theirs. They learned of Garbo’s work via Ultra, decrypts of German radio messages encoded on Enigma machines. The British were able via Ultra to read and decipher a huge amount of German intelligence as it emanated from Berlin and other listening posts.

To communicate with the Germans, Garbo wrote a great deal of correspondence in secret ink, sending more than 400 letters and later 2,000 wireless messages. For compensation, the Germans sent him 20,000 British pounds. In his letter, Garbo said that he had contacts inside the British Ministry of Information, as well as an agent in Canada. One of his agents, he said, was so high up in the chain of command that he spied on the activities of British Admiral of the Fleet Louis Mountbatten.

Garbo was nothing if not inventive. He cabled the Germans and told them that he was offered a job inside the Ministry of Information working for a man named Brenden Bracken, who was a friend of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The job at the ministry would give him ample opportunity to spy for the Germans and provide them with huge amounts of information. But, he told them, he had qualms about accepting the job because he would be betraying Germany. He was told in no uncertain terms to take on the assignment. From his new job, he sent back more false information.

After some initial dismissals, the British bagan to take more interest in Garcia’s activities. MI6’s counterintelligence branch, called Section V, had been intercepting information between Madrid and Berlin, most of it false. They soon put all the pieces together and realized that the German agent, named Arabel, was sending out false information, and that man had to be Garcia.

After a bitter dispute between the various British intelligence services about what to do with Garcia, he was finally smuggled out of Lisbon via boat bound for Gibraltar. Once safely in Gibraltar, he was sent to England. He landed in Plymouth on April 24, 1942. At the docks, he was met by MI5 (British Security Service) officers Cyril Mills and Thomas Harris. He was debriefed by Harris and other members of British intelligence, and his story was cross-referenced against other intelligence that had come in. At that point, he was accepted as a double agent for the British.

Garbo Joins Double Cross & The “Twenty Committee”

Garcia was now put in the Double Cross System, the most secret program the British had during World War II, which was responsible for counterespionage activities. The British had been able to read German military secrets from a variety of electronic sources, one of them Ultra. The man put in charge of the Double Cross/Twenty Committee was John Masterman. Masterman, formerly an Oxford professor, had spent four years in a German prison camp during World War I.

In the early months of 1944, Allied planners were devoting all their time to the upcoming Allied invasion of France. It was at this critical juncture that Garbo would prove to be the best spy the British had. All of his previous work in deceiving the Germans would now come to fruition.

In January 1944, Garbo received a letter from his controllers in Germany telling him that the Abwehr had received word of a major Allied offensive against Europe. They told him to watch for unusual ship, air, or ground movements and to report such information to them immediately.

What they were referring to was D-Day. Garbo’s most important disinformation operation was about to begin.

This story was first published in the March 2015 edition of Military Heritage. Order your subscription here!

The D-Day Misinformation Campaign

Allied intelligence, on the eve of D-Day, came up with the so-called Reid Plan in which Garbo would report about the first phase of the invasion of Europe. His message was that airborne landings had already started, four hours before the seaborne landings took place. Thus, while the Germans could do nothing to frustrate the invasion, they would have no doubt about Garbo’s reliability in providing concrete information. He was further to report on points in England where the troops were embarking on their ships, as well as their ultimate destination.

On June 5, one day before the actual invasion, Garbo radioed Madrid asking that his secure channel be kept open for an important announcement. But German radio operators on the other end did not reply because the Madrid radio operators were off the air from 11:30 pm until 7 am the following day. By the time the Madrid radio operators came back on line, the invasion was already under way and the Germans did not move their tanks, which were inland from the Normandy coast, up to the beachhead to blunt the Allied landings.

On June 6, 1944, Garbo began sending a message that lasted 129 minutes. He reported that he had located the whereabouts of an Allied force called Army Group Patton in southeastern England. He further said that the Allied push on the Normandy beaches was a diversion and that the real invasion would take place at the Pas de Calais. As is common knowledge today, Army Group Patton did not exist, but the Germans took the bait, believing that the Normandy attack was just a diversion.

In response to Garbo’s warning, Hitler ordered the Fifteenth Army, composed of tank and infantry units, to be diverted from Normandy.

Before the Normandy landings, Garbo told the Germans of the existence of deep formations of planes, tanks, ships, and trucks along the ports of the English Channel. However, these were nothing more than fakes, constructed of plywood by Allied engineers. This army in waiting was photographed by German reconnaissance aircraft.

Garbo also radioed his controllers in Germany saying that three of his fictitious agents, Donny, Dick, and Dorick, had vital news for him. Garbo sent a message saying that the landings at Normandy were a “diversionary maneuver designed to draw off enemy reserves in order to make an attack at another place. In view of the continued air attacks on the concentration area mentioned, which is a strategically favorable position for this, it may very probably take place in the Pas de Calais, particularly since in such an attack the proximity of air bases will facilitate the operation by providing continued strong air support.”

By August 1944, German radio warned that Garbo’s cover was about to be blown. Fearing he would be compromised, Garbo went underground. All in all, the Germans paid Garbo and his phantom network almost $340,000. They even awarded him the Iron Cross; ironically, Garbo was the best agent they ever had.

Garbo and the Double Cross System had completely fooled the Germans into believing the Allied attack on France would take place at the Pas de Calais instead of Normandy. It is not too much to say that if it were not for the herculean efforts of Garbo and the fictitious agents he created, the success of D-Day would not have been possible.