UK files show how double agent tricked Germans over D-Day

LONDON: Secret files released in Britain yesterday shed new light on how a Spaniard dubbed the greatest double agent of World War II tricked Germany with false intelligence about the D-Day Normandy landings.

Juan Pujol, codenamed Garbo, was one of British intelligence service MI5’s most prized wartime assets, tricking Berlin with elaborate misinformation from a made-up network of sub-agents.

The Hitler regime never discovered Pujol’s deception and even awarded him the Iron Cross for his services, while he was also honoured by Britain.

In perhaps his biggest success, he helped mislead the Germans about the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.

Afterwards, he persuaded them that the Normandy landings were a diversion before a bigger operation in the Pas de Calais area of northern France, further along the coast.

Pujol told them “that the present attack was a large scale diversionary operation for the purpose of establishing a strong bridgehead in order to draw the maximum of German reserves to the area of operations and to retain them there in order to be able to strike a second blow with ensured success,” his case officer Tomas Harris wrote in a secret memo dated June 13, 1944.

“He gave reasons as to why the second assault was likely to come in the Pas de Calais area,” Harris added.

Pujol — apparently motivated by a hatred of fascism and communism rooted in his Spanish Civil War experiences — started his intelligence career feeding the Germans false information about Britain while living in Lisbon.

His information was based on sources like “a Blue Guide (tourist guide), a map of England, an out- of- date railway timetable,” according to an MI5 memo dated July 12, 1943.

“Fortunately, he has a facile and lurid style, great ingenuity and a passionate and quixotic zeal for his task,” the memo added. — AFP