That isn’t to say he didn’t make some mistakes. “So he was a complete amateur, but he was able to sort of built up enough of a portfolio to finally approach the British.” “He was really gathering these sort of factoids from different encyclopedias, and even from advertisements he saw and placards he saw in the street,” Talty says. Juan Pujol Garcia, also known as Agent Garbo, circa 1940. Though Pujol sent Germany false reports, he used lots of factual information to make them seem legitimate, says Stephan Talty, author of Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day and a forthcoming book about a Cold War rescue mission. Essentially, Pujol became a rogue double-agent whom Britain didn’t even know it had.

After that, he began sending the Nazis fabricated information that they thought was from London, but which was actually fed from Lisbon and Madrid. Posing as a Spanish official who was flying to London, Pujol made contact with Nazi officials in Madrid and told them that he was interested in spying on Britain for the Third Reich. Instead, he formulated a plan to pad his resume while aiding the war effort. When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, he was determined to join the British war effort as a spy against Germany so determined that he wasn’t deterred when British officers turned him down because he didn’t have any connections or credentials. Pujol was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who had come to loathe totalitarianism, both in Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler.

And that’s not even the most interesting thing about him.

After World War II, a critical MI5 spy named Juan Pujol Garcia faked his own death, and kept it secret for almost four decades.

Counter espionage ww2