Story of a Double Agent

 

So today's blog is about an interesting guy who acted as a double agent and faked his death for 36 years.

                                    (Image source:- Google pictures)

In World War II, a Spanish spy named Joan Pujol Garcia approached the Allies to work for them. When they refused, he approached the Nazis, and they accepted him (giving him the codename Arabel). Once he earned credentials working as a Nazi spy, he approached the Allies again, this time getting a job as a double agent (codenamed Garbo).

This is where it gets unbelievable. He fed the Germans a combination of misinformation, true but useless information, and high-value information that always got to the Germans just a little too late. He even created a network of 27 fictitious agents while not a single one of these sub-agents existed. They were completely imaginary, but regardless, he submitted expense reports for them and had the Nazis giving him money to pay their salaries. At one point, when he had to explain why some high-value information got to the Germans late, he told them that one of his spies had died. He actually got the Germans to pay the imaginary spy's imaginary wife a very real pension for her loss.

Not only did his false information get the Nazis to waste millions of mark, but he was also instrumental in convincing the Nazis that the attacks on D-Day were just a diversion, and the real attack was yet to come, keeping vital German resources away from the front lines. The man got the highest honor of service from both the Allies and Axis in World War II, pulling off the greatest double agent move ever. He is the only person to ever get an Iron Cross from the Germans (which required Hitler's personal authorization, since he wasn't a soldier) and an MBE from King George VI.

Ciao!

Source :- Reddit , History.com