The 100% Real Tale of Juan Pujol Garcia, Super Spy; or, How One Weird Elf-Looking Spaniard Straight-up Made Shit Up and Won the Second World War
This beautiful elf-looking man is Juan Pujol Garcia. We’re going to call him Pujol, because that's his name.
If you're going to take down the Nazis, you might as well look adorable as hell doing it.
Our boy Pujol was born in Spain before WWII. As an adult, he did his mandatory 6 months in the army during the civil war, but aside from that he just studied animal husbandry at uni and ran a chicken farm. He loved his chickens. But then Franco, the dictator at the time, was a massive dick and arrested him, his mum, his sister and his brother in law for not being super into republicanism or some shit, and he was like “ugh, I guess I’m into politics now”. He was not a fan of both communism and fascism because, frankly, they were a hindrance to his chicken farming plans. So when Franco started getting all buddy-buddy with Hitler, our boy Pujol moved to Portugal and decided he was going to be a super spy and single-handedly take out the Nazis so he could go back to his chicken farm.
Ah, the 40s, when an adult man could live out the dream of a 7-year-old.
So Pujol showed up at the British Embassy and was like “hey guys, I want to be a spy. I’m going to go spy on the Nazis for you and it’s going to be great”. But the British weren’t super pumped to have this elf-looking Spaniard dirtying up their embassy, so they told him to fuck off. And off he did fuck. But only as far as the German Embassy, where he was like “hey guys, I’m here to spy on the British for you, I super love fascism and am here to support you”. The Nazis took him up on it, gave him a bunch of spy gear (I assume a trenchcoat and some invisible ink or whatev) and £600 for expenses, and sent him off to London.
He got exactly as far as the public library in Lisbon.
Here, Pujol got a tourist’s guide to Britain and some British magazines and started to straight-up make shit up. Considering that he a) had never been to Britain, b) knew nothing about Britain, and c) for the life of him couldn’t work out the batshit British currency system, which was still in shillings and shit at the time, and so just sent his expenses as an itemised list and told them he’d send the amounts later, it was a miracle that the Nazis did not even at all twig that he was just some dude in a Portuguese library and not a London-based super-spy.
He also talked some shit about Glaswegians, saying they would “do anything for a litre of wine”, unaware that they weren’t big on wine in Scotland and also didn’t use the metric system. But we’ll let him off for that sass, because the Germans STILL DIDN’T NOTICE, because clearly, despite the fact that he had blatantly never been to Britain, NONE OF THEM HAD EITHER.
Had he spent time in Glasgow, he'd know that Glaswegians drink awful piss-water that tastes like sadness.
Pujol then went back to the British Embassy and was like “hey lads, now I’m a literal German agent and I would like to spy on the Nazis for you and it’s gong to be great” and the British were like “dude we’ve discussed this get your elf-looking Spanish arse out of here, we are busy doing a war”. Because, frankly, nobody involved in this war was particularly bright.
But the thing was, at this point, there were ZERO GERMAN SPIES in Britain, because by this time Benedict Cumberbatch had cracked the Enigma Code and every time the Germans tried to drop off a spy (which they did by bunging them out of a plane in the middle of the night), the British just arrived and picked them up pretty much instantly. So all the actual German spies were either in jail or working as double agents, feeding the Nazis false information.
AND THEN, all of a sudden, there was all this chat on the secret German group chat about this AMAZING SUPER SPY who was getting all this super great info about the Brits. And the Brits were like “hold the fucking phone, we do not have this man in any of our jails, what's going on” so they contacted all their embassies trying to find out who the fuck this guy was. And the embassy in Portugal was like “…oh yeah. We totally know this guy. Our bad”.
So they approached Pujol, who was still chilling in the library in Lisbon, and were like “hey wanna be a spy” and he was like “fucking obviously, I am already a spy” and so they flew him to London to be a real double agent. Which wasn’t chicken farming, sure, but it was good enough.
Fun fact: his codename was Garbo, after the actress Greta Garbo.
Makes perfect sense, because as you can see they looked very similar.
In London, MI5 started making Pujol’s reports REALLY GOOD by feeding the Nazis bits of useless true information, or super good information that MI5 artificially delayed so it always arrived slightly too late to be helpful. He even got sassy about it, being like “HOW DARE you miss my super important and helpful transmission, I will not stand for such incompetence” and the Germans were like “sorry, you’re a great and good spy, we will do better”.
Pujol had a whole network of spies across Britain that fed him information. Except none of them were real. He really diligently tracked all their backstories and whereabouts and they were sometimes blamed for stuff that went wrong. Like when one SUPER HELPFUL communication was CONVENIENTLY LATE, he told them it was because his guy in Liverpool had got sick and died. MI5 put a eulogy in the paper for this poor fake dead man to make it more realistic. And then, because he was the biggest piece of shit troll in history, he managed to persuade the Germans to pay the fucking fake widow of the fucking fake dead man a fucking real pension. At one point, he had 27 fake agents, and the Germans paid him like $400,000 to support them, which you really have to respect as a way to make a living.
At some point, he started looking like a bad cartoon of a spy and STILL nobody figured something was up.
A year or so into this, Pujol was instructed by the Germans to report on some bombs, and realised there was no way of giving false information without arousing suspicion. Instead of giving useful information that would lead to British deaths, he arranged his own arrest and then sent a message later being like “OOPS ARRESTED SORRY, I’M BACK NOW”. And the Germans were still just like "yep, cool, that all checks out, everything very normal here".
Our boy Pujol actually played a huge part in D-Day, telling the Germans that the planned invasion was going to be in Calais, rather than Normandy. They backed this up by sending FAKE PLANES and INFLATABLE TANKS because apparently they were at war in a fucking episode of Scooby Doo.
But the best bit about Pujol’s phenomenal career of weaponised shitposting is that THE GERMANS LITERALLY NEVER NOTICED. When the war ended, he was awarded a MBE by the king, and also the Iron Cross, which was a German military award, making him the only person in history to receive military colours from both the British and the Nazis.
The British later asked him to come back to his weird fake spying to spy on the USSR, and he was like “nah bro, I’m just going to fake my own death and move to Venezuela". Which he did, and opened a bookshop, and married another wife, and died in the 80s at the age of 74.
He never did get his chicken farm back, though.