This was to prove more difficult than he could have imagined. He decided contact the British authorities and offer to spy against Germany. How he did this was dictated by his admiration for Britain, then standing alone in the face of the Axis. The onset of war in 1939 convinced him that he should make a contribution, as he put it, 'to the good of humanity'. He emerged from that experience with a dislike for totalitarianism in general and a particular loathing for Nazism. He reluctantly fought in the Spanish Civil War, managing to do so on both sides and - so he claimed - without actually firing a single bullet for either side. GARBO - whose real name was Juan Pujol - was born in Barcelona in 1912 to a family of moderate means and liberal political beliefs. Tomas Harris, GARBO's MI5 case officer, 1946 Still less were they to discover that the network which they instructed him to build up in the UK was to be composed of 27 characters who were nothing more than a figment of the imagination.' 'In 1941 when the Germans were all-powerful in Spain, the British Embassy in Madrid was being stoned, France had collapsed and the German invasion was imminent, little were the Germans to know that the small meek young Spaniard who then approached them volunteering to go to London to engage in espionage on their behalf would turn out to be a British agent. (The Service does not reveal the names of its agents unless the agents themselves have publicised their connection with us, as GARBO did in 1985 in publishing his own autobiography - 'Operation GARBO' - under his own name). This page relates the remarkable story of GARBO and how he deceived the German High Command. The Security Service made a significant contribution to the success of D-Day through its double agent Juan Pujol, codenamed GARBO, who has been described as the greatest double agent of the Second World War. The Normandy Landings of 6 June 1944 marked the beginning of the liberation of occupied Western Europe.

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