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Fake Vampires, Wailing Ghosts, and Other Fascinating Psy-Ops and Military Deceptions

Khalid Elhassan January 29, 2020 33 min

North Vietnam - Viet Cong Fighter — Viet Cong. Wikimedia

5. Bodyguard’s Greatest Double Agent

Juan Pujol Garcia as a Spanish Army conscript in 1931. Wikimedia

Perhaps no single person made a greater contribution to the success of Operation Bodyguard than Juan Pujol Garcia (1912 – 1988). An eccentric Spaniard, Pujol’s desire for adventure and excitement led him to hoax the Nazis with fictional spying during WWII. The hoax grew into the greatest deception operation of the conflict and played a significant role in ensuring Allied victory on D-Day and in the subsequent Normandy Campaign.

Pujol hated fascists, and when WWII began, he decided to help the Allies “for the good of humanity”. However, when he offered his services to British intelligence, he was rejected. Undeterred, he posed as a Nazi-sympathizing Spanish government officer and offered his services to the Germans. Their military intelligence, the Abwehr, accepted and ordered him to Britain, where he was to recruit a spy network.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.