Joan Pujol Garcia - After The War

After The War

After the end of WWII Pujol feared reprisals from surviving Nazis. With the help of MI5, Pujol travelled to Angola and faked his death of malaria in 1949. He then moved to Lagunillas, Venezuela, where he lived in (relative) anonymity running a bookstore and gift shop.

Pujol divorced his first wife and married Carmen Cilia with whom he had two sons, Carlos Miguel and Juan Carlos, and a daughter who died in 1975 at the age of twenty. By 1984, Pujol had moved to his son Carlos Miguel's house in La Trinidad, Caracas.

In 1971 the British politician Rupert Allason, writing under the pen name Nigel West, became interested in Garbo. For several years, he interviewed various former intelligence officers, but none knew Garbo's real name. Eventually Tomas Harris' friend Anthony Blunt, the Soviet spy who had penetrated MI5, said that he had met Garbo, and knew him as "either Juan or Jose Garcia". Allason's investigation was stalled at that point until March 1984 when a former MI5 officer who had served in Spain supplied Pujol's full name. Allason hired a research assistant to call every J. Garcia in the Barcelona phone book, eventually contacting Pujol's nephew. Pujol and Allason finally met in New Orleans on 20 May 1984.

At Allason's urging, Pujol travelled to London and was received by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace, in an unusually long audience. After that he visited the Special Forces Club and was reunited with a group of his former colleagues including Colonel T. A. Robertson, Colonel Roger Hesketh, Cyril Mills and Desmond Bristow.

On the 40th anniversary of D-Day, 6 June 1984, Pujol travelled to Normandy to tour the beaches and pay his respects to the dead.

Pujol died in Caracas in 1988 and is buried in Choroní, a town inside Henri Pittier National Park by the Caribbean sea.