In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis. The British turned him down. So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war. It worked better than anyone could have imagined. His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination. The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies. He didn't go to Britain. He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up. Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports. He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine. The Germans loved him anyway. Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of. The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London. Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world. Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents. When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow. Who also didn't exist. Then came D-Day. Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant. Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton. That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him. German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came. The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross. A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire. He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war. After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop. For decades the world thought he was dead. In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches. Some of them thanked him.

83 years ago today, German soldiers landed in North America. Almost nobody found out for nearly 40 years. On October 22, 1943, the U-boat U-537 slipped into a remote bay near the northern tip of Labrador. Its mission wasn't to fight. It was to steal the weather. Weather in the North Atlantic moves west to east. Whoever knew what was forming over Canada and Greenland could predict conditions over Europe and the convoy routes days in advance. The Allies had stations all over that region. Germany had almost nothing. So Siemens built Germany a robot. An automatic weather station that could measure temperature, pressure, wind, and humidity, then radio coded reports back on its own every few hours. U-537 carried one across the Atlantic, along with a meteorologist named Dr. Kurt Sommermeyer. The crossing was brutal. A storm battered the boat and tore away part of its anti-aircraft armament. But they made it. A landing party rowed ashore with about ten canisters, each weighing over 200 pounds, and hauled them up the rocky ground while armed lookouts watched the horizon. In about a day, they had the station assembled. A tall antenna mast. Battery canisters. Instruments. They named it "Kurt," after the meteorologist. Then they disguised it. They painted the canisters with the words "Canadian Meteor Service." There was no such agency. They were betting that anyone who stumbled across it in that wilderness would assume it belonged to the Canadian government and walk away. They even left empty American cigarette packs lying around. Then U-537 disappeared back into the Atlantic. The station only worked for a short time, likely just a couple of weeks, before its transmissions stopped. U-537 never made it home. A year later, it was sunk with all hands by the American submarine USS Flounder in the Java Sea. And here's the wild part. Labrador wasn't even part of Canada in 1943. It belonged to Newfoundland, a separate British dominion that didn't join Canada until 1949. For decades, no one knew Kurt existed. Then in the late 1970s, a retired Siemens engineer researching Germany's wartime weather stations found records of the mission. He contacted a Canadian military historian. In 1981, they reached the site. Kurt was still there. Canisters scattered across the rocks. The fake "Canadian Meteor Service" markings still on them. The only armed German landing in North America during WW2, hidden in plain sight for almost 40 years. Today you can see it at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.