Larry Enmon

Truth is stranger than fiction…

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.

Ford Introduces Pumpkin Spice F-150 buff.ly/ZZdzNVZ

Man Considers Himself A Hacker After Guessing His Own Gmail Password On 3rd Try buff.ly/tLBuc4y

The story of the last Japanese soldier is well known throughout the world. The last German to surrender was Georg Gärtner. Georg Gärtner was captured in 1943 by British troops in Tunis while serving in the Afrika Korps. He was transferred to the United States as a prisoner of war. At the end of the war, Gärtner feared being repatriated to his hometown of Schweidnitz in Lower Silesia, which had by then become a Polish city under communist rule. He decided to escape. On September 22, 1945, he escaped from the prisoner-of-war camp in Deming, New Mexico, by jumping aboard a freight train. This train took him to California. Gärtner then moved from town to town along the West Coast of the United States. He worked as a lumberjack, dishwasher, and laborer. He improved his English, adopted a new identity as Dennis F. Whiles, obtained a Social Security card, and fabricated a biography in which he claimed to have grown up in a Connecticut orphanage after the accidental death of his parents. He eventually settled in Norden, California, where he worked as a ski instructor in the winter and in construction or sales in the summer. It was there that he met Jean Clarke, whom he married in 1964. He adopted her two children from a previous marriage. Throughout this time, the American military continued its search. For forty years, Gärtner remained on the FBI's list of most wanted individuals. However, American authorities considered him to pose no threat, believing he was merely trying to avoid being sent back to Eastern Europe—not out of loyalty to defeated Germany, but out of fear of the new regime. Although Gärtner led a quiet life, his wife grew increasingly worried by his refusal to discuss his past. In 1984, when she threatened to leave him, he confessed the whole truth to her. At her insistence, he decided to make his story public. The following year, he contacted historian Arnold Krammer, a renowned expert on German prisoners of war in the United States. Together, they published a book titled Hitler's Last Soldier in America. Gärtner became famous overnight. He was invited onto several television programs, including The Today Show, where he symbolically "surrendered" to host Bryant Gumbel. The income generated by the book sales ensured him a degree of financial independence. When he came forward, the American government found itself facing a legal vacuum. Gärtner was not an illegal immigrant, since he had been brought to the United States against his will. He had not escaped from a prison in the strict sense, since prisoners of war were, in principle, supposed to be released and repatriated. And because his escape had taken place after the official end of hostilities, it was uncertain whether he would still be considered a prisoner of war in the legal sense. No charges were filed. The FBI stated it no longer had any interest in him, and immigration officials confirmed they had no intention of deporting him. Gärtner was invited to apply for U.S. citizenship. After several years of application, he was naturalized in November 2009. He devoted the end of his life to his passion for painting. Georg Gärtner passed away in 2013 in Loveland, Colorado.

This seems pretty accurate.

Staged, I tell ya...

التفكير خارج الصندوق 😍