'Unknown' agent deserves memorial.

Byline: DENISE ROBERTSON

YOU won't have heard the name Juan Pujol Garcia mentioned much last week but, without him, D-Day might not have been the success it was.

A passionate foe of fascism, as war threatened he approached the British authorities offering to spy for Britain.

Rejected, he offered himself to the Germans in the hope he could betray them.

From a base in Lisbon he sent a stream of fictitious reports about Britain and the Germans were utterly convinced..

His messages were picked up by Britain's code breakers and he was enlisted as a double agent, with the codename Garbo. He assembled 27 sub-agents and informants. The only thing they had in common was that they didn't exist.

The deception plan covering D-Day was codenamed Fortitude; a plan to persuade the Nazis that the main thrust would be into the Pas de Calais and not Normandy. A fake US army was assembled in Kent and between January 1944 and D-Day, "Garbo" fired off more than 500 radio messages from an MI5 safe house in London's Crespigny Road.

He warned that the Normandy attack would be just a feint and throughout July and August 1944, the Germans kept two armoured divisions and 19 infantry divisions on the Calais coast, waiting for the "real" attack, giving the Allies time to reinforce the Normandy bridgehead.

Six weeks after D-Day the Spaniard was awarded the Iron Cross by a grateful Germany and the MBE, in secret, by a grateful Britain. After the war he was spirited away to Caracas, to protect him from neo-Nazis. He earned a living there as a language teacher and died in 1988.

There is no memorial to him, and his name remains largely unknown. Surely he deserves a blue plaque on that London house where he weaved the lies that helped to win the war.

. Denise's new novel, The Winds of War, is set in World War Two and is published by Little Books at pounds 16.99 and pounds 7.99.

. Denise Robertson cannot enter into any personal correspondence..