How spy's homesick wife nearly ruined D-Day

Wartime double agent Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed Garbo by MI5, was vital in defeating Nazi Germany - but his efforts were nearly scuppered by his wife.

Garbo, a Spanish national based in Harrow during the Second World War, convinced Berlin the D-Day landings would take place at the Pas de Calais and not Normandy.

But his pivotal role in giving the Germans a false location was nearly sabotaged by his homesick wife, Araceli Gonzalez de Pujol, who hated the UK's food and weather, according to declassified MI5 files.

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The couple quarrelled violently in June 1943, a year before D-Day, prompting Gonzalez to say she would expose Garbo to the then fascist Spanish embassy in London unless she was allowed to travel home to see her mother.

Such was MI5's concern that Garbo had to devise an elaborate hoax to silence her.

Gonzalez was told her husband had been imprisoned by his spymasters after an argument over her treatment and was taken blindfold to meet him.

"In an emotional reunion, she swore at him she had never meant to carry out her threat to go to the embassy and had simply wanted her request to return home to be taken seriously," says the Daily Telegraph. Gonzalez signed a statement saying she would never again threaten to expose her husband and he was "released".

Garbo has been hailed as one of the most important spies of all time, reports The Guardian. The Germans never discovered he was a double agent and even awarded him the Iron Cross in 1944 – the same year he received an OBE from the UK.

After the war, MI5 helped the couple travel to South America, where, fearing reprisals, Garbo faked his own death. However, his marriage did not last and he remarried and died in Venezuela in 1988.