After the outbreak of World War II, Pujol, who despised Adolf Hitler, volunteered his services to British authorities in Madrid but was rejected.
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The FBI also helped Sebold set up a specially rigged office in Manhattan, where agents clandestinely filmed him meeting with German spies, including Frederick Duquesne, head of a Nazi espionage network in America.īefore his remarkable espionage career, Pujol, a Barcelona native born in 1912, cycled through a series of occupations, including failed chicken farmer, owner of an unsuccessful movie theater and manager of a rundown hotel. The FBI constructed a shortwave radio station on New York’s Long Island, where agents impersonating Sebold exchanged hundreds of messages with the Nazis. Back in the United States in February 1940, the FBI convinced Sebold to become the agency’s first counterspy, or double agent. Sebold secretly went to the American consulate in Cologne and reported what had happened. The Nazis, who had learned he once worked briefly at an airplane factory in California, threatened him if he failed to cooperate. Three years later, during a visit to his homeland, Sebold was recruited to spy on the United States for Germany. Sebold, a German native born in 1899, served in his nation’s army during World War I then lived in the United States and South America before becoming a naturalized U.S. Instead, he gave the Nazis misleading information, causing them to redirect the attacks to less populated areas and likely saving numerous lives. In 1944, Chapman, codenamed Zigzag by MI5, parachuted into England once again, this time on a mission to let the Germans know whether their missiles were reaching their targets. For his supposed bravery, the Nazis awarded him a medal. In January 1943, the British faked an attack on the De Havilland factory and successfully tricked the Germans into thinking Chapman had done his job. In late 1942, after parachuting into England on a mission to blow up a De Havilland aircraft factory north of London, Chapman instead offered to work for MI5, the British intelligence agency. There, the Germans took Chapman up on his offer and eventually trained him as an agent for the Abwehr, the Third Reich’s military intelligence organization. Not long after, he was arrested again and sent to a Nazi-run prison on the outskirts of Paris. When Chapman was released in 1941, he offered to spy for the Germans but was ignored. While he was behind bars, World War II broke out and the Germans seized Jersey. In 1939, he was arrested on the island of Jersey and sentenced to prison.
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Born in England in 1914, Chapman did a brief stint with the British army as a teen then turned to crime, becoming a professional safecracker.