6. There was a British double-agent in World War II known as Greta Garbo, but not the Greta Garbo
As with Harry Houdini, numerous sites claim without evidence that Greta Garbo worked with MI6 throughout the war as a messenger and spy. They offer little in the way of evidence. They also ignore the fact that Garbo herself once told a friend, Sven Broman, “I would have died of shame if I had ever had anything to do with spying”. There is also no evidence that Garbo left the United States between the years 1938 and 1946. There was however a spy and double agent by the name of Garbo in Great Britain during the Second World War. His name was Juan Pujol Garcia. Garcia approached the British about spying on the Germans as early as 1939 and was rejected.
Garcia set himself up as a spy for the Germans in Lisbon, working for the Abwehr. He used British tourist guides and recently seen newsreels to create reports back to Berlin which seemed to be coming from London. In April, 1942, MI5 moved him to Britain and assigned him the code name Garbo. Garcia was a leading contributor to the success of Operation Fortitude, the deception campaign over the time and place of the Overlord Invasion in 1944. Garbo was so convincing to the Germans – his Abwehr codename was Alaric – that he was awarded the Iron Cross in July, 1944, via radio. At the end of November Garbo was awarded an MBE by King George VI. His many activities as a double agent are the likely reason for the unsubstantiated reports of Greta Garbo spying for the British during World War II.