Yesterday we heard about Dilly, who broke the German Secret Service Enigma Cipher. Today, in the third part of our series from a mystery contributor, we hear the story of Garbo; the most important of the double agents...
The Double Cross agent-runners believed they could do more with the false intelligence they were feeding the Germans. If the double agents fed the right bits of phoney information to their Abwehr handlers, they could be used to build up a completely false picture of the allied forces waiting to invade occupied Europe. There were five main agents involved in preparing the false plans for D-Day. The greatest of these was the Spaniard Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed Garbo.
The wonderful thing about Garbo, certainly so far as we at Biteback are concerned, is that you don't have to read anybody else's book to find out what he did. He is wonderfully open and honest about it in his own account, published exclusively by Biteback as one of our Dialogue Espionage Classics. Operation Garbo: The Personal Story Of the Most Successful Spy of World War II by Juan Pujol Garcia and Nigel West is a fascinating read.
Garbo admits he was already sending the Germans false intelligence even before the British recruited him! He had originally offered to spy for MI6 but was clearly making up the intelligence he claimed to have and as a result was turned down.
He then went to the Germans and offered to go to London to spy for them. They immediately agreed. But Garbo didn't bother taking the risk of going to London. Instead, he based himself in the Portuguese capital Lisbon and, using a Blue Guide to Britain and a Jane's guide to Royal Navy ships, compiled a series of ludicrous reports that the Germans accepted at face value, still believing that this was intelligence coming from London.
The British intercepted Garbo's false reports and became worried that the Germans might realise they were nonsense and that might make them look again at all the reports they were getting from the agents in Britain. They couldn't afford to let that happen. The Germans might realise they were being had. So in February 1942, Garbo was recruited to work for the British as a double agent and taken to London from where he fed false information to the Abwehr that fitted in with the D-Day deception operation.
Garbo told the Germans that he was running a network of 27 agents across the UK, including a Swiss businessman in Bootle who reported 'drunken orgies and slack morals in amusement centres' in Liverpool, and a Venezuelan in Glasgow who claimed Clydeside dockers would 'do anything for a litre of wine'. When the Swiss businessman died of cancer his widow took his place. The Venezuelan also ran agents in Scotland, one of them a communist who thought he was working for Moscow. Garbo’s mistress, a secretary in the War Cabinet, slept with army officers to gather valuable pillow talk. Garbo set up a network of agents in Wales, mostly Welsh Nationalists, who were led by 'a thoroughly undesirable character' who worked purely for money.
This is beginning to look like a great espionage network for the Germans to have so it would probably be good to point out that, despite complex personal lives that would not have looked out of place on a TV soap, none of these wonderful agents actually existed. But the Abwehr Enigma messages deciphered by Dilly's section at Bletchley Park showed the Germans believed that all these phoney characters really did exist! Everything was in place to make Double Cross the most successful intelligence operation of all time, but everything now depended on Garbo!
Tune in tomorrow to hear the story of how Garbo saved D-Day...