Operation Garbo

"This again is about the power of the imagination. This is a very worldly book. Pujol is one of the most extraordinary characters. He ended up fighting for both sides during the Second World War . Sometime in 1941 he decided that someone had to put a stop to Hitler and he was going to do that. So what he did was to walk into the British Embassy in Madrid and said: ‘I would like to spy for you.’ And the Brits said, ‘Who are you, you funny Diego person, go away!’ And so he walked into the German Embassy and did the same thing and they welcomed him in and gave him all their secret codes and inks. So he went back to the British Embassy and told them what he had and ended up later on working for them. In the meantime the Germans told him they really wanted him to go to London but actually he went to Lisbon and just made up a series of reports about what was going on in London which he dreamt up with the help of the local library, French newspapers and a copy of Baedeker’s Guide to England . The Germans never saw through these made-up reports even though he made some real clangers. For example, he said in the summer the royal court moves to Brighton. Eventually the Brits realised there was this German spy they hadn’t caught because they were picking up intelligence reports and they heard about him and then they worked out it was the guy who pestered them to spy for them. So they brought him back to England where he ended up playing a massive role in the success of D-Day. Incidentally, he was known as Garbo because he was so good at acting and made up all these incredible stories about the network of sub-spies he had working for him which, because he was like a novelist, he described in amazing detail. At the end of 1943 he began sending misleading information concerning the coming invasion of France; the Germans believed that the D-Day invasion of Normandy was a feint. So he was a key player in the double-cross system which was the secret part of the whole D-Day operation. He managed to persuade the Germans that D-Day was actually a diversion and a tactic and the main attack would be elsewhere. And they believed him. They had their troops elsewhere and if that had not been the case there is no way the Allies would have managed to open up the Western Front. If you think about it, he is part of this surrealist theme that so many Spanish writers have. Through his imagination he was an incredible asset for the British."