Agent Garbo

Stephan Talty, “Agent Garbo: The Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, 252 pp

“Agent Garbo” is the highly unlikely story of a self-made secret agent who matched wits with the best minds of the Third Reich — and won. Juan Pujol was a nobody, a Barcelona poultry farmer determined to oppose the Nazis. Using only his gift for daring falsehoods, Pujol became valued by Germany as their most trusted agent.  Yet, it took four tries for him to convince the British he was really on their side. In the guise of Garbo, Pujol created an imaginary million-man army, invented armadas out of thin air, and brought a vast network of fictional subagents to life. His unwitting German handlers believed every word, and banked on Garbo’s lies as their only most credible source within Great Britain.  Of course, unknown to these same German handlers, every German agent in Great Britain was under the control of the British.

I was previously under the impression that the German’s considered their coastline defenses designed to totally and immediately repel an attack anywhere on the Normandy beaches. This book makes clear that that was impossible and was never the German plan.  They were committed to positioning their forces so they could respond and arrive within a day or two of any attack anywhere on the beaches.  Yet, if this is a fact, then why not spend more time and materials on the transportation infrastructure of the area rather than on concrete bunkers?  This book does not deal with that question.  Anyway, the deception that the British agents and others provided was aimed at freezing the Nazi forces away from the coast, particularly around Calais, for at least two days.  Pujol (Agent Garbo) convinced the German High Command that the D-Day invasion of Normandy was a feint and the real attack was aimed at Calais. The Nazis bought it, turning the tide of battle at the crucial moment.  For many reasons, this book specifies, only Calais and Normandy were the only credible invasion targets.  Normandy is 160 miles southwest of Calais.

Garbo’s greatest accomplishment:  on June 9, 1944, the mighty First Panzer Division, 25,000 strong, was ordered to head south from the Pas de Calais to join the counterattack against the Allied bridgehead.  But then came Garbo’s explicit warning that the Normandy invasion was a ruse specifically designed to draw off troops from the Calais before the main assault.  The order to the First Panzers was countermanded.   Eisenhower had said before the invasion “Just keep the Fifteenth Army out of my hair for the first two days,” he got more than 15 days.  A month after D-Day, no fewer than twenty-two German divisions were still held back in the Fifteenth Army sector.  Hitler had “reposed an almost mystic confidence in Garbo,” MI5 later concluded.  Far from realizing they had been fooled, the Germans assumed that Allied plans had changed.  On August 30, Garbo reported that the planned attack on the Pas de Calais had been canceled, and the Germans believed him, as they had believed him from the start. 

My Notes:

Pg. 20:  The Spanish Civil war which began in 1936, ended on April 1, 1939, with General Francisco Franco taking control of a broken, hate-addled nation.  Pujol was in as bad a shape as his country.  He was no longer willing to settle for an anonymous life as a chicken farmer.  He’d learned how to talk his way past firing squads and to convince people of whatever he wanted to convince them. 

Pg. 42:  Late spring 1941: Hitler had taken Poland, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Austria.  German U-boats were attacking merchant ships in the Atlantic, massive Luftwaffe raids were targeting Coventry and central London, and Rommel and his Afrika Korps were sweeping across North Africa.  FDR had signed the Lend-Lease Act but America was still neutral, while Italy and Japan had allied themselves with the Third Reich and Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler.  In Germany, the program of euthanasia of the sick and disabled was more than a year old, and the first experimental use of poisonous gas at Auschwitz was now four months away.

Pg. 82:  As in Hollywood, money mattered.  The amount of cash each agent cadged from the Germans indicated how seriously he or she was taken.  (Over his career, Pujol would exceed every other MI5 agent many times over, earning $1.4 million [at today’s value] and single-handedly bankrolling much of the double-cross system with his “earnings.”)

Pg. 94:  MI5 had Garbo notify the Germans, one day late, that the Allies planned an invasion of North Africa.  It was precisely the intelligence the Germans wanted from their top spy.  This message proved Garbo’s worth without costing any lives.

Pg. 102:  Hitler was a voracious consumer of intelligence reports as long as they didn’t contradict one of his core beliefs.  Canaris poured resources and men into Paris, but London was kept off-limits.  Hitler believed that, once he overran the continent, he could negotiate a peace with Churchill.  “I don’t want any wretched spies creeping about in England,” he told his staff officers, “and jeopardizing my plans.”  That all changed in the summer of 1940 when Churchill’s obstinacy and the RAF made it clear that England would never surrender.  The original aim of the German intelligence effort in Britain was to lay the groundwork for an invasion.  When that hope was finally abandoned, its double agents switched their attention to the Allied war effort.  And then, particularly, to the coming invasion of France.

Pg. 156:  Few gave the invasion plan much chance of success.  Amphibious landings in support of an invasion had a bloody reputation earned over many centuries.  Kublai Khan’s attacks on Japan in 1274 and 1281 failed because of storms and bad ship design; the Spanish Armada’s attempt to land an army on British shores in 1588 was wrecked by storms and a ferocious naval battle; the huge British invasion force at Cartagena in 1741 was defeated by a much smaller Spanish contingent; and Gallipoli in 1915 and 1916 had become a byword for disaster.  True, the Allies had managed three successful landings in WWII—North Africa, Sicily, and Salerno—but all three had been against unfortified positions.  When the Allies attacked the heavily defended coast at Dieppe in August 1942, the invasion had failed at the cost of thousands of lives.