Agent Garbo

Were the D-Day landings saved from failure because of a lone secret agent ? Agent Garbo tells the astonishing 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 Germany’s most valued agent — or double agent: it took four tries before the British believed he was really on the Allies’ side.

In the guise of Garbo, Pujol turned in a masterpiece of deception worthy of his big-screen namesake. He created an imaginary million-man army, invented armadas out of thin air, and brought a vast network of fictional subagents whirring to life. His unwitting German handlers believed every word, and banked on Garbo’s lies as their only source of espionage within Great Britain.

For his greatest performance, Pujol had to convince 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. Based on years of archival research and interviews with Pujol’s family, Agent Garbo is a true-life thriller set in the shadow world of espionage and deception.

Author : Stephan Talty
ISBN-13 : 9780547614816
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date : 03/07/2012

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publishers Weekly

Epic intelligence coups of WWII unreel in this colorful caper saga. Journalist Talty (Empire of Blue Water) recounts the exploits of Juan Pujol, an idealistic Spanish chicken farmer and hotelier who ran an ingenious free-lance scam to feed German intelligence officers in Spain fabricated information from an England he had never seen, then persuaded the initially dismissive British to accept him as a double agent. Derring-do subsides to theatrical fraud once Pujols is safely ensconced in London as Agent Garbo, with a network of 27 fictitious pro-Nazi spies, including an imaginary mistress in the War Office, and a team of real British intelligence officers who scripted the misleading dispatches he radioed to the enthralled Germans.

Garbo’s greatest feat was to help convince Hitler to divert troops from Normandy to Calais to await a second Allied invasion that never came. Talty’s Pujol is a captivating character with a talent for operatic confabulation, but Garbo is just the alluring lead in massive deceptions that the author likens to Hollywood productions, complete with rubber tanks, fake ships, and a Montgomery impersonator. The result is a rollicking story of wartime eccentrics and their labyrinthine mind games. Photos. Agent: Scott Waxman, Waxman Literary Agency. (July)

Kirkus Reviews - Kirkus Reviews

The exciting, improbable adventures of a young Spanish spy who managed to become Britain's most effective tool in deceiving Hitler. The mammoth concerted effort to trick the Germans into believing that the D-Day invasion was not really landing at Normandy but at Calais--despite Hitler's better instincts--required months of careful planning and streams of deceptive information fed to the Germans by agents like Juan Pujol, aka Garbo. A journalist of wide-ranging interests, Talty (Escape from the Land of Snows: The Young Dalai Lama's Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero, 2011, etc.) tells Garbo's story with verve and suspense. Pujol grew to hate the Germans after witnessing the mechanized violence of the Spanish Civil War and concocted imaginative scenarios to help the Allies by initially offering himself as a spy for Germany. Once he convinced the British he was for real, he was used to feed the Nazis a steady mixture of truth and falsehood to establish his trustworthiness.

Deflecting the Nazis from the real invasion at Normandy was the great task of the so-called XX Committee of the British secret services, whose function during the war the author compares to the workings of a Hollywood studio. As Garbo, the double agent was supplied with a wireless radio in his London safe house and communicated with the Germans in cipher. Despite German suspicions surrounding the disastrous trial run for the invasion in 1943, Garbo and other top agents were able to convince them that the invasion would be a "fake double-pronged attack--a spring assault on Norway and a summer invasion of the Pas de Calais." To accomplish this, a ghost army was created and moved around southern England--duly reported on by Garbo in the hope of keeping Hitler's 15th Army away from the Normandy beaches for the first 72 hours after the invasion. The ruse succeeded beyond everyone's expectations--more than two weeks after the invasion, German divisions still stood on alert at Calais. A lively, rollicking good read.