Today's intelligence operation is a bit strange.. it begins with a freelance spy, working from home with his wife.. a man who did almost what no one had done before him, in that mysterious world. And it ends with a pet dog.. that almost changed the entire outcome of World War II.
This freelance spy, we gave his code name yesterday.. "Garbo".. the Allies called him that for his astonishing brilliance at acting and deception.. after the amazing actress "Greta Garbo". The Germans gave him the code name "Alaric".. one of the cleverest, most gifted and most imaginative spies in history.
His real name was "Juan Pujol Garcia".. an ordinary man, who began his work in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.. he was surprised that the Spanish leader "Franco" was supporting the Führer, and supplying the Nazis with volunteers to fight on Germany's side, even though Spain was neutral.
That did not please "Garbo", because he was absolutely opposed to dictatorship and fascism.. he wanted to help, so he went with his wife and offered their services as volunteer spies.. to British intelligence.
British intelligence officers chatted with them for a while, and then they committed one of the biggest mistakes in the history of British intelligence.
They dismissed them politely, and told them, "Thank you, we don't want you".. since they had no experience in the world of espionage, and had never worked in anything related to intelligence before.
But "Garbo" walked out of the British intelligence headquarters, and went straight to the German consul, and offered his services to German intelligence.
And German intelligence accepted to put him and his wife to work.
At first they asked him for a few simple things, and he carried them out to perfection. A spy is sometimes asked for things that are illogical, or that seem completely naive.. like monitoring whether a certain grocery store is open or closed at a certain hour.. or whether a fight broke out in a certain bar at a certain hour.
These naive pieces of information will later confirm, for the intelligence officers who gather the data, other information coming from other spies.. and make them certain of their loyalty and of whether their information is truly accurate. For example, the closed grocery store will confirm another piece of information that came from another spy: that he could not hand over the microfilm at the grocery store as they had asked, because it was closed at that same hour, and so on.
Just as happened in the real story of "Raafat El-Haggan", when he was asked, through his tourism company, to give the wife of one of the Israeli generals a travel ticket as a gift, while she was shopping, on a fully paid trip.. including a personal allowance. The Egyptian spy did not know why he was doing this. He simply carried it out.
A spy usually does not have the full picture. It is only with the side that runs him. And his knowledge is only as much as is needed to allow him to complete his mission.
Anyway, "Garbo" understood that well.. so he carried out these simple things to perfection.. so they trusted him.. and they began assigning him to gather bigger information, about Spanish public opinion.
And "Garbo" went off to deceive the Nazis.. with a flood of fake, fabricated information, which he composed with astonishing precision.. so much so that when they asked him to travel to Portugal, to monitor the size of crowds in certain places, like airports.. he never moved from his seat in their home.. and he asked this question of a friend of his who worked for the Dutch airline.. and when the information reached him.. he put it in code in a sealed envelope, and asked his friend at the airline to send the envelope from Portugal to an address he would give him. So that the envelope would reach the Nazis bearing the stamps and seals of the state of Portugal.. so they would be certain he had really been there.. while he was sitting in his home, in his wife's arms, sipping a warm drink beside the window.. And because his friend at the airline traveled everywhere.. "Garbo" was able, through him, to send the Nazis messages in this way from London and Portugal and Poland and Bulgaria.. without ever leaving his seat...!
And then "Garbo" informed the Nazis that he had recruited a man working at Lisbon airport.
And suddenly he informed them that he had recruited others in Spain.. then three in Portugal.. and another in London.. and he reported that the total of those he had recruited was about 27 spies.. all of them working to gather information in the service of the Führer.
The truth is that "Garbo" had not recruited a single person!
They were all fictitious names and characters, of his own invention, and the information he obtained from ordinary newspapers, and he formulated it in an astonishing style, until it seemed to be real, valuable information.. so much so that some experts said of him that he was capable of writing a piece of information of one line, in a small booklet of twenty pages, whose contents you read in fascination, and then in the end you come out with nothing but that line. They also said of him:
"A man capable of selling ice to the Eskimos". Or as we say in Egypt: "He sells water in the water-carriers' alley".
And the Germans asked for information about the new spies, so he supplied them with a great deal of information about their upbringing and history and characteristics and studies and ideas. And he described them with extreme precision: one of them was lame, blond and freckled, and another was thin and wore spectacles and his father had died a year earlier in Madrid (he got this detail from an ordinary obituary on the deaths page).. he even went so far as to invent fictitious situations and quarrels, and questions and requests in the voices of those fictitious spies.. which convinced the Nazis completely, and made them more and more reassured about him.
And the Nazis felt the attention, and gave Garbo a sum of 1000 dollars a month.. to spend on his supposed network, which in truth did not exist, so he would hold back 90 dollars for himself, and cable the rest under a pseudonym, to the resistance movements against Nazism in France and Poland and Austria.
Anyway, one time, because "Garbo" was in the end an amateur, that led British intelligence to intercept a message of his at one point, and his brilliant style of writing astonished them, and what astonished them more was that all the information he was sending was fake, even though the real information was available to a man like him.. he could obtain it with some effort.. so they arrested him, and interrogated him.. two whole years before the Normandy landings.
And the English discovered that "Garbo" had been deceiving the Nazis on his own for a whole year, and that he had donated all the money he had received from them to the resistance.. trying to help the Allies, without them realizing.. and they understood the fatal mistake they had made, when they dismissed him from the intelligence office, and they discovered in panic that he could, in good faith and with this dark talent of his, have landed them in serious trouble, and made the Nazis move in another direction that harmed them, other than the one they were seeking to push them toward.. so they decided this time to correct the mistake.. and to recruit him and train him to genuinely help them.
And for the first time "Garbo" was put on the right track, in the world of intelligence. And his information began to take on a more serious character. And that made the Germans suspicious of him.. so they decided to send another spy, to investigate one of the agents of "Garbo's" fictitious network.
And this information reached the Allies at a critical time, so with astonishing speed, they planted one of their own men as the limping agent of "Garbo's" network.. and that he was waiting for a coded message to be delivered to him.. so the Nazis were completely reassured about brother "Garbo".. after their exposure of him could have cost him his life. And "Harris", "Garbo's" case officer with the English.. began planting real agents.. with the same dates and characteristics that "Garbo" had invented.. in order to cover him completely.
The network that includes "Garbo" and "Popov".. under the umbrella of "Operation Bodyguard".. also includes a new face, a woman who hated Nazism, of Soviet origin.. raised in Paris.. so she felt deep pain at the Nazi attack on Paris and their hostility toward Russia, her original homeland.. so she did something extremely strange.
She approached Nazi intelligence to work with them as a spy.. and like "Garbo".. her intention was to mislead them.. so they agreed.. and the Nazis sent her to Spain.. and then one night orders came to her, to travel in the early morning to London. As soon as she landed in London.. she left the airport for the British intelligence office.. and told them everything, and offered to work with them as a double agent.
"Treasure" was her code name.. meaning "the treasure".
Her real name was "Nathalie Sergueiew".. who becomes the third face, in the operation.. and one of five extremely important senior spies, with the Allies.
British intelligence agrees to her working with them, but she sets a very strange condition for continuing the work.
She demands that they bring her beloved dog "Frisson", because England's strict quarantine laws.. refused to let him in from the airport and sent him back to Spain again.. and he was held in quarantine there.
Her case officer reassures her that she will bring her the dog, and "Treasure" begins working with the Allies.
The grand plan was that the Allies would be able to liberate northern Europe.. and there were two places perfectly suitable for landing the Allied forces.
"Calais" or "Normandy". The two places are in northern France.. but far from each other. The deception had to be tight, because German weaponry was far more advanced than the Allies' weapons.. and the German soldiers were very fierce.. the German tanks were faster and more heavily armored and their strikes were stronger.. and consequently any direct confrontation meant victory for the Germans.
Deception was therefore necessary.. and the recovery of land.. to destroy German morale, and to build the necessary fortifications and anti-tank trenches.. which would mean German loss and Allied victory.
And the whole division is recruited.. including "Treasure", to work on a special mission.. pushing the Germans to believe that the Allied landings would take place at "Calais".. not Normandy.
And "Treasure" works in that direction with all her strength.. and at the same time the Allies send "Popov" to meet "Garbo" and charge him with these instructions.
And in the Allied factories, work goes on at full speed, to manufacture 500 tanks.. and 50 aircraft and 1500 paratroopers!
These pieces, including the soldiers, were mock-ups and wooden decoy dummies.. resembling the real models exactly.. their purpose being to mass them in certain places, to support the Allied spies' stories, and to make the Germans believe that the landings would take place at Calais.
And the intelligence men ask "Treasure" and the rest of the team.. to supply the Germans with certain information.. all of it indicating that the landings would take place at Calais.
The observation of a single soldier, in his military uniform.. in a certain place in wartime, has an enormous effect, and can confirm or deny a vast amount of information.. and accordingly, the team moves and begins its work.
And with the messages arriving from the Germans carrying specific questions for their spies, "Garbo" and "Popov" and "Treasure" and others, it began to be clear that the Germans were starting to believe that the landings would take place at Calais.
And one month before the Normandy operation.. the operation the Allies called "Operation Overlord".. the Germans had become completely convinced that the Allies would carry out a landing at Calais.. but a slight possibility remained with the Germans.. they could not ignore it.. that the Allies might choose Normandy.
And onto the scene emerges a new agent.. a woman whose code name was "Brox" or "Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir".
She was the female counterpart of "Popov".. an extremely wealthy woman.. a society star.. a beauty who could seduce any man at any time she wished.. and she knew how to please a man with a single word.. and she knew how he thought and what he wanted and when.. so men were constantly panting after her.
This lady had been an agent for the English from the first day, they pushed her onto the Germans and she penetrated them.. and she sent them a coded telegram that was the decisive word in their doubts about Normandy.
And the strange thing is that the telegram referred neither to Calais nor to Normandy.
The telegram said that the landings would most likely take place in the Bay of "Biscay" north of Spain.
And here the Nazis ignored Normandy completely.. and they were left with two options... Calais or Biscay.
And the Germans distributed their forces between Biscay and Calais, awaiting the Allies.
But suddenly two extremely dangerous things happen.
"Garbo".. was always donating his money, as we said, as soon as it arrived from the Nazis.. so in that month, when the money for his network reached him.. a Nazi officer suddenly visited him.. just an hour later.. and asked to see the telegraph receipts by which he had transferred the money.. and when "Garbo" had nothing, the Nazi officer arrested him on grave suspicion.. and took him to Gestapo headquarters.. and they placed him under guard, and began interrogating him.
And that was a real catastrophe.. "Garbo" was a tough man and a man with a cause.. he would not confess easily even if the Nazis tore him apart piece by piece.. but he adored his wife to the point of worship.. and if they threatened to torture her he would confess to everything and reveal a great deal.. besides, he already knew "Popov" and had met him before face to face.. and that meant the network would collapse and the effort of years would be lost.. and the Normandy landings would never succeed.
And while the Allied intelligence men were thinking of a solution to this disaster.. another disaster appeared.
"Treasure's" dog, which was in quarantine in Spain.. her case officer was trying to bring him to her.. and she actually succeeded.. but while taking the dog out of the Spanish quarantine.. the English officer tasked with transporting him, took him out of his crate, and began to pet him.. and the dog saw a cat passing in the street.. so he suddenly jumped from the man's hands and began chasing it.. and a passing car ran him over, and he was killed instantly.
And the English case officer meets her spy "Treasure" in a grocery store.. and while they are choosing goods and without turning to each other.. she tells her that the dog is dead.. and "Treasure" erupts in a mighty fury.. and tells her that she had agreed with the Germans on a special code.. to send them, if she fell under English control, and that she would go and send this code immediately.. and tell them that the Calais landing.. is nothing but a deception.
And "Treasure" leaves in a rage bordering on madness.. and jumps into a taxi.. and the English officer does not catch up with her.. so she goes back to headquarters and tells them what happened.
And the entire outcome of World War II is placed at stake because of a dog.
But this story is long, so we will continue talking about it later.
And the talk will have a sequel.
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- Previous posts in the first comment.
- The first picture is of "Treasure" and her dog.
- The second picture is of "Garbo" and his wife.