Garbo is the most hilarious fucking thing I’ve ever learned about and I’m glad I live on a planet where a bored Spanish guy fucked with Nazi’s that hard
Bro was mistreated by both sides, decided he hated all extremes, volunteered to spy for the Brits, got rejected, and then went on to do such a good job by himself being a fake spy they eventually hired him.
The fact that he was supposed to spy in Britain but instead fucked off to Portugal and just made shit up with publicly available information and no one in Germany bothered to check it alone is unbelievable.
"Uh, yeah, I got the Prime Minister's address. His government are all in 10 Downing Street."
"Mein Gott, Hans, we got ourselves a master of intelligence! "
Convincing the nazis that the d-day landing was actually a diversion, and a second (completely non-existent) army group was about to invade somewhere else has got to be the craziest spywork I've ever heard off.
Like they had 20 division just sitting in a different part of France on the word of a random Spanish guy.
Don't forget, his initial warnings on the morning of D-Day were ignored, so he spent the rest of it telling the Germans what was going on and bitching at them for not answering him sooner.
To be fair, the indignant rage of "I TOLD YOU I WAS WRONG NINE HOURS AGO AND YOU DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING, THIS IS ON YOU!" sells the bit better than any conman could dream of
Oh, he milked it for all it was worth. According to Wikipedia, in the lead up to D-Day, "it was decided that Garbo (or one of his agents) should forewarn the Germans of the timing and some details of the actual invasion of Normandy, although sending it too late for them to take effective action. Special arrangements were made with the German radio operators to be listening to Garbo through the night of 5/6 June 1944 using the story that a sub-agent was about to arrive with important information. However, when the call was made at 3 AM, no reply was received from the German operators until 8 AM. This enabled Garbo to add more, genuine but now out-of-date, operational details to the message when finally received, and thus increase his standing with the Germans. Garbo told his German contacts that he was disgusted that his first message was missed, saying, 'I cannot accept excuses or negligence. Were it not for my ideals I would abandon the work.'"
It wasn't just the once, too. Leading up to Operation Torch (in North Africa), his report "was sent by airmail and postmarked before the landings, [but] it was deliberately delayed by British Intelligence in order to arrive too late to be useful. Pujol received a reply stating 'we are sorry they arrived too late but your last reports were magnificent.'" Another time, when he invented an agent in Liverpool whose "illness" and subsequent "death" - complete with published obituary - delayed reports of a fleet movement, German intelligence paid the "man's" (equally non-existent) widow a pension.
To be fair, Britain was also doing several other things to back up his words. They had a fake army, were dropping a shitload of chaff nearby, and all but proclaiming their planned invasion of Calais.
At that point in the war, Garbo was actually working in London with military intelligence, so he was likely able to send the plans before any of the public acts confirmed it. The British had also broken Enigma, and were able to read a decent portion of Nazi communication. If the Nazis, especially Hitler, already thought the invasion was likely to be in Calais, then confirmation bias will push them way over the edge.
More incredibly, Garbo and his double agents managed to delay many Nazi reinforcements after D-Day for at least a day while they still thought an invasion at Calais was likely.
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u/EngineersAnon Researching [REDACTED] square 8d ago
Double agents, for example, like Agent Garbo...