Infiltration and disinformation
Aug. 20th, 2021 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI first heard about the legendary Agent Garbo when reading Ben McIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat a few years back; shortly thereafter, I found a copy of Stephan Talty’s Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day in a secondhand bookshop and had to get it.
While the framing (especially the outrageous subtitle) comes perilously close to endorsing the notion that D-Day was won due to one Great Man of History, the book overall does a pretty good job of illustrating Juan Pujol’s strengths and weaknesses, and all the moving parts that go into any kind of successful disinformation campaign. It becomes pretty clear that if the British hadn’t scooped up Pujol reasonably early and outfitted him with the support needed to keep such a big network of fake spies straight, it would only have been a matter of time before he fucked up something badly enough for the Germans to notice, even the not particularly clever ones in Madrid. But overall, these World War II spy stories are fun because they involve a lot of very colorful people just trying out a bunch of completely bananas stuff, and I don’t really care that much that each book tries to make it sound like the story it’s telling is the single most important one. (That said, there is a very good case that “tricking the Germans into defending Pas de Calais for days and days after the Normandy invasion via inventing a phantom army” was certainly a big one.) The book is also fairly sympathetic to Pujol’s first wife, Araceli, on the occasion when she rebelled against British intelligence and almost blew his cover (it’s clear to me that British intelligence was leaving money on the table by not hiring a damn babysitter for the kids and employing Araceli, too). The most interesting part to me was reading about the tricks Pujol used to keep both his main infiltration persona and his massive network of socks (they didn’t call them socks, as there was no internet upon which to have sockpuppet accounts in those days, but they were socks) in good with the Nazis even after several operations that should have burned them.
Overall a fun little read about some Good Old-Fashioned Nazi Fightin’.
While the framing (especially the outrageous subtitle) comes perilously close to endorsing the notion that D-Day was won due to one Great Man of History, the book overall does a pretty good job of illustrating Juan Pujol’s strengths and weaknesses, and all the moving parts that go into any kind of successful disinformation campaign. It becomes pretty clear that if the British hadn’t scooped up Pujol reasonably early and outfitted him with the support needed to keep such a big network of fake spies straight, it would only have been a matter of time before he fucked up something badly enough for the Germans to notice, even the not particularly clever ones in Madrid. But overall, these World War II spy stories are fun because they involve a lot of very colorful people just trying out a bunch of completely bananas stuff, and I don’t really care that much that each book tries to make it sound like the story it’s telling is the single most important one. (That said, there is a very good case that “tricking the Germans into defending Pas de Calais for days and days after the Normandy invasion via inventing a phantom army” was certainly a big one.) The book is also fairly sympathetic to Pujol’s first wife, Araceli, on the occasion when she rebelled against British intelligence and almost blew his cover (it’s clear to me that British intelligence was leaving money on the table by not hiring a damn babysitter for the kids and employing Araceli, too). The most interesting part to me was reading about the tricks Pujol used to keep both his main infiltration persona and his massive network of socks (they didn’t call them socks, as there was no internet upon which to have sockpuppet accounts in those days, but they were socks) in good with the Nazis even after several operations that should have burned them.
Overall a fun little read about some Good Old-Fashioned Nazi Fightin’.