Operation Garbo

Garbo was the British codename of Juan Pujol Garcia, perhaps the most influential spy of the Second World War. By feeding false information to the Germans on the eve of the D-Day landings he ensured Hitler held troops back that might otherwise have defeated the Normandy landings. This allowed the Allied push against the Nazis in Europe to begin. Amazingly, Garbo's cover was never broken and he remains the only person ever to have been awarded both the British MBE and the German Iron Cross. After the war Garbo faked his own death and fled to Venezuela with a mistress, where he later opened a book store. Ironically, his family in Spain only found out he was still alive when this book was published - Garbo having failed to realise it would also be translated into Spanish.

Auteur

Juan Pujol Garcia was born in Barcelona in 1912. He died in Caracas in 1988. Nigel West often speaks at intelligence seminars and has lectured at both the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square and at the CIA headquarters in Langley, where he once lectured on counter-intelligence to an audience that included the Soviet spy Aldrich Ames. He now teaches members of the intelligence community at the Counter-Intelligence Centre in Washington DC (www.cicentre.com). He is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and World War II Quarterly. In 2003 Nigel West was awarded the US Association of Former Intelligence Officers' first Lifetime Literature Achievement Award. In 2011 he was appointed chairman of the St Ermin's Intelligence Book of the Year panel of judges.

Texte du rabat

He was GARBO to the Allies and ALARIC to the Germans - the most successful double agent of the Second World War. Indeed, his spy network across Britain was so highly regarded that he was decorated for his achievements ... by both sides.
Throughout the war, GARBO kept the Germans supplied with reports from his ring of twenty-four agents. Hitler's spymasters never discovered or even suspected a double-cross, but all the agents in GARBO's network existed solely in his imagination.
In one of the most daring espionage coups of all time, GARBO persuaded the enemy to hold back troops that might otherwise have defeated the Normandy landings on D-Day; without him, the Second World War could have taken a completely different course.
For decades, GARBO's true identity was a closely guarded secret. After the war, he vanished. Years later, after faking his own death, Juan Pujol García was persuaded by the author to emerge from the shadowy world of espionage, and in this new edition of his classic account, now updated to include his agents' original MI5 files, GARBO reveals his unique story.