Sort of by accident, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, we went to see Garbo: The Spy, a 2009 documentary and got the kind of surprise you hope for from movies and books. I’d scanned the ads available and knew enough to know the movie involved a Catalan/Spaniard, an area of the world close to my heart, D-Day in WW II, and spying. Why not? we thought. It’s too wet to go walking and it’s only playing once.
What a good idea!
Juan Pujols Garcia was born in 1914 to a moderately well-off family in Barcelona. When the Spanish Civil War arrived Juan escaped being drafted by the Republicans for a while, hiding under very strenuous circumstances. Half starving he finally joined the Republicans with the plan of crossing the lines to join the Nationalists (read Fascists), but he got his directions crossed up and walked back into Republican lines shouting “I’m leaving the Republicans to join you!” Naturally, they fired on him. Escaping again, he passed through Madrid and the Nazi headquarters, volunteering to spy for the Germans. They told him to beat it.
Winding up in Lisbon, he solicited employment by mail from both the British and the Germans and began sending reports to the Nazis about what he was seeing in London, although he was working it out from periodicals in the Lisbon library.
The story gets wilder. Seeing that the Germans were acting on some of his made-up reports the British finally hired him and brought him to London where, with his handlers, he continued to send false and misleading reports to the Germans for years. His most crucial contribution was to convince the Germans that the Allied invasion in June 1944 was to take place across the narrowest part of the Channel, to Calais, and that activity at Normandy was simply a diversion. The film makes pretty clear how the ruse worked, not once but twice and allowed the invasion to be successful, thus ending the war 9 months later.
It’s really quite a marvellous story, not least because Pujol Garcia — with the code name Garbo, because he was the best actor his handlers had ever seen– wanted no part of fame and glory. As the war ended he faked his death and disappeared, not surfacing until 1984 when author Nigel West tracked him down. Quiet, mild mannered, not a dashing James Bond at all. For all his confused politics early in life, he apparently had his moment of clarity. He is quoted at the end of the film as saying “I only wanted to fight against inequity and injustice with the only tools I had.”
The film itself is oddly constructed, with talking heads in color intercut with black and white documentary footage. They don’t tell us who they are until well into the movie. Cuts of old spy movies appear through out, recognizable by film buffs, and somewhat related to the story line, but sometimes just humorous. The sound track is quirky as well. But it all works together to tell a story with several surprises about a key moment in history and a quirky man who perhaps saved thousands of lives by his ability to tell whopping big lies and hold all the parts together over years. At one time he had some 27 “agents” reporting to him — all invented!
I don’t see where else the film is playing and it’s not yet at Netflix, but keep an eye out for it. It’s really entertaining history, winning several documentary awards in Europe in 2009. The film site has more information. You can find Nigel West’s book about him at used book stores and libraries. Another has been written by Tomas Harris, based on the M15 files kept of Garbo’s activities And of course an on-line search will turn up details about his life and exploits