Garbo: The Mysterious Life of the Most Effective Double Agent in World War II cover art

Garbo: The Mysterious Life of the Most Effective Double Agent in World War II

 Preview
This Season's Biggest Deal

£0.99/mo for 3 months + £10 Audible bonus

Auto-renews at £5.99/month after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Get this deal
Offer ends on 28 December, 2026.
More purchase options

Garbo: The Mysterious Life of the Most Effective Double Agent in World War II

By: Charles River Editors
Narrated by: Steve Knupp
Get this deal

Auto-renews at £5.99/mo. after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 28 December, 2026.

Buy Now for £7.99

Buy Now for £7.99

This Season's Biggest Deal | £0.99/mo for 3 months + £10 Audible bonus

£5.99/mo after 3 months - terms apply. Cancel monthly
Summary
 World War II stood apart in many ways from every earlier war, not least in the way that it reached to every corner of the planet and involved a noticeable segment of humanity's collective resources. Battles erupted not only on land and the sea's surface as they had for centuries, but also in the ocean depths and the windswept heights of the sky. Nearly every conceivable terrain saw use as a battlefield: the neat farmland and small towns of Western Europe; the streets of major cities; storm-swept ocean at the edge of the Arctic Ice; tropical swamps and jungles; thick forests; open steppes stretching for hundreds of miles; sandy and stony deserts in North Africa; picturesque tropical islands and atolls; frozen tundra; the slopes of active volcanoes; rugged mountain ranges; and many other regions of the globe.Underneath it all, one of the war's most crucial struggles happened in the realm of the unseen, inside the human mind and amid the invisible flow of radio waves. Every war is a battle of wits as intelligence-gathering, tactics, and strategies clash, from the level of individual action up to the grand, overarching schemes of generals and statesmen, but intelligence took on a freshly urgent aspect in World War II. The collective fates of offensives, armies, and nations came to hang on the ability to trick the enemy.At 3:00 a.m. on June 6, 1944, a wireless set in a quiet house in northwest London began tapping out a call sign. The man who had written the message was a slight, balding 32-year-old Spaniard with a neat mustache and a soft voice, and he had spent the entire evening waiting for this moment. Across the English Channel, the largest seaborne invasion in history was already underway, with paratroopers already on the ground in Normandy while thousands of ships were moving toward the beaches. Within a few hours, the first landing craft would drop its ramps.The message he sent was meant for German intelligence in Madrid, and it warned that Allied troops were boarding ships and that an attack on France was coming. Every word was true, and the British sent it with full approval. Nobody in Madrid answered.The mans name was Juan Pujol García, and he was well-known by both sides who fought on D-Day, or at least so it seemed. The Germans knew him as Arabel, a dedicated Spanish fascist who had slipped into Britain and built a network of informers across the country, while the British knew him as Garbo, a name borrowed from a Hollywood star. Both names described the same man, but only one side knew the truth.Before World War II, Pujol had been a poultry farmer, a cinema manager, and a hotel manager whod served in both armies during the Spanish Civil War and fired at no one. When he decided early in World War II that he wanted to help defeat Hitler, the British turned him down three times, so he went to the Germans instead, convinced them he was one of theirs, and began sending them detailed reports from England while he actually lived in Portugal, working from a tourist guide agency and a public library. By the time the British realized what he was doing, he had already invented an espionage network that didn't exist, and once they accepted his help, that imaginary network became one of the war's most effective weapons of deception. In the months before D-Day, Garbo helped persuade Hitler that the Normandy invasion was a feint, ensuring that thousands of German troops waited near Calais for an attack that never came. For his services, Hitler approved the award of the Iron Cross. For the same services, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire. Needless to say, few people in history have ever been decorated by both sides during the same war.Then, after playing such a vital role in World War II, he completely vanished. He let the world believe he had died of malaria in Africa, and for more than 30 years almost no one knew he was alive.©2026 Charles River Editors (P)2026 Charles River Editors
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet