How spy’s ‘hysterical’ wife put D-Day at risk
THE “hysterical” wife of Britain’s top double agent put the D-Day landings in peril, previously unseen MI5 files have revealed.
The papers, published for the first time today, describe how legendary Second World War “Agent Garbo” was in danger of being exposed by his homesick spouse.
Garbo was a Spanish-born spy who helped defeat Hitler by passing false information about plans for the landings in France on June 6, 1944, to German intelligence.
But the MI5 files, which were top secret for 70 years, reveal how Garbo – real name Juan Pujol Garcia – was almost unmasked.
Suicide
His wife Araceli, who was also Spanish, became “emotional and neurotic” when British intelligence refused to let her leave London and visit her mother in Spain. She then tried to blackmail spy chiefs into relenting.
Garbo’s MI5 handler Tomas Harris wrote in his report in June 1943 that Mrs Garbo suffered “acute homesickness”.
Harris said: “She threatened to leave her husband. As this did not produce the desired effect, she threatened to take action which would spoil the work.”
Mrs Garcia told him: “I shall have the satisfaction that I have spoilt everything. Do you understand? I don’t want to live another day in England.”
The files, held at the National Archives in Kew, west London, also tell how Garbo came up with a plan to make Mrs Garcia abandon her threatened treachery.
He told MI5 to convince her he had been arrested over her actions.
That sparked “hysterical outbursts” and she rang Harris in tears before attempting suicide – turning on all the gas taps, oven and fires at her home.
Spy chiefs then picked her up and drove her blindfolded in a closed van to a British interrogation centre. She was shown her husband, unshaven and dressed as a detainee, and immediately vowed to support his work.
Harris wrote of Garbo: “The extraordinary ingenuity with which he has conceived and carried through this plan has perhaps saved a situation which might have been intolerable.”
Garbo tricked the Nazis into believing landings in Normandy were a decoy and the real invasion would be north, at Pas de Calais. Hitler diverted troops who might have halted the landings.
The Germans never realised Garbo was fooling them and even awarded him the Iron Cross.