How spy’s unhappy wife threatened to torpedo plans for the D-Day landing
HE was the most successful double agent of the Second World War, running a network of fictional spies who helped pull off the D-Day landings. But Agent Garbo, the colourful Spaniard at the centre of Operation Double Cross, had more important things to worry about than the Nazis.
His ‘highly emotional and temperamental’ wife nearly derailed D-Day after threatening to unmask him when he refused to let her go to a party at the Spanish Embassy.
She even left the gas taps on in an apparent suicide attempt because she was homesick, according to secret service files released by the National Archives at Kew.
Garbo, whose real name was Juan Pujol Garcia, almost single-handedly ran a network of fictional spies who fed the Germans false information.
Once he had earned their trust, he sent misleading intelligence in the run-up to D-Day that convinced the Nazis to deploy troops away from real landing sites. The elaborate deception was conducted from his semidetached home in Hendon, north-west London.
His ploy saved countless Allied lives and helped set the Germans back months.
But the newly declassified files reveal that while his spying ruse went without a hitch, he struggled to keep his domestic situation under control. In one row,
‘Satisfaction that I spoilt everything’
his wife Araceli told her husband’s MI5 handler in 1943: ‘I am telling you for the last time that if at this time tomorrow you haven’t got me my papers all ready for me to leave the country immediately – because I don’t want to live five minutes longer with my husband – I will go to the Spanish Embassy.
‘I know very well what to do and say to annoy you and my husband… I shall have the satisfaction that I have spoilt everything.’
The security service was so concerned it ordered a watch on the embassy with orders to detain her if she appeared.
In a report, Garbo’s casehandler Tomas Harris noted: ‘Mrs Garbo has never managed to adapt herself to the English way of living. Her desire to return to her country has driven her to behave at times as if she were unbalanced.’
Harris concocted a plan worthy of any Bond film to prevent her from blowing her husband’s cover. But it was not elaborate enough for Garbo, who thought up his own ‘drastic’ strategy.
He left his wife a note saying he had been arrested. This triggered a ‘hysterical outburst’ and she phoned Harris in tears, saying her husband had always been loyal to the cause.
Mrs Garbo summoned another MI5 officer to her home, where he discovered her in her kitchen with the gas taps on in an apparent suicide attempt.
She was later taken blindfolded to see Garbo in an MI5 camp, where he was unshaven and dressed in prisoner gear. The plan worked and, ‘weeping hysterically’, she signed a statement swearing she would never tell the Germans that her husband was a double agent.
Harris later wrote in praise: ‘The extraordinary ingenuity with which he has conceived and carried through this plan has perhaps saved a situation which might otherwise have been intolerable.’
Incredibly, Garbo was repeatedly turned away by MI5 when he offered to assist the war effort but when the intelligence service realised his incredible feat in setting himself up as a double agent, they adopted him.