CLASSIFIED! THE ADVENTURES OF A MOLEHUNTER
By Nigel West
(Bite Post
£25, 384 people)
Was the ultimate success of D-Day due, in large part, to one man? A man whose true identity was unknown until the 1980s and, even today, is not a household name?
It sounds too much like a silly Hollywood movie to be true. And yet this is the suggestion of the brilliant, even obsessive, ‘mole hunter’ and spy tracker, Nigel West (a pseudonym of Rupert Allason, Conservative MP under Mrs Thatcher and John Major) in this book about his investigations. about espionage in the last 50 years.
Consider the evidence. Surely the most important day in recent military history was June 6, 1944, D-Day, when the Allies finally landed in France and began to repel the Nazis from the beaches of Normandy. It was truly a race against time. Had these landings failed, another attempt that summer would have been considered impossible, the element of surprise would have been lost, and the war would have dragged on for at least another two years.
By then, Hitler might well have perfected weaponry like “the Me262 jet fighter, the Henschel guided missile, and perhaps a ‘dirty’ uranium warhead for the V-2 ballistic missile,” West says, which could have changed the war. completely.
Double agent Juan Pujol García, code name Garbo, pictured outside Buckingham Palace on a visit to London.
As the Duke of Wellington supposedly said of the Battle of Waterloo, D-Day was “a hard-fought thing.”
Yet for all the dogged courage of soldiers on land, the brilliance of military planning, engineering marvels such as floating ‘Mulberry ports’ and the technical genius of men like Alan Turing, who cracked the Enigma code , there was another, more There is a hidden force at work that helped make D-Day (finally, after months of hard and bloody fighting) a success: the work of military intelligence, especially by feeding the Germans false information . The most crucial lie is that the Allies would attempt to invade the Pas de Calais, not Normandy.
To convince them of this, German spies themselves were informed of the massive troop buildup in Kent and warned that any further apparent Allied plans were a red herring – the opposite of the truth.
Even farm machinery in the southeast was converted to leave what looked like tank tracks for Luftwaffe reconnaissance pilots to photograph.
It was a deadly and bewildering game of truths and lies, deceptions and double deceptions, and a certain double agent named Garbo “took the brunt of the deception campaign.”
Even a month after D-Day, the German High Command was still so confident in Garbo’s assurances that a second Allied attack could still be launched near Calais, that valuable German regiments were directed there instead of Normandy. Bright!
But who was this agent with bags of chutzpah and nerves of steel? The official version stated that Garbo died in Angola in 1949. But after much manhunt, in 1984 West finally located an elderly Spanish man named Juan Pujol García, then living in Caracas, Venezuela, and who admitted to being the brilliant double agent.
In June of that year, García visited the beaches of Normandy on what must have been an emotional trip. He died in 1988.
Surprisingly, when he first approached the British embassy with his offer to spy for them, García was rejected. Only when he ingratiated himself with the Germans did the British accept his offer to be a double agent.
There are many other fascinating stories here, from this shadowy world we know so well from the novels of John le Carré. In fact, West even confronted the master of the spy novel himself with his own secrets, something Le Carré did not appreciate.
The Royal Marines stormed the beaches in June 1944. Forty years later, in June 1984, Garcia visited Normandy on what must have been an emotional trip. He died in 1988
After much chasing, in 1984 West finally located Garcia, who appears here as a young man.
Le Carré worked for MI6 until the mid-1960s and had “a tempestuous affair in Germany with the wife of an MI5 officer”, which made him clearly unpopular. But he actually began spying for MI5 as early as 1952, on his fellow students at Oxford.
It is true that many may have been naively communists or pro-Soviet sympathizers, in their own privileged and elegant way, but it must take a particular temperament to spy and report on fellow students and friends to the cold bureaucracy. It is no wonder that le Carré’s novels are so riddled with various types of betrayal.
Many agents here, far from being George Smiley’s discreet ‘grey man’, are downright flamboyant. Take Ronnie Seth, ominously codenamed Blunderhead by Special Operations Executive. He parachuted into occupied Europe in 1942, was captured by the Gestapo, narrowly escaped execution, and finally reappeared in Paris in 1944, wearing a Luftwaffe uniform! He later set about selling his “patented penis amplifier by mail order.”
And what spy novelist, in his wildest imaginations, could have imagined a compromised Soviet spy who ended up knighted and working as Surveyor of the Queen’s Tables? I mean Anthony Blunt, of course.
“I felt almost physically sick at his ruthless attitude toward his betrayal,” West writes, “which, as he admitted, had resulted in the death of at least one British source in Moscow.”
Strangest of all, a top-secret bunker in which the wartime British government could be safe from any amount of aerial bombardment turns out to be a rather gruesome windowless building in Dollis Hill, northwest London, which is still is standing. Literally bombproof, demolishing it would be too expensive!
Finally, savor the moment in 1990, in the heady days of post-Soviet perestroika, when historian John Costello boldly flew to Moscow, walked to the former KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square, knocked on the door and asked to take a look . All the old KGB files. Of course, they said it in so many words. Get in now.
I’m not sure this would be so easy today.