The brilliant double-agent who tricked Hitler and saved D-Day – and how the British had

CLASSIFIED! THE ADVENTURES OF A MOLEHUNTER

By Nigel West

(Biteback Publishing

£25, 384pp)

Was the ultimate success of D-Day due, in large part, to a single man? A man whose real identity was unknown until the 1980s — and, even today, is hardly a household name?

It sounds just a bit too much like a hokey Hollywood movie to be true. And yet, this is the suggestion of the brilliant, even obsessive, ‘molehunter’ and tracker of spies, Nigel West — a pseudonym for Rupert Allason, Conservative MP under Mrs Thatcher and John Major — in this book about his investigations into espionage over the past 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 push back against the Nazis from the beaches of Normandy. It was truly a race against time. Had these landings failed, another attempt that summer was deemed impossible, the element of surprise would have been lost and the war would have dragged on at least another two years.

By that time Hitler could well have perfected weaponry such as ‘the Me262 jet fighter, the Henschel guided missile, and perhaps a “dirty” uranium warhead for the V-2 ballistic missile’, says West, which might have changed the war completely.

Double agent Juan Pujol Garcia, codename Garbo, pictured outside Buckingham Palace on a visit to London

As the Duke of Wellington is alleged to have said about the Battle of Waterloo, D-Day was ‘a damn close run thing’.

Yet for all the dogged courage of the soldiers on the ground, the brilliance of the military planning, the engineering marvels such as floating ‘Mulberry harbours’ and the technical genius of men like Alan Turing who cracked the Enigma code, there was another, more hidden force at work which helped to make D-Day — eventually, after months of hard and bloody fighting — a success: the work of military intelligence, especially in feeding the Germans fake information. The most crucial lie being that the Allies would try to invade the Pas-de-Calais, not Normandy.

To convince them of this, Germany’s own spies were informed of mass troop build-ups in Kent, and warned that every other apparent Allied plan was a red herring: the opposite of the truth.

Even farm machinery in the South-East was converted so as to leave what looked like tank tracks for the Luftwaffe reconnaissance pilots to photograph.

It was a deadly, bewildering game of truth and lies, bluff and double-bluff, and a certain double agent called Garbo ‘shouldered the lion’s share of the deception campaign’.

Even a month after D-Day, German High Command still so trusted Garbo’s assurances that a second Allied attack might yet be launched near Calais, that valuable German regiments were directed there instead of Normandy. Brilliant!

But who was this agent with bags of chutzpah and nerves of steel? The official narrative claimed that Garbo died in Angola in 1949. But after much chasing, in 1984 West finally tracked down an elderly Spaniard called Juan Pujol Garcia, then living in Caracas in Venezuela, who admitted to being the brilliant double agent.

In June that year, Garcia visited the Normandy beaches in what must have been an emotional journey. He died in 1988.

Remarkably, when he first approached the British embassy with his offer to spy for them, Garcia was turned down. It was only when he ingratiated himself with the Germans that the British took up his offer to be a double agent.

There are many other fascinating tales here, from this shadowy world we know so well from the novels of John le Carré. Indeed, West even confronted the master of the espionage novel himself with his own secrets — something which Le Carré did not appreciate.

Royal Marines storm the beaches in June 1944. Forty years later, in June 1984, Garcia visited Normandy in what must have been an emotional journey. He died in 1988

After much chasing, in 1984 West finally tracked down Garcia, who is pictured 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 distinctly unpopular. But he actually started spying for MI5 as early as 1952 — on his fellow students at Oxford.

Granted, many may have been naively Communist or pro-Soviet in sympathy, in their tweedy privileged way, but it must take a particular temperament to spy and report on one’s fellow students and friends to cold officialdom. No wonder Le Carré’s novels are so haunted by various kinds of betrayal.

Many agents here, far from being the unobtrusive, George Smiley ‘grey man,’ are positively flamboyant. Take Ronnie Seth, for instance, ominously codenamed Blunderhead by the 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 went into business selling his ‘patented penis enlarger by mail order’.

And what spy novelist in his wildest imaginings could have dreamed up a committed Soviet spy who ended up knighted and working as the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures? I’m referring to Anthony Blunt, of course.

‘I felt almost physically unwell at his cold-blooded attitude to his treachery,’ writes West, ‘which as he admitted had resulted in the death of at least one British source in Moscow.’

Most bizarre of all, a top secret bunker to which the British wartime government could be safe from any amount of aerial bombing, turns out to be a rather hideous windowless building in Dollis Hill, in North-West London, that is still standing. Literally bomb-proof, demolishing it would be too expensive!

Finally, savour the moment in 1990, in the heady days of post-Soviet perestroika, when the historian John Costello boldly flew to Moscow, marched up to the old KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, knocked on the door and asked to have a look through all the old KGB archives. Sure, they said in as many words. Come right on in.

I’m not sure this would be quite so easy today.