So as many of you have already watched it, have anyone thought how did the enigma machine ended up in the British hands? Now, in The Angle, you see Ashraf Marwan attending a lecture where some guy named GARBO is mentioned by professor. Link? Yes. Time for today's thread https://twitter.com/SocialChartered/status/1311562030910894081

Juan Pujol García, a poultry farmer from Spain, who had developed a loathing of both fascism and Communism during the Spanish Civil War, decided to help Allies by becoming an spy for them. He and his wife both contacted British and American intelligence but both rejected them

So before approaching the British again to offer his services as a double-agent, he decided to establish himself as a German agent. He created an identity as a fanatically pro-Nazi Spanish government official who could travel to London on official business by fooling a printer

He contacted a German secret service agent in Madrid,who accepted him and gave him a crash course in espionage (including secret writing), a bottle of invisible ink, a codebook, and £600 for expenses. His instructions were to move to Britain & recruit a network of British agents

Rather than going to britain, he went to lisbon and using tourist's guide books,reference books, magazines, reels or what ever he could gather on britain, he compiled them to look like credible reports. He faked travels and claimed expenses while creating a fictitious spy network

Because he had never actually visited the UK, he made several mistakes, such as claiming that his alleged contact in Glasgow "would do anything for a litre of wine", unaware of Scottish drinking habits or that the UK did not use the metric system

The British had become aware that someone had been misinforming the Germans after the German navy attempted to hunt down a non-existent convoy reported to them by Pujol. MI5 brought him to Britain and he was nicknamed GABRO after famous actress Greta Gabro.

Pujol wrote 315 letters, averaging 2,000 words, addressed to a post-office box in Lisbon supplied by the Germans. His fictitious spy network was so efficient that his German handlers were overwhelmed and made no further attempts to recruit any additional spies in the UK

The information supplied to German intelligence was a mixture of complete fiction, genuine information of little military value, and valuable military intelligence artificially delayed. Pujol used a Royal Dutch Airlines pilot willing to carry messages to and from Lisbon for cash.

In 1943, responding to German requests for speedier communication, Pujol and his MI5 Officer Harris created a fictitious radio operator. Many time he had to fakereasons why his agents failed to report easily available information that the Germans would eventually know about.

Once he reported that his (fabricated) Liverpool agent had fallen ill just before a major fleet movement from that port, and so was unable to report the http://event.To  support this story, the agent eventually 'died' and an obituary was placed in the local newspaper

The Germans were also persuaded to pay a pension to the agent's widow. His german codename was Alaric. For his communication to be safely coded, germans provided him the enigma machine which was then sent to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park (shown in The Imitation Game)

His encrypted messages were to be received in Madrid,manually decrypted and re-encrypted with an Enigma machine for retransmission to Berlin. Having both the original text and the Enigma-encoded intercept of it, British had best possible source material to crack german engima key

now coming to his best act, deception of germans to believe that the landing of allied forces is going to happen at Strait of Dover instead of actual landing at Normandy, the counter offensive which won the war for Allies.

In order to maintain his credibility, it was decided that Garbo (or one of his agents) should forewarn the Germans of the timing and some details of the actual invasion of Normandy, although sending it too late for them to take effective action.

Special arrangements were made with the German radio operators to be listening to Garbo through the night of 5/6 June 1944,using the story that a sub-agent was about to arrive with important info. When the call was made at 3 AM,no reply was received from the Germans until 8AM

Garbo told his German contacts that he was disgusted that his first message was missed, saying "I cannot accept excuses or negligence. Were it not for my ideals I would abandon the work. He added more out dated info which was useless but still enough to increase his credibility

German accepted Garbo's reports so completely that they kept two armoured divisions and 19 infantry divisions in the Pas de Calais waiting for a second invasion through July and August 1944.

The German Commander-in-Chief in the west refused to move these divisions to Normandy. There were more German troops in the Pas de Calais region two months after the Normandy invasion than there had been on the invasion day.

In late June, Garbo was instructed by the Germans to report on the falling of V-1 flying bombs. Finding no way of giving false information without arousing suspicion, and being unwilling to give correct information, Harris arranged for Garbo to be "arrested".

He returned to duty a few days later and told Germans that he now have to avoid London, and also forwarded an "official" letter of apology from the Home Secretary for his unlawful detention. Germans paid him $340,000 to support his network of around 27 fabricated agents

He was awarded Iron Cross by Germany and MBE by Britain. After world war 2, in 1949 he faked his death by malaria in Angola and moved to Venezuela where he lived as a book shop keeper. He was found by a british author in 1984 who called every J. Garcia in Barcelona Phone Book