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WWII: Failed novelist becomes a spy for Germany, makes up a fake spy network
- wrp 3y agoStrangely, there is no mention of the Graham Greene novel, Our Man in Havana.
- agwa 3y agoApparently Greene learned about García while working for MI6 and it inspired Our Man in Havana! https://earlybirdbooks.com/our-man-in-havana-excerpt https://earlybirdbooks.com/our-man-in-havana-excerpt
- bloat 3y agoAnd then Our Man In Havana inspire le Carré to write the Tailor Of Panama. It's a story that keeps on giving!
- 082349872349872 3y ago> instead he moved to Lisbon and created bogus reports about Britain from a variety of public sources see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn
- Hucklederry 3y ago[flagged]
- churchill 3y agoHow exactly do you mean?
- _visgean 3y ago> Pujol had a key role in the success of Operation Fortitude, the deception operation intended to mislead the Germans about the timing, location and scale of the invasion of Normandy in 1944 Maybe read the article before commenting? He was very much against nazis.
- zanellato19 3y agoAre you in favor of the nazis? Because this comment makes it looks like you are.
- bigbillheck 3y agoCheck their post history they're some sort of white supremacist (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39519099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39519099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39397491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39397491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39405619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39405619) which isn't necessarily nazi but is in the same ballpark.
- hprotagonist 3y agolearned about this some years ago on tumblr of all places. https://dumb-science-jokes.tumblr.com/post/172122916995/magpiesyousharply-frosty-the-snowden https://dumb-science-jokes.tumblr.com/post/172122916995/magp...
- Waterluvian 3y agoThe casual, frank, oftentimes exaggerated style demonstrated here is one of my favourite narrative styles for learning history.
- FinnLobsien 3y agoI think part of that is because their only intent is to tell the story in a way people understand. They're not trying to sound smart because there's no editor or boss that reviews their writing. Their point is to make sure someone gets the story, not that they get promoted or something
- Waterluvian 3y agoThat makes sense. It reminds me of Drunk History. The way a drunk person will just tell you a story without any complex fluff because sentences are expensive when you’re drunk.
- FinnLobsien 3y agohahaha never heard of that one. I like "write like your reader has to pee" lol
- hef19898 3y agoWhat about people reading on the toilette?
- Waterluvian 3y ago
- Bluescreenbuddy 3y agoThis would make a great series on HBO.
- DinaCoder99 3y agoEddie Chapman even more so!
- mhh__ 3y agoThe Ben MacIntyre anthology would be a winner
- mjhay 3y agoThe Nazi's SD and Abwehr intelligence services were incredibly incompetent, as this case shows. The Abwehr did have a relatively high concentration of anti-Nazis, which didn't help either.
- hef19898 3y agoThe SD was reasonably competent in counter-intelligence, they were by incompetence by the SEO so. Agree that foreign intelligence operations were beyond bad. I want to call out Fremde Heere Ost under Gehlen in particular, one for his and his departments constant failures to analyse the Soviet, and two fornhim being choosen to lead the new German foreign intelligence service due to his only qualification: being staunchly anti-communist.
- jandrese 3y agoPlus a number of the members were outright British agents, notably in their training corps.
- FactKnower69 3y ago>After developing a loathing of political extremism of all sorts during the Spanish Civil War, Pujol decided to become a spy for Britain as a way to do something "for the good of humanity". So he joined up with the British Empire just as it began carrying out a genocide in Bengal in 1943. The centrist brain is incredible
- ben_jones 3y agoLet’s be honest how aware were British citizens of events in Bengal under wartime censorship?
- hef19898 3y agoAlso he fought the Nazis, and didn't support the Bengal famine or blocking of mitigation actions. And yes, most people didn't know what happened, even in India itself it took a while until new spread.
- istultus 3y agoI find it best to just sit at home and shout that everyone else but me is morally corrupt, YMMV. (As an aside, isn't the "centrist brain" always blamed by extremists for not picking a side? But here he picked a side?)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- m3kw9 3y agoHe can’t win in your books, he can join up with hitler or just do nothing and play with himself right?
- skykooler 3y agoI learned about this from an episode of Citation Needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blN49yGet8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blN49yGet8g It's a great watch!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jftuga 3y agoI found this fascinating: Excerpt 1: "Pujol had the distinction of receiving military decorations from both sides of the war – being awarded the Iron Cross and becoming a Member of the Order of the British Empire." Excerpt 2: "His fictitious spy network was so efficient and verbose that his German handlers were overwhelmed and made no further attempts to recruit any additional spies in the UK, according to the Official History of British Intelligence in World War II." Excerpt 3: "On occasion, he had to invent reasons why his agents had failed to report easily available information that the Germans would eventually know about. For example, 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 event. To support this story, the agent eventually "died" and an obituary was placed in the local newspaper as further evidence to convince the Germans. The Germans were also persuaded to pay a pension to the agent's widow." Excerpt 4: "For radio communication, "Alaric" needed the strongest hand encryption the Germans had. The Germans provided Garbo with this system, which was in turn supplied to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Garbo's 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, the codebreakers had the best possible source material for a chosen-plaintext attack on the Germans' Enigma key."