IN the week that the future of the world's most famous fictional spy, James Bond, has been thrown into doubt, the award-winning documentary about one of the greatest spies of all time is going to open at the Renoir in English.
Garbo, The Man Who Saved The World, has been produced and directed by Spanish film maker Edmon Roch and the production won Best Documentary and the recent Goya Awards, Spain's equivalent of the Baftas. It has also been highly commended at film festivals across Europe.
The documentary, which has taken Roch six years to make and taken him all over the world researching once classified documents, especially at Somerset House in London and in Washington, is about the Barcelona-born Joan Pujol Garcia who became one of Britain's most important spies, playing a key role in ensuring the success of the Normandy landings.
However, he was also working for the Germans, or rather the Nazis thought he was, and for years literally played with the Germans, providing them with completely false information. But, for his bogus commitment to helping the Third Reich, he was awarded the Iron Cross, as well as the MBE by the Duke of Edinburgh for his very real services to the Allied war effort.
Pujol was brought up by his father to believe in democracy and not conflict. His father was always full of praise for Britain the only country in Europe where democracy works and where the police can keep order without guns, he would tell the young spy.
So, when Pujol got the chance, he decided that he wanted to play a small role in saving mankind and help the good guys, the British, Roch explained yesterday.
But, as Roch stressed, this documentary is proof that fact is quite often better than fiction.
Pujol was the anti-James Bond. During the Spanish Civil war he kept changing sides, after having tried to desert, in order to avoid having to fire a gun, and he succeeded.
His lethal weapon was his imagination. said Roch.
Pujol's first three offers of help to the British secret services were rejected. They were a bit suspect about the motives of a Spaniard,. said Roch. But eventually MI5 recruited him after Pujol's role in the Siege of Malta.
He spoke no English, only Catalan and Spanish and his first wife Areceli Garcia knew what he was doing, as did his case handler, the intelligence officer Thomas Harris who died in a suspicious car crash in Majorca, to where he had retired, in 1964.
Pujol was not a double agent in the true sense of the word, he never did any actual spying, said Roch.
What he did was write letters to his wife and these were full of information which was decoded by translators at the German and British Embassies in Madrid and then forwarded to British and German commanders.
At first, Pujol was based in neutral Portugal and duped the Germans into thinking the letters were coming out by secret RAF flights, hence they were back dated.
But what was even more amazing is that he conned the Germans into thinking that he was running a network of 27 agents all over the UK and this really impressed the Nazis.
In his letters he would mention Agent 5, 7, or 9, whichever, and the fictitious information they had passed on to him,.
The Nazis had no proper spies in Britain to corroborate Pujol's information so they took it all in and admired his ability to have such a large team operating undetected.
But, none of these agents really existed, they were all in his imagination. What is more, they were all on the pay roll of the Nazis who paid the money into Madrid and the money was used to help fund MI5.
There is one hilarious case of the widow of one of the bogus agents dying and the Germans paid her a pension... Roch said.
Pujol was eventually stationed in London until the end of the war and then he and Harris had one final meeting here in Majorca.
The British secret service wanted Pujol to continue but move into the Cold War, however the two men both turned down the offer. Harris retired to Majorca and became an established painter while Pujol faked his own death and slipped off to start a new life in Venezuela.
In 1984, four years before his death, British spy writer and former Tory MP Rupert Allason tracked him down and helped write his memoirs without which Pujol would have taken one of the greatest secrets of the war to his grave for fear of reprisals.
Roch has yet to find a distributer for the documentary in Germany, some do not believe it is true....
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