THE story of the Spanish MI5 double agent, Juan Pujol, alias Garbo, who for years provided the Germans with false information during the WWII and was crucial in the success of the Normandy landings, has taken a new twist.
In response to an article published in the Bulletin this week about the award-winning documentary Garbo the spy, the man who saved the world, which is currently showing in English at the Renoir, we received an email from Boris Popov, the son of another British double agent Dusko Popov, alias Tricycle, who worked with Garbo and was one of three spies involved in tricking the Germans over D-day.
What is more, as his son reveals, his father was a frequent visitor to Majorca, as was Juan Pujol, whose MI5 case intelligence officer Tomas Harris, also lived on the island.
In fact it was here in Majorca that Pujol and Harris held their final meeting to discuss the British intelligence service's offer of them continuing to spy during the Cold War.
They both agreed to decline and Harris was later killed in a suspicious car accident in Majorca when the brakes of his car failed.
According to official MI5 documents, there was only one appropriate codename for a playboy double agent who had a penchant for ménage a trois.
But although Agent Tricycle may have come across as an early James Bond-type, he was vital to Britain's intelligence gathering and, some say, the country's most important agent.
Born Dusko Popov, into a wealthy Yugoslavian family in 1912, he was recruited by MI5 to run as a double agent between 1940 and 1944.
Communicating by wireless, invisible ink postcards and a special code of microdots, he convinced his German employers that he was passing them important British military intelligence - but in fact all he gave them had been carefully cleared and construed.
In 1941, Popov was dispatched to the United States by the Abwehr to establish a new German network. He was given ample funds and an intelligence questionnaire, a list of intelligence targets.
Of the three typewritten pages of the questionnaire, one entire page was devoted to highly detailed questions about U.S. defenses at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. He made contact with the FBI and explained what he had been asked to do. During a televised interview, Dusko Popov related having informed the FBI on August 12, 1941 of the impending attack on Pearl Harbour. For whatever reason, either the FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover did not report this fact to his superiors, or they, for reasons of their own, took no action in regard to this apparent German interest in Pearl Harbour. Popov himself has said Hoover was quite suspicious and distrustful of him and, according to author William Mole Wood, when Hoover discovered Popov had taken a woman from New York to Florida, he threatened to have him arrested under the Mann Act if he did not leave the U.S. immediately.
In 1944, Popov became a key part of the Operation Fortitude deception campaign.
However, when his German intelligence handler (who was also a double agent and knew of Popov's control by the British) was arrested, the British feared Popov had been betrayed and ceased giving him critical information to pass along.
However after time passed and no indication of any distrust of Popov was discernible, he was brought back into use.
Popov died in 1981 aged 69, leaving behind a widow and three sons, one of which has lived on the island for many years.
Dusko Popov published his memoirs Spy, Counterspy in 1974.
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