Financed largely by the gushing subsidies of the Catalonian regional authority, this documentary hypes its Barcelona-born subject, Juan Pujol García, as ‘the man who saved the world’ in its Spanish/Catalan release, while for the British, they wisely left it at ‘Garbo: The Spy’ Well, they obviously couldn’t just call it ‘Garbo’ but the basis for that claim to distinction (attributed far more convincingly to Cold War defector Oleg Penkovsky in a 1994 book) does not get clarified until the film, which lasts for an hour and a half, and offers perhaps twenty minutes of actual content, is just about over.

That task then falls to Rupert Allason, who authors books about spies and spycraft as Nigel West, and under that alias was enlisted as one of the five talking heads that supply the tri-lingual narrative continuity. Argues West: if the double agent called Garbo had not succeeded in feeding the Germans strategic disinformation about the site of the Allied landings in Europe, D-Day might well have proved a huge debacle, giving the Nazis time enough to develop the atom bomb; result: bye-bye world. Possibly.

That is not altogether spurious, merely as conjectural and inconclusive as are the very few facts in circulation about Juan Pujol (1912-1988), known as Arabel to the Abwehr and Garbo to his handlers at British Intelligence. Having so little to go on creates problems in answering the only question that justifies a two-hour documentary about someone who appears out of nowhere to play a critical role at one of history’s turning points, namely: what in God’s name was it that impelled him to go and do what he did?

In an account published, with much additional material by Allason, as Operation Garbo, Pujol writes that he was ‘determined to fight injustice and iniquity with the weapons at my disposal’. A glance at his involvement in the Spanish Civil War suggests, however, that the dominant ideology in his case was Opportunism. He went into hiding for a year to avoid being conscripted by the Republic. After being rumbled and sent to the front, he tried deserting to join up with Franco’s forces, but lost his bearings and wound up back behind his own lines. Later on, he did manage to join up with the Nationalists. and though he could boast at the end of the war that he had never fired a single bullet for either cause, it hardly sounds like the curriculum of a committed anti-Fascist fighter.

Whatever the true reasons may be, Juan Pujol walked away from a comfortable life in a neutral country, and, acting entirely on his own, for no discernable personal motive, and certainly without being asked, convinced German military intelligence that he was not only anxious to hasten the Axis victory in Europe, but also in a position to do so. The first was a big lie, the second was a big joke, but for reasons forever inexplicable, the Germans swallowed them both entire.

No one in Berlin tumbled to the fact that it was all a charade, a boutade, not even when Arabel reported that some Glasgow navvies had their tongues loosened by a bottle of wine, or that the stifling summer heat caused a great many Londoners to abandon the capital. Nor could they imagine that the 22 sub-agents reporting to Arabel from strategic points throughout the UK did not, well…exist. It appears Juan Pujol liked to invent characters and make up stories about them, not least of all about himself.

No one in Berlin ever realized that Arabel was not filing his summaries from Britain. In point of fact, their star agent had never in his life set foot in that country, whose currency system baffled him. Instead, he was lying low in Lisbon between July, 1941 and April, 1942 routing the reports he concocted through the German military attaché in Madrid. It was during this period he made four approaches to the British, all of them rebuffed, until his report of a non-existent RN flotilla heading to break the siege of Malta caused the Germans to alter the course of their Mediterranean fleet and the British to take his offer seriously.

It is after Pujol gets whisked off to London that the documentary starts playing footsie with history, suggesting that he carried on just as he had been doing from Lisbon, a free spirit retailing fanciful fabrications to the Germans as they occurred to him. Not so; the Garbo sideshow was immediately taken over as franchise of British Intelligence. All of the product processed by the Abwehr from that point on was carefully devised and dosed out by senior MI6 experts and routed through Tomás Harris, the enigmatic Anglo-Spanish agent runner who became Pujol’s contact, confidante and case officer.

Tommy Harris gets mentioned exactly once in this film without making his role clear. It was he, for example, who saw to it that a trumped-up obituary appeared in the papers when one of their nominal agents had to be killed off in order to maintain operational cover. Harris can perhaps be thought of as managing director of the new London-based Garbo, Ltd. with MI6 big shots such as Cyril Bertram Mills huddled in the executive boardroom setting the strategic priorities while the founder, his presence more indispensible than ever to the firm’s success, is relegated to a figurehead position outside the decision-making loop.

But the narcissistic nationalists who run Catalonia evidently want the world to acknowledge that it was saved by one of their local lads. Billing Juan Pujol as the man who saved D-Day would not be stretching the truth nearly so far, however, and this is what author Michael Seaman opted for in preparing his edition of Tommy Harris’s case file on the Garbo operation that was declassified in 2003. In the film, Seaman explains how the Germans were gulled by Garbo into keeping their main forces deployed in the Pas de Calais area instead of Normandy, while at the same time making it clear this was part of the grander “Fortitude” deception scheme devised by the Allied High Command.

At war’s end, Garbo he was awarded the Iron Cross by the grateful Germans, along with an MBE, and thenabruptly vanished from the scene. He left behind a stunningly beautiful wife and three children, who were later told that their father had died in Angola. Actually, he went to live his life over again in Venezuela complete with a new wife and family. Not only was the spy formerly known as Garbo erased from history, so was his alter ego, Juan Pujol García, until Allason tracked him down in time for him to come back and take part in the 40th anniversary D-Day commemorations and pick up his MBE at Buckingham Palace.

This in its skeletal form, is the Garbo story, and well worth the telling though it is, if you are going to do it on film you should get somebody who knows how to use that medium in its historical documentary mode. Why are there no interviews with people who actually knew Pujol, starting with his two sets of three children each? There is a granddaughter with whom he is said to have developed a closeness, but only the nephew who put Allason on the trail that led to Venezuela is featured. Pujol’s first wife, Araceli García was very much a part of the spy operation and may have confided details of it to others. She might well have known the answers to many of the questions raised in this film and in some instances, I have the feeling she might well have been the answer.

So what do you put on the screen while the heads are talking? Unfortunately and unforgivably, the director has assembled a potpourri of archival clips from movies of the period. Making a collage out of B-movie stock shots is worse than just film-school jejune, it trivializes and diminishes the fact that World War II was more than a text to be deconstructed by cutting from a monocled, uniformed and bogus impersonation of Nazi bestiality, a Curt Jurgens or Adolphe Menjou or William Powell plotting some new deviltry with a swastika-emblazoned secret weapon, to authentic newsreel footage of a starved child in a concentration camp.

To claim that mixing fact and fiction is exactly what Garbo himself did is a ninny’s excuse. But among these celluloid tesserae, there is one film that does, I think, suggest a valid approach to understanding Garbo and his motives: Alec Guinness’s brilliant performance in Our man in Havana gives us an ordinary character whose secret talent for fantastical improvisation and deadpan effrontery is just what the masters of the clandestine world are pre-disposed to believe. For me, that juxtaposition brings the historical Garbo into sharper focus and points also in the direction of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 movie, catch me If you can.

At one point in this documentary, the psychiatrist Stan Vranckx observes that as a rule, it take two to make a deception; the deceiver and the deceived, and both must draw on their respective reserves of counter-intuitive perversity in order for the deception to work. It seems inexplicable that German High Command should have believed in Juan Pujol García, until you recall that they had already let themselves believe in somebody even more preposterous and manifestly incapable of making good on his undertakings than Garbo was, and that was Adolf Hitler.

See the film’s homepage here: http://www.garbothemovie.com/EN/homeEN.php