WWII: Failed novelist becomes a spy for Germany, makes up a fake spy network | Hacker News Reader

WWII: Failed novelist becomes a spy for Germany, makes up a fake spy network

en.wikipedia.org

79 pointsFinnLobsien41 comments

I 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."

learned about this some years ago on tumblr of all places.

https://dumb-science-jokes.tumblr.com/post/172122916995/magp...

The casual, frank, oftentimes exaggerated style demonstrated here is one of my favourite narrative styles for learning history.

I 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

That 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.

hahaha never heard of that one. I like "write like your reader has to pee" lol

What about people reading on the toilette?

Write like your reader’s legs have fallen asleep.

That would do it! I just wonder, in which direction, shorter writing because people want to get up or longer because you are sitting anyways?

I found it really hard to follow and internalize the information

Strangely, there is no mention of the Graham Greene novel, Our Man in Havana.

Apparently Greene learned about García while working for MI6 and it inspired Our Man in Havana! https://earlybirdbooks.com/our-man-in-havana-excerpt

And then Our Man In Havana inspire le Carré to write the Tailor Of Panama. It's a story that keeps on giving!

I learned about this from an episode of Citation Needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blN49yGet8g

It's a great watch!

> instead he moved to Lisbon and created bogus reports about Britain from a variety of public sources

This would make a great series on HBO.

Eddie Chapman even more so!

The Ben MacIntyre anthology would be a winner

The 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.

The 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.

Plus a number of the members were outright British agents, notably in their training corps.

>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

Let’s be honest how aware were British citizens of events in Bengal under wartime censorship?

Also 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.

I 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?)

He can’t win in your books, he can join up with hitler or just do nothing and play with himself right?

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