Garbo: The Spy (2009)

Astounding documentary from director Edmon Roch about the first (and one of the only) deliberate double agents (most double agents are found out and then turned).  A Spanish guy who was just looking for a job, he pretended to be an ardent Hitler supporter around Madrid for a few weeks, then marched into the German Embassy in 1940 and offered his services as a spy, saying he regularly traveled to London (a lie) and spoke English (another lie).  They trained him, showing him tricks of their trade and vital encryption codes, and sent him to London.  Instead of hopping a boat to London, he spent 11 months in Lisbon lounging on a beach and using a travel book of England (!) to fool his employers that he was actually in London.  He made up every piece of information he gave them, when they grew suspicious, he would blame a contact (a person he fabricated) for the misinformation.

He was eventually hired by the British (who gave him the code name Garbo, saying he was "the greatest actor on earth") and shipped off to London, where he invented an elaborate network of contacts, each of them paid by the Germans (he had thirty or more completely imaginary contacts).  When his "contact" in Liverpool failed to report a British fleet deployment, he told the Nazis the contact had been ill.  Garbo then placed a bogus obituary in the local newspaper announcing this non-person's death, and not only did they swallow this, they sent a generous pension to his non-existent widow (pocketed by Garbo).

 He would purposely feed lies to the Germans, the Brits would give him enough true but harmless information to make him appear credible, and the Americans would give him vital information, but a few hours too late to do any harm.  His most cunning trick was to convince the Germans that Allied forces were planning on invading the French coast at Pas De Calais, not Normandy, claiming Normandy was the diversion and not the other way around.  They believed him, so much so that two months after D-Day, they still had most of their army poised at Pas De Calais, thus saving thousands of lives, on both sides.  A few weeks after Germany surrendered, he met with his secret Nazi contact in Madrid, who thanked him for his valuable service, handed him a fortune, and Garbo disappeared into thin air, never to be seen again (the Allies arrested the contact minutes after Garbo left).  That week, he was awarded the German Iron Cross (in absentia) and a month later was awarded Master of the British Empire (in absentia), the only person in history medaled by both sides.

The film itself is not anything out of the ordinary, a mixture of talking heads and clips of old spy movies.  But this guy's story is so extraordinary that I was totally enthralled during its breezy 82 minute running time.  Why a narrative film has not been made about this scoundrel is perplexing...perhaps because no one would believe it.