Double-Edged Sword

By: Steve Anderson

Narrated by: Max Roll

This concise, fast listen tells the true story of a self-made double agent who bluffed his way into the most ambitious Allied deception operation of WWII. In 1942, German military intelligence believed the Spaniard Juan Pujol Garcia was running a formidable spy network for them inside enemy Britain. In reality their man in London was making it all up, from Portugal. Pujol had fooled the Germans all on his own after the British embassies in Madrid and Lisbon rejected his services repeatedly. But soon British intelligence would smuggle the dogged double agent to London and build up his subterfuge under the code name Garbo. In 1944, Pujol aka Garbo took the lead on an elaborate Allied deception campaign that fooled Hitler and his generals about the D-Day invasion - and surely saved thousands of lives. Double-Edged Sword focuses solely on the most crucial moments of an epic double cross that Pujol was so uniquely built to pull off.

©2014 2014 Steve Anderson (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

A rivetting spy story

This is the fascinating story of double agent Juan Pujol García, an enterprising and courageous man who succeeded in making the Nazis believe that he was running a large network of pro-Nazi agents in the UK. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the Allied war effort was the part he played in deceiving the Nazis about the location of the Normandy landings in 1944. His wife's role in having him believed and accepted as a spy was equally enterprising and courageous, although she has no role after that and is painted as a liability after she joins Juan in the UK. After finishing the book I went to the internet to see photos of Juan and was surprised to find additional and sometimes contradictory information. Nonetheless, the story stands as a rivetting spy story and well worth reading. Max Roll does an excellent job with the narration.