Matt Cole

I'm an engineer. I solve problems. I condense complexity to its lowest common denominator. I'm quiet, but don't get me wound up.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis.

The British turned him down.

So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war.

It worked better than anyone could have imagined.

His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination.

The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies.

He didn't go to Britain.

He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up.

Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports.

He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine.

The Germans loved him anyway.

Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of.

The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London.

Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world.

Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents.

When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow.

Who also didn't exist.

Then came D-Day.

Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant.

Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton.

That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him.

German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came.

The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross.

A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war.

After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop.

For decades the world thought he was dead.

In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches.

Some of them thanked him.

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

Oh, no. That would be TERRIBLE.

[Scott Dworkin @funder]

Republicans in Fort Worth closed 92 polling places to "save money." Day one of early voting: 50,409 people showed up. In 2022 it was 29,197. You can't cut your way out of this one, fellas. #BlueWaveIn10Days

[Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews]

The Attorney General is NOT the "Secretary of Justice"

The Attorney General is supposed to be independent of Presidential directives... according to former Atty Gen. Eric Holder

Holder spoke with MSNOW

[Students for Amy Acton @students4amy]

Amy Acton packed a 10,000 venue and gets a massive welcome in Cleveland

[Henry Winkler @hwinkler4real]

Marion is my friend , was an extraordinary acting partner , Marion is so wise and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO you, You are a loving Human

[Jody @IBtalking]

Kimberly @cspanwj Just for the Record.

Why is this so hard to air?

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

🚨BREAKING: On behalf of Mary Peltola's campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Elias Law Group has filed to fight DOJ's lawsuit to rig the Alaska Senate election.

We will win this case, Mary will win this election, she will be certified and seated.

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

It's Sunday, nine days out, and America hates Donald Trump.

Go vote.

[Hakeem Jeffries @RepJeffries]

MAGA extremists are focused on enriching themselves while gas prices continue to rise and the economy gets worse.

Enough.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

We’ve never seen corruption like this.

Under Trump, a whole pardon industry has grown up around the White House, with wealthy criminals paying well-connected insiders for a shot at clemency. Some have paid up to a million dollars. This case blows past all of them.

A billionaire banker named Julio Herrera Velutini was charged with trying to bribe Puerto Rico’s governor to fire the official investigating his bank. Herrera wanted his record wiped clean, so he went looking for a pardon from Trump.

Herrera’s daughter gave $3.5 million to a group supporting President Trump. Then the Herrera family offered Alina Habba, the President’s former personal lawyer, a job guaranteeing her more than $50 million over four years, at a company with no public profile. Habba signed the deal while she was still a federal prosecutor.

A few weeks after Habba started, Trump gave Herrera a full pardon.

No matter your party, we can all agree that justice should never be for sale. That’s why I helped start the End Corruption Caucus in Congress, and why I’m fighting to bring the pardon process out into the open.

Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

https://t.co/qToAVqMQEC

[NUKES @atomicarchive]

Project Salmon was a nuclear test detection research experiment (Vela Uniform). The 5.3 kt device tamped in place at the bottom of a 822-meter (2,700 feet) hole in the Tatum Salt Dome near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was detonated on October 22, 1964.

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

Sometimes I think Trump's DOJ exists to help me run up my win record. They file frivolous cases that they then litigate incompetently.

Yes, the Alaska case is a step towards authoritarianism, but we will fight and we will win. ⚖️🗳️

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

🚨BREAKING: Democrats have asked a federal judge to move quickly in their lawsuit seeking to stop the White House from threatening state and local election officials with criminal prosecution and demanding that states remove voters from registration rolls. https://t.co/kDPefi9tld

[Chuck Todd @chucktodd]

So Ramaswamy is making the argument that because his opponent was traumatized and abused as a child, she’s not qualified for office? Just astonishing how anti-human being this guy is. I have a feeling more voters will believe a candidate lacking shame or empathy is unqualified to represent a state the size of Ohio.

[Sean O'Leary @seanholeary1]

West Virginia AG, JB McCuskey, often decries "lawfare". But the most egregious example of lawfare is his use of his office to harass and silence WVians who dare to expose the economic, health, and environmental damage being done by fossil fuel industries. https://t.co/TzSpppILL1

[🇺🇸𝗢𝗹𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿⚓️ @USN_Submariner]

Incredible footage from May 1962: USS Ethan Allen (SSBN 608) executing the Operation Dominic Frigate Bird test. History's only submerged SLBM launch to end in a live nuclear detonation, firing a Polaris missile armed with a W47-Y1 600-kiloton warhead. With views from Balao-class submarine USS Carbonero (SS-337).

[Annie @AnnieForTruth]

🎯🎯🎯

[Canada Hates Trump @AntiTrumpCanada]

Trump’s brain is a synapse graveyard.
It’s so full of scrambled circuits, it couldn’t connect two fucking thoughts with a pair of jumper cables.

[Karen Piper @PiperK]

The questions the Vanity Fair journalist Matthew Cole asked Kushner's lawyer reveal that this scandal is huge, much bigger than today's article covers.

Matthew Cole has sure done his homework, and I can confirm some of it by following the Trump campaign and administration over the years. Now Kushner is trying to pretend he kept his head in the sand and knew nothing.