As the child of poor peasant he was used to tending to his parents' cattle and goats.Garbely recollects in a biographical interview from 2018 that already as a primary-school pupil he was fascinated by news and reportages, especially from radio broadcasting.

[4] In June 1969, Garbely and the then 83-year-old Karl Dellberg [de], who was one of the founders of the socialist movement in the Upper Valais, published a jointly written essay with the provocative title "Orgasmus" in the youth magazine Reflex.

However, when the Migros-management fired editor-in-chief Roger Schawinski because of his left-wing editorial policy in September 1978 and the staff protested by going on strike, the company stopped publishing the paper altogether.

However, Garbely left the job already at the end of the same year following a conflict with co-founder Bodenmann about the separation of journalism and party politics in the editorial policy.

[5] While he kept on contributing to the Rote Anneliese,[15] he focused during the 1980s on writing as a freelance journalist for various print outlets of Swiss media, amongst them: In addition, he occasionally published stories in the Austrian news magazine Profil and the West German weekly Stern.

The event escalated into an open revolt when some of the farmers set train wagons on fire to block the railway line that linked Paris and Milan.

"[21] On 10 October 1987 Garbely and photographer Angelo Guarino from the Keystone photo agency went to Geneva International Airport upon the request of a former TAT-colleague who then worked at the Stern magazine in Hamburg.

[22] Shortly afterward Garbely confirmed on behalf of a team from Stern, which was en route to Geneva, that Barschel had checked into the five-star luxury hotel Beau Rivage.

Those film rolls provided the only reliable photos from the scene, since the camera used by the Genevan police investigators delivered under mysterious circumstances only flawed pictures.

With regard to Barschel's note about having taken a stroll close to the airport with the mysterious Robert Roloff, who could allegedly have been a witness to his defence, Garbely argued that this claim was impossible considering the evident check-in at the Beau Rivage.

[25] When Heinrich Wille became the chief prosecutor in Lübeck in 1994, the investigation into Barschel's death gained new momentum and Garbely went to the Northern German city to testify in court about his activities regarding the affair.

[22] Twenty years after Barschel's mysterious death, Garbely produced his own documentary film about the affair, focusing on the investigation by Griessen as well as on the findings by Hans Brandenberger [de], a retired professor of toxicology at the University of Zurich.

[27] Garbely's growing reputation as an investigative journalist raised the interest of the Schweizer Fernsehen – SF ("Swiss Television"), the public broadcaster for German-speaking Switzerland.

[29] In 1990, Garbely and his colleague Pascal Auchlin published the book Umfeld eines Skandals ("Environment of a Scandal"), which was based on court records and police files.

In 1991, Garbely wrote the script for the drama play "Seelenmarkt" ("Soul Market")[32] which was performed as part of the musical-theatrical spectacle Gratzug 91 ("Wild Hunt 91") in Brig-Glis to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the Old Swiss Confederacy.

[33] The Walliser Bote wrote in its review that the play demonstrated«in an oppressively impressive way that the past, history, does not only consist of political decisions, heroic wars and economic development, but always and above all of individual fates, which not only support this progress and heroism, but above all suffer it.»[34] Another outstanding scandal that Garbely worked on was the one which later became known as Operation Rubicon by the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Garbely started researching the subject at the beginning of 1993 when Hans Bühler, a Swiss sales engineer working for Crypto AG, was released from detention in Iran after almost one year.

[1] Subsequently, he started working freelance for the TV programme Mise au point ("Focus") of the French-language public broadcaster Télévision Suisse Romande (TSR).

He continued to pursue his long-standing interests, i.e. Switzerland's dealings with Nazi Germany, scandals involving intelligence services, drugs and arms trade (especially politically motivated assassinations), white-collar and environmental crimes as well as issues from his home canton of Valais.

In 2020, for instance, he published a reportage in the online newspaper INFOsperber [de] about how the Swiss pharmaceutical company Lonza has covered up highly toxic pollution from its industrial landfill site near Visp in Valais.