Churchill's Spy Files
Page 16
In mid-December 1940 he turned up at Lisbon and left a prearranged message at the British Passport Control Office for Richmond Stopford, the SIS head of station. Stopford arranged for his flight to Bristol on 20 December where he was met by a suitably briefed MI5 officer, Jock Horsfall, a former racing driver, who escorted him to the Savoy Hotel in London.
When debriefed, Popov revealed that his German contact in Lisbon, ‘Ludovico von Karstoff’ (actually Albrecht von Auenrode) was attached to the German Legation, and that he had been given the identity of an emergency contact in London, a Czech named Georges Graf. Popov was introduced to ‘Bill Matthews’, who was to act as his handler and was actually William Luke. Popov’s task of creating an import-export firm was assisted by MI5, which installed him in a prestigious office in Imperial House, Regent Street and a company entitled Tarlair Limited, a name devised by Tommy Robertson. His secretary, Gisela Ashley, was also thoughtfully provided by MI5, as was his manager, Mrs Brander, and although Popov never spotted it, he was kept under constant surveillance and his flat in Park Street was fitted with hidden listening devices.
In January 1941 Popov returned to Lisbon to report on his progress to von Auenrode, and then travelled to Madrid where he was met for further debriefing by Jebsen. In between his meetings with the Germans he kept secret appointments with SIS’s Ralph Jarvis, and reported that he had received instructions to develop his operation in London a stage further by recruiting two of his contacts, his attractive Austrian girlfriend, Friedle Gaertner, code-named GELATINE, and a former army officer, Dickie Metcalfe, code-named BALLOON.
As Popov acquired his two sub-agents so MI5 gave him a new, more appropriate cryptonym, TRICYCLE. After his return from Lisbon in February 1941 Popov handed MI5 a questionnaire that he had been instructed to complete that provided a useful insight into the enemy’s intelligence requirements and revealed the quality of the information already in its possession. In addition, Popov was requested to complete a detailed study of the defences along a stretch of the English coastline from the Wash in Norfolk to Southampton. He was also specifically asked: ‘When are five battleships of King George V class ready?’ Popov also revealed that the purpose of recruiting GELATINE and BALLOON was so they could continue operations in England, leaving him free to undertake a special mission in America.
This new assignment was discussed by von Auenrode and Popov when they met again in Lisbon at the end of February 1941 as Popov delivered a favourable report on his two new sub-agents and offered a solution to the Abwehr’s problem of establishing a permanent, reliable conduit to its agents in England through which they could receive money. Popov’s ingenious solution was to suggest Plan MIDAS.
Popov was to go back to Lisbon in March 1941 to make one last interim report before his American assignment and to finalise MIDAS. While the Abwehr was keen to proceed with the plan to finance TATE, it showed less enthusiasm for a map that Popov pretended he had obtained from an acquaintance in the Royal Navy. It supposedly charted the location of minefields along Britain’s east coast, but the matter was pursued no further, apparently because the Germans believed the document to be out of date. The remainder of the visit was spent in preparation of Popov’s forthcoming voyage across the Atlantic, which was to be made, theoretically at least, on behalf of the Ministry of Information in London to assess the effect of British propaganda on Yugoslavs in America.
Popov had travelled to Portugal, for the fourth time that year, on 26 June and received a briefing from von Auenrode concerning the tasks he was to undertake while in the United States. In addition he was given a questionnaire that, using microphotography, had been reduced to the size of six full stops concealed on a telegram so as to escape any search Popov would be put through in Bermuda or New York. This development created great interest in London because microphotography was then quite a novelty and this was one of the very first examples of its operational use. As for the questionnaire itself, a large part of it related to naval installations in Hawaii, which, though poorly translated by the FBI, was to take on a greater significance after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor four months hence.
Popov arrived in Manhattan on 12 August escorted by SIS’s John Pepper and Hamish Mitchell, whom he had met in Bermuda, but while MI5 had been delighted by the double-agent’s performance, the FBI was decidedly cool to the prospect of an enemy agent’s arrival. Nevertheless, British Security Coordination had arranged for Popov to be interviewed by Lieutenant Chambers from the US Office of Naval Intelligence and G-2’s Captain Murray at the Waldorf Hotel on Saturday, 14 August, and according to the official report of the encounter, Popov had information about ‘five or six German agents operating in the US’. This news was promptly passed to the FBI on the following Monday morning. The FBI’s initial reaction to Popov’s arrival appears to have been lukewarm, judging by the twelve-page report written by an FBI Assistant Director, Earl J. Connelley, following a three-hour meeting that was held on Wednesday 18 August, six days after Popov’s arrival. The next morning he was introduced to Percy J. Foxworth, the FBI special agent assigned to his case, and it was on this occasion that Popov showed him his personal codebook, and a sample of the crystals the Abwehr had supplied him with to make secret ink. It has been suggested that Hoover did not much care for Popov’s behaviour, or his morals. Certainly on one occasion the FBI wrecked an amorous weekend and brought Popov back to New York after he had attempted to take a girlfriend to Florida in September, thereby crossing state lines for an immoral purpose, contrary to the federal statute known as the Mann Act. While Popov was in the US responsibility for supervision of his day-to-day conduct lay with Charles F. Lanman, the special agent reluctantly assigned to his case by the FBI. Popov entrusted Lanman with his code, based on the novel Night and Day, and established himself in an apartment at 530 Park Avenue, New York, spending the weekends at a cottage in Locust Valley, Long Island, with his newly acquired girlfriends, Terry Brown and the French movie actress Simone Simon. As agreed with the FBI, he did mail a few reports to Portugal but, by October, he had received no acknowledgement of them, which led MI5 to fear the Abwehr was losing interest in him. The situation was saved by a message from Lisbon ordering Popov to travel to Brazil and report to Albrecht Engels, code-named ALFREDO, at the German firm AEG in Rio.
During his three weeks in Rio Popov held several meetings with ALFREDO and received instructions to establish a radio station in America to communicate with Rio and Lisbon, and to collect information on war production, the composition and destination of transatlantic convoys, and technical developments in the field of anti-submarine warfare. Popov’s extended contact with the personable Engels served to compromise him, especially when he topped up IVAN’s dwindling funds.
Popov returned by ship to New York triumphant but the FBI remained uncooperative in helping him to collect suitable information for his wireless link, to the point that in March 1942 SIS disclosed that it had learned the Abwehr was having second thoughts about IVAN’s loyalty, and there was a belief that he had come under the FBI’s control since his arrival in the United States the previous August. This had been revealed in ISOS decrypts that, inexplicably, SIS had refused to share with MI5 until the following May, by which time the situation had deteriorated into a major crisis. Finally SIS revealed an ISOS text from Berlin to Lisbon, dated 21 March, instructing IVAN’s handler to test him with a question about his salary. Once again, Popov was running low on funds, had failed to pay several overdue bills, including one on his telephone, and the FBI refused to finance his extravagant partying. He had replied to the query from Lisbon entirely unaware that it had been designed to confirm his bona fides, and was not told that another ISOS intercept from Berlin, dated 5 May, advised that the Abwehr’s Luftwaffe branch had concluded IVAN had been ‘turned’. In August an exasperated FBI asked SIS to withdraw Popov, and two months later he returned to Portugal, escorted by MI5’s Ian Wilson, having been warned by BSC that the he might receive a less than warm welcome. Ign
orant of the full circumstances, or that the Abwehr had become very suspicious of him, Popov put on a bravura performance in Lisbon, complaining that German parsimony had handicapped his ability to fulfil his mission, and was rewarded with a new assignment in London and $20,000. Naturally, these events were monitored through ISOS, although Popov was never indoctrinated into the source used by MI5 to check on his status and integrity. Not all the thirty-six letters he had mailed from the United States had been received at their destination, and there was some dissatisfaction that he had been unable to travel to Hawaii. Popov defended himself vigorously, claiming that shortage of funds had reduced his efficiency, and gradually won the Abwehr over. They rewarded him with $26,000 and 75,000 Escudos, and on 17 October reported to Berlin that Popov’s integrity as a German spy was undiminished.
Popov’s fourteen months in the western hemisphere served to highlight the different attitudes prevailing in London and Washington DC about the way double-agents should be exploited, but the experience, although damaging for the FBI’s increasingly tense relationship with BSC, had proved helpful in solving the problem of authorising the release of information suitable for distribution to double-agents, an obstacle which had hamstrung Popov, was eventually solved in January 1943 by the creation of an Anglo–American coordinating body, known as Joint Security Control.
Popov spent a week in Lisbon placating his German controllers, and then flew back to London with the seeds of yet another ingenious scheme in mind, this time to free some of his brother’s friends from Yugoslavia on the pretext that they could be recruited as agents, among them Eugn Sostaric.
Following his success Popov decided to try the same trick again and in mid-July 1943 flew to Portugal but, instead of travelling under his civilian cover of an international commercial lawyer, he went with a diplomatic passport, having been called up for Yugoslav military service, or so he told Jebsen who met him in Lisbon. The idea was to persuade the Abwehr to allow a group of Yugoslav officers who had been interned in Switzerland to escape to Spain. As Popov had anticipated, the Germans had seized on the proposal because it presented them with a useful method of infiltrating agents into the Allied forces. Indeed, the Abwehr had been so taken with the scheme that they had asked Ivo Popov, who had now been enrolled into the organisation with officer rank, to supervise the Yugoslav end of the escape route. This was exactly what Popov had wanted, for it left him with an officially sponsored underground railroad across Europe on which Ivo could send friends with little fear of enemy interference.
TRICYCLE’s adventures would continue well into the following year, but by the time Petrie introduced him into the Churchill reports, in September 1943, he was well-established as one of MI5’s star performers and the head of its stable of Yugoslav agents, which he was about to expand. The new double-agent mentioned in the report, alongside the familiar characters TRICYCLE and MUTT, was TATE, actually a Dane, Wulf Schmidt, who had parachuted into Cambridgeshire in September 1940 and ‘turned’ at Camp 020.3
Originally from Abenra in the German territory of Schleswig–Holstein, Schmidt had been recruited by the Abwehr in 1939 after his return from working overseas, first as general manager on a cattle ranch in Argentina, and then growing bananas for a fruit company in the Cameroons. Schmidt served in the Danish army, stationed in Copenhagen, and had then volunteered for what he had believed would be a short stay in England. He spoke good English, albeit with a heavy accent, and his task was to carry out a reconnaissance prior to a German invasion. Although he was to parachute solo, he was actually one of several agents to be dropped into England during September 1940. Of the others, Goesta Caroli, a Swede by birth who had made two short visits to the Birmingham area just before the outbreak of hostilities, was known to him as they had been trained in Hamburg together, and they had arranged to meet in England.
Schmidt was flown to England by an ace Luftwaffe pilot, Captain Karl Gartenfeld, and dropped over RAF Oakington, close to the village of Willingham. He spent just a few short hours at liberty for he was challenged by a member of the local Home Guard in Willingham soon after he had completed his breakfast in a cafe. When he was searched Schmidt was found to be carrying £132, $160, a genuine Danish passport in the name of Wulf Schmidt, and a forged British identity card bearing the details of ‘Harry Williamson’, bearing an address in London that had been suggested to the Abwehr by another of MI5’s double-agents, Arthur Owens. Under interrogation Schmidt initially stuck rigidly to his cover story, but when MI5 demonstrated that Caroli had been in custody since his arrival and that he had already made a very full confession, Schmidt cracked. Finally, after a session with MI5’s psychiatrist, Dr Harold Dearden, Schmidt agreed to cooperate and accompanied his captors back to Willingham, where he recovered his parachute and radio from their hiding places. At midnight on 16 October he transmitted his call sign, D-F-H, and reported to Hamburg, under the supervision of MI5’s wireless expert, Ronnie Reed, that he had found lodgings near Barnet. In reality he had been installed with Tommy Robertson and his wife at Roundbush House, Radlett.
MI5 was persuaded to accept Schmidt as a double-agent by the transparent candor of his initial statement in which he identified a dance band pianist named Pierce as a key member of an existing Abwehr circuit whose name had been given to Schmidt in Hamburg in case of emergencies. In reality the pianist was known to MI5 as RAINBOW and had been operating under Robertson’s guidance since February. This item provided MI5 with useful confirmation that Schmidt, now dubbed TATE (because of his resemblance to the music hall comedian Harry Tate), was telling the truth, and that the Abwehr continued to believe RAINBOW was an authentic source.
While claiming to have found work on a farm, Schmidt acquired a notional girlfriend named Mary who often stayed with him at the weekend, and was a cipher clerk based at the Admiralty. In November 1942 she was loaned by the Admiralty to the US Naval Mission and supposedly introduced Schmidt to British and American naval officers who, towards the end of 1942, carelessly left classified documents for him to read.
Schmidt also played a role in the deception campaign to cover the D-Day landings, and was able to report General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s arrival in England in January 1944, to take up his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander, even before the news had been officially released. His farm in Radlett was too far from the coast to make any useful observations so Schmidt’s employer sent him to spend the summer on a friend’s farm near Wye in Kent. From this location he monitored troop movements and he participated in STARKEY, a deception mounted during the summer of 1943 designed to persuade the Germans of an imminent attack in the Pas-de-Calais region, so as to reduce the pressure on the hard-pressed Russian front. As a precaution, a special GPO landline from London was constructed to the notional remote transmitting site in Kent so if the Germans ever decided to use direction-finding equipment to check on the source of Schmidt’s transmissions, it would confirm his location in the south-east. In March 1944 Schmidt supported the D-Day cover plan, code-named FORTITUDE NORTH, intended to convey the impression that the forthcoming Allied assault on Europe would take place in Scandinavia, so Schmidt reported that, by chance, he had learned that the British minister in Stockholm, Victor Mallet, had been brought home to London for urgent consultations with the Foreign Office.
After the success of D-Day Schmidt was employed collecting information on the time and location of V-1 explosions. This data was vital for correcting the aim of the weapon and it had been Whitehall’s intention to suggest to the enemy that many of the rockets were overflying the capital, or at least impacting north of the centre, so their range would be shortened. On 21 September 1944 Schmidt passed a significant milestone, the transmission of his thousandth signal. His message read: ‘On the occasion of this, my 1,000th message I beg to ask you to convey to our Führer my humble greetings and ardent wishes for a speedy victorious termination of the war.’ Schmidt maintained contact with Hamburg until the very last days of the war, and was decorated with the Iron C
ross.
* * *
The espionage of Douglas Springhall had been mentioned, in the June 1943 report to the Prime Minister, when he had been arrested, and his would be the only example of a Soviet spy ring. However, the report did not go into any detail beyond passing brief comment on his accomplices, Mrs Olive Sheehan and Mrs Ray Milne. Unexplained was Springhall’s significance, for he really represented the very first evidence of the wholesale, deliberate CPGB penetration of Whitehall. MI5’s investigation of Springhall began with his diary, which was found to contain a record of his various meetings, among them a rendezvous on 9 April 1943 at the Pop-Inn Café in Leicester Square with Ormond Uren, Milne and Helen Gresson, the Scottish organiser of Russia Today. Springhall’s poor tradecraft would reveal the extent of the plot, and in September 1943, two months after Springhall’s conviction at the Old Bailey, MI5’s Roger Hollis sought the help of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch in an effort to identify some of the underground cell membership whose true names had been concealed by the adoption of a ‘Party name’. He explained that:
… a total of twenty-nine individuals who are or have been members of the Air Ministry Group. Of these we know the actual identity of eight, namely:
CONWAY
Miss E.G. GALLEY
HAYNES
Miss Joan MURRELL
JAMES
Miss H.J. DENYER
KELLY
Miss I.M. SCHOLL