Churchill's Spy Files

by Nigel West

  In his statements Fraval was confused over the crossing of the Franco/Spanish frontier in four cars. Unversagt explained that one new car was for a Spaniard on the frontier and therefore only three of the four cars continued into Spain; this necessitated a change of seating accommodation. There are no other observations on the report and it remains to identify various vague persons described by Fraval.

  Similarly, with Feyguine, Unversagt had some observations that were helpful for MI5’s reassessment of the case:

  Not until the alias Riquier was mentioned did Unversagt recognise Feyguine as an agent who had twice been in Brussels. The name Feyguine is unknown to him and he could not recall this individual from the photograph shown to him.

  It was in about February 1943, whilst in Paris, that Unversagt was introduced to a French agent who it was suggested could be sent to England. Unversagt suggested that he be sent to Brussels where a meeting first took place at the Rotisserie Ardennaise in the Boulevard Adolphe Max. Subsequently this agent paid another visit to Brussels, but it cannot be recalled why he was not taken on for training by Ast Belgium. At this time Unversagt was paying frequent visits to Germany in connection with his brother’s illness.

  As regards Unversagt’s pre-war activities, he provided a detailed account of his movements, and this suggested his only visit to England had been five months in 1931 when he stayed with the Hewlett family at the Palace Hotel in Brixton as an exchange student while their daughter was at Bad Ems. Soon afterwards he had contracted tuberculosis, and when he was called up for military service in September 1939 he was posted as an interpreter to Stalag XIIA, a PoW camp in Limburg, In February 1940 he was transferred to Colonel Walter Sensburg’s Abstelle in Wiesbaden, but actually spent several months at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos. When he was declared medically fit he was sent to an Abwehr training school at Le Touquet where two agents, José Waldberg and Karl Meier, were undergoing training for missions to England. Both would be captured, examined at Camp 020, and hanged.4

  Unversagt was released from Camp 020 in October 1945 and returned to the American zone of occupation in Germany.

  14

  5 MAY 1944

  As well as mentioning the now familiar figures of TRICYCLE and DREADNOUGHT, the thirteenth of Petrie’s reports described the interdiction of three enemy spies, Joseph Vanhove, Alejandro Urzaiz and José Polo, the recent trial of Pierre Neukermans, whose case had been described in Chapter 11, and the subversive activities of a group of local Communist revolutionaries.

  At the time of drafting, José Polo was still held in custody in Gibraltar, awaiting a flight to England, and it was only when he was interrogated at Camp 020, a week or so after the report had been delivered to the Prime Minister, that SIS realised that their man in Barcelona had been duped by a very plausible liar. Far from offering interesting information about the Abwehr, Polo proved to be an accomplished fraudster who had sold his services to both the British and the Germans, and had played each off against the other, to the point that SIS had invited him to spend a fortnight in Gibraltar, meeting someone who was promised to be a senior intelligence officer. Worse, SIS had obligingly passed Polo down a clandestine escape route through an SOE safe house in Seville, where he had joined an MI9 felucca for the voyage to Gibraltar.

  When it was finally acknowledged that Polo was nothing more than a fabricator, SIS was left with quite a dilemma, because by then he had acquired some sensitive information about SOE, MI9 and Camp 020. In those circumstances he could hardly be allowed to return to Spain so, to ensure his silence, he was detained until four months after the end of hostilities in Europe, by which time his information could do no harm.

  APRIL 1944

  A. SPIES.

  1) Three more enemy agents of interest have been placed under detention, two Spaniards and one Belgian. The latter-named, Joseph Jan Van Hove, arrived in Sweden early last year, ostensibly as a deserter from the crew of a German merchant ship. He said that he wished to come to England in order to join the Belgian Forces. Owing to various difficulties of transport he was not brought to this country until recently. On his first examination he persisted in his original story, but has now confessed that he was sent to England as a spy. He had been provided with instruments for secret writing disguised as matches, one of which was found on him, and during his time in Sweden had in fact written some fifteen letters to his spy-master. He awaits prosecution.

  2) The first of the two Spaniards, Alejandro Urzaiz Guzman, was detained at Trinidad, He was then returning to Spain from a journey in Cuba, Mexico and the United States as a representative of a Spanish bank. Urzaiz is known to us from Most Secret Sources as an enemy agent. While he was at Cuba the German Secret Service paid considerable sums of money to him, partly for himself and partly for the use of their local representative. So far, however, Urzaiz, who is now under interrogation in this country, has maintained a stubborn silence. He admits that he received the sums referred to, but protests that the transaction was not in any way connected with the Germans, and that any mysterious circumstances surrounding it are attributable to his desire to avoid Spanish currency restrictions. It is evident, however, that the Germans attach importance to Urzaiz as, since his arrest, a protest has been received from the Spanish Government at the instigation of General Jordana, who has in fact been moved to intervene in the matter by another of the Spanish Government who, there is reason to believe, is acting on behalf of the Germans.

  3) The second Spaniard, an individual named José Polo, was arrested in Gibraltar. It is not clear whether he had at that time a mission from the Germans to spy in Gibraltar, but it is known that he had previously worked for the Secret Service in France, Germany and Spain. He will be transferred to this country, as it is anticipated that he may have information of interest to say about his employers.

  4) It appears from Most Secret sources that Juan Brandes, one of the representatives of the German Secret Service in Lisbon, claims to have despatched an agent to England on the 15th April and expects to be in a position to send another at some date after the 29th. Particulars are available about these two agents which should enable us to identify them if indeed they exist, but previous enquiries which we have had occasion to make into the workings of Brandes’ organisation suggest that they are more likely to be products of his imagination. Our information is that Brandes himself, a disagreeable young man of 23, is far from loyal to his employers, and has been maintaining himself in Lisbon as a Secret Service agent for some years as a means, among other things, of avoiding military service.

  5) Neukermans, the Belgian spy mentioned in previous reports, was sentenced to death at the Old Bailey on Monday, 1st May. It will be recalled that after passing through the London Reception Centre, Neukermans was at large for some six months in this country before he was recognised by someone who had known him on the continent and was exposed in his true colours.

  There has been the possibility of other persons like Neukermans slipping through the net that has led the Security Service uniformly to resist the pressure sometimes brought to bear on them to shorten the period of detention at the LRC of aliens arriving in this country, which could only result in lowering of the standard of thoroughness required for the proper scrutiny of these persons.

  B. SPECIAL AGENTS.

  The agent TRICYCLE has now returned from visiting his masters in Lisbon. He has once more succeeded in convincing them of his complete reliability and has extracted from them a large sum in dollars as an advance against his future services. So far as the Germans knew, his reason for visiting Lisbon was that he is acting as the organiser of an escape route on behalf of the Yugoslav Government. This undertaking has now the cordial support of the German Secret Service, who hope to use it as a means of reinforcing their network in England. In practice, however, the effect will be the opposite, since the escapers are selected in London and sent from Yugoslavia by TRICYCLE’s brother, DREADNOUGHT. The latter, who visited TRICYCLE while he was in Lisbon, and
brought with him a number of personal messages from General Mihailovitch to King Peter, has now become one of the Abwehr’s most important agents in Yugoslavia. He has been advanced to the rank of Sonder-führer or Lieutenant-Colonel. He has since returned to Yugoslavia to continue his work of sabotaging the local manifestations of Goering’s Four Year Plan. Apart from his work for German Military Intelligence, TRICYCLE has now also established a connection in Himmler’s organisation to whom he has delivered a political report, and from whom he has received an interesting questionnaire. They appear to have the highest opinion of him and are taking steps to ensure that his work for them remains unknown to other German masters.

  C. SABOTAGE.

  1. The Security Service has been investigating a case of sabotage on HMS Aylmer, when sand was placed in the gearing of the mainshaft of the turbo-blower. One culprit was identified as Stoker Petty-Officer P.E.L. Land. He pleaded in extenuation of his offence that he had domestic troubles, and therefore wished to delay the sailing of the ship. He was dismissed from the service and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

  2. Three more saboteurs belonging to Himmler’s organisation have been arrested in Italy. They had been instructed to destroy one target of the ordinary type, and in addition to assassinate Generals Alexander and Mark Clark.

  C. TROTSKYITE.

  Correspondence between Roy Tearse, an industrial organiser of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and Heaton Lee, a Tyneside organiser, was intercepted and showed that they were naively interesting themselves in the strike of ship-yard apprentices. Papers were submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who instructed that searches be made of the premises of the Party and certain of its leaders in London, Newcastle, Glasgow and Nottingham. On evidence revealed in the searches, warrants were issued for the arrest of Roy Tearse, Jock Haston, the national organiser of the Party, and Heaton Lee and his assistant Anne Keen. All these persons are new in custody and have been charged with conspiracy to incite or instigate a strike contrary to the provisions of the Trade Unions and Trade Disputes Act of 1927.

  E. LEAKAGES.

  Despite the efforts which have been made in so many ways to prevent leakage of information occurring through careless talk and the like, cases continue to be reported, of which the following are examples:-

  A woman employed as a book-folder in the Confidential Section of HM Stationery Office disclosed to fellow-workers at a Civil Defence First Aid Post, where she did part-time duty, information regarding a confidential publication with which she had been dealing. She was prosecuted and sentence to three months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

  A fireman telephonist wrote a letter to a friend disclosing information which he had received in the course of his duties recording air raid damage. He was prosecuted and fined £50.

  A doctor at Portsmouth saw fit to draw a sketch of certain devices which were being prepared in connection with future operations. He was prosecuted and fined in all £75.10.00.

  A workman employed in connection with the preparation of devices for use in future operations wrote a letter describing their nature and purpose. He was prosecuted and fined £25.

  5th May 1944

  * * *

  The Spanish case referred to, Alejandro Guzman Urzaiz, originated in January 1944 with the FBI when the routine inspection of the transatlantic mail showed a payment made to him in Cuba from a compromised source, a 24-year-old model, Valentina Kurz, in Spain and Portugal. This led the FBI’s liaison officer in London, Arthur Thurston, to alert MI5’s Herbert Hart, and to a request that the 45-year-old Urzaiz, a Siemens employee, be detained when he sailed from New Orleans to Spain in February on the Spanish SS Magallanes. When the ship docked at Trinidad in February there would be an opportunity to seize Urzaiz, who had been identified from decrypts as a Nazi spy, although the FBI’s surveillance of him in the United States and Cuba had not produced any evidence. However, ISOS had incriminated him when he left Bilbao at the end of August 1943 bound for Havana on the Marques de Comillas, apparently representing the Banco Exterior de España but without a diplomatic passport. In several of the decrypts he was referred to by the code name VIENTO. After Urzaiz’s arrest his wife, Matilde, was allowed to continue her journey.

  When questioned by the FBI in Trinidad Urzaiz insisted that his trip to Cuba had been an opportunity to visit his wife’s relatives in Mexico and conduct some banking business. When challenged about the transfer of large sums from Spain and Portugal, he claimed that the money, amounting to $21,000, was a black market currency transaction. Further than that, he admitted nothing apart from acknowledging that he had spotted surveillance and lodged a complaint about it to the Mexican intelligence service, which happened to be headed by a friend of his wife’s family.

  Coincidentally, Fernando Kobbe was sailing on the same vessel, but he was protected by his consular status. However, when word reached Madrid of Urzaiz’s arrest, either through Kobbe or a report in the Daily Express, the Spanish foreign minister, Francisco Jordana, immediately protested, through the British embassy in Madrid and the Spanish ambassador in London. Meanwhile, Urzaiz was flown to Bermuda and placed on the frigate HMS Torrington for the voyage, via a brief stop at St John’s, Newfoundland, to Belfast, where he landed in 20 April 1944 for transfer to Brixton prison and then Camp 020.

  Under interrogation Urzaiz conceded only that he had broken Spanish currency regulations, and refused to name the source of the money he received in Cuba, which ISOS confirmed was the Abwehr. In conclusion, Camp 020 could ‘not prove Urzaiz guilty of any intent or action on behalf of the enemy and against the interest of the Allies although it is implicit in his refusal to identify material contacts and satisfactorily explain his financial arrangements’. Nevertheless, his detention was continued and the stalemate was perpetuated with MI5 unwilling to divulge the nature of the evidence against him. ‘Either the FBI and the British authorities were bluffing, in which case Urzaiz saw no reason to confess, or we had evidence which we were unwilling to produce. The latter is correct, for the security of Source is worth more than an admission from Urzaiz.’

  Given that it is likely that the clumsy surveillance warned off Urzaiz from incriminating himself, and there was really no evidence that he had accomplished more than making contact with the Abwehr in Madrid, it is remarkable that Petrie singled him out for the Prime Minister’s attention. So far as could be ascertained, Urzaiz had not completed any espionage assignment, and although some of his currency was unaccounted for, it seemed unlikely that he had been able to hand on very much cash to any alleged Abwehr representative in Cuba. In July 1944 Kim Philby, as head of SIS’s Iberian counter-intelligence branch, was consulted on what statement should be made to the Spanish government, and the decision was taken to say the bare minimum. Accordingly, Urzaiz remained in custody until August 1945, when he was escorted by a pair of Special Branch detectives to Portsmouth, placed aboard HMS Glasgow and released in Gibraltar.

  * * *

  Identified in ISOS as the head of the Berlin Ast in Lisbon, Juan Brandes appeared initially to be an exceptionally able and dangerous adversary, managing agents in many theatres, including one in Egypt in July 1942, although this information only emerged from the cryptanalysts in December of that year. Other reports on Brandes were supplied by Section V’s Martin Lloyd, who handled a double-agent code-named VIPER, actually the concierge at the Hotel Aviz, and had been assigned the task of penetrating the Lisbon Abwehr. To assist in the cause MI5’s Richmond Stopford and Section V’s John de Salis were posted to Portugal and offered another asset, code-named CHLOE, to be introduced by VIPER to Brandes. By way of background, ARTIST mentioned that Brandes was partly Jewish and had been posted to Lisbon personally by Admiral Canaris to keep him out of danger. TRICYCLE confirmed this, and opined that Brandes was anti-Nazi and very pro-British. He was also strongly suspected of having fabricated his network of Swiss sub-agents, which meant that his sole source was VIPER, whose principal function was to photocopy the
passports of his hotel’s guests.

  Brandes claimed to have an agent in England, another in the United States, and two in South America, with whom he maintained contact through Swiss diplomats. However, there was growing belief in London that Brandes was a fraud, emulating notorious fabricator Paul Fidrmuc, code-named OSTRO.

  1. Hans Brandes is an agent or representative of Ast Berlin and of HKW who has made Lisbon the centre of his operations. He controls or claims to control a fairly extensive network of agents. A number of them appear to be Jewish, or at least to be based on Switzerland. The particulars available about them on secret sources suggest that they are, at least ostensibly, of a higher grade than most Abwehr agents. The principal ones of whom we have knowledge are:

  INSTERBURG, tentatively identified by SIS as Paul Rene Keller of a Swiss transport firm in Lisbon.

  AESCULAP who was said to have been in Cairo in July, 1942, and subsequently to have left for de Gaulle’s headquarters at Fort Lamy. He was later reported in Portuguese Guinea and last heard of in Freetown in January 1943.

  BUNSEN probably a Swiss, who was in New York in October when he returned to Switzerland via London.

  In December of the same year he was said to be about to return to England. More recent evidence shows that he has now returned to Switzerland after having apparently been in London.

  The IRA Man. Nothing is known of this man except that he is an Irishman member of the IRA, who was intended in November 1942 for Estonia, which may, in that context, have been a cover name for England.

  PETTERMANN Another agent, possibly connected in some way with AESCULAP, who was intended for this country in January 1941. We know nothing of him except that according to Brandes was full of good prospects.