Churchill's Spy Files

by Nigel West

  THE WEASEL

  A Belgian ship’s physician, Dr Hilaire Westerlinck, from the liner Thysville, who landed in England with his wife in May 1942.

  THE WORM

  A Yugoslav, Stefan Zeiss, from Belgrade, recruited by Ivo Popov.

  TREASURE

  The French journalist Lily Sergueiev, known to the Abwehr as TRAMP, who arrived in London in November 1943. KV 2/466.

  TRICYCLE

  The Yugoslav playboy Dusan Popov, known to the Abwehr as IVAN. KV 2/848.

  ZIGZAG

  The British safe-cracker Eddie Chapman, known to the Abwehr as FRITZCHEN. KV 2/458.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1 TRIPLEX was a joint MI5-SIS clandestine operation that copied the content of certain diplomatic pouches sent to Lisbon, Madrid and Stockholm from their London missions. The project was managed by Anthony Blunt for MI5 and David Boyle for SIS.

  1 First Report, 2 April 1943

  1 No German saboteurs were ever landed in Palestine by U-boat, although in August 1942 an Abwehr courier, Jawad Hamadi, had been dispatched on U-372, but the submarine was sunk off Haifa.

  2 Charles O. Boyd was a South African student arrested in Scotland in November 1942 soon after his arrival from France. He had been compromised by ISOS, which revealed that he had been trained for an Abwehr mission to South Africa. He was interrogated at Camp 020, where he tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists, and was imprisoned for the remainder of the war at Dartmoor. The suggestion that he be run as a double-agent was vetoed by Prime Minister Jan Smuts. KV 2/1158.

  3 Gastao de Freitas, formerly employed by the Marconi Company in Lisbon, was a wireless operator on the Gil Eannes at the end of June 1942, when he was recruited by a German agent named Schmidt to make radio reports of his sightings of Allied shipping in the Atlantic. Compromised by ISOS, he was detained on 1 November 1942 by a destroyer, HMS Oribi, and taken to Gibraltar for transfer to Camp 020. After some initial resistance, de Freitas confessed to having broadcast encrypted reports of Allied shipping for enemy U-boats and was detained until the end of the war, when he was deported to Portugal. KV 2/2947.

  4 Manoel Mesquita dos Santos was a Portuguese journalist who left Lisbon at the end of April on a mission to Lourenço Marques. However, the ship returning him to Lisbon in October 1942 put in at Freetown, where he was arrested and transferred to Camp 020. KV 2/2108.

  5 Ernesto Simoes was arrested soon after his arrival at Poole from Lisbon at the end of July 1943, having been betrayed by ISOS that indicated he had been recruited in May and given a training course in secret writing by a well-known Abwehr figure, Kuno Weltzien. A well-travelled 31-year-old Portuguese aeronautical technician recruited by the Ministry of Labour, he was placed under surveillance by MI5 B6 watchers, and given discreet help to obtain a job at the Percival Aircraft factory in Luton, where he lodged with one of the other employees. He wrote a single letter to a German cover address in Lisbon, Lucia Gonzales, rua Jardin do Regador 29, 4o, and apart from seducing his landlady, Mrs Gibbs of 27 Alton Road, made no attempt to engage in espionage, even when he was encouraged to do so by an MI5 agent provocateur code-named EGGS who was fluent in Spanish and worked at the Napier factory assembling Sabre aero engines. Simoes did, however, receive a reply to his letter, concealing a message instructing him to use a new cover address in Lisbon: Maria da Conceição de Almeida, rua Astor Isadore 13–10. The decision to liquidate the case was taken because of the fear that he had found a method of communicating with the Abwehr undetected, and the general lack of progress over a period of three months’ surveillance.

  Simoes was arrested on 16 November 1943, questioned at Luton police station, where he made a partial confession, and then was transferred to Camp 020 for interrogation by Tommy Harris of B1(g). He signed a comprehensive confession in March 1943 and remained at Camp 020R, at Huntercombe Place, until June 1945, and was deported from Hurn to Lisbon by air in September 1945. KV 2/294.

  2 Second Report, 2 May 1943

  1 Johann (Julius) Hagemann was interrogated in Belgium at the end of the war. KV 2/32992.

  2 Werner Unversagt was interrogated by MI5 at the end of the war. KV2/90; KV2/91.

  3 OSTRO was Paul Fidrmuc, a Czech suspected of fabricating his information.

  3 Third Report, 1 June 1943

  1 Frank Duquesne was a German spy arrested by the FBI in New York in June 1941 and sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment. The prosecutions resulted in nineteen pleas of guilty and a total of thirty-two convictions but several of the couriers employed on Nord Deutsche-Amerika liners evaded capture because they were out of the jurisdiction. KV 2/1956.

  2 Compromised by ISOS, Juan Lecube was arrested at Trinidad while on a voyage to Panama and reached Camp 020 in October 1942. In spite of the weight of evidence against him, including the formulae for secret ink, he never confessed and was transferred to Huntercombe. In December 1944 he was moved to Dartmoor, and was deported to Spain in August 1945. KV 2/1456.

  3 After his dismissal from MI5 Hooper was employed by Shell Oil in The Hague and retired aged 54 to run a translation business. He died at Epe in 2001.

  4 Fourth Report, 2 July 1943

  1 Joe Garber had fought in Spain with the 15th International Brigade and then spent two years employed by the Servicio de Investigacion Militar.

  2 For Oliver Green’s MI5 file, see KV 2/2204.

  5 Fifth Report, 1 September 1943

  1 The Italian sabotage offensive on Gibraltar was described by Marshall Pugh in Frogman: Commander Crabb’s Story (New York: Scribner, 1956) and the 1958 film The Silent Enemy.

  2 Popov eventually published an account of his wartime adventures, Spy Counter Spy, in which he changed the names of the members of his network, and in December 1980 Ivo Popov died at home outside Nassau. Eight months later, on 10 August 1981, Popov died at his home, formerly the bishop’s palace in Opio.

  3 Harry Williamson’s own account may be found in Seven Spies Who Changed the World (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991).

  4 A Foreign Office cipher clerk, Captain John King was convicted of Soviet espionage in October 1939 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. KV 2/815.

  5 Dr Alan Nunn May was convicted of Soviet espionage in May 1946 and was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He was released in 1952 and died in January 2003. KV 2/2209–2226; 2563–2564.

  6 Sixth Report

  1 For the internal histories of CICI see WO 208/3088, and SIME KV4/223.

  2 See also the account by Grosjean’s son in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (Vol. 18, No. 2, February 2005).

  3 For Frank Ryan’s MI5 file, see KV 2/1291.

  4 Hermann Goetz had been sentenced in London to four years’ imprisonment in March 1936 for espionage. He parachuted into County Meath in May 1940 and was arrested in Dublin seventeen months later. He took his own life in May 1947 shortly before he was due to be repatriated.

  7 Seventh Report, 1 November 1943

  1 See also Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies edited by Oliver Hoare (London: Public Record Office, 2000).

  2 Ken Crosby, unpublished autobiography, Crosby’s Luck.

  3 A Type VII submarine attached to the 6th Flotilla, the U-252 was on her first patrol when Ib Riis was delivered to Iceland from Norway but was sunk on 14 April 1942 by HMS Stork and Vetch during an attack on Convoy OG 82.

  4 The U-279 was sunk on 4 October 1943 during a depth-charge attack by a Coastal Command Liberator off the coast of Iceland.

  8 Eighth Report, 1 December 1943

  1 Secret Service Rendered by Lily Sergueiev (London: William Kimber, 1968). Her MI5 file documents the murder of her sister, the Countess Moussia Sauty de Chalon, by a Belgian mechanic, Leon Murant, near Asniere-sur-Seine in northern France in September 1945.

  9 Ninth Report, 1 January 1944

  1 The two German submarines that did reach Argentina were the U-530, which surrendered in in Mar del Plata, and the U-977 a month late
r.

  2 Malcolm Muggeridge described some of his warime experiences in Mozambique in his autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time (London: Collins, 1972).

  10 Tenth Report, 1 February 1944

  1 GARBO released his autobiography GARBO, by Juan Pujol with Nigel West (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985). See also GARBO: The Spy Who Saved D-Day (London: Public Record Office, 2000); Agent Garbo by Stephan Talty (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012); The Spy with 29 Names by Jason Webster (London: Chatto & Windus, 2014).

  2 The condemned spy was Oswald Job.

  3 The ‘recently arrived’ SD spy in Italy was probably Mandredo de Blasis.

  4 The Yugoslav naval officer was most probably Eugn Sostaric, code-named METEOR, and introduced previously in the second report.

  5 One of the two returned double-agents was TRICYCLE.

  6 An oblique reference to Ernesto Hoppe as the character who had been instructed to deliver cash and valuables to Argentina by U-boat. Oddly, his case had already been covered in the Ninth Report.

  7 Kenneth Rose. Elusive Rothschild (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981).

  11 Ninth Report, 7 March 1944

  1 Louis de Bray was captured on 26 September 1944 and interrogated at Camp 020. His MI5 file is at KV2/120.

  12 Churchill Intervenes

  1 Sir Walter Citrine was General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress for twenty years, and a director of the Daily Herald until 1946.

  13 3 April 1944

  1 G.W. was MI5’s code name for Gwylym Williams. See SNOW by Madoc Roberts (London: Biteback, 2014).

  2 Vera Erikson had landed near Portgordon in Scotland in September 1940. She was detained for the remainder of the war and was interrogated by Klop Ustinov. See Klop: Britain’s Most Ingenious Spy by Peter Day (London: Biteback, 2014).

  3 Justin Tocabens was interrogated at Camp 020 in July 1944. He had been employed by Werner Unversagt to pay Joseph Vanhove’s salary to his wife.

  4 Waldberg and Meier were hanged at Wandsworth in August 1941.

  15 3 June 1944

  1 The assault on Tito’s headquarters at Drvar in Croatia on 25 May 1944, code-named ROSSELSPRING, by the 500th SS Parachute Battalion failed. The Abwehr had exploited signals intelligence to locate Tito, but could not find the cave in which he and his staff had been living. The Germans withdrew after suffering heavy losses.

  2 Saetrang’s fellow passengers Stefansen and Elverstadt were transferred to Glasgow on the Leopoldville, and detained for two months before being released.

  3 In 1991 Ib Riis’s memoirs, British Spy in Iceland, were published in Icelandic.

  4 Fresenius was uncertain whether the U-boat was the U-287 or U-289 but identified the commander as Alexander Kellwig. This mission, while attached to the 3rd Flotilla at Bergen, was U-289’s first and last. It was sunk on a second patrol on 31 May 1933 by HMS Milne off Jan Mayen Island.

  5 The Big Network by Roman Garby-Czerniawski (London: George Ronald, 1961).

  16 3 July 1944

  1 Having broken with the CPGB in 1934, Jack Haston became a founder member of the Trotskyite Workers International League and moved to Ireland with the Delta group when he feared the organisation would be banned. As he returned he was imprisoned for travelling on false papers. He later campaigned in South Africa, was a parliamentary candidate in the 1945 Neath by-election and joined the Labour Party in 1950. He was employed as a lecturer for the National Council of Labour Colleges and died in 1986 aged 73.

  2 Roy Tearse was the Industrial Organiser for the Trotskyite Revolutionary Communist Party on Tyneside and his party’s influence on the shipyard apprentices was discussed in Cabinet on 3 April 1944 (CAB 65/41). His 1944 conspiracy conviction was quashed on appeal. He retained his commitment to the Trotskyite cause and in 1971 formed a secretive faction, the Discussion Group. He died in October 1986. ASS 34/104/2.

  3 Heaton Lee radicalised the divorcée Anne Keen while on a voyage from South Africa to England in 1935.

  4 Born Angel Ryan, the daughter of a Hampshire vicar, Anne Keen emigrated to Cape Town with her family but returned to England in 1935 and two years later, having been radicalised by Heaton Lee, became secretary of the Workers Internnational League. She remained an active Trotskyite, joined the Labour Party and died in London in December 2001 aged 86.

  17 1 August 1944

  1 Bedaux’s home, lent to the Duke of Windsor, was the Château de Candé in Touraine, just south of Tours.

  2 Erich Pfieffer had been implicated, with Dr Ignatz Griebl, in the 1936 Günther Rumrich espionage case in New York. On that occasion Pfieffer had eluded the FBI and escaped to Germany.

  18 August 1944, undated

  1 For an account of 30 Commando’s entry into the German embassy in Rome and the destruction of the sabotage cache, see Gentle Johnny Ramensky by Robert Jeffery (London: Black & White, 2011).

  19 5 October 1944

  1 See also SNOW by Madoc Roberts (London: Biteback, 2013).

  2 See also John Moe: Double Agent by Jan Moen (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1986).

  20 3 November 1944

  1 Mistakenly identified in the MI5 report as ‘Werner’ Lorenz, he was actually Fritz Wilhelm Lorenz. In his diary entry for 24 November 1944 Guy Liddell also referred to him as ‘Werner Lorenz’.

  2 Lorenz was arrested in Namur, not Paris.

  21 12 December 1944

  1 See The Strange Case of Traitor Sergeant Harold Cole by Brendan Murphy (London: Macdonald, 1987).

  2 See The Venlo Incident by S.P. Best (London: Hutchinson, 1950).

  3 See The Mirror of Deception by Gunter Peis(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976).

  4 Suzanne Marteau was identified by Verloop and Damen as an 18-year-old girl from Mons who had been coerced by van Vliet. Her brother had been deported as a forced labourer and she pretended to assist an escape line from Brussels to Paris via Erquelinnes and Jeumont. MI5 received reports that she trafficked in tobacco and drugs.

  5 For Richard Christmann’s MI5 file see KV2/946.

  6 For Ridderhof’s MI5 file see KV2/1170.

  7 For Knoppens’ MI5 file see KV6/38. In his SOE in the Low Countries (London: St Ermin’s, 2001) M.R.D. Foot erroneously stated that ‘senior Abwehr agents exonerated him just after the war’ (p. 181).

  8 For Celosses’ SOE file see HS9/284/3.

  9 JOHANNES was Professor George Jambroes. In fact he and his wireless operator had been arrested by the Germans at his drop-zone upon arrival.

  10 KALE was K.W. Beukema Toe Water, who was arrested in September 1942 and executed at Mauthausenin in September 1944.

  11 The address was Charlotte de Bourbonsatraat 229. According to Damen, de Wilde was a 40-old pre-war Dutch policeman and Nazi Party member from Groesbeek who joined Abt III in 1943 under Willi Kup. Supposedly an expert forger, Damen was allegedly told by his American captors that de Wilde had been arrested on 19 September 1944 at Nijmegen but sent by accident to England as a PoW.

  12 MARCEL was Jack Agazarian, a key member of the PROSPER reseau. He was arrested soon after his return to Paris in July 1943 and was executed at Flossenburg in March 1945.

  13 STEAK was an entirely notional agent supposedly recruited in the field.

  14 APOLLO was J.D. van Schelle, who returned to England in December 1943.

  15 BRUTUS was Johan Gruen (not to be confused with MI5’s double-agent Roman Garby-Czerniawski) who was arrested in January 1944 and released in April 1945.

  16 Madame Mertins was actually Mrs Mertens, proprietor of the Hotel Leopold II at 5 rue de Croisards in Brussels.

  17 The navigator of a USAAF B-17 bomber shot down over Holland in October 1943, John Hurst supplied a detailed account of his experiences along the VIC line, unaware he had been under German sponsorship throughout his journey to Spain.

  18 CHIVE was Johan Ubbink, who escaped to Bern in November 1943, where he contacted London to raise the alarm. SPROUT was his companion, Pieter Dourlein, whom the Germans tried to discredit when he attempted to wa
rn SOE about NORDPOL.

  22 6 January 1945

  1 War Commentary was published by Vernon Richards, whose father Emilio Recchioni was involved in a plot to assassinate Benito Mussolini in 1931. Richards was convicted at the Old Bailey of incitement and was sentenced in April 1945 to nine months’ imprisonment. After his release he continued to manage the Freedom Press, publishing anarchist material. He died in Hadleigh, Suffolk, in 2001. His co-editor, Philip Sansom, was also editor of the Sewing Machine Times and died in October 1999.

  23 19 February 1945

  1 The seven spies in Iceland had been captured in April 1944. They were: Einar Sigvaldason; Larus Thorsteinsson; Magnus Gudbjornsson; Sverrir Matthiasson; Ernst Fresenius; Sigurdur Juliusson; and Hjalti Bjornsson. See Chapter 15. Evidence that the Germans expected an invasion on the Norwegian coast may be deduced from the scale of the garrison, amounting to eleven divisions and five brigades, totaling 350,000 troops. In addition there were twenty-seven U-boats based at Bergen, Narvik, Trondheim, Hammerfest and Kirkenes.

  24 5 March 1945

  1 The agent in Spain was almost certainly the fabricator OSTRO.

  2 Ewen Montagu, the Naval Intelligence Division representative on the XX Committee, recalled in Beyond Top Secret U (New York: Coward, McCann, 1977) that ‘Churchill was away at a conference and the decision was based on the cowardly principle that no one was entitled to decide that A should die rather than B, and the scheme was vetoed. At this point Sir Findlater Stewart revealed his great courage. After his briefing by John Drew he was convinced that the Germans valued several of our agents highly and would accept their reports’ (p. 159).

  3 See The Double Cross System of the War of 1939–1945 by J.C. Materman (London: Pimlico, 1995) p. 181. After the war Flak Regiment 155’s commanding officer, Max Wachtel, confirmed that he had relied on agent reports rather than the data transmitted by equipment fitted to some of the V-1s.