Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  Hitler remained suspicious about Normandy, yet Garbo and the XX Committee were making progress. Churchill was reading reports of Garbo’s successes. Heinrich Himmler sent a personal note of congratulations to Kühlenthal in Madrid on his finding such a valuable gem—and asked Garbo to keep a sharp eye out. “The object of further reconnaissance [that is, Garbo’s espionage] must be to ascertain in good time when embarkation began and the destination of the groups of forces in south east England.” Colonel Roenne even quoted Garbo in a report on enemy intentions, pasting a snippet of conversation between Garbo and his friend at the Ministry of Information into his own evaluation. Tommy Harris marveled: “It is a unique case of an agent’s report being quoted verbatim in an official report of so high a level.”

  MI5 also noticed a subtle change in the incoming questionnaires: not only was the Abwehr asking about Garbo’s phantom divisions, indicating that the fake FUSAG had turned real in the German mind, but the questionnaires were no longer originating in Madrid. They were coming directly from Berlin.

  With twenty-three days left until D-Day, Garbo began the overture for the last part of the caper. He met with his phony paramour at the Ministry of War and “learned” that the invasion would open with a diversion, to draw Hitler’s reserves away from the still unknown target area. True to Strangeways’s maxim, Garbo never mentioned Calais or Normandy, but the implication was clear. The first attack would be a feint, and the Germans must hold their forces back until the real invasion began. Eight days later, it was the Ministry of Information’s turn: Garbo was asked to help write pamphlets on the second front, based on actual military reports, which would be sent to Latin America. It was through a Ministry of Information leak that Garbo had predicted the invasion of North Africa, the news of which had tragically reached the Germans one day too late to be of any use. This time, he would send the warning by wireless, so there would be no delay. He would reveal the truth about D-Day as it happened.

  It was impossible to keep Normandy completely off Hitler’s radar. It held too many advantages for an invading force. So as the clock ticked closer to the final hour, the trick was to make Hitler believe that what he would soon witness wasn’t entirely real. Though you are seeing troops at Normandy, Garbo was saying, you are not really seeing troops at Normandy. They are fakes, imposters, bugaboos. Ignore them.

  On May 28, only nine days before D-Day, there was a sign that Garbo and Brutus were getting through to Hitler: the Allies had intercepted a message from the Japanese ambassador to his superiors in Tokyo that contained the record of a long conversation with the Fürher:

  Speaking of the Second Front, Hitler … thought that about eighty divisions had already been assembled in England … I accordingly asked the Führer if he thought that these British and American troops had completed their preparations for landing operations and he replied in the affirmative. I then asked him in what form he thought the Second Front would materialize, and he told me that at the moment what he himself thought was most probable was that after having carried out diversionary operations in Norway, Denmark and the southern part of the western coast of France and the French Mediterranean coast, they would establish a bridgehead in Normandy or Brittany, and after seeing how things went would then embark upon the establishment of a real Second Front in the Channel. Germany would like nothing better, he said, than to be given a chance of coming to blows with large forces of the enemy as soon as possible.

  So Normandy would be followed by the “real Second Front.” The information, Hitler said, came from “relatively clear portents.” The portents were Garbo, Brutus and a few other trusted sources. They’d penetrated to the core of the German leadership.

  It was excellent news. But a thousand miles away, in Lisbon, events were reaching a climax in a drama that would throw Garbo’s entire mission into doubt just as it seemed to be paying off. A month before, on April 29, a mysterious and conflicted man, a friend of P. G. Wodehouse’s, a spy-runner close to Hitler’s personal interpreter, described in his MI6 file as “a blond, monocle, very bad black teeth, very clever,” had vanished from the spy capital of Europe. The Gestapo was suspected in his disappearance. And the missing man knew everything there was to know about Garbo.

  19. The Prisoner

  HIS REAL NAME WAS Johann “Johnny” Jebsen, and like the clichés of an old-school German villain, he clamped a monocle over his right eye, but with a slight air of irony. The son of a wealthy Hamburg shipping mogul, he’d studied at the medieval German university at Freiburg. Jebsen played the part of a young shipping scion impeccably: fine suits, dazzlingly beautiful girlfriends, a supercharged Mercedes-Benz 540K convertible to roar through the shady depths of the Black Forest. In the early 1930s, the university was swarming with brownshirts (the Sturmabteilung, or storm troopers) and blackshirts (the SS), but Jebsen disdained them. He was a free spirit who hated Hitler and the book burners who patrolled the campus.

  It was at Freiburg that Jebsen met the suave Dusko Popov, the future Allied double agent Tricycle, who was also studying at the university and casting a mocking eye at the local SS boys. The two became fast friends. In fact, Jebsen served as Popov’s second in a duel over a woman, in which the Serb had shocked the Freiburg student body by choosing pistols over the traditional sabers. The other duelist protested the choice, and Jebsen handled the complex negotiations, claiming that obscure Serbian cavalry honor codes obligated his friend to fight only with firearms. It was a white lie. Popov had chosen guns because he was a deadly shot; he’d won marksmanship contests back in Dubrovnik. The duel was soon called off.

  Popov’s almost reckless daring showed in other ways. He railed against Hitler in student debates and was soon visited by four members of the Gestapo, interrogated for eight days and thrown into prison, where fellow inmates told him he was fated for the concentration camps. Many of Popov’s university friends turned on him, but Jebsen did the opposite, and worked to get him out. The Germans expelled the young Serb from the country with a passel of veiled threats and warnings not to return. When Popov got off the train in Basel, he found his German friend Jebsen waiting for him at the station, having driven the convertible at top speed across the Swiss border. This swirl of intimate connections—women, fast cars, mockery of the lumpen brownshirts and a certain taste for danger—bound the two young men together.

  When the war came, the pair reunited in Belgrade. Popov found the dapper young man changed: disheveled, drinking heavily, smoking cigarette after cigarette, his teeth stained with tobacco—and working for the Abwehr. Why, Popov wondered, would a virulent anti-Nazi like Jebsen join the German intelligence service? But Popov owed his life to his old college friend, and he agreed to help him in his new career. He soon realized that Jebsen was no friend of his supposed bosses.

  Months later, Popov found himself in Belgrade at a dinner with a “friend” of Jebsen’s named Müntzinger, who touted the inevitable German triumph and asked the Serb, none too subtly, if he’d like to join the side of the victors. Jebsen fidgeted and avoided Popov’s eyes as the pitch was made. “I can’t say I was shocked, or that I was surprised—subconsciously I must have been prepared for the offer—but I did feel a burst of adrenaline running through me.” Jebsen later admitted that the German was his boss at the Abwehr and that he himself had put Popov’s name forward as a possible spy.

  Popov pretended to take up the Abwehr’s offer. He was given a phial of secret ink and told that the enigmatic Jebsen would be his controller and contact. The Serb promptly went to the British embassy and volunteered to work for the Allies as a double agent.

  Days later, Jebsen burst into Popov’s bedroom with upsetting news: the family’s chauffeur, who’d been driving Popov around town, had betrayed him. He’d recorded every place the new spy had visited, including six stops at British passport control, which was commonly known as the working address for M16 in Belgrade. If the list made its way to others in the Belgrade Abwehr, Popov was a dead man.

  The chauffeur
was found in a train yard in Belgrade two days later, shot multiple times. Popov paid for the funeral and sent a beautiful bouquet of flowers. Who killed the duplicitous chauffeur remains a mystery. Who ordered him shot is not. Popov had done what he’d needed to do to survive.

  Popov returned the favor by repeatedly trying to get MI5 to bring Jebsen into the fold: he was brave, smart, connected and anti-Nazi. The British demurred; they already had the star of the network, Popov. Jebsen was a playboy and an Abwehr operative—who knew if he could be trusted? And if MI5 brought Jebsen in and he turned out to be loyal to the Third Reich, Popov would be irretrievably compromised.

  By the summer of 1943, the situation was changing. Jebsen was in serious danger from his own side. He was involved in a currency-smuggling scheme that allowed Gestapo officers to stash money in Switzerland, against strict German regulations. All was going well until one day Jebsen took a closer look at the notes that Himmler’s men had been passing to him: they were counterfeit. Furious, he exposed the scheme and accused the Gestapo of cheating him. Jebsen believed his own agency, the Abwehr, would back him up in his war against the Gestapo, but when he was called to headquarters in Berlin to discuss the controversy, he received a mysterious telegram telling him not to go.

  Frantic, Jebsen went to the British embassy in Madrid and revealed everything. By now, he trusted no one. “He wanted to find out if the Abwehr were after him, as well as the Gestapo,” the embassy wrote London. “If they were, then Tricycle was blown, in which case Jebsen would fake his suicide” and disappear. He wrote a note addressed to the Madrid Abwehr, saying that he’d been driven to kill himself because of his friendship with Popov, who he knew was a secret agent for the British. “I know that a Court Martial would sentence me to death for what I have done … Do not be afraid that there will be a scandal. I shall send my things to Father Confessor for the poor. Then I shall take poison and swim far out into the sea.”

  MI5, with the advantage of the Ultra intercepts, knew that Jebsen wasn’t in mortal danger. The meeting in Berlin was routine; there was no witch-hunt. But MI5 couldn’t tell Jebsen that without revealing the existence of Ultra. Instead, they allowed the drama to run its course, and when the Gestapo didn’t knock on Jebsen’s door, the spy began to calm down. But Jebsen soon realized what an enormous risk he’d taken by going to the British. If anyone had seen him slip into the enemy’s headquarters, he’d end up in a concentration camp. He tried to withdraw his offer to spy for the British. MI5, however, had other ideas. “We have pointed out to him … that he has already taken an irrevocable step.” It was too late to turn back.

  A meeting between Jebsen and the British was scheduled for Lisbon in December 1943. It was to be Jebsen’s coming-out party as a double agent, code-named Artist. Two British intelligence officers, Major Frank Foley of MI6 and Ian Wilson of MI5, flew to Lisbon to debrief him. The stylishly dressed Popov was on the same flight, though the Brits pretended not to notice him. At the Lisbon airport, the secret service agents jumped in a car headed for the embassy, while Popov directed his driver to the Estoril Casino, the scene of Garbo’s first great triumph with the stolen diplomatic passes. In Popov’s shoulder holster was a new Luger pistol, and in his briefcase was a diplomatic bag brimming with secret documents and rolls of undeveloped film—much of it shot by an MI5 officer that morning. The XX Committee had given the Serbian agent a treasure trove of Fortitude material to pass to the Abwehr.

  As Jebsen prepared to speak with the British agents, Popov waited on a Lisbon street to meet his German controller, a Major von Karsthoff, who knew him as “Ivan.” A car pulled up and Popov got in the rear, ducked down and adjusted his back against the leather seat so the Luger didn’t pinch. When he got to Karsthoff’s new villa, however, alarm bells began to go off in his mind. The girl who greeted him was new, not the usual secretary he’d been accustomed to. She walked him back to the drawing room and went to get the German officer. He waited, nerves taut.

  Always the dandy, Popov was studying himself in a pair of glass-windowed doors when he heard Karsthoff’s voice behind him.

  “Turn around slowly, Ivan,” the voice said. “And don’t make any sudden moves.”

  Popov stiffened. He was certain that he was blown and that Karsthoff had a pistol trained at the base of his spine. If he was going to die, Popov wanted one last chance to display his old Dubrovnik skills with a gun. His hand slipped under his suit coat toward the Luger. He began to pivot. But just before he turned fully and whipped the gun around toward his Nazi controller, he caught a reflection in the glass doors. Karsthoff wasn’t poised with his own Luger, ready to kill him. He was standing rather awkwardly, unarmed, with an apprehensive monkey perched on his shoulder.

  Popov let go of the Luger’s butt, turned and laughed. “What’s the matter?” Karsthoff barked in mock anger. “Do I look ridiculous?” The monkey had been a gift from an Abwehr agent who’d just returned from Africa. The spy-runner had been afraid his agent would startle it. That was the reason for the warning about sudden moves. Popov had nearly shot Karsthoff and blown his cover and that of Jebsen and God knows who else.

  An even more shocking moment was waiting for the British agents Foley and Wilson as they sat down to debrief Jebsen. Their new recruit, it turned out, knew there was a British-controlled double agent feeding information to the Abwehr. In fact, Jebsen gave the two officers enough information about Garbo to identify him beyond a doubt. By bringing Jebsen into MI5, the agency had unintentionally put its star agent at enormous risk. If Jebsen told his MI5 handlers about the Spanish spy and saw that they did nothing to arrest him, Jebsen would realize that the agent was already under their control.

  The revelation was chilling. When Foley and Wilson returned to London and gave a full report on their meeting, it dawned on the top brass at MI5 that this sordid little drama in the back streets of Lisbon could change the course of World War II.

  MI5 was worried enough that they considered terminating Popov as a double agent and smuggling Jebsen out of Portugal. Better to lose Tricycle than Garbo. The agency even considered killing Jebsen. The risk of exposure was just too great.

  But in the end, the idea was rejected. The deception planners could only hope Jebsen would stay loyal and, most importantly, free. Tricycle was taken off Fortitude because of fears that he could jinx the scheme. “The whole Tricycle set-up might collapse at any moment … ,” Guy Liddell wrote in his diary on December 8, 1943. “Artist has also heard about Plan Dream”—the 1942 currency-smuggling operation that was one of Juan Pujol’s first operations in London—“which brings him perilously close to Garbo.” But over the next few months, Jebsen stayed free and the worries over his fate slowly dissipated.

  The optimism lasted exactly four and a half months. Then, in late April 1944, word reached London: Jebsen had vanished. Intercepts from Ultra told the grim story: he’d been kidnapped by his own side.

  Jebsen’s position had begun to unravel in February. A good friend and fellow Abwehr officer had defected to the Allies; Jebsen was a regular visitor to the defector’s mother’s home. The Abwehr began to watch Jebsen to see if he would lead them to the fleeing man. More bad news for Jebsen came in April: his supporter Canaris had been dismissed from the Abwehr after suspicions about his loyalties deepened; he was soon under house arrest. Canaris’s power would now flow to the hard-line SD, which had no loyalties to Jebsen. He’d lost his staunchest protector.

  But the spy-runner remained jaunty with confidence. When a friend, a baroness he’d known for years, informed Jebsen that a special team of agents from the RHSA (the agency that directed the SD) had flown to Lisbon to get to the bottom of the currency scam, Jebsen told her not to worry. In fact, a trap was being set. One of his business colleagues was informing on him, feeding the SD a record of his every connection to the Allies and every incriminating remark he made. The net was growing tighter.

  Jebsen was ordered to an April 21 meeting in Biarritz to talk about Popov’s exorbitant
demands for money (he’d asked for $150,000, a king’s ransom even to free-spending German intelligence). Jebsen finally began to worry: Biarritz was just across the border in France; if the SD wanted to spirit him out of the country, there was no better place to kidnap him. He refused to attend the meeting. His superiors warned him that not attending was tantamount to desertion.

  And then the skies seemed to clear. The SD agreed to give Jebsen $75,000, to be handed on to Popov. In addition, they had decided to award Jebsen a prestigious medal, the Kriegsverdienstkreuz first class, which no other German operative in Lisbon had received. Jebsen breathed a sigh of relief, writing to Popov on the day of the meeting in Biarritz, “I congratulate you on being my Beloved Führer’s best agent, who is genuine without any doubt.” He even met with an MI6 agent before his departure. The British operative reported back to London that their mole appeared happy and at ease. It was the last time the Brits talked to Jebsen.

  On April 29, the spy and a friend were called to a meeting with an SD officer. When Jebsen arrived, the SD man told him the truth: he was going to be taken to Berlin that very moment. Jebsen dashed for the door, but the officer overpowered him, forcibly drugged him and stuffed him into the false bottom of an enormous metal trunk. His friend received the same treatment. The two trunks were loaded into a Studebaker and driven to Biarritz, where the two prisoners, now fully conscious and surely aware of their fate, were transferred to an airplane and flown to Berlin and handed over to the Gestapo.

  With D-Day just two months away, Jebsen was installed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, twenty miles north of the capital. The Allies assumed he was being tortured. The Gestapo’s methods in the camps included beating prisoners with a stick wrapped in barbed wire, crushing their fingers with thumbscrews, burning them with cigarettes, applying electrical shocks to the testicles, and wrapping a man in chains and then tightening them with a tourniquet until the flesh burst apart. “Under interrogation,” wrote J. C. Masterman, head of the XX Committee, “it was to be presumed that much, if not all, of the history of his activities would come to light, and in that case many of our best cases were doomed.” If Jebsen talked, not only Popov but the whole slate of double agents, Garbo included, would be blown.