He smiled and replied that “of course, she was right.”
Kliemann dropped off Lily and her little dog at her parents’ flat near the Trocadéro. “I will make contact again soon,” said the major. Then, as usual, he did nothing at all.
In her diary Lily wrote: “Babs lifts up his shaggy, truffle-like nose and looks at me inquiringly.” (The diary is written entirely in the present tense, and much of it is devoted to her dog.) “I take Babs on my knees, on the drawing-room sofa, and say in his pink ear: ‘It’s a fine game, it’s a grand game, but, you know, if we lose it, we’ll lose our lives … or mine, at any rate.’ ” Babs would be the first to perish in the game.
2. A Bit of an Enigma
Dusko Popov, the Serbian playboy, was not as feckless and apolitical as he seemed. The invitation from his old friend Johnny Jebsen to work for German intelligence was an attractive one. The year 1940 was a time of deep anxiety as the German army rampaged across Europe. Poland had been under German occupation since September of the previous year; Denmark had been invaded in April, followed by Norway; Belgium and the Netherlands surrendered in May; France had fallen in June. Yugoslavia might be next. A Serbian businessman with interests across Europe would need German friends and, as Popov told Jebsen, he was keen “to get an easy living.”
But within days of accepting Major Müntzinger’s offer, Popov began to work on his own plan. A small seed of courage had taken root in this hitherto callow and shallow soul. A few days after the dinner with Müntzinger, he contrived to bump into John Dew, first secretary at the British embassy in Belgrade, at a legation party. In a quiet moment on the terrace, he told Dew that an old university chum, now an Abwehr officer, had made moves to recruit him. “Interesting,” said Dew (who privately suspected Popov was “an awful crook”). “Be a good thing for you to keep in touch with that chap.” Dew put Popov in contact with the MI6 station chief in the Yugoslav capital. “Continue your conversation with the Germans,” Popov was advised. “Be friendly but don’t overdo it. Ask for time to prepare your trip.”
Johnny Jebsen laid out Popov’s mission on behalf of German intelligence: he would travel to London via neutral Portugal under the guise of a businessman exporting raw materials from Yugoslavia to Britain. Once there, he should begin sending back information by writing letters in secret ink. This was the principal method of covert communication between spies, a way of passing information that was becoming something of an espionage art in 1940. Jebsen showed Popov how to make the ink using a tablet of Pyramidon, a common treatment for headache, dissolved in white gin. When Popov had something to report, he should write an “insignificant letter in type” on one side of a piece of paper and use the ink and a sharpened matchstick to write invisibly on the other. The letter should then be sent to “Maria Elera” at an address in Lisbon, where it would be picked up by the Abwehr. When a developer chemical was applied to the paper, the secret writing would appear.
Maria Elera was described by Jebsen as “a young girl, about twenty-two, a journalist, Mulatto, who would pass as his girlfriend.” She would soon become exactly that. Popov would report to the Abwehr station in Lisbon. “Your spymaster will be Major Ludovico von Karsthoff,” Johnny explained. “You may find yourself liking him.” Finally, Popov was handed a list of questions, covering subjects as diverse as Britain’s coastal defenses, deployment of troops, civilian morale, and politics: “Who were Churchill’s enemies? Who was in favour of starting to negotiate peace with Germany?” Popov immediately handed the questionnaire over to MI6. By November, Popov, code-named “Ivan” by his German handlers, was ready to go.
Popov and Jebsen met for a farewell drink at the Serbian King Hotel in Belgrade. “We are now both in the same service,” Jebsen remarked. There was something about his smile that gave Popov pause. Here was a German spy who was a devotee of P. G. Wodehouse; a mouthpiece for Nazi propaganda who said he was terrified of fighting but who obviously relished the risky world of espionage, knew how to make secret ink, and professed himself “strongly pro-British.” Jebsen even employed a British secretary, Mabel Harbottle, a starchy English spinster who might have stepped from the pages of a Wodehouse novel. Miss Harbottle had formerly worked for Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, and though a German citizen, Mabel remained “British at heart.” She flatly refused to type his letters unless reassured that whatever Jebsen was doing for the Germans “could not hurt British interests.” Jebsen gave her that assurance—an odd commitment from a man specifically employed by the German Reich to do as much damage as possible to British interests. As Popov put it, Johnny was “a bit of an enigma.”
The same was true of Jebsen’s new boss, Admiral Canaris, one of the most puzzling figures of the Second World War. Supple and sinuous and a master of the espionage game, Canaris was held in some awe by the other leaders of the Third Reich, including Hitler. Himmler loathed and distrusted him. So did Ribbentrop. Canaris was determined to win the espionage battle for Germany, yet his loyalties were shifting, his personal convictions opaque. He was openly friendly to Jews and would help save many from the gas chambers. He made little secret of his disdain for the hysterical violence of the Nazis. And he ran the Abwehr, the great sprawling German intelligence machine, as a personal fiefdom, with little reference to the high command. But then, the Abwehr was itself an anomaly within the Nazi military structure. Its officers tended to be drawn from the German upper classes, old-fashioned military types with little sympathy for the boorish ideology of Nazism: some were professionals, but many were lazy and corrupt, and a number of senior officers were actively opposed to the Hitler regime.
“What is Canaris like?” Popov asked his old friend. “A sensitive man, unobtrusive,” came the considered reply, “with much curiosity, vast intelligence, and a great sense of humour. He gives the impression of preferring to listen rather than to speak.” Johnny Jebsen might have been describing himself.
Popov would later insist that Jebsen knew from the outset that he would make contact with the British and wanted him to do so. Secretly anti-Nazi, a devoted Anglophile, Jebsen was already playing a subtle and dangerous double game. Popov was only pretending to work for the Germans, and Jebsen, it seemed, was only pretending to believe that he was. Each was lying, both knew it, and neither admitted it. “There was a curious ambiguity about friendship for people in our positions,” wrote Popov. “You tried to convince yourself that a friend would be on the right side, yet you couldn’t dare trust that friendship far enough to reveal yourself.”
Popov arrived a week later in Lisbon, where he was met by a chauffeur and driven in an Opel sedan to a large stucco villa in the Moorish style in the seaside resort of Estoril. At the door of Villa Toki-Ana he was greeted by a gentlemanly figure with a warm smile and a mass of “blackish hair on his hands.” Popov was training himself to spot distinguishing features.
“I have been instructed to help you to the utmost,” said his host. “You have inspired a lot of faith at the Tirpitzufer [Abwehr headquarters in Berlin], and they are making ambitious plans for you.” Johnny had been right: Popov felt immediately drawn to Ludovico von Karsthoff: “He was tall and dark and his movements were those of a big cat.” Von Karsthoff gave Popov the name of another German agent in London, a Czechoslovak named Georges Graf, who could be contacted in case of emergencies. In the evening Popov and von Karsthoff drank champagne and dined sumptuously. Though Popov would never know it, von Karsthoff’s real name was Kremer von Auenrode, an educated and worldly aristocrat from Trieste whose main objective was to get through the war with maximum pleasure and minimum danger.
Popov’s registration card
Tar Robertson
At dawn on December 20, 1940, Dusko Popov, Yugoslavian businessman, alighted at Whitchurch Airport near Bristol. There he was met by Jock Horsfall, a prewar racing driver who was MI5’s most trusted chauffeur. As they neared the capital, Popov could see the menacing roseate glow over London: the Luftwaffe’s bombers had departed, b
ut the fires were still burning.
In the lobby of the Savoy Hotel, a tall officer in the striking tartan trousers of an officer in the Seaforth Highlanders strode forward, hand outstretched. “Popov, hello. I’m Robertson.” He looked, thought Popov, “like Hollywood’s concept of a dashing British military type.” Popov felt an instinctive liking for another spymaster, this one on the other side. “Let’s get acquainted,” said the Englishman, ushering him toward the bar. “We’ll get down to business tomorrow.”
This urbane, upper-class Englishman with distinctive trousers might have been welcoming a new member into one of London’s more exclusive clubs—which, in a way, he was.
Major Müntzinger’s boast that Germany had “many agents in England” was entirely correct. But so far from being “excellent,” most of them were hopeless, many were actively disloyal, and a number were already working against Germany as double agents.
The counterespionage section of MI5, known as B Section, was presided over by Guy Liddell, a shy, cello-playing spy hunter whose voluminous diaries offer an extraordinary insight into the wartime work of this remarkable secret organization. In combating German espionage, Liddell faced two overriding and interconnected problems: a huge host of spies who did not exist, and a second, much smaller body of secret agents who most certainly did.
With the outbreak of war, Britain was gripped by what Liddell called a “Fifth Column Neurosis,” the unshakable and all but universal belief that the country was riddled with enemy spies preparing to rise up if Hitler launched an invasion. This fear was stoked by spy novels, an excitable press, and a peculiarly British urge to play amateur sleuth. “There is a well-defined class of people prone to spy-mania,” wrote Winston Churchill, who had the mania himself. These imagined spies came disguised as nuns, butcher’s boys, churchwardens, and traveling salesmen. They appeared perfectly respectable. The head of Home Forces insisted that “the gentlemen who are the best behaved and the most sleek are the stinkers who are doing the work and we cannot be too sure of anybody.” A spy might look like your bank manager. Indeed, he might be your bank manager. Robert Baden-Powell, the original scoutmaster, insisted he could identify a German spy from the way he walked, but only from behind. Reports flooded into MI5 detailing the nefarious activities of this hidden spy army: they were poisoning the ice cream, leaving marks on telegraph poles to guide the invading forces, drugging cigarettes, and training the inmates of lunatic asylums as suicide squads. When six cows stampeded on the tiny island of Eilean Mor in the Scottish Hebrides, this was immediately ascribed to secret enemy activity. That the spies were invisible was merely proof of how fiendishly clever they were at disguising themselves. Even pigeons were suspect, since it was widely believed that enemy agents had secret caches of homing pigeons around the country that they used to send messages back to Germany. Britain’s fear of spy pigeons would eventually come home to roost in a most unlikely fashion.
These spy sightings were, as Liddell put it, “junk,” but the suspicion that Germany had launched an espionage campaign against Britain was entirely accurate. In July 1940, the Abwehr held a conference in Kiel, attended by Germany’s most senior intelligence officers, at which a plan was drawn up (code-named “Operation Lena” after the wife of a senior Abwehr officer) to recruit and train dozens of spies and dispatch them to Britain to conduct sabotage operations, infiltrate British society, and collect information on troops, airfields, civilian morale, and anything else that might aid a German invasion. German spies began slipping into the country: they came by boat, submarine, and parachute; some, like Popov, came legally or disguised as refugees. Of the two dozen spies or so deployed to Britain between September and November 1940, five were German, while the others were variously Dutch, Scandinavian, Cuban, Swiss, Belgian, Spanish, and Czechoslovak. These were far removed from the superspies imagined by a nervous British public. Most were poorly trained and petrified; some spoke no English at all and had only a sketchy notion of the country they were supposed to blend into. They did not look like your next-door neighbor—they looked like spies. Only a few were genuine Nazis. The rest were variously motivated by greed, adventure, fear, stupidity, and blackmail. Their number included several criminals, degenerates, and alcoholics. According to one MI5 report, “a high proportion suffered from venereal disease.” Some had opportunistically volunteered to spy against Britain, with the intention of defecting. Some were anti-Nazi from the outset. This motley collection of invasion spies had only this in common: not a single one escaped detection.
The task of intercepting enemy spies was made immeasurably simpler after cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking center in Buckinghamshire, cracked the Abwehr wireless code and began reading Germany’s most closely held secrets. The breaking of the Enigma, the German cipher machine, was the most important intelligence triumph of this or any other war: here was an information gold mine, referred to variously as “Ultra,” or the “Most Secret Sources” (or “MSS”), and guarded more jealously than any other wartime secret. With access to the wireless traffic passing between Berlin and its Abwehr stations, from the end of 1940 the British could track German intelligence operations from start to finish and plan accordingly. With advance warning from the Bletchley Park code breakers, these incompetent and highly visible spies were “easy prey.” Once in custody, they were taken to the secret wartime interrogation center at Latchmere House in Richmond, or Camp 020, under the command of Captain (later Colonel) Robin Stephens.
Known as “Tin-eye” on account of the monocle permanently screwed into his right eye, Stephens was xenophobic, rude, manipulative, ruthless, and brilliant. Spies were subjected to intense interrogation using every method to extract the truth short of physical violence. Those deemed unsuitable as double agents were either imprisoned or tried and executed. The others, a small minority, were offered a choice: work for Britain against Germany or face the hangman’s noose. “You have forfeited your life, but there is a way of saving your life,” was how Tin-eye framed the issue. Unsurprisingly, this argument proved persuasive. Of the twenty-five German spies sent to Britain between September 3 and November 12, 1940, all but one was caught (the lone evader shot himself); five were executed; fifteen were imprisoned; and four became double agents, the first recruits of what would grow into a substantial army of deceivers.
The officer in command of this fledgling force was Thomas Argyll Robertson, known as Tommy, but more usually Tar on account of his initials. Spymasters are expected to be intense types, ferociously clever and faintly sinister. On the surface, Tar Robertson appeared to be none of these. The son of a Scottish banker, he was cheery, amiable, funny, and self-mocking. If he ever opened a book, there is no record of it. As a young man he had, according to one relative, “an almost suicidal appetite for dusk to dawn partying, pretty women, and fast cars,” expensive tastes that put paid to his army career in the Seaforth Highlanders when he ran out of funds. After an undistinguished stint in the City, in 1933 he was recruited into MI5 through the old-boy network. He retained a military air and the tartan army trousers that earned him the nickname “Passion Pants.” In demeanor he was “a perfect officer type, who could have been played by Ronald Colman,” the English actor, with “friendly eyes and an assertive way about him.” His family considered him “less than promising.” But once installed in MI5, Tar revealed a natural talent for hanging around in pubs and picking up gossip. He was “immensely personable and monstrously good looking,” according to one colleague, “with a charm that could melt an iceberg” and an “unmistakable twinkle” that encouraged the spilling of confidences. Beneath the affability and “delightful chuckle” was a personality of granite determination and a ruthless streak. Hugh Trevor-Roper considered his secret-service colleagues “by and large pretty stupid—some of them very stupid.” But Tar he regarded as a “real genius” with an uncanny knack for reading character and knowing instinctively when he was being misled. Robertson knew better than anyone else in British i
ntelligence how to spot a lie, and therefore how to tell one.
The British secret services traditionally took a fastidious approach to double agents, regarding the practice of “turning” intercepted spies and using them to mislead the enemy as faintly disreputable. Such creatures were classed as “agents doubles”—in French, as if to underline that this was typically duplicitous Continental behavior. But before the war, MI5 recruited only one truly important double agent, an experiment that almost ended in disaster. Arthur Owens was a Welsh-born electrical engineer with a “shifty look” who began his spying career by providing information to MI6 after his visit to German shipyards. Owens also made contact with the Abwehr, which gave him the task of recruiting radical Welsh nationalists for sabotage operations. (This was an early hint of the Abwehr’s bizarre but firmly held belief that the Welsh valleys were filled with violent secessionists awaiting the opportunity, with Nazi encouragement, to rise up against their English oppressors.) He then turned double agent and agreed to work against the Germans. Tar was made case officer to Owens (code-named “Snow,” a partial anagram of his surname) and eventually concluded that this “stupid little man given to doing silly things at odd times” was playing each side against the other, but inefficiently. The case was eventually wound up, largely because Owens was a fantasist whose mind did not “work on logical lines.” Yet the Snow case had helped Bletchley Park to break the Abwehr code, provided useful leads on tracking down other German spies, and “saved us from absolute darkness on the subject of German espionage,” according to Dick White, Liddell’s deputy. It also gave Robertson an early taste of just how fickle, troublesome, and valuable a double agent could be.
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