Thrusting Popov back into suspicious German hands after the American debacle was Robertson’s biggest gamble so far, and he knew it: “His chances were nothing like even money. The odds must be at least two to one that he was blown. And, if he was, it was pretty certain that he would be tortured to squeeze him dry of information about our system, and there was an equally probable death sentence awaiting him at the end.”
Dusko Popov flew from New York on October 12, 1942, leaving behind “an enormous number of gramophone records,” a number of broken hearts, and a stack of bills that would follow him, unpaid, for the rest of the war. Montagu thought Tricycle’s decision to return to Lisbon was “the greatest instance of cold-blooded courage that I have ever been in contact with.”
Before leaving New York, Popov had sent a telegram alerting von Karsthoff that he would be arriving in Lisbon on October 14, 1942. “Will telephone office on arrival. Hope Johnny will be waiting for me.”
Instead, he was welcomed back to Portugal by a smiling von Karsthoff, along with a clean-shaven, dark-haired man Popov had never met before, who gave his name as Kammler. Popov described this new officer, a lieutenant, as about twenty-eight years old, “stiff in manner,” and speaking English “as if he learned it from a book.” His real name was Otto Kurrer: an officer in the Abwehr espionage division, he was there to take part in the debriefing of the prodigal agent. Their manner was friendly but businesslike, and Popov could sense he was being regarded with “some suspicion.”
Settled in the large salon of a comfortable apartment on the Avenida de Berna, von Karsthoff came straight to the point and presented Popov with what sounded oddly like a school report card. His work in England, before leaving for the United States, had been “very good”; in America it had initially been “excellent,” then “medium,” and then, for the last three months, “terribly bad.” Von Karsthoff eyed him keenly: “Now you know what Berlin thinks of you.”
Popov responded by telling von Karsthoff what he thought of Berlin. He delivered a furious broadside against the Abwehr for sending him to the United States, undersupported and underfunded. He was now deeply in debt, he said, and it was all the fault of his German handlers. “You send me there with no help whatsoever, no contacts, a few miserable dollars, and you expect me to produce results in no time.” It was a bravura performance and put von Karsthoff on the defensive: “We did all we could. It was Berlin’s fault.” The Abwehr man seemed uninterested in the meager haul of intelligence Popov had brought back from the United States; he did not try to pick holes in his story; he did not even discuss the little intelligence he had sent. Von Karsthoff, it seemed, was not only willing to believe Popov’s story but unwilling to ask him anything that might make it harder to do so. The reasons for his eagerness were personal, professional, and financial. Popov had long assumed that his German handlers were skimming off money that should have been passed to him. Kammler observed darkly that Popov had not received adequate funds in the United States because Jebsen had “embezzled” at least ten thousand dollars. They were all making money, illicitly, from Popov’s spy salary: von Karsthoff, Jebsen, and even, it seemed, this man Kammler.
“Berlin are stupid fellows,” Kammler remarked. “They are sitting at desks and don’t realise the difficulties of being without money. Please work hard in the future or we shall all have trouble here. And you’ll see we will be able to give you big bonuses.” Popov had become more than a spy in the eyes of his German handlers. He was a valuable business and thus in a powerful bargaining position, since von Karsthoff and Kammler were clearly terrified that he “might make a scene with Berlin.” He now demanded full payment of all the money he claimed to be owed. The financial wrangling continued for days, but Popov had the upper hand. “Kammler begged him not to make difficulties over money arrangements because such difficulties might cause Kammler to be removed from Lisbon and sent to the Russian front.” If Popov continued as before, they would all make money, and Berlin would be pleased. If he did not, then they were all in deep trouble. They could not afford for him to fail.
He had absolute faith in his own powers of persuasion and seduction, and rightly so, for three days later London intercepted a message sent by von Karsthoff to Berlin, in which he reported that Popov had been subjected to “severe” interrogation and no evidence had been found that he was engaging in “double work”: Popov was in the clear. “Lisbon seem to have satisfied themselves that Tricycle was not double-crossing them,” Tar reported.
Popov spent a week in Lisbon arguing over money, until a deal was finally struck: the Germans would pay him $25,000, plus 6,000 Portuguese escudos and a salary of $2,500 a month, depending on his performance. From Popov’s standpoint, this was a remarkable bargain: a lump sum to repay debts he had not incurred for services to the Third Reich he had not rendered, and a future stipend to continue betraying the Germans and supplying information that was either useless or false. The origin of the money and Jebsen’s role in the deal were unclear, but Popov’s old friend was somewhere in the background, pulling strings and lining his pockets.
Following the script laid out by Wilson, Popov declared that he intended to return to London and continue spying as before. “Berlin wants information of direct use for military purposes,” von Karsthoff told Popov. Reports on public morale, industrial output, and political gossip were all very well, but “we are not so interested in people’s feelings, not in production, but interested in purely military facts.” Specifically, Berlin wanted advance warning of Allied military plans. Now that America had entered the war, there would surely be a counterattack to try to roll back the German occupation, in North Africa, France, Norway, or somewhere else. “What about invasion?” von Karsthoff demanded. “Where will it be? See what kind of training and instruction the army has. Are they learning any languages? What kind of beaches are they training on?” Popov should furnish as much information on military preparations as possible, and the Germans would make their own deductions.
Popov landed back in Britain with this new mission, $25,000 in cash in his pocket, and five matches impregnated with a new type of secret ink sewn into the shoulder pads of his overcoat. A room was waiting for him in Claridge’s Hotel, but Tar Robertson asked Jock Horsfall, the MI5 chauffeur, to drive Popov directly from the airport to Robertson’s own house in west London, “so that I can satisfy my curiosity and at the same time welcome him home.”
Popov seemed “voluble and rather confused,” expressing “a great deal of vague feelings of grievance with regard to his American visit.” But there was no doubt whose side he was on. “He is entirely friendly towards us and I have no doubt about his loyalty.” At a debriefing session the next morning attended by Robertson, Masterman, and Wilson, Popov searched through his pockets for the cash given to him by von Karsthoff, finally located the wads in his trench-coat pocket, and dumped it all on the table. Masterman was stunned at his “extraordinary casualness about money” and observed: “It is quite probable that he would have lost or been robbed of this large sum of money without worrying very much about it.” Popov explained, without rancor, that his German handlers were embezzling, “both by making profit on exchange and taking a considerable rake-off from money from Berlin.” He seemed to regard this as normal business practice. “I was cheated by Johnny, I was cheated by Von Karsthoff,” he said. “I think Kammler earned a lot of money from the exchange.” Once again he urged MI5 to recruit Jebsen, whom he described as “very anti-Nazi.” If properly handled, “Johnny would give him a great deal of information.”
He was adamant that any German doubts about his loyalty had been dispelled: “Any suspicion against me was cleared up on the first day.” Popov’s best defense was the sheer force of his personality, Tar reflected, his uncanny “ability to impose himself and his views on the Germans when personal contact could be made.” Von Karsthoff was “not in any way suspicious” and had promised to send a letter to the Savoy Hotel with three microdots containing questionnaires for Pop
ov’s new mission. The MI5 team was deeply relieved: “Von Karsthoff has defended Tricycle as his agent and made a good deal out of the business.” Here were fine opportunities for blackmail and manipulation. But it was the German hunger for information about Allied invasion plans that set Tar thinking. Von Karsthoff wanted raw military intelligence, as much as possible, and urgently. “We may be able to draw our own conclusions,” he had told Popov.
It was a revealing observation, for it suggested that with careful planning, the Germans might be guided into drawing not their own conclusions but the conclusions the Double Cross team wanted them to draw.
8. The Great Game
Roman Czerniawski met Hugo Bleicher, his German handler, in the lavatory of the Brasserie Georges in Lyon on August 15, 1942. In the intervening weeks, the Polish spy had learned how to construct a wireless transmitter, memorized his code, and consumed food “in enormous quantities” at a Chinese restaurant next door to the safe house on Rue Dufrenoy, rebuilding his strength after months in prison. Concealed in the heels of his shoes were two transmitting crystals. Czerniawski had slipped across the border into Vichy France and made contact, as instructed by Colonel Oscar Reile, with Polish intelligence, explaining that he had escaped and now needed to get to Britain, quickly. He revealed nothing about his deal with the colonel. The Polish secret service contacted MI6, and plans to evacuate the leader of the defunct Interallié network, who had miraculously evaded the clutches of the Germans, were set in motion: he would be smuggled into neutral Spain using the underground route for escaping POWs and then put on the next flight to Britain.
Bleicher had been shadowing him and thoroughly enjoying his “free holiday” in southern France. He even brought along one of his French mistresses. The meeting in the Brasserie Georges was the first time they had met since Roman Czerniawski’s “escape.” Their conversation in the restaurant lavatory was brief and quite odd.
With some embarrassment, Bleicher said that although he “realised that any manifestation of mistrust on their part would jeopardise the affair,” German bureaucratic rules required a “written guarantee” of Czerniawski’s loyalty. This was “a mere formality.” Bleicher then handed over a piece of paper that stated, in German, that Czerniawski was “starting to work for the National Socialist State in a military capacity, and undertaking his mission voluntarily, and if he failed in his duty the Germans would be entitled to take reprisals.” Here was a bold threat disguised as form filling, a guarantee that if he reneged on his promises, then the people he loved would be killed. Only a state as murderous and bureaucratic as the Third Reich would require a man to sign his own family’s death warrant and consider it binding. Czerniawski signed.
The next day, Bleicher picked up a letter at the Hôtel d’Orléans. It read: “Long Live Hitler, the Great Builder of a new Europe!” Czerniawski was on his way to Britain.
In London, Roman Czerniawski was greeted by the Polish community as a returning hero: a patriotic “super-spy” who had defied the Germans in occupied Paris and then, astonishingly, managed to slip out of their grasp. During October 1942, he was interviewed by both British and Polish intelligence officers and subjected to the “most exhaustive and painstaking” interrogation. No one smelled a rat. The Polish pilot was praised for his “great daring and initiative” in forging the Interallié network. “He is a natural leader of men and has great organising ability,” MI5 noted. Colonel Stanislaw Gano of Polish intelligence, who had met Czerniawski in London the year before, welcomed him back with open arms. The story of his flight from German custody was “amazing,” and “everyone was prepared to accept it as genuine.” Or almost everyone. Some found Czerniawski’s account a little too heroic to be credible. A rumor began to circulate that “there was something funny about his escape.”
Czerniawski was not the only member of the French network to reappear in Britain. Monique Deschamps (“Moustique”), the “tiny, vivacious and attractive” head of the Interallié’s southern sector, had also escaped the Gestapo and made her way across the Channel. So, too, had Mathilde Carré. Like Czerniawski, she had agreed to work for the Germans as a double agent in Britain. Under Bleicher’s instruction, she had used the captured Interallié wireless to maintain the fiction that she had escaped the roundup and was continuing her work as an Allied agent. In the spring of 1942, Bleicher had her send a message to London, asking to be evacuated, as she feared she was about to be arrested. The British agreed to send a boat to collect her from the French coast. “The plan was that in London I should get as many names as I could of agents working in France for the Allies.… After that, the great roundup would take place. They promised me an enormous sum of money, a trip to Germany and the publication of my memoirs in the largest Nazi newspaper.” Mathilde was in thrall to her German lover. She promised to bring back for Bleicher “a couple of pairs of shoes” from a London boot maker. Bleicher may have hated the British, but he was partial to handmade English shoes.
Mathilde Carré was picked up by a fast British motor gunboat at Bihit point near Lannion, on the Brittany coast (Bleicher having ensured that no German patrol would be on hand to interrupt the rendezvous). In London, she was interrogated by a uniformed British officer with impeccable manners and a steely look. “Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy is so often preferable to Gallic excitability,” she later reflected. Once again she broke almost immediately, confessing that she had been recruited as an Abwehr agent but insisting that she had always intended to betray the Germans as soon as she was on British soil. She did not, however, explain her relationship with Hugo Bleicher or her role in the breakup of the Interallié network. The British did not quite know what to make of Mathilde Carré. She was lodged in a safe house and kept under close surveillance.
Czerniawski’s arrival in London sealed her fate. Mathilde had betrayed them all, he explained: “Her guilt is the greater since, although she must have fully realised the extent of the catastrophe, she helped the Germans in their work.” Bleicher had doubtless put her under intense pressure, “but there is no excuse whatever for treason and betrayal to the enemy of her colleagues, knowing that they will face the firing squad.” Czerniawski did not, of course, mention that he, too, had been recruited by German intelligence.
Mathilde was arrested and lodged in Aylesbury Prison: she would spend the rest of the war behind bars.
Czerniawski, the decorated war hero, was given a desk job by the Polish government-in-exile. He moved into a flat in Brompton with Monique Deschamps, who became his lover. For the first time since the war began, Roman’s life appeared to achieve a sort of calm. Then he dropped what MI5 called “the bombshell.”
Six weeks after arriving in Britain, Czerniawski presented Colonel Stanislaw Gano of Polish intelligence with a sixty-four-page typewritten document, written in English and entitled “The Great Game.” It began: “The Germans are entering the final stage of losing the game. It has become my ambition to conclude this affair in grand style.” Czerniawski then proceeded to describe, in detail, his recruitment by the German secret service: the conversations in his jail cell at Fresnes, the deal struck with Bleicher and Reile, the terms of his mission, and his faked escape from German custody. As proof he produced “the wireless crystals which he had kept hidden in the heels of his shoes.” He had merely been playing a part, he said, “carrying out a carefully worked out plan to fool the Germans.” He insisted: “During the whole period of my ‘collaboration’ with the Germans they did not receive from me the slightest hint which might have helped them in combating our or Allied organisations on the Continent.”
The double agent now offered to turn triple agent, pointing out that he was in a unique position to tell the German High Command, via wireless, anything that Allied intelligence wanted to tell them. Czerniawski laid down the rules of his game: “I shall discuss personally all data with the British, or rather with one Englishman, an officer who alone would hold the entirety of the affair in his hands and would be in charge of it.… I would act as
the expert.” No one else in Polish intelligence should know the truth about how he had really gotten out of France: “The story of my escape, for the good of the cause, must continue to be regarded as true.”
This extraordinary document ended with a characteristically grandiose flourish: “I am convinced that if an exact plan is laid down now and carried out logically and adhered to strictly, then the Great Game has all the chances of success and may yield great results. If I have acted wrong in organising the Great Game the news that I have perished in an air accident will save my family and my colleagues.”
When Colonel Gano had finished reading, he looked up, staggered, but before he could speak, in a final dramatic gesture, Czerniawski “demanded a revolver to shoot himself, if his request were refused and he was found to have failed in his military duty.”
Gano’s first reaction was shock, but his second was blind fury. Czerniawski had lied to his superior officers. He had deliberately concealed the true circumstances of his escape. He had struck a deal with the enemy and had continued to hide the truth for weeks after arriving in Britain. He had made Gano look a fool. Czerniawski responded that he had not revealed the truth until now because he was not “certain of the degree to which the Germans had penetrated Polish HQ in London.” The suggestion that the Polish government-in-exile might harbor enemy spies made Gano even angrier. He ordered Czerniawski to return to his flat and await further orders and declared his belief (from which he never wavered) that Czerniawski was a “sinister individual” who deserved to be shot.
Czerniawski’s treatise (he called it “his book”) was passed to Tar Robertson at B1A. If Czerniawski was telling the truth, then he might be useful to the Double Cross team. If he was lying then, like Mathilde Carré, he should be locked up and, if necessary, executed. The decision must be made quickly, since if Czerniawski was to demonstrate his worth to the Germans, he would need to make radio contact as soon as possible. Christopher Harmer was once again tasked with teasing out the motives of a potential double agent and deciding his ultimate fate.
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