Double Cross

by Ben MacIntyre

  On the morning of March 14, Hoppe drove her to the Place Pombal, at the top of Avenida da Liberdade. A familiar, square-shouldered figure appeared, melodramatically, from behind the fountains. Kliemann embraced her warmly. He was smartly dressed, as always, in a blue suit and felt hat, but thinner, his hair grayer than before. She noted, for the first time, that his upper teeth were false. “He looks much older,” she wrote. “Something akin to pity stirs in me.” He was delighted to see her and as self-centered as ever. “My stock has gone up recently because of your success,” he declared. “You are the first person to have achieved this: to have got yourself into England, to have come out again, and to be able to return. I am very proud of you, Lily! Your success has helped my position a good deal. I nearly lost my job. If you give up now it’ll be the end of me.”

  In the back of Hoppe’s car, Kliemann talked nonstop, mostly about himself. His leg had recently been poisoned, which is why he had lost weight, he said. He had spent Christmas with Yvonne at Thonon-les-Bains on the Swiss-French frontier. He wanted Yvonne to fire her maid, who was “lazy and impertinent and always answering him back.” Like all truly selfish people, Kliemann believed the minutiae of his life must be fascinating to all.

  The car stopped outside an apartment block, and Kliemann led her upstairs to an empty flat. On the table lay a parcel wrapped in paper and string. He was beaming with pride. She unwrapped it to find what looked like an ordinary transistor radio in a “shabby” wooden case; inside was a transmitter, almost certainly a wireless taken from a captured British SOE agent. “Here are the two holes to which you connect your tapper. It’s the only outward sign that could arouse suspicions,” said Kliemann. A wireless expert would show Lily how to make a Morse code tapper from household items. But first, Kliemann declared brightly, some sightseeing, and then lunch.

  A few hours later Lily stood on the ramparts of the Castelo dos Mouros, the great Moorish fort looking out over Sintra. On the fifteen-mile drive from Lisbon, Kliemann had happily prattled away about how satisfied the bosses were with Lily and, more important, with him. “Berlin was very pleased with her for getting to Bristol. Her descriptions of divisional signs were very well given and very precise. She was to send more like that.” In the future she must also send bomb damage reports. “It is a very worrying business running agents,” he remarked. “Because with most of them, I am always worrying about whether they are double-crossing or not. With you, in whom I have complete confidence, it makes me feel bad to be sending you to do such unpleasant things and to run such risks.” Still, he reflected, the war might soon be over: “The situation is quite hopeless and it is only a matter of time before Germany will have to give in.” He did not seem unduly concerned.

  They drove through delightful scenery, with blossoming fruit trees along the roadsides. Lily later remembered thinking that she didn’t feel like going back to England.

  Lily had brought with her a small Zeiss camera. As they toured the castle, she said: “What about a picture? It would be a souvenir.”

  “What a good idea. You did well to bring your camera,” said Kliemann, never suspecting that the camera had been supplied by MI5 for the express purpose of obtaining his picture for its files. Lily snapped Kliemann as he clambered up through one of the castle turrets. Then she set the automatic shutter and took another photograph, of the two of them together beside a fountain. She is smiling a little coquettishly. He strikes his best spymaster pose. They are both visibly happy.

  Kliemann ordered lunch at a small restaurant. While they were waiting for the food to arrive, she presented him with the wallet. His face lit up. Then he reached in his pocket and handed Lily a packet. Inside was a pretty bracelet of forty-five diamonds set in platinum, three hundred pounds in notes, and twenty thousand escudos. He was gathering more money, he said, which he would give her “at midday tomorrow.” After the meal was cleared away, Kliemann grew serious.

  “Do you think there is going to be an Allied invasion?”

  Lily recalled what Tar had said. “Yes.”

  “I too. When do you think it will take place?”

  “I think the landing is imminent.”

  Kliemann frowned and then launched into a prepared speech. “Now listen to me carefully, Lily. The next big move in the war will be the Allied landing. Our only chance of winning, at the moment, is to throw them back into the sea. To do that we must know in advance where they are planning to land, so that we can prepare a hot reception. It could be in Holland or Belgium, but we don’t think so. We are fairly sure that it will be in France, and there are two possibilities: either the Pas de Calais or Normandy. If they choose the Pas de Calais, the Allied troops will be concentrated on the Channel coast; but if it is to be Normandy, they will move them into the area around Bristol. Do you understand? What you must tell us is whether there is a build-up of troops and other activities, so we can work out where the enemy is making for.”

  She should spend as much time as possible visiting her relatives in the West Country, paying particular attention to any military activity on Salisbury Plain, and reporting “everything seen in or around Bristol.” Where was Eisenhower’s headquarters? What exercises were taking place? Were invasion barges arriving in Bristol from America, and if so in what numbers? “Information obtained by observation is of interest, but high-level gossip is not of much interest as it rarely proves accurate.” When her radio was working, she should transmit on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 11:00 p.m. “I want the transmissions to be as short as possible. The shorter the better.” Kliemann reached into his wallet and presented Lily with a single British stamp, explaining that on the top left-hand corner was a microdot: “These are the instructions for the transmitting set in case you forget anything.” She put the stamp in her note case.

  Only now did Kliemann ask how she had managed to travel to Lisbon. Lily launched into her cover story about her job at the Ministry of Information and the propaganda films for which she was gathering material. Kliemann nodded approvingly. She had memorized numerous corroborative details, including how Alfred Hitchcock was working for the ministry’s film division and exactly where the canteen was located. But he asked not a single question.

  After lunch they strolled along the waterfront and watched the fishing boats pull away from the coast. Kliemann turned to her. “What is our hold over you?”

  “My parents are still in Paris, as you once reminded me … but it would be better for you to realise that I am acting freely, rather than under pressure. You’d feel much surer of me.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy this most incurious of spies. It was dark when they climbed into Hoppe’s car for the drive back to Lisbon. As they passed through Estoril, Kliemann remarked: “I would like to have shown you the casino and take you to a chic restaurant for dinner, but it wouldn’t be wise. The place is full of international gangsters, double agents and intelligence agents. It is better that we shouldn’t be seen together in public.”

  The next morning, Hoppe showed her how to make a Morse code tapper using a block of wood, a nail, a kitchen knife, and a book. He then handed over two new transmitting crystals and a list of frequencies and taught her a new code. Kliemann arrived, carrying a large paper bag. Inside were 1,500 one-pound notes. He explained that he had “planned to hide the money in a cigar box but could not find one large enough.” He would try to find banknotes of a larger denomination, he said, and a bigger box.

  Lily now explained that, as part of her propaganda work, she had made contact with the press attaché at the British embassy and he had agreed to send the radio to London in the diplomatic bag. This was a most implausible story. The diplomatic bag was used to transfer sensitive information; it was not a free luggage transportation service for civilians. But once again, Kliemann evinced no suspicion and happily agreed that “this was a wise move, to avoid any possible curiosity by security officials at the airport.”

  There was one more important piece of business. Now that she had a
wireless, Lily would need a “control signal,” a way to indicate that she was now transmitting under British control, should she be caught. “We must take all possible precautions,” said Kliemann. “Suppose the British unmask you. They won’t arrest you. They’ll watch you for a short time. They’ll register all your transmissions to make sure they know your methods. Then they’ll force you to work for them, under the threat of a revolver. I want to give you some means of warning us, some sign which they cannot detect, but for which we’ll be watching very carefully.” Kliemann’s plan was simple: “If she was discovered by the British and told to go on transmitting, she was to call PSE QSL SK”—Morse shorthand for “Please acknowledge reception.” Lily replied that this was “silly”—which it was, since if she added something new to a message, “the British would know that this was some sort of sign.” She suggested a more subtle danger code.

  “At the beginning of the message, between KA and the call-sign, there is a dash. Sometimes I do it, sometimes not. If I do it twice—once in the message and once in the repetition of the message—it’ll mean I’m no longer a free agent. But only if the dash is there both times. If it’s only in once, it doesn’t mean anything. Because now and then I may send it just to make it less noticeable. If they comb through a series of my messages, they will see that it varies and won’t pay any attention when I repeat it.”

  Kliemann was impressed: “That’s excellent.” In his notebook he wrote: “Strich zwischen Anfang und Nummer,” dash between the beginning and number.

  They arranged to meet the next day at 11:00 a.m. in the Praça do Comércio a few hours before Lily’s flight. Kliemann, astonishingly, was waiting, with a very large box of cigars under one arm. Inside, he whispered, under a layer of cigars and a false bottom, was five hundred pounds in five-pound notes. They walked around the square, arm in arm. Kliemann paused by a fountain, lit a cigarette, and looked solemn.

  “Even if it meant the end of my career, if you said you did not want to go back to England, I would not force you.”

  “I would rather go on until the end,” said Lily.

  Kliemann was a ridiculous spy, a vain and fragile egotist, but he was also capable of gentleness, and he was offering his spy a way out. Lily’s British spymasters had never shown her such care.

  Kliemann kissed her hand and walked away.

  In her diary Lily wrote: “Five months ago I was so full of enthusiasm, so ready to love the British, so eager to help them. I admired them; I trusted them; I had faith in British fair play. I worked readily for them; I took risks on their behalf. In return, I only asked for one thing: to keep my dog. It wasn’t asking much, but it was too much for them! Tomorrow I’ll be in London, I’ll hand them over the money, the code, the radio, everything … except for a dash! A dash that will enable me to destroy all my work, all their work, the minute I want to. I shall not use my power. I know that. But I will know that I have them at my mercy!”

  Agent Treasure landed at Bristol Airport at five thirty the next morning, in thick fog, and was driven to a hotel. There she was given a cup of tea and some toast, along with a tiny square of margarine and half-teaspoonful of marmalade. A few minutes later, Mary Sherer strode in, bustling and businesslike. Lily handed over the box of cigars with the cash inside, the radio crystals, the stamp with the microdot, the diamond bracelet, and the photographs of Kliemann smiling in the sun.

  “He must be daft,” said Mary. “The colonel will be absolutely delighted.”

  Robertson came to Rugby Mansions the next day to congratulate Lily in person. “So here you are again!” he said jovially. “We didn’t really expect you.” And added: “They are very fine cigars.”

  The radio, money, and bracelet were examined by MI5’s experts. The transmitter was pronounced to be “indistinguishable from an ordinary radio to the untrained eye.” Exactly thirty-nine of the five-pound notes were forgeries. The bracelet was valued at £175.

  Lily described her conversations with Kliemann, his hunger for information about military maneuvers in the southwest, and his almost endearing naïveté. “I have nothing against Kliemann personally,” she told Mary. “He has always treated me very well and it makes me feel very badly to have to lie to him and cheat him.”

  “What would he do if he thought you were controlled?” Mary asked. “Presumably he would not tell Berlin because this would make him look such a fool.”

  “I am absolutely sure that if he thought I was double-crossing, he would report it.”

  Mary sent a glowing report to Tar: “Treasure gave a very good account of herself, particularly given the flimsy nature of her story. She did very well in Lisbon and has provided us with a new, very valuable channel of communication.”

  Yet there was one aspect of Lily’s story that troubled her. Mary had studied the files in B1A. So far, every wireless agent sent by the Germans had a “control signal,” a way to tip off the Abwehr that they had been caught and were sending messages under British direction. Sometimes this was merely a misspelling or an added comma. Kliemann had briefed her intensively on how to operate her wireless, but “no suggestion for indications of operation under duress was made.” Lily never mentioned a control signal: “She states she was never given any security check or other means of informing the Germans if she was controlled by the British. In fact, they never spoke of the possibility of this happening.” Having made a note of this anomaly, Mary Sherer promptly forgot about it.

  On April 13, Mary took Lily to Hampstead Heath, to a house with a royal blue front door. The little radio transmitter had been set up in a top-floor bedroom. At twelve minutes past midnight, Lily sent a message to Kliemann: “Arrived Safely.” She did not insert a dash, either in the message or in its repetition. Over the next two months, whenever she tapped out a message, she thought about the dash. “Every time, I know that I can destroy the work of three years. Just a dash, and the Germans will know that I work under the control of the Intelligence Service … and the British will suspect nothing. This is my revenge—they made me a promise and they didn’t keep it. Now I shall have them in my power.”

  19. Jebsen’s New Friend

  Johnny Jebsen was a one-man production line of secrets. His reports, funneled back to Britain via MI6 in Lisbon, contained an extraordinary wealth of detail about flying bombs, economic conditions in Germany, intelligence reports, and “even an account of opinions expressed by Hitler and Himmler and Kaltenbrunner,” the chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). Artist’s information was gleaned from no less than thirty-nine subsources and informants, ranging from Abwehr secretaries to Canaris himself, and the quality was so good that MI6, territorial as ever, wondered whether it should be shared with other branches of intelligence, since there was “no authority from C to act as a circulating section.” Jebsen grew bolder. The V2 rocket, the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, was being manufactured at the Rax-Werke factory in Wiener Neustadt using slave labor from Mauthausen concentration camp. Passing on this information, he “seriously and earnestly put the proposition that when his trouble with the Gestapo is cleared up he should return to Germany and organise the sabotage of the factory at Wiener-Neustadt.” Jebsen was now offering to sabotage the most potent secret weapon in the German arsenal. “This proposal sounds fantastic, but I repeat that Artist takes it very seriously.” Even more extraordinary was Jebsen’s suggestion that MI6 should recruit as a spy the wife of one of Britain’s most famous novelists.

  P. G. Wodehouse was now living with his wife, Ethel, in Paris, where the couple had regular contact with a number of high-ranking Germans. Jebsen saw an opportunity. Charles de Salis of MI6 reported:

  P. G. Wodehouse and his wife were great friends of Artist, who helped them financially from time to time. They are at the moment in Paris. Mrs Wodehouse is very pro-British and is inclined to be rude to anyone who dares address her in German. She has on occasion said loudly in public places: “If you cannot address me in English don’t speak at all. You had be
tter learn it as you will have to speak it after the war anyway.” Artist thinks she might be a useful source, as both she and her husband are in close touch with [Paul-Otto] Schmidt, Hitler’s interpreter, who often talks to her of the conversations he has had to interpret between Hitler and the various foreigners who visit him. Wodehouse himself is entirely childlike and pacifist.

  It is not known whether MI6 acted on this suggestion and recruited Ethel Wodehouse, but Jebsen’s suggestion casts a new light on their time in Paris. Critics accused the novelist and his wife of living in queasy accommodation with the Nazis, after Wodehouse foolishly agreed to make radio broadcasts at the Germans’ behest. Jebsen’s report proves that while Wodehouse himself may have been passively apolitical, his wife was so anti-Nazi that she was considered a potential spy.

  Jebsen believed he was safe. Elements within the Abwehr saw him as “anti-Nazi and latterly defeatist,” but he had his defenders. A colleague in Berlin promised to warn him of any imminent danger: if he received a “telegram saying ‘come back immediately’ this was a pre-arranged signal which in fact meant ‘do not come, the Gestapo are after you.’ ” He had also recruited a new bedroom mole within the Lisbon Abwehr station: Baroness Marie von Gronau, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a pioneer aviator who was the Luftwaffe attaché in Tokyo. Marie was a secretary in the counterintelligence section and happily told Jebsen whatever was passing across her boss’s desk. In jest, he asked Marie to marry him. She turned him down but was “fascinated by his intelligence and wide knowledge.” She may have been equally attracted to the “seemingly inexhaustible funds at his disposal.” After the war, Marie von Gronau was asked if she had known Jebsen was a British agent. She replied that he had denied it so often she assumed he must be, and recalled how he dropped telltale remarks such as: “I am His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy” and “Friendship goes across borders of nations, regardless of a state of war.”