Double Cross

by Ben MacIntyre

  For the next two months, Jebsen lay on his bunk, his ribs too badly broken to stand. Completely cut off from the outside world, he was unaware that in Frankfurt his wife, Lore, was pregnant with his child. But slowly, despite the starvation rations and freezing cold, his strength started to return, and with it, hope. Jebsen began to imagine ways to escape. A number of British prisoners were held at Sachsenhausen, including Lieutenant Commander Mike Cumberlege, a piratical Royal Navy officer with a gold earring, and Lieutenant Colonel John Churchill, widely known as “Mad Jack,” a commando who fought armed with a claymore, longbow, and bagpipes. Cumberlege had been captured in 1945 while attempting to blow up the Corinth Canal. Churchill had led an ill-fated commando attack on the German-held island of Brac in Yugoslavia in 1944: surrounded by six of his men, he played “Will Ye No Come Back Again” on the bagpipes until a mortar shell landed, killing everyone but him, and he was captured. These were men, as the writer Saki put it, “who wolves have sniffed at.” Jebsen, a man who would have run a mile from a wolf, struck up an unlikely friendship with them both.

  In September 1944, Jack Churchill crawled through an abandoned drain under the camp wire and set off on foot for the Baltic coast. He was recaptured, transferred to a camp in the Tyrol under SS guard, and then set free by a German army captain after the SS moved out. He walked ninety-three miles into Italy and linked up with an American armored force. When Churchill finally got back to Britain, he produced a letter written by Mike Cumberlege to his wife. The letter contained a message, in code, that read: “JOHNNY JEBSEN HUN HELD HIGH TREASON CAN D REPEAT D POPOFF HELP URGENT FO KNOW OF JJ ALL CHARGES AGAINST US ARE BASELESS.” The Foreign Office had never heard of Johnny Jebsen, and to make matters worse, as the message was passed around, his name was garbled. “I can make little of this. We appear to have no record of any Johnny Jebsen or Debsen,” wrote one official.

  In February 1945, a Gestapo escort arrived from Berlin with orders to collect Jebsen and Heinz Moldenhauer. Petra Vermehren saw the two men leave under guard. On April 12, Moldenhauer was returned to the camp alone. He told Vermehren that he was surprised not to find Jebsen back in Sachsenhausen already. The Red Army was now closing in. A week later, the SS ordered 33,000 inmates to begin the forced march northeast. Moldenhauer was among the thousands killed on the way. Mike Cumberlege had already been transferred to Flossenbürg camp, where he was shot five days before it was liberated. Petra Vermehren was one of 1,400 women still in Sachsenhausen when the camp was liberated on April 30. She returned to Hamburg and resumed her writing career.

  Johnny Jebsen had vanished. Ian Wilson, Artist’s onetime case officer, set out to find him. A “driven personality” who “never found the art of conversation,” Wilson was a man of deep, if well-hidden, feelings and granite loyalty. It was, he said, “my personal wish to help those who helped us,” and none had been more helpful than Jebsen. “I do feel that it is up to this office to use all possible diligence in finding out exactly what happened.”

  Wilson owed Jebsen a debt and, with the single-mindedness that was his trademark, he meant to discharge it. Recalling that Jebsen had spoken about meeting Marie von Gronau in a café in Flensburg three days after the end of the war, in May 1945 he wrote to the British intelligence officer in that part of Germany and asked him to be ready in case Jebsen turned up.

  My old friend Johnny Jebsen stated long ago that when the Allies defeated Germany he would hope to have made his way to Flensburg in Schleswig Holstein. It is just possible that he may have been able to get himself to SH, in which case I have little doubt that he will get in touch with British intelligence. Should he come to your notice it might be as well to have him sent to this country, purely for his own cover and protection. He knows my own name which will serve as a password. I hope he has got the KVK [War Merit Cross] First Class which he said he was going to give me.

  Jebsen did not appear. Recalling the “assurance we gave Johnny that if anything happened to him we would look after the welfare of his wife,” Wilson went looking for Lore Jebsen, who had by now given birth to Jebsen’s son. With the help of Popov, he found her in the Russian sector of Berlin, arranged for her to move to the British zone, helped her get a job back on the stage, lobbied MI5 to request the German government for a state pension, and found a lawyer to untangle Jebsen’s financial affairs. “She will be able to live in comfort,” he wrote. John Marriott could not understand why his colleague was going to such lengths: “We have no financial and very little moral responsibility for Mrs Jebsen,” he wrote. “Wilson is, as you know, obstinate, pertinacious and kind-hearted and he feels a great sense of responsibility.” He shared that responsibility with Popov who, heartsick at the disappearance of his friend, launched his own hunt for Jebsen and those who had abducted him. He traveled to Switzerland and Germany, interviewing anyone who might know of his fate.

  Wilson and Popov tracked down Jebsen’s business associates, his lovers, and his secretary, Mabel Harbottle. “None of these people had any definite information about what had happened to Artist.” One of Jebsen’s business partners, a Yugoslavian named Glusevic, said he had been quizzed by the Gestapo about Jebsen and “formed the impression that the Gestapo had not extracted full information about anything from Artist.” Wilson went hunting for the German officers, notably chief investigator Obergeheimrat Quitting, “who would be most likely to know of Artist’s ultimate fate.” Popov was keen for vengeance: “If you have luck and find the man, keep him alive until I come, I would love to have a few words with him.” Quitting never resurfaced.

  The NKVD, it seemed, was also on the trail of Jebsen. Soviet intelligence officers had interrogated Popov’s family in Yugoslavia before the war’s end and seemed to “know everything about Jebsen, including his visits to Lisbon.” Wilson wondered “how the NKVD could be aware of Jebsen’s movements”—the answer, of course, was Anthony Blunt.

  Wilson refused to lose hope. “We do not know whether or not Artist is still alive, but if he is, he may yet prove to be a valuable agent.” He went back to work at McKenna & Co., Solicitors, but continued the hunt. Others came to the conclusion that Jebsen must be dead. Tar Robertson had shared Wilson’s determination to find out “what actually happened to him in the end, as Johnny did some extremely good work on our behalf” but reluctantly decided he must have been transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp, “which was the normal place for internees to be sent who were to be killed.” Popov eventually came to believe that his friend had been “shot while trying to escape.” On February 17, 1950, a court in Berlin formally pronounced Johnny Jebsen dead.

  Wilson was not convinced, nor was Lore. “She refuses to believe he is dead,” wrote Wilson. Petra Vermehren, “the last person to see him alive,” was also “emphatic that he did not die” in Sachsenhausen. A rumor persisted that Jebsen “was liberated by the Russians only to be rearrested and consigned to some camp in Russia.” That might explain the interest of the Soviet NKVD. A strange report from MI6, citing an American source in Lisbon, reported that “Johnny Jebson [sic] has left for England.” In a postwar interrogation, Walter Schellenberg, the Nazi intelligence chief, stated categorically: “Jebsen has not been killed.”

  The mystery lingered, but Wilson’s investigations had proved one thing beyond doubt: Jebsen had “kept the faith”; he had never revealed anything to his captors about the Double Cross plot, either before D-Day or after it. “There is nothing to indicate that whatever may have happened to him he was forced to disclose facts which we wanted kept secret.” Jebsen had taken his secret with him to the grave, or wherever else he had vanished to.

  Perhaps Jebsen was caught up in the last murderous spasms of the Nazi regime, as Tar believed, killed and tossed into some unmarked mass grave, like so many others. Or perhaps he made good his escape. In the chaos and confusion of those final days, it was easy to disappear. Heinrich Müller vanished, as did Quitting and other Nazis. So did Juan Pujol and Paul Fidrmuc, Agents Garbo and Ostro. Roger Michael,
von Roenne’s assistant, who may have spied for all sides, or none, reached the end of the war and then evaporated. Johnny Jebsen had the ingenuity, the means, and the motive to disappear. His funds had seemed, to his colleagues, “inexhaustible,” and he was an acknowledged expert in bribery. He had many debts to call in, many an underworld contact to shield him, and any number of places he could hide. He had bank accounts in Paris, London, Berlin, San Francisco, Dubrovnik, and Shanghai. He had every reason not to stay in Germany to discuss his questionable business activities with the authorities and every motive to want to start afresh somewhere else, as someone else. Ian Wilson died in 1978, still wondering what had happened to his lost spy.

  The Double Cross double agents spied for adventure and gain, out of patriotism, greed, and personal conviction. They made an eccentric, infuriating, courageous, and astonishingly successful team. And the most important of them has disappeared from history, just as he vanished from the world at the age of twenty-seven: Johnny Jebsen, former international playboy turned dodgy businessman; a young man of cynicism, black humor, deep intellect, and physical frailty; the chain-smoking Anglophile dandy who took up spying in order not to fight, but who defied the Nazis because he believed, above all, in friendship. He was unable to resist worldly temptations, but he resisted his Gestapo torturers to the end. Like many ordinary, flawed people, he did not know his own courage until war revealed it. Jebsen might easily have turned history in a disastrous direction to save his own skin, and he chose not to. Agent Artist was not a conventional D-Day hero, but he was a hero nonetheless.

  Johnny Jebsen

  Acknowledgments

  Once again, I am deeply indebted to dozens of people who have helped me to write this book by generously providing guidance, hospitality, gentle mockery, food, and fellowship, as well as access to documents, photographs, recorded interviews, and memories. I am particularly grateful to the families of the agents and their case officers, German as well as British, who provided me with so much valuable material: Fiona Agassiz, Robert Astor, Marcus Cumberlege, Gerry Czerniawski, Prue Evill, Jeremy Harmer, the late Peggy Harmer, Anita Harris, Caroline Holbrook, Alfred Lange, Karl Ludwig Lange, Belinda McEvoy, David McEvoy, Marco Popov, Misha Popov, and Alastair Robertson. I have benefited greatly from the expertise of a number of brilliant historians and writers, including Christopher Andrew, the late Michael Foot, Peter Martland, Russell Miller, Nigel West, and Paul Winter. My thanks to Jo Carlill for her superb picture research, Ben Blackmore for long hours of research at Kew, Mary Teviot for her genealogical sleuthing, Manuel Aicher for research work in Germany, José António Barreiros in Lisbon, and Begoña Pérez for her help with translations from the Portuguese. I am also grateful for the advice and help of Hugh Alexander, David A. Barrett, Paul Bellsham, Roger Boyes, Martin Davidson, Sally George, Phil Reed, Stephen Walker, Matthew Whiteman, and all my friends and colleagues at the Times. I owe a particular debt to Terry Charman, Robert Hands, and Mark Seaman for reading the manuscript and saving me from some excruciating howlers. The remaining errors are all my own work. To those who prefer not to be named, I am deeply grateful for all your help.

  It is a pleasure and a privilege to be published by Crown. My thanks go to Molly Stern, Charlie Conrad, Miriam Chotiner-Gardner, Anna Simpson, and Katie Johnson for their unfailing efficiency and patience, and to John Glusman for his enthusiastic support of this book from its earliest stages. My agent, Ed Victor, has been a rock of encouragement throughout my writing career. My children have kept me sane through another book with their support and good humor; and to Kate, as ever, all my love.

  Notes

  Citations marked “KV” refer to the Security Service files, “CAB” to Cabinet Office files, and “FO” to Foreign Office files, all at the National Archives (TNA) at Kew, London.

  Epigraphs

  1 Tangle within tangle: Winston Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (London, 1991), p. 55.

  2 The enemy must not: Sun Tzu, The Art of War, chapter 7.

  Preface

  1 It may well be: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–1945 (London, 2001), p. 554.

  2 In wartime, truth: Fourth Eureka meeting, November 30, 1943, quoted in Thaddeus Holt, The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War (London, 2004), p. 505.

  3 utterly impossible to disguise: J. C. Masterman, The Double Cross System in the War 1939–1945 (London, 1972), p. 150.

  4 It is here that the: Führer Directive no. 51, March 11, 1943, cited in Joshua Levine, Operation Fortitude: The Story of the Spy Operation That Saved D-Day (London, 2011), p. 199.

  Chapter 1: Raw Recruits

  1 We both had some intellectual: Dusko Popov, Spy/Counterspy (New York, 1974), p. 5.

  2 He smiles freely showing: KV 2/846.

  3 His coldness, aloofness: Popov, Spy/Counterspy, p. 6.

  4 not thinking my looks would be: Ibid., p. 7.

  5 Need to meet you urgently: Ibid., p. 2.

  6 two girls from the chorus: Ibid., p. 16.

  7 sharp intelligence, cynicism: Ibid., p. 14.

  8 because it saved him from: KV 2/845.

  9 a wangle by Canaris: KV 2/856.

  10 time travelling throughout Europe: KV 2/859.

  11 Hitler is the undisputed master: Popov, Spy/Counterspy, p. 23.

  12 No country can resist: Ibid., p. 24.

  13 our sole source of information: KV 2/72.

  14 based on the highest ideals: Roman Garby-Czerniawski, The Big Network (London, 1961), p. 14.

  15 Every signpost: Ibid., p. 21.

  16 vision: Ibid., p. 22.

  17 She was small: Ibid., p. 43.

  18 Thin and muscular: Mathilde-Lily Carré, I Was the Cat (London, 1960), p. 69.

  19 in an appalling French: Ibid., p. 68.

  20 under the eyes of an enormous: Ibid., p. 66.

  21 Instead of throwing myself: Ibid., p. 67.

  22 Every time he spoke: Ibid., p. 70.

  23 A great bond of friendship: Ibid., p. 69.

  24 do great things: Garby-Czerniawski, Big Network, p. 47.

  25 you walk so quietly: Ibid., p. 49.

  26 It will be inter-Allied: Ibid., p. 56.

  27 who had received a: Carré, I Was the Cat, p. 86.

  28 In her black fur coat: Garby-Czerniawski, Big Network, p. 79.

  29 To defeat the enemy: Ibid., p. 124.

  30 a tall, thin Pole: Carré, I Was the Cat, p. 81.

  31 REMPLACEZ LE COUVERCLE: Garby-Czerniawski, Big Network, p. 77.

  32 Big Network composed: Ibid., p. 83.

  33 packed in such a way: Ibid., p. 125.

  34 RE: GOERING TRAIN: Ibid., p. 144.

  35 a typical little provincial: Carré, I Was the Cat, p. 98.

  36 no question of any jealousy: Garby-Czerniawski, Big Network, p. 120.

  37 strange woman, idealistic: Ibid., p. 58.

  38 C’est la vie: Ibid., p. 180.

  39 You’ve kept us all busy: Ibid., p. 188.

  40 the head of some business: Ibid., p. 187.

  41 We are perfect partners: Ibid., p. 194.

  42 I was petrified by the: Ibid., p. 205.

  43 exceedingly dull: KV 2/2098.

  44 an utter shit, corrupt: Cited in Anthony Read and David Fisher, Colonel Z: The Secret Life of a Master of Spies (London, 1985), p. 361.

  45 I realised he must have: Nigel West, “High Society Spy,” Mail on Sunday, May 7, 1995.

  46 Attractive in appearance: KV 2/2098.

  47 apparently innocuous letters: West, “High Society Spy.”

  48 She is very intelligent: KV 2/2098.

  49 I must do something: Nigel West and Juan Pujol Garcia, Operation Garbo (London, 2011), p. 48.

  50 I wanted to work for them: Ibid., p. 49.

  51 I was fascinated by the origin: Ibid., p. 29.

  52 rant away as befitted: Ibid., p. 50.

  53 He should be careful: Mark Seaman, “Introduction,” in Tomás Harris, Garbo: The Spy Who Saved D-Day
(London, 2004), p. 50.

  54 There are men here: Ibid., p. 58.

  55 did not particularly like Germans: Lily Sergueiev, Secret Service Rendered: An Agent in the Espionage Duel Preceding the Invasion of France (London, 1968), p. 10.

  56 promised to obtain for her: José António Barreiros, Nathalie Serguiew: Uma Agente Dupla em Lisboa (Lisbon, 2006), p. 34.

  57 let the French down badly: KV 2/464.

  58 It might be quite easy: Barreiros, Nathalie Serguiew, p. 56.

  59 I am interested: Sergueiev, Secret Service Rendered, p. 32.

  60 Why do you want to work: Ibid., p. 33.

  61 Babs lifts up his shaggy: Ibid., p. 15.

  62 I take Babs on my knees: Ibid., p. 56.

  Chapter 2: A Bit of an Enigma

  1 to get an easy living: KV 2/853.

  2 an awful crook: KV 2/859.

  3 Be a good thing for you: Dusko Popov, Spy/Counterspy (New York, 1974), p. 21.

  4 Continue your conversation: Ibid., p. 29.

  5 insignificant letter in: KV 2/845.

  6 Your spymaster will be Major: Popov, Spy/Counterspy, p. 45.

  7 Who were Churchill’s enemies: Ibid., p. 31.

  8 We are now both: KV 2/845.

  9 What is Canaris like: Ibid., p. 18.

  10 There was a curious ambiguity: Ibid., p. 45.

  11 blackish hair on his hands: KV 2/847.

  12 I have been instructed to: Popov, Spy/Counterspy, p. 47.

  13 He was tall and dark: KV 2/847.

  14 Popov, hello: Popov, Spy/Counterspy, p. 53.

  15 many agents in England: Popov, Spy/Counterspy, p. 24.

  16 Fifth Column Neurosis: KV 4/186, Diaries of Guy Liddell, March 15, 1940.

  17 the gentlemen who are: TNA, Records of the Central Office of Information, INF 1/264–8.