by John Bryden
The war was then in its seventeenth month. MI5 was undergoing a huge and largely uncontrolled expansion that had mixed rigid police-officer types with know-it-all academics and lawyers. Amateurism was rife, evident even in the choice of name for the new committee: the XX Committee (in conversation, the “Twenty Committee”). While it must have seemed terribly clever to whomever thought it up, it would have taken no time at all for an enemy intelligence analyst to notice that the number twenty in Roman numerals is “XX” — a double-cross. Later, there was even a Thirty Committee — XXX — for handling triple agents.
Popov was rushed into service, and was soon provided with some attractive intelligence to take back to his German masters in Lisbon. Before he departed, however, he was given plenty of opportunity to gather other useful intelligence on his own:
Bill [Popov’s case officer] accompanied me frequently on trips I was obliged to make to gather information for the Germans. The XX Committee had decided I should actually do this job myself so the Germans couldn’t trip me up when they questioned me. Theoretically the concept was sound. In practice it didn’t work all that well.
The hitch was my photographic memory. Not everything I saw could be passed on. A board of experts decided what could be told the Germans. That meant I had to unlearn a good part of what I had seen. I lost more time studying what I had to forget than remembering what I was to report….10
The “concept” was not sound at all, but lunatic. It is hard to imagine anything more naive than to allow a freshly turned enemy agent to make observations of value and then solemnly tell him he was not to divulge them when he again came under enemy control. Yet, such was the persuasiveness of the intercepted Abwehr messages that had preceded his arrival.
Indeed, it was 1939 and Arthur Owens all over again, only this time instead of trips to Belgium and Holland to meet DR. RANTZAU, it was trips to Portugal to meet Gustav von Karsthoff, chief of the Abwehr office in Lisbon. Von Karsthoff — so Popov said on his return — was delighted by his offerings and rushed to Berlin with them, bringing back “a Mr. Kramer” (Major Ritter’s deputy at Ast Hamburg, Dr. Karl Kramer) bearing a questionnaire that filled nine closely typed pages, forty-six of the fifty-two questions having to do with air intelligence. Popov was told of the plan to send him from England to the United States and then on to Egypt.11
It all went so perfectly. Popov, now code-named TRICYCLE, was allowed to extend his travels around Britain — to Coventry, Birmingham, and London — 12 and was again sent back to Lisbon, arriving on March 15. A few days later the Hamburg-Berlin teletype machine clattered out the following from Abt I/Luft:
A-3570 reports by personal meeting for the period between 14.2 to 15.3.41.
Subject: New Houses of Parliament
[Translation]
The building is between Little Smith Street and Marsham Street, Westminster, and is about 150–200 yards south of Victoria Street towards Westminster Abbey. The building has five floors, is almost new and has an area of about 100 x 80 yards. The upper floors are not used. They are strongly protected by sandbags and steel plates. The outer walls have brick protection 4 feet thick and about 8 feet high. The main entrance is on Little Smith Street and is exactly opposite from sub-station U which is the largest substation of the Westminster Auxiliary (Fire) Service. Winston Churchill’s private entrance is on Marsham Street. The King is doing his official business in the same building. I received this information from the deputy chief of the above sub-station at the end of January.13
A-3570 did not get it right, but came dangerously close. He was not so much directing the Luftwaffe to where members of Parliament gathered, as to Churchill’s underground bunker, which also housed the Cabinet War Room. In the immediate area, but just north of Victoria Street rather than south, it was the brain and nerve centre of the British armed forces, with a roof that was hastily and poorly constructed. A direct hit by a German heavy bomb and the course of the war, and its aftermath, would have been very different.14
Was this TRICYCLE? Undoubtedly so. ivan — Popov’s Abwehr code name — was remembered in interrogations after the war as being specifically attached to Abw I/Luft15 (Abwehr air intelligence), and the coincidence of the spy’s reporting period — February 14 to March 15 — corresponds to when Popov was in England between trips to Lisbon. The “by personal meeting” would have had to involve the spy entering Europe through a neutral country, either Sweden or Portugal. Popov, at this stage anyway, was another protegé of Major Ritter.
A-3570’s other messages also had to do with air intelligence, but while the information might have appeared genuine to Luftwaffe analysts, most of it was not. The numbers given for aircraft production were not far off the mark, but the elaborate description of the characteristics of Britain’s two-man Defiant fighter was useless; it had already been grounded as a failure. There was more material of like type, including one earlier message suggesting that Lena parachute spies would not be executed by the British if they were found to be carrying German army identification.16 Not likely, surely.
All of this suggests MI5 disinformation, although expecting the Germans to believe that a Yugoslav who could barely speak English could have obtained high-grade air intelligence seems to be a bit of a stretch.17 The message drawing German bombers to Churchill’s bunker is another matter. Short of being someone’s attempt to kill Churchill, it is likely his mention of “the New Houses of Parliament” was something Popov casually threw in as a result of his case officer showing him around London.
Ironically, the very fact that the message was relayed to Berlin is evidence that it was recognized as false. Canaris had no desire to see Churchill or the king hurt. He would not have wanted it sent on unless Major Ritter thought it was untrue. Fortunately, the Luftwaffe did not act on the information. Its policy still was to target war-related infrastructure, sparing where possible civilian institutions and military and political command centres.
By this time, Canaris had Britain’s interests very well looked after. Major Ritter could filter out any really dangerous intelligence that passed through Ast Hamburg, while von Karstoff — also an especially trusted Canaris loyalist — could keep an eye on things at KO Portugal. He was shortly to have the help of another agent especially trusted by Canaris: Paul Fidrmuc, later to be notorious to the Allies as ostro.
Fidrmuc was the best. He had been a spy for the Abwehr since 1934, and had operated in Canada, the United States, and Britain before the war. He was sitting in a jail in Denmark awaiting trial for espionage when German troops marched into that country. He was forty-three, sly, well-travelled, and a capable writer in both English and German. He arrived in Lisbon just as Popov made his approach to MI6 in Belgrade.
It may have been coincidence, of course, but if Popov was to operate against England from Lisbon, he needed a case officer. While MI5 might be satisfied to believe that von Karsthoff ran his spies hands-on, it was Abwehr practice — like any espionage organization anywhere — to have staff members of an Ast or KO manage the agents. It would seem Fidrmuc was sent to Lisbon to work in that capacity with Popov.18
Indeed, the three men — von Karsthoff, Fidrmuc, and Popov — had much in common. The first two were vintage Austrians, left over from the aftermath of the First World War and the breakup of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. This had involved the realignment of Austria’s borders and the creation of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Following the breakup, Fidrmuc found himself suddenly a Czech, and von Karsthoff would have been an Italian had he stayed in Trieste after it was chopped off and handed to Italy. No Nazis these two.
Popov, for his part, told the British he was born in Titel, Serbia, but when MI5 tested him on his language proficiency, it was found that along with Serbo-Croat, German, and a smattering of English, he was fluent in French and spoke excellent Italian with a Viennese accent, a considerable achievement for a young man from the Balkan backcountry. The language profile — especially the Viennese accent — better fi
t a Croat from Dubrovnik, as the Germans understood him to be. If that was the case, then he probably shared the fierce anger of Croatians at being lumped in with the Serbs in the new Yugoslavia, rather than being given independence. That would have made him partial to the Germans, not to the British.19
In any case, it was not intended that Popov work through Portugal for long. Major Ritter planned to put his gift for languages to use by getting the British to take him on in Egypt as a double agent attached to the counter-espionage agency there — Security and Intelligence Middle East (SIME).20
North Africa, up to the beginning of 1941 a backwater of the war, had suddenly burst into view with Indian and English troops under General Archibald Wavell, trouncing three times their number of Italians. Over 115,000 were captured and the rest were thrown back from the threshold of Egypt almost to Tripoli. It was the British army’s most brilliant accomplishment of the war.
Mussolini was devastated. The Italian dictator was noted for his bombast, but there was nothing to puff about now. The new Roman legions of the 1940s had been humiliated. Hitler took pity and offered a modest German force to help prop up the Italians. German troops and panzers began landing in Tripoli in January. Then someone on Hitler’s staff — maybe Hitler himself — had a very good idea. General Wavell was highly regarded by the Germans. During the interwar years he had been a prominent theorist on the principles of mechanized warfare. He was a tank man, and defeated the Italians by sending his armour around and between and behind them, the parched plains of Libya being perfect for a battle of movement. Against such a commander, one must put a leader of like qualities. Hitler chose General Erwin Rommel.
It was an inspired choice. The fifty-year-old Rommel had once commanded Hitler’s personal guard and had made a name for himself during the invasion of France, when his panzer division had been first across the Meuse and had led the dash for the Channel. He had caught Hitler’s eye, and to all appearances was a loyal follower of the Führer.
It is testimony to the speed with which Canaris could act that he had Popov aimed on Egypt within weeks of Rommel being named to Africa. If Popov could be properly set up as a double agent for SIME in Cairo, he could fish for intelligence on Rommel as well as on Wavell.
When MI5 switched off SNOW’s wireless transmissions on April 13, 1941, Major Ritter was deeply involved in paving the way for Popov in Egypt, and in developing Abwehr espionage capacity in the eastern Mediterranean generally. If dropping Owens meant MI5 was losing confidence in its other double agents, it could affect Popov. Months of planning and preparation could be destroyed just when Rommel had gathered sufficient forces to strike at the British. It was a crucial moment for Major Ritter and undoubtedly the reason why the Germans now proceeded to show tokens of their continuing faith in TATE.
The XX Committee, for its part, must have breathed a collective sigh of relief when Popov returned from his third trip to Portugal at the beginning of May. He told of being congratulated on the excellent intelligence he had been obtaining. He reported no trouble selling Plan Midas to von Karsthoff, and his phantom sub-agents, balloon and gelatine, were to be put on the Abwehr payroll. As the FBI was later to observe suspiciously, “von Karsthoff showed very little curiosity about Popov’s activities in England, his means of entering or leaving the country, or his sub-agents, but left the impression that he was to manage everything.”21 He was given £300 for balloon and gelatine and US$2,000 for himself.
By the end of May in England, the bombers had largely stopped coming as Hitler switched his Luftwaffe resources to the east for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Britain’s scorched and smoking cities were to get a reprieve. Imminent invasion was no longer to be feared. The raison d’être of the Wireless Board, the XX Committee, and Major Robertson’s wireless double agents — now reduced to two, TATE and dragonfly — had ceased to be. For the XX Committee especially, finding something new to do was crucial.
The answer was to shift emphasis to general deception. RAINBOW, and the handful of other non-wireless double agents that had been run separately by Major Sinclair, were turned over to Robertson’s newly minted B1A section. The XX Committee similarly expanded its mandate to all double agents, although still only in an advisory capacity. Robertson retained actual command. It meant that if he and Masterman were going to make names for themselves in their new roles, Popov, with his rich promise of fooling the Germans in the United States and Egypt, was their best bet.
For Major Ritter, June 1941 was a black month, and it got even blacker. Twelve days after breaking his arm when his plane ditched in the Mediterranean, he lost his American triple-cross operation, and with it his job with the Abwehr. His fault had been to assume that what he was getting away with in Britain could be duplicated in the United States. Not so.
William Sebold — tramp to the Germans, Harry Sawyer to the Americans — had enjoyed an easy run of it for over a year. His FBI operators at Centerport, New York, had faithfully radioed to Hamburg whatever he gave them, in readable cipher or not, and were sending on his behalf daily weather reports that included barometric pressure that even the FBI acknowledged was useful to German U-boats prowling the Atlantic.
Ritter, however, had over-extended himself. With the FBI looking after the transmitter, he allowed Sebold to become the centre of a small network of spies who sent their information as actual documents smuggled aboard ships bound for Europe. To facilitate this activity, the FBI was enticed into setting Sebold up in a dummy business. Unfortunately, unlike MI5 and Arthur Owens in Britain, the FBI did not leave Sebold to his own devices. When Sebold’s spies came calling at his office, it was with the whirring and clicks of FBI cameras behind a two-way mirror on the wall.
It must have seemed low risk at the outset. The United States was not at war, so even if Ritter’s agents were eventually arrested, at worst the penalties would only be a few years in jail. And even if the FBI caught on, why should it break up the party when there was no need to? The British had let Owens collect intelligence and obtain it from sub-agents for years without interfering. However, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had made his reputation and that of the Bureau’s by spectacular show trials during Prohibition. The movies and photos were for the press as well as for the courts.
There was indication of what was to come. Earlier in the spring, in a mighty blaze of publicity, the FBI took to the courts with the breakup of the “Joe K” spy ring, a Nazi security service enterprise that went sour when British postal censorship in Bermuda turned up and turned over one of his invisible-ink secret letters. The lucky break of an automobile accident and some good detective work had led to the capture of Kurt Ludwig, a.k.a. Joe Kessler, and his confederates.
On June 29, 1941, the FBI again pounced. In a lightning roundup, twenty-nine agents associated with Sebold were arrested. There were lurid headlines in newspapers across the United States and the world, and fabulous cinema footage of spy-to-spy meetings. It was thrilling stuff and captivated the American public for weeks on end, but it was the last thing Hitler wanted. Having attacked the largest country in the world just the week before, he did not want to give offence to the most powerful. There was hell to pay in Berlin.22
It was tremendously embarrassing to Canaris. A furious Hitler was deaf to any explanations, including that Sebold had been deliberately planted on the FBI. Major Ritter had to take the blame, and the punishment was swift. He was kicked out of the Abwehr, and Abt 1 Luft Hamburg was closed down and its staff dispersed. Ritter wound up in an anti-aircraft unit for the rest of war.23
The FBI scoring a double-agent triumph did not bring much cheer to MI5 either. The Bureau was good about it, giving details of its investigation to British Security Coordination, the MI6 office in New York, to pass along to its MI5 colleagues in London.24 MI5 could claim nothing like it. The minor German agents and sympathizers it had so far arrested had led to no spy rings. All had been individuals, or very small group efforts that had failed at the outset. Yet it was the British who were
at war, not the Americans.
MI5’s only riposte was to promote its prowess with double agents. Thus Popov — TRICYCLE — slated shortly to pass through the United States on his way to Egypt, was touted to the FBI as a kind of espionage superstar, a deeply cunning professional who had penetrated to the heart of the German secret service apparatus in Portugal and Spain,25 without giving the Americans any details, or any hint that there were still fears he had been blown by Owens.
Then something really exciting occurred. RAINBOW, a.k.a. George Eibner, the young man who roamed England with a small dance band, and who occasionally exchanged secret-ink letters with the Germans under Major Sinclair’s direction, received a letter from Portugal bearing instructions on a piece of film negative posing as a period at the end of a sentence. This was amazing. For more than a year, Eschborn had been struggling at Hamburg’s direction to reduce spy-photos to the size of postage stamps. This was new technology light years beyond his best efforts. Major Robertson was hugely impressed.26
It wasn’t new. To realize this, Robertson had only to read page 214 of Colonel Nicolai’s book The German Secret Service (London, 1924). Germany’s chief spymaster of the First World War wrote:
Finally the use of photographic reduction in the service of espionage deserves mention. It is accomplished by the reduction of documents as large as a sheet of typing paper to the size of a leaflet a millimetre square. In this way agents could receive almost indiscernible instructions which they could read with the help of magnifying glass.27
But Robertson had not read it; nor had the FBI told its British counterparts that Sebold had arrived in the United States sixteen months earlier with four microphotographs stuck to the back of his watch. The FBI had even gone on to make them for him.28
