by Larry Loftis
Major Hope and Major Bristow reported back that SIS did not object, and Popov left Paris for Hamburg on October 27. Hope had given Dusko a Mission Order to visit a Major Jo Stephenson in Germany, which Dusko would do on November 1. One of Johnny’s friends, Dr. Max Bruecher, had previously offered help, so he would be Dusko’s first call.
While Dusko scoured Germany for leads, a familiar name resurfaced in London: Quetting. The U.S. Forces European Theater Office, which had interrogated SS-Standartenführer Eugen Steimle, notified the London War Room on November 30 that Steimle might indirectly help with locating Jebsen. Steimle, USFET reported, had replaced Wilhelm Kuebart at Abwehr/SD Mil B after the failed July 20, 1944, putsch.* In the fall of 1944, the message went, Hermann Quetting, recently promoted to Sturmbannführer (major), had contacted Steimle to “discuss the Jebsen case.” Quetting, it turned out, had been entrusted by the SD with Johnny’s investigation and wanted to interrogate Jebsen’s associate, Brandes. Steimle was certain, the report noted, that the Gestapo had made Brandes testify. Steimle had no further information, however, and Quetting’s name quietly disappeared.
Dusko returned to Paris at the end of the year and on January 2, 1946, reported to London. He had not found Bruecher and otherwise had made no progress on Johnny.
Months passed.
The first week of April Tar sent a letter to a Lieutenant Colonel S. H. Noakes: “TRICYCLE is most anxious to have the JEBSEN case cleared up conclusively, and try to determine what actually happened to him at the end.” Dusko had offered, Tar said, to go to Hamburg to interview Johnny’s English secretary, Miss Harbottle, and Bruecher, who apparently was now living in Freiburg. Bruecher was a mutual friend of Jebsen’s and Popov’s, Tar wrote, and Dusko had entrusted Max to look after Lore Jebsen in Dusko’s absence.
Robertson also requested that Colonel Noakes investigate the names of individuals exterminated at the concentration camp in Mauthausen. This camp, Tar wrote, was the typical place where prisoners were sent to be killed, and Johnny might have been transferred there from Oranienburg.
On April 10 Tar requested travel approval from the Military Permit Office, and on April 25, Dusko flew to Hamburg and stayed two nights. He made no progress on Jebsen, but did manage to meet with Johnny’s wife, and apparently with Bruecher. While there, he also hunted for—and found—Jebsen assets unknown to Lore. At the Hendelsbank in Frankfurt, Johnny had stashed 400,000 Reichsmark. With a friend in Oberusel, he had hidden $20,000, thousands in Swiss Francs, and 2,700 gold pieces. With another friend, in Flensburg, he had cached silver, art, rugs, and other valuables. Dusko gave Tar and Dr. Bruecher the addresses and contact names for each location, and suggested that Max would be able to collect everything for Lore within a short time.
To assist Bruecher in the task, Tar sent a letter to Lieutenant Colonel B. Melland of the British Army of the Rhine, asking that Melland assist in providing Dr. Bruecher travel papers for all areas. Robertson’s correspondence to Melland marks the first time that British Intelligence conceded that Johnny was dead, Tar referring to him as “late.”
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While the information does not appear in MI5 files, Popov would later state that Walter Salzer, the name given by Frederick Hahn, had killed Johnny. Dusko vowed to return the favor. “Getting Salzer became a personal vendetta,” he told an interviewer. “Up until then the war, for me, had been a matter of fighting for ideals—and, of course, getting paid for it. But avenging Johnny’s death had nothing to do with money or ideals. He was my friend and I was determined to kill the man who murdered him. In a sense my war didn’t start until the war ended.”
After scouring much of the country, Dusko wrote in his memoirs, he found Salzer in Minden, a small town west of Hanover. At gunpoint he forced Salzer into a jeep and then drove to a nearby wood “to put a bullet through his brain.” When they reached a desolate area, Dusko asked who had ordered Johnny’s execution. Salzer said, “My superiors.”
Blood boiling, Dusko asked for names.
Salzer stuttered.
Dusko asked again.
No answer.
Popov raised the pistol.
Seconds hung as he stared into the bleak eyes of Johnny’s killer.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t pull the trigger. Tossing the gun aside, he smashed Salzer’s face with everything he had. The German crumpled. Fury inflamed and unrelenting, Popov pummeled the Nazi again and again, punching him mercilessly as Johnny had been beaten.
Exhausted, knuckles dripping blood, he stood.
Salzer was unconscious.
As Dusko turned to leave, he heaved and started vomiting. First the contents of his stomach, and then five years of stress and intrigue. “I vomited my sins and my shame and my pain,” he wrote. The sleeping pills, the benzedrine, the seducers and shadows, truth serum and car bombs—all gone. The lies, the danger, the hatred—no more. The clutch of Nazi claws, pinning him as prey to be devoured, had finally been broken.
Dusko Popov had survived the lion’s mouth.
EPILOGUE
“Spying is not a chivalrous business,” Popov once said. To live as a double agent, a spy had to be an unflinching liar. Dusko was. It was a banner device that undoubtedly had saved his life time and again during the war.
And probably after.
One of the dangers in World War II espionage was gray areas. “Killing a German in Germany in August 1945 presented no difficulties,” Dusko wrote. But it wasn’t that simple. If you killed a Wehrmacht soldier on May 7 you were doing your job. If you killed him on May 8 you committed murder. But who would complain if a bloodthirsty Nazi was killed? The juridical answer was that war criminals would be tried at Nuremburg. But what if the Nazi in question committed war crimes yet did not have a high enough profile to catch Allied attention? Such was the case, Dusko believed, with Johnny’s killer.
He would walk away scot-free.
Dusko found that reality unjust and maddening. For Johnny’s sake, he longed to bring the killer to justice. And so he tracked down Salzer intending to shoot him, but in the end simply beat him and let him go.
Or did he?
In Spy Counter-Spy, Popov wrote that Tar Robertson told him of Johnny’s death at the end of December 1944. MI5 files, however, reveal that Dusko went to Germany in October–November 1945 to find out what happened to Johnny. And while Tar had conceded Jebsen’s death earlier, as late as August 1947 Allied Intelligence was still actively interviewing war prisoners to “provide a new lead to the elusive last chapter of the Jebsen story.” Yet Popov’s memoirs state that he hunted Walter Salzer two years prior, in August 1945. Strangely, in an interview promoting his book, Dusko claimed that Salzer survived the war, “was tried and served several years in prison.” Popov even added that “Walter Salzer is [presently] one of the heads of a chemical company in Germany.”
The Nuremburg Trials show no record of a Walter Salzer. In addition, leading up to the trials the Allies interrogated principal SD and Abwehr officers still alive—including Kaltenbrunner, Schellenberg, Kuebart, Schroeder, Schreiber, and Kammler—and none of them mentioned a Walter Salzer. Schellenberg, who headed SD’s foreign intelligence, did not mention the name in his memoirs. Nor did Wilhelm Höttl, who helped direct the SD’s production and distribution of counterfeit currency, one of the alleged crimes for which Jebsen was investigated.
Salzer doesn’t show up in Station X/Bletchley Park radio intercepts. He doesn’t appear in the accounts of prisoners at Oranienburg. Most importantly, the last person to see Johnny alive—whom Popov mentions—was Mrs. Petra Vermehren. She testified in 1947 that a Kriminalrat Hofmeister was in charge of Jebsen and that a Sturmbannführer named Schmitz interrogated Johnny and took him away for the last time in February 1945. Vermehren did not mention a man named Salzer.
The reason is simple: Walter Salzer did not exist.
I posed the problem of dates and the unk
nown Salzer to Marco Popov, Dusko’s son, and his answer resolved both discrepancies: “Although Dusko never actually admitted this to me or any other member of the family (he only winked for response),” Marco wrote, “I am convinced Dusko found the person who ordered JJ’s execution and killed him. This in the aftermath of war would have been considered murder. I thus believe Walter Salzer is a borrowed name and Dusko’s vendetta epilogue was a personal matter not to be found in MI5 files.”
Marco’s supposition is credible. If Walter Salzer was Johnny’s killer and Dusko only beat him, why the need to change dates and names? Only if Dusko had actually killed the German would he need to craft an alternate story.
So who actually killed Johnny? And who, presumably, did Dusko kill? Three men are logical candidates: Hofmeister, Schmitz, and Quetting. Hofmeister and Quetting were the two officers implicated in the May 5, 1944, intercept revealing who was to be handling “FLIP” (Jebsen). According to Mrs. Vermehren, Hofmeister “was responsible for everything that happened to Jebsen,” and it is possible that he ordered Schmitz to shoot Johnny. Quetting was the officer in charge of Johnny’s investigation, and was the one who had bragged about having Jebsen abducted and brought to Berlin. Importantly, he was also the officer Popov suspected. “If you have luck and find the man,” Dusko had written to Ian Wilson, “keep him alive until I come, I would love to have a few words with him.”
The time that Popov would have hunted any of the three was on his October–November 1945 trip. Not that Popov would have informed Robertson of Johnny’s killer, or that Dusko was going after him, but as late as April 1946 Tar was still inquiring as to what might have happened to Johnny, wondering if he had been sent to a termination facility at Mauthausen.
No one can prove that Hofmeister, Schmitz, or Quetting killed Jebsen, or that Popov killed any of them. The ultimate fate of Johnny and his killer will remain a mystery, as well as what Popov did or didn’t do about it. If he did kill one of them, together with his acknowledged elimination of Bozidar, perhaps agent TRICYCLE would have earned Ian Fleming’s double-0 designation:
003.
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That Popov would terminate the man who murdered Johnny comes as no surprise. Dusko was not above what many would consider justifiable revenge, and would be the first to admit that he had many faults—incorrigible playboy, unrepentant spendthrift, impetuous, and a man for whom danger was a stimulant. He lived life on the edge, always peering over the precipice at the next treacherous challenge. But he was also courageous, loyal to a fault, and exceedingly kindhearted. Dusko looked after Johnny’s widow after the war, clearing her debts, finding Johnny’s assets, and making sure she was financially secure and safe. He even petitioned MI5 to pull strings, which they did, so that Lore could obtain ongoing work as an actress in Hamburg. He also gave money to fellow Yugoslavs in need, both during and after the war, some of whom he barely knew. To one individual, he gave his entire Yugoslav army salary.
But his great contribution to humanity was his success during the war. With no disrespect to Juan Pujol, it can safely be said that Dusko Popov was Britain’s greatest WWII double agent, and perhaps history’s best spy. He was involved in more operations (ten), had more actual sub-agents (eight), and faced greater danger than any other agent. While Pujol and Popov were both inducted into the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Pujol received an MBE (Member), while Dusko received the higher OBE (Officer). MI5’s application for the decoration on Popov’s behalf spoke volumes:
“Dusan POPOV is a Jugo-Slav national and originally offered his services to the British Embassy in Belgrade in 1940 at a time when his own country was neutral and the prospects for British victory did not look favorable. . . . The work of this agent was invaluable to the Allied cause and the channel of communication played an important part in deceiving the enemy prior to the Normandy invasion. At all times this agent has co-operated with the British authorities to the fullest extent at great danger both to himself personally and to his relatives in Jugo-Slavia.”
As British Royal Navy Lieutenant-Commander Ewen Montagu wrote in the foreword to Spy Counter-Spy, Popov “put his head into the lion’s mouth” by returning to Lisbon and Madrid time and again when his cover was surely blown. Spy novelist Graham Greene, who served with MI6 on the Iberian Peninsula and knew intimately the activities of agent TRICYCLE, would later say that Popov was “the most important and most successful double-agent working for the British during the war.”
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With the end of hostilities and the search for Johnny and his killer resolved, Dusko settled into his home at 3 Rue Dosne, Paris, and shocked his friends by getting married. On March 6, 1946, he wed a lovely French girl, Janine Ducasse, and they would have a son, Dean, two years later. He launched a publishing business with a tourist guide to France and continued the import-export business, maintaining his interest in Tarlair, Ltd., the company he had set up with Dickie Metcalfe as his London cover. Years later, the person still conducting the affairs of the office was Dusko’s old MI6 secretary, Gisela Ashley. By the fall of 1947, Tarlair had offices in London, New York, Paris, and Rome, and Dusko had developed significant business for the company in Krefeld, Germany.
Yugoslavia had become Communist after the war, however, and Dusko was now stateless. He asked MI5 if he might become a British citizen, and the office felt it was the least Britain could do. Tar expedited the application, and on June 12, 1946, Dusko was naturalized. In a final letter to Colonel Robertson on June 17, Dusko wrote: “I just want to thank you very much for all you have done for me. . . . To express my thanks would not be enough,” he said. Giving Tar his assurance of doing his best to be worthy of his new country, Dusko offered that he was at the disposal of MI5 whenever they thought he might be useful.
Dr. Ivo Popov—physician to King Peter and peasants alike—settled in Italy, was decorated with the King’s Medal of Courage in the Cause of Freedom (KMC) on April 18, 1947, and was naturalized as a British citizen on September 11, 1947. His application read: “Director of Medicine, 349 Corso Vitorio Emanuele, Rome.” Two weeks later a “Hans Popper” from Germany was also naturalized, his occupation listed as “Serving Officer in His Majesty’s Forces.”
No address was given.
Misha—the baby twice condemned—would survive the war and go on to make his father proud, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Oxford, a Ph.D. at Stanford, and serving as a consultant to the FBI, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Attorney General.
Dusko’s OBE, an award normally presented in a formal investiture at Buckingham Palace, was delayed because of the delicacy of decorating a double agent. MI5 chief General David Petrie was adamant that the award would have to be conferred in a private setting due to the restrictions of the Official Secrets Act. It was, on November 28, 1947, and at the place most suited for the Balkan playboy.
The Ritz bar.
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In 1948 Dusko was nominated as secretary-general of the European Movement, a lobby organization promoting European unity, but he decided to focus on business. His import/export endeavors continued to thrive, and in 1951 he purchased Château Castellaras, a hilltop estate in southern France overlooking Nice. Built in the design of a sixteenth-century ruins castle, Castellaras would for the next ten years host lavish parties for Popov’s business colleagues and government friends. His marriage, however, faltered, and he and Janine would divorce in 1960. The following year he sold the castle to Seligmann Bank and purchased La Grande Bastide, former summer palace of the Bishop of Grasse. Since the Bastide adjoined two hundred acres he had purchased seven years earlier, Dusko now had an estate worthy of an international mogul.
While on a business trip to Stockholm in 1961, Dusko met Jill Jonsson, a stunning blonde worthy in every respect to the girls of Bond. Even with their considerable age difference, Jill was smitten. “Dusko was such fun, so full of energy. . . . He was li
ke a magnet, everyone was drawn to him. Every day he sent me flowers. . . . I didn’t care what people thought. I knew that I could not live without him and he could not live without me.”
They married on June 14, 1962. He was 50, she, 19.
Dusko and Jill Popov on the beach in the Bahamas.
Parade magazine
Over the next seven years they had three sons—Marco, Boris, and Omar—and embarked on a storybook marriage. Dusko’s business, which continued to flourish, would take him to America, England, Germany, South Africa, and beyond.
In 1965 the Johannesburg Sunday Times interviewed Dusko regarding a $15 million business deal he was transacting with the government of South Africa. In an article about this “man of mystery,” the Times journalist wrote that during the interview Popov’s telephone was constantly ringing and that telex messages were buzzing in from New York, London, and Geneva. “He deals with governments, multi-million dollar corporations,” the writer said. “He is a delightful person and for the half hour of our interview he charmingly told me practically nothing that I wanted to know. Then he showed me to the door and returned to his world of millions and mystery.”
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Dusko Popov was a man of mystery, to the world and to his family. Not until 1974, with the arrival of his memoirs, would Popov reveal to anyone, including his wife, that he was BICYCLE, of whom H. Montgomery Hyde had written in 1962’s Room 3603; IVAN, of whom Ladislas Farago had written in 1971’s The Game of Foxes; TALLYRAND, of whom Sefton Delmer had written in 1971’s The Counterfeit Spy; and TRICYCLE, of whom J. C. Masterman had written in 1972’s The Double-Cross System.
