The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  The written word joined the spoken in forms ranging from leaflets to books, which agents from England smuggled into occupied territory or were dropped by planes. From the start of the war the British conducted “confetti raids” on their high-altitude nightly bombing missions, and American flyers eventually mastered the techniques of dropping leaflet bundles by parachute and at lower levels during their daylight raids. For informing the French in the unoccupied part of the country about the Allied war effort, American OWI propagandists developed a four-page weekly newspaper, L’Amérique en Guerre, printing five thousand copies a week and sending them by air to Lisbon, from where they went into a diplomatic pouch carried to the American ministry in Vichy and the consulate in Marseille.

  The producers acknowledged that the paper was “a dowdy little sheet about half the size of a tabloid” and a small instrument of war at best; but the ministry kept welcoming the paper until Germany occupied Vichy France and the American diplomatic corps was interned. With the Vichy outlet closed off, L’Amérique went on to bigger and better things. In November 1942 the British dropped a new airborne edition of 250,000 copies on Paris and northern French cities. The paper was still a four-pager but carried three columns of news on each page and had illustrations. In January 1943 page size was increased; it now bore an American flag on the masthead, and it carried four-color maps and illustrations. When American planes joined in dropping the paper, circulation sometimes reached a spectacular seven million copies a week. OWI’s Overseas Branch also put together a miniature weekly for Spain, Carta de America, in an attempt to balance favorable German treatment in the Spanish press. Like L’Amérique, the paper reached Lisbon by air and was sent on by diplomatic pouch to Madrid.

  The OWI’s favored publication directed to friendly and neutral nations was Victory, an illustrated magazine printed on slick paper and both offered for sale and given away to barber and beauty shops and to hotels. Writing in The New Yorker in 1944, Marya Mannes reported that despite the volume of free copies in circulation, Victory was snapped up from Lisbon newsstands the moment new issues appeared.

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  Following the cross-Channel invasion, disagreements surfaced among Allied propagandists in Portugal and elsewhere over American psychological warfare tactics, which the British found overly aggressive. With Allied forces now in enemy territory, the American view was that propaganda efforts should not only assist the military machine but be out in front of its progress. An OWI directive set out the new policy: “From now on our propaganda offensive will run boldly in advance of our military offensive. We shall proceed on the implicit assumption that the German will to resist can be broken and will be broken by next December.”

  To that end American propagandists, working on the assumption that the attempt on Hitler’s life in July revealed the presence of a large peace movement in Germany, appealed to the populace through leaflets and radio broadcasts to take acts of passive resistance, pushed rumors of the Führer’s worsening health, and promoted the surrender of German troops. With the last, the propaganda effort had some success, as it had in the earlier military campaign in Italy. Anthony Eden revealed in the House of Commons that 77 percent of German prisoners captured after D-Day said they had heard or seen appeals to surrender, and 40 percent had leaflets with them when they did so.

  Another aspect of American propaganda tactics with the war’s end in sight was directly to challenge neutral countries to support the Allied cause. This meant no longer giving material aid to Germany but also actively cooperating with the Allies; continuing on the sidelines, it was made clear, would be a postwar liability. In Portugal the British, always better attuned to Salazar’s inclinations, realized the country would not wholly abandon neutrality under pressure. While it would move closer to the Allied cause, there remained, among other divisive issues, the large obstacle of the Communist Soviet Union and the prime minister’s less than enthralled view of Americans and their hard-charging methods. But the British also understood that American propaganda aimed at Portugal, considerably increased after Normandy, had had the effect of enhancing the United States in Portuguese eyes at the expense of Britain. In a memorandum from Lisbon in September 1944, Marcus Cheke offered London a clear-eyed, if rueful, assessment of American propaganda at work:

  The inflated staffs of the U.S. Mission go about their business in the latest and most flashy of American cars, which are expressly reserved for U.S. officials abroad, and whet the appetites of the Portuguese, planning a brave new world to come… . It is reasonable to suppose that so long as the U.S. is to play a part in Europe, Portugal, with its Atlantic seaboard, will be a country of prime importance to them. However this may be, this intensive propaganda is having some effect in turning the minds of the Portuguese toward America and therefore away from Britain. I submit that it would be dangerous complacency to assume that their effort is a mere flash in the pan and that we can afford to live on the capital of sentimental ties, goodwill, and trade connections accumulated in the past.

  His country’s best bet, Cheke added, was to concentrate its attention on Salazar, whose bond with Britain was strong, and who was inclined to believe the British could serve to balance American as well as Russian power in the Europe to come.

  Disagreements and rivalries aside, with the push across France into Germany the Allied propaganda machines found themselves flush with success in Portugal. The Salazar regime now leaned so far to the Allied cause that editorials in Portuguese newspapers anticipated a swift Nazi defeat, and newsreels of the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris were shown to cheering audiences. Tributes to Churchill and the Anglo-Portuguese alliance were everywhere in newspapers and magazines. Use of Reuters and Exchange Telegraph by the Portuguese press now far eclipsed that of Germany’s DNB. A news bulletin put out by the British embassy’s press office reached a monthly circulation of 74,000 copies, and British and American feature films were shown in cinemas throughout the country with few restrictions.

  Perhaps the most telling sign of the propagandists’ triumph was that the Salazar regime came around to acknowledging Russia’s participation in the war. Newsreel footage of Stalin was allowed in cinemas for the first time in February 1945, causing Stephen Lockhart, who had replaced Marcus Cheke as the new British press attaché, to note that “in all cases the reaction [of the audience] was the same, a gasp of surprise and astonishment whenever he appeared.” Salazar’s explanation for allowing the newsreels was clipped and pragmatic: “Since Stalin existed it was no use behaving as if he did not!”

  11

  The Seething Cauldron

  … the already seething cauldron of espionage and counterespionage that wartime Lisbon constituted.

  —George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950

  When he became counselor of the American legation in Lisbon in the late summer of 1942, George Kennan had more than routine diplomatic duties to deal with. As he later revealed, his “real mission … was the coordination of American intelligence in Portugal,” and taking on the chores of legation counselor was necessary to preserve his cover. Intelligence operations in Portugal had “gotten rather fouled up,” he further noted, and he was charged with “trying to disentangle things.” In another context he said that, privately and informally, he had been asked to “straighten out the dreadful confusions which our various intelligence people had created, among themselves and with the British… .” Kennan did not to disclose the particular nature of the confusions, leaving it that they were caused by efforts of American secret agents to “insert themselves,” belatedly, into the “seething cauldron” of Lisbon’s spy war.

  During wartime and in later accounts, the city’s shadow world encouraged metaphors. “Great clearing house” of spying was common, as in an editorial in The Economist in 1942: “The place [Lisbon] has become a great clearing house for international information, a centre of espionage and a meeting place where thousands of invaluable contacts can be developed or maintained.” Others depicted
the city as a crossroads, ant heap, hot bed, skulking place, playing field, nerve center, listening post, and so on, of clandestine activity. But Kennan’s hackneyed, thriller-fiction image of a seething cauldron stands out for its suggestion that Lisbon’s spy stew was a mix of agents and double agents, amateurs and professionals, the comically furtive and the deadly serious. That Kennan may have intended such a thickly layered view is supported, perhaps, by his going on to say about his intelligence task that he accomplished it, but “not without the usual lurid byplay—sometimes (and usually) laughable, sometimes fantastic, sometimes hair-raising.”

  Rather than metaphor, the British journalist and author Phillip Knightley used an apocryphal story to portray the amusing side of Lisbon spying. A small-time Portuguese agent—call him X—contacted the British in Lisbon and offered to sell them a new German codebook for $100,000. After some deliberation the British forked over the money. Then X contacted the Germans in Lisbon and said he had valuable information that he would sell for $100,000. When the Germans agreed, he told them he had sold their new codebook to the British. Rather than responding angrily, the Germans realized they could use the code to plant false information that would have the British running in circles. Then X went back to the British and told them he would tell them something really valuable for another $100,000—which was that he had told the Germans about selling the codebook to the British. At this point the British had had enough and told X to expect a very serious accident in the near future. But before the accident could take place the British received a call from the chief of the Portuguese secret police, who simply said, “I understand you people have been threatening my partner.”

  All neutral countries had the same magnetic pull for spies as they did for propagandists. Yet here again Portugal, with its open port of entry and exit and its evenhanded neutrality, offered a particularly enticing field for both Allied and Axis intelligence operations. In his 1957 novel The Case of the Four Friends, Britain’s highly placed wartime spymaster J. C. Masterman (about whom more below) has a character explain Portugal’s importance for agents of both sides:

  Portugal was neutral, and so to Portugal came the agents official and unofficial of many countries and countries on both sides. It was not possible to learn in Berlin what was happening in London, but it might well be possible to hear, or guess, or deduce in neutral Portugal what was happening in both. And further, it might be possible to spread information (and make it appear credible) of what was not happening in London or Berlin and yet have it believed in the other place. And so Lisbon became a kind of international clearing-ground, a busy ant-heap of spies and agents, where political and military secrets and information—true and false, but mainly false—were bought and sold and where men’s brains were pitted against each other.

  All told, it is estimated that as many as forty to fifty foreign intelligence services were at work in wartime Lisbon. But nationally formed groups occupied a high end of espionage activity—a level at which, as Masterman’s novel has it, men’s brains were pitted in competition. Far below was a vast outcropping of watchers, informants, and freelance agents whom the journalist Jack Alexander, writing in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943, crisply evoked by quoting an unnamed Portuguese: “Everyone in Lisbon make espionage.” Only slightly less bold, American military intelligence in the same year reported that “a remarkably high proportion of the inhabitants [of Portugal] are working for one or more intelligence services.” And the same report added: “Espionage has become a national Portuguese racket.”

  Harvey Klemmer, in his National Geographic article, questioned the importance of intelligence gathering when conducted as a mass occupation: if “the suave young men and the beautiful young women who loiter about the hotels” were truly dangerous agents, “they would take more pains to hide their identity.” This seemed equally true of spies who invariably hung about in bars. Klemmer told of meeting one night with an American businessman at the bar of the Palácio Hotel in Estoril and cautioning him that there were Germans present. “Don’t worry about them,” the man replied. “They’re just a bunch of leg men. The one on the left tells Musso [Mussolini] who’s here. The big fellow does the same for Himmler. The little guy keeps Goebbels supplied with English newspapers.”

  The leg men and women, the bottom feeders of the spy trade, were found everywhere in Lisbon and along the Sun Coast, using their eyes and ears and not infrequently only their imaginations to earn their keep from the intelligence services, or simply an evening meal. These paid informers, typically Portuguese but also refugees and others washed up in Lisbon by the war, were so ubiquitous that they gave rise to what Hugh Muir called an “epidemic of spy fever” in which those not in the game suspected everyone else was. Women, in Muir’s estimation, were especially susceptible to the scourge. He told of an attractive American who at bridge in a hotel lounge invariably lost because her eyes kept darting from the table. “Sorry,” she would say after playing a wrong card, “but I was looking at that guy like Trotsky in the corner. Says he’s American, American my foot!” And another woman told him with absolute conviction that German agents had poisoned her husband. “They talk by signs,” she insisted, “and make the swastika by crooking their little fingers and linking them together.”

  Unattached women were invariably labeled spies, though Alice-Leone Moats suspected that many were really down-at-the-heels workers in an equally old profession. Those she happened to meet struck her as “so abysmally stupid that I couldn’t believe any government would really pay them good money to gather information.” Polly Peabody told of a strange woman who said she was Swiss and spent her days in the sun growing darker and more mysterious, leaving observers positive she was a spy but with no idea for whom. Then there was a group of four Germans who regularly sat in the lobby of the Palácio, spaced about in the corners of the room. Now and then they merged to talk, then hurried back to their corners. One of them, a man, carried a raincoat despite the lack of rain. Another was Hollywood handsome. A third—bald, thick-necked, a scar across his forehead—had the look of a dime-novel spy. What could they all be but spies? “It became quite absurd in the end,” Peabody concluded, “but one could never completely get away from the spy-mania, because there were quite a number of real ones around.”

  Howard Wriggins of the American Friends Service Committee regularly had an elderly retiree of the British Foreign Service drop by to ask in diffident fashion for his impression of certain refugees the Quaker relief office was caring for. When Wriggins assured him they were indeed refugees and truly in need, the man always apologized for his questions—leaving Wriggins to suppose he was trying to connect shreds of information picked up from other sources. In one instance, the fellow inquired about a German woman who had gotten permission to live in Lisbon rather than the refugee containment town of Caldas da Rainha. Apparently that was enough to raise suspicion. Another Englishman was always seated at the bar of the Tivoli Hotel at lunchtime. When Wriggins sat beside him they would chat amiably, the man revealing about himself only that he was in the import-export business. Was he actually a spy—and the Tivoli bar his daily listening post?

  The bars and brothels of Lisbon’s waterfront were assumed to be settings where more useful wartime information might be picked up. The German Abwehr was known to own or control some brothels, and they trained the workingwomen in methods of drawing information from seamen about sailing dates and routes of convoys. The British countered by lining up a string of brothels of their own. One day in the British embassy, John Beevor, a secret agent working undercover in the embassy (and about whom more below), was shown a card in which, in English, a certain madam cordially invited the bearer to her home for “a jolly good time and dancing too.”

  Shipping, railway, and airline offices were regularly patrolled for the names of those coming and going from Lisbon. Possibly more than that turned up at the flying boat landing port on the Tagus River after the Pan American Clipper crash in 1943. Aline Griffith, an
OSS agent based in Spain, was told by a fellow agent in Lisbon that Japanese operatives were first on the site of the downed plane—“cruising the wreckage before anyone could get to the scene, picking up pouches destined for Allied embassies, leaving wounded passengers to drown while salvaging top-secret documents.” The main Portuguese secret police figure at the port, one Corte Real, was also in the pay of the Germans and reportedly turned over to them parts of the plane and possibly some mail. (Amazingly, some seventy thousand letters were salvaged from the crash, with most addressed to American troops. Mailbags of sodden letters were transferred from Lisbon to Britain’s General Post Office, where after reconditioning some 95 percent were in shape for delivery.)

  It was common belief that maids in hotels routinely sifted through wastebaskets for sellable material. Likewise, stewards and other workers aboard transatlantic ships and planes were assumed to be agents or informers. In one known instance, Rene Mezenen, a steward in the Clipper service, was used by German intelligence as a courier between Lisbon and the United States, for reporting on convoy sightings and for smuggling platinum into Portugal. After his arrest in New York, he pleaded guilty to all charges and went to prison. In another case a Portuguese citizen living in New York, John Da Silva Purvis, was arrested on a charge that, while working as a stevedore aboard neutral ships, he transported maps for his German handlers. Roberto Vallecilla, a native of Colombia, chose letters rather than ships as his means of transmission. When arrested in Washington, where he was employed as a government translator, he was charged with beginning work with the Germans in 1940 while a student in Lisbon. After training, he was sent to the United States to provide information about aircraft production and other matters by means of invisible writing on the back of letters.