The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

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  While clearly of a higher order than leg workers trolling for information, Real, Mezenen, Purvis, Vallecilla, and their like were minor players in the spy game, given narrow tasks to perform and paid accordingly. (In the charge against him, Vallecilla was said to have received $2,900 for his secret letter writing.) Well above them was the realm of prized agents who were trained or self-trained for undercover work and given the trickiest and most dangerous assignments—the James Bonds and George Smileys of spy lore. If ever they emerged from the shadows, it was not in news accounts of the time but, as government secrecy restrictions eased and documents became available, well afterward in memoirs, histories, and scholarly studies. Ordinarily such tales were success stories—the agents had at least survived to tell their deeds or have them told—though the likelihood of failure and its possibly unhappy consequences were always intimately part of the spy genre.

  For John Beevor, failure on a large scale came at the very start of his undercover career. Like David Walker, Beevor was an agent of Britain’s Special Operations Executive—or the Baker Street Irregulars, the informal name attached to SOE operatives due to the group’s London headquarters in Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street—and also like Walker he was sent on a secret mission to Lisbon. His assignment was not spreading the Sibs of black propaganda but laying the groundwork for sabotage operations within Portugal. Specifically he was charged with forming a local resistance organization to go into action in the event of a Nazi invasion of the country by attacking roads, bridges, mining operations, and oil facilities along the Tagus estuary.

  The background of the lightly organized operation—Beevor, a lawyer in civilian life, had been given only brief training and spoke no Portuguese—was earlier British advice to Salazar to make only token resistance to a German incursion and shift his government to the Azores. Anglo-Portuguese discussions about countering an invasion had, however, eventually bogged down over conditions that would require evacuation of the government, levels of resistance on the mainland, and British involvement in defense of the Azores. In sending a secret agent to Lisbon without informing the Portuguese prime minister, SOE was taking the matter of resistance into its own hands.

  Beevor’s cover as assistant military attaché in the Lisbon embassy was arranged by Ambassador Ronald Campbell, one of the few at the embassy who knew of his undercover mission. Since Beevor had been told that a German attack within months was a strong possibility, he quickly went about building a postoccupation group. The only problem he found in recruiting pro-British Portuguese was their high level of enthusiasm for the work, which made the keeping of secrets difficult. He left the actual dealing with them to regional organizers, whom he supplied with money to dole out for services rendered.

  When the German invasion of Russia reduced the likelihood of a Nazi move on Portugal, Beevor returned to London expecting new directives. “Hitler might be in Moscow by the end of 1941,” he was told, “and if so he might switch forces back to Iberia in 1942. So continue as before but with the utmost discretion.” Beevor returned to Lisbon with a gnawing sense that at any moment something could go wrong with his mission.

  Something did. Through a Portuguese crackdown on pro-Allied propaganda early in 1942, two of his organizers came to police attention. Then police learned that an apartment Beevor had unwisely leased in his own name had been used, with Beevor’s equally unwise consent, by an agent of Britain’s MI6 to interview a man in a location away from the embassy. Salazar then indirectly raised with Ambassador Campbell the possibility of someone in the Lisbon embassy secretly preparing to resist a German occupation.

  Campbell in turn informed Beevor that, since his diplomatic contacts with Salazar depended on mutual candor, he felt compelled to reveal the name. Beevor protested, but Campbell went ahead; sabotage work in an occupied Portugal was not as important as London maintaining cordial relations with the country, especially with negotiations over the Azores just ahead. Infuriated that he had been kept in the dark about the British action, Salazar demanded Beevor’s recall. Beevor’s response was twofold: he prepared a report the ambassador could show Salazar, emphasizing that the sabotage plans were in Portugal’s interests; and with the help of the MI6 in Lisbon he put together another report that set out German illegal actions in the country, which already surpassed anything he had been planning. The second report, cleared by London, revealed the Abwehr’s infiltration of government departments, bugging of the foreign ministry and possibly Salazar’s office, widespread bribery of officials, and the extent of German informer networks within Portugal.

  Impressed and possibly surprised by the reports, Salazar considered allowing Beevor to stay on in Lisbon. Ultimately his fate was left to Campbell, and in June 1942, a year and a half after arriving in Lisbon, Beevor was removed from the embassy and brought back to London for a new SOE assignment. Left behind was a secret mission in shambles. Portuguese police had already arrested or deported scores of Beevor’s agents, including employees of Shell Oil in Portugal, members of the country’s Communist party, and others in Salazar’s political opposition.

  As for the counterintelligence report on German secret activity in Portugal, Salazar was in no hurry to act upon it or fully comprehend what it revealed. Six months after receiving the dossier, Campbell reported him as saying, “He intended to do it himself, but it was a long job and he simply had not had the time.” It was the spring of 1943 before the Portuguese took action against the Nazi spy ring. In the meantime four Lisbon propaganda distributors were arrested, presumably as a warning to Portuguese citizens to avoid giving aid to the British, and in June 1942 Salazar in a radio address attacked foreign propaganda for dividing his people. To the mild satisfaction of the British, he included Axis as well as Allied propaganda. Nonetheless a frustrated Campbell pushed British propagandists to get the prime minister to open his eyes “to see on which side his bread is buttered” in the contest between Britain and Germany.

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  At the same time John Beevor was setting up his SOE postinvasion sabotage operation in Portugal, his MI6 colleague operating from the British embassy in Lisbon, Philip Johns, was puzzling over how to get all the figures under his command—agents, informers, staff members—to safety if the Germans rolled across the border. After much discussion with other attachés and the ambassador, it was decided the best hope of escape would be by sea to North Africa, on a ship that would hold Johns’s personnel and others in Lisbon who might be on the Gestapo’s wanted list—in all, some one hundred passengers. London approved the idea and the funds needed, and Johns set about looking for the right vessel, which turned out to be an oceangoing tug moored in Porto. After it was acquired for eight thousand pounds, brought to Lisbon, and named the Johan, it seemed wise to conduct a test run. Since having it fully boarded by the intended escapees and loaded with fuel would alert both the Portuguese police and the local Germans, only a few members of the embassy and Johns would make the run, and it would be only a twenty-mile weekend ride up the Tagus to the town of Vila Franca de Zira, where on Sunday an annual festival was to take place.

  The upriver journey was uneventful, and the shipmates spent Saturday night on board. During the festival the following day, the town jammed with people, adorned with flags and banners, and booming with music, a bull run took place through the streets. In the evening a giant barbecue was held in the town square, the Johan party at a reserved table, and afterward there was dancing and consumption of local wine until the early hours. At dawn the next day the vessel turned down the Tagus, and the passengers returned more or less ably to Monday work.

  Johns counted the test a success and the festival a “wild and unforgettable party for wartime Portugal.” Never needed at sea, the embassy got rid of the Johan after the war, though before that it had had some effect on Philip Johns’s career. Due to irritation with what he thought was confused direction coming from headquarters in Britain, he lodged an official complaint, and London sent another MI6 officer
to investigate the Lisbon station. When Johns, who had led the station for nearly two years, learned that the inquiry included looking into the expense incurred on the river trip, he decided he was being purposely undermined and asked for a new assignment elsewhere. After future MI6 assignments in North and South America, he transferred in 1943 to the SOE.

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  While John Beevor was still dangling in Lisbon after the exposure of his secret operation, the assistant military attaché at the American legation in Lisbon, Robert A. Solborg, urged Washington to take up his cause—understandably so since he was engaged in similar undercover work. An agent of the newly formed Office of the Coordinator of Information, soon to be renamed the Office of Strategic Services, Solborg had arrived in Lisbon in February 1942 as the first OSS operative based in mainland Europe.

  The background he brought to the work was, to say the least, varied. Born in Warsaw and the son of a Polish general, Solborg had served as an officer in the tsarist cavalry in World War I. After a severe wound he was sent to New York on a Russian military purchasing mission. When Communists took power in Russia, he returned to the United States, this time to become a citizen, and later enlisted in the army. Following service as a military attaché in Paris, he went into business with Armco Steel, and when war broke out in 1939 he was the firm’s managing director in Britain and France. In December 1940 Solborg joined American military intelligence, and the next year he was recruited by the dynamic head of the OSS, William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, for the Secret Intelligence Branch of his new agency and sent to London to study the operations of Britain’s SOE before his posting to Portugal.

  Under Solborg the OSS Lisbon station was soon using paid agents for surveillance work and developing plans for sabotage against German-owned or -leased mines should the Nazis march into Portugal. The Lisbon station also had the unglamorous task of providing OSS’s Research and Analysis Branch back in Washington with a steady supply of German newspapers, journals, and books to pore over for intelligence value. (British intelligence was supplied with the same material through Lisbon, giving rise to a local story that, since British and German civilian planes flew from the same airport and at similar times, Portuguese workers simply transferred bundles of material brought in by planes of one country to planes of the other.)

  In 1941 Solborg had toured North Africa for eight months, officially as an Armco executive but gathering information for military intelligence on French resistance figures. Afterward he made journeys through Portugal and Spain, reporting back that he could detect nothing indicating a likely German invasion of the Iberian peninsula. In Lisbon the following year, and against Donovan’s instructions, Solborg went to Casablanca to meet with a French officer about a plan to form a pro-Allied government in French North Africa. He had told John Beevor the trip was cleared with American intelligence at the level of the War Department, and he would fix it up with his OSS boss later. Donovan did not wait for an explanation. “It was agreed between us (you gave your promise) that no activities were to be carried on in North Africa,” he informed Solborg. “You are directed to stop immediately whatever you may be doing, go to Lisbon and await orders.” From Portugal, Solborg flew to Washington to appeal his case in person. Donovan refused to see him and subsequently fired him for insubordination, though Solborg stayed on in Lisbon as a military attaché reporting to the War Department.

  He was still in the position in April 1945 when he was drawn on to assist the American deception effort against Japan. With important channels to the Japanese in Germany and Argentina now closed, military attachés in the European neutral centers of Bern, Stockholm, and Lisbon were asked by military intelligence in Washington to locate agents with lines of communication to Tokyo. Solborg in Lisbon came up with four such types. One of them he identified as the director of the Portuguese secret police, whom he called “a clever man of independent financial means, blindly devoted to Salazar and the totalitarian regime.” The others on his list were a former press attaché of the Hungarian legation in Lisbon; a Turkish woman who had been the mistress of the Japanese military attaché in Lisbon; and a Portuguese army officer. Throughout the late spring and summer of 1945 Solborg was given weekly lists of disinformation items for his channels to convey to the enemy—and he reported to Washington that on his end the operation was proceeding smoothly.

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  At the time of the Allied landings in North Africa in 1942, Donovan’s OSS was well supplied with operatives on the Iberian peninsula. For the American ambassador in Madrid, Carlton Hayes, this produced more aggravation than comfort. As he saw it, the agents were both too energetic and too unskilled. American ministers in neutral countries were generally opposed to OSS activity in their territory, but Hayes left diplomatic language aside in setting out his hostility. Washington was told that Donovan’s agents were “notoriously uneducated, indiscreet, and intemperate,” and that their secret antics were endangering the Anglo-American policy of keeping Franco in the neutral camp. Hayes distinguished between the experienced foreign-service officers and military attachés on his embassy staff and OSS men “whose missionary zeal outstripped their judgment.” Along with some of their superiors back home, the agents failed to understand that their mission was to win the war against the Axis, not overturn the Spanish government. Hayes proposed to Washington that the OSS in Spain either be placed under the authority of the military attaché in Madrid or removed from the country altogether. In a lengthy response, Donovan rejected both plans but admitted Spain was a problem for the OSS, with many of the men it sent overseas “virtually amateurs” due to the hurried buildup in the size of his agency.

  In June 1943 the rift in Madrid between the ambassador and Donovan’s organization was temporarily overshadowed by what had the appearance of a major OSS blunder in Portugal. Earlier the American legation in Lisbon had intervened with Washington to prevent, as George Kennan recalled, “various eager beavers in General Donovan’s OSS from developing plans for a revolt against Portuguese authority on the part of the inhabitants of the Azores.” The Azores matter may have been part of the “dreadful confusion” that Kennan said he was asked to straighten out in his diplomatic post. In any case, the background for the scheme was American distrust of Salazar—in some quarters, Kennan noted, he was considered “a dangerous Fascist and in league with the enemy”—and impatience with British efforts to secure military use of the Azores. A rebellion by the islands’ inhabitants, so it was imagined, would undermine Lisbon’s rule and prepare the way for an American takeover.

  The Azores revolt never left the planning stage. With the trashcan burglary in the early summer of 1943 the OSS was less fortunate. A Portuguese employed by OSS Lisbon and placed inside the Japanese embassy as a messenger in the office of the naval attaché removed some crumpled sheets of paper from a wastebasket and turned them over to agents. The pages had numbers and Japanese characters on them, leading the Lisbon station to believe the writing might represent a cipher. The sheets were delivered to the OSS in Washington, which in turn sent them on for analysis. When it was determined the writing was indeed a cipher but one used for low-level communication and, beyond that, one already known to American code breakers, the papers were filed away as useless.

  Then in July the American military read messages moving between Tokyo and its embassies in Lisbon and Madrid that indicated the Japanese had learned from Italian sources that Americans had entered the Lisbon embassy and possibly gained access to its codes. The Japanese ambassador in Lisbon was ordered to report back at once on security measures while the ambassador in Madrid was told to dispatch an officer to examine the Lisbon embassy’s procedures.

  The flurry of messages among the Japanese set off alarms in Washington. A major secret of the war was that the United States had broken Japan’s cipher machine used to encrypt high-level diplomatic communication. Known as Magic, the decoding operation gave the Americans vital access to Japanese military planning since much of it was revealed in diplomatic
traffic among embassies and consulates. If Japan believed one of its diplomatic ciphers had been compromised in Lisbon, it might well change all its coding systems.

  General George V. Strong, the powerful chief of military intelligence in Washington, launched an investigation that forced the OSS to turn over records of the Lisbon operation. Strong and Donovan had clashed before, partly as bureaucratic rivals, partly because Strong was determined to keep intelligence matters in military hands. The purloined papers offered him a choice opportunity to reduce Donovan’s authority, and he was soon firing off memos to General George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff, denouncing OSS activity as “ill advised and amateurish” and a “menace to the security of the nation.” Strong also informed Marshall that George Kennan had confirmed to him that OSS Lisbon agents were complete amateurs who should have known that their sources within the Japanese embassy (there were two, the other, also Portuguese, located in the office of the military attaché) were surely double agents who also informed on the OSS.

  In his defense, Donovan launched a campaign that maintained that the Portuguese who removed the cipher material had acted entirely on his own initiative. The orders to both figures inside the Japanese embassy were only to “pick up any available information as to Japanese official activities and to report on any callers or conversations.” Donovan also pointed out that Strong had been given advance notice of the existence of the two informers, as had British intelligence services and George Kennan in the American legation. According to Donovan, Kennan had in fact “congratulated the agent [who took the material] on the operation and encouraged further activities.”