by Ronald Weber
12
One World to Another
It was an Alice in Wonderland experience, passing from one world to another, except in this case both worlds were abnormal.
—Dusko Popov, Spy/Counterspy
Some of Garbo’s long run of success as a double agent was thanks to the shortcomings of his German handlers and the Abwehr itself. From the start of the war Admiral Canaris and many key aides in the service’s divisions had distanced themselves from the Nazi cause. “The Abwehr as a whole,” observed a British historian, “became notorious as a haven for dissidents from the regime”—“a group of men,” as an Abwehr defector further identified them, “who do not like the Nazis and do not want to go to war.”
Beyond its ideological wavering, the Abwehr in neutral countries such as Portugal and Spain operated as independent and often competing units working under diplomatic cover and with little central control from Berlin. In recruiting and running secret agents, the units often seemed to act in a fog of disinterest, scrutinizing them with little care, monitoring them loosely, failing adequately to evaluate or even read raw data in their reports. Corrupt station chiefs supplied just enough information to hold their positions while enhancing their standard of living through padding expense accounts, taking “commissions” on money paid to agents and informers, and currency transactions. (J. C. Masterman noted that after the war information came to light indicating, as the Twenty Committee had surmised, that Abwehr officials intentionally ignored suspicions about German agents in Britain. “They thought it better for selfish reasons,” Masterman wrote, “to have corrupt or disloyal agents than to have no agents at all.”)
After Hitler replaced Canaris as head of the Abwehr in early 1944, the service was absorbed into the SS under Heinrich Himmler. In London the new leadership and organization of a presumably more formidable German intelligence system was a serious concern for the Twenty Committee. But if Britain could no longer count on the Abwehr’s lack of rigor, it now—the Normandy invasion near at hand and the war about to enter its final phase—had fortunate timing on its side. “If the changes had been made earlier,” Masterman acknowledged, “it is probable that the new brooms would have swept away much that we were concerned to preserve. Once again, the margin of safety for our double-cross system was very small.”
The luck of timing was again evident in the spring of 1944 when an Abwehr officer in Lisbon, Johann Jebsen—a flamboyant figure who lived in a villa in Estoril and shuttled back and forth to Lisbon in a Rolls-Royce—went to the German legation for what he understood would be the presentation of a medal. Instead he was overpowered by an officer of the SD, the security service of the SS, rendered unconscious with drugs, put in a metal trunk fitted with air holes, placed in a sedan with diplomatic plates, and driven to France. (In another version of what took place, Jebsen was invited to tea at the legation, knockout drops were put in his tea, he was given an injection, and then removed to France; in still another, he was simply kidnapped from his villa.) Transferred to the custody of the Gestapo, he was later moved to a concentration camp in Germany and executed.
To the British, Jebsen was a recently acquired double agent working on the Continent under the code name Artist. When it was learned in London that he had been taken by the Gestapo, there was hope that he was suspected only of illegal currency transactions; nonetheless under questioning he might betray crucial information about the double-cross system—in particular about the work of Dusko Popov, a Yugoslav whom early in the war Jebsen had recruited for the Abwehr and the British had come to value, as a double agent with the code name Tricycle, nearly as highly as Garbo. While Garbo encountered his German case officer in Spain only after the war, Tricycle in wartime often traveled from Britain to Portugal for face-to-face meetings with his Lisbon-based handler, putting himself and the entire British double-cross system in jeopardy.
*
Johann Jebsen and Dusko Popov first met in 1936 at Freiburg University in Germany and became fast friends. With the war, Jebsen, from a prominent Hamburg shipping family and now an anti-Nazi member of the Abwehr, came to Belgrade and proposed that Popov, a charming and supremely confident commercial lawyer, work as a German operative in Britain. Popov immediately revealed all to the British embassy in Belgrade, which in turn put him in touch with a local MI6 agent. After getting instructions from England, the agent told Popov to accept the German offer but say he needed to get to London for business reasons—and add that while there he would try to recruit a friend who might also agree to work for the Germans. In reality the British wanted Popov in England to make certain he was on the Allied side and not setting himself up as a triple agent.
The Germans agreed to the London trip, and in November 1940 Popov was sent on a journey that took him first to Rome and then to Lisbon, the usual training point and launching site for inserting German agents into Britain. Following a convoluted set of deception maneuvers, he was brought to the Moorish-style villa in Estoril of a tall and elegant figure who was the Lisbon head of the Abwehr’s intelligence section. Under the name Ludovico von Karsthoff, he would serve as Popov’s case officer through nearly all of his time working for the Germans. Over drinks that first evening they discussed methods to be used in future meetings: Popov—known by the Abwehr under the code name Ivan—would always be taken by car to the attached garage of one of Karsthoff’s residences, lying flat in the back seat to avoid notice; on return, lying flat again, he would be dropped off within walking distance of his hotel, the Aviz.
In those future meetings Karsthoff personally handled Popov’s spy education, instructing him about codes, mail drops, and how to take photos of installations with a girl posed in front so they looked like tourist snapshots. (The officer had a special fondness for the cloak-and-dagger aspects of spying. During their long relationship one of the ways he had Popov get instructions was by code while watching Elizabeth Sahrbach, Karsthoff’s secretary and mistress, at roulette in the Estoril casino, the numbers she played indicating the place, date, hour, and minute of a meeting. “It was an expensive code,” Popov dryly noted. “She rarely won.”) Karsthoff also let Popov know that a certain Fritz Kramer, head of Abwehr counterintelligence in Lisbon, would be keeping an eye on him while he was in Portugal.
In late December 1940, after several weeks in Portugal, Popov took a commercial flight to England, the prized ticket seemingly coming in normal fashion but in fact arranged by MI6 in Lisbon. A car and driver were waiting at the airfield near Bristol, and Popov was transported to the Savoy Hotel in London for a meeting with an MI5 officer and Twenty Committee member, T. A. (Tar) Robertson, who took him for beer and sandwiches. Later, from his hotel window in the Savoy, Popov got his first taste of the London blitz.
Four days of tough grilling by various intelligence officials followed—among many uncertainties about Popov was his well-earned reputation as a playboy who favored, as he admiringly said of himself, sports cars and sporting women—before he convinced his interrogators that he was thoroughly anti-Nazi. Working in his favor was his refusal to accept any money for his services from the British (though he would allow, as it turned out, MI5 to come to his rescue when he was in trouble with debts, as he often was) while expecting to be handsomely compensated by his German masters.
Popov was given the code name Scout and linked with a robust Scot, using the cover name Bill Matthews, as his case officer. Popov’s own cover, entirely genuine, was that he was a businessman with an office in Imperial House in Regent Street, from where he represented a group of Yugoslav banks which were allowed to purchase goods that were not vital to the war effort. While he was still in Lisbon, the Abwehr had given Popov a list of questions to pursue, and to be on solid ground when later quizzed by the Germans, he traveled about England and Scotland in the guise of his business work. Matthews accompanied him and used the time together to put to rest any lingering doubts about Scout’s authenticity.
Some of what Popov supposedly gleaned was sent back to Karsthoff
in secret writing in letters directed to accommodation addresses in Lisbon, with Popov’s office secretary mixing the invisible ink given him in Lisbon by the Germans and drafting coded letters that he copied in his own hand. The bulk of what he gathered, however, would always be passed along in person during business trips to Lisbon. Along with occasional truths and half-truths, he fed the Germans deception material that, at the early stage of his double-cross work, largely dealt with British morale and military readiness. To this were added choice tidbits of rumor and gossip he picked up as a prosperous man-about-town in London who, under the guidance of a social mistress provided by MI5, had entrée to elite English society.
Another mission Popov was given came personally from MI6’s chief, Stewart Menzies. “It is an important game,” Menzies said of Popov’s work with the Twenty Committee and MI5, “but we mustn’t let it reduce the possible crop to a limited field. My department wants to profit by your talents and your circumstantial position as well.” Popov was instructed to gather in Lisbon information about Admiral Canaris and other top Abwehr figures, using his friend Jebsen as a main source. Menzies was trying, as Popov understood the assignment, to prepare himself for direct communication with Canaris or those around him about removing Hitler from power. “I am handling this matter myself,” Menzies emphasized. “All information you pick up is to come directly to me with no intermediary.” He added: “One last thing. All MI6 representatives abroad will be instructed to give you unlimited assistance, but limit your contacts with them to emergencies only.”
Carrying a briefcase filled with papers about Yugoslav deals for the purchase of Portuguese tin and turpentine, Popov made his first visit to Lisbon as a double agent in early January 1941. “It was,” he later wrote, “an Alice in Wonderland experience, passing from one world to another, except in this case both worlds were abnormal. War-torn London to an artificial Lisbon, crowded to the bursting point with refugees and competing secret services superimposed hodgepodge on this city of medieval appearance and archaic mentality.” But he was doing more than moving into a sharply different atmospheric situation, for when he exchanged London for Lisbon he was knowingly placing himself at the mercy of the Abwehr. “Each time Dusko went back to Lisbon to report to the Germans,” said a British official after the war, “he was warned his life was in their hands and we could do nothing to help him if things went wrong.” Menzies had been blunt, warning him that “one false step and you’ll bugger everything, yourself in the lead.” Popov also understood that if he were exposed as a double agent the Gestapo would surely take retribution against his parents, two brothers, and other relations living in Yugoslavia.
After a meeting with Karsthoff that went well despite the Abwehr officer’s close questioning about his espionage work in England, Popov traveled to Madrid for a meeting with Jebsen, who brought him a ten thousand dollar bonus from Berlin for his stellar London efforts. The money was welcome—to the Germans it was always clear that Ivan was in their employ solely for the money—and it was good to see his old friend, though Jebsen maintained the outward appearance that he was a dedicated Abwehr officer, and Popov that he was a dutiful Abwehr agent. Back in Lisbon, Karsthoff suggested that since some of Popov’s contacts in London were proving so valuable, he should try to recruit them as independent agents—an idea, Popov knew, that would both greatly delight the Twenty Committee and add to his prestige in the eyes of the Abwehr. Soon he was running, in Britain, Balloon and Gelantine, the latter in reality his MI5 social mistress, and the service switched his code name from Scout to the more fitting, for an agent with two notional channels of misinformation, Tricycle. (In the authorized history of MI5, the name is said to have had an even more apt origin: Popov’s “fondness for three-in-a-bed sex.”)
Popov continued to move routinely back and forth between London and Lisbon. Often in Lisbon he met with Jebsen, who came in from Berlin, and through him he was able to obtain for Menzies and MI6 the names of important Abwehr figures in Germany as well as lists, with code names and private addresses, of the main Abwehr officers in Lisbon and Madrid. But with the German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, abruptly ending the possibility of shipping goods into what was now occupied territory, Popov had to come up with a new explanation for his Portuguese visits. He proposed to the Germans that if a Yugoslav government-in-exile were set up in London, following the lead of the French, Poles, and other occupied nationalities, he might pull strings and get himself a ministerial position. The Germans leaped at the possibility since it provided excellent cover for a new use of their valued agent.
When Ulrich von der Osten, the German intelligence specialist for the United States, was struck and killed by a taxi in New York, Popov’s Abwehr handlers chose Ivan as a successor. On their end, the British agreed to loan Tricycle to the FBI, and in early August 1941 Popov, with the imposing title of Delegate of the Yugoslav Ministry of Information to the United States, left for Lisbon to await a Clipper flight to New York. Karsthoff gave him a thorough questionnaire listing information the Abwehr wanted from America, though this time the material did not have to be memorized. The Germans had developed microdots in which the questions were easily concealed, with Ivan the first secret agent to use them (and also, as Tricycle, to provide a copy to Philip Johns, the MI6 station chief in Lisbon). Karsthoff was so pleased with the arrangement and Ivan’s capacity to build an intelligence operation in America that champagne was popped to celebrate—and Popov given an advance of some forty thousand dollars to be deposited under a false name in a New York bank, with more to come as needed from a bogus Portuguese company in the United States.
On August 10, 1941, Popov left Lisbon for New York on the Dixie Clipper. In his briefcase he carried seventy thousand dollars in cash (the advance from the Germans, money of his own, and money from a bank in Yugoslavia for goods that could no longer be delivered); eleven German microdots for his use; a phial of crystals for making invisible ink; a list of ten addresses—eight of them in Lisbon—as mail drops for his letters; a copy of Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day to use for coding radio messages; and half a business card to identify himself to a German agent who would present the other half. If such a carry-on load of money and spy paraphernalia caused him any unease, it was not apparent. After an excellent meal of fresh fish in the Azores, Popov slept the rest of the way to Bermuda, where a British intelligence agent joined him for the journey to Port Washington. A room had been reserved at the Waldorf Astoria, and after a shower and a room-service sandwich Popov took a leisurely stroll about New York, where he had never been before. In a car showroom on Broadway, a new Buick convertible with red leather seats caught his eye. He had to buy it, and did—the start of an American style of lavish living he meant to fully savor while, as Ivan, keeping his German paymasters satisfied.
An unseen obstacle in the way was the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. The British believed the best use of Tricycle was to continue on American soil the clever deception work he had done in London. Hoover had something else in mind: using him to entrap real German spies in the United States, who could then be prosecuted in a blaze of publicity. In addition to this major difference, there was the stumbling block of Popov’s persona. The officers of MI5 had shrugged off Popov’s unrestrained playboy manner, largely going along with his self-serving view that it was an established part of his cover with the Germans. The puritanical Hoover was not as flexible. Popov’s spending was offensive—after taking delivery of the Buick, he leased a New York penthouse, had an interior designer decorate it, hired a Chinese manservant, and shelled out some twelve thousand dollars for furniture, books, a hi-fi system, and stacks of records—and his obsessive womanizing annoyed Hoover all the more. Within a month of his arrival in New York he and a young Englishwoman were lovers and spending long weekends together on Shelter Island.
Yet this was only the start of a long American trail of high living and heated romance. After breaking up with the Englishwoman, Popov leased a weekend retreat on Lon
g Island, complete with gardener and domestic staff, and revived an affair with the glamorous French film actress Simone Simon, whom he had known in Paris before the war. Not surprisingly, by the end of February 1942 Popov was running short of money and demanding more from the Abwehr, which was not immediately forthcoming since he had sent little useful information. Neither had he pleased the FBI by leading them to German agents operating in the country.
Popov stayed more or less at work in the United States through the summer of 1942. But by then he had gone through all his money, was in debt to the FBI, and had transmitted so little material that the British feared the Abwehr had grown suspicious. Facing up to what had become a bad show on both sides, MI5 and the FBI mutually agreed to cancel the loan of Tricycle.
*
J. C. Masterman remarked that Tricycle’s key strength as a double agent was always his “ability to impose himself and his views on the Germans when personal contact could be made.” This capacity was put to the test when Popov returned to Lisbon in the autumn of 1942. The sight of the sparkling Tagus filled him with confidence—“I felt alive again seeing it as the Boeing glided in. I was back in the game again”—and he quickly turned the tables on Abwehr concerns about his poor performance in America by maintaining it was their fault: they had failed to provide Ivan with enough money to properly perform his duties. Popov did not know that Berlin had ordered Karsthoff to end all contact with him, and presumably arrest him, if he failed to explain adequately his American failure. But after long questioning, Popov’s ploy of continued harping on money was successful. By the time he was ready to leave Lisbon for London, he was fully back in Karsthoff’s good graces and carrying with him $25,000 in Abwehr cash, 6,000 escudos to cover his Lisbon expenses, and a promise of a future payment of $2,500 a month if he produced good work.
At his office in Imperial House, Popov was put through a lengthy debriefing by an MI5 team. Soon thereafter his new questionnaire for Britain arrived from Lisbon—in the form of a microdot attached to a message—asking for information about the effects of German bombing on England, details about searchlights, and much more. The Twenty Committee at once began preparing answers, both true and false, for Ivan to forward to his new cover addresses in Lisbon. Plainly, Tricycle was also back in full accord with the British.