The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  At the end of November Popov shifted his residence from the Savoy Hotel to Clock House, rented quarters with a maid in a fine part of Knightsbridge, though on a street where few homes were undamaged by bombs. He was now running new double-cross agents along with Balloon and Gelantine as well as writing his long and laborious letters to Lisbon. He was properly attending to his romantic needs as well as his clandestine obligations, but the sedentary nature of his espionage left him restless for a more active role.

  He soon found one in the form of a deception scheme that he presented to MI5 in May 1943. As he also laid out the plan to the Abwehr in Lisbon in the summer and autumn of 1943, with the authority of the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London he would set up an escape route for Yugoslav military officers languishing in Switzerland after escaping from occupied territory. The benefit for the Abwehr, who would actually create the “escape” route, was that it would enable them to infiltrate the Yugoslavs with agents who would eventually reach Britain—figures whom MI5, as of course the Abwehr did not know, would immediately apprehend or turn into double agents for Tricycle’s network after winnowing them from genuine officers. The escape route would be through France, using false documents provided by the Germans, then into Spain where Popov himself would meet the “escapees” and direct them to British officials in Madrid and finally to Gibraltar before transport to England.

  To Popov’s delight and surprise, Karsthoff and his superiors in Berlin bought into the plan without hesitation, and the Yugoslav escape route—the slipping-out plan, as Masterman called it—went into operation. Masterman would later acknowledge that Popov “successfully carried out the greater part of his scheme.” Popov himself estimated that about 150 men were moved from Switzerland, some reaching London, others going no farther than Paris. An added benefit for Popov was that the escape operation reunited him with his older and much admired brother, Ivo, a medical doctor who was working for British intelligence in Yugoslavia under the code name Dreadnought. Popov had hoped the slipping-out plan might involve Ivo, but neither brother had been aware the other was a British double agent.

  Popov was also now reconnected with Johann Jebsen. While in charge of the Madrid end of the Yugoslav escape route for the Abwehr, Jebsen had become alarmed that the service would no longer be able to shield him from the Gestapo. Given the way the war was going for Germany, no doubt he was also pondering his own future. In Lisbon he contacted an MI6 officer and set up a meeting in Sintra, where he arrived nattily dressed in a pin-striped suit and announced: “I recruited three people to spy for me against Britain. I knew them to be pro-British and knew they would double-cross me. I am pleased you are running my agents. Now run me.”

  Masterman simply recorded about Jebsen’s change of sides that “by the end of September [1943] he had agreed to participate actively with us in order to further his professed anti-Nazi views.” For Popov, the official turnabout of his close friend was “like a baptism—three and a half years late.” In his new role as Artist, Jebsen informed the British about Abwehr agents within England, among them the figure well known to them as Garbo. He also came up with information about German weapons systems, including the V-1 flying bomb, which was passed along to the current MI6 station chief in Lisbon, Cecil Gledhill. London came back with long lists of technical questions for Artist, with the queries eventually so detailed that specialists were sent to Lisbon to talk with him.

  About the time Artist began working for MI6, Popov’s presence in Lisbon paid off for American OSS operatives in the city. Stretched out in the back of a car one night while being transported to a meeting with Kartshoff, Popov overheard the two Abwehr secretaries driving him refer to a “der Dicke Alois” who had trouble maneuvering his ample behind into the car. Popov knew of an Austrian political refugee called Fat Alois who had a low-level job at the American embassy yet the means to live at the Palácio in Estoril, where Popov preferred to stay himself. Intrigued, he followed Alois one evening when he went to the cinema in the casino building, then after ten minutes left—an old spy gambit to gain an hour or two of secret time. Popov trailed him in darkness from the casino to the coast road to Lisbon, where a car Popov recognized as an Abwehr vehicle picked him up. The next day he reported what he had seen to MI6, which passed the information to the OSS. Fat Alois quickly confessed to selling secret documents to the Germans, then in an effort to save himself denounced a young Portuguese servant working in the American embassy who was also in the Abwehr employ. When taken into custody the servant was found to possess a newly made key to one of the embassy safes.

  Popov’s relationship with his Lisbon case officer remained close, so much so that he spent Christmas of 1943 at Karsthoff’s farm in Colares, a few miles from Sintra, where champagne was consumed and carols sung despite the general gloom of German guests about the direction of the war. The recently acquired farm and a new Cadillac were fruits of money Karsthoff regularly skimmed from Berlin’s payments to Popov and his notional network in England. While Popov was a money machine for the Abwehr officer, he was also inadvertently the recipient of his protection. Since Karsthoff’s own fate was tied to Berlin continuing to believe Ivan was a top agent, pursuing possible cracks in that façade was never in the officer’s interest.

  Popov’s last Lisbon visit took place at the end of February 1944. For the Germans he was there to organize another group of Yugoslav escapers; for the British he was delivering to the enemy deception information about the Normandy invasion in June. It was a measure of MI5’s confidence in Tricycle that he was allowed at this critical juncture in the war to continue his intimate contact with the Germans—questioned by them, socializing with them—while other double agents were kept in England writing letters and sending wireless messages. With Canaris’s dismissal from the Abwehr and the shakeup of the organization, Popov’s formal interrogation in Lisbon was now handled by an SD officer, Alois Schreiber, rather than Karsthoff—a two-day grilling that Popov survived without incident. Ultra intercepts later indicated that Berlin had accepted Ivan’s deception material as confirming its own overall view of Allied invasion planning.

  During the Lisbon trip Popov was reunited with his brother Ivo, who, at Ivan’s insistence, had been sent to Lisbon to discuss with him the Yugoslav escape route. After Ivo appeared as a passenger in Jebsen’s Rolls-Royce, the brothers repaired to the Palácio for room service and talk. MI6’s Lisbon station chief later arranged a secret dinner in Dreadnought’s honor, afterward reporting to Britain that the agent had revealed “a seriousness and depth of feeling which contrasts with Tricycle’s expansive bonhomie.”

  As for Jebsen, his work for British intelligence as Artist continued to have high value, yet with D-Day drawing close there was also high risk in keeping a double agent on the Continent and beyond reach of immediate protection. The Twenty Committee had ceased sending to Portugal and Spain seamen double agents—always a prime means of contacting the Germans and Japanese—but had nonetheless left Artist in place despite intercepted messages indicating he was in trouble with Berlin. Abruptly pulling him out of Portugal, it was argued, might alert the German to the existence of Ultra at a time when its continued operation was essential.

  The decision would prove a source of lasting regret among some in MI5 when, in the spring of 1944, Jebsen was taken into custody in Lisbon and eventually moved to Gestapo control. He had a wealth of information that could harm Allied interests, but whatever he might reveal would come too late to matter. Once again, Masterman would write, “we were saved by time and fortune. D-Day arrived before the Germans had succeeded in unraveling all the tangled skein of the Artist case, and presumably there was little opportunity after the invasion for patient research into such matters in German offices.” (Even had such research been possible at the time, it would have revealed—as was learned following the war—that Jebsen, whose kidnapping had involved currency dealings, apparently disclosed nothing about British double agents.) Nonetheless, with Artist now beyond any control,
the Twenty Committee took the precaution of shutting down the work of Tricycle and his ring of subagents.

  Popov first learned of Jebsen’s desperate situation on May 7, when he returned to Clock House and found two MI5 officers waiting for him. He was told only that Artist had not been seen at his Estoril villa and had failed to keep an appointment with his MI6 control in Lisbon, but Popov had no doubt that his friend was under arrest, nor about what awaited him. His immediate response was to write angrily to the Germans in Lisbon that if Jebsen were not released he would cease all Abwehr work. In the Abwehr shakeup Karsthoff had been removed from his Lisbon post and transferred to Austria (eventually he was captured and executed by the Russians), leaving Popov to deal with new spymasters of the German SD. But even had Karsthoff still been in place in Lisbon, Popov knew it was unlikely the letter would have any effect since Jebsen was in Gestapo hands.

  Shortly thereafter, the fighting in Normandy now intense, Popov was invited to what he thought was a small dinner at London’s Hyde Park Hotel. It turned out to be a surprise gala attended by nearly everyone he knew in MI5. There it was announced that Tricycle had been recommended for a British honor, an OBE, in recognition of his work for the intelligence service. Popov was moved and embarrassed, though he could not keep concern for Jebsen from intruding on his thoughts.

  It helped to some degree that Ivo had escaped German arrest in Yugoslavia and had been moved to England by MI6. The brothers took adjoining rooms in the Savoy—Clock House had been damaged by a V-1 bomb—and enjoyed another reunion. But Dusko’s concern for Jebsen would not let him rest. In the fall of 1944 he began a long effort to locate where Jebsen was being held—there was some reason to believe he was still alive—by following Allied troops across previously occupied territory, doing what he called “de-Nazification” work for military intelligence while also searching for Jebsen. He reached Paris and then Zurich, but his inquiries led nowhere, and around Christmas he was back in London and was told Jebsen was dead. While trying to escape from Oranienburg concentration camp near Berlin, he had been shot—an overworked euphemism, Popov understood, for execution. He went back to his mopping-up work for intelligence on the Continent while now also searching for Jebsen’s killer.

  In August 1945, the war over, he found him, a man named Walter Salzer who was in hiding on the outskirts of the nearly destroyed German port city of Minden. He had been a member of the SD, and when confronted by Popov about his actions he gave the standard explanation: he had followed the orders of superiors. Popov drove Salzer to a remote area, meaning to shoot him with a pistol. When he could not, he beat him with his fists, then left him crumpled on the ground and drove away.

  After the war Popov declined to return to a Yugoslavia under Communist rule. Although he eventually settled in France, in 1946 he became a naturalized British citizen. Late the following year he was presented with his OBE. Since MI5 was far from ready to showcase its former double-cross figures, the typical ceremony of awarding the decoration was moved from Buckingham Palace to a location that seemed suitable for someone like Tricycle. The chosen venue was the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly.

  *

  While still active as a British double agent in Lisbon in 1943, Johann Jebsen had uncovered the existence of Ostro, the code name of what he thought was an Abwehr spy ring in the city that was passing the Germans information derived from subagents in England and America. Dusko Popov remembered his friend telling him, “Ostro is run by someone named Paul Fidrmuc von Karmap, but I haven’t much of a line on him. I don’t know his background and I don’t know if that’s his real name, although I rather doubt it.” When Popov asked how long Ostro had been at work, Jebsen told him, “Don’t know. The Abwehr has been keeping Fidrmuc under cover. Even von Karsthoff and Kamler [Abwehr officers in Lisbon] don’t have any control over him. They have orders only to collect his information and send it by special courier to Berlin.”

  Jebsen and Popov did not know that British intelligence had been aware of Fidrmuc since at least early 1942, and believed, or later determined, that he was an Austrian who had fought in World War I and for several years had been working for the Abwehr in Denmark and Italy before entering Portugal in the summer of 1940. With his Danish wife he settled in Estoril under the cover of a businessman who was a partner in Brucker-Traus, a Lisbon firm exporting Portuguese products to Germany. Furthermore, Ostro was his code name and he had no string of agents communicating with him, as he claimed, by secret writing in airmailed letters to Lisbon. The material he was feeding the Germans was a concoction put together from reading Allied publications, contacts with prominent Portuguese figures, and straight out invention that was as magnificently bogus as Juan Pujol’s during his Lisbon period. Nonetheless, the reports, as Jebsen had discovered, were considered so valuable by the Germans that they bypassed analysis by the Lisbon Abwehr and were sent on to Berlin by radio or special courier.

  Further evidence of Ostro’s standing in Nazi eyes came from knowledge that high-ranking officials visited Lisbon to consult with him, and that the Germans richly rewarded him for his services with cash and art objects he put up for sale. Ostro had no hesitation in also seeking additional funds. With the end of the war in sight in the spring of 1945, he suggested to the Germans that he and his network receive three-months’ advance pay to protect the operation against what might soon be an interruption in their endeavors. Ostro also expected that his German masters treat him with full awareness of his importance, as an American military intelligence report in 1943 had stressed:

  This officer, who lives in Lisbon but is responsible direct to … Berlin, has for the last two or three years professed to maintain an immense network of agents in all parts of the world, who report back to him by air courier. FIDRMUC has contrived to get himself regarded by the Abwehr as a wayward genius who produces the goods but must on no account be flustered. There are, however, grounds for believing that his network is wholly or chiefly imaginary, and its reports invented in Lisbon.

  The Twenty Committee in London equally believed that Ostro’s reports were inventions, but there was concern that through chance, educated guesswork, or picking up a Lisbon story with some credibility he might convey dangerous information, especially in the period before the Normandy landings. By use of British controlled double-cross channels it was possible to correct or confuse anything Ostro transmitted, yet worry persisted. Given his authority with the Germans, his Lisbon reports were likely given closer attention than those sent by Abwehr agents at work in England. The concern was realized when Ostro, in a report also containing much incorrect information, hit home with a prediction that the invasion would take place on the Cherbourg peninsula, and gave as his supposed source a British officer on the staff of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Seemingly one of the major intelligence feats of the war, the report had no noticeable influence on German planning, though it brought Fidrmuc a note of congratulations shortly after the June 6 assault took place.

  In February 1945 an Ostro report correctly noted the transfer of Canadian troops from Italy to the front in northwestern Europe, prompting fresh anxiety by the Twenty Committee. Finally, as J. C. Masterman wrote, a “variety of schemes” were “put forward for the elimination of Ostro.” He did not elaborate on the character of the proposals, adding only that none succeeded and Ostro continued as an Abwehr agent in Lisbon and thorn in the Allied side to the end of the war. At the time of Ostro’s Canadian report, Guy Liddell noted in his diary that MI5 should “buy him up or bump him off.” (Philip Johns, the former head of MI6’s Lisbon station, on bumping off: When a highly wanted figure who had infiltrated escape lines and turned over names to the Gestapo was located in Lisbon, he asked London for permission to dispose of him. The signal that came back said “kill him repeat kill him.” Johns subsequently noted that “there was no lack of volunteers to take drastic action and the man disappeared without trace!”) According to one account, Stewart Menzies of MI6 resisted elimination in favor of an ef
fort to turn Ostro to the Allied side, but the war ended before an approach to him could be made.

  Just shortly before the war ended, Fidrmuc left Lisbon for Barcelona, from where in March 1945 he submitted his final report to the Germans. The following year he was taken into custody by the American military, moved to internment camps, and interrogated over a period of several months. Since he was not a Nazi party member and fit no arrest category as a war criminal, he was eventually released. Much of what is believed about him stems, in addition to that learned by Allied agents in Lisbon and through Ultra intercepts of radio traffic between Lisbon and Berlin, from his recollections under questioning.

  Among the deeds he recounted was a futile attempt on his part to recruit Frederic Prokosch as an agent after he learned that the American writer, living in Estoril in 1940-1941, was returning to the United States. When in 1943 Prokosch passed through Lisbon on his way to an Allied propaganda post in Sweden, Fidrmuc advised the Abwehr to make contact with him, but he believed nothing came of this effort as well. Fidrmuc cast himself in a more successful light in a strange story involving Britain’s ambassador Ronald Campbell. In August 1943 Fidrmuc was alone on the beach near the Setúbal when a boat appeared with three people aboard, one of whom he recognized as Campbell. After the party went swimming, their boat was stranded by the outgoing tide, and Fidrmuc helped them launch it. When asked to watch their belongings on the beach while they explored a nearby cove, he agreed and used the opportunity to search their pockets. In Campbell’s he found a small diary with coded messages, which he memorized and later reconstructed. Fidrmuc showed his notes to an Abwehr officer, and the two decided they had something to do with an important meeting between an Italian general and Allied military officers. Fidrmuc wrote up a special report for Berlin, yet learned in response only that he should have stolen the diary.