The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  The final American interrogation report on Fidrmuc made mention of the British view that much of the intelligence he forwarded to the Germans was “erroneous,” but it took no firm position on whether or not it was wholly or partially invented. The report left it that since his stream of reports throughout the war had satisfied top Nazi figures, Fidrmuc had to be considered “one of the most successful and potentially dangerous German agents of the war.” Walter Schellenberg of the German SD, during his postwar interrogation, gave added weight to this view by calling Fidrmuc the best source of military intelligence the Nazis had in Portugal, and among the top four of all German agents.

  While the British took Fidrmuc seriously enough to want him removed, they were convinced he had worked alone in Lisbon and that his reports were not only inventions but often amusingly mistaken. A British intelligence agent remarked in a memorandum about Ostro that his messages supposedly coming from subagents in England “have been, with the exception of a tiny percentage, not only false, but fantastically so.” A similar near-comic edge in phrasing with regard to Ostro also appeared in the name British intelligence agents in Lisbon pinned on Fidrmuc, who as it happened was a skilled oarsman. They called him “the canoe man” because, as it was explained, he was always “hanging about the sea around Lisbon. We thought he was looking out for U-boats.” In Michael Howard’s official study of British deception work, an Ostro report is quoted to illustrate both how wrong, even almost humorously wrong, his inventions could be. Describing panic caused by V-bombs striking central London, Ostro wrote: “Acute anxiety among the people has not been relieved. More evacuation is expected. The Plutocratic families in particular are leaving London.”

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  Lily Sergueiev’s service as a British double agent was finished before the war ended, though the Germans had good reason to think otherwise. She was based in England and transmitted disinformation in secret writing, which in turn was passed on to a handler in Paris, an Abwehr officer named Emile Kliemann. Early in 1944 her double-cross work abruptly changed when she was asked by MI5 to arrange a meeting with Kliemann in Lisbon, during which she would provide him with valuable information and he would give her a wireless radio transmitter and frequencies to reach the Germans directly. Letters were taking too long to get through and the British, with D-Day looming, wanted to step up the pace of the deception campaign. Known to MI5 as Treasure, Sergueiev agreed to the move even though she feared blowing her cover in a face-to-face meeting with Kliemann. Early in her recruitment by the Abwehr he had told her, “If I thought that you were betraying us, I’d shoot you here and now! But you won’t ever betray us because your parents have remained in Paris. In Paris.”

  The Russian-born Sergueiev indeed had parents living in occupied Paris, and she understood the leverage the Germans had over her. But she was used to a life of risk. Tramp, her German code name, well described early travels that had taken her from Paris to Warsaw, Berlin, Beirut, and Indochina. Back in Paris after the fall of France, she was sought out by the Abwehr due to her ability with English as well as French, and the fact that she had relatives in England and Portugal and a sister in North Africa. The Germans trained her in spycraft, including the use of Morse code, and regularly paid her salary but were in no hurry to assign her a mission. With delay following delay, which included Kliemann’s inability ever to be on time for meetings with her, she worried the war would be over before she accomplished anything.

  Finally in the summer of 1943 she was told to go to Lisbon to keep an eye on the local British community while waiting to get to England through the help of a cousin living in Cambridge. Once there, her cover would be that she was a refugee who had managed to escape Europe by buying the necessary documents and now wanted to help the Allies liberate France. As an Abwehr agent, she would visit friends living in the village of Wraxall near Bristol and report by invisible ink on everything coming and going in the bustling area on the Mouth of the Severn.

  On her way to Lisbon, Sergueiev stopped in Madrid, went directly to the British consulate, and offered her services as a double agent. After initial interrogation, the British arranged for her to travel under a false name to England via Gibraltar—Portugal had refused her a visa, presumably because of her Russian name—with the ostensible purpose of visiting her relative in Cambridge. She had one nonnegotiable demand: her cherished dog Babs had to make the journey to England as well, though without going through an ordeal of six months of quarantine. The British told her they would see to it. As for the Germans, they were delighted to have their agent bypass Lisbon and go directly to England. Kliemann came from Paris to Madrid to supply her with funds to last for six months and with jewelry she could sell after she arrived.

  She expected to spend only a few days in Gibraltar, but weeks passed. When questioned about the delay, the British told her there were problems with Babs. An American pilot she met on the Rock said he could get a friend to fly the dog to London, thus skirting all controls. Sergueiev agreed to leave Babs with the pilot, but only after the British, informed of the plan, agreed to transports Babs if the pilot failed to come through.

  In London there was the usual period of rigorous interrogation before Sergueiev met with her MI5 case officer, Tar Robertson, who explained the importance of her work for Britain, took custody of the money and jewelry the Germans had provided, and said she would be paid 50 pounds each month plus traveling expenses. Sergueiev agreed to the money but noted to herself that the Germans had valued her services at the equivalent of 250 pounds a month. Money, she also reminded herself, was not why she was now helping the British. In aiding them she understood she was aiding France.

  As she recorded in a diary, the information subsequently given to her by Robertson and his aides and fed to the Germans made little sense: “… bits of conversation mentioning rank and badges; trains supposedly seen in stations; information obtained by chance through overhearing conversations in the train.” But it seemed to add up to something since the Germans heartily praised her work. Her life in England, though, gave her little comfort; she felt isolated, and the people she worked with were efficient but cold and unemotional.

  Her only close relationship was with Mary Sherer, the day-to-day contact assigned to her by Robertson. The pair often ate together and went to films, yet Sherer carefully kept a professional distance. A continuing irritant, as Sergueiev let Sherer know, was British failure to keep their word about bringing her dog to England. Shortly before her mission to Lisbon she learned from her sister in North Africa that Babs, who had been taken there from Gibraltar by an American pilot, had been killed in a road accident. “Everything is indifferent to me now,” she confided to her diary about the loss. “The circle of loneliness has closed around me; I am alone, absolutely alone.”

  The cover MI5 arranged for her in Lisbon was nearly impossible for even Sergueiev to take seriously. Through her English cousin, the story went, she had found a position in the cinema section of the Ministry of Information, which was preparing a series of films for showings in liberated countries. There was urgency about the project because the Americans were doing the same and had more capacity for turning out propaganda films. She had offered a suggestion that, in order to make the MOI films more realistic, someone should talk with experienced filmmakers who had escaped from occupied territory to neutral places such as Lisbon. Since she spoke French, she had proposed herself as the one to contact exiled French screenwriters about working on the films, and her MOI supervisors had agreed. Despite doubts about the flimsy story, Sergueiev cabled Kliemann that she was coming to Lisbon and bringing him information. He in turn was to provide her with a transmitter, a code to use, and money.

  She flew to Lisbon in early March 1944, took a room in the plush Avenida Palace Hotel, and learned at the British embassy that a figure the MOI had supposedly sent her to meet, the chief of the film section in the embassy’s press attaché office, was away in London. Her handlers in MI5 had never considered that possibility. Know
ing the Germans would check all details of her Lisbon mission, Sergueiev quickly developed another explanation for her presence in the city, which was that she now understood that most French refugees were going to North Africa via Spain and Gibraltar, so she would write the press attaché in Madrid for help in locating scriptwriters there. This would take time, as would a letter to the MOI in London asking for instructions about a journey to Madrid or the possibility of sending screenwriters to Lisbon rather than Gibraltar. The wholly notional process would buy her about a month for staying on in Lisbon. With her new cover story Sergueiev put on her other hat and tried to contact Kliemann, only to learn he was still in Paris and apparently had no idea she had come to Lisbon. Two weeks passed before he reached the city, and for their first meeting he was smartly turned out in a dark blue suit and a felt hat but late as usual. When she spun her far-fetched account of film work for the MOI, he simply said, “You are very clever. Very, very clever.”

  Over the following days a technician taught Sergueiev how to operate as well as take apart and reassemble the transmitter Kliemann had brought her. Then she had to learn to build by hand a Morse key because it seemed too chancy to include a keyboard with the transmitter on her return to England. A story she had invented for the British, as she told Kliemann, was that the transmitter was actually a secondhand radio bought from a Frenchman and could be shipped in the diplomatic bag due to her work with the MOI.

  Just before she left Lisbon, Kliemann took Sergueiev in a hired car on a sightseeing idyll to Sintra, where she used a camera with an automatic shutter to take snapshots of the two of them. When the photos were developed, she gave Kliemann three prints and the negatives, keeping another set for herself and one for Tar Robertson. On the drive back to Lisbon, Kliemann told her he would happily escort her to the casino in Estoril for a fine dinner but realized it would not be wise to be seen together in such a den of international agents and double agents.

  Meeting in Lisbon the following day, they took a ferry across the Tagus for lunch in Cacilhas, where Kliemann gave her fifteen hundred pounds, the money all in one-pound notes and wrapped in a large parcel. “You find it a bit bulky?” he asked her. “A bit!” she exclaimed, and insisted the funds had to be exchanged for larger notes. Before separating that day, Kliemann said they must agree on a secret message which would indicate to him that the British had found her out and were forcing her to work for them. She suggested a simple repeated stroke in Morse code. “That’s excellent!” Kliemann responded, and noted the signal in a notebook.

  At their final Lisbon meeting Kliemann gave Sergueiev 500 pounds in ten-pound notes—all he had been able to exchange in local banks for British currency—and the rest of the money in Portuguese escudos. He also presented her with a bracelet with forty-two diamonds set in platinum that he had bought for 69,000 escudos. As they parted, he told her to be very cautious when she returned to England, then bent over and gallantly kissed her hand.

  Dank and dreary London gave Sergueiev a feeling that she had never really been away, but when Mary Sherer saw the bracelet on her wrist and asked her to describe what Lisbon had been like, she sketched the city in affectionate detail. “I wish I could have gone too,” Sherer replied dreamily. Then she resumed her MI5 role and took from Sergueiev her photos of Kliemann and the bank notes and bracelet she had been given and put everything in an envelope to send on to Robertson.

  When contact with the Germans was made with the transmitter, Sergueiev was again in the business of sending disinformation messages, now at a rate of six a week. On weekends she left London and went to her friends near Bristol, and from there took imaginary journeys that allowed her to harvest imaginary information. In reality there was furious activity in the area, with convoy after convoy arriving and a constant flow of armored vehicles and trucks carrying British and American troops. With the air heavy with a sense that the invasion was about to take place, Sergueiev’s workload increased to as many as three messages a day. From the Germans came anxious requests for added detail.

  On June 2, 1944, Sergueiev recorded in her diary a conversation in which she was asked by Sherer to explain a remark she had made earlier about her ability to “ruin” the work she was doing for the British. She had said exactly that in one of her recurring periods in which overwork, her loneliness, and continuing bitterness over the loss of her dog surfaced in vengeful awareness that she had a lever of power at her disposal. With two strokes of her Morse key she could tell the Germans she was no longer a free agent. “There is a security check,” she told Sherer, but did not disclose what it was. Sherer, she knew, would have to inform Robertson.

  A week after the Normandy invasion Sherer and Robertson appeared at Sergueiev’s flat, and Robertson informed her that because of the security check she had arranged in Lisbon with the Germans she was no longer considered trustworthy. Consequently her work was over. She would have a fortnight to vacate her flat, and he would provide her with transportation either to Paris or to her sister in Algiers. If she made any difficulties or spoke to anyone about her work, she would be jailed and then handed over to French authorities.

  While Lily Sergueiev was through with the British—though Treasure, with someone else operating the transmitter in London, continued to contact the Germans—she was far from done with the war. She told Robertson she would return to France but without his help. In the process of doing so, she had to be interrogated by an agent of French intelligence, and to this end MI5 furnished the service with a dossier that said British intelligence had organized her journey to England and that she had worked there under the authority of the War Office until June 14, 1944. As a recruit of the French army, Sergueiev returned to liberated Paris at the end of August 1944, finding her parents alive and well.

  Later J. C. Masterman wrote that from the Twenty Committee perspective, Treasure “turned out not to belie her name.” And with justifiable pride in the machinations of the British double-cross system, he added that after Paris was freed

  we allowed treasure … to return to France in the French ATS [women’s auxiliary army]. In August the German Abwehr officer who ran the case [Kliemann] was captured and was brought to England as a prisoner of war. treasure was therefore in France and her spymaster in England; but wireless communication continued as though treasure was still here and her spymaster in Europe!

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  With equal reason for pride, Dusko Popov remarked in a memoir of his spy career that “Ian Fleming said he based his character James Bond to some degree on me and my experience. Could be.” The possibility stemmed from an encounter with Fleming that, according to Popov, had taken place in Estoril just before he left to work with the FBI in the United States. One evening he became aware of Fleming—whom he believed, incorrectly, was an MI6 agent—observing him in the lobby of the Palácio Hotel, later in a restaurant, and finally in the casino, where Popov was involved in a masterly performance at the baccarat table. An explanation for the watchfulness was that Popov was carrying with him a hefty amount of Abwehr money for deposit in a New York bank, though in fact to be turned over to the British, and Fleming was protecting the funds for MI6. But in Popov’s estimation this was not likely, and he believed that Fleming really had his eyes on him as a potential fictional character. “Perhaps,” Popov wrote, “he developed what happened that night into a Bond adventure.”

  The Bond novel Popov had in mind was Fleming’s first, Casino Royale, in which Agent 007 out-duels the sinister Le Chiffre at the baccarat table. Whether Popov actually inspired Fleming’s novel is uncertain, though the two could have crossed paths in wartime Portugal. In May 1941 Fleming, a commander in the British navy and now a member of naval intelligence, arrived in the country on a flight from England. With him was his boss, Admiral John Godfrey. While waiting for a Clipper flight to New York to begin coordinating British intelligence work with their American counterparts, the two stayed at the Palácio. After dinner one night they went to the casino, where the only gamblers present wer
e a few Portuguese businessmen. Fleming gambled and lost, and when leaving the tables said to Godfrey, “What if those men [the Portuguese gamblers] had been German secret service agents, and suppose we had cleaned them out of their money; now that would have been exciting.”

  Although Popov might well have, he did not suggest that a more illustrious British novelist made imaginative use of Tricycle. Juan Pujol could have floated stronger claims for Garbo, and Paul Fidrmuc even stronger ones for Ostro. All three agents would have come to the attention of Graham Greene when he returned to England in early 1943 after fourteen months in West Africa as an MI6 operative. Greene was taking up a new post with the secret service, first at a country facility in St. Albans, later in an office building in central London’s Ryder Street, where one floor was occupied by the American X-2 group under Norman Holmes Pearson.

  Greene was attached to Section V of MI6, and his immediate boss was Kim Philby, the future defector to the Soviet Union. Philby ran the section’s Iberian Department, which monitored operations in Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, and North Africa, and Greene was put in charge of the Portuguese desk. He knew little about the country and nothing about the language, but with Portugal swarming with undercover figures the new post was clearly a promotion in the spy business. In his other business as a novelist, Greene already had behind him the enduring achievements of Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory together with the superb thrillers This Gun for Hire and The Confidential Agent.