The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  To prepare for the work with Philby’s group, Greene put together a handbook listing names and activities of all known Axis intelligence agents in Portugal. Doing so meant going through an existing card index and sorting out true and false information, a slogging task given that the confirmed names of some two thousand enemy agents were on file together with another two hundred Germans living in Portugal who had intelligence involvement. Greene also had to contend with some forty-six business firms in the Iberian peninsula considered covers for German clandestine activity.

  With this large preliminary task finished, Greene’s everyday duties were those of collecting and filing intelligence reports from agents in Portugal as well as intercepts from Bletchley Park, and sending coded instructions back to MI6 agents in Lisbon. In later accounts of the work, Greene downplayed its importance. He told a biographer, “It was an office job really… . Giving directions to our man in Lisbon.” And he wrote himself: “… it was a question of files, files, endless files.” Philby remembered him working “quietly, coolly and competently” as a deskman, and for writing “terse, sometimes devastating marginalia” on correspondence coming from the field. “Poor old 24000, our Man in Lisbon,” went one example, “charging around like a bull in a china shop, opening up vast vistas of the obvious.”

  Routine or not, the Portuguese desk gave Greene intimate knowledge of Lisbon’s shadow world and allowed him to take part, under Philby’s direction, in a broad effort in 1943 and 1944 to turn German agents in Portugal to the Allied side. Some were abandoning what by now was clearly a sinking ship, and came over on their own accord, Artist among them. Others needed a shove.

  An agent of MI5 introduced Philby to an ideal man for the shoving, Jona von Ustinov, a cosmopolitan figure (and father of the actor Peter Ustinov) who went by the name Klop Ustinov. In World War I he had served in the German army, and before World War II had worked in London as a press attaché at the German embassy. Now connected with British intelligence, Ustinov was said to have an unerring eye for distinguishing Nazi and anti-Nazi elements within the Abwehr. Sent to Lisbon with the excessively British cover name of Middleton-Pendleton, he chose figures at the German legation—top officials but also clerks and secretaries—whom he believed were anti-Nazi and sent them messages beginning “Greetings from Klop” and suggesting a rendezvous at some remote spot or lunch at a flat he shared with an MI6 agent. “Yes,” Klop often reported afterward. “He’s willing to work with us.”

  On the Portuguese desk in London, Greene would have duly noted Ustinov’s achievements. His work also involved him, in indirect fashion, with the Abwehr’s Admiral Canaris, as Greene recalled when he later reflected on Kim Philby’s Communist affiliation. During Canaris’s appearances in Portugal, Greene had sent telegrams to the police that informed them about the spymaster’s movements, all in an effort to annoy him. Had Philby allowed the provocation because it actually served Russian interests?

  [T]he thing which I have always wondered [Greene wrote] was whether Kim Philby smiled up his sleeve when I arranged to have Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, harassed. I had him harassed, when he went to Portugal, by giving the police information about the meetings he was holding and so on. My telegrams had to be passed by Kim and he didn’t prevent it and everyone knows now that Admiral Canaris was on our side. He was anti-Hitler. But there was talk on the German side of a separate peace which the Russians were very much afraid of. I wonder whether Kim knew this and was letting me harass him because the Russians feared a separate peace.

  Just before the Normandy invasion in June 1944, Greene abruptly resigned his position with MI6 and took a new post with the political intelligence division of the Foreign Office for the remainder of the war. More than a decade later, and after publishing The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, he turned back to his time on the Portugal desk for the comic spy novel Our Man in Havana. About the origin of the tale Greene recorded that, shortly after the war ended, he was asked to write a film script and thought about “a Secret Service comedy based on what I had learned from my work in 1943-4 of German Abwehr activity in Portugal.”

  Nothing came of the film, but as late as 1956 Greene was planning a similar film treatment set in wartime Portugal, and intended to go to Lisbon to gather local atmosphere. As it turned out, he chose to write a novel with Havana as the setting in the period in which Fidel Castro’s guerrillas and the Batista regime were locked in a struggle for control of Cuba. Published in 1958, Our Man in Havana was quickly followed by a film version (with the screenplay by Greene) shot in Havana with permission of the triumphant Castro.

  In the story Jim Wormold, a feckless, longtime English vacuum-cleaner salesman in Cuba, is recruited by a British secret service agent named Hawthorne (played in the film by Noël Coward) to be their man in Havana (agent 52900/5). Wormold shrewdly rises in spy stature—and income to provide for his beloved and crafty young daughter—by dint of invention. With a map of Cuba, copies of Time magazine, and various government publications he fabricates a spy ring made up of characters with useful fields of expertise—an engineer, an economics professor, a drunken pilot. Back at headquarters in London, Wormold’s superiors accept the information his subagents supply, delightfully erroneous, at face value.

  When crude drawings of parts of a vacuum cleaner are submitted along with a report of the engineer, London concludes it might be a diabolical weapon under construction by someone (rebels, Americans, Russians, Germans, and so forth) in the Oriente hills. When “they” (“the others”) learn of the drawings, and learn too that British intelligence believes them important, they also take Wormold and his work seriously, so much so that they decide to poison him. The attempted murder fails, but “they”—an agent in the form of a pipe-smoking rival English vacuum cleaner salesman—take revenge by killing Wormold’s valued German friend Dr. Hasselbacher. The comedy now turns less comic, and Wormold, so to speak, turns with it. He seeks out the murderer and, after an exchange of gunfire, kills him.

  The truth out at last about the notional drawings and the notional ring of agents, Wormold is recalled to London, expecting to be sacked or possibly even hanged. But doing either would amount to admission of incompetence by intelligence officials. So, in a return to the novel’s full comic mode, the top official—a figure known simply as “Chief”—informs Wormold that his intelligence post in Havana will close but he will be kept on in England with a position on the training staff (“Lecturing. How to run a station abroad. That kind of thing”). And, naturally, he is in line to receive a British honor, an OBE.

  13

  Wolfram by Day

  Your stories are good. Wolfram by day and fornication by night—your colleagues must eclipse in gallantry all other competitors in Dr Salazar’s raffish capital.

  —Letter of Sybil Eccles to David Eccles, 1942

  Jim Wormold’s surname might simply have been a witty reversal of “old worm,” but it could also have been suggested by a prized Portuguese mineral. On MI6’s Portugal desk in London, Graham Greene could hardly have avoided incessant talk about the vital wartime need of wolfram, or wolframite, and possibly the odd name of the ore stuck with him when he came to write his story of the inept vacuum cleaner salesman become honored British spy. In any case, wolfram had a way of getting inside the minds of both Allied and Axis officials. “I think I never heard of wolfram before I went to Spain,” confessed Ambassador Carlton Hayes. “I soon learned, however. In fact, all of us at the Embassy in Madrid had perforce to make it a topic of daily conversation and some of us dreamed about it at night.” From Lisbon in 1942, David Eccles wrote his wife in England about the British ambassador to Washington “penning wolframic messages” to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, with Hull then sending back bewildering instructions to Lisbon’s American legation that left everyone there helplessly begging the British embassy’s aid in drafting coherent replies.

  From the start of the war Portugal’s neutrality coexisted with the intent of extr
acting as much commercial benefit to the country as possible. In a radio address to the nation in 1942 Salazar effectively acknowledged the dual aim by remarking that “the desire for neutrality cannot be superior to the interests of the nation.” In the economic sphere of trade he wielded neutrality as a national resource, which allowed him to conduct through most of the war a flourishing business with both sides. Portugal imported its needs of wheat, oil, steel, and military materiel and exported its staples of cork, wine, wool, olive oil, canned sardines, turpentine, tin, and—of overriding importance—wolfram, the mineral from which tungsten is derived, used in military production to harden steel for tanks, airplanes, and armor-piercing shells.

  The Allies could draw on wolfram supplies in the United States and in South America. Germany’s wolfram came mainly from China and Burma until the war closed down ship routes and rail transport across Russia. The Third Reich then turned to abundant deposits in Spain and especially Portugal. From 1942 forward, Portugal was Germany’s main source of wolfram, and following the fall of France the Reich had secure land routes for moving the ore from the Iberian peninsula. (Portugal did not supply wolfram to Mussolini’s Italy on grounds it could end up in Germany, throwing off the balancing act of equal treatment of the belligerents.) The trade with Portugal was so essential for Germany that always there was fear, actual and rhetorical, that if denied wolfram the Wehrmacht would come and take it—or German submarines would attack Portuguese shipping on the high seas as a warning of what might befall the country.

  In December 1941 the Portuguese merchant ship Corte Real was sunk by a U-boat while on its way to the United States with, so Germany later claimed, a cargo of wolfram that, had the ship landed, presumably would have been sent to Britain. After the attack David Eccles noted in a letter written from Lisbon that the “wolfram business goes from bad to worse, the Germans have now sunk a Portuguese ship carrying wolfram to the USA to warn this wretched little country … that they mean to stop at nothing to secure wolfram for themselves and to deny it to us and America. We are getting near a shooting war as you can see.” Eccles later added to his letter that “we find it untrue that the ship had any wolfram.”

  *

  In the early period of the shooting war David Eccles was a central figure on the Allied side in the long and intense contest over Portuguese wolfram. He had flown into Lisbon from England in April 1940, just before the fall of France, and would be based there off and on for more than two years. He was on the wartime staff of the British Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW), made up of businessmen and civil servants with a mission of limiting trade between neutral countries and Germany while bolstering it for Britain. Spain and Portugal were of prime importance, and Eccles’s assignment in Lisbon was to head the commercial side of the embassy. His business experience in the Iberian peninsula was considerable since he had been chairman of a British company that had built and operated a railway across northern Spain.

  He found the small Lisbon staff of MEW squeezed into rooms in the ambassador’s residence, and his first task was to set up new offices where he could conduct business with Portuguese officials. The only one who ultimately counted was Salazar, and the ambassador, Walford Selby, turned over to Eccles much of the direct contact with the prime minister and his staff. By his own reckoning, Eccles got along well with the dictator, whom he considered handsome, dignified, intelligent, and thoroughly informed. Salazar frequently called on him about matters of finance, the British sea blockade, and virtually all else involving Anglo-Portuguese relations.

  They spoke together in French in Salazar’s office in São Bento Palace, with Eccles feeling he had to be prepared for any subject, as if back at Oxford during a tutorial. Now and then their conversations drifted off weighty matters. After deciding on the Portuguese decoration to be given the Duke of Kent during his appearance in the summer of 1940 at the centenary celebration, Salazar asked Eccles, “What about yourself? Would you like a decoration?” When Eccles politely declined, Salazar turned to a window and mused, “Look down there at the homes of my people. I have their respect. Perhaps also their love. That is the only decoration worth having.”

  Eccles routinely sent letters to his wife in England about his life and work in Lisbon. The day he arrived in the city he informed her that “Lisbon at first sight—the streets and wall-gardens—seems more like Italy—Naples or Sicily—than anything I’ve seen in Spain. Flowers everywhere. Oranges and reds predominate, but as I look closer I expect I shall find every sort.” Later he found Lisbon “the most adorable place. The combination of blue skies and sea, the colours and the gardens, have gone straight to my heart.” Although the embassy where he had a suite was sunk “in a slum where dogs bark and cocks crow almost all night,” he dined regularly with the ambassador in a “life of luxury”: “We breakfast on the terrace in an embrace of flowers, the orange juice is the best in the world. A superb chef sends exquisite lunches and dinners to be eaten with the finest silver and linen under the gaze of George V and Queen Mary.”

  The countryside beyond Lisbon, as seen on weekend drives and long walks, was as engaging as the city. “Fields of maize and vineyards and patches of pine trees,” as Eccles described the scene. “The houses white with browny-red tiles… . Any man, after a hard life, would be glad to come to rest in such a place.” Accounts of his economic work, on the other hand, came with an emotional roller coaster of success and failure. In October 1940 he wrote:

  I am disappointed here. The relations we established with the Portuguese Government in May-July were really good. Now they are quibbling and crotchety. It’s a one-man show and that man [Salazar] is so complex and gifted that he takes handling. Well, there we are, after three months of air battles [with the Luftwaffe over England] he doesn’t seem (I haven’t seen him, this is what I gather) to believe in us as much as he did in July.

  But abruptly Eccles turned from his troubles with Salazar to the consolations of living and working in Lisbon: “The harbor reflects the blue of heaven, there go half a hundred ships, with or without navicerts, who cares, they look so quiet and confident riding on the Tagus. I love Lisbon, but hate to think of the chances we miss here.”

  Late in November 1941, believing his efforts in Lisbon finished, Eccles returned to London and a new post within MEW. But with the new year and America in the war, he had to return because “the wolfram negotiations in Portugal turned sour” and the British embassy in Lisbon thought he might soothe “Salazar’s bloody-mindedness.” America in the war meant that negotiations about Portuguese wolfram shipments were now a three-nation affair, and all the more difficult. Still, the diplomatic life was not all unrelenting labor. Eccles acknowledged to his wife that “if we work late at night in Lisbon it is certainly not wolfram that engages our attention,” and went on to disclose “here [the Lisbon embassy] the most frightful scandals. Everyone sleeping with everyone else and being catty about the others. What a nuisance sex is! Why can’t we mind less? I mind very much, but I also see the point of celibacy.” To which his wife deftly responded: “Wolfram by day and fornication by night—your colleagues must eclipse in gallantry all other competitors in Dr Salazar’s raffish capital.”

  While wolfram negotiations remained problematic for Eccles, some trade deals went smoothly in that they involved disputes only over price. “I am up to my neck in buying 750,000 cases (100 tins each) of sardines,” he noted. “What a job it is as the [British] Ministry of Food only want to pay £3 a case against the ruling intra-Blockade price of £6 upwards.” Eccles also found himself queried for advice when Portugal began thinking of food rationing. He asked the Ministry of Food to supply literature on its program in England, then realized Portugal could not follow the system since so many of its citizens were unable to read and write. One day a boy had mistakenly brought to his flat a parcel addressed to someone living above him. “Don’t you read?” Eccles asked him. “Not every day,” the boy replied, without a trace of humor.

  *

  Thr
oughout the war Britain enjoyed a significant advantage in securing Portugal’s wolfram since British-owned companies controlled the most productive Portuguese mines and had long practice in extracting and exporting the ore. Germany owned or controlled mines as well but had to buy from Portuguese or other producers to meet increasing annual requirements as the war went on. A further and equally significant British advantage was that Portugal allowed its oldest ally to buy on credit while Germany paid with Portuguese escudos. By war’s end the British debt for wolfram and other Portuguese products caused the two countries to reverse their historic financial positions, with Portugal now the creditor nation.

  Germany’s need for cash payment was eased by complex money arrangements with Portuguese banks whereby German and Swiss currency was exchanged in Lisbon for escudos. Germany also exchanged monetary gold for escudos, and there was some payment in the form of imported German steel, fertilizer, and military equipment. A 1945 study by the American embassy in Lisbon found that Portuguese companies and government ministries also advanced escudos to Germany to facilitate purchases. Perhaps as a last resort to gain local currency for buying wolfram, the Germans offered for sale in Portugal and Spain a half-million bottles of high-quality French champagne and some twenty tons of pâté de foie gras.

  Britain in 1942 had intervened in the scramble for wolfram in Spain and Portugal by denying it to Germany through preemptive buying—purchasing more than needed and outbidding on price—through its MEW-formed United Kingdom Commercial Corporation. America joined in the fray through its wartime economic arm, the United States Commercial Company. Combined Anglo-American buying caused the price of ore to skyrocket. Portuguese wolfram going for about a $1,000 a ton in 1941 reached $6,000 a ton the following year, which included a steep $1,200 government export tax. By 1943 prices had soared to 775 percent above prewar rates, lifting the wolfram business to a $100 milliona-year industry. Preemptive buying went on for other Portuguese products imported by Germany—sardines especially, and one winter the British scored a coup by snapping up nearly every sheepskin in Portugal to frustrate the Wehrmacht’s need for them in the Russian campaign—but wolfram remained the primary focus, and in the mining areas escalating demand created fevered conditions.