Within forty-eight hours, Bibi reported that his “friends” had agreed to pay her one hundred pounds a month “to start with, and extra sums for good information.” The money would be paid through Swiss and Portuguese accounts, disguised as alimony payments from her ex-husband. Her code name would be “Dorette.” She would communicate using secret ink, he said, a “marvellous trick” by which she could write to them without ever being discovered. Letters should be sent either to Chauvel at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo or to a cover address in Lisbon. “We just want facts, not opinions or reactions.”
Elvira interrupted him.
“This is already quite different to the ‘little business’ we were originally meant to do together.”
“This is infinitely more interesting, and if you are successful, it represents a life job.” Ten days later, an excited Bleil, already quite drunk, met Elvira in a Cannes park shortly before noon. “He looked around nervously and asked me if I was sure I wasn’t being followed.” Then he reached into his pocket and handed her a small bottle of colorless liquid. “The Germans are the greatest chemists in the world and this is their newest and best invention.” Elvira did not say that she already had a bottle of British secret ink in her handbag. They repaired to the empty lounge of the Hôtel Majestic, where Bleil ordered champagne.
“I always act on intuition,” Bleil said. “And I feel I can just trust you. If I am wrong, it will ruin my whole career.”
Elvira felt a stab of remorse. Bibi might be a sozzled Nazi spy, but in character he was a child and seemed hopelessly out of his depth. “I felt rather sorry for him, and frankly almost wished I had kept out of all this, but bucked myself up by thinking that since you start doing a job you must do it fully and shut all softness away.”
Bleil’s hands were trembling. He reached for his hip flask. “You must never breathe a word of this to any living soul,” he said, and swigged.
Elvira merely remarked: “I have no desire to spend the rest of the war in prison.”
Lily Sergeyev was being driven mad by the waiting. She had volunteered to spy for Germany, but Germany was in no hurry whatsoever to take up the offer. Even her terrier-poodle, Babs, seemed to be feeling the strain. For almost a year she had kicked her heels in Paris while Major Emile Kliemann, nominally her Abwehr case officer, arranged meetings that he failed to turn up for on time. When he did appear, he enthusiastically discussed the missions Lily might perform for the Third Reich and then did nothing at all. Plans to send her as a spy to Syria, Australia, and Dakar all came to nothing. Kliemann was far more interested in exploring the pleasures of Paris and discussing his love life. He remained besotted with Yvonne Delidaise, “a nice girl but without much principle” in Lily’s opinion. Yvonne had long, fair hair, blue eyes, and a turned-up nose and dressed in frills, which Kliemann liked to buy her. In her diary, Lily described Yvonne as “pretty but rather fat in build and [with] very broad hips.” She was, however, twenty-six years old, and Kliemann, nearing fifty, was infatuated. He played her the violin until he wept. One night he told Lily that he had decided to divorce his wife and marry Yvonne but had not yet gotten around to telling his wife or Yvonne.
Kliemann paid Lily a retainer of three thousand francs a month. She was taught Morse code by Richard Delidaise, Yvonne’s brother, a barman at Le Bourget Airport and a keen Nazi collaborator who had qualified as a wireless instructor before the war. Once she had mastered the rudiments of Morse, he revealed to her the mysteries of coding. Next, in an apartment near the Opéra, she was introduced to two bald men who “looked a little like birds of prey.” They taught her how to make secret ink by melting a special, unidentified substance, dipping a toothpick in it, and then writing on “ordinary writing paper that has been rubbed all over with dry cotton wool in order to raise the fibres very slightly.”
Lily, however, felt no closer to being sent on a spying mission than she had been when she first met Kliemann, and her patience was fraying fast. Unpredictable and ambitious, she had complicated motives. She would later claim she had been driven by the purest patriotism and always intended to switch sides as soon as possible. But she was also motivated by adventure and the belief that she was destined to play the leading lady in her own drama. She had become fond of genial, romantic, inefficient Kliemann but found him infuriating. Lily was not a patient woman. To make matters worse, she was suffering from painful kidney stones. “This has been dragging on so long, the war will be over before I have had time to do anything,” she complained to her diary.
Finally, after Kliemann failed to turn up for yet another meeting, Lily Sergeyev threw an almighty tantrum. Yvonne Delidaise found herself on the receiving end. “I am sick of it,” Lily ranted. “I don’t like to be made a fool of. It is always the same: he is not there, or he’s just left, or he’s in a conference. Nothing has been done for over a year. So let’s call it a day.” Then she slammed down the telephone.
When Kliemann turned up the next day and tried to pacify her, she tore a strip off him. “You shall not continue to treat me as if I was an old boot. I am not going to listen to you. I’m fed up, and you can look for someone else.”
Perhaps it was this histrionic performance that jolted Kliemann into action. More likely the major realized that unless he actually demonstrated some sort of activity to his bosses, his lotus life in Paris might be in jeopardy. But whatever the reason, the sluggish German espionage machine cranked into life.
Kliemann arranged for them to rendezvous and then, to Lily’s astonishment, kept to the arrangement. “It is the first time the Major has ever arrived on time for an appointment,” she wrote. He was suddenly a paragon of crisp efficiency. He had orders from Berlin: Lily was to make her way to Britain via Madrid, posing as a refugee keen to “serve the Allied cause by any means in your power.” She would use the code name “Solange,” while Kliemann would sign his messages “Octave.” She would be met in Madrid by one of the local Abwehr agents: “He could recognise you by your little dog, as you insist on taking Babs with you.” Kliemann would join her in Madrid in a few weeks’ time and bring her a wireless transmitter hidden inside a gramophone player. He ended with a pompous exhortation: “I have confidence in your success. You must not doubt. You MUST succeed.”
As the train pulled out from Gare d’Austerlitz, Lily—Agent Solange—wrote in her diary: “I wave a handkerchief at Mummy standing on the platform. Babs sniffs with satisfaction. I pull up the window, make a place for Babs. I’m leaving France, to try to help those who want to set her free.”
5. The Club
In the MI5 offices on St James’s Street, John Masterman was thinking, as usual, about spies and cricket. The Double Cross team was shaping up into a decent squad, he reflected, with new contenders appearing all the time. Some of the new arrivals were naturals, eager to play, and signed up almost immediately; others were untalented or uncooperative and were dealt with accordingly.
Josef Jakobs, a forty-three-year-old German dentist, was found in a Cambridgeshire field in early February with a broken ankle. Unable to move, he had fired his revolver to attract attention. After Jakobs’s interrogation at Camp 020, Tin-eye Stephens briskly concluded that Jakobs was a “scrofulous Nazi” and “manifestly unemployable as a double agent,” since he showed no inclination to collaborate. He was tried and sentenced to death by firing squad. “He died at the Tower of London,” wrote Tin-eye, “a brave man. His last words directed the firing squad to shoot straight.”
Much more promising were two young Norwegians, John Moe and Tör Glad, who had been dropped off the Scottish coast by German seaplane and then rowed to the rocky shoreline of Banffshire in a rubber dinghy loaded down with sabotage equipment, a wireless, and two bicycles. They immediately turned themselves in to the astonished Scottish police. Their story was corroborated by Bletchley’s Most Secret Sources, and they were duly enrolled into the Double Cross system with the code names “Mutt” and “Jeff,” after the popular American comic strip about two misma
tched and somewhat dim-witted gamblers. The names were unfair, as Mutt and Jeff would develop into unflashy but solid middle-order all-rounders.
Danish fascist Wulf Schmidt, alias Agent Tate, was also proving a useful player, though he was not allowed to operate his own transmitter, owing to lingering doubts that his “newfound loyalty to this country would survive any real strain.” But the chicken feed Tate was sending to Germany appeared to be going down well, and in time he would become, in Masterman’s words, “a pearl among agents,” setting the record for the longest continuous radio contact with Germany.
By far the most talented of the early recruits was Dusko Popov—Agent Skoot—the libidinous Serb playboy, who was proving not only good at the game but slightly too good to be true. First one side, and then the other, trusted him and then began to wonder whether it should. The first to raise serious doubts was William (Billy) Luke, the MI5 case officer assigned to handle him. An industrialist from Glasgow who owned a linen thread company, Luke was not unlike Popov in character, with a roving eye and a taste for the high life—which was exactly why Tar Robertson had chosen him for the job. He could match Popov drink for drink and almost girl for girl. But Billy Luke was worried: “I cannot help regarding him with a good deal of suspicion. I just have the general feeling that he may be a most accomplished liar.” Had Popov lied to MI5? Might he be a plant?
After a month in Lisbon, Popov flew back to London, where he was subjected to a second interrogation even more penetrating than the first. Popov told Robertson and Luke that he had been warmly welcomed at Lisbon’s Portela Airport by von Karsthoff himself. Back at the Villa Toki-Ana, he had recited his rehearsed story in detail, describing the meeting with Ewen Montagu and the snippets of information he had supposedly gleaned. Von Karsthoff had then flown to Paris to report to his Abwehr superiors and returned with the verdict that although they were “not very impressed and thought the answers too general,” they felt Popov would make an excellent agent. There was no hint of suspicion. Indeed, they seemed to have “blind confidence” in “Agent Ivan” and wanted him dispatched back to England to gather more intelligence as soon as possible. Von Karsthoff had issued Popov fresh secret ink and a lengthy new questionnaire covering a vast array of subjects, including morale, military matters, and politics. “You’ll soon want to know what Churchill had for dinner,” Popov remarked.
The Abwehr “expected much from his second visit,” von Karsthoff observed. Great rewards would be his if Popov worked hard and improved the quality of his information. Von Karsthoff hinted at a possible mission to the United States. Popov had happily spent the remaining weeks in Lisbon, wining and dining at von Karsthoff’s expense, establishing business contacts, and conducting an affair with a divorced French marquise. Popov was certain: the trip to Lisbon had been a resounding success.
The amusements laid on for Popov the previous Christmas had given him a taste of London’s wartime high life, and he was a little disappointed to find he was now expected to make his own entertainment. “London is rather a dull place,” he wrote to Johnny Jebsen in secret ink. “Most of the nice girls have gone to the country and whisky is 16 shillings a bottle. That would make you very unhappy.” Popov did not demand to be paid—the Germans were already rewarding him handsomely—but as MI5 would soon discover, he did expect to be provided with what he considered the necessities of life: namely, wine, women, and song. Especially women. Tar Robertson was a man of the world, but even he was mildly taken aback when Popov “hinted that a little high-class feminine society would be most acceptable.” Robertson had never been asked to act as a procurer before, but he knew where to find an expert. Sergeant Lewis of the Metropolitan Police Vice Squad was asked for “suggestions as to possible female acquaintances who might be used as agents.” MI5 was not looking for a prostitute, Tar insisted, but “a woman purely and simply to entertain Skoot and keep him out of mischief, at the same time to keep us informed of the various curious associations which he is making in this country.” Lewis said he had a candidate in mind.
Popov’s MI5 file contains a number of amorous notes sent to Popov from “Gwennie,” who was married to “Charles” and worked, during daylight hours, for the Red Cross. (A typical example reads: “I won’t be able to see you tomorrow after all as Charles is unexpectedly coming to London!! He won’t be here for long so I’ll ring you as soon as I can. I’m so sorry as I was ready for you! Love Gwennie.”) She was almost certainly an MI5 plant; Popov almost certainly knew it, and he certainly did not mind. Gwennie’s full name has been carefully expunged from the record. She remains one more unsung heroine, performing sterling, though unconventional, wartime service for her country.
Von Karsthoff’s new questionnaire indicated significant German interest in Scotland’s coastal defenses, and so it was decided that Billy Luke would take Popov on a tour of his homeland: that way Popov could accurately describe to von Karsthoff what he had seen, while being steered away from things he should not see. It would also be an opportunity for Luke to test Popov’s honesty and show him a good time. Just how good a time Popov was having could be measured by the color of his face. “Complexion depends on previous night’s activity,” Tar Robertson noted dryly. “If the night has been a good one, from his point of view, the complexion is rather white and blotchy.”
Popov and Luke’s tour of the north turned into an extended pub crawl, the days spent among “typical Scottish scenery” and the nights “filled with jovial entertainment in congenial company.” They visited Loch Lomond and Gare Loch, stopping for regular refreshments, and then headed to Edinburgh. Popov later recalled: “There was a law that existed at that time that you couldn’t have a drink unless you had travelled five miles and so my case officer, being a true Scotsman, interpreted this as meaning that you had to stop and have a drink every five miles.” In Edinburgh, they stayed at the Central Hotel, drank at the American Bar and the Piccadilly Club, and dined at the Malmaison and the Mirabel. Popov was plainly not spying for Germany, Luke reported, since “he made no effort to obtain information of any kind, nor did he ask any questions which could be connected with espionage.” But in the course of their evening pleasures, Popov did drop one particularly interesting hint about his friend Johnny Jebsen: “He did not think it would be difficult to persuade Jebsen that he is fighting on the wrong side. Jebsen is at heart pro-British.” Popov even suggested he might be able to recruit for MI5 the man who had recruited him to German intelligence, “especially if he could meet him in Madrid, provide him with vivacious and beautiful feminine society and lose money to him at poker.” Here was a tempting prize: a member of the Abwehr who might be lured into the Double Cross pack. “It may be desirable to enlarge on this theme,” wrote Luke.
After three days of carousing and sightseeing, Luke returned to London, white and blotchy, impressed by Popov’s stamina, and fully reassured that he was not, after all, playing a triple game. “He is quite definitely working for us and not the Germans,” wrote Luke. “Clever, versatile and firm of purpose, he has personality and charm and would feel at home in society circles in any European or American capital, being much the usual type of international playboy. He misses no opportunity of disparaging the Germans and the Nazi leaders and has a great hatred of Goebbels, a whole-hearted admiration and respect for the English and is convinced that Great Britain will win the war.” His prodigious womanizing might eventually be a problem, Luke predicted: “He is fond of the society of attractive women, who are apparently plentiful in Dubrovnik, where it seems that virtue is at a discount.” His amorous exploits would provide material for Maurice Dekobra—the French erotic novelist. But Luke was now certain that Popov was dependable and ready to risk his life again by returning to Lisbon: “Skoot is an ingenious, cheerful and amusing companion of whose sincerity and loyalty I, personally, am satisfied.” Unknown to Popov, his older brother Ivo, a doctor in Belgrade, had also approached MI6 with an offer to spy against the Germans: the Popov family was firmly on side.
/> Reassured, Tar set about “building up” Popov with some first-class chicken feed, verifiable but harmless answers to his questionnaire that would convince his Abwehr handler that he was, indeed, the efficient and energetic spy he seemed to be. Von Karsthoff had suggested that Popov should recruit some subagents, should he find anyone suitable. MI5 obliged: the first was Dickie Metcalfe, a former army intelligence officer. To von Karsthoff, Metcalfe would be portrayed as a disgruntled, broken-down gambler working for an arms dealer, who had been cashiered for passing fake checks and was prepared to spy on his former colleagues because “he hates them all.” Since Metcalfe was portly he was given the code name “Balloon.” A second subagent was lined up in the more svelte form of Friedl Gaertner, a thirty-four-year-old Austrian cabaret singer, well connected in London society, who had already done work for MI5. Her father had been a member of the Nazi Party, so it was hoped that, when the Germans came to check up on her, she would be considered reliable. Gaertner was a “link with people of a high state of society in this country” and therefore “in a position to get good information from indiscretions of well-placed friends in government and diplomatic circles.” She was given the code name “Gelatine” because the word almost rhymes with “jolly little thing,” which is how the men of B1A saw her. Popov also saw her that way. Inevitably, they became lovers.
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