Double Cross

by Ben MacIntyre

  Now that he was no longer considered likely to “scoot,” Popov was also awarded a new code name more fitting to his status as the most promising of double agents. He was rechristened “Tricycle.” This may have been, in part, a reference to Popov’s insatiable appetites and his reputed but probably apocryphal taste for three-in-a-bed sex. It also recognized that the Tricycle network now consisted of one big wheel—Popov—supported by two smaller ones, Agents Balloon and Gelatine.

  While Robertson was playing word games with his agent’s nom de guerre, Popov had some fun with Tar’s nickname. He had asked MI5 for help in setting up his own import-export business, which would provide good cover as well as a genuine income. “They propose to buy and sell anything in any market,” wrote Tar, who arranged for Popov to occupy a lair of offices in Imperial House, 80 Regent Street. MI5 even produced an attractive part-time secretary to handle Popov’s correspondence and mind the business. In a tip of the hat to his spymaster, Popov named the new company “Tarlair Ltd.”

  As he prepared to head back to Portugal once again, Popov was a little anxious that “the answers we had given him to his questionnaire were lacking in detail and would jeopardise his supposed position as a good spy.” He was also suffering “slight moral scruples about the part he was playing,” simultaneously befriending and betraying von Karsthoff. Masterman offered a typically donnish and convoluted reassurance: “The strictest moral censor, having regard to his motives, would not cavil his conduct.” Popov, whose English was not quite Oxbridge standard, surely had not a clue what he was saying. Luke spoke a simpler language, telling him “that the work he had undertaken was extremely valuable to this country.” That conversation seemed to reassure Popov, for he penned a farewell letter to his case officer that revealed an unexpected depth of purpose in this apparently pleasure-seeking young man. “It would be difficult for me to define the feeling I experience on leaving your brave country. I am leaving with a heart filled with hope. You, my dear Luke, are the classical example of English calm, [a] manifestation of the most powerful English weapon, ‘to remain human.’ It is this that will demolish Hitler’s machine.”

  Billy Luke

  On the day of Popov’s departure, Luke took him to lunch at the Savoy and found him cheery but “somewhat tired,” pale, and blotchy. He had spent what he called “an expensive evening” the night before, after an exhausting week featuring Friedl, Gwennie, the 400 Club, Coconut Grove, and dinners at the Hungaria. Popov requested “a small automatic revolver in case of need” and seemed entirely unfazed when Luke explained that this might be tricky and possibly unwise. Popov was stepping back into extreme danger, and they both knew it: “We could do nothing to help him if things went wrong.” Agent Tricycle sauntered off with “a slightly rolling gait, the very reverse of military,” to catch the Lisbon plane, leaving MI5 to pay his stupendous hotel bill.

  Luke and Popov were birds of a feather, and Tar observed the bond growing between them with satisfaction. In the shifting, shadowy world of Double Cross, the relationship between agent and handler was fundamental: “A case officer should be personally responsible for each agent, with his hands, as it were, on the pulse of the patient from morning until night, and with an eye on every twist and turn of the patient’s mind.” David Petrie, the chief of MI5, had ordered that B Section should “command the best talent and experience that the service possesses,” but it was not easy to find people equipped to act as friend, psychologist, and patient nursemaid to a group of individuals who were, almost by definition, erratic, frequently infuriating, and quite possibly disloyal.

  Section B1A was expanding, and what had started as an experiment was fast becoming a major enterprise. “The running and control of double agents,” wrote Masterman, “is a very long, laborious and infinitely complicated task. A truly formidable work of coordination, preparation and crucial analysis.” Each double agent required “the whole-time service of a case officer to control and organise him, a wireless officer to monitor and perhaps submit his messages, at least two guards, possibly an officer with a car to collect his information and probably a housekeeper to look after and feed the whole party.” The MI5 offices on St James’s Street were becoming distinctly crowded. Tar Robertson sat in the first office, while the adjoining room was shared by Masterman and John Marriott, Tar’s chief assistant and deputy. A solicitor in civilian life, Marriott was “the collector of facts,” a stickler for rules and economies; the dry, nitpicking counterpoint to Tar’s extravagance and ebullience who peered at the world suspiciously through bottle-top spectacles. The case officers, already five in number, sat together in the largest office, along with two filing clerks and another officer responsible for disseminating intelligence arising from the cases.

  The officers, each handpicked by Robertson, were a distinctly unorthodox crew: in addition to Billy Luke, their number included Cyril Mills, a part-time circus impresario; Hugh Astor, the son of Times owner Lord Astor; and two very different lawyers, Ian Wilson, methodical and withdrawn, and Christopher Harmer, witty, intuitive, and glintingly clever. As shown by the effort that went into choosing code names, the agent runners delighted in wordplay, and the atmosphere at Number 58 was relaxed and frequently hilarious. They were an extraordinarily youthful team: Tar was just thirty when war began, and Hugh Astor was just twenty-three when he joined the team. Harmer, a year younger than Tar, described B1A as a group of “overgrown schoolboys playing games of derring-do absorbed from reading schoolboy books and adventure stories.” There was also one “schoolgirl,” although it would have taken a brave man to describe her as such.

  Gisela Ashley, who went by the spy name of “Susan Barton,” was at this time the only woman in the section and a most formidable intelligence operative. German-born and vigorously anti-Nazi, Gisela had left Germany in the 1920s, appalled by the rise of German fascism. She married a British man and then divorced him when he turned out to be homosexual, retained her British citizenship, joined MI5, and established a lifelong partnership with another intelligence officer, Gilbert Lennox, with whom she wrote a number of successful stage plays. “Mrs. Barton” had been a “casual agent” for some years before the war, reporting on the German community in Britain. Her play Third Party Risk opened at St Martin’s Theatre in 1939, shortly after she moved to The Hague under diplomatic cover to spy on the Germans. There the secretary of the German naval attaché took a shine to her, and Gisela appeared to be on the point of penetrating the German legation when disaster struck. In November 1939, two MI6 agents were lured to a rendezvous at Venlo on the Dutch border, in the belief that they were meeting an anti-Nazi officer, and kidnapped. One of them, astonishingly, was carrying in his pocket a list of British agents, including, it was feared, Gisela Ashley. She was hurriedly recalled and assigned to Robertson’s section. Gisela’s brother was by now a U-boat captain, but Mrs. Barton’s loyalty was never in doubt. With her “real understanding of German and Nazi mentality,” she played a vital role in B1A, and as the lone woman in a unit composed of men, she offered an important corrective to some of the more extreme chauvinism around her. Masterman barely noticed women; Marriott found the opposite sex tiresome and unpredictable; Wilson refused to allow women solicitors in his law firm. But they could not ignore Gisela Ashley. The vivacious Mrs. Barton, the secretary who opened his mail and ran the Tarlair office, was Gisela Ashley, special agent, carefully placed at Popov’s elbow to keep an eye on him.

  Christopher Harmer would later remark: “Thank God for Tar, I say, he gave us all our heads and encouraged us and, if we were doing something stupid, he pulled us up by tact and persuasion rather than by direction.” Tar Robertson was a “born leader,” according to Masterman, “gifted with independent judgement,” but he was also a firm believer in mixing business with pleasure. Indeed, he saw no distinction between the two and was a devotee of the three-hour lunch. Rank counted for little: Robertson was a major and would end the war as a lieutenant colonel, but most had no military rank at all. Yet b
eneath the public-school banter, the puns and badinage, ran deep veins of anxiety in a community cauterized by secrecy and suffused with uncertainty. Every case officer was acutely aware that a single slip could bring the entire project crashing down, with catastrophic consequences. Most Secret Sources showed that the Germans were constantly assessing and reassessing their agents, trusting them and doubting them, and those judgments, in turn, had to be evaluated and reevaluated by Section B1A, prompting Tar to remark: “In this game one never knew quite how things would appear to the opposition, although one did one’s best to guess.”

  The Germans, he reasoned, must assume that some of their agents had been intercepted and would surely suspect that at least some of these were working as double agents. Perhaps that suspicion could be used to advantage: if a double agent was run “in an obviously bogus fashion,” the Germans might assume general incompetence on the part of the British and therefore overlook the real double agents. Alphonse Timmerman, a Belgian ship’s steward, was arrested as a spy in early 1941 but declined to cooperate. While Timmerman (code-named “Scruffy”) languished in prison, B1A began sending secret-ink letters in his name to his German handler. These contained a number of glaring errors to indicate that Timmerman was being controlled. It was a brilliant plan, typical of the lateral thinking beloved of the Double Cross team, and it failed utterly. The Germans never spotted the deliberate mistakes and “seemed unable to realise that Scruffy was obviously controlled.” This unshakeable faith in their spy was confirmed by Most Secret Sources. The Scruffy case was terminated. This was a disappointment for B1A, but far more so for Alphonse Timmerman, who was executed. The Abwehr even failed to spot his death notice in the Times. Slowly it began to dawn on Tar Robertson that the Abwehr really might be as gullible as it seemed. Yet Tar remained convinced that other spies must be at large in Britain, perhaps even working within MI5. And he was right.

  In February 1941, Guy Liddell, the head of B Section, took on a new personal assistant. He was tall, thin, good-looking, and homosexual; a brilliant art historian and a linguist with all the right social connections. His name was Anthony Blunt, and he was a Soviet spy. Four years earlier, Blunt, a secret and dedicated communist, had been recruited into the NKVD (later the KGB) by Dr. Arnold Deutsch, alias Otto, the cultured espionage talent spotter responsible for forging the so-called Cambridge spy ring. At the urging of his Soviet handlers, Blunt had applied to join the intelligence services, and by 1941 he was at the very heart of Britain’s secret war machinery. Liddell had little need of an assistant, “since he always does all the work again himself,” and Blunt soon moved on to other work within the section. He had a finger in many of the most secret pies, working on German counterespionage, running B Section’s surveillance unit, and intercepting the diplomatic bags of neutral countries. Languid, erudite, and whimsical, he cut a distinctive figure in the corridors of the St James’s building: he quoted Winnie-the-Pooh sipping on a bottle of cod liver oil and malt and remarking, “That’s what Tiggers like for breakfast,” and liked to play leapfrog in the canteen.

  Despite his charm, Blunt was not universally liked, although much of the animus was colored by hindsight. “He was a very nice and civilised man,” recalled Dick White, Liddell’s deputy, “and he betrayed us all.” Tar Robertson disliked Blunt intensely; his attitude sprang not from any doubts about his loyalty but from a homophobia common to the time. “I couldn’t stick the man. One knew that he was queer and before the war one would not have countenanced letting him anywhere near the office.” Tar’s distaste for Blunt’s homosexuality did not stop him from discussing the most secret aspects of his work with him. In the public-school parlance of the time, a gay man was said to be “batting for the other side”; but Blunt was batting for the other side in a way that no one inside MI5 could possibly have imagined, and making a remarkable score.

  Blunt first began passing secret information to his Soviet handler, Anatoli Gorsky, in January 1941, when the USSR and Germany were linked under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: passing military information to a power in alliance with Britain’s enemy was an act of treason. Blunt would continue to feed secrets to Moscow, in vast volume, for the rest of the war. The Soviets gave him the code name “Tony,” the only example of a wartime code name that was actually an agent’s real name—either a clever double bluff or amazingly stupid. Blunt met his handler once a week to hand over documents, both originals and copies. He memorized vast amounts of material, consulted the MI5 archive to answer Moscow’s special requests, and spent his lunch hour rummaging through the desks of colleagues. He passed on personal files, operational information, intelligence summaries, Bletchley Park intercepts, diplomatic wireless traffic, and details of MI5 tradecraft, including bugs, surveillance, and interrogation techniques. Seldom has an intelligence organization been so comprehensively penetrated. “Tony is a thorough, conscientious, efficient agent,” his Russian handler reported to Moscow. “He tries to fulfil all of our tasks in time and as conscientiously as possible.” Britain and the Soviet Union would become allies against Hitler, but Blunt’s torrential leakage of information to Moscow still represented the single gravest threat to the Double Cross operation. If Soviet intelligence was penetrated by the Germans, then the information he was passing to Moscow would end up in Berlin. Over the next four years, Blunt would hand the Soviets a staggering total of 1,771 documents.

  But not for an instant did the Double Cross team suspect the double agent in their midst.

  6. Garbo Takes the Stage

  In the winter of 1941, the Bletchley Park team decoding Abwehr wireless traffic between Madrid and Berlin made a most alarming discovery. Tar Robertson’s fears, it seemed, were justified: the Germans did indeed have an agent active in Britain, writing secret missives to a controller in Madrid. His code name was Agent Arabel. He seemed to be well informed, energetic, and resourceful and had recruited at least two subagents. Most Secret Sources revealed that Berlin was delighted with his work.

  The implications were potentially catastrophic. This mysterious Arabel was in a position to contradict information supplied by the Double Cross agents, in which case “the duplicity of all MI5’s double agents might be revealed.” An uncontrolled agent, particularly one as good as this, could not only unravel the network in Britain but expose the agents, most notably Popov, to mortal danger. “Who was this Arabel and how had he got into the country? Where had he sprung from? Where was he getting all this information from?”

  The task of analyzing intercepted traffic for counterespionage purposes fell to the B1B section of MI5, known as Special Research and headed by Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart, a young Jewish lawyer who would go on to become a professor of jurisprudence at Oxford. The more H. L. A. Hart and his team pored over the Arabel traffic, the stranger it appeared. His fabulously drawn-out messages appeared to be written by someone suffering from chronic verbal incontinence. But more than that, the information supplied by Arabel was frequently, and sometimes hilariously, wrong.

  Arabel reported, for example, that the people of Liverpool indulged in “drunken orgies and slack morals at amusement centres.” He appeared to believe that the summer heat was so intense in London that the diplomatic corps decamped en masse to Brighton for the summer months. He reported major naval maneuvers on Lake Windermere (which is landlocked) involving an American-made amphibious tank (which had not been invented). He provided details of unreal army regiments and even provoked the enemy into attempting to intercept a convoy, sailing from Malta, that did not exist. Arabel was submitting meticulous monthly expenses to Berlin, but in a most curious form. He claimed, for example, to have visited Glasgow by train, at a cost of “87 shillings and 10 pence” (this should have been rendered as “£4 7s. 10d.”). Britain’s predecimal currency was confusing, but not so baffling that someone living in the country would not have grasped it after nine months. Such errors escaped the notice of the Abwehr, but the “very wild messages” being relayed through Madrid presented MI5 with a
peculiar riddle: this rogue spy was eccentric and innumerate, or a fraud, or mad.

  In Lisbon, former chicken farmer Juan Pujol, invulnerable to rejection, had continued to pester the British to recruit him. Despite producing evidence to show he was now in the employ of the Germans, he was repeatedly turned down. His wife, Aracelli, his accomplice from the start, took up the cause and approached the American naval attaché in Lisbon, who contacted his opposite number in the British embassy, who duly (but very slowly) sent a report to London. Finally, MI6 twigged that the German agent sending the bogus messages must be Juan Pujol García, the Spaniard who had repeatedly approached them in Lisbon. In the ancient British tradition of pointless interdepartmental rivalry, MI6 (responsible for intelligence overseas) still did not inform MI5 (responsible for counterespionage in the UK) of Pujol’s existence. Only a chance conversation between Tar Robertson and an MI6 officer from Lisbon alerted B1A to what was going on. Even then, MI6 was unwilling to allow Pujol to join the Double Cross team. “I do not see why I should get agents and have them pinched by you” was, according to Guy Liddell, the attitude taken by MI6’s head of counterintelligence. “The whole thing is so narrow and petty that it really makes me quite furious,” wrote Liddell.

  A “walk-in,” in spy jargon, is an informant or agent who, without prompting, contacts an intelligence organization with an offer of information. Pujol had walked in to the British time after time and then, when told he was not wanted, walked out again. Forced to rely on secondary sources and a first-rate imagination, he was in constant danger of exposure. His guidebook, for example, compared Brighton to the Spanish town of San Sebastián. Since diplomats escaped the summer heat of Madrid by moving to San Sebastián, Pujol logically, and wrongly, assumed that the same must be true of Brighton. It was, MI5 observed, “a miracle that he had survived so long.”