Harmer spent days interrogating Czerniawski. The resulting report is a masterpiece of psychology, a remarkable insight into the mind of a spy. Czerniawski was telling the truth, Harmer concluded, but not the whole truth, and only those parts of the truth that suited his purposes. He claimed the Abwehr had recruited him, whereas he had plainly volunteered to spy for it; he insisted he had been acting a part, but the Germans had successfully plied him with propaganda and stroked his vanity; he had come to Britain planning to see which way the winds of war were blowing, and only after assessing the situation had he decided to come clean.
“There are considerable doubts about his integrity,” wrote Harmer. “It seems possible that he might be embarking on some form of triple cross.” But Czerniawski was reliable in one important respect:
His loyalty is entirely to his own country, and every problem he sees is bound up with the destiny of the Polish people. He is of an intensely dramatic and egotistical nature. This may be due in some part to his size. It is necessary to avoid taking him at his own valuation. His character, sense of drama, and the feeling of self-importance which his intelligence work has given him—which makes him regard himself in some way as a sort of Joan of Arc of Poland—causes him to dramatise and overrate the part he has played.
Harmer tried to imagine what it must have been like for Czerniawski in Fresnes prison, “a loyal and fervent Pole in a weak state, physically and mentally,” and he reproduced the scene:
As his condition gets lower, so his credibility of propaganda and ideas of grandeur become greater. Their confidence in him grows, and when he suggests that he might also act as a spy for them, they take this suggestion seriously. He himself really thinks that there may be a possibility of fixing up an arrangement between Poland and Germany.
But on reaching Britain, Harmer surmised, Czerniawski realized that his German jailers had misrepresented the political situation.
He finds that so far from wanting collaboration, the Polish official circles here are determined to continue the fight against Germany. His health and strength and sense of judgment return, he realises that as a loyal and patriotic Pole, it is impossible for him to carry out his mission. With a dramatic gesture, therefore, he presents his book to his chief.
Czerniawski’s loyalties depended entirely on what he perceived to be Poland’s best interests. “I do not think he is a spy using this story as his cover,” wrote Harmer. “There is no evidence, nor any probability, that he has worked here to the detriment of Britain and for the benefit of her enemies.” He had already “rendered very great service to this country,” and, properly handled, he could do so again:
The Germans would have confidence in him given their hold on him. There is no reason why we should not open up his transmitter. With imagination, and with his very original mind, we might possibly confuse and deceive the Germans to a remarkable extent [but] a successful exploitation of the opportunities is dependent on his willing cooperation.
Yet again, some senior members of B1A were unconvinced. Marriott, the stickler for rules, pointed out that it had been agreed “we are never going to tolerate any person who has worked for our service agreeing in any circumstances to work for the Germans.” Masterman argued that “the Germans have really lost nothing by letting him go: for they have cleaned up the whole of his organisation, and the only thing left would have been the doubtful satisfaction of executing him.” It seemed possible that the Germans had sent Czerniawski to Britain as a plant, “knowing pretty well certainly that he would throw in his hand with us.” If so, they would know his messages were false from the outset. Were Bleicher and Oscar Reile simply using the Pole to try to find out what the British wanted the Germans to believe? “We are not yet at all convinced as to his bona fides,” Guy Liddell wrote in his diary.
The dispute over Czerniawski provoked a blazing row between Masterman, representing the cautious old guard, and Christopher Harmer, the young enthusiast keen to run the Polish spy. Masterman seemed “hell-bent on chopping him,” thought Harmer, and even “intrigued behind my back” to do so. The day before his wedding to his secretary, Peggy, Harmer wrote Masterman “one of the rudest letters I have ever sent.” They later made up. “I loved the old boy,” wrote Harmer. “I suppose he was only doing his job—of exercising a wise and mature restraint on the irresponsibilities of the hot-headed youngsters.” But the hothead stood his ground, insisting they should not “throw the case away.” Tar Robertson agreed. The Abwehr radio station in Paris had been trying for weeks to make wireless contact. It was decided that Czerniawski should begin sending radio messages back to his German controllers, but only on a temporary basis “under close supervision.” The Polish authorities, suspicious and resentful, convened a military court of inquiry, which issued a severe reprimand to Czerniawski and relegated him to a “non-job.”
Czerniawski was delighted with the way matters had turned out. “The NEW GAME is beginning,” he wrote to Harmer. “The Germans lost the old one. They must lose the new one as well. In my opinion it is a difficult game, but it might yield enormous advantages, especially during the decisive moments which are drawing nigh.” More puffed up than ever, he now set out on the third lap of his extraordinary espionage career, with a new mission and a new name. As a spy in occupied France he had adopted the code name “Walenty” (Valentine); as a spy for the Germans he had become “Hubert”; and now, as a double agent for the Double Cross team, he was renamed once again. Henceforth he would be Agent Brutus.
The classically educated Harmer came up with this nom de guerre. “Roman Czerniawski had been turned by the Germans, and then re-turned by us, so I thought ‘Et tu, Brute?’ ” Of course, he had carried out a very brave mission in Paris during the first year of occupation, so I thought of Brutus’s final speech from Julius Caesar which begins ‘He was the noblest Roman of them all.’ ” The words “Et tu, Brute?” are also, of course, the most famous denunciation of treachery in literature, the words of a man who has been stabbed in the back by a friend he trusted. Harmer was convinced that Roman Czerniawski, unlike Shakespeare’s famous Roman, would not betray him, but his playful choice of code name carried the unmistakable hint of anxiety.
Tommy Argyll “Tar” Robertson, the mastermind of Double Cross. (Private Collection)
Latchmere House, the top-secret interrogation center in southwest London, where captured spies were imprisoned, grilled, and “turned.” (Imperial War Museum [HU66759])
John Masterman, Oxford history don, cricketer, and the “elder statesman” of the Double Cross system. (The Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford)
Gisela Ashley, alias “Susan Barton,” German-born expert on Nazism and the most senior woman in B1A. (Private Collection)
Dusko Popov, “Agent Tricycle,” Serbian playboy, international businessman, and double agent. (Private Collection)
French film star Simone Simon, one of Popov’s many lovers. (Twentieth Century Fox/The Kobal Collection)
Maria Elera, Brazilian model: photograph from the MI5 files labeled wearily, “Popov’s latest girlfriend.” (Private Collection)
Popov with his first wife, Janine. (Private Collection)
Roman Czerniawski, “Agent Brutus”: Polish patriot, trained intelligence officer, and the most professional of the Double Cross spies. (Private Collection)
Captain Czerniawski (fourth from right) with his Polish regiment shortly before the fall of France in 1940. (Private Collection)
Colonel Oscar Reile, Czerniawski’s German case officer. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Hugo Bleicher, the Abwehr’s ruthless counterespionage officer in Paris. (Private Collection)
Monique Deschamps, “Agent Moustique” (Mosquito), the French Resistance agent who would later marry Roman Czerniawski. (Private Collection)
Mathilde Carré, “The Cat,” the Resistance agent who helped to build, and then destroy, Czerniawski’s network. (Private Collection)
Mathilde Carré outside the Montmartre
restaurant where she betrayed the Interallié intelligence network. (PA)
Elvira Concepción Josefina de la Fuente Chaudoir, “Agent Bronx,” seen here at the Hurlingham Club with MI5 case officer Billy Luke. (Private Collection)
Major Christopher Harmer, a lawyer in peacetime, case officer for Brutus, Bronx, Mutt, and Jeff. (Private Collection)
Hugh Astor, case officer for Brutus and Bronx. (The Times [London])
Helmut Bleil, the alcoholic German intelligence agent who recruited Elvira Chaudoir in the south of France. (Private Collection)
Juan Pujol García, “Agent Garbo,” and his wife, Aracelli, in Spain, c. 1940, during a rare moment of domestic harmony. (Private Collection)
Garbo in disguise, a man of “great ingenuity, and a passionate and quixotic zeal for his task.” (The National Archives)
Karl-Erich Kühlenthal of the Madrid Abwehr, Garbo’s gullible German case officer. (Private Collection)
Tomás Harris, the half-Spanish art dealer who helped Garbo to create a fictional network of twenty-seven subagents across Britain. (Private Collection)
Johnny Jebsen in Turkey in 1942. (Private Collection)
Johnny Jebsen, “Agent Artist.” (The National Archives)
Johnny Jebsen on the day of his marriage to actress Lore Petersen, to whom he was serially unfaithful but deeply loyal. (Private Collection)
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. (BArch, Bild 146-1979-013-43)
Hans Oster, Canaris’s deputy. A secret anti-Nazi plotter who recruited Jebsen to the Abwehr. (BArch, Bild 146-2004-0007)
Paul Fidrmuc, “Agent Ostro,” prized Abwehr agent and fraud. (Private Collection)
Anthony Blunt, MI5 officer, art expert, and Soviet mole. “He was a very nice and civilized man, and he betrayed us all.” (Private Collection)
Guy Liddell, the shy, cello-playing head of MI5’s counterintelligence B Branch. (Private Collection)
Code breakers at work at Bletchley Park, the secret code-breaking center in the Buckinghamshire countryside codenamed Camp X. Deciphered German wireless messages were circulated as MSS, “Most Secret Sources.” (Bletchley Park Trust/The Times [London])
With information from the code breakers, MI5 intercepted scores of enemy spies, such as John Moe and Tör Glad, double agents “Mutt” and “Jeff,” pictured before their departure from Norway in 1941. (The National Archives)
Lily Sergeyev’s French identity card issued in November 1941, soon after her recruitment by German intelligence. In Paris, she was trained in the use of wireless, secret inks, and coding. (The National Archives)
Lily Sergeyev, “Agent Treasure,” who brought “a rich dowry: the confidence of the Germans.” (The National Archives)
Babs, Lily’s beloved dog, a critical if unlikely player in the D-Day story. (The National Archives)
Mary Sherer, the only woman officer in the Double Cross team. (Private Collection)
Pigeons were used to pass messages, gather intelligence from behind the lines, and plant false information on the enemy. (Imperial War Museum [H_003054])
D-Day troops at Weymouth heading into battle: “It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.” (Getty Images)
9. The Flock
Agent Cyril, a potential new recruit to the Double Cross team, was not quite what MI5 had been expecting. Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir was, Harmer later recalled, “one of the most elegant women I had ever met.” She wore a cloche hat, and as she sat down she peeled off a pair of silk gloves, revealing “beautifully varnished nails.” For a moment, Christopher Harmer was at a loss for words. “She was really very striking.”
On her return from France, Elvira had been debriefed by MI6, which concluded her mission had been “carried out to the best of her ability” and then handed her on to Tar Robertson with the recommendation that she be deployed as a double agent.
Harmer’s task was to assess her usefulness. He introduced himself as “Mr. Palmer,” while John Masterman, who sat in on the interview, called himself “Masterson.” (Case officers used—and still use—pseudonyms as close as possible to their own names. That way, if someone happened to use their real name, the person who was not supposed to know it might assume he had misheard.) Over the next hour, Elvira told the story of her recruitment in Cannes by a German agent named “Bibi” and the deal to furnish political and military information for one hundred pounds a month. She “made a good impression,” thought Harmer.
Tar Robertson was cautious. “It is by no means clear that she has told us everything she knows.” Further investigation into her private life raised the possibility that she might be blackmailed over her “Lesbian tendencies.” (For some reason, the word “lesbian” is frequently capitalized in MI5 files: perhaps this was the result of a classical education, since the word derives from the name of the island of Lesbos, or perhaps the officers thought such an exotic species deserved special grammatical treatment.) She had been reprimanded before for indiscretion, and although “she would appear to have learned wisdom, that point will have to be taken into account in considering her employment as a double agent.” Her German recruiter was also an unknown quantity. Britain’s MI5 had by now amassed a great deal of information about German intelligence personnel. This data was entered onto punch cards and fed into a “Hollerith machine,” an electrical tabulating apparatus originally invented to process data for the U.S. census. Elvira’s detailed description of Helmut Bleil was run through the device but “disclosed no possible trace.” This anxious, amateur, and alcoholic spy seemed to be operating semi-independently. “We have not come across this man before.”
The most vigorous skeptic was Masterman, who did not want a woman on the team and pointed out that an indiscreet, cash-strapped “Lesbian” with a gambling habit represented a serious security risk. “We ought not to plunge into this case,” he wrote. “I cannot help feeling that the Germans would not have given Cyril so much secret ink etc. unless they had fairly good evidence of her attachment to them. So I am driven back to the fear that she may in fact have deceived SIS.” Elvira had made no secret of her interest in money. “She is a rather expensive woman,” noted Masterman. “Has she cost SIS a packet?”
Harmer won the day. “I think this woman is telling the truth,” he insisted. “Bleil regards her as a bona fide agent and has so represented her to his masters.” Her social contacts, as a “typical member of the cosmopolitan smart set,” would enable her to report all sorts of misleading political and social gossip from the gaming tables and salons of London. Elvira was asked to explain why she wanted to become a double agent; her answer was revealing: “She replied that she had no such desire at all, although she would do it if it was any use.” Whatever Masterman’s suspicions, she was not motivated solely by money. On October 28, 1942, Elvira was officially brought onto the Double Cross team. Harmer, now her case officer, “impressed on her the absolute need for secrecy.” She, like Garbo, would be provided with a cover job at the BBC and paid a monthly salary equal to the money she was receiving from the Germans. Under MI5 control, she should begin writing secret letters to Bleil at once. In case of difficulty she could contact “Mr. Palmer” at Grosvenor 3171. As a precaution, her letters would be intercepted and her telephone bugged.
All she now needed was a suitable new code name, something sophisticated, racy, and intoxicating, as befitted this beautifully manicured spy. “I chose the name of a rum-based cocktail,” Harmer later recalled. (The Bronx martini is usually made with gin, but the barman at the Hyde Park Hotel made a wartime version from rum, orange juice, and sweet and dry Vermouth.) “It was one of the very few cocktails you could buy during the war when gin was in short supply,” said Harmer. “It was a very appropriate, short name for an exceptional woman.”
Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir became Agent Bronx.
The little Spanish gentleman who had moved into 35 Crespigny Road, Hendon, was a refugee from Franco’s Spain, it was said, who did
translation work at the BBC. Every morning Señor Pujol caught the Underground train into central London, and every evening he came back home to his family. He spoke little English and seemed polite, shy, and rather dull. Indeed, the only interesting thing about the new arrivals, from the neighbors’ point of view, was the state of their marriage: their nightly rows in loud and incomprehensible Spanish were a source of considerable entertainment in Crespigny Road. The neighbors would have been surprised to discover that the Pujols were arguing over the finer points of espionage. They would have been even more astonished to learn that, instead of working at the BBC, the little Spanish man spent his days in a small office on Jermyn Street, making up an army of fake spies.
Juan Pujol possessed what his case officer, Tomás Harris, called a “remarkable talent for duplicity.” Harris was no slouch in that department, but Agent Garbo was in a league of his own, a master of invention whose “entire existence remained wrapped up in the successful continuation of the work.” Unlike other double agents, Pujol’s “absolute loyalty” was never questioned. He was, in the best way, an extremist and a fanatic. The pair spent all day at the Jermyn Street office, located conveniently close to the Double Cross headquarters, inventing a world of spies, devising stratagems, cooking up new chicken feed, and composing messages. They would break for lunch at Garibaldi’s Italian restaurant and then resume in the afternoon. Their make-believe sessions sometimes extended far into the evening.
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