On May 19, Bletchley Park deciphered a personal message from Georg Hansen to Aloys Schreiber in Lisbon: “I wish to convey special appreciation and thanks for carrying out Operation Dora.” Schreiber replied that “a written report on Dora matters was following by air.”
Then, just two weeks before D-Day, the references to “Johnny,” “Dora,” and all the missing money abruptly ceased. Ian Wilson wondered if the sudden silence was ominous: “It seems to me not unlikely that Artist may have been shot, or may have committed suicide shortly after his arrest.” Yet he tried to look on the bright side: “There is still no indication that Artist has made any confession.”
Wilson’s flicker of hope would have been swiftly extinguished had he known where Jebsen was at that moment.
Jebsen and Moldenhauer had arrived in Berlin by train, under guard, on May 1. From there they were driven to the military prison at Wünsdorf, near Zossen, and lodged in separate cells, while Georg Hansen made “arrangements for their interrogation by legal experts.” The SD, however, had already gotten wind of Jebsen’s abduction and demanded that Hansen put “the captive at the disposal of Kaltenbrunner as soon as possible.” A full investigation into another potential defector was exactly what Hansen hoped to avoid. He refused to surrender the prisoners and instructed Kuebart to tell the SD that “as Jebsen was a soldier he regarded it as a matter within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Abwehr.”
For several days, Kuebart “did his best to place difficulties in the way of Jebsen being handed over.” The dispute even reached the desk of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the OKW. Finally, a “brusque ultimatum” arrived from SS Obergruppenführer Heinrich Müller demanding that Jebsen be handed over to the Gestapo at once. Among the murderous sycophants surrounding Hitler, Müller stood out for his brutality: the head of the secret state police, he was a principal architect of “the final solution,” directed the SS murder squads that followed the German army into the Soviet Union, and personally presented Himmler with evidence of Canaris’s links to the anti-Nazi resistance. He loathed anyone with an education—“One really ought to drive all the intellectuals into a coal mine and then blow it up,” he declared—and he was not a man who took anything but yes for an answer. The demand to surrender Jebsen had already “produced a great deal of ill-feeling in the Abwehr,” according to Kuebart, but there was no point in arguing with “Gestapo” Müller. Jebsen was taken into police custody by one Sturmbannführer Schmitz, an aide to Schellenberg, who accused Jebsen of “having betrayed the work of the SS to the Abwehr” and consigned him to a cell in the notorious Gestapo prison on Prinz Albrecht Strasse to await interrogation.
Jebsen had often hinted to his British handlers that he was involved in shady business deals with high officials. Indeed, he had told Marie von Gronau he had “so much information on the SD they would not dare investigate him.” But his financial chicanery, it seems, went far beyond the forgery scam that had first put him on the wrong side of the Gestapo. Jebsen had been using diplomatic bags to smuggle money from one occupied country to another and “engaging in large-scale manipulations of currency and gold” with the connivance of high-ranking officers, who got a cut of the profits but had since “got into difficulties because it became apparent they had more money to spend than could be justified by their apparent incomes.” In addition, some senior SS and Gestapo figures had used Jebsen as an unofficial banker: “Certain sizeable sums of money have been given to Jebsen, who deposited the sums in such a way as to render the sums inaccessible.” He was also back in the forgery business: “Some SS officials had been printing foreign currency and he had exchanged it for gold value. He was now suspected of having made too much profit for himself and the SS wanted to remove him for knowing too much.” To cap it all, he was accused of “improperly converting SD monies for his own use.” Jebsen was nothing if not bold in his financial corruptions: he had contrived to diddle senior officers in each of the three most brutal elements of the Third Reich—the Gestapo, the SS, and the SD—and they were out for his blood.
MI5 was right to believe that Jebsen was being investigated for his financial dealings but wrong to assume that this was the only, or even the main, reason he had been kidnapped. Müller was in no doubt that Jebsen was a British spy. Schellenberg confirmed in a postwar interview that Jebsen had been “accused of working for Britain.” According to Eduard Waetjen, an Abwehr officer working for American intelligence, Jebsen had been tipping off members of the anti-Nazi resistance when they were about to be arrested. “Because of good connections he helped many people who had difficulties with the Nazi organisation,” Waetjen testified. “By his warning, many people were saved.” Kuebart’s postwar testimony also confirms that Jebsen was suspected of conspiring with the British and planning to defect. The extent of that guilt was as yet undetermined, but Müller and his thugs intended to find out.
The two officers in charge of Jebsen’s case were SS Standartenführer Eugen Steimle and Obergeheimrat Quitting. They went to work on Jebsen at once.
The Gestapo prison at 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the neoclassical former Museum of Decorative Arts, consisted of thirty-nine basement solitary cells and one communal cell. Torture was conducted in specially equipped rooms in the upper floors. The term Verschärfte Vernehmung, or “sharpened interrogation,” had been coined by Müller himself in 1937 to describe the torture techniques used on “Communists, Marxists … saboteurs, terrorists, members of the resistance movement, asocial persons, Polish or Soviet persons who refuse to work.” By 1944, the extraction of confessions had been refined to a vicious art. Müller’s Gestapo torturers were masters of the electrode and rubber nightstick, the genital vise, the soldering iron, and the ice-cold bath, in which prisoners were thrust to the point of drowning. Captured members of the French Resistance were told to try to resist torture for at least twenty-four hours; the Gestapo boasted that in forty-eight hours they could squeeze any man or woman dry.
Gestapo interrogation records were destroyed before the end of the war. The only evidence of what happened to Jebsen comes from a handful of witnesses, postwar interviews, and the testimony of other prisoners. Karl Weigand, an Abwehr officer in Madrid, was summoned to Berlin to discuss the interrogation of Jebsen and returned, according to colleagues, “in a highly nervous condition and mentioned something about the unpleasantness of having one’s fingernails torn off.” Hjalmar Schacht, once Hitler’s trusted economist, who was arrested on suspicion of resistance activities, briefly occupied the cell next to Jebsen. According to Popov, Schacht “caught a glimpse of Johnny once as he was being brought back from an interrogation. His shirt was drenched with blood. As the guards were about to lock him in his cell, Johnny turned to them, haughty as ever, saying ‘I trust I shall be provided with a clean shirt.’ ” A former Abwehr colleague who visited Jebsen in prison (itself a brave act) described Jebsen as looking like a “typical concentration camp victim.” Jebsen was never a physically robust man, with his varicose veins and rattling smoker’s cough, but after the attentions of the Gestapo he was barely recognizable: “His flesh and muscle had melted away, and his head looked enormous, sitting on top of his wasted neck and shoulders.”
Torture works. But it does not always work, and it doesn’t work on everyone, and sometimes it extracts information that is wrong. “Violence is taboo,” wrote Robin “Tin-eye” Stephens, who ran Britain’s wartime interrogation center in London. “Not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information.” A person in terror and pain will often tell their torturers what they imagine they want to hear, just to stop the agony, just for a while.
Johnny Jebsen knew much that Steimle and Quitting wanted to hear—for a start, the details of his various business dealings. Merely offering up the names of officers implicated in his scams would have provided Müller with useful ammunition and bought, perhaps, some respite. He could have confessed to everything he had told MI6 about Hitler’s secret weapon, the workings of German
intelligence, and even his suggestion that the wife of P. G. Wodehouse would make a good spy. The Gestapo, the SS, and the SD would have been more than interested. He could have revealed that Popov was a double agent, and that every German spy in Britain was either turned or invented, by admitting that he had identified them all to the British and they were still functioning. He could have told them enough to reveal the truth about the looming invasion and change the course of the war. But by May 20, with less than three weeks to go until D-Day, he had told them nothing at all.
23. Bronx Gets Toothache
As D-Day approached, MI5 told Winston Churchill that Jebsen seemed to be holding out—“There is still no indication that Artist has made any confession, or that the Abwehr have come to realise the true position,” wrote Guy Liddell. In further evidence that the deception remained on track, the Germans continued to shower the double agents with praise, encouragement, and even medals. When Agent Tate “transmitted his 1,000th message,” the prime minister was informed, “he took the opportunity of referring to this fact and expressing his loyal devotion to the Führer. A cordial reply has been received, and it is hoped that this will be followed up by the further advancement of Tate in the order of the Iron Cross, of which he already holds the first and second class.”
The case officers were now competing for German decorations. Eddie Chapman, Agent Zigzag, had been awarded the Iron Cross; Agent Tate might get as many as three; Jebsen had promised Wilson his War Merit Cross. Hugh Astor believed Brutus deserved a decoration and began actively lobbying for a Nazi gong. He suggested that Chopin, Brutus’s fictional wireless operator, send a message to Oscar Reile recommending that “Agent Hubert” be awarded a medal, since this would “remind the Germans Brutus is running great risks and working under great difficulties solely for ideological motives.” Astor drafted a message in what he hoped was the style of a “not very intelligent old man”:
Colonel, please forgive me for troubling you with a personal matter.… Hubert would never forgive me if he got to learn about it. He has made great personal and financial sacrifices in the interests of our work. He frequently works until the early hours of the morning preparing lengthy reports. He has mentioned casually to me the daring exploits which he has carried out in order to obtain the information and I am sure that his honour would be more than satisfied if you could recommend him for some decoration.
Wireless intercepts showed that the Germans thought Lily Sergeyev’s wireless was “functioning flawlessly”; her messages were being conveyed, word for word, to the intelligence analysts at Zossen. By comparing her original message with its coded repetition on the German intelligence network, the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park could break that day’s code almost immediately: “The messages of Treasure and Brutus are being so consistently relayed verbatim on the German w/t [wireless] network that, with the assistance of this ‘crib,’ there has been a very considerable saving of time and manpower in deciphering Most Secret Sources.” For the first time, a note of excited pride crept into the report to Churchill. The Double Cross agents, he was told, “have, at a critical moment, acquired a value which it is scarcely possible to overestimate.”
But just as this upbeat assessment was handed to Churchill, fresh disaster loomed in the shape of a small, dead dog.
On May 17, Mary Sherer took Lily Sergeyev to see Gone with the Wind in the West End. Lily’s kidneys ached, and she was running a temperature. She had convinced herself once again that she was dying. Mary decided she needed a treat. Both women wept copiously during the film and emerged red-eyed and in high spirits. “I always cry in the cinema,” said Mary. They linked arms as they walked home. In her diary Lily wrote: “Mary crying at the cinema! Is she human, after all, this Mary with whom I’ve been working for seven months, trying to discover some signs that she is a living being and not an automaton.”
Perhaps it was this newfound amity, or perhaps her premonition of impending death prompted the revelation, or perhaps, frankly, she didn’t give a damn. But the next morning, as they were preparing another wireless message, Lily leaned over with a conspiratorial air and observed that if she should die, Mary should not try to work the transmitter without her.
Mary, suddenly alert, asked her what exactly she meant by that remark. Lily, realizing she had revealed too much, was defensive and dug herself in deeper.
“I didn’t mean to warn you; I’m not concerned about what happens to your people. I don’t owe them anything. I trusted them. You know the result! But I have told you now. You are warned.”
With a flush of horror, Mary understood that this was not a warning but a thinly veiled threat. Lily must have been given a control signal after all—otherwise why should they not run the transmitter without her? Indeed, she might already have alerted Kliemann that she was being run as a double agent. Mary was appalled and suddenly very worried.
“The landing is very near, and thousands of lives depend on our ability to deceive the Germans.…”
“Why do you suppose I have told you all this?” asked Lily.
Mary knew the answer. “You were very fond of Babs.”
She demanded that Lily describe her control signal and reveal whether she had used it.
Lily refused on both counts. “You can go through all my transmissions with a mathematical genius, but you won’t find it.”
“You realise I must warn Colonel Robertson,” Mary said. She immediately sent a message to the head of B1A that was short, precise, and deeply alarming.
Sergueiew [sic] made a statement to the effect that when she visited Lisbon she fixed up a control signal with Kliemann which she had not told us about on her return. She had meant, on her return, to get the W/T working well and then blow the case. She confessed that her motive was revenge for the death of her dog for which she considered we were responsible. On return from Lisbon she had changed her mind about blowing the case. She refused to divulge what the signal was.
Tar Robertson was not merely displeased, he was scorchingly furious. Lily was holding Operation Fortitude to ransom over a dog. She might have alerted the enemy already, but as she refused to divulge the signal, there was no way of checking. Kliemann’s messages of congratulations might be bluffs. And if the Germans had realized Lily was passing over deceptive material, they would compare the thrust of her messages with information from the other agents, spot the similarities, and find out the truth. Robertson faced a dreadful choice: if he shut down Treasure’s wireless and she had not warned Kliemann she was controlled, it would immediately arouse German suspicions while depriving Bletchley Park of its useful “crib” at a time when breaking the codes quickly was vital. But keeping the channel open would be a dangerous gamble, since he had only Lily’s word (whatever that was now worth) that she had genuinely changed her mind about wrecking the deception. But however fickle she might be, Treasure was too enmeshed in the deception to be extracted now. Mary wrote: “In spite of Sergueiew’s [sic] confession, she should carry on operating her W/T herself. However the nature of her traffic would have to be altered and anything of a deceptive nature would now be out of the question.”
An emergency plan was drawn up. “We see no particular object in having a showdown with her at this moment,” wrote Liddell; the showdown would come later. Lily would be kept under surveillance. Her past and future transmissions would be closely monitored for any evidence of the control signal. Her telephone would be tapped. A radio technician would stand by, ready to take over and mimic her radio “fist” at the first sign she had alerted Kliemann. And then, as soon as D-Day was over, Lily would be admonished, fired, and quite possibly arrested. She had deceived her case officers, conspired with the enemy, and perhaps tipped off Kliemann, putting countless lives in jeopardy for reasons of personal pique and in retaliation for a dog killing that might or might not have taken place.
The Double Cross team, so confident in its report to Churchill, was plunged back into a state of roiling insecurity. On top of the continuing uncer
tainty over Jebsen’s fate now came the gnawing fear that Lily was lying and Kliemann—tardy, inept Kliemann—might be stringing them along. Since Lily was working her own radio, she might yet be able to wreck the operation. “Treasure is in a position to blow her case to the Germans at any time she wishes to do so,” wrote Liddell. “She is a very temperamental person. Although her statement may not be true, it shows she is unreliable.” The Tricycle network had already been shut down as a means of deception, and now Treasure had been taken out of the equation too. That left Garbo, Brutus, and Bronx.
On May 27, 1944, Antonio Manuel de Almeida, director and general manager of the Banco Espírito Santo in Lisbon, received a telegram, in French, from one of the bank’s London clients. It read: “Envoyez vite cinquante livres. J’ai besoin pour mon dentiste,” “Send fifty pounds quickly. I need it for my dentist.”
Senhor Almeida knew that this particular client was always short of money; he knew, too, that any message relating to her doctor or dentist was intended for the Germans: he immediately passed the telegram to the German intelligence station on Rua Buenos Aires. From Lisbon the message passed to Hauptmann Schluetter in Cologne, then to Berlin, and from Berlin to Zossen, where Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir’s telegram would be interpreted not as a dental emergency but as a warning: “I have definite news that a landing is to be made in the Bay of Biscay in one week.”
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