Double Cross

by Ben MacIntyre

Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir, the sexually venturesome, boredom-prone gambler with the elegant fingernails, had proved her worth: as the Third Reich collapsed, she was deployed to find out which elements in the German hierarchy might sue for peace. “Bronx is the most suitable of all B1A cases for a political role,” wrote Astor. “They will take the initiative in putting out definite peace feelers through Bronx.” Elvira wrote a letter on August 15, 1944, offering her continued services to Germany, at a price.

  It is quite evident that you have lost the war [and] I am extremely worried that the advancing Allied armies may come into possession of my dossier which would provide evidence of my espionage activities. Will you please give me an assurance that all incriminating evidence will be destroyed? I am prepared to go on working, even after the war if you wish, provided that you continue to pay me.

  The response was as keen as ever: “Good work. Write quickly and often.”

  Elvira was instructed to go to Madrid, make contact with German intelligence, and “learn as much as possible about German ideas on peace terms but not in any way attempt to act as intermediary between the two powers.” The idea that Elvira could conceivably have acted as an international go-between would once have been regarded as ludicrous: the good-time girl had come a long way.

  Elvira flew to Madrid on December 19, 1944. “I believe that she will make a good job of it,” Astor wrote. “She is likely to be closely questioned about her telegram threatening Bordeaux. Bronx has never met Ormsby-Gore but I have attempted to give her a description of him and believe that she is now able to give a colourful account of the incident.” Before leaving, she told Astor that “if any mishap should befall her I should notify her friend Miss Monica Sheriffe.” With that, she set off, “in cheerful heart.” But by now the German intelligence organization in Madrid, once a byword for ruthless efficiency, had all but disintegrated. Elvira could find not a single German spy.

  Back in London, she dispatched a furious letter of complaint to the Germans: “Absolutely livid about the uselessness of the journey which was expensive and disagreeable. You let me down. I only made the journey because I was expecting a handsome bonus.” She received an abject apology and a request to send word if she learned of another Allied invasion in Scandinavia or northern Germany. The suggested code was almost identical to the one she had used before D-Day. This time, the demand for fifty pounds for her dentist would indicate Denmark, whereas a request for one hundred pounds would mean “parachuting to the west of Berlin and landing in the German Bay.” Here was fresh evidence that the earlier ruse had worked. “It is difficult to believe that the Germans would have used this same code again,” Masterman observed, “if they had been dissatisfied with its use by Bronx in May 1944.”

  Elvira Chaudoir, 1995

  The Germans “eagerly await her news and will probably believe any information she puts over,” said Astor, and as the end drew near, she passed on news intended “to lower the German will to resist” and encourage capitulation. “Guerrillas will be treated without mercy,” she reported, citing her friends in the government. Agent Bronx was helping to shape postwar Germany. The debt-driven spy recruited as a gamble and picked up in a French casino had paid huge dividends. MI5 was delighted: “Her long-term possibilities should not be overlooked.”

  There would be no long-term career. The declaration of peace brought a simultaneous declaration from Elvira that she was retiring from espionage. She received a parting gift of £197. “Words of gratitude and appreciation were freely expressed on both sides.” She moved to a small village in the south of France, having inherited the remains of her father’s guano fortune. For the next half a century, she ran a gift shop called l’Heure Bleu in Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur. She avoided casinos but ran short of money nonetheless. In 1995, Hugh Astor informed Stella Rimington, then director general of MI5, that the former Agent Bronx was broke. In December 1995, Elvira received a check for five thousand pounds as “a way of making the point that her war-time service is still remembered and appreciated.” Elvira died a month later at the age of eighty-five. To some her later life may have seemed dull, but Elvira was never bored again. Of her role in the war, she remarked: “I recall the adventure as the most wonderful and intense period of my life.”

  Dusko Popov, 1974

  With the coming of peace, Dusko Popov, the playboy spy, got married, became British, and was awarded a medal, marks of respectability that did nothing whatsoever to change his habits. “I am getting fed up with my married friends criticising my immoral life,” he told Billy Luke, his first case officer, adding that his fiancée was a “young and pretty French girl (just your type).” He married Janine on March 6, 1946, in Megève, France. Popov’s bride was just eighteen but “apparently entering into this matrimonial adventure with her eyes open,” MI5 noted sardonically. His application for citizenship was swiftly approved: “I will try to do my best to be worthy of my new country,” he told Tar Robertson. “I am still at your disposal whenever you think I might be useful.” A year later, they met at the bar of the Ritz, where Tar handed Popov a leather box containing an OBE, in recognition of his role “in deceiving the enemy prior to the Normandy invasion.” Tar apologized for the unorthodox presentation ceremony, but the setting could hardly have been more appropriate: an espionage relationship that had started at the Savoy was brought to a close at the Ritz.

  The British secret services were still trying to disentangle Popov’s finances long after the war ended. “We are making arrangements as regards the receipts for his furniture,” wrote Kim Philby in 1948, with infinite weariness. Popov’s businesses prospered, though never conventionally: one week Tarlair Ltd. was trading cholera serum to the Egyptian government, the next Popov was importing Peugeot cars, selling rubber hose to the French, and setting up a German textile industry. “His activities have freewheeled far outside any MI5 commitment,” observed Ian Wilson, who started acting as Popov’s solicitor as soon as he ceased to be his case officer. Popov purchased a castle overlooking Nice. His marriage did not last. He met a blonde eighteen-year-old Swedish student named Jill Jonsson in 1961 and married her the following year. They moved into the former summer palace of the Bishop of Grasse. His finances remained opaque, his tastes extravagant, and his mysterious glamour undimmed.

  Only in 1974, when the truth about Britain’s wartime deceptions began to emerge, did Popov reveal that he had been Agent Tricycle. His book, Spy/Counterspy, was vigorously written, entertaining, and partly invented. James Bond was all the rage, and the book contained scenes straight from the 007 playbook—gorgeous women appearing naked in his hotel bedroom, punch-ups with evil Nazis, the staking of thousands of dollars on the turn of a card. Popov was a conscientious spy who told his British case officers everything; none of these episodes appears in the MI5 files. Popov’s true story reads like fiction, but like most spies, he could not resist making it up. In the 1970s, Popov and his brother Ivo, the former Agent Dreadnought, opened a rejuvenation clinic in the Bahamas, an appropriate last venture for a man who continued to live life like a twenty-five-year-old. He died in 1981 at the age of sixty-nine.

  Most of the B1A team drifted back into civilian life. In 1948, Tar Robertson retired to Worcestershire to look after sheep, farming his flock as gently and cleverly as he had tended the Double Cross agents. John Masterman, soon “Sir John, OBE,” became provost of Worcester College, Oxford, then vice-chancellor of that university. He played cricket, wrote detective novels, sat on various worthy boards, and scandalized some of his former colleagues in 1971 by publishing his account of the Double Cross system in defiance of the Official Secrets Act. Hugh Astor became Middle East correspondent of the Times and covered the birth of an independent Israel before joining the newspaper’s board in 1956. Billy Luke resumed his business career and in 1958 became master of the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards of the City of London. Christopher Harmer returned to practicing the law. In memory of his favorite double agent, the Harmers w
ould occasionally go to the Hyde Park Hotel bar and drink a cocktail made from rum, orange juice, and vermouth, called a Bronx. Mary Sherer met Phyllis McKenzie, who had worked for British intelligence in New York during the war, and the two women became inseparable. They lived together for the rest of their lives, “perfect foils for each other.” Within MI5 they were assumed to be lesbians or, rather, Lesbians. Together they moved to Rome and opened the Lion Bookshop on Via del Babuino near the Spanish Steps. “Mary was a very fast runner and would think nothing of pursuing the rather numerous petty thieves that abounded in Rome during and after the war. She loved a challenge.” This formidable pair of English ladies, known as “the Lionesses,” spent their days surrounded by books and a large posse of dogs: Pekinese, French bulldogs, and pugs, “all of which Mary doted on.”

  Flight Lieutenant Walker spent the rest of his days happily breeding pigeons. Gustav, the pigeon who brought back the first news of D-Day, was awarded the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross, to “signalise its performance on D-Day.” Gustav died soon after the war when his breeder trod on him while mucking out his loft.

  Tommy Harris settled in Spain after the war, where he painted and gave memorable parties at which he told outrageous spy stories that few believed. He was killed in 1964 at the age of fifty-four after his car spun off a road in Majorca and crashed into a tree. Some saw the accident as sinister. Guy Liddell remained in MI5, a continued fount of good humor and good sense. “There is no doubt that the Russians are far better in the matter of espionage than any other country in the world,” he wrote prophetically in 1945. “They will be a great source of trouble to us when the war is over.” When the Cambridge spies were finally exposed, Liddell would be caught up in the scandal and even, unfairly, suspected of being a double agent himself.

  Anthony Blunt left MI5 as soon as the war ended and resumed his career as an academic. He was knighted, courted, and feted and went on to become professor of the history of art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. When he was finally outed as a spy in 1979 and publicly disgraced, he became a semirecluse, taking refuge in “whisky and concentrated work.” In a posthumously published memoir, Blunt wrote that spying for the Soviets had been “the biggest mistake of my life.” Yet soon after his exposure as a double agent, he bumped into Tar Robertson and told the former boss of B1A: “It has given me great pleasure to have been able to pass the names of every MI5 officer to the Russians.”

  Other players in the Double Cross team faded into obscurity. Wulf Schmidt, Agent Tate, became Harry Williamson, a British citizen, a photographer on the Watford Observer, a breeder of tropical fish, and a “respected judge at cage bird exhibitions around the country.” Paul Fidrmuc, Agent Ostro, invented spy reports for the Germans until the end of the war and then vanished. He achieved immortality eleven years later when Graham Greene, who had seen reports on both Garbo and Ostro as a young MI6 officer, combined them as the inspiration for Wormold in Our Man in Havana, the spymaster with the imaginary network. Clifton James published a book in 1954 entitled I Was Monty’s Double: he acted the part of himself—and Monty—in the film adaptation.

  Emile Kliemann, Lily’s case officer, was arrested by American troops in Louveciennes on August 20, 1944. He might easily have escaped with the rest of the German intelligence officers, but he was running late. The preceding weeks had been most unsettling for Kliemann: suspected of involvement in the July Plot (wrongly, he was far too idle for conspiracy), his flat had been searched by the Gestapo, and he had then come under machine-gun fire from the Free French forces as he tried to flee the city. He surrendered with alacrity and was imprisoned in Fresnes, where Czerniawski had once been held. Yvonne Delidaise and her brother Richard were arrested the same day.

  Kliemann’s American interrogators found him “somewhat shifty; responds well to flattery; talking as much to save his own skin and that of his fiancée as anything else.” Quizzed about his intelligence work, Kliemann grew crafty, explaining that he had run a top-level woman agent in Britain code-named “Tramp” and was “very proud and gratified at the results achieved.” Kliemann then played what he thought was his trump card, suggesting that Treasure should be run, with his help, as a double agent, entirely unaware that she had been one from the start. “He has no idea,” wrote Liddell, “that he himself is the sucker.”

  Kliemann was released in May 1945; he had been far too lazy to commit any serious crimes. He returned to Austria and his wife, taking with him memories of Yvonne and a pigskin wallet from Dunhill’s of London, inscribed to “Octave … a souvenir from London.” In the 1960s, an overexcited newspaper article on German spies described Kliemann as having a “sharp and ruthless brain.” The clipping was inserted into his MI5 file with an eloquent one-word comment alongside that description: “Kliemann?!”

  More than five thousand people were arrested in the orgy of violence and score settling that followed the July Plot of 1944. A few days before the attempt to assassinate Hitler, Georg Hansen told his deputy, Wilhelm Kuebart, to stand by to “arrest various Nazis on the day of the attempt.” The day after the bomb planted by Claus von Stauffenberg failed to kill the Führer, Hansen and Kuebart were both arrested. Heinrich Müller, the Gestapo chief, orchestrated the bloody reprisals against anyone considered defeatist, disloyal, or ideologically suspect. Hansen and Kuebart were soon joined in Lehrter Strasse Prison by Alexis von Roenne, the anti-Nazi intelligence expert. Kuebart was interrogated as to why he had “made difficulties” over surrendering Johnny Jebsen. His answers were dismissed as a “tissue of lies.” Brought before the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, the prisoners were accused of conspiring with a “small clique of cowardly officers to murder the Führer, to overthrow the National Socialist regime and conclude an unworthy peace pact with the enemy.”

  Hansen was executed by hanging on September 8, 1944, at Plötzensee Prison, Berlin. Von Roenne was executed next, without ever explaining whether his falsification of the Allied order of battle had been a deliberate act of sabotage. Canaris, the former Abwehr chief, was kept alive by Himmler as a possible pawn for use in negotiating with the British; but finally he, too, was killed in Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945, along with his deputy, Hans Oster, two weeks before the camp was liberated. Kuebart, surprisingly, survived. He had already written farewell letters, after his lawyer said “he considered the case already lost from the intrinsic gravity of the charge,” when he learned he had been acquitted for lack of evidence. He was dishonorably discharged from the German army and spent the remainder of the war working on a farm.

  “Gestapo” Müller was last seen in the Führerbunker the day before Hitler’s suicide. “Defend Berlin to the last man, the last bullet,” he ordered, and then disobeyed himself by vanishing. His fate remains a mystery. Documents discovered in 2001 appear to indicate that he was still in American custody at the end of 1945. Over the years, Müller has been variously “sighted” in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Cairo, Damascus, Moscow, Washington DC, and New Hampshire.

  Aloys Schreiber, Jebsen’s kidnapper, went back to teaching the law. Ludovico von Karsthoff (or Kremer von Auenrode, to restore his real name), the pleasure-loving Lisbon Abwehr chief, fell into the hands of the Soviets and is believed to have been executed. Oscar Reile returned to Germany and wrote no fewer than three academic works on the theory and practice of intelligence, in one of which he claimed, not quite credibly, that he had always suspected that Roman Czerniawski was a double agent. The spy catcher Hugo Bleicher wrote a substantially misleading autobiography, Colonel Henri’s Story, and died in 1982. Karl-Erich Kühlenthal became a wealthy and respected clothing retailer in Koblenz. He died in 1975, unaware of how thoroughly he had been duped.

  Hans Brandes, the betrayer of Johnny Jebsen, was arrested in Portugal and held in a civilian internment camp in the American-occupied zone in Germany. He convi
nced his captors that he was “a poor, half-Jewish businessman and as a result was cleared, used as a trustee and eventually released.” MI5 was enraged to find Brandes had slipped through the net, describing his interrogation as “pure whitewash” and his release as a “grave miscarriage of justice.” Tar Robertson launched a manhunt: “Brandes was mixed up with the kidnapping of Johnny. It would be a good idea to lay hands on him.” But as time passed, the memory of his perfidy faded. By 1954, he was back in the family firm as managing director of Fritz Werner Machine Tools. On April 15, 1971, Hans Brandes was found in his car on a dirt road in Schäftlarn, near Munich, dead from poisoning. The investigators could never decide if he had been murdered or committed suicide.

  Johnny Jebsen was dragged into the Oranienburg sector of Sachsenhausen concentration camp in July 1944, a month after D-Day. Skeletally thin, he could hardly walk and “his hair had fallen out in patches.” The camp, thirty miles north of Berlin, was a place of unimaginable horror. Over thirty thousand political prisoners, homosexuals, gypsies, and Jews died there during the course of the war from exhaustion, disease, malnutrition, execution, or brutal medical experimentation.

  Petra Vermehren, the journalist arrested after her son defected in Istanbul, was interned there and learned of Jebsen’s arrival through the camp barber. She found out which cell he was in and threw stones at the window “until she attracted his attention.” Jebsen was overjoyed to see his old friend. In a whisper, “he told her that the Gestapo had abducted him because he had divulged information to the British.” He had been arrested on a charge of high treason, he said, but because he had refused to talk, he was now under investigation for Devisen Verbrechen, the foreign-currency crime of exchanging forged British five-pound notes. Jebsen did not know it, but in Sachsenhausen Himmler had employed a team of 140 imprisoned Jewish photographers, lithographers, and photoengravers to churn out forged British and American currency. His “crime” had been started in this prison camp by the very people accusing him.