Authors: John Bryden
There surely could be no better testimonial to his success than such lavish praise from an opponent still deceived after so many years: Popov was, in fact, another one of Major Ritter’s triple agents, as later evidence will prove.
The Germans gave warning of Popov’s impending arrival in Britain in a way that was to become standard for agents to come. The Government Code & Cipher School had only just broken the “main Abwehr hand cipher” when the following messages were intercepted and deciphered:
13.12.40 — Lisbon-Berlin.
POPOV from Belgrade has reported here. He claims to be employed by ÖLSCHLAEGER and JEBSEN of SCHLOSS (Berlin) for GOLFPLATZ (Great Britain). I request urgent information. POPOV also is in need of money.
18.12.40 — Berlin-Lisbon.
Radio your view as to when our agent POPOV can leave for GOLFPLATZ (Great Britain). His JEBSEN telegram has arrived, but is unintelligible. Refund his expenses.1
An MI5 officer awaited Popov when he flew into Whitchurch on December 20, 1940, and for the next ten days he was put through an intensive series of interrogations by various MI5 officers, Major Robertson included, and by Colonel Oreste Pinto, the ace spy catcher of the Dutch government-in-exile. He sailed through it all, for the wireless intercepts confirmed a cover story that had been months in the making.2
Popov first came to notice some months earlier when he called on the British embassy in Belgrade to inform officials that he was a lawyer from Dubrovnik and he had been approached to spy for the Germans by a friend from his student days in Germany. The MI6 station officer there encouraged him to develop the contact, so Popov went back to the friend, Johann Jebsen, and indicated his interest. This led to his recruitment by an Abwehr officer named Major Ölschlaeger, who arranged for him to go to England under the cover of a businessman with shipping interests. All this Popov reported to the MI6 officer. The mention of Ölschlaeger and Jebsen in the intercepted messages clinched the truth of his story.3
During his vetting on arrival in England, MI5 interrogators did notice one oddity. Popov had been given a surprisingly “primitive” invisible ink, one based on a popular headache remedy called Pyramidon. The secret messages to be written on the letters he was to send to cover addresses in Portugal could be developed by heat, a routine test for secret writing used by all wartime postal censorship agencies. When this observation was put to Popov, he deftly explained that at their last meeting Jebsen had taken away the ink he originally had been given and replaced it with one he said was better, which obviously it was not. This explanation was accepted.4
According to what Popov remembered nearly three decades later in
Spy/Counterspy
, Jebsen introduced him not to someone named Ölschlaeger but to a Major Munzinger, “who took orders directly from Canaris.” Popov also has Jebsen explaining that he joined the Abwehr because he was an admirer of Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, and Schacht “was on very close terms with Canaris.” Jebsen also mentions that he was personally introduced to Canaris by his aide, Colonel Oster, “whose political ideas and philosophy are identical to mine.” These statements, if true, put Jebsen firmly on the inside of the army/Abwehr conspiracy against Hitler.5 Popov implies in his book that he did not know this at the time.
If Popov reported the Schacht-Oster connections during his 1940 interrogations, the significance would have escaped MI5, but not MI6. Because of the Abwehr’s secret peace overtures in the fall of 1939, Schacht was known to be a serious opponent of the Nazis, and Oster was known for tipping off the Dutch and the Belgians to Hitler’s 1940 invasion plans. This was probably why, after having been cleared by MI5, Popov received an invitation from Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, to spend the weekend at his brother’s stately home in Surrey. There they could talk.
It was quite incredible. Menzies was head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. That made him one of the most powerful persons in the country. It put him at Churchill’s elbow almost daily, and he was privy to the deepest secrets of the state. Popov was just a lowly Abwehr spy turned double agent. The closest Popov should have got to Menzies was as a name on a piece of paper voyaging across his desk.
They spent a few hours alone in the library of the house. In telling the story, Popov paints a picture of a white-haired and fatherly Menzies, sunk deep in an armchair, eyes on a line of the flames in the fireplace, quietly talking encouragement and advice to the young spy. Then:
“Now,” Menzies paused, put a match to his pipe, apparently collecting his thoughts — “to get to the point, we already have a fair amount of information about many officers in the Abwehr, including Canaris, but I want to know much more about everybody who is intimately connected with Canaris, and also with Dohnányi and Oster. I think you could get that information through Jebsen.”
“He’d probably know,” I agreed.
“It may be helpful if I explain the reasons behind this request. We know that Canaris, Dohnányi and Oster are not dyed-in-the-wool Nazis. They are what might be termed loyal officers, or patriotic Germans. In 1938 Churchill had a conversation with Canaris. Unofficially — he wasn’t in office then. Churchill came to the conclusion that Canaris was a sort of catalyst for the anti-Hitler elements in Germany. That’s why I want to know more about the people he attracts. Eventually, I may want to resume the conversation that Churchill initiated. In that event, I must be in a position to evaluate the strength of those around Canaris.”
I nodded my understanding. Menzies was contemplating a dialogue with Canaris or those close to him with a view to ousting Hitler.
“I am handling the matter myself,” Menzies stressed. “All information you pick up is to come directly to me with no intermediary….”6
No solid evidence has ever been found that Canaris and Churchill met before the war, although there is one tantalizing clue. In August 1938, Canaris sent a one-man secret mission to Britain on behalf of the chief of the general staff, General Beck, asking for assurance that Britain would intervene if Hitler carried out his threat to invade Czechoslovakia. “Bring me certain proof that Britain will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked and I will put an end to this regime,” Beck was reported as saying. The emissary was an obscure landowner-politician named Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, and he made no progress whatever with the officials of Chamberlain’s government. Churchill, however, also received him and was sympathetic, giving him a letter agreeing that a world war would ensue if German troops crossed into Czechoslovakia. As an opposition politician he could do no more than that.7
Chances are the officials seen by Kleist-Schmenzin did not know what Canaris looked like. Faking a passport would be nothing to the Abwehr, and Canaris was known to enjoy going around in disguise. With a little hair whitener and a false moustache, Canaris could have been made to look like Kleist-Schmenzin.8
Popov said nothing of his meeting with Menzies to anyone. As far as MI5 was concerned, he was simply another turncoat spy whose arrival was especially timely because the XX Committee had only just been set up. The committee’s initial membership comprised J.C. Masterman (chairman), Major Robertson, and Flight Lieutenant C.C. Cholmondely for MI5; Felix Cowgill for MI6(V); intelligence officers from the Admiralty, Air Ministry, and Home Forces; and someone from the Home Defence (Security) Executive. Ewen Montagu, then a lieutenant-commander in the naval reserve, represented naval intelligence.
The discussion at the XX Committee’s first meeting on January 2 soon turned to how best to use Popov to baffle the Germans.9
The war was then in its seventeenth month. MI5 was undergoing a huge and largely uncontrolled expansion that had mixed rigid police-officer types with know-it-all academics and lawyers. Amateurism was rife, evident even in the choice of name for the new committee: the XX Committee (in conversation, the “Twenty Committee”). While it must have seemed terribly clever to whomever thought it up, it would have taken no time at all for an enemy intelligence analyst to notice that the number twenty in Roman numerals is “XX” — a double-cross. Later, there was even a Thirty Committee — XXX — for handling triple agents.
Popov was rushed into service, and was soon provided with some attractive intelligence to take back to his German masters in Lisbon. Before he departed, however, he was given plenty of opportunity to gather other useful intelligence on his own:
Bill [Popov’s case officer] accompanied me frequently on trips I was obliged to make to gather information for the Germans. The XX Committee had decided I should actually do this job myself so the Germans couldn’t trip me up when they questioned me. Theoretically the concept was sound. In practice it didn’t work all that well.
The hitch was my photographic memory. Not everything I saw could be passed on. A board of experts decided what could be told the Germans. That meant I had to unlearn a good part of what I had seen. I lost more time studying what I had to forget than remembering what I was to report….10
The “concept” was not sound at all, but lunatic. It is hard to imagine anything more naive than to allow a freshly turned enemy agent to make observations of value and then solemnly tell him he was not to divulge them when he again came under enemy control. Yet, such was the persuasiveness of the intercepted Abwehr messages that had preceded his arrival.
Indeed, it was 1939 and Arthur Owens all over again, only this time instead of trips to Belgium and Holland to meet DR. RANTZAU, it was trips to Portugal to meet Gustav von Karsthoff, chief of the Abwehr office in Lisbon. Von Karsthoff — so Popov said on his return — was delighted by his offerings and rushed to Berlin with them, bringing back “a Mr. Kramer” (Major Ritter’s deputy at Ast Hamburg, Dr. Karl Kramer) bearing a questionnaire that filled nine closely typed pages, forty-six of the fifty-two questions having to do with air intelligence. Popov was told of the plan to send him from England to the United States and then on to Egypt.11
It all went so perfectly. Popov, now code-named TRICYCLE, was allowed to extend his travels around Britain — to Coventry, Birmingham, and London — 12 and was again sent back to Lisbon, arriving on March 15. A few days later the Hamburg-Berlin teletype machine clattered out the following from Abt I/Luft:
A-3570 reports by personal meeting for the period between 14.2 to 15.3.41.
Subject: New Houses of Parliament
[Translation]
The building is between Little Smith Street and Marsham Street, Westminster, and is about 150–200 yards south of Victoria Street towards Westminster Abbey. The building has five floors, is almost new and has an area of about 100 x 80 yards. The upper floors are not used. They are strongly protected by sandbags and steel plates. The outer walls have brick protection 4 feet thick and about 8 feet high. The main entrance is on Little Smith Street and is exactly opposite from sub-station U which is the largest substation of the Westminster Auxiliary (Fire) Service. Winston Churchill’s private entrance is on Marsham Street. The King is doing his official business in the same building. I received this information from the deputy chief of the above sub-station at the end of January.13
A-3570 did not get it right, but came dangerously close. He was not so much directing the Luftwaffe to where members of Parliament gathered, as to Churchill’s underground bunker, which also housed the Cabinet War Room. In the immediate area, but just north of Victoria Street rather than south, it was the brain and nerve centre of the British armed forces, with a roof that was hastily and poorly constructed. A direct hit by a German heavy bomb and the course of the war, and its aftermath, would have been very different.14
Was this TRICYCLE? Undoubtedly so. IVAN — Popov’s Abwehr code name — was remembered in interrogations after the war as being specifically attached to Abw I/Luft15 (Abwehr air intelligence), and the coincidence of the spy’s reporting period — February 14 to March 15 — corresponds to when Popov was in England between trips to Lisbon. The “by personal meeting” would have had to involve the spy entering Europe through a neutral country, either Sweden or Portugal. Popov, at this stage anyway, was another protegé of Major Ritter.
A-3570’s other messages also had to do with air intelligence, but while the information might have appeared genuine to Luftwaffe analysts, most of it was not. The numbers given for aircraft production were not far off the mark, but the elaborate description of the characteristics of Britain’s two-man Defiant fighter was useless; it had already been grounded as a failure. There was more material of like type, including one earlier message suggesting that
Lena
parachute spies would not be executed by the British if they were found to be carrying German army identification.16 Not likely, surely.
All of this suggests MI5 disinformation, although expecting the Germans to believe that a Yugoslav who could barely speak English could have obtained high-grade air intelligence seems to be a bit of a stretch.17 The message drawing German bombers to Churchill’s bunker is another matter. Short of being someone’s attempt to kill Churchill, it is likely his mention of “the New Houses of Parliament” was something Popov casually threw in as a result of his case officer showing him around London.
Ironically, the very fact that the message was relayed to Berlin is evidence that it was recognized as false. Canaris had no desire to see Churchill or the king hurt. He would not have wanted it sent on unless Major Ritter thought it was untrue. Fortunately, the Luftwaffe did not act on the information. Its policy still was to target war-related infrastructure, sparing where possible civilian institutions and military and political command centres.