Agent Garbo (31 page)

Popov pretended to take up the Abwehr’s offer. He was given a phial of secret ink and told that the enigmatic Jebsen would be his controller and contact. The Serb promptly went to the British embassy and volunteered to work for the Allies as a double agent.

Days later, Jebsen burst into Popov’s bedroom with upsetting news: the family’s chauffeur, who’d been driving Popov around town, had betrayed him. He’d recorded every place the new spy had visited, including six stops at British passport control, which was commonly known as the working address for M16 in Belgrade. If the list made its way to others in the Belgrade Abwehr, Popov was a dead man.

The chauffeur was found in a train yard in Belgrade two days later, shot multiple times. Popov paid for the funeral and sent a beautiful bouquet of flowers. Who killed the duplicitous chauffeur remains a mystery. Who ordered him shot is not. Popov had done what he’d needed to do to survive.

Popov returned the favor by repeatedly trying to get MI5 to bring Jebsen into the fold: he was brave, smart, connected and anti-Nazi. The British demurred; they already had the star of the network, Popov. Jebsen was a playboy and an Abwehr operative—who knew if he could be trusted? And if MI5 brought Jebsen in and he turned out to be loyal to the Third Reich, Popov would be irretrievably compromised.

By the summer of 1943, the situation was changing. Jebsen was in serious danger from his own side. He was involved in a currency-smuggling scheme that allowed Gestapo officers to stash money in Switzerland, against strict German regulations. All was going well until one day Jebsen took a closer look at the notes that Himmler’s men had been passing to him: they were counterfeit. Furious, he exposed the scheme and accused the Gestapo of cheating him. Jebsen believed his own agency, the Abwehr, would back him up in his war against the Gestapo, but when he was called to headquarters in Berlin to discuss the controversy, he received a mysterious telegram telling him not to go.

Frantic, Jebsen went to the British embassy in Madrid and revealed everything. By now, he trusted no one. “He wanted to find out if the Abwehr were after him, as well as the Gestapo,” the embassy wrote London. “If they were, then Tricycle was blown, in which case Jebsen would fake his suicide” and disappear. He wrote a note addressed to the Madrid Abwehr, saying that he’d been driven to kill himself because of his friendship with Popov, who he knew was a secret agent for the British. “I know that a Court Martial would sentence me to death for what I have done . . . Do not be afraid that there will be a scandal. I shall send my things to Father Confessor for the poor. Then I shall take poison and swim far out into the sea.”

MI5, with the advantage of the Ultra intercepts, knew that Jebsen wasn’t in mortal danger. The meeting in Berlin was routine; there was no witch-hunt. But MI5 couldn’t tell Jebsen that without revealing the existence of Ultra. Instead, they allowed the drama to run its course, and when the Gestapo didn’t knock on Jebsen’s door, the spy began to calm down. But Jebsen soon realized what an enormous risk he’d taken by going to the British. If anyone had seen him slip into the enemy’s headquarters, he’d end up in a concentration camp. He tried to withdraw his offer to spy for the British. MI5, however, had other ideas. “We have pointed out to him . . . that he has already taken an irrevocable step.” It was too late to turn back.

A meeting between Jebsen and the British was scheduled for Lisbon in December 1943. It was to be Jebsen’s coming-out party as a double agent, code-named Artist. Two British intelligence officers, Major Frank Foley of MI6 and Ian Wilson of MI5, flew to Lisbon to debrief him. The stylishly dressed Popov was on the same flight, though the Brits pretended not to notice him. At the Lisbon airport, the secret service agents jumped in a car headed for the embassy, while Popov directed his driver to the Estoril Casino, the scene of Garbo’s first great triumph with the stolen diplomatic passes. In Popov’s shoulder holster was a new Luger pistol, and in his briefcase was a diplomatic bag brimming with secret documents and rolls of undeveloped film—much of it shot by an MI5 officer that morning. The XX Committee had given the Serbian agent a treasure trove of Fortitude material to pass to the Abwehr.

As Jebsen prepared to speak with the British agents, Popov waited on a Lisbon street to meet his German controller, a Major von Karsthoff, who knew him as “Ivan.” A car pulled up and Popov got in the rear, ducked down and adjusted his back against the leather seat so the Luger didn’t pinch. When he got to Karsthoff’s new villa, however, alarm bells began to go off in his mind. The girl who greeted him was new, not the usual secretary he’d been accustomed to. She walked him back to the drawing room and went to get the German officer. He waited, nerves taut.

Always the dandy, Popov was studying himself in a pair of glass-windowed doors when he heard Karsthoff’s voice behind him.

“Turn around slowly, Ivan,” the voice said. “And don’t make any sudden moves.”

Popov stiffened. He was certain that he was blown and that Karsthoff had a pistol trained at the base of his spine. If he was going to die, Popov wanted one last chance to display his old Dubrovnik skills with a gun. His hand slipped under his suit coat toward the Luger. He began to pivot. But just before he turned fully and whipped the gun around toward his Nazi controller, he caught a reflection in the glass doors. Karsthoff wasn’t poised with his own Luger, ready to kill him. He was standing rather awkwardly, unarmed, with an apprehensive monkey perched on his shoulder.

Popov let go of the Luger’s butt, turned and laughed. “What’s the matter?” Karsthoff barked in mock anger. “Do I look ridiculous?” The monkey had been a gift from an Abwehr agent who’d just returned from Africa. The spy-runner had been afraid his agent would startle it. That was the reason for the warning about sudden moves. Popov had nearly shot Karsthoff and blown his cover and that of Jebsen and God knows who else.

An even more shocking moment was waiting for the British agents Foley and Wilson as they sat down to debrief Jebsen. Their new recruit, it turned out, knew there was a British-controlled double agent feeding information to the Abwehr. In fact, Jebsen gave the two officers enough information about Garbo to identify him beyond a doubt. By bringing Jebsen into MI5, the agency had unintentionally put its star agent at enormous risk. If Jebsen told his MI5 handlers about the Spanish spy and saw that they did nothing to arrest him, Jebsen would realize that the agent was already under their control.

The revelation was chilling. When Foley and Wilson returned to London and gave a full report on their meeting, it dawned on the top brass at MI5 that this sordid little drama in the back streets of Lisbon could change the course of World War II.

MI5 was worried enough that they considered terminating Popov as a double agent
and
smuggling Jebsen out of Portugal. Better to lose Tricycle than Garbo. The agency even considered
killing Jebsen. The risk of exposure was just too great.

But in the end, the idea was rejected. The deception planners could only hope Jebsen would stay loyal and, most importantly, free. Tricycle was taken off Fortitude because of fears that he could jinx the scheme. “The whole Tricycle set-up might collapse
at any moment . . . ,” Guy Liddell wrote in his diary on December 8, 1943. “Artist has also heard about Plan Dream”—the 1942 currency-smuggling operation that was one of Juan Pujol’s first operations in London—“which brings him perilously close to Garbo.” But over the next few months, Jebsen stayed free and the worries over his fate slowly dissipated.

The optimism lasted exactly four and a half months. Then, in late April 1944, word reached London: Jebsen had vanished. Intercepts from Ultra told the grim story: he’d been kidnapped by his own side.

Jebsen’s position had begun to unravel in February. A good friend and fellow Abwehr officer had defected to the Allies; Jebsen was a regular visitor to the defector’s mother’s home. The Abwehr began to watch Jebsen to see if he would lead them to the fleeing man. More bad news for Jebsen came in April: his supporter Canaris had been dismissed from the Abwehr after suspicions about his loyalties deepened; he was soon under house arrest. Canaris’s power would now flow to the hard-line SD, which had no loyalties to Jebsen. He’d lost his staunchest protector.

But the spy-runner remained jaunty with confidence. When a friend, a baroness he’d known for years, informed Jebsen that a special team of agents from the RHSA (the agency that directed the SD) had flown to Lisbon to get to the bottom of the currency scam, Jebsen told her not to worry. In fact, a trap was being set. One of his business colleagues was informing on him, feeding the SD a record of his every connection to the Allies and every incriminating remark he made. The net was growing tighter.

Jebsen was ordered
to an April 21 meeting in Biarritz to talk about Popov’s exorbitant demands for money (he’d asked for $150,000, a king’s ransom even to free-spending German intelligence). Jebsen finally began to worry: Biarritz was just across the border in France; if the SD wanted to spirit him out of the country,
there was no better place to kidnap him. He refused to attend the meeting. His superiors warned him that not attending was tantamount to desertion.

And then the skies seemed to clear. The SD agreed to give Jebsen $75,000, to be handed on to Popov. In addition, they had decided to award Jebsen a prestigious medal, the Kriegsverdienstkreuz first class, which no other German operative in Lisbon had received. Jebsen breathed a sigh of relief, writing to Popov on the day of the meeting in Biarritz, “I congratulate you on being my Beloved Führer’s best agent, who is genuine without any doubt.” He even met with an MI6 agent before his departure. The British operative reported back to London that their mole appeared happy and at ease. It was the last time the Brits talked to Jebsen.

On April 29, the spy and a friend were called to a meeting with an SD officer. When Jebsen arrived, the SD man told him the truth: he was going to be taken to Berlin that very moment. Jebsen dashed for the door, but the officer overpowered him, forcibly drugged him and stuffed him into the false bottom of an enormous metal trunk. His friend received the same treatment. The two trunks were loaded into a Studebaker and driven to Biarritz, where the two prisoners, now fully conscious and surely aware of their fate, were transferred to an airplane and flown to Berlin and handed over to the Gestapo.

With D-Day just two months away, Jebsen was installed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, twenty miles north of the capital. The Allies assumed he was being tortured. The Gestapo’s methods in the camps included beating prisoners with a stick wrapped in barbed wire, crushing their fingers with thumbscrews, burning them with cigarettes, applying electrical shocks to the testicles, and wrapping a man in chains and then tightening them with a tourniquet until the flesh burst apart. “Under interrogation,” wrote J. C. Masterman,
head of the XX Committee, “it was to be presumed that much, if not all, of the history of his activities would come to light, and in that case many of our best cases were doomed.” If Jebsen talked, not only Popov but the whole slate of double agents, Garbo included, would be blown.

Should they shut Garbo down? On May 10, with D-Day less than a month away, Tommy Harris met with Masterman, MI5 counterespionage chief Guy Liddell and Tar Robertson, who was in charge of the double agents, to decide. The meeting was tense; Harris’s nerves were wearing down. “Tommy is still extremely apprehensive,”
Liddell reported. Masterman began by arguing that no change should be made this late in the game; they didn’t know for sure what Artist was confessing or how badly Tricycle was compromised. If information came through that the situation was deteriorating, “the agents should be used
to fill the German mind with confusion instead of passing over a complete cover plan.” Otherwise, stay the course.

Tommy Harris vehemently disagreed. He was clearly suffering a crisis of faith, and his worst nightmare was now coming true. He couldn’t get the image of Jebsen in the concentration camp out of his mind; he imagined the spy blurting out the details of Garbo’s secret life. Harris knew what would happen next. A sharp-minded analyst like Roenne would listen to the tortured man, then go into the archives and carefully reread Garbo’s messages about
FUSAG,
not through the lens that Kühlenthal had placed in front of Garbo from the beginning—that of Garbo as super-Nazi—but as a hard-nosed skeptic hot on the trail of a mole. Conceivably, he could go all the way back to 1941. For God’s sake, they still had the messages in which Pujol talked about Glasgow stevedores craving liters of wine! It was a disaster. Harris knew it took only the tiniest shift in perspective, a sudden soul-chilling loss of confidence, to unmask an agent for what he really was.

That wasn’t all. The analyst would then take Tricycle’s traffic, read the two side by side, then Brutus’s, and then Tate’s, and the Abwehr would realize that what they were looking at were not simultaneous reports of the same phenomena—an actual invasion originating in southeastern England aimed at the Pas de Calais—but a plot of unimagined proportions to disguise the real target, which could only be Normandy.

MI5 drew up a table comparing the traffic passed by Garbo and by Tricycle, with dates and regiments and divisions written in small boxes, along with the information sent over to the enemy. The two sets of phantom messages matched up almost exactly, of course. Then MI5 gave copies of Garbo’s traffic to one of its officers who knew nothing about Fortitude. Could he detect a targeting of one part of the French shoreline? The officer said that there was a bias toward the Pas de Calais, but only a slight one. The test was inconclusive.

Harris was feeling exposed, the old worry—
how the hell do you hide the largest invasion in history?
—needling him. Smoking black cigarette after black cigarette, he pushed his colleagues to take what they’d gotten and walk away. Garbo’s controller was the sensitive conartist who has lost his nerve the night before the out-of-town rube is to be taken for everything he’s worth.