ON THE NIGHT OF 7–8 April 1941, a German seaplane deposited Tor Glad and John Moe into a dinghy off the Banffshire coast in Scotland. The two spies were Norwegian, although Moe had British citizenship through his mother, and spoke English with a Lancashire accent having spent holidays with his grandparents in Ashton-under-Lyne. Both men had no intention of working for the Germans and had decided to give themselves up on arrival in Britain.
Landing near Crovie, on the Moray Firth, in the early hours, the two agents went to a nearby fisherman’s cottage and bashed on the door with the butt of a pistol. When the occupant eventually answered he was surprised to see two armed men at the doorway. When Moe told him they had just been landed by a German aircraft, the fisherman slammed the door shut in their face and telephoned the police. The two men went off on bicycles and eventually flagged down the police car that had been sent to investigate the fisherman’s call. The two men immediately offered themselves into custody, claiming they had been landed as German spies.
At Banff police station they were treated well enough, offered cups of tea and before long became the object of curiosity among a number of local visitors. When the local chief constable arrived he contacted someone in Aberdeen and was told to put the spies into isolation – too late, as it turned out.
By 6pm a security officer, Major Peter Perfect, arrived from Edinburgh and took control of the situation. He was annoyed at the chief constable for having allowed the two men to speak to so many locals, and demanded a list of names of everyone who had visited them. In turn all these people were tracked down and had the frighteners put on them – they had definitely not met any German spies that afternoon.
The security officer sat the two Norwegians down and began a preliminary interrogation. They told him they had been recruited by the Abwehr in Oslo and had undergone the training specifically to get the opportunity to travel to Britain, where they could join the Allies. They outlined their mission, and showed Major Perfect their equipment, including a set of detonators concealed inside a hairbrush.1
Despite spending a night in a cell, the two Norwegians were still treated hospitably on their trip south to London the next day. That is, until they arrived at Camp 020 in the back of an army truck. As the tarpaulin cover opened, a captain screamed at them: ‘Get down, you bloody spies!’ John Moe began explaining that they were not really spies, but was met with a barrage of abuse by the seemingly hysterical captain: ‘Shut up, you bastards! Nazi pigs.’ At this point the two Norwegians began to realize that perhaps everything was not going to work out as smoothly as they had anticipated.2
The two men were taken to separate cells and submitted to the full works. First up for Moe was a visit to Dr Harold Dearden, the camp’s often-maligned resident psychiatrist. After a physical examination, Moe was examined by a dentist who searched his mouth for items hidden in dentures, including suicide pills. Following the examinations, he was taken to face Commandant Stephens for the first time.
Moe describes walking into a huge dining room with a table at one end. Behind the green baize-covered table was seated a group of men whose faces were obscured by the light of two large windows behind them. To the side he noticed his radio set had been brought into the room. It suddenly dawned on Moe that this was a court martial and he was about to be tried for espionage. His discomfort increased when he asked the panel of seated men if they wanted him to show them how to work the radio. One of the panel, probably Stephens, yelled at Moe: ‘Come here! And in future only speak when you are spoken to.’3
Eventually Moe managed to establish his identity through his grandfather, a colonel in the 9th Manchester Regiment. The panel checked this information and appeared to relax somewhat. A chair was brought for ‘Mr Moe’, who proceeded to tell the panel everything he knew about the Abwehr in Oslo. Next up for a grilling was Tor Glad. What neither Moe nor Glad had any inkling of was that their arrival was not unexpected, but had been revealed by ISOS.4 What the panel at 020 was doing was checking their version of events against the information provided by the Bletchley decrypts.
Whereas Moe appeared to be genuine, the panel were suspicious that Glad had worked for Nazi censorship in Norway. Although some suspicion remained against Glad, the two Norwegians were handed over to B1a and taken out for dinner.
Moe recalled meeting a group of civilians in plus-fours, checked socks and tweed jackets with leather trim who introduced themselves as Charles, Jock and Bill. They were then joined by a Danish-speaking man who could understand Norwegian and were taken out for dinner at a restaurant called L’Ecu, near Piccadilly. After a full meal, followed by drinks and cigars, the two Norwegians were taken by tube to Earls Court, where MI5 kept a safe house in Argyll Mansions.
All the while the Norwegians were being entertained they were also being interrogated by the secretary of the Twenty Committee, Charles Cholmondeley, and ferried around by Jock Horsfall. On 10 April, the day after their night out in Piccadilly, Liddell recorded his verdict on the new arrivals. His concern was that Moe appeared ‘under the thumb’ of Glad, who had joined the Germans very soon after the invasion of Norway. Although Glad said he had helped a lot of his countrymen to join up with the Norwegian forces, Liddell was not sure about him.5
By the end of April the two agents were very much set up. They had been unkindly codenamed Mutt and Jeff after the cartoon characters whom they were thought to resemble. Like the cartoon duo, Moe (Mutt) was short and stout, while Glad (Jeff) was tall and lanky. They were installed in a safe house at 35 Crespigny Road, Hendon, and assigned Christopher Harmer as their case officer. Living next door with his wife and son was radio expert ‘Ted’ Poulton who would supervise their transmissions.
Although Mutt appeared to be completely genuine, suspicion over Jeff continued. In attempt to loosen his tongue, one of the pair’s minders took Jeff out on a pub crawl. It was a disastrous move. While Jeff could hold his drink, his minder Philip Rea entirely lost control of himself and started telling the Norwegian all about daredevil exploits he had performed for MI6. In the end Jeff had to carry Rea back to Crespigny Road. He was very quickly transferred out of MI5.
The end for Jeff came when, bored at the relative inactivity, he broke his curfew by spending the night with a nurse called Joan. He then upset the authorities by trying to sell his brand new Leica camera to a local photographic shop. This version of the German camera was new and unavailable in Britain and so the shopkeeper became suspicious and reported the matter to the police. On 16 August Jeff was taken by Harmer to John Marriott, who informed the Norwegian that he was unreliable and could not be used. However, because of the secrets he knew, he had to be interned for the duration of the war. From that point on, Jeff’s messages would be sent by an MI5 substitute.
XX
Since arriving in the United Kingdom and coming under British control, Tate had been operating from Barnet under the alias Harry Williamson. So impressed were the Germans with the quality of his traffic that six weeks into his mission Nikolaus Ritter nominated him for the Iron Cross First Class.6 His British employers were equally happy with him and Tate enjoyed quite a degree of personal freedom. For a spell he lived at Robertson’s home, with his wife Joan and their young daughter.
MI5 feared that if Ritter believed Snow was working under British control, then he would have to accept that Tate was also controlled. With this in mind, and obviously not realizing that Ritter was no longer in Portugal running the agents in England, MI5 decided to test Tate’s position with the Abwehr by urgently requesting more funds. By judging how much effort the Germans put into supplying this money, and by looking at the amount of money offered, they hoped to gain some appreciation of the agent’s standing with the enemy.
On 10 April Liddell recorded that Tate had made an urgent request for cash. Tate had a certain way with words and his broadcasts were often peppered with expletives. His message to Hamburg went along the lines of a demand that unless they paid him £4,000 they could ‘go fuck themselves’.7 A week later Liddell recorded that the Germans had suggested dropping money from an aircraft and then sending a larger amount of money later on, care of the Post Office at Watford. Encouraged by this news, Liddell made arrangements with the Air Ministry not to shoot down the German plane. However, the Abwehr changed its mind and informed Tate they were arranging for someone to parachute in with the money. Furthermore, Tate would know this agent from his time in Hamburg.
The arrival of this new agent was also foretold by another captured agent called Josef Jakobs, who had arrived in Britain by parachute on the night of 31 January. As he landed, Jakobs broke his ankle and spent the night in agony caught up in his parachute and unable to move. The pain was so unbearable that in the morning he pulled out his pistol and began firing into the air to attract attention. He did not have too long to wait before being picked up, and after an initial interview at Camp 020, Jakobs was taken to hospital and allowed to recover from his injury before further attempts were made to interrogate him. Although the spell in hospital had revived his spirits and he proved a tough nut to crack, on 29 April 1941 Jakobs revealed the description of a man who might be expected to arrive in the near future.
In the early hours of 13 May, agent Karel Richter parachuted into England from a plane piloted by Gartenfeld. After burying his equipment and going into hiding for three days, Richter walked into the town of Colney and approached PC Scott in the High Street. Richter told the policeman he was feeling unwell and asked to be taken to the nearest hospital. Instead, Richter found himself in the local police station where he was searched and a sum of £500 and $1,400 was found on him. The local superintendent had previously been warned by MI5 to be on the look-out for anyone carrying large sums of money, so Richter was immediately suspected of being a spy. The fact that his identification papers had been based on the Snow blueprint sealed his fate.
Under questioning, Richter claimed he was a Sudeten Czech; he had landed in a boat ten miles west of Cromer on the previous night and was on his way to London, where he was due to meet someone outside the barber’s shop of the Regent Palace Hotel. He claimed not to know who this person was but he had been told to hand over £450. Richter told the police that he was formerly in a concentration camp and accepted the mission for a chance to escape to America. A plausible story, perhaps, but MI5 had heard that sort of thing before.
Richter was sent off to Camp 020, where he proved a difficult subject. Much to the annoyance of his interrogators he gloated over them, telling them that very soon the Germans would invade and it would soon be him sitting on the other side of the interrogation table. His spirits were dampened somewhat when the information about him provided by Jakobs was revealed. Then, after much careful grooming, Jakobs was brought into the interrogation room to confront Richter.
After this unexpected rendezvous, chinks began to appear in Richter’s armour. It still required 17 hours of interrogation before the German agent revealed where his parachute and equipment had been hidden. Accompanied by Commandant Stephens and other camp officers, Richter was taken back to the place where he had hidden the equipment near Hatfield.
Further interrogation revealed that Richter had been recruited by Jules Boeckel who had had him trained in air intelligence and radio transmission. He was then handed over to Hauptmann Praetorius who completed his instruction. The most alarming revelation to come from Richter regarded his mission. Initially he said that he had to give some money and a quartz radio crystal to another German agent at the Regent Palace Hotel. After this he was to make meteorological reports and provide details of the electrical grid system in England. However, as the interrogation progressed, Richter revealed his primary mission was to check up on the reliability of Tate. Richter explained some of the recent messages sent by Tate had caused the Germans to become suspicious that he was either under control or had been substituted by another person, which was in fact the case. Praetorius had apparently described Tate to Richter as ‘our master pearl’ before adding: ‘If he is false, then the whole string is false.’ Richter then went on to explain that once he had met Tate he had to make every effort to obtain a boat and return to Germany in order to report back in person.
This was alarming news to say the least. Tommy Robertson later described it as ‘a dicky period in our career which we were never anxious to be looked at too closely’.8 Clearly Richter could not be allowed to return to Germany and therefore his usefulness as a double agent was very limited, as the Germans would press him to report on Tate.
Meanwhile, Tate had been on the air complaining that his money had still not showed up. He sent the German another of his short, but violent tirades, this time not even bothering to encode it, but sending the message en clair: ‘I shit on Germany and its whole fucking secret service.’9 This cajoling appeared to work, and it was not long before the Germans suggested a new plan. Tate was told to take a No. 11 bus from Victoria Station at 4pm. On board the bus would be a Japanese man carrying a copy of The Times and a book in his left hand. At the first stop Tate and the Japanese would get off the bus and wait for the next No. 11 to come along. Tate was to sit next to the Japanese and ask him if there was any news in the paper. The Japanese man would hand Tate the newspaper, which would contain the money.
Agreeing to the plan, Tate pointed out that the No. 11 no longer had a terminus at Victoria and suggested using a No. 16 instead. Robertson decided that some undercover Special Branch officers should put the Japanese courier under observation to establish his identity and see where he went.
After a few missed opportunities, the plan went ahead on 29 May. The scheme almost failed when the bus was stopped by a policeman at a crossroads. Believing this was the first stop, Tate and the courier jumped off the bus, which then drove off without them. Realizing their mistake, the pair were then unable to get onto the following bus, which was not held up at the crossroads. Eventually the pair got onto the fourth bus to come by, all of which messed up the Special Branch officers waiting up the road. Luckily another Special Branch officer – a champion cyclist – was following the bus on his bicycle. He saw what had gone wrong and so cycled off ahead to warn everyone further up the road. The exchange went ahead as planned and Tate walked away £200 the richer. He later radioed Hamburg and informed them he would be off the air for several days as he was going to get drunk. The Japanese courier was photographed and followed back to the Japanese embassy by two Special Branch women. He turned out to be Lieutenant Commander Mitinory Yosii, one of the assistant naval attachés.
Despite getting the money, Tate needed a means of regular income. Even at 1941 prices, £200 was not going to last an active spy without any other income too long in the field. The answer to the problem was aptly codenamed Plan Midas.
This plan was the brainchild of Dusko Popov, the double agent brought to London just before Christmas. The Yugoslavian playboy had been kept quite busy, making several trips to Lisbon. Furthering his career as a German spy, Popov had carried out several reconnaissance missions with his Scottish case officer, William Luke – whom Popov knew by the alias Bill Mathews. The Yugoslav merited special considerations because he was not a radio agent – he would actually have to report back to the Germans what he had seen under cross-examination. Therefore he was actually taken out by his case officer to visit the sites in question. However, once they arrived close to a site, Popov was left in a local pub while the case officer went and took the photographs on behalf of the agent. Once developed, these photos would be shown to him, often with bits blacked out, revealing what he was meant to have seen. The trouble was that if the Yugoslav actually saw the sites himself, the Germans might be able to coax more out of him than the British wished them to know. This was especially true when he was sent to spy out some of Colonel Turner’s decoy sites. If Popov saw that a Q site was actually nothing more than a series of lights on top of poles, there was always the danger this might leak out.
He had also spent considerable energy promoting a deception scheme devised by Ewen Montagu, codenamed Plan IV. Montagu proposed Popov be given a nominal source for passing naval intelligence to the Germans. The source would be a Jewish barrister who had become an officer in naval intelligence and was desperate to ingratiate himself with the Nazis in return for preferential treatment when the invasion came. He gave Popov the cover story that this officer could get his hands on a chart showing the location of sea mines. In return he wanted a letter from the Germans saying that if he was captured he was to be handed over to the Abwehr, not the Gestapo. Popov had his reservations and said he would need a name for this offer to work. Montagu offered his own name, saying that it cropped up on enough Jewish charity committees and the Germans could also check it on the law list. Popov accepted and from that moment on Montagu became Germany’s most important source on secret naval intelligence. It was only at the end of the war that he considered the potential repercussions of being fingered in captured Nazi documents as an agent!10 Unfortunately although the scheme was well thought out, Popov had trouble selling it to his employers. Even when Popov announced that Montagu was prepared to hand the mine chart over in person at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, the Germans – unusually, it must be said – still would not take the bait.11
Popov had much more success when he reported the recruitment of two sub-agents in London to keep things ticking over while he was away. Both agents were of course nominated by MI5. The first was Dickie Metcalfe, codenamed Balloon. Metcalfe was introduced to Popov as a disgraced army officer who had been forced to resign after financial irregularities. With a taste for fast living, Metcalfe was in desperate need of cash and had a grudge against the British government. In fact Metcalfe had resigned his commission in 1935 without any disgrace attached to his name at all.
The second agent was Friedl Gartner, the Austrian socialite Popov had met at the home of Stewart Menzies’ brother. Popov and Gartner had been romantically linked since his return from Lisbon. She was given the codename Gelatine, which was apparently a corruption of ‘jolly little thing’.12 Her forte was supplying political information to the Germans she was supposed to have picked up from society gossip. The information was in fact all provided to her by their case officer, Bill Luke. All Gartner did was phrase the information in her own style and then have it written in secret ink.
Because he was now head of a network of three agents, MI5 codenamed Popov Tricycle, the name by which he is most famously known. Alas, the popular myth that he was called Tricycle because he enjoyed three-in-the-bed romps is unfounded.
In Friedl’s case, she did not require the Germans to pay her as an agent because she was nominally a supporter of their cause. For Balloon this was totally different. He was a mercenary and needed payment in return for the information he provided. Tricycle’s German employers asked him to take cash from Lisbon to pay Balloon, but Tricycle declined this, pointing out that he would be searched and the numbers on any banknotes would be recorded. If the money was handed over to Balloon and he was subsequently caught, the British secret service would be able to trace Tricycle by the numbers of the banknotes. Instead Tricycle suggested a much more complex means – one that already had the backing of the Twenty Committee. If von Karsthoff also agreed to this, it meant that MI5 would effectively become the paymaster of the German espionage system in Britain.
Plan Midas was quite complex. Devised by Popov and Tommy Robertson, it centred on a wealthy London theatrical agent named Eric Glass who agreed to cooperate with MI5, even though he had no idea what this cooperation entailed. Mr Glass, so the cover story went, was entirely convinced that Britain was going to lose the war and, to protect his interests, wanted secretly to move his money out of Britain. To achieve this he was willing to pay over the odds on the exchange rate and was prepared to pay 10 per cent commission to anyone that would facilitate the deal.
Tricycle travelled to Lisbon on 28 June. In his first meeting with von Karsthoff, Tricycle mentioned the theatrical agent’s plight. As expected, von Karsthoff immediately took the bait, thinking this would be the perfect way to pay the agents in Britain and make a little bit of money for himself on the side. It took several weeks for authorization from Berlin to proceed, but finally the deal was done. Less the 10 per cent commission, which was shared equally between von Karstshoff and Tricycle, the sum of $40,000 was paid into a New York bank account in the theatrical agent’s name by the Abwehr. In return, the theatrical agent in London would pay the same sum to a person in Britain of the Abwehr’s choosing.
Where the plan nearly blew up in MI5’s face was when Tricycle was asked the name of the theatrical agent and his address. He mistakenly gave Glass’s name as Eric Sand, at 15 Haymarket, just off Piccadilly. When Tricycle returned to Britain and reported in, the mistake was quickly realized. The name plaque in Mr Glass’s office was changed to read ‘Mr Sand’, Glass was told to answer all his calls as Mr Sand and an MI5 receptionist was temporarily installed in the building. Dick White was furious about Tricycle’s mistake, rightly pointing out that if the Germans checked up on this ‘Mr Sand’ they would quickly find out he did not really exist.13
It was now a question of waiting to see who turned up to collect the payment from ‘Mr Sand’. In the end, it was Tate who received the instruction to go to Piccadilly and collect the money. He reported collecting £18,000 cash from the theatrical agent in his next transmission to Germany.
Clearly Tate was still trusted by the Germans, otherwise they would not have chosen him to make such a large pick up. In an almost comical twist, by solving one problem, B1a had now created an even bigger headache for themselves. Although relieved that Tate appeared to be back in the Germans’ good books, they realized that with £18,000 burning a hole in his pocket, the Germans would now expect Tate to be able to go anywhere and buy information and make reports like never before. Solving that problem would take a little more thought.
In the meantime, the Tricycle case took an unexpected turn that effectively put him out of action until the end of 1942. Having instigated Plan Midas, the Yugoslavian was sent by the Abwehr to the United States in order to form a spy ring there. This mission was to cause untold trouble, as Tricycle’s case was passed firstly from MI5 to MI6, and then to the American FBI. It was hoped that FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover would see the advantage of using Tricycle to set up and run a German espionage network that the United States could control much the same way MI5 had done in Britain. Unfortunately this was not to be so.
One of the most controversial aspects of Tricycle’s mission related to a questionnaire he was given by the Germans. A sizeable portion of this questionnaire was dedicated to information on the naval base at Pearl Harbor. According to Popov’s post-war memoirs his contact in the Abwehr, ‘Johnny’ Jebsen, had left him quite clear that Japan was planning an attack on Pearl Harbor, probably using the British torpedo attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto as its model. Furthermore, due to the limitations of Japan’s strategic oil reserves, this attack would have to be launched before the end of 1941. In his account of the double cross system, Masterman appears to confirm this, indicating that Popov was sent to give the questionnaire to the Americans in person to make the argument more persuasive.
Arriving in New York City in August 1941, Tricycle was passed over to the FBI, who greeted the agent like a treacherous enemy pariah. Rather than allow Tricycle’s contact with the Abwehr to pass through the British, the FBI was uncooperative in the extreme. Hoover fell out with Tricycle, believing that the Yugoslav was immoral and that the only possible use for him was to catch spies and earn headlines for his organization. More crucially, according to Popov’s memoirs, nothing was done about the Pearl Harbor questionnaire except to ‘bury it’, with disastrous results.14
Tricycle’s cover in the United States was to report the views of British propaganda by Yugoslavs living in the United States. From the Abwehr’s point of view, Tricycle was to use his playboy lifestyle to ingratiate himself with the current movers and shakers in American society. To this end, Tricycle rented an exclusive penthouse on Park Avenue, bought an expensive car, took skiing holidays at Sun Valley and had a long-running affair with the French-born Hollywood actress Simone Simon, all of which infuriated the apparently puritanical Hoover.
In November 1941 Tricycle was ordered to Rio de Janeiro to meet the Abwehr representative there. He was asked to set up a radio link with Brazil and given a large sum of money. This radio link was operated by the FBI, who refused to allow Tricycle to have any say in what information was sent over to the Abwehr. This was potentially disastrous, as when, or if, Tricycle ever did return to Lisbon, he would have no idea about the information he was supposed to have collected.
Towards the end of the year, Twenty Committee member Ewen Montagu was sent out to America to see how the case was developing. On his return from America he gave a report on Tricycle to the Twenty Committee on 26 February 1942. His report on the agent’s handling in America was not good reading. In short, Tricycle was depressed. Since arriving in America he had done very little except his mission to Rio and living out his playboy lifestyle. Montagu pointed out that the only FBI officers with previous experience of double cross cases were senior members of their service who were now unavailable to run cases of this nature. The juniors in charge of the case knew little or nothing of the technique and, to make matters worse, Montagu speculated that there might be upwards of six counter-espionage services in the United States, none of whom appeared to be cooperating. His gloomy conclusion was to try to get Tricycle out of the United States and into Canada as soon as possible.
There was more trouble to come with Tricycle, this time on the other side of the Atlantic. Although Tricycle had no idea what the FBI were sending the Germans, the British secret service was intercepting the Abwehr’s opinion of it through ISOS. When MI5 enquired about this ISOS material, the SIS refused to pass on any of the secret material relating to Tricycle, citing the three-mile limit of Empire protocol, and pointing out that Tricycle was the property of SIS as long as he remained beyond that limit.
Eventually, in May 1942 MI5 were shown ISOS reports. There had been good reason to conceal them: they indicated that the Abwehr had become suspicious of Tricycle because of the poor quality of his otherwise excellent reports. Speculating why the reports were substandard, his Abwehr controllers speculated that Ivan, as Tricycle was known to them, had become a double agent since arriving in the United States.
This was extremely bad news. It must be remembered to what extent the B1a cases were linked. If Tricycle was suspected, so would be his sub-agents Gelatine and Balloon. Through Plan Midas, Tate would also have to become a suspect. If this occurred, the Germans would have cause to investigate all the other cases operating out of the United Kingdom.
In view of this potential crisis, Liddell went out to America to meet with the FBI and try to impress upon them the opportunity presented by Tricycle. On 4 July Liddell met Tricycle and then went to see FBI Assistant Director, Percy E. ‘Sam’ Foxworth, who was considered ‘by far and away the ablest and most intelligent representative of the FBI’ by the British. He came away disappointed by the interview.15
Unfortunately, there was a fundamentally different view of double agents. Foxworth argued that Tricycle had cost the FBI a great deal in terms of money and information passed to the enemy, but they had got little back in return. Liddell explained that they had got a great deal out of the case. Tricycle was, he told Foxworth, ‘an insurance policy against penetration’ by additional German spies. If Tricycle was giving the Germans what they wanted, they would not need to send others. In addition, those that might already be operating there would eventually become known to Tricycle and thus be revealed to the FBI.
In the end Foxworth wasn’t interested. It must be recognized that the pressures that had caused the Twenty Committee to come into being were mostly absent in the United States. America was not in imminent danger of German invasion as Britain had been in 1940 when the importance of stopping the reports of agents was paramount.
Therefore, with the Americans and the British agreeing to disagree, on 3 August Tricycle was passed back to British control.16 Before Tricycle could be allowed to return to Europe and face his German employers, he had to come up with a plausible account to explain why his time in the United States had been so unproductive. Quitting his apartment and moving to the Waldorf Astoria, it took some time for Tricycle to piece together an account. He was warned that the Germans might go rough on him in Lisbon, or even try to send him to Germany where the Gestapo might interrogate him, but the brazen Tricycle was all set for a showdown with his German bosses.
He arrived by plane in Lisbon on 14 October and arranged a meeting with his controller, von Karsthoff. Berlin had warned von Karsthoff that at the first indication the Yugoslav’s story did not appear plausible, they were to break off contact with the agent immediately. However, von Karsthoff was somewhat taken aback by Tricycle’s aggressive stance. The double agent laid the blame for the mission’s failure at the Abwehr’s door, claiming they had given him inadequate funds for his mission. Von Karsthoff shot back, insinuating that the agent had spent too much time frolicking with movie stars. Also, apparently, a photograph of Tricycle with Simone Simon had appeared in the press. This was hardly the sort of low-key approach secret agents were supposed to maintain. In turn, Tricycle pointed out that in the United States Hollywood stars were like royalty, and thus presented a crucial opportunity to break into important society circles.
Tricycle then played his trump card – he threatened to resign. Although von Karsthoff menacingly pointed out that espionage was not the sort of game you could just walk away from without consequence, he did back off a little. Again, the weakness of the Abwehr was that too many people’s prestige and income were linked to keeping their agents in the field. The loss of an agent meant the loss of that prestige and income, which might in turn result in a posting somewhere undesirably cold. This is perhaps what had saved Snow, Celery and Tate and what now saved Tricycle. Three days after his arrival, the agent was given the all clear from Berlin. On 21 October he returned to Britain to rebuild his case with his slate wiped clean. By then, Tricycle’s star had been replaced by another: the greatest double agent of them all – Garbo.