7

 

The Spies Who Never Were

 

 

Did the benefits of secret intelligence flow only one way? Certainly the Germans did not think so. One of the important rebuttals that the Abwehr secret service would have offered was the network of spies they had established in Britain. These spies sent back such valuable information that the Germans awarded several of them the Iron Cross in recognition of their contributions.

At the war's outset, one of the agents the Abwehr would have cited was an electrical engineer code-named Snow. His firm did work for the British Admiralty, and Snow was also assigned to seek German customers. During his trips to Germany he let it be known that he was a Welsh nationalist bitterly opposed to the British. Recognizing that he could be a resource for useful information about the Royal Navy, the Germans had, in 1936, recruited him as an agent.

When war broke out, he quickly made himself the hub of an organization with a dozen or more Anglophobic agents throughout Britain. He trained them in the radio codes of the Abwehr, and his network became highly regarded by his spymaster for the information it transmitted about ship movements and deliveries of materials from the U.S. When, in 1940, Snow collapsed from the strain of his double life, his spy work was taken over by one of the subordinates he had so carefully trained.

A second agent, code-named Tate, was a sturdy young German fluent in English and trained in espionage. He parachuted into Britain equipped with special radio equipment that he used to receive orders from his controllers and to transmit back answers to their questions. Active to the war's end, he sent hundreds of messages about what he observed and was able to learn in Britain. He was one of those granted the Iron Cross, First and Second Class.

Zigzag was the code name given to a criminal imprisoned by the British on the Channel Island of Jersey. When the Germans occupied the island, he offered his service in a spirit of vengeance against his former captors. The Germans trained him as a demolition expert and dropped him by parachute on the mainland. His primary mission was to sabotage the De Havilland factory where Mosquito light bombers were being produced. He was promised fifteen thousand pounds if he did the job. On January 29, 1943, he was able to report his success. An explosion had done extensive damage to the plant, as British newspapers indignantly reported and aerial reconnaissance could verify.

Tricycle was the code name of a youth from a wealthy Yugoslav family. Through his family's business he had high-level contacts in many countries—for example, he had once squired the Duke of York around during the duke's visit to Belgrade. Before the war he had gone to Germany's University of Freiburg to study law. When the war began, one of his German friends who worked for the Abwehr asked Tricycle to become a Nazi agent in Britain. The friend explained that while the Abwehr had many spies there, they wanted someone who could move in the upper strata of English society and help determine who would best cooperate in the coming invasion of Britain. To provide cover for his presence in England, he could carry on his business interests. The Germans knew he was a high liver and an inveterate womanizer, but they were willing to pay him well for his services. He gained his code name from the three-person spy agency he established—an agency the Germans relied on heavily for insights into the thinking of Britain's elite. When U.S. entry into the war began to seem inevitable, the Germans sent him to New York to begin structuring an American spy network.

The star of their show was the agent code-named Garbo—a Spaniard who presented himself at the German embassy in Madrid as one who so strongly hated Communism that he was willing to become a spy for German Fascism. Before sending him to Lisbon for his flight on to London, his German spymasters equipped him for his mission; he took with him a questionnaire covering information they most wanted to receive, along with secret ink, money and an address to which he could mail his findings. The Germans were delighted by his long, colorful, insightful reports from Britain, especially after he lined up a network of agents reporting to him from advantageous spots all over the island. The Abwehr also respected the care he expressed for his helpers, as when his agent in Liverpool sickened and died. In response to the obituary notice Garbo posted to them, his spy-masters wished him to extend their deepest sympathies to the agent's widow. He, too, was awarded the Iron Cross.

With these highly effective spies in place, along with a scattering of lesser agents, the Germans were content that their needs for special intelligence from Britain were being fully met. They soon saw no further necessity of dropping in new agents from the air or landing them from U-boats.

For the Allies, the most delicious irony of the war was that all of this complex infrastructure of German espionage was a chimera. Every one of some 120 agents and subagents the Nazis thought they had in their pockets was, in fact, a double agent, working under British control.

Snow, whose real name was Arthur Owens, made a practice during his prewar journeys back and forth to Germany of supplying snippets of information to the Nazis while also collecting facts that could prove useful to British authorities. As soon as war broke out, he immediately offered his services to Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. SIS chiefs were doubtful about him at first and actually locked him in a prison cell. But Snow proved his loyalty and became an enormous asset. His organization of a dozen agents was entirely imaginary. His reports to the Abwehr via radio included accurate tidbits mixed in with subtle misinformation. The reason for his end as a German agent was not that job pressures had caused him to collapse but that he had become an alcoholic and was no longer trustworthy. The British phased him out and had one of his "subordinates" take charge.

Tate really was a German who parachuted into Britain. Quickly captured, he was presented with the choice of being hanged or agreeing to be "turned" to work for the British. He chose life and underwent what was described as "an almost religious conversion to the Allied cause." Tate became one of the most trusted members of the British team, showing great resourcefulness in seeming to meet the demands of his Hamburg spymaster while larding his largely innocuous responses with carefully skewed data.

As for Zigzag and his destruction of the De Havilland factory, that was all neatly arranged by the British. Camouflage experts created a fake extension to the plant that could be blown up without hindering production at the real facility. The press, ignorant of what had actually happened, ran lurid accounts of the sabotage, which Zigzag could triumphantly report in order to collect his fifteen thousand pounds.

Tricycle's real name was Dusko Popov. During his studies in Germany he formed some close friendships but also, secretly, developed a fierce hatred of Nazism. Consequently, when Johann "Johnny" Jebsen, one of his friends, came to Belgrade to recruit him as a spy for German intelligence, Popov sought the advice of the British consul. He was told to go ahead and pretend to work for them. Settling in London, Popov lived well—largely at the Nazis' expense. He rented luxurious accommodations and enjoyed numerous romances. His reports of weekends spent at the country estates of the rich and powerful made good reading for his German overlords while misleading them as to the true situation in Britain. To the end the Germans considered him one of their ablest agents and regarded the reports that he and his support net sent from London as among the most valuable intelligence they received. In England, Popov worked with Ian Fleming and is thought to be one of the models Fleming used in creating James Bond.

In his way, Garbo—whose real name was Juan Pujol—was as creative as Fleming. Son of a father who instilled in him the desire to fight tyranny, he set out to do as much destruction to the Nazi cause as he could manage. Instead of going from Madrid to Britain, as his spymaster thought he'd done, he holed up in Lisbon and for nine months prepared a series of letters that he purported to write in England and convey by courier to be mailed to the Germans from Portugal. He had never been to Britain, and all he had to work with now was a tourist guide to England, an out-of-date railway timetable, a large map of the islands and whatever he could glean from bookstalls. He also had his imagination. His letters pictured him reporting from London while his first subagents fed him useful information from the West Country, Glasgow and Liverpool. It was all fiction, but the Germans were royally duped.

Twice Garbo approached the British to serve as an agent for them and twice he was rebuffed. He finally gained their approval in an unexpected way. Bletchley Park's codebreakers had found that the Germans were marshaling their forces to intercept a large convoy that was supposed to have left Liverpool bound for Malta. It was puzzling—there was no such convoy. The British took a different view toward Garbo when they discovered that the expedition, on which the Germans expended a huge waste of effort, was his invention. He was smuggled into Britain in April 1942 and given his code name in recognition of his chameleonlike ability to assume varied roles.

In London, Garbo blossomed. He expanded his network to six agents, all of them imaginary. From his facile pen flowed reports from all six, each revealing an individual style. The stream of information—always with a top spin of misinformation—he sent to his masters was so bounteous that when gathered together after the war his reports totaled some fifty volumes.

The Liverpool agent, who had reported that nonexistent Malta convoy, came to be seen as a problem. With German aircraft closing the Thames as a convoy destination, Liverpool became the main convoy harbor. An agent there would be expected to see more than the Germans needed to know. Garbo's solution was simply to kill him off. The accounts he transmitted of the agent's declining health and subsequent death, together with the newspaper obituary he sent along, were all fakery. The Germans paid their respects to a widow who existed only in Garbo's imagination.

The most impressive indicator of the trust the Germans placed in Garbo is that they informed him of the code used by the Abwehr intelligence service in their station-to-station communications. When the code was changed, they sent him the new one—saving a great deal of work for Bletchley Park!

Garbo-Pujol's story had a glorious ending. After V-E Day, he honored his pledge to secrecy and slipped away to Venezuela. "I wanted to be forgotten," he said, "to pass unnoticed and to be untraceable." And so he remained for thirty-six years. But then, when the stories of the double agents became public knowledge, writer Nigel West tracked him down. Pujol returned to England to a hero's welcome, received a personal thanks from the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace, and told his story in collaboration with West in their popular book Operation Garbo.

 

 

The XX Committee: Master Tricksters

 

Behind all this artful hocus-pocus is an equally inventive story. When the war began, the German secret service was bereft of spies in Britain. This was the result of deliberate policy. Ever hopeful of persuading those Aryan-blooded Brits to join, or at least acquiesce in, the German battle against the Bolsheviks, Hitler had forbidden placing any agents in Britain. He wanted to avoid having the unmasking of spies roil the relationship. Only when it became evident that Britain would remain an implacable foe did Hitler allow the creation of a spy network.

The Germans were clumsy in this task. While their agents were generally fluent in English, they were poorly trained in the vagaries of English social norms and quickly gave themselves away. One tried to use his forged ration book to pay for a meal at a restaurant. Another, when billed two-and-six, thought that meant two pounds and six shillings, not two shillings and sixpence. The agents' fake identity documents contained easy-to-spot errors that had been placed there on the sneaky advice of Snow. Germans landing with radios began immediately to send messages from one location as though not knowing that direction finding allowed the British to triangulate on them and track them down. And the Germans trusted agents such as Snow so unreservedly that they gave him the names of other spies, who were summarily captured.

In its first major attempt to place spies in Britain, from September to November 1940, the Abwehr landed twenty-one agents. All but one were captured or gave themselves up. The exception committed suicide.

When the British realized what a prime asset they had in their hands, questions arose as to how to make the most of it. How could they manage the finicky game of supplying information that would satisfy the Abwehr without doing real harm to Britain? In January 1941, representatives of the various services and the Foreign Office came together to establish the Double Cross Committee, also called the Twenty Committee because the Roman letters for twenty depict a double cross. Holding weekly meetings until May 1945, the Double Cross Committee took over responsibility for control of the double agents.

Chosen to head the committee was J. C. Masterman. Before taking on this wartime duty he had made his living as a writer of popular mystery novels. Now he turned his skills to the task of supervising the scripts to be transmitted to the Germans.

The committee started cautiously. Acceptance of the incredible fact that there were no undetected spies in Britain, and therefore no one to alert the Abwehr that its network was comprised of all double agents, was slow to sink in. Also, before becoming too bold with misinformation, the credibility of the double agents had to be established in order to make their spy-masters confident they were being well served.

A case officer was assigned to each double agent. Usually this was an older man who could serve as a father figure to the uprooted, scared and often unstable youth under his control. The Twenty Committee saw to it that the agent's course was as authentic as possible. If an agent was requested by his spymaster to report on a specific defense factory, Masterman wrote later, "We arranged, if it was possible, that he should visit the place himself before he replied." The agent "must experience all that he had professed to have done." The committee also saw to it that each agent was provided with an identity card, ration books, clothing coupons, a place to live, a housekeeper and cook, day and night guards, possibly a car and driver, and a radio operator to monitor and transmit his messages.

Care was taken to back up agents' claims. In addition to the war plant explosion to justify Zigzag's reports, a mock generating station was blown up, and at a time when the Nazis were convinced that the U-boats were starving the British, a simulated food storage area was destroyed. Newspaper accounts of the shocking incidents of sabotage made good reading for the Abwehr and earned fresh plaudits for their hard-working agents.

Treading the narrow catwalk of responding to the German spymasters' queries and orders without surrendering information of real value, the committee members made it an ironclad practice never to release new material until it had been cleared by the appropriate authority. At times cautious reviewers crossed out whole sections of proposed scenarios. When the Americans came aboard, the same courtesy was extended to them. General Eisenhower and Admiral Stark were asked to name an army and a navy officer to approve what Double Cross would report about the American forces.

Always in the minds of Masterman and his team was the idea that, as he explained, "at some time in the distant future a great day would come when our agents would be used for a grand and final deception of the enemy." Awaiting that day, they satisfied themselves with less bold deceits.

When invasion of Britain was threatened, the agents accentuated the island's readiness to fend off attackers. The shore defenses were made to seem perceptibly stronger than they were. Warnings went to the Abwehr that antiaircraft resources were being effectively organized to destroy Luftwaffe planes. The numbers of Spitfires available to the RAF were boosted, and the production of new aircraft was exaggerated. German generals were not to be allowed to think the British people would give in tamely; the mood was reported to be defiant, the morale high.

During the Blitz, the Air Ministry gave the committee a special charge: persuade the Luftwaffe to ease off on bombing the cities and concentrate more on the RAF airfields. In order to win the war of attrition, the ministry wanted the German planes to fly where the antiaircraft defenses were strongest—RAF's airfields—and lessen their attacks against the less well protected urban centers. The committee responded by preparing papers purporting to report on a hand-wringing meeting of the Air Raid Review Committee. The papers expressed alarm about poor defenses at the airfields and the inadequacy of the training of their antiaircraft gunners. These were weaknesses that must be corrected: altogether too many planes were being destroyed on the ground. Naturally these distressing papers fell into the hands of Germany's agents.

Did the deception work? An Ultra decrypt told of the German air force's belief that "the British ground organization concentrated in the south of England is the Achilles' heel of the RAF. A planned attack on the ground organization will hit the British air force at its most tender spot."

Similarly, the Twenty Committee was given a role to play in the deception carried out in November 1942 to mislead the Germans about the Allied landings in northwest Africa. The Nazis were aware that something big was coming; they didn't know where. To keep them off guard, the double agents played to Hitler's fears of an attack through Norway and also raised the specter of a landing in northern France. As far as a landing in Africa was concerned, Ultra decrypts showed that the Germans felt sure the Allies lacked the shipping to manage a landing inside the Mediterranean; they believed any landing the Allies might try would be made down the West African coast at Dakar. The deception worked: there was little opposition when the Allies went ashore at Oran and Algiers, inside the Mediterranean, as well as at Casablanca, on the Atlantic coast.

Double Cross was a fragile venture. Everyone feared that each day the cover would be blown and the Germans would wake up to the fact that they were being gulled. Several times that moment came perilously close. Probably the closest call came with the agent code-named Summer. He was another of those German lads who had parachuted into Britain, been captured and chosen to cooperate. But his betrayal weighed on him. One day he half strangled his guard and raced off on the guard's motorbike, heading for the coast. Along the way he came across a canoe he could steal. He lashed it to the bike, apparently thinking he could use it to cross the Channel or the North Sea. Unfortunately for Summer, the bike broke down, and he was recaptured and, to make sure he would make no further attempt, executed. The reliable Snow reported to Summer's spymaster that his agent had come under suspicion by the police and had gone into hiding. So Double Cross survived another day, and in fact kept on fooling the Germans until the war's end.

The question remains: why did the Germans fail to realize that their agents were submitting more misinformation than material of true benefit? Masterman's answer was that much of this vulnerability derived from the Abwehr's flawed system. Each spymaster's prestige, job security and income depended on his having discovered an agent and launched him on his career. If an agent's reliability was questioned, his chief defender invariably turned out to be his own case officer, who would go to any lengths to protect him against doubt and criticism. After all, any case officer who admitted misgivings about his agent could face the prospect of a Gestapo prison or reassignment to the Russian front.

Soon after the war ended, Masterman prepared a report on the Twenty Committee, but for twenty-five years he could not get approval to have it published. His slim volume, The Double-Cross System, appeared in 1972.

That was too soon for him to reveal the role of the codebreakers in helping Double Cross succeed. He referred instead to "secret sources" that "permitted us to observe that the reports of our agents were transmitted to Berlin; that they were believed." Hinsley's later history spelled out BP's participation and detailed how Bletchley's codebreakers mastered each advance in the sophistication of the Abwehr's codes, including its conversion to Enigma.

Conquest of the Abwehr Enigma, as Sebag-Montefiore has related in Enigma, was another triumph for Dilly Knox and his "girls," the pretty young women he liked to have around him—all quite platonically, it would seem. Using the manual techniques Knox called "rodding," Mavis Lever and Margaret Rock broke the Abwehr cipher on December 8, 1941.

The rewards of the codebreaking went well beyond verifying that the double agents' skewed information was being accepted as truth. The spy-masters' questions supplied rich clues as to the direction of the Germans' thoughts and intentions. They also pointed up gaps in the enemy's knowledge that could be exploited. In tandem, the Twenty Committee and Bletchley Park made "turned" spies and Nazi-hating volunteer agents into strong contributors to Allied victory. In Hinsley's words, they turned what the Germans thought to be a major asset into "a substantial liability."

 

 

Tricycle's Ignored Pearl Harbor Warning

 

Another series of incidents involving one of Britain's double agents, the Yugoslav volunteer Dusko Popov, deserves mention here. The first was that previously mentioned raid on Italian warships at Taranto. On a November night in 1940, Britain's fast new aircraft carrier Illustrious, guarded by a screen of four cruisers and four destroyers, slipped stealthily through the Mediterranean southeast of the boot of Italy. Just after eight-thirty, her crew began launching the carrier's twenty-one venerable open-cockpit Fairy Swordfish torpedo bombers. Their target lay 170 miles away: the good portion of Italy's war fleet that lay at anchor in Taranto's harbor.

The sneak attack completely surprised the Italians. Swooping in at mast height, the Swordfish sent their missiles crashing into ship after ship. At the cost of just two planes, the British sank or badly damaged three battleships, two cruisers and two destroyers, putting nearly half the Italian navy out of action for a long period. Most important, the raid frightened the Italians into moving their capital ships out of Taranto and into the safer harbor at Naples. The significance was that they were now too far away to be effective against British convoys in the Mediterranean.

In May 1941, the Italians were again surprised—this time by a visit of Japanese naval officers wishing to review their Tripartite partner's naval facilities. Rear Admiral Kobe Abe and his aides wanted to know every possible detail of the British Taranto raid and form in their minds a complete picture of how it was carried out.

Shortly afterward, Popov made one of his regular trips to Lisbon, ostensibly for business but actually to check in with his German spymasters. There he also met with Johnny Jebsen, who, although highly placed in the Abwehr secret service, was revealing himself to be as anti-Nazi as Popov. In fact, Jebsen did become a double agent, code-named Artist, working for the Twenty Committee.

In Lisbon, Jebsen reported on his own puzzling recent mission. He had been a German representative in the group escorting the Japanese at Taranto. It was clear to him, as he informed Popov, that Japan's military leaders were gathering information to guide their own surprise attack by carrier aircraft. But against whom? And where?

The answers, Popov was convinced, came when the top German intelligence officer in Lisbon met with him, instructed him to go to the U.S., asked that he set about establishing a new German spy ring in the country and gave him a questionnaire to which the Germans wanted answers. It was also urgent that Popov travel to Hawaii as soon as he could manage. When he read the questionnaire he could understand why. Of the hundred or so points of interest included, fully a third pertained to Hawaii, with a whole series of questions relating specifically to Pearl Harbor.

Popov was in no doubt, nor were his British colleagues when he returned to London, regarding the significance of these two events. The Japanese were planning a Taranto-style attack on the Pearl Harbor anchorage of U.S. Navy ships. The Germans were doing what they could to supply their Asian partners with useful information.

What to do with this vital intelligence? The British at the time were gingerly seeking to improve relations with the one U.S. agency then assigned to conduct counterespionage activities, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Masterman and his associates judged that the FBI's credit-seeking director, J. Edgar Hoover, would jump at the chance to be the one to alert the U.S. military to Japan's planned raid. They also believed that Hoover would welcome the opportunity to work with Popov in developing an American equivalent of the Twenty Committee. It seemed right to Popov's British controllers that he himself should meet with Hoover and his FBI staff members, since, as Popov wrote, "the Americans might want to question me at length to extract the last bit of juice."

Ewen Montagu, a member of the committee, has reported in his Beyond Top Secret Ultra that the head of British intelligence, Stewart Menzies, called J. Edgar to acquaint him with Popov and prepare the way for his mission. Montagu himself was sent to the U.S. to assist Popov in establishing the American double-agent network.

Yet, because of the fierce clash of personalities, because the turf-protecting FBI was incapable of achieving the broad cooperation of agencies necessitated by a Twenty Committee, the entire venture came to nought.

On August 12, 1941, Popov took a Pan Am flying boat from Lisbon to New York. There he met with the FBI's agent in charge, Percy "Sam" Fox-worth. Popov showed Foxworth the two German secrets he thought would be of greatest interest to the Americans. One was the questionnaire. The other was a sample of the microdot system the Nazis were developing as the means to condense a large amount of secret data into a dot that would appear like nothing more than a speck of dirt on the surface of an innocuous-looking letter.

To the question of when Popov could see the director, Foxworth hedged. The meeting couldn't take place for another two weeks. No explanation for the delay was given, but Anthony Summers, a biographer who has charged that Hoover was "a closet homosexual" and "a practicing transvestite," has determined that at the time Hoover was away on vacation with his near-constant companion, Clyde Tolson.

Popov decided he couldn't sit idle for a whole fortnight, and since one of the objectives asked of him on the questionnaire was that he investigate U.S. military bases, "especially in Florida," Popov decided he would drive to Florida in the flashy convertible he'd purchased. He couldn't take along Simone Simon, the French movie star he'd squired in the past. Instead, he would drive south with a new friend, an English model working in New York.

On his second day in Miami, he wrote in his memoir, he was lolling on the beach with his girlfriend when he was approached by a formidable figure in a business suit and tie who asked him to come along to the beach bar. There a second man, "looking like his half-brother," told Popov, "You are registered in this hotel as man and wife with a girl you're not married to."

House detectives, Popov thought, and suggested that he go get his wallet so things could be "cleared up."

The men were not house detectives. They were FBI agents and informed Popov he had broken the Mann Act, which made it a federal offense to transport a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. They did not add that it was one of the least-enforced measures in U.S. law. What they did tell him was that either he send the woman home immediately or he would be taken in, to face a minimum of a year and a day in prison.

Braving the model's annoyance that he had—disguising the real reason for his actions—given in to house detectives, Popov put her on a plane back to New York that same day and drove north alone.

These were the preliminaries to Popov's meeting with Hoover. Popov's memoir placed the meeting in Foxworth's office, with Hoover sitting at Foxworth's desk. The scene was set for a violent clash of personalities: the slim, suave, macho Yugoslav facing the pudgy, fussy but all-powerful American.

"Sit down, Popov," Hoover ordered, with what Popov remembered as "an expression of disgust on his face."

"I'm running the cleanest police organization in the country," Popov quoted Hoover as saying. "You come here from nowhere and within six weeks install yourself in a New York penthouse, chase film stars, break a serious law, and try to corrupt my officers. I'm telling you right now I won't stand for it." He pounded on the desk with his fist "as though to nail his words into my brain."

Popov defended himself. "I'm not a spy who turned playboy. I'm a man who always lived well who happened to become a spy." The Germans, he told Hoover, expected him to live well and would become suspicious if he didn't.

According to his memoir, he also told Hoover, "I did not come to the United States to break the law or to corrupt your organization. I came here co help the war effort." Popov explained about the questionnaire, the Pearl Harbor warning and the microdot system. He finished by dwelling on the plan to organize a double-agent network under FBI control. In describing what would be needed to make the system work, he said, "You cannot expect a crop if you don't put in the seed. You cannot deceive the enemy if you don't . . ."

He stopped. Hoover, giving in to braying laughter, had turned to Foxworth, saying, "That man is trying to teach me my job."

Popov saw that any further discussion was futile. He had communicated the critical information he had come to report. He stood up and walked out.

"Good riddance," Hoover yelled after him.

Popov refused to believe that his mission had been wasted. Several FBI officials, including Foxworth himself, saw the value of what had been handed them. The questionnaire alone should convince any thoughtful leader of its import. Besides, Popov thought, he could count on his British superiors to make the information known to high U.S. government officials.

He went off to Rio de Janeiro to meet with a German spymaster there and deliver a batch of double-cross material of his own devising. On December 7 he was on a passenger liner returning to the U.S. when news about the raid on Pearl Harbor began to trickle in. He anticipated hearing of a great U.S. victory. When instead he learned of the debacle, he couldn't believe his ears. "How, I asked myself, how? We knew they were coming. We knew how they were going to come. Exactly like at Taranto . . . I couldn't credit what I was hearing."

Like others involved in secret operations during the war, Popov was constrained by Britain's Official Secrets Act from telling his story until thirty years later. When his memoir, Spy/Counterspy, was published in 1974, it touched off a firestorm of controversy that has still not receded.

Apologists for Hoover and the FBI, for example, deny that Hoover and Popov ever met. The FBI says it has no record of any such meeting. They also claim that whatever was of value in Popov's questionnaire was passed on to the responsible military authorities and even to President Roosevelt. But subsequent research has found that while a paraphrased one-page version of the questionnaire was included in a sheaf of reports circulated by the FBI, it did not include the material on Hawaii.

So why didn't the British, knowing of Popov's troubles with the FBI, pick up the ball? The answer given by Masterman: "Obviously it was for the Americans to make their appreciation and to draw their deductions from the questionnaire, rather than for us to do so. Nevertheless, with fuller knowledge of the case and of the man, we ought to have stressed its importance more than we did."

Ironically, Hoover was much more taken with Popov's news about the microdot system than with the Pearl Harbor warning. In 1946 Hoover published in Reader's Digest an article telling how FBI agents had intercepted a Balkan playboy "son of a millionaire" in New York and in going through his possessions had discovered on the front of an envelope this "dot that reflected the light." Under a microscope that magnified the dot's contents two hundred times, he wrote, "we could see that it was an image on a film of a fully-sized typewriter letter, a spy letter with a blood-chilling text."

Hoover was careful not to add that the actual content of the first dot the FBI saw was a copy of the German questionnaire.

Where is the truth in all this? Certainly Popov, writing decades after the events, slipped up on some details and may well have embellished the account. But reading the questionnaire today in the context of what Popov and the British were trying to convey does raise the question of how those references to Hawaii and to Pearl Harbor could have failed, somewhere along the line of recipients, to set off alarm bells.

The FBI did, Montagu has written, use Tricycle's name in sending messages to his spymaster. But they were "low-grade, trumpery stuff that almost any half-witted agent could have got." Further, "It is almost impossible to believe—they never let Tricycle know what they had sent or what the Germans had asked." At the Twenty Committee's request, Popov was allowed to return to Britain and in "the greatest instance of coldblooded courage that I have ever been in contact with" he met with his spy-master in Lisbon, explained away his American failures and again became a key member of the committee.

Postwar events also show that Popov's British masters did not share Hoover's disdain of him. Hinsley rates him as one of the three "most valuable" double agents in Britain's cause. In recognition of the daring and dangerous but vitally important work he carried out, the British promoted him to the honorary rank of colonel, granted him British citizenship and awarded him both the Distinguished Service Medal and the Order of the British Empire.

Jebsen, however, was arrested by the Gestapo, for reasons that are not clear. This was a development of great concern to the Twenty Committee because of what he could reveal. But he was killed, presumably trying to escape, and honorably carried his secrets with him.

Amid all the controversies swirling around Popov, this is for certain: he went to his grave believing that J. Edgar Hoover was "the person responsible for the disaster at Pearl Harbor."