Double Cross Read online

  Inevitably, there were tensions within the group. Mathilde loathed Renée, considering her “a typical little provincial woman, and badly dressed.” Czerniawski insisted there was “no question of any jealousy,” but he reflected that Mathilde was a “strange woman, idealistic but ruthless, ambitious, very nervous and highly strung.”

  In the autumn of 1941, Czerniawski was told to report to an airfield near Compiègne, where a plane would pick him up to bring him to London for a debriefing. On October 1, an RAF Lysander glided out of the sky, piloted by a man with a mustache whose only French, by way of greeting, was “C’est la vie.” On arrival in England, Czerniawski was met by Colonel Stanislaw Gano, the head of Polish intelligence. “You’ve kept us all busy on this side,” said Gano, who looked, Czerniawski thought, like “the head of some business firm.” For twenty-four hours Czerniawski was quizzed on every aspect of his network. Gano seemed particularly interested in Mathilde Carré. “We are perfect partners,” Czerniawski assured him. Finally, to his amazement, he was ushered into the presence of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the Polish prime minister. Sikorski gravely declared that Czerniawski had been awarded the Virtuti Militari, the highest Polish military decoration. “I was petrified by the suddenness, unexpectedness and solemnity of the moment,” Czerniawski later wrote. He would soon be dropped by parachute back into France to continue his work. The little Polish spy was proud, but with gratification came a niggling doubt, a small premonitory stab of anxiety: “Subconsciously I felt a disturbing uneasiness.”

  Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir spent night after night at the gaming tables in Hamilton’s Club or Crockford’s Casino in Mayfair, and though she sometimes won, she always lost in the end. It was most frustrating. But when Elvira wasn’t gambling, she was bored to death—which was why she had agreed to have lunch with a man who, she had been told, might offer her a most interesting and well-paid job.

  Boredom stalked Elvira Chaudoir like a curse. Her father, a Peruvian diplomat, had made a fortune from guano, the excrement of seabirds, bats, and seals, collected off the coast of Peru and exported as fertilizer. Elvira grew up in Paris, where she was expensively educated and tremendously spoiled. In 1934, at the age of twenty-three, to escape the tedium, she fled into the arms of Jean Chaudoir, a Belgian stock exchange representative for a gold-mining firm. Jean turned out to be a crashing bore, and life in Brussels was “exceedingly dull.” After four years of marriage and a number of unsatisfactory love affairs with both men and women, she came to the conclusion that “she had nothing in common with her husband” and ran away to Cannes with her best friend, Romy Gilbey, who was married to a scion of the Gilbey gin dynasty and very rich. Elvira and Mrs. Gilbey were happily losing money made from gin in a casino in Cannes when the Germans invaded France; they fled, in an open-top Renault, to St. Malo before taking a boat for England.

  In London, Elvira moved into a flat on Sloane Street, but the tedium of life swiftly descended once more. She spent her evenings shuttling between the bar at the Ritz and the bridge tables, losing money she did not have. She would have borrowed from her parents, but they were stuck in France. She tried to join the Free French forces gathering around the exiled Charles de Gaulle but was told she was unsuitable. She did a little translating for the BBC and found it dreary. She complained, to anyone who would listen, that she could not get an interesting job because she was Peruvian. One of those who happened to be listening, one night at Hamilton’s, was an RAF officer, who told a friend in military intelligence, who passed her name on to someone in MI6.

  And so it was that Elvira Chaudoir now found herself, at the age of twenty-nine, in the grill room of the Connaught Hotel, sitting across the table from a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit with a bristling white mustache and the eyes of a hyperactive ferret. He had introduced himself as “Mr. Masefield.” His real name was Lieutenant Colonel Claude Edward Marjoribanks Dansey, also known as “Haywood,” “Uncle Claude,” and “Colonel Z.” He was assistant chief of MI6.

  Claude Dansey was witty, spiteful, and widely disliked by his fellow spies. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the waspish historian who worked in wartime intelligence, considered him to be “an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning.” Dansey was a most unpleasant man and a most experienced spy. They made an odd couple: Elvira, tall and overdressed, with a sweet, rather innocent face, her auburn hair arranged into a question mark over her forehead; Dansey, small, bald, bespectacled, and intense. Elvira rather liked this fizzing little man, and as the conversation unfolded it became clear that he knew a great deal about her. He knew about Mrs. Gilbey and the unsuccessful evenings at the bridge tables; he knew her father had been appointed Peruvian chargé d’affaires to the collaborationist Vichy government in France; he knew what was, or rather what was not, in her bank account. “I realised he must have been tapping my telephone. There was no other way he could have learned so much about me and my friends,” she later reflected.

  Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir

  Dansey offered her a job. Her Peruvian passport, he explained, meant that she could travel with comparative ease in occupied Europe, and her father’s diplomatic status would provide cover for an extended visit to Vichy France. She could report on political matters, but more important, she might get herself recruited as an agent by the Germans. This is the intelligence technique known as “coat trailing,” dangling a potential recruit before the opposition in the hope that, if recruited, he or she can then be put to work as a double agent. She would be well paid for her efforts. Elvira did not hesitate.

  The MI6 assessment of its new recruit was blunt: “Attractive in appearance. She speaks fluent French, English and Spanish. She is intelligent and has a quick brain but is probably rather lazy about using it. A member of the international smart gambling set, her friends are to be found in any of the smart bridge clubs in London.” Surveillance revealed that her “tastes appear to be in the direction of the ‘high spots.’ ” Police reported “hilarious parties” at the Sloane Street flat, with “rowdy behaviour, singing and shouting late at night, and the arrival of drunken men and women in the small hours.” Deputy Chief Constable Joseph Goulder noted, with disapproval and some understatement, that Mrs. Chaudoir “favours the companionship of women who may not be careful of their virginity.” Though Elvira might have come across as some dizzy-headed socialite, in reality she was bright and resourceful, and with a cast-iron cover: a good-time girl with no interests beyond the next cocktail, the next bed partner, and the next bet. She was also attractive to both sexes and hungry for cash, qualities that might come in useful. As Dansey knew from a lifetime of espionage, even the most intelligent and discreet of people will tend to indiscretion if they think they are talking to a foolish and beddable woman.

  In a flat in Knightsbridge, Elvira was taught how to use secret ink, using a match head impregnated with a chemical powder. Once in France, she would write “apparently innocuous letters” to a cover address in Lisbon. “Between the lines of those letters I was to insert my intelligence reports penned in an undetectable fluid that could be developed by Dansey’s technicians.” Elvira was a swift learner. “She is very intelligent and quick to grasp essentials,” her instructor reported.

  Her budding spy career very nearly came to an early end when a certain Sub-Lieutenant Burnett of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve reported that, one night at Crockford’s, he had overheard Elvira Chaudoir boasting that “she was being taught a secret service code in the neighbourhood of St James’s and that shortly she was to be sent to Vichy.” Elvira was given a severe scolding and told that “she must abstain from divulging information which may have come to her knowledge.” Chastened, she promised to be more discreet, but the incident had demonstrated one of her more aggravating (and endearing) traits: like many spies, she found it hard to keep a secret.

  Elvira was given the oddly masculine code name “Cyril” and told to stand ready to go to France. Her war was about to become very interesting indeed.<
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  Juan Pujol García had been many things in his short life: cinema proprietor, businessman, cavalry officer (though he feared horses), and reluctant soldier. He had spent most of the Spanish Civil War in hiding from Francoist forces. A graduate of the Royal Poultry School at Arenys de Mar, Spain’s most prestigious college for chicken farmers, he ran a poultry farm outside Barcelona, though he hated chickens. Pujol had no head for figures and the business went bust. Stocky and spry, with a high forehead and “warm brown eyes with a slightly mischievous tint,” he looked like a fighting bantam. When the Second World War broke out, Pujol decided he wanted to spy for the British. “I must do something,” he told himself. “Something practical; I must make my contribution towards the good of humanity.” Hitler was “a psychopath,” Pujol concluded, and so he must support the Allies. “I wanted to work for them, to supply them with confidential information which would be of interest to the Allied cause, politically or militarily.”

  Quite where and how he would obtain such information he had yet to work out. “My plans were fairly confused,” he later admitted. His memoirs, written many years later, suggest that his quixotic, deeply held determination to fight Hitler sprang from an aggressive form of pacifism and an abiding distrust of political extremism in any form. He was a supremely gentle soul, proud never to have fired a gun; he planned to fight Nazism in a different way. “I was fascinated by the origin of words,” he wrote many years later. “The pen is mightier than the sword. I believe this sincerely and absolutely. I have devoted the greater part of my life to this ideal, using all my talents, all my convictions, all possible schemes, machinations and stratagems.” Pujol would fight a unique sort of war, with words as his only weapons.

  In January 1941, the twenty-nine-year-old Catalan approached the British embassy in Madrid with an offer to spy against the Germans. He was politely but firmly told to go away. In a variant of Groucho Marx’s dictum, the British did not want anyone in the club who wanted to be a member. Pujol next tried the Germans, pretending to be a keen fascist willing to spy against the British—in the hope that, once recruited, he could then betray them. The Germans told him they were “extremely busy.” But the little Catalan with the oddly intense eyes continued to badger the Germans in Spain, schooling himself in National Socialism until he could “rant away as befitted a staunch Nazi.” Finally (mostly to get him to shut up), the Germans said that if he could get to Britain, via Lisbon, he would be considered for intelligence work. This was enough for Pujol. From that point on, he began to worm his way into German confidences, and in particular those of Major Karl-Erich Kühlenthal of the Madrid Abwehr station.

  Kühlenthal would be comprehensively duped in the course of Operation Mincemeat, the deception in which a dead body was floated ashore in Spain carrying forged documents indicating an Allied landing in Greece rather than Sicily. The German officer was efficient, paranoid, and stupendously gullible. From Pujol’s point of view, he was the ideal case officer. Kühlenthal duly equipped Pujol with secret ink, cash, the code name “Agent Arabel,” and some advice: “He should be careful not to underestimate the British, as they were a formidable enemy.” On his arrival in Lisbon, Pujol once more contacted the British and once more was rejected. This left him in something of a quandary, since he needed to start feeding information to the Germans as soon as possible. On July 19, 1941, he sent a telegram to Kühlenthal announcing his safe arrival in Britain.

  Juan Pujol

  But he was not in Britain. Pujol was still in Portugal. Denied the opportunity to gather real intelligence for either side, he decided to invent it, with the help of the Lisbon public library, secondhand books, and whatever he could glean from newsreels. He dug out the names and addresses of real British munitions companies, consulted the Blue Guide to England for relevant place names, and used a Portuguese publication entitled The British Fleet as a primer on naval matters. Pujol had never been to Britain. He simply imagined it, sending back detailed, long-winded reports about things he thought he might have seen had he been there. Pujol’s style was exhaustingly verbose, a thicket of clauses and subclauses, adjectival swamps, and overwrought sentences that stretched to a distant grammatical horizon. He would later claim that this extraordinary writing style was a way of filling up the page without saying very much. Though he loved to play with words, his reports were full of glaring errors. He could never get a grip on British military nomenclature or culture. Imagining that Glaswegian drinking habits must be similar to those in Spain, he wrote: “There are men here who would do anything for a litre of wine.” His German controllers not only failed to spot his mistakes but heaped praise on Agent Arabel, particularly when he claimed to have recruited two subagents in Britain who were, of course, entirely fictional. For nine months Pujol remained in Lisbon, doing what spies, when stuck for real information, have always done: inventing what he thought his spymasters wanted to hear. He would continue to make it up, magnificently, for the rest of the war.

  Major Emile Kliemann of the German Abwehr was having a most agreeable war. Occupied Paris was an exceptionally pleasant place to be, if you happened to be one of the occupiers. He had an office on the Champs-Élysées, a comfortable apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, plenty of disposable cash, and very little to do. Most important, he had a new mistress named Yvonne Delidaise. A Frenchwoman with a German mother, Yvonne was demanding, expensive, and twenty years his junior. His dumpy Austrian wife was still in Vienna and certain to remain there. This was also a source of satisfaction. Kliemann’s job was recruiting informers and ferreting out French spies, but his indefatigable colleague Hugo Bleicher seemed happy to do the hard work, which was just fine with Kliemann. A Viennese businessman posted to Paris in June 1940, Kliemann had little time for Nazism. Indeed, he “did not particularly like Germans” and rather hoped that Germany would not win the war too quickly, as he wanted nothing more than to continue his newfound Parisian life, making love to Yvonne and meeting the odd dodgy character in his favorite café, Chez Valerie. Portly and broad-shouldered, Kliemann wore a neatly clipped mustache and a gold signet ring on the third finger of his left hand with the initials “EK.” He dressed with what he considered understated elegance, dyed his sideburns, and wore his hair carefully parted and greased down. He played the violin and collected antique porcelain. At forty-three, Major Emile Kliemann was vain, romantic, clever, staggeringly lazy, and consistently unpunctual. As befits a spy chief, he had assembled an impressive number of aliases—“Killberg,” “von Carstaedt,” “Polo,” “Octave,” and “Monsieur Jean”—though not a single workable spy.

  On October 13, 1941, Kliemann reluctantly arranged to meet a potential recruit, a twenty-nine-year-old Frenchwoman of Russian origin, recommended by one of his colleagues. Her name was Lily Sergeyev.

  Kliemann was two hours late for their rendezvous at the Café du Rond-Point. The young woman waiting at the corner table was handsome without being beautiful. She had curly brown hair, bright blue eyes, and a square chin. In fluent German, Lily Sergeyev (who also spelled her name “Sergueiew” and, occasionally, “Sergueiev”) explained that she was a journalist and painter. Her father had been a czarist government official, but after the revolution, when Lily was five, the family had emigrated to Paris. Her grandfather, she announced with pride, had been the last imperial Russian ambassador to Serbia. Her uncle, General Yevgeni Miller, had commanded the Fifth Russian Army in the First World War and then vanished in 1937 and been executed in Moscow two years later. Her father now sold cars. Her mother was a dressmaker. She considered herself French. She wanted to spy for Germany.

  Lily Sergeyev

  Kliemann was intrigued. Lily seemed vivacious, intelligent, and, most important, interested in Kliemann. He invited her to dinner at the Cascade restaurant, near the Bois de Boulogne, explaining that Yvonne, his “secretary,” would meet them there. The young woman insisted on bringing her dog, a small white male terrier-poodle cross named Babs, to which she was obviously devoted.


  Once they were seated in the restaurant, Lily told her story. A restless spirit, she had made a number of epic journeys across Europe by bicycle and on foot, including one that had taken her through Hitler’s Germany. There she had been impressed by the efficiency of the Nazi regime and had written a series of admiring articles for the French press. She had even interviewed Göring, who had “promised to obtain for her a personal interview with Hitler.” This had not materialized. In 1937, a German journalist named Felix Dassel, whom she had met on her travels, had told her he was working for German intelligence and asked Lily if she wanted a job. She had declined, but when the Germans marched into Paris, Dassel had reappeared. Over dinner at Maxim’s, she had told him that the British had “let the French down badly and that she had no love for them.” Dassel had asked her again if she was prepared to work for the Germans; this time, she had accepted. It was Dassel who had recommended that Kliemann arrange this meeting.

  Yvonne was yawning by this point in Lily’s story, but Kliemann was curious. She seemed genuine enough, and enthusiastic, though nervous. “It might be quite easy for me to get to Portugal, to Australia, or to England,” she said. “I have relatives in all those places and nobody would be surprised if I wanted to get out of France.”

  Kliemann pondered. “I am interested in your project,” he said finally. “I think we will send you to Portugal. I very much doubt that you will be allowed to go to England.”

  Then, suddenly, Kliemann caught Lily’s wrist and fixed her with what he plainly believed was a penetrating, spymasterly stare: “Why do you want to work for us?”

  There was a long and uncomfortable pause. Her reply, when it came, was an odd one.

  “Major, you are an intelligent man: how much can my answer be worth to you? I can tell you that it is from conviction, a matter of principle, or because I love Germany, or else I hate the British. But if you were the enemy, if I were here to spy on you, to betray you, do you think that my answer would be any different? So will you allow me not to answer?”