Luke Lamanna (22:53)
In February 1944, Serbian playboy Dushko Popov landed in Lisbon. A car was waiting for him. As usual. He got in, preparing himself for another meeting with his German handlers. Popov was buzzing with excitement. His handlers were playboys too, and they didn't care much for Nazi ideology. They routinely skimmed money off the top of Popov's salary from Berlin to pay for their hefty gambling and alcohol habits. Popov didn't mind, so long as it kept suspicion off of him. He was more concerned about MI5. He knew they still worried about his loyalty. There had been a fierce debate about his position among the Double Cross team, but ultimately they decided they could trust him enough to hand deliver misinformation about the D Day Khan. Popov was keenly aware of how much responsibility he held. The invasion was only a few months away. If he was found out, it could ruin all their careful plans. Popov checked his briefcase. He made sure he had the documents the British had given him. All of them contained falsified details that indicated an attack At Pas de Calais. The Allies had even built up a fake army with wooden airplanes and inflatable tanks in the southeast of England to suggest they would land there. Popoff carried photographs to bolster his story. The car dropped Popov off at the Abwehr offices. He walked in with a big smile, expecting a happy reunion with his handler. Instead, a new Nazi officer walked out to greet him. A man he'd never seen before. The officer was stern and serious. He eyed Popov with suspicion and seemed immune to his charms. For the first time since he defected to the British, Popov felt a prickle of nerves. The officer ordered Popov to take a seat in a side office. He had no choice but to oblige. His heart pounding under his expensive suit. The officer grilled him on his activity in London. He asked him who he'd met with, where he'd been, how he'd acquired his intelligence. Luckily, Popov loved to gamble and he had a great poker face. He pulled out the documents and calmly told the officer how he'd been able to collect them. He talked about meeting high level British businessmen who let slip about a buildup of troops across the Channel from Pas de Calais. The photographs he brought were proof. The officer looked at the documents closely. Popoff sat back and smoked a cigarette. Inside, he was burning with anxiety. If the officer called his bluff, he had no more cards to play. The interrogation continued for two days. In the end, the officer seemed to accept Popov's story. He thanked Popov for his work and took the doctored paperwork with him. Popov slumped back in his chair, relieved. He needed a drink. Or maybe a few. Shortly after Popov's trip, Lily Sergeyev also flew into Lisbon. On the flight, she debated whether or not she should slip away. Once she got back to Europe, she could turn her back on her life of espionage completely. But in the end, she decided against it. Lilly wasn't a quitter, no matter how upset she was with how MI5 had handled things. Lily met with her German handler on March 14, 1944. He thanked her for all the excellent intelligence she had been providing lately. Then he told her he had something new for her. He handed her a gift. Wrapped in paper and string, Lilly slowly unwrapped the package. Inside the box was a small radio transmitter. Lilly smiled. It was exactly what MI5 had been hoping the Germans would give her. This meant they really trusted her. Her handler explained that the Nazis wanted information about where the Allied troops were gathering. Lilly was given instructions about when and how to radio them with messages. She would Be using Morse code as an extra precaution. Then her handler looked at her seriously. He explained that there was a chance that the British might try to make contact with her and flip her to their side and from there get her to sabotage the Nazis. Lily fought the urge to smile. She wanted to say, you have no idea. Then her handler gave her something called a control signal. A small code that would tell the Germans if the British knew she was spying and were trying to manipulate her. All Lilly had to do was put a double dash into one of her messages and the Germans would know she was relaying false information. Lilly knew what she should do the moment she got back to England. She should tell her case officer, Mary, everything this man had told her, including the part about the control signal. But she couldn't stop thinking about how cold the woman's reaction had been after her dog Babs had died. Not a flicker of sympathy. Not the slightest display of compassion. Why should she be faithful to a person like that? So Lily made a secret pact with herself. She decided she would tell her case officer everything about her time in Lisbon. Everything except the control signal. It gave her a thrill to keep a secret from MI5, to hold just a little bit of power over them. If she really wanted to, she could ruin the entire D Day plot. Just like the British had ruined her life when they let Babs die. On the flight back to England, Lily couldn't stop smiling. For the first time since the war began, she felt like she had some control over her life. While Popov and Lilly enjoyed the sun in Lisbon, Juan Pujol Garcia was pacing back and forth in his office in gloomy London. A fascist spy from Wales was causing problems with the D Day Khan. The spy was stationed in the southwest of England, which is where the troops were gathering for the real invasion of Normandy. The spy would surely see all the military activity and warn the Germans. Juan thought carefully about what to do with this man. He couldn't allow him to relay any real information, so he came up with a plan. What if the spy came down with a serious illness? One that would keep him from reporting on any future troop movements? The fascist spy, of course, did not exist. He was one of Juan's many invented contacts. He had been working for MI5 for two years now. During that time, Juan had invented a network of over 20 fake agents. He fed their made up reports on Allied plans to the Germans, who never seemed to suspect that he might be lying to them. But the process of creating his fake network was stressful. Wan often spent 12 hours a day in his office, spinning his web of false information. He had to keep detailed notes of every report to keep his lies consistent. By the end of the war, his various fake agents had over a million classified pages in their files. The Germans had to believe every lie he told them. If they noticed even a slight discrepancy in his reports, it could ruin everything. To make matters worse, Juan's wife, Araceli, was miserable in London. She was cut off from her community in Spain and forbidden from speaking about her husband's work. Every night, she and Juan would argue for hours. One day, she threatened him with blackmail. She said she would reveal his role as a spy unless she and her son were allowed to go back home. Juan had to think fast. He didn't want to lie to his wife, but his work was too important. So he came up with a plan. He had a contact from MI5 come to his house and tell his wife that Juan had been arrested because of her threats. By the time he came home a few hours later with a made up excuse about his release, she was beside herself. Through her tears, she promised to never tell anyone about his work. Despite the challenges of being a spy, Juan remained incredibly motivated to defeat the Germans. He had lived through the terrors of fascism in Franco Spain. He wanted to do as much damage to the Nazis as possible. Plus, with every made up report, he delighted in taunting the Germans. Juan could make them believe anything he came up with. In early May 1944, Tar Robertson sipped his afternoon tea, enjoying a rare moment of peace. D Day was only a few weeks away. The Allies were amassing an army of more than 150,000 troops to strike at Normandy. Most nights, Tarr slept at his office. At least, he tried to sleep. He would usually lie awake at night worrying about whether the Germans would buy into his plan. If they believed the invasion was happening at Calais, the Germans would be unprepared for the real invasion at Normandy and the war would hopefully be over within the year. One of Tarr's colleagues came running into his office. The panicked look on his face was all Tarr needed to know. Something had gone terribly wrong. Tar learned that one of Popov's sources in German intelligence had been arrested. This source knew Popov was a double agent. MI5 had no idea why Popov's source had been detained. But the possibility that he would be interrogated could unravel the whole Operation Fortitude plan. If the source revealed Popov was a double agent, the Germans would immediately identify his intelligence as false, which would lead them to see that the invasion was not happening in Calais, but Normandy. The Double Cross team exploded into chaos at the news. Some of Tar's colleagues yelled at him, saying they knew Popov couldn't be trusted. Tar shouted back that it wasn't Popov's fault that his source had been arrested. They needed to make a plan, and the team loudly argued about how best to move forward. Some agents asserted that only Popov needed to be shut down. But others said Popov's source could potentially reveal the entire Double Cross operation. So the whole thing needed to be disassembled as soon as possible. Amidst all the shouting, Tar's head was spinning. The invasion was only a month away. They were so close to convincing the Nazis of the Calais invasion. Popov had been especially crucial to this plan. Shutting him down now was the safer bet. But they'd be losing a valuable asset. The eyes around the room turned to Tar, who knew that the decision finally came down to him. Tar ordered the room to be quiet. He decided that Operation Fortitude was too important to be stopped. The team would just deactivate Popov as an agent, since he was at the highest risk of being exposed. All the other double agents would continue sending false intelligence that pointed to Pas de Calais. The Double Cross team would monitor German communications as closely as possible. If the Brits found out that Popov's source talked to the Germans, they would shut Double Cross down completely. As Tarr went back to his office, he'd hoped he'd made the right decision. The pressure of ensuring the Allies victory weighed heavily on his shoulders. If the Germans caught wind that they were being lied to, the whole war could change on a dime. On May 17, less than three weeks before the invasion, Lily Sergeyev was feeling down again. She was having health problems, she missed babs, and she was tired of lying. Her work as a spy had been nonstop for weeks. She'd sent several reports of false military information to her German handler, exactly as the British had asked her to do. It was all very draining, especially considering how little she was being paid. With every radio transmission, Lilly toyed with the idea of sending two dashes, her control signal, to indicate she was being coerced by the British. If she sent it, the Nazis would immediately know the messages she was sending were false. She still hadn't told the British about her control signal. Keeping it a secret made her days just a bit brighter, even if she never used it. Lily's MI5 case officer, Mary, came to see her. Lily figured it was to go over radio communications, but Mary finally seemed to realize how depressed Lily was. She asked if Lily wanted to go see a movie together. They both deserved a day off. Lily wasn't sure if this was some kind of trick. This was very unlike Mary, who was usually overly formal. But going to the movies sounded a lot more fun than sending off more radio transmissions, so she agreed. The two of them went to see Gone with the Wind. When they left the theater, Lily was completely stunned to see Mary crying. Maybe her case officer wasn't such a machine after all. The next day, Mary came over to discuss Lily's next transmission. It might have been Mary's display of emotion the day before, or maybe she was just tired of keeping a secret. But Lily couldn't stand it anymore. She blurted out that her handler had given her a control signal. Mary's eyes widened in horror. Lily knew she had just kicked the hornet's nest. Mary's friendliness from the day before melted away. In a cold voice, she told Lily not to go anywhere. She said she had to inform Tar Robertson and raced out of the apartment. Lily sat down on her bed. She realized it had been a huge mistake to tell the truth. But there was no going back now. Tar drove as fast as he could to Lily's apartment. His blood was boiling. Lily had already caused enough problems with all her moping about her dog. Now she may have just sacrificed everything he'd worked for. Only weeks away from the finish line after storming in, he demanded to know whether she had sent the CONTROL signal. If she had, the Germans would know. The reports she sent were lies. Lily stayed calm in the face of Tar's anger. She promised that she hadn't sent the signal. She had only kept it from them because she was angry about Babs and about how little she was being paid. Tar's face flushed red. He couldn't believe that she might have thrown all of Operation Fortitude out the window out of spite. Was a little dog really worth sabotaging the mission that might end the most deadly war in world history? He yelled at Lily for being so childish and selfish. She yelled back that MI5 had been selfish when they hadn't kept their promise about Babs. Tar asked her to tell him what the control signal was. Lily refused to tell him, especially after he'd been so rude to her. Tar took her radio transmitter away and left in a huff. He raced back to MI5's office. He instructed the members of his team to pore over Lily's communications. They had no idea what the control signal was, but they needed to try and find it. If she had sent it to her handler, their whole plan would need to change fast. As Tar looked over Lily's telegrams, fear bubbled up inside him. He had just lost Popov. Now another one of his agents was potentially compromised. He had only a few weeks to make sure the mission still had a chance of succeeding. Tar didn't trust Lily, not after she lied about the control signal. But for now, all he could do was hope that she'd been telling the truth when she said she hadn't sent it.
