The director had ordered me to have no conversation with the courier but merely to hand over the cash and go away. However, the courier handed over to me in his turn a large book done up in a bright orange paper and told me that between two of the pages I should find three ciphered messages which must be sent off urgently by radio to the Centre. He also said that he had valuable information which he wanted to get over and suggested a further meeting as soon as possible and named a place near Geneva- which was also very near the German- controlled French frontier.
All this made me very suspicious as such loquacity against strict orders was unusual in a Soviet agent. I began to suspect that perhaps the original courier had been arrested and his place taken by an Abwehr agent. The orange wrapping would serve as a convenient beacon light for anyone who was trailing me home, and the meeting place near the frontier would serve admirably for abduction in the best Gestapo traditions. As for the cipher messages- if these were also phony, then they would serve as admirable pointers towards identifying my transmitter. I had no doubt that the Germans had long been monitoring the network and if on one of the services that they were listening to they suddenly found the three messages they had planted it would at once identify that transmitter as mine.
I tried to dissemble my suspicions as much as I could and said that I could not attend a meeting that week as I had business elsewhere and so fixed on a meeting in a week's time. On leaving the rendezvous I hid the book as well as I could under my coat and returned home by a roundabout route, taking evasive action. In my next transmission I reported on this fully to the director and he agreed that I should not attend the meeting. As regarded the cipher messages, which were there as the courier had said, gummed between two pages and in a cipher that I did not know, the director asked me to send them over but so to disguise them with dummy groups and then by re-enciphering in my own cipher, that they would neither be recognisable as the original messages to the monitors nor serve as a guide to our cipher to the cryptographers.
A fortnight later the Centre informed me that my suspicions were correct and that the courier had been a German agent and that as I had been recognised by at least one member of the Abwehr I must regard myself in jeopardy and at least partially compromised. I was therefore to break all connection with Rado and his group and contact my own agents only through a system of cut-outs. I took this opportunity to break finally with Lorenz and Laura and told Moscow that this was because they had refused to deal with me through a cut-out. This was probably lucky for me as I learnt afterwards in Moscow that the Russians had discovered from captured German documents that I was to be kidnapped at my next rendezvous with Lorenz and taken to Germany.
From the end of June 1943 I had contact with Moscow only about twice a week, and the traffic was principally concerned with financial transactions and reporting on the liquidation of Anna and her group. As regarded finance, it was about this time that I started my most ambitious single financial transaction. I was arranging for the transfer of a hundred thousand dollars from the United States for our use in Switzerland. The innocent intermediary in this case was a Swiss firm with, of course, a branch in New York. The Centre was being more than usually tiresome and insisting that the money should be paid in ten separate instalments of ten thousand dollars each, while the Swiss company wanted it in a lump sum. The negotiations dragged on for months and it was not till the end of October that a compromise was finally reached whereby the money was to be paid in two equal sums of fifty thousand dollars each. In order to see fair play it had been arranged that the Swiss franc equivalent of this sum, three hundred thousand francs at the black market rate, should be paid into an account in the names of two lawyers, one to be nominated by each side. I approached a well-known Lausanne lawyer, known to me only by reputation, and asked if he would act for me, explaining that it was a normal business black market transaction. Unfortunately for me my arrest came just before the transfer could be made; this was, however, fortunate for the lawyer as otherwise he might have found himself in the embarrassing position of being the unwitting paymaster of a Russian spy.
After I had reported on the arrest of Anna and completed the preliminaries for the transfer of the hundred thousand dollars I had little to do, as I was now out of touch with Rado on Moscow's orders. As a result I got permission from the Centre to take a holiday and so in September I had a well-earned rest in Tessin, far away from the hurly-burly, excitement, and fatigue of international espionage.
In my absence, however, that precious pair, Lorenz and Laura, had not been idle. On my return I questioned my concierge Madame Muller as to whether anyone had been inquiring for me in my absence. She then told me that a couple, answering to the description of Lorenz and Laura, had been round and had tried to pump her as to my friends and my habits. The excuse that they gave was not uningenious. Laura said she was very worried as I had been at one time very much in love with her sister and had indeed not only promised to marry her but things had gone so far that it was imperative that I should marry her. However, at this stage my affections had apparently cooled off and they were trying to find out whether there was not perhaps another attraction which had seduced me from the charms of her sister. If there was someone, then they wished to contact them and warn them of my "true character" as a heartless seducer. They had also visited my charwoman, Helene, with a similar story, and had offered money to both in an endeavour to extract the information.
They were, however, singularly unsuccessful. The life of a Soviet agent leaves little time for romance. My day was far too full with contacting my sources, coding, decoding, and transmitting, for me to have any time for amorous dalliance. Any spare time I had I spent in a vain attempt to catch up on my arrears of sleep. I was also not such a fool as to meet my contacts in my flat, so that this little effort was almost useless from Lorenz's, or rather the Abwehr's, point of view. Not quite, however, as they obviously now knew my address and name as well as having my photograph.
Previously Lorenz had made one other effort to get me out of the way. After my arrest I learnt that the Swiss police had received a denunciation from the French Consulate General in July. The denunciation, as my name was then unknown to Lorenz, merely consisted of my photograph with a statement that the original of the photograph was an important Soviet spy who was working a radio transmitter from Lausanne. The police took no notice of this as they received hundreds of such denunciations each day, and it was only later that they connected this up with Rado and his network. This denunciation had obviously come from Lorenz, since only he had my photograph and he also had good connections with the French Deuxieme Bureau. The reason why Lorenz was anxious for me to be arrested by the Swiss, and only in the last resort by the Germans, was obvious. It arose from no nice feelings about shedding blood, but from a very lively sense of self-preservation. Not only was he being financed by the Abwehr but also he had been receiving large sums of money from me- none of which he had thought fit to declare to the Germans. Also he knew that if I were arrested I could give a fairly- complete picture of his past (which I had learnt from Moscow before I first contacted him), which details he was not anxious for the Germans to know. Over and above this he was living in Switzerland on Swiss papers and wished to go on living there after the war- a war which at that time he could see it was unlikely that Germany would win. It was therefore in his interest to keep his hands as clean as possible and get me safely shut up in a Swiss prison where I could do him no harm; but this must be arranged in such a way that he was kept out of it, or there might be awkward questions as to how exactly he knew all the facts. Hence the anonymous denunciation via the French.