276 • JOHNS, PHILIP
‘‘special service’’ and promptly driven by a civilian member of the
Passport Control Office to Brussels, where he was introduced to Ed-
ward Calthrop, the wheelchair-bound head of station.
Johns remained in Brussels until the evacuation in May the follow-
ing year and then joined SIS’s Naval Section in London. As the third
most senior member of the section, Johns recalls that one of his du-
ties was to confer withIan Fleming, his liaison contact in theNaval
Intelligence Division. ‘‘After our exchanges on duty matters, we
would often lunch together, sometimes at one of his clubs, Boodle’s,
where he maintained (and I could not but agree) that the wartime
cuisine was probably the best available in London.’’ Early in 1941
Johns was posted as head of station to Lisbon, the neutral capital that
had become a center of European espionage. During his two years in
Portugal, Johns encounteredDusko Popov, one ofMI5’s manydou-
ble agents, andDonald Darling, the localMI9representative who
had been identified mistakenly by the notorious Portuguese secret
police, PIDE, as the head of SIS’s local networks. Johns recalls the
arrival of a double agent codenamedtricycle:It was reported to me... that he had been given by his German controllers
a questionnaire relating to the US defenses of Pearl Harbor. At the time, if
I remember correctly, little importance was attached to this piece of infor-
mation and if of value it would have been for the Americans to assess,
although of course at that time the USA had not entered the war. As it
turned out, whentricyclewas handed over to theFederal Bureau of
Investigationon his arrival in the USA, the implication in regard to Pearl
Harbor was given little credence.In December 1942 Johns was recalled to London for a new assign-
ment, the supervision of a complicated shipping deal in Buenos Aires
intended to transfer the ownership of some Axis merchant vessels
mothballed in neutral ports to front companies in Argentina. The
scheme was to be financed by the Treasury, but after Johns had ar-
rived and opened negotiations, the project was abandoned and Johns
was sent to Rio de Janeiro as head of station. He remained in Brazil
until October 1943, when he returned to London via New York to
take command ofSpecial Operations Executive’sBelgianSection.
For the last 18 months of World War II, Johns was in command of
the Low Countries Section, which combined the Belgian and ill-fated