412 • PEARSON, ROBIN
during World War I and was recruited in 1940 in The Hague for an
Abwehrmission to the United States. Meiler surrendered to the
Dutch embassy in Madrid in early 1942 and was turned over to SIS,
who passed him on to theFederal Bureau of Investigation(FBI).
When he arrived in New York in July 1942 he was run by the FBI,
and his traffic was transmitted from an FBI transmitter on Long Is-
land from 1943 until the end of the war.pat j’s fictitious network,
financed with money supplied bymike, included three pro-Nazis,
holst,herman, andotto.
On one occasion, a courier carrying eight rare stamps forpat j
only reached Buenos Aires, where he failed to send them on in the
mail to New York and drank himself to death on the proceeds. An-
other source of funds was a Jewish refugee who passed on $3,000 he
had received from a Frenchman in Spain long known to be in the pay
of the Abwehr. The Frenchman relieved the Germans of an estimated
80 million French francs during the war but was taken into custody
by the French authorities afterward.PEARSON, ROBIN.A lecturer in economic history at the University
of Hull, Dr. Robin Pearson was identified in September 1999 as a
former East German agent codenamedarmin. He was interviewed
byMI5in 1994 when examination of the archives of the HVA, the
East German intelligence service, revealed the identity of 34 Brit-
ish sources recruited while studying in East Germany. According to
his HVA file, Pearson had spent a year at Leipzig as an undergraduate
at Edinburgh in 1977 and had been recruited as a source to supply
information about his fellow students and others likely to be offered
jobs in Whitehall or with British Intelligence. Over a period of 12
years, he had held clandestine meetings with his HVA contacts in
Amsterdam, Antwerp, Vienna, and Copenhagen, occasionally travel-
ing on an East German passport under the alias Robert Behlert. His
handler was identified as Berhart Kartheus. Pearson continued to
supply information until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November
1989.
PEASANT.TheSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) code name for Hel-
mut Siegfried Goldschmidt, a Dutch Jew recruited by theAbwehr,
who surrendered to SIS in Lisbon in 1943. He was taken to England