PORTUGAL• 429agents,balloon, a former army officer, andgelatine, his Austrian
girlfriend, who both protested about his descriptions of them. Later
editions were amended, but the book will be remembered principally
because of Popov’s charge that his Abwehr questionnaire, which
contained many queries concerning Hawaii and in particular Pearl
Harbor, had been overlooked or deliberately ignored by the FBI.
Popov claimed that the FBI had been hostile to his mission and
had disapproved of his admitted promiscuity. He also alleged that he
had endured an awkward interview with J. Edgar Hoover before he
had been sent back, empty-handed, to London. The FBI has chal-
lenged Popov’s version and has denied that Hoover ever met the spy,
but Popov’s full FBI file, of 19 volumes, has yet to be declassified
public scrutiny.
After the war Popov continued to maintain contact with SIS and
was in touch withNicholas Elliottwhen the latter was SIS’s repre-
sentative in Bern. He was imprisoned briefly in Marseilles when one
of his commercial ventures fell foul of the law, but retired to a beauti-
ful house in Opio in the south of France after a successful commer-
cial career in Germany and South Africa. He died in August 1981,
still locked in conflict with the FBI.See alsoBOND, JAMES;
JOHNS, PHILIP.PORTLAND SPY RING.SeeHOUGHTON, HARRY.
PORTON DOWN.The Ministry of Defence’s Chemical Defence Es-
tablishment, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, was founded in 1916 and
covers 7,200 acres. Initially the site employed a thousand people and
investigated countermeasures for German mustard gas. In 1940 a se-
cret biological warfare laboratory was built, and some experiments
were conducted on behalf ofSpecial Operations Executiveto de-
velop a tear-gas weapon and a toxic but nonlethal jelly for offensive
operations. Porton Down has frequently undertaken classified proj-
ects for the security and intelligence services and has been identified
as a target of Soviet espionage, although no case of hostile penetra-
tion has been discovered.
PORTUGAL.Although ostensibly neutral during World War II, Anto-
nio Salazar’s regime was considered pro-German and his feared se-