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After the run-in with Edgar, Popov turned for help to a senior member of the British intelligence team in New York, Charles Ellis. The Director of the FBI, Ellis observed, pulled tantrums every day. He would ask Stephenson to intervene. Stephenson tried and got nowhere.6 So did an emissary sent from London by MI-6 chief Colonel Menzies. Menzies’ concern was that Edgar’s obduracy would destroy all the painstaking work that had gone into making Popov a star double agent.

Soon, Popov discovered the FBI had placed microphones all over his Manhattan apartment. Life with his Bureau contacts became a series of verbal skirmishes. He was, however, at last given a trickle of low-grade information to send to the Germans, and clearance to travel to Brazil to meet an Abwehr contact. Popov left New York, not to return until after Pearl Harbor.

So far as one can tell, Edgar did not tell Donovan’s department, which existed to coordinate intelligence, about Popov either. Edgar’s attitude to British intelligence in the weeks before Pearl Harbor, the British history notes say dryly, ‘was quite evidently to suppress its activities if he could.’

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When Popov’s memoirs were published in 1974, two years after Edgar’s death, the FBI flatly rejected his allegations. Edgar’s successor as Director, Clarence Kelley, said the Bureau ‘certainly did not receive information which indicated the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.’ According to Kelley, the files showed that Popov ‘never personally met Mr Hoover,’ that his story was more fiction than fact. Thomas Troy, former CIA officer turned intelligence historian, claimed that Popov ‘never personally warned Hoover about such an attack … He warned nobody.’ Popov, both men suggested, was little more than a troublesome playboy.

British Intelligence veterans said the opposite. John Masterman, the wartime head of Britain’s interservice XX, or Doublecross, Committee, which used double agents with legendary success, had assessed Popov for himself from the start, and addressed him affectionately in future correspondence.7 He considered Popov ‘a leading and highly placed agent … one of the leading figures in the doublecross world.’

Montgomery Hyde, who worked with British intelligence in New York, thought him ‘one of the most important British double agents’ – a rating endorsed by the author Graham Greene, an MI-6 veteran. Ian Fleming, who also met Popov during the war, may have used him as one of the models for James Bond. Former Commander Ewen Montagu, of Naval Intelligence, thought Popov a man of steel and basic common sense, who ‘made a great contribution to the Allied victory.’

So well regarded was Popov that the British eventually gave him the honorary rank of colonel, British citizenship, the Order of the British Empire, the Distinguished Service Medal and a Modigliani painting – a gift from the royal family. He was godfather to the nieces of MI-6 Chief Stewart Menzies.

FBI files contain no written record of a meeting between Edgar and Popov, but that proves nothing. Edgar made an art form of concealing information in alternate file systems, or simply not recording it at all. Edgar’s office records, released only in 1991, show that he was indeed in New York in late September 1941, the approximate time of the meeting alleged by Popov – a fact Popov could not have known when he wrote his memoirs.8

Popov did not concoct his story in the seventies to create a publishing sensation, as detractors suggest. He reported the episode to his superiors at the time. William Stephenson, who disliked saying anything that would damage Anglo-American relations, avoided public comment on the Popov controversy. He discussed it in private, however, with his biographer, coincidentally also named William Stevenson.

‘Our conversation was not for publication at the time,’ said writer Stevenson. ‘But he was very clear. He said Popov had indeed met Hoover – he knew all about it. He thought it was a terrible