HITLER’S SPY
ALSO BY JAMES HAYWARD
Shingle Street
The Bodies on the Beach
Myths and Legends of the First World War
Myths and Legends of the Second World War
Never Such Innocence Again
First published as ‘Double Agent Snow’ in Great Britain
by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012
This paperback edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © 2012 by James Hayward
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
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The right of James Hayward to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-85720-856-9
ISBN: 978-1-47113-263-6 (ebook)
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‘History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes . . . ’
WINSTON CHURCHILL (November 1940)
CONTENTS
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
1 ‘Typical Underfed Cardiff Type’
2 Colonel Johnny
3 OIK Calling Hamburg
4 The Welsh Ring
5 Double Agent Dick
6 The Trawler Treff
7 Operation Lamp
8 Nazi Frightfulness in Surrey
9 Summer and Snow
10 The Executioners
11 Double Trouble
12 Working For Peace
13 Snow On Ice
14 Sins of the Father
Epilogues
Bibliography and Sources
Acknowledgements
Index
A Note on the Author
List of Plates
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Arthur Owens – the troublesome British double agent codenamed SNOW by MI5, and JOHNNY by the German Abwehr. Hitler’s chief spy in England between 1937 and 1941.
Captain Thomas Robertson – Snow’s long-suffering case officer at MI5, informally known as Tommy or Tar.
Guy Liddell – Robertson’s immediate superior at MI5, where he is head of B Division (counter-espionage).
Major Nikolaus Ritter – Snow’s flamboyant German handler, based at Stelle X in Hamburg, aka Doctor Rantzau.
Lily Bade – Snow’s beguiling mistress, of German descent and thirteen years his junior.
Bob Owens – Snow’s eldest son, referred to as Snow Junior by MI5.
William Rolph – a former MI5 officer employed to supervise Snow between February and May of 1940.
Gwilym Williams – a former policeman from Swansea, hired by MI5 to help Snow run his imaginary ‘Welsh ring’ in 1939 (aka Agent G.W.).
Sam McCarthy – a dope smuggler of Canadian origin, and Snow’s second MI5 sidekick in 1940 (aka Agent Biscuit).
Walter Dicketts – the veteran confidence trickster employed as sidekick #3 from late 1940 onwards (aka Agent Celery).
Wulf Schmidt – a German parachute agent and close personal friend of Ritter, turned by MI5 as Agent Tate.
Gösta Caroli – another German parachute agent, dropped into England in 1940 and turned as Agent Summer.
John Masterman – a colleague of Robertson and Liddell at MI5, later chairman of the so-called Twenty Committee charged with running Allied double agents.
PROLOGUE
On the night of Saturday, 19 April 1941, in lethal celebration of Adolf Hitler’s fifty-second birthday, corpulent German air force chief Hermann Göring dispatched 700 bombers to London, intent on delivering his Führer a gift to remember. Flying in relays for seven hours, many crews managed to squeeze in two missions, with the keenest of the Luftwaffe bombardiers even notching up three. For the first time during the Blitz – and the last – the long tail of Heinkels, Junkers and Dorniers were able to drop 1,000 tonnes of high explosive on the beleaguered capital. Thanks to cloud overcast most of the raiders bombed blind, scattering their payloads wildly, killing 1,200 people and triggering more than a thousand major fires. The small price paid only added to mordant Nazi delight, das Tausendtonnengeschenk costing the Luftwaffe just four aircraft lost.
Major Thomas ‘Tar’ Robertson of B Division, MI5, drew back a corner of the heavy blackout curtain covering the office window at 54 Broadway. Beyond Green Park parachute mines and incendiaries rained down on Mayfair, demolishing banks, tailors and gentlemen’s clubs. Searchlights, tracer and phosphorus dazzled; fire consumed. The war news from overseas was no more encouraging. Having routed the Yugoslavian army, victorious German troops had pushed back Allied forces in Greece and southern Albania, raising the possibility of yet another chaotic British evacuation by sea. On the other side of the Mediterranean the port of Tobruk was under determined siege by Rommel’s Afrika Korps, while the recent destruction of several U-boats failed to disguise the fact that the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic was still running in Germany’s favour.
That a mysterious female agent with ‘good legs’ had been observed stepping off the Lisbon plane at Whitchurch held a measure of promise for Robertson and Section B1A. All things considered, however, this trifling development was unlikely to bring about a swift Allied victory.
Besides, everything paled into insignificance beside the crisis of confidence which had lately enveloped Tar’s star double agent. Codenamed SNOW by MI5, and JOHNNY by their opposite numbers in Germany, for the last five years the diminutive Welshman born Arthur Graham Owens had operated as Hitler’s chief spy in England, masquerading as a nationalist traitor in return for an astronomic salary and a vanity rank. In truth Agent Snow was planting disinformation on the bungling German Abwehr, a bodyguard of lies by which Robertson’s department hoped to reverse the disastrous flow of events since Dunkirk, making the so-called double-cross system one of the few effective weapons in a British armoury still desperately short of tangible hardware.
The flaw in this ingenious deception scheme was Snow himself. Even by the standards of the rogues’ gallery of hustlers and shadowplayers run by B1A, Arthur Owens was more trouble than a barrel of Barbary apes. The little man had endeared himself to no one in the Service, a string of sceptical handlers noting a penchant for expensive motors, cheap women and flights of wild egotistical fancy that would shame Walter Mitty. ‘In drink he is probably not completely aware on these occasions that what he is saying is a lie,’ rued the latest glum case summary. ‘Similar doubts have pervaded his motives in acting as an agent. At times in his complicated career Agent Snow has seen himself as a patriot doing dangerous and valuable work for his country; at other times, no less genuinely, as a daring spy, clever enough to outwit British Intelligence.’
Lisbon had been his nadir. Two months earlier, in February 1941, Owens had flown to Portugal to treff with his German handler, Herr Doktor Rantzau, only to return to London bearing a bullish peace proposal drafted by high-ranking Nazis. Worse still, Owens now insisted th
at he had been unmasked as a British double agent by the other side.
Fox shot, flush busted.
Instinct told Robertson that the vital double-cross secret was probably safe. After all, Snow had returned from Lisbon very much alive, his pockets bulging with sterling and dollars, and a veritable Woolwich arsenal of exploding pens. However, Owens appeared now to be a burnt-out case, pleading duodenal ulcers while at the same time sinking a bottle of brandy a day, and increasingly desperate to please Lily Bade, the high-maintenance floozy who had lately given birth to their child. Had the schizophrenic complexities of the disorientating double-cross realm become too much to bear? Or had Snow simply fabricated his tale of illness and exposure in Iberia in order to engineer a comfortable retirement with a foot in both camps?
The only certainty was that Owens had returned from Lisbon with a sexually transmitted disease. Louche, lazy and libidinous, everything Snow touched became corrupt or contaminated, like King Midas in reverse. True, since the end of the Phoney War in May 1940 he had achieved outstanding results for MI5, exposing several pre-war sleepers in Britain and luring a dozen hapless invasion spies who arrived by parachute and boat. Most had been captured with laughable ease, then dropped by the hangman after cursory trials. Better still, Robertson had managed to flip several of these incoming agents as fresh double-cross assets. Indeed, the Dane codenamed Tate had even been awarded an Iron Cross by his gullible German masters.
With the first stirrings of spring, however, Snow’s credibility had melted clean away. The Lisbon fiasco aside, on April Fools’ Day the body of a previously unknown German agent had been discovered in a shelter in Cambridge. Isolated, penniless and emaciated by hunger, the V-man had hastened his own demise by placing an Abwehr-issue 6.35 mm Mauser automatic to his temple and squeezing the trigger. Poorly forged papers identified him as Jan Willem Ter Braak, an unremarkable Dutch refugee, yet his pink ration book told a different story, while his ID card bore telltale sample serial numbers buzzed to Hamburg on Agent Snow’s transmitter.
Ter Braak had been at large for six months, during which time Cambridge had suffered several damaging air raids. How many more Nazi spies might have bypassed Snow’s illusory shadow network?
Back at his desk, Tar Robertson leafed again through page after page of muddled, contradictory transcripts and flimsies. Rogue Agent Snow was a riddle wrapped up in an enigma. The one glimmer of hope was that new Ultra decrypts from Bletchley Park confirmed that Germany was poised to invade the Soviet Union, perhaps even as early as May. Codenamed Barbarossa, the assault would commit Adolf Hitler to a war on two fronts that would eventually destroy his ‘thousand year’ Reich. Though far removed from the frozen steppes of Russia, Agent Snow too had a key role to play. The intricate lies put across in his name would one day step up from tactical to strategic, their deceptions determining the fate of tens of thousands, whether Bomber Command airmen high above the steel mills of the Ruhr, merchant navy sailors dodging U-boats in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, or entire infantry divisions storming the beaches of Italy and France, opening up the second front, delivering Europe from evil.
Humdinger, as the little man himself was apt to say.
Bombs continued to fall thick and fast as the Führer’s birthday Blitz entered its fourth violent hour, those dropping closest to Broadway causing the very foundations of the building to shake. Robertson could picture the scene at Homefields, the comfortable Surrey safehouse provided for Hitler’s chief spy in England, two dozen miles from the mayhem surrounding SW1. Probably Owens was playing cards with his Intelligence Corps minder, pouring freely from a bottle of black-market brandy, conjuring fresh alibis and ailments, his fate dangling by the most slender of threads.
Snow.
Shabby, scapegrace little man Snow. Running with the hare while hunting with the hounds. Hiding in plain sight, always playing both ends against the middle.
Shrugging off a powerful sensation of déjà vu, Major Robertson reached for his green-handset scrambler phone and asked the girl on the switchboard for a Weybridge number.
The die was cast.
1
‘Typical Underfed Cardiff Type’
By his own account, Arthur Owens’ extraordinary career as a double-cross agent was triggered by Zeppelin shells. A quarter century before the Luftwaffe delivered the Tausendtonnengeschenk on London, marauding German airships were sent to harry the capital with pinprick raids, causing little material damage but confirming a Hunnish reputation as barbarians and ‘baby killers’. Barely sixteen when the first Zepps arrived in 1915, and thus too young to take to the air in an Avro or Sopwith, or charge over the top from a trench, Owens would later lay claim to feelings of profound outrage.
Profound, yet wholly unpatriotic. By his own account, after his father’s engineering firm devised a ‘special shell’ which brought down Zeppelins in droves the War Office denied the company any credit, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of pounds. A more elaborate version of the same story found room for corrupt officials, titanic legal battles in the High Court and the confiscation of a private yacht by vindictive government agents. This, so the little Welshman said, had left him feeling ‘very bitter’ towards England.
Tall tales of political and personal betrayal provided the perfect backstory for Hitler’s chief spy in England. That the Zeppelin shells story was entirely untrue also served to set the scene for Owens’ picaresque rise as a secret agent, whose erratic moral compass and predilection for intrigue and fantasy would, by 1940, bring his country to the brink of disaster.
With his sharp features, beady eyes and nicotine-stained fingers, Arthur Graham Owens was nobody’s idea of a gentleman spy. The youngest son of a master plumber, the future Agent Snow was born in the small Welsh industrial town of Pontardawe on 14 April 1899. His father, William Thomas Owens, had moved his business from Bristol to Glamorganshire fifteen years earlier, just as coal-rich Pontardawe began to boom and bloom as a micro ‘tinopolis’, exporting tinplate and galvanised steel to all four corners of the globe. Though his small engineering business was dwarfed by the forges and mills thrown up by the ironmasters, entrepreneurial William Owens expanded his company as the town grew, graduating from manufacturing humble plumbing supplies to cast-iron radiators and acetylene gas equipment, styling himself as an inventor and patentee.
In middle age William Owens took a second wife, Ada, who was some sixteen years his junior. Like William, Ada was a native of Somerset, making the Owens household at 224 Dyffryn Road culturally rather more English than Welsh, aspirant middle class, with a small complement of domestic staff. Their youngest son Arthur received a solid education at Pontardawe County School, where he showed a talent for sciences, and then served an apprenticeship with a firm of electrical engineers in nearby Clydach, no doubt with a view to bringing new skills to the family business. Short of stature, as well as social graces, the young scion was nevertheless talkative, quick witted and blessed with a keenly inventive mind. But for primogeniture, William Owens & Company would almost certainly have been his eventual inheritance.
However, these formative years were overshadowed by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. With his flair for mechanics, Arthur dreamed of joining the Royal Flying Corps, the newest and most glamorous of the three armed services; later he would hint at having held a commission and flown fast Sopwith Camels. In truth Owens was too undersized for military service, and too highly strung. There were no pilot’s wings, and no Zeppelin shells. Condemned to remain in dreary Pontardawe for the duration of the conflict, surrounded by collieries, mills and begrimed mundanity, the little man determined to escape and seek his fortune elsewhere.
With his half-brothers held in reserved occupations, the name Owens appears nowhere on the Pontardawe war memorial. Nevertheless, genuine tragedy touched the family in the summer of 1918 when Ada succumbed to a brain haemorrhage. Now an elderly widower, William sold up and took his money back to Bristol, where he purchased
a comfortable town house in the affluent suburb of Clifton. Arthur moved too, describing himself as a ‘manufacturing chemist’ of independent means, and stepping out with a petite blonde from Knowle named Irene Ferrett. Possibly Irene fancied that Arthur had been a scout pilot; certainly her diminutive beau was inclined towards flights of fancy and magical thinking. The couple married in September 1919 and moved into the large town house at 23 Gordon Road, living an indolent, carefree lifestyle until the following January, when William Owens, master plumber turned gas magnifico, succumbed to chronic kidney disease.
Zeppelin shells or no, the profits from large wartime contracts meant that Owens Senior left his heirs a substantial estate. Rather than return to industrial Glamorgan, or further his career as a chemist or engineer, Arthur instead moved to Mumbles, a popular seaside resort near Swansea, where he hoped to cash in on the postwar holiday boom by setting up a confectionery business. While her husband honed his skills as a humbug merchant, Irene nursed their son, born Graham Robert in September 1920 but known always as Bob. For many entrepreneurs the tourism bonanza delivered easy money, yet Owens was financially irresponsible and proved incapable of living within his means. In little more than a year the pretender from Pontardawe had managed to run through the bulk of his inheritance, and found himself fending off disgruntled creditors.
Never knowingly heroic, the little man cut and ran. Like tens of thousands of other Britons during this turbulent postwar period, Arthur Owens chose to make a new life in Canada, where English-speaking WASPs were once again being encouraged to ‘fill up the vast waste spaces’ after the war in Europe had forced a lull in westward immigration. The family sailed from Bristol in October 1921 and eventually settled in Ontario, where Arthur gained employment as a public utility engineer. In 1925 Irene gave birth to a daughter, Patricia. After five years the couple became naturalised Canadian subjects, and Owens entered into a business partnership with an Australian named John Mercer. Applying his inventive skills to battery technology Owens claimed to have perfected a new type of lead oxide paste for use in accumulators, which the pair registered as a potentially lucrative industrial patent.
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