MI5 might have preferred to keep Snow’s priceless transmitter under lock and key at Wormwood Scrubs, yet there was always the risk that the Abwehr would triangulate his signals, and smell a rat. Verisimilitude therefore required that Owens actually broadcast from home, which in turn raised further complications, including the need for a live-in wireless operator and constant supervision by watchers from the Special Branch and Section B6. Since the high-frequency bands used by Wohldorf required an aerial thirty metres long, erected high in the air and free from obstructions, there was also the need for a large roof space, ideally situated above a top-floor flat.
Finally released from Wandsworth on the evening of Monday, 11 September, Owens spent his first night of liberty in a cell at Kingston police station, albeit as a ‘special’ prisoner. The following day was taken up with house-hunting, Robertson and Gagen eventually settling on a four-room apartment at 9 Norbiton Avenue. The house was a nondescript Edwardian villa a mere stone’s throw from the nearest railway station, though, less conveniently the vacant flat was unfurnished. Meakin spent the rest of the day installing Snow’s bothersome transmitter, concealing the lengthy dipole aerial in the attic, while Robertson carefully drafted Snow’s next message to Doctor Rantzau. ‘Must meet you in Holland at once. Bring weather code. Radio town and hotel. Wales ready.’
With Tar at his shoulder, Owens keyed the signal at 11.30 that night. Yet again there was no reply. After waiting for several long hours, the message was repeated at 04.00 on Wednesday morning. This time the funkers at Wohldorf were wide awake. ‘We immediately received a reply,’ Tar noted. ‘But their message was quite undecipherable. We asked for a repeat, whereupon the Germans replied that they wanted a repeat. After this last message we decided it was high time to give it up.’
Despite these frustrations, this fumbled exchange represented a significant breakthrough. ‘There are dramatic moments in the history of most institutions,’ vouched an internal history of MI5. ‘This, in the record of double-cross activities, was one of them. For with Snow’s first message the double-cross system was well and truly launched. He was in fact the fons et origo of all our activities for the next five years.’
Only now was the 18B Order served on Owens formally suspended, and Lily allowed to join him at Norbiton Avenue. Snow’s pretty lover was driven down from West Ham by Bill Gagen and provided with funds to buy furniture. Quite correctly, Robertson surmised that wily Lily Bade was rather more than a mistress on the make and would need to be watched just as carefully as Agent Snow. Determined to take no chances, Owens’ minders placed the klamotten in a locked room with the key retained by B1A.
For Snow to remain credible with ‘Herr Doktor Rantzau’ it was vital to resume some more meaningful contact without further delay. With deep misgivings, MI5 agreed to allow him to return to the Continent to treff with the Doctor in person, this time in Rotterdam. With the Netherlands still neutral, Owens could maintain his pre-war cover as a commercial traveller and simply call Stelle X by telephone once he arrived. Rantzau, Tar hoped, would hasten across the border to meet with Johnny, provide dope on other Nazi spies still at large in Britain, and perhaps even betray Hitler’s military designs on Western Europe.
Colonel Johnny had other ideas. On Thursday, 14 September, Robertson returned to Kingston with a passport and exit permit made out in the name of Thomas Wilson, and briefed Owens to travel via Tilbury and Flushing the following day. Reverting to type, Owens asked Tar to conjure up a suitable Welsh sidekick, sufficiently well briefed to convince Rantzau that ‘Wales ready’ was no idle boast. Gagen proposed a Special Branch sergeant who spoke German and ‘had the appearance of a Welshman’, though his candidate was immediately vetoed. ‘Snow said that the Germans do not understand Welsh as he had tried them out in the language. But they know what it sounds like and would not be easily taken in by an impostor.’
Owens had every reason to be cautious. Agent Snow was loyal to neither side, an imposture that even the thickest Special Branch sergeant was quite likely to detect. Besides, the disorientating, schizophrenic world of the double agent in wartime required nerves of steel, as well as the ability to contrive endless stories and subterfuges – some as Johnny, more as Snow. An amateur might easily crumble under pressure. Instead, Snow’s ideal stooge should be the type of man described by MI5 as possessed of ‘a natural predilection to live in that curious world of espionage and deceit, and who attach themselves with equal facility to one side or the other, so long as their craving for adventure of a rather macabre type is satisfied.’
That neither Tar Robertson nor Nikolaus Ritter could be entirely certain of what Owens got up to on the far side of the water made his dangerous game so much easier to play.
Snow finally departed from London on Friday, arriving in Rotterdam at six in the evening and checking into the Hotel Monopole, a fascist-friendly establishment. Having left a telephone message at the Auerbach office, Owens sat down to wait for the Doctor. Over the course of an eventful weekend there was much to occupy his mind. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, causing the Mo[ś]cicki government to flee to Romania, while U-29 torpedoed and sank the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous in the Bristol Channel, causing the shocking loss of 518 men. With 50,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) already landed in France, the chances of a negotiated peace looked increasingly remote.
Ritter did not arrive until Monday, bringing with him a colleague named Kurtz and taking a suite at the Weimar, a luxurious waterfront establishment. ‘He asked me what work I had done,’ Owens recalled. ‘I told him that my time had been occupied with getting a new address, and putting the radio in working order. Rantzau said he had £80 for me, and as much as I required in London. I complained of radio trouble. They said things were difficult but that they would get the new set to me by U-boat at the first opportunity.’
What actually transpired between Snow and Rantzau is difficult to gauge, since Owens’ reports to British intelligence were highly selective and few Abwehr files would survive the war. By his own account to MI5, following detailed discussion of codes and transmission times the conversation turned to sabotage in Wales. Ritter identified heavy industry around Port Talbot and Briton Ferry as possible targets.
‘I’ve got a contact in Swansea,’ fibbed Owens. ‘Just an ordinary sort of man, not very flush with money. He’s in touch with the head of the Welsh Nationalist people, Plaid Cymru. Their leader lives somewhere up north.’
‘Is this middleman reliable?’ asked Ritter.
‘One hundred per cent.’
‘Then bring him to Brussels in a fortnight. We’ll put him up at the Savoy, show him we mean business.’
‘He’ll be tickled to death.’
Ritter recharged their glasses, then asked Colonel Johnny to find a quiet spot on the Welsh coast suitable for landing arms and explosives. Owens cast his mind back eighteen years to his brief, unhappy interlude as a candy magnate in Mumbles. ‘Oxwich Bay, perhaps. Maybe Rhossili.’
‘Keep it coming, Arthur. Troop movements, tank units, any RAF squadrons transferring to France. And more on this wireless cloud business.’
‘I can give you that now,’ replied Owens, initiating an exchange recorded only in Abwehr files. ‘There’s a line of UHF radio stations running right the way down the east coast. They bounce electronic beams off aircraft. Wash out death rays and stalling engines, that’s nothing but a stunt. These things are capable of tracking the approach of your bombers from miles away – range, altitude and numbers. The whole damn works.’
‘This dope comes from where?’
‘A Philips engineer, attached to the Air Ministry.’
‘English?’
‘Dutch. But he’s on the level.’
The Doctor smiled broadly, his gold tooth flashing. Here, at last, was confirmation that the nests of puzzling masts dotted around the English coastline beamed out something more significant than marine navigation signals, or primitive television broadcas
ts. The workings of the British radar network was Johnny’s best sample yet. Worth reporting to Admiral Canaris in person, in fact.
CONGRATULATIONS all round.
By way of a quid pro quo, Ritter offered Owens a strategic revelation of his own. ‘Once the main part of the British army has left for France we intend to surround London with thousands of paratroops. Probably most of our Fallschirmjäger will die, but think of the effect on morale. Nazis with Tommy guns and flame throwers, running amok in the garden of England.’
‘Your public water supply,’ added Kurtz. ‘Easily poisoned with deadly bacteria. And you’re a chemist, I see.’
‘Schrecklichkeit,’ grinned Ritter, ‘followed by swift surrender on favourable terms. There’s no need for this unfortunate war to drag on, Arthur. We’re all of us working for peace. And I see big things ahead for Der Kleine.’
From humbug merchant to mass poisoner in one fell swoop. Never mind the Hall of Fame at the Reichstag, Ritter’s latest stunt promised immortality in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds.
Next day Owens left Rotterdam £80 richer, albeit green with fright at the prospect of being torpedoed midway between Flushing and Tilbury. There was also the prospect of Luftwaffe raids on the new Hawker Hurricane factory at Kingston, barely a mile from Norbiton Avenue. This, too, Ritter had predicted. Death from the air, and poison in the water. Perfidious Albion, so it seemed, held even greater perils than Nazi Germany.
The jumpy triple agent would have fretted even more had he known that MI5 were now in dialogue with the War Cabinet about mandatory capital punishment for enemy spies.
‘The matter appears to have been overlooked in our Defence Regulations,’ remarked Liddell. ‘The Director of Public Prosecutions says that trial for high treason would be far too cumbersome and ineffective. All the high legal pundits agree that a law should be framed so that if a spy is convicted of espionage the judge has no alternative but to sentence him to death, on the same lines that he would sentence a murderer. It is always open to the king to whittle the sentence down to three weeks if he so desires.’
Indefinite detention without trial under Defence Regulation 18B would be condemned as ‘in the highest degree odious’ even by Winston Churchill. To captured spies, however, unlimited gaol time under draconian emergency powers beat a date with the hangman, or a firing squad.
Back in Blighty, Agent Snow was grilled by Robertson for several hours. Owens bluffed at length about Welsh Nationalists, Italian submarine parts and Russian oil, but mentioned nothing about selling out British radar, or loose-lipped sources at Philips. Instead, Robertson was struck hardest by the Little Man’s animated chatter about terror raids and secret weapons. ‘Snow impressed on me that Rantzau has lived a lot in America, and has acquired the American outlook of showmanship. Yet he has the greatest respect for Rantzau’s brains and ability, and says that his power is quite extraordinary.’
So too was his timing. On the afternoon of Tuesday, 19 September, as Owens made his way back to Tilbury, Adolf Hitler broadcast a speech from Danzig, triumphalist in tone, laced with hints of a secret weapon ‘against which no defence would avail’. Suitably alarmed, British intelligence agencies scrambled to discover more about the fantastical doomsday device, said to be capable of blinding and deafening its victims. Public alarm spread like wildfire, fuelled by sensationalist newspaper coverage; some no doubt feared an atomic bomb, a weapon of mass destruction first mooted in public six months earlier. ‘This terrible weapon is probably meant to intimidate,’ wrote John Colville, a junior secretary at the Foreign Office. ‘But it does give one a slight feeling of uneasiness, because even Hitler and his satellites usually have something on which to base statements of this kind.’
SIS turned to a gifted young Oxford scientist, R. V. Jones, who noted that the latest ‘death ray’ demonstrated to MI6 had shown remarkable properties only as a fruit preserver, and deduced that the weapon kited by Hitler in Danzig was merely the Luftwaffe. Nevertheless, in his final report Jones sounded a note of caution. Dismissing some of the more fantastic rumours, including ‘machines for generating earthquakes’ and ‘gases which cause everyone within two miles to burst’, the scientist warned that a number of Nazi projects deserved to be taken seriously. This prescient list included long-range rockets and pilotless aircraft, as well as two items brought back from Rotterdam by Agent Snow: bacteriological warfare, and poison gas.
Within days, irate freshwater anglers found vulnerable reservoirs suddenly closed to fishing. Meanwhile, by sinister coincidence, a virulent measles epidemic tore through MI5. Quietly grateful, Tar Robertson and his team were allowed to return to central London, quitting Wormwood Scrubs for the more convivial surrounds of 58 St James’s Street, a short walk from Piccadilly.
Reunited with Lily at Norbiton Avenue, Owens set about discouraging the Luftwaffe from bombing the Kingston area by transmitting unfavourable weather reports. ‘22.07 hours, September 23. Cloud base 350 metres. Westerly wind, Force 3. Sky totally overcast.’
Visiting Snow three days later, MI5 fell prey to paranoia of a different kind. That evening Tar Robertson’s new assistant, a former banker named Richman Stopford, drove down to Kingston to supervise the evening transmission. He was joined on the journey by another B Division officer, Michael Ryde, recently appointed as Regional Security Liaison Officer for Surrey. Mindful of tradecraft, the pair parked near Norbiton station and completed their journey on foot. As they walked through the subway, Stopford’s gaze was drawn to a loitering girl. ‘She was fairly thickset, short, aged about 25 to 30, wearing a dark blue felt hat and dark coat in some tweed material. In the darkness of the subway I could not be certain of the colour of her hair, although I passed very close to her. My impression was that it was dark.’
On turning the corner into Norbiton Avenue the intelligence men watched as an expensive-looking car drew up outside number 9, disgorging Owens and Lily, along with two unidentified men. Electing to telephone Robertson, Stopford retraced his steps to the station, only to find that he was being followed by a third unidentified male. Moreover, the dark, dumpy girl still stood guard at the mouth of the subway.
Happily the mystery was soon dispelled. The men in the car were Bill Gagen and his sergeant, and the tail behind Stopford one of the Special Branch watchers detailed to keep tabs on Owens, plainly good at his job. But who was the mysterious female in the blue felt hat? ‘I told Owens that we were suspicious someone had been watching us, possibly a girl,’ warned Stopford. ‘This news made him somewhat nervous, so much so that I had to code most of his messages myself.’
Stopford took security very seriously indeed, and poured scorn on the amateurish conduct of their rival spooks from Scotland Yard. ‘The fact that neither Mr Ryde nor I were aware that Inspector Gagen was intending to appear at Snow’s flat very nearly resulted in a major calamity. It is essential that the minimum number of people should be seen to enter and leave, and it is taking a quite unnecessary risk to allow Gagen, in a large and shiny car, which he parked outside the door, to go in and out as he chooses. The good lady in the flat opposite did in fact put her head out of the door to see who all the people were going up and down her back stairs.’
Thanks to these various misadventures, Owens only just managed to transmit on schedule at 22.00. Numbering his message #13, OIK informed Wohldorf that he was now: ‘Leaving for Wales. Will radio Friday night at 12. Seeing Williams. Please reply.’
After requesting a repeat, Wohldorf replied: ‘Need military and general news urgently daily.’
Ignoring this plea, Owens buzzed over a mundane weather report, reception of which was confirmed after two repeats. ‘Visibility 900 metres. Cloud base 400-500 metres. North-easterly wind, Force 2. Temperature 50 Fahrenheit.’
Apparently happy, the distant Abwehr operator signed off with some light-hearted banter: ‘Good night, old boy.’
Seldom had war seemed more phoney.
4
The Welsh Ring
U
nreliable Special Branch officers aside, worried Agent Snow had not long to wait before uninvited guests began to darken the door of the new London stelle. Responding to a knock on the morning of Tuesday, 3 October, Owens found himself face to face with a tall, thin, bespectacled man whose voice when he spoke carried the faintest hint of an American accent.
The stranger asked whether Owens knew ‘the Doctor’, and asked for a telephone number. Owens hedged artfully. What with the war situation, he said, the Post Office would take at least a week to connect a line. The sinister American promised to return. Closing the door in his face, Owens called Major Ryde to demand increased protection. ‘We must assume,’ Tar remarked, ‘that from now on Snow will probably be followed by someone from the other side.’
Even if the thin man really existed, the Security Service stood no chance of tracking him down. Despite having doubled in size since the outbreak of war MI5 found itself swamped by a rip tide of urgent requests, all of which competed for top priority. For Liddell and Robertson in B Division, the investigation of innocent foreign nationals and suspected Fifth Columnists took up fully three-quarters of their time, an absurd state of affairs epitomised by a report from a clergyman’s daughter in Winchester, who confidently denounced a lodger as ‘un-English’ for failing to flush a lavatory.
This left B1A with insufficient resources for proper counter-espionage work, such as identifying Snow’s mystery visitor, and investigating reports of clandestine signalling from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Much of this technical toil was undertaken by the Radio Security Service, in truth little more than a collection of pre-war radio hams. ‘Tar tells me that our DF organisation is virtually no organisation at all,’ Liddell fretted. ‘We require 60 experts at least. At the moment we have 27 amateurs twiddling knobs. In the meantime another station has been located in Belfast. This is interesting as Owens had already told us of its existence. There seems no reason to doubt his loyalty at the moment, but he is under close supervision. When things begin to warm up we hope to do useful work by sending misleading messages.’
Hitler's Spy Page 7