The violent denouement saw Best and Stevens abducted in broad daylight and hustled across the border into Germany, a humiliating coup that grabbed headlines worldwide as ‘The Venlo Incident’. Both men cracked under interrogation, and were forced to endure the grinding miseries of Sachsenhausen and Dachau. ‘With memories of past cowardice in a dentists’ chair,’ Best admitted, ‘my estimate of my fortitude under torture was modest in the extreme.’
Inevitably, British intelligence agencies now viewed all German initiatives with deep suspicion, and Gwilym Williams’ proposed trip to a spy school inside Germany was put on hold. ‘Venlo will be a great blow to SIS and also ourselves,’ Liddell commented. ‘It seems not unlikely that a member of the Dutch general staff, Colonel Sas, previously reported as a German agent, was responsible for giving the whole show away.’
Sas was innocent, and the blundering continued apace. Towards the end of November MI6 received a mystery package from Oslo containing detailed intelligence on German electronic warfare technology, including guided missiles, navigational beams and even rocket research on an obscure Baltic island called Peenemünde. This astonishing windfall also confirmed that enemy radar had been responsible for bouncing the disastrous Bomber Command raid on Wilhelmshaven on 4 September. ‘It was probably the best single report received from any source during the war,’ lamented SIS scientist R. V. Jones. ‘But the leading doubter implied that the whole thing was a plant. All I could do was to keep my own copy, and in the few dull moments of the war I used to look it up to see what should be coming along next.’
Meanwhile, as Arthur Owens continued to buzz humdrum weather reports from rented rooms in Kingston, undermining MI5 at every turn, Richman Stopford found himself inexorably drawn towards the ladies’ underwear department at Selfridges.
The upmarket Oxford Street department store became an unwitting battlefield in the secret war after Owens received his salary for November. Three of the four £5 notes posted from Bournemouth were found to be marked with a telltale rubber stamp, ‘S & Co Ltd’, which Lily recognised as belonging to Selfridges. After checking with the chief cashier, Stopford, a former banker, ascertained that the notes in question had crossed the counter on 14 November, when staff recalled serving a woman aged about sixty, said to be well spoken and possessed of a charming manner. During a subsequent case conference at MI5 the mystery customer was provisionally identified as Mathilde Krafft, a housekeeper employed by a naval officer living near Southampton, whose own bank records were found to match payments recently made to Snow.
Mail intercepts suggested that Krafft planned a return trip to London on 7 December. Accompanied by two counter girls from Selfridges, Stopford staked out platform 13 at Waterloo, then followed Krafft to a ‘somewhat suspect’ travel agency at Moorgate, where a firm identification was obtained. ‘She was dressed in a very dark fur coat and wore a bunch of violets,’ said Stopford. ‘Moderately well dressed for an elderly lady, with a typical German hausfrau appearance, and a rather active look in her eyes.’
Krafft’s biography was somewhat bizarre. German by birth, she had married a wealthy English coconut planter in Fiji but was now a widow with British nationality, and an adopted daughter named Editha Dargel. Even after Editha was deported on account of pro-Nazi agitation, Krafft continued to distribute Abwehr funds wired from the Sparkasse Bank in Hamburg, unaware that her cover now hung in shreds. Rather than have her arrested, Tar Robertson decided to keep the coconut widow under careful observation.
Despite having sacrificed Eschborn and Krafft to burnish his own reputation with MI5, a stunt not likely to have been authorised by Ritter, rogue Agent Snow still managed to blot his copybook, dispatching Lily to Manchester to liaise with Charlie while holding back funds earmarked for new microphotography equipment. Once again, Robertson was obliged to read Owens parts of the riot act. ‘I pointed out that as Snowy was the head of their organisation in this country it was up to him to get the thing going. In order to keep him up to the mark, I said I would speak to him every evening and ask how he had got on. I also took Owens through his accounts. From what I can see he has done England for as much money as he can possibly get.’
Money, and a mansion to rival Sloane Avenue or Pullman Court. Tired of cramped conditions at Norbiton Avenue, and still fearful of raids on the Hawker aircraft factory, Owens and Lily moved three miles north to Richmond, taking the lease on a substantial four-storey property at 14 Marlborough Road. Aside from the fact that the leafy suburb was more upmarket than nondescript Norbiton, the proximity of Richmond Park also facilitated clandestine meetings, thus avoiding the steady flow of visitors that made the first safehouse untenable. At the fancy new London stelle on Marlborough Road Snow’s B6 watchers occupied the lower floors, while Owens and Lily seized Lebensraum on the second and third. Once again the wireless aerial was concealed in the attic. Unbeknownst to Snow and his mistress, Robertson also installed a bugging device in the dining room.
Determined to see a return on his investment, Tar also convinced his superiors to allow limited disclosure of genuine military intelligence via Snow, subject to careful vetting by the Wireless Committee. ‘We must not give the enemy information so valuable that it would be likely to outweigh any subsequent benefits,’ warned a colleague. ‘A nice assessment of profit and loss has to be made in every case.’ Nevertheless, in order to put over the Big Lie, which might influence the outcome of entire battles and campaigns, it was also acknowledged that ‘a long period of truthful reporting is usually a necessary preliminary.’
Forsaking trivial buzzings about food rationing and barrage balloons, Owens was allowed to reconnoitre RAF stations at Croydon, Kenley and Farnborough, all of them home-defence airfields for Hurricanes and Spitfires of Fighter Command. In addition Wohldorf received worrisome details of the Short Stirling, a new four-engined heavy bomber poised to enter squadron service and with sufficient range and lifting power to carry 3,500 pounds of high explosive to Berlin. Göring, the corpulent commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, had already sworn that no enemy aircraft would be allowed to overfly Germany, let alone the capital. ‘If one enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Göring. You may call me Meyer.’
Meyer it would be.
At the same time Snow deliberately sabotaged his next treff in Belgium. Developing an earlier lie, he now warned Robertson that Williams appeared genuinely sympathetic to the German cause. ‘In Antwerp, G.W. said confidentially to Snow that he thought they were very fine fellows, that the Nazi party had done a tremendous lot for German working people, and that Williams did not feel he was quite playing the game.’ More credibly, Owens also argued that G.W. was a novice, liable to ‘give the whole show away’ if snatched in a Venlo sequel. Indeed, the two MI6 officers, Stevens and Best, were now reported by the press to be ‘detained at the headquarters of the Nazi Black Guards in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin’.
Evidently MI5 agreed, for on Friday, 15 December just one British spy boarded the Sabena DC3 carrying passengers to Brussels from the small, deco-styled civilian airport at Shoreham in Kent.
Duplicitous double agent Snow.
Once again, Owens met Ritter in Antwerp, and over a bottle of fine brandy at the Hotel Suisse handed over a wealth of ‘samples’ not cleared by the Wireless Committee: shadow war factories in the Midlands, bulk storage of aviation fuel at West Bromwich, shipping movements, improved torpedoes. There was but one black mark: Ritter had been recalled to Berlin to explain why weather reports from the London stelle were so innacurate. Seldom if ever did these tally with the bulletins received from Holland and Ireland.
The explanation concocted was simplicity itself. It was, Owens argued, quite impossible to furnish accurate weather reports after dark, let alone in the blackout. Patiently, Ritter instructed Johnny to assess the weather over London in daylight, then broadcast as usual at night.
By way of exchange Ritter handed over £215, with the promise of a regular monthly salary of £250 and better wireless e
quipment. The Doctor also told Owens to expect a delivery of time-fused firebombs disguised as packets of Swedish bread, to be smuggled on board Allied merchant shipping berthed at Liverpool. In addition, Hitler’s chief spy in England was tasked with bribing a ‘reliable fisherman’ to rendezvous with a U-boat in the North Sea, this in order to take advantage of ‘the ease with which smuggling is carried out on the east coast of England’.
Agent Snow flew back to Shoreham on Tuesday. Flush with money, he immediately splashed out on a Ford Model 10 – hardly the equal of the sleek white Jaguar SS100, but effective enough when it came to shaking off Special Branch tails on forays away from Marlborough Road. With less than a week to go before Christmas, however, there were no gifts for B1A, merely baubles and trinkets. Robertson learned only of firebombs which ‘looked something like Ryvita’, a revised weather code and vague details of a man ‘influential in high military circles’ known as Llanloch, who had sold secrets to Germany and now intended to stand for Parliament.
It was hardly the Oslo Report. Tar’s frustration only increased after Owens and Lily grew wise to the bug installed in the dining room. ‘Its usefulness has been impaired by the fact that most of the conversation is carried on in the kitchenette. Further, since it was installed Owens has bought a radiogram, which is turned on to the full extent when they indulge in any lengthy exchange. I am unable to resist the conclusion that it is done with the purpose of drowning the conversation.’
Worse was to follow in less than a week. Following Stopford’s positive identification of Mathilde Krafft, the Selfridges coconut widow, Guy Liddell asked MI6 to make discreet enquiries of her adopted daughter, Editha Dargel, now living in exile in Copenhagen. Unhelpfully, the Danes interrogated Dargel in blunt fashion, in the process letting slip that British intelligence knew her mother was distributing Nazi money in England. The result, candidly described as ‘a bad slip-up’ by Liddell, saw Krafft warned off further activity, and a worrying wireless flash sent from Wohldorf to Richmond.
When it rained in London, so an old saying ran, the people of Hamburg opened up their umbrellas.
Until further notice, the London stelle was being shut down.
Kein glas bier.
5
Double Agent Dick
Across Europe the winter of 1939/40 was one of the coldest on record. As a relentless cold front blew from east to west, the Baltic iced over from shore to shore for the first time since 1883, while in Lapland Finnish and Russian troops froze solid like statues, fighting to the death in temperatures as low as minus 43. In Britain, birds froze in trees, mercury in thermometers and beer in mugs. Snowfall at sea solidified incoming waves at Folkestone, Southampton and Bognor, and in Cirencester a vicious ice storm lasted two whole days, flailing streets and houses with super-cooled raindrops that froze on impact. Large swathes of the Home Counties lay buried under impassable snowdrifts, some rising as high as fifteen feet, paralysing roads and railways for days on end, delaying deliveries of food and fuel, and prolonging the agonising cold. Frostbite gnawed, hypothermia dispatched.
In Richmond the frozen Thames enabled festive skaters to flit gaily from bank to bank. On the upside, with Snow on ice, the freeze in wireless traffic between London and Wohldorf meant that Arthur Owens was able to spend most of his time lounging in bed with his sexy mistress Lily Bade.
On the downside, Lily fell pregnant.
Humdinger.
At least the harsh arctic weather slowed the march of the Red Army through Finland, and temporarily foiled Hitler’s Blitzkrieg assault on the Low Countries. On 10 January a Luftwaffe liaison aircraft became lost in fog and crash landed on the wrong side of the Belgian border. Among the classified documents recovered was a complete set of plans for the attack, a catastrophic slip which forced the German High Command to postpone Fall Gelb (Plan Yellow) until spring, at the same time shifting the main thrust to Sedan on the French frontier. A lackadaisical diary entry from Guy Liddell betrayed muddled thinking within British intelligence: ‘A German aeroplane came down in Belgium the other day with certain papers indicating an attack on Belgium and Holland. It looks rather as if this may have been part of the scheme for the war of nerves.’
Wartime reporting restrictions meant that many people in Britain failed to appreciate the extent and severity of the big freeze. Tar Robertson therefore pressed ahead with plans to dispatch Agent Snow on a reconnaissance tour of the North-East of England, this with the object of ticking boxes on Rantzau’s latest microdot questionnaire. ‘A double agent should, as far as possible, actually live the life and go through all the motions of a genuine agent,’ decreed MI5. ‘As a result his messages appeared to be true, and he did not trip over details of topographical or local observation. A lie when it is needed will only be believed if it rests on a firm foundation of previous truth.’
Like a diminutive Captain Scott, Owens left Richmond on 15 January, armed with coupons sufficient for thirty gallons of petrol, but precious little idea of the hazards ahead. Heading north along the A1 in his draughty Ford 10 Snow turned slowly to ice, and gamely struggled as far as Harrogate before finally being forced to turn back. Thawing out at the George Hotel in Grantham, he claimed to have watched a woman in a fur coat pump a group of RAF officers for information, fanning fears that the enemy were using ‘Mata Hari methods’ to glean military intelligence. ‘Tar told me of another case of a prostitute who seems to be intimate with a number of RAF officers,’ wrote Liddell, eyebrow raised. ‘Cases of this sort seem to be on the increase.’
Forcing a passage to Newcastle next day, Owens attempted to infiltrate the headquarters of 13 Group, the fighter wing charged with defending the North-East. On Wednesday Snow attempted to reach the port towns of Hull and Grimsby but found each and every road blocked by his namesake, and once again crawled back to Grantham. A reconnaissance of Wattisham airfield in Suffolk on Thursday was more successful, with Owens able to drive straight up to the guardroom and swap small talk with a loose-lipped flight sergeant. ‘He was told that recently an officer in RAF uniform had been all round the aerodrome, and not until after he had left was it realised that he was bogus. Owens said there was nothing to prevent anybody going all over the aerodrome without being in any way disturbed.’
After spending his fifth night away in Ipswich, Owens returned home on Saturday virtually empty-handed. Extreme weather had thwarted his efforts to reach Grimsby or Lowestoft to seek out a pliable boat-owning smuggler, and also stymied the collection of any worthwhile dope from Bomber Command stations across Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. ‘No Handley Page bombers at Dishforth but Wellingtons instead,’ he buzzed ineffectually. ‘Numbers etc unknown because everything covered in heavy snow.’
Still Wohldorf was reluctant to communicate, and in response to a nudge informed A.3504 that Llanloch, the corrupt and doubtless imaginary politician, would not now be getting in touch. ‘There is,’ Liddell wrote ruefully, ‘a slight impression that something may have gone wrong.’ The thaw came only in February, when Rantzau suddenly requested another treff in Antwerp. Agent Snow set off for the tiny civilian airport at Lympne near Hythe on 7 February, hopeful of reaching Brussels despite the continuing bad weather, and again travelling alone.
But not for long.
At Victoria station, as Owens took his seat in the first-class compartment, he became aware of a mysterious stranger regarding him intently from the end of the corridor. Soon after the watcher sat down opposite and struck up a conversation. This was Samuel Stewart, a shady Glaswegian shipping broker whom MI5 already suspected of gunrunning for the IRA. By a strange coincidence – which was no coincidence at all – Stewart was also en route to Antwerp, with a seat on the very same flight. When bad weather grounded the Sabena DC3 at Lympne, the new best friends elected to repair to a hotel in Folkestone.
Owens and Stewart returned to the airport on Friday morning, at which point the Scot came slightly unstuck. ‘He had a number of papers taken off him when passing through the controls,’ Owen
s recalled. ‘But not the passport he was taking over for a girl in Belgium to enable her to get into the United Kingdom.’ Pressed by Robertson, Snow teased him by saying that he had glimpsed the passport too briefly to note any particulars. Indeed, he had ‘deliberately trained his memory to forget everything, as a good memory for names, faces and information was dangerous.’
In Antwerp, Stewart further impressed Owens by picking up the tab for a lavish evening meal. ‘Snow is firmly convinced that Stewart is supplying particulars of ships sailing from this country and Ireland,’ Tar noted with approval, at long last sensing a breakthrough. ‘And that he is a very large cog in the German espionage machine.’
Keen to crack bigger nuts than Charles Eschborn and Mathilde Krafft, Tar had briefed Agent Snow to complain to Ritter of being badly overstretched as a one-man stelle, and in sore need of help. When they met next day Ritter agreed, promising to send over a South African agent who spoke perfect English, and handing Owens a letter to post to one Eugene Horsfall, a sleeper residing on the Sussex coast where he posed as an examinations tutor. Ritter also gave Owens £650 in dollars and Bank of England notes to open a London office as a convincing front for international trade. More ominously, Herr Doktor Rantzau remained ‘very anxious’ to obtain particulars of the water supply to Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle, and promised that the ‘real war’ would start in the middle of April.
Whether the wireless shutdown in January was a genuine response to the Krafft fiasco, or a ruse to confound MI5, is unclear. Whatever the truth, back in London Tar Robertson judged Snow’s fourth wartime mission ‘highly successful’. To his great relief, the Abwehr had again confirmed Owens as a trusted agent worthy of considerable financial investment, and at long last disclosed the identities of several more Nazi spies who could now be discreetly surveilled. Indeed excitement over the unmasking of Sam Stewart, who appeared to connect the Abwehr with the IRA, served to eclipse a far more significant intelligence coup, namely Ritter’s frank disclosure that the Phoney War would turn ‘real’ midway through April.
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