Hitler's Spy

by James Hayward

  While Dicketts copied out a list of shipping movements, Charlie told Snow that he needed a new enlarger. ‘Owens took a roll of notes from his pocket, gave the requisite money to Charlie, and told me to take him to a large photographic shop in Bond Street. On the way Charlie was very frightened, and asked if we were being followed. While he was in the store a tall man in a Burberry mackintosh was standing at the counter near the entrance, focusing cameras in our direction, and I am of the opinion that he was photographing us.’

  Eschborn’s raw nerves owed something to the fact that he was also scamming Snow by securing the enlarger on part-exchange. After returning Charlie to Euston, Dicketts reported this duplicity to his employer. Agent Snow merely shrugged. ‘Well, he’s got away with an easy £50.’

  Towards the end of the afternoon the pair were joined by Lily and Kay and strolled half a mile to Charing Cross Road, where Owens spent £4 on expensive aviation books at Foyles. Back in Richmond, after an eventful day as an enemy of the state, Dick watched with interest as the Little Man grew increasingly anxious about his mission to Belgium, refusing even to play darts, and foregoing their customary nightcap. ‘Later he warned me again of secrecy, and instructed me to call the following morning and go with him to Victoria to see him off on the 9.45 to Shoreham aerodrome.’ By way of a bonus, Owens pressed on Dicketts a full bottle of genuine Mountain Dew whisky. ‘I protested that he had been generous enough, and he replied, “You are having this with the Führer. Enjoy it, and don’t worry about anything.”’

  Unbeknown to Hitler’s chief spy in England, for the last twelve hours Dick had been playing his own double game. That morning, instead of keeping his appointment with a drinks supplier in Hammersmith, Dick stopped off at 151 Victoria Street, a security-service office since 1909. There he asked to speak to Air Commodore Archie Boyle, the newly appointed Director of Air Intelligence, with whom he had served two decades earlier. Boyle declined to see him, so Dicketts gave his statement to an aide, claiming that he had penetrated ‘the heart of the German secret service in this country.’

  This wholly unexpected development finally allowed Tar Robertson to identify Dick Moreton as Walter Dicketts. For B1A, the unauthorised admission of a career criminal into Snow’s inner circle was yet another worrisome security breach. ‘Owens is a stupid little man who is given to doing silly things at odd moments,’ Tar fulminated. ‘At this stage there must be a large number of people in this country and elsewhere who are quite au fait with what he is doing. If possible, we could in some way make arrangements to frighten Snow in order to prevent him from doing this sort of thing again.’

  On Thursday morning Dicketts drove Owens to Victoria station. Less than a mile away, Neville Chamberlain prepared to tell a meeting of Conservatives at Central Hall that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ by failing to deliver a knockout blow against Britain and France. Colonel Johnny saw things very differently indeed. Boarding the train to Shoreham airport, his parting shot to Dicketts was typically opaque. ‘After Owens told me to stay with my wife at Marlborough Road and look after Lily, his last words were: “If I am successful I shall be able to do anything I like.”’

  This vaulting claim was no idle boast. Back in Antwerp, Owens kept his complex triple-cross game in play with fresh dope on the so-called wireless cloud, detailing a string of new radar stations between Grimsby and Southend, far smaller than the Chain Home sites but, like them, able to detect the approach of hostile aircraft by means of UHF radio waves. This latest innovation was Chain Home Low, able to track raiders down to 500 feet, and only just operational. There was even a detailed description of the CHL installation at Hopton, halfway between Yarmouth and Lowestoft, including the wooden tower and aerial array. ‘The whole area was strongly guarded and I had to pass through at high speed,’ Owens boasted. ‘It’s impossible to get close to the towers but I hope to get details from other sources. Do all you can to jam these signals, or knock out the power source.’

  Plainly the Little Man had accomplished more in Suffolk in January than digging his Ford out of snowdrifts. To Ritter, dope of such potent strength served to excuse the clodhopping Krafft–Dargel fiasco in Denmark, and calamitous exposés in the Daily Herald.

  Owens also promised to deliver up a suitable agent for sabotage training in Germany as early as May. Three months earlier Gwilym Williams, the former police inspector from Swansea, had been put forward for this high risk-assignment, only to fall victim to an outbreak of cold feet following the Venlo incident. Now Owens proposed a far better candidate: tall, aged about forty, knew his way around boats. Had knocked around the world a bit, too.

  Walter Dicketts was absolute jake.

  Unfortunately MI5 took a dimmer view of the Police Gazette regular as agent material. On Saturday morning, as Snow sold out Chain Home Low to the Abwehr in Antwerp, the telephone tap at Marlborough Road revealed that Dicketts proposed to meet Lily and Kay at noon on the platform at Putney station. Calling on Scotland Yard rather than the Branch, Robertson arranged for CID officers to arrest Dick on the Birmingham warrant, and reserved a cell for him at Richmond police station. Britain’s least wanted was duly lifted without fuss, his enforced departure passing unseen by Lily and Kay.

  Behind bars once again, Dicketts was quick to volunteer that he had ‘valuable information’ about a dangerous Nazi spy ring. After a lengthy interview, Robertson supervised a search of his room at Montague Road but found nothing incriminating. ‘I am quite certain in my own mind that Dicketts is not a Gestapo agent,’ he concluded with relief. ‘He tried to report the facts of the case, and actually paid a visit to the Air Ministry. Although he is a rogue from a financial point of view, he is loyal towards this country, his one motive being to try to get some sort of job in the air force. He saw his chance when he stumbled by luck across Owens and his nest of German agents.’

  Faced with the prospect of being taken to Birmingham under escort, Dicketts put through a call to Kay, explaining that he had ‘got into some wretched business’ with a quarrelsome family member, the whole amounting to ‘rather a bother’. He was, he said, at his lawyer’s office, and had no choice but to head north to put things right. ‘I told her not to worry, or discuss it with anybody. I would tell Lily and Snow when I saw them, and wire when I was returning.’

  On Sunday Robertson telephoned the Deputy Chief Constable of Birmingham and briefed William Clarence Johnson on a tricky situation. ‘I said that I was keen, if possible, to get rid of Dicketts for some time, and prevent him from saying anything in the witness box in connection with the Snow case, which he might easily do in a plea for leniency.’ Since Dicketts had made much the same play before Hampshire Assizes nine years earlier, Johnson promised to do what he could to ensure that the recidivist crook swindler received another long stretch behind bars.

  Owens flew back to Shoreham on Sunday. With £1,000 concealed in his false-bottomed suitcase, and complete freedom of action in Britain, Colonel Johnny breezed confidently through Customs and Immigration. Annoyingly, however, there was no sign of his sidekick-chauffeur outside the terminal building. Back at Marlborough Road, Agent Snow’s displeasure increased tenfold on learning that Dicketts had been unmasked, and was therefore unavailable for sabotage training in Germany. ‘I told him to cut adrift from his new friend and his business as soon as possible,’ insisted Robertson. ‘So far as his connection with Snow was concerned, Dicketts was trying to obtain as much money from him as possible in a long firm fraud.’

  Dicketts faced the music at Birmingham Police Court on Tuesday, 9 April, where he was let off lightly with a £5 fine. At dawn that same morning ‘real war’ broke out as German forces invaded Denmark and Norway, seizing key ports and airfields with the aid of paratroops and local Nazi sympathisers – seismic events which put petty crooks and rubber cheques in their proper perspective. Scarcely able to believe his luck, Dicketts hastened back to Richmond that same afternoon, intending to collect Kay from Marlborough Road. On arrival, however, a ‘tremendous row�
�� blew up, with Owens berating Dick over his no-show at Shoreham and abandoning their wives to the mercy of enemies on either side.

  ‘I heard later in the evening that they had become good friends again,’ Tar noted drily, having received word from Burton. ‘I took steps to ring Snow’s flat and insist that Dicketts remove himself at once and never return. Dicketts, fortunately, is under the impression that we assisted him considerably in letting him off with a fine. He has also been very strongly warned that he must not on any account mention the information about Owens in his possession.’

  Robertson offered a carrot as well as a stick, and promised to try to find Dicketts a job. ‘I don’t mind what branch of the service I go into,’ begged Dick three weeks later, writing from new lodgings in Kilburn. ‘Field force, intelligence, clerical or stores. I am just forty years of age and in a fairly fit condition, with the exception of a certain personal nervousness engendered by my past of eleven years ago. I can drive any kind of car, handle any small boat, and don’t mind risk or danger.’ Unfortunately the Air Ministry knew Dicketts of old, and refused point-blank to consider reinstatement.

  Having lost a sidekick far more promising than Alex Myner or Gwilym Williams, Owens played back little of value from Antwerp to MI5. The Doctor, he claimed, had advised him to change his code on a daily basis, and provided two copies of The Dead Don’t Care by Jonathan Latimer, published by Methuen at sixpence. It was hoped that the pair might treff again in May. Owens also warned that the City of Sydney, a cargo steamer en route to Mauritius, was carrying two time-fused firebombs in her hold, smuggled on board by Abwehr saboteurs in Amsterdam.

  ‘From our personal talk,’ deduced Robertson, ‘I am very much inclined to think that Snow is entirely trustworthy, and quite straightforward in the things which he gives me and the answers to my questions.’

  Having invested rather less in the Little Man, Guy Liddell sounded a note of caution. ‘These bombs may well be a plant, and I am advising that we take no action. The Director-General and Jasper Harker agree.’

  In fact the Ryvita bombs were all too real, but of inferior design, and failed to explode before the ship reached Port Louis seven weeks later. Robertson was wrong to trust Owens, no doubt hoping against hope that money, comfortable lodgings and 18B bought loyalty of a sort. Harder to comprehend is the fact that MI5 seemed to miss the significance of Owens’ next treff with Rantzau, proposed for May by the mysterious Doctor – on board a fishing trawler, in the middle of the cold North Sea.

  Agent Snow had forecast ‘real war’ for the middle of April, a prediction borne out by the German invasion of Denmark and Norway. Now the trawler treff surely tended to suggest an absence of neutral dry land in Western Europe by the end of May. No Netherlands, no Belgium, not even a Duchy of Luxembourg.

  Yet again, MI5 were in danger of missing the boat.

  6

  The Trawler Treff

  In a fit of uncommon bravado, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, denounced the German invasion of Norway on 9 April as the act of ‘a homicidal lunatic or mad dog’. In fact, precisely the opposite was true. In moving to ‘protect’ Norway against ‘Franco-British aggression’ Hitler not only obtained sheltered bases for U-boats and surface raiders to harass Allied shipping in the North Atlantic but also secured vital shipments of iron ore from Sweden, Norway’s close Scandinavian neighbour. There was also the small matter of the Norsk Hydro plant in Telemark, the only facility in Europe capable of producing heavy water for nuclear fission.

  Right hot.

  Parachute troops (Fallschirmjäger) dropped from the skies over Oslo to seize key harbours and airfields, in the process revealing a novel military innovation already flagged as a threat to London by Agent Snow. With no airborne arm of their own, Britain and France hurriedly embarked an amphibious force for Norway, though the troops boasted little in the way of specialist training and looked certain to face opposed landings at ports such as Narvik and Trondheim. Plainly some form of deception would greatly increase their chances of success, and perhaps repeat the trick of the ‘Russians in England’ in 1914, whose phantom presence delivered victory at the Battle of the Marne. Thus, as a scratch Allied force was hastily assembled in northern ports, MI5 laid plans for the vanguard to land with Snow on their boots.

  ‘French and Canadian troops sailing from Scotland to Norway,’ Owens buzzed Wohldorf, sticking to a script dictated by the Wireless Committee. ‘Information difficult to obtain. Very secret.’

  Adopting a somewhat bolder stance, on 19 April the Joint Intelligence Committee agreed that Agent Snow should try to convince the enemy that the main Allied effort would fall on Bergen. A scheme was devised whereby Owens would put across to the Germans that the War Office had issued an urgent call for photographs of Bergen. ‘This information should be brought to Snow through Charlie, who is in a first-class position to hear of such requirements. On sending this over by radio, it is hoped that the Allies will be able to make a fairly easy landing at Trondheim.’

  The stunt became all the more urgent after several British, French and Polish brigades landed at Narvik, only to encounter determined counter-attacks and raging blizzards. Inevitably, Snow’s Bergen deception fell apart just as shamefully as did the entire Norwegian campaign. Charlie inexplicably failed to call Snow as arranged on the morning of Saturday, 20 April, after which Owens set off on a lengthy reconnaissance tour of the West Country, leaving William Rolph in charge at Sackville Street. Eschborn finally telephoned on Tuesday, but made no mention of Bergen and spoke only of Trondheim – where landings had already begun, flagged loudly in advance by the Fleet Street press.

  The result was another inglorious debacle. Allied forces failed to gain a viable foothold anywhere in Norway and by the end of the month were being evacuated, with Quislings and a phantom Fifth Column widely held to blame. ‘The place was full of spies,’ complained one Scots soldier of the Trondheim expedition. ‘Every move we made was known to the Germans almost as soon as we made it. A Norwegian radio operator signalled directions to German aeroplanes which were carrying out raids. The Norwegians shot him.’

  Spies, so it seemed, lurked on every corner. The day after Owens set off on his field trip, Rolph received an exotic visitor at Sackville Street. Sporting a blue suit and an impressive black fez (but a limited command of English), an Indian seaman dropped off a package containing two brand-new wireless valves. In a rare display of efficiency Rolph tailed the dapper courier back to the City of Simla, a freighter berthed at the Albert Dock following a round trip from Tilbury to Antwerp. The Lascar was quickly identified as Mohideen Coonjee, almost certainly hired by Obed Hussein, a disaffected Indian national based in Antwerp, who had already attempted to sabotage British shipping using the port. Fortunately his efforts were no more effective than the dud firebombs placed on the City of Sydney.

  MI5 remained at sea throughout April. While Snow toured aerodromes and ports around Exeter and Bristol, Robertson turned his mind to the intricacies of the proposed trawler treff. Although chartering a worthy vessel was relatively straightforward, hiring a civilian crew threw up significant security risks. Looking further ahead, Tar also recognised that it would not be enough to simply land the explosives on the east coast. ‘Suitable factories must be picked in various parts of the country,’ he advised Liddell. ‘Naturally it will be necessary to have an actual explosion in order to instil confidence into the enemy. This should be followed by a necessary amount of publicity in the press.’

  There was also the vexed question of a suitable sidekick. Walter Dicketts’ lengthy criminal record kept him out of the frame, besides which he already knew far too much about Snow and the double-cross system to be allowed to travel into Germany. Gwilym Williams, too, was unsuited to the task, having been unable even to penetrate Plaid Cymru, let alone raise a functioning Welsh Fifth Column. ‘I filled in the form but I received no reply,’ the retired inspector informed Tar in a discouraging letter. ‘With great respect, I wish to point o
ut that my activities might be construed as being contrary to the provisions of the Police Pensions Act 1921, Section 15.’

  Ironically, the candidate put forward by Maxwell Knight of Section B5B was a dead ringer for Dicketts. Sam McCarthy was an occasional MI5 informant who had ‘knocked around the world a good deal’ as a dope addict, smuggler, petty thief and jailbird, and had recently completed a mission in Holland linked to a fascist named Heath, now interned under 18B. Canadian by birth, and variously known as ‘Frank’ or ‘Mac’, B1A now saddled Knight’s rough diamond agent with a puzzling new cryptonym: BISCUIT.

  ‘He is to be put on Snow in such a way as to preclude the possibility of Owens realising that he is one of ours,’ proposed Liddell. ‘Snow is to see him and let things develop in the ordinary way.’

  Owens returned home on the last day in April. Despite having spent more than a week in the field, however, the dope buzzed from Richmond to Wohldorf remained dangerously low-grade. ‘Westland Aircraft producing new machines, Supermarine production 50 Spitfires monthly. Bristol Aircraft making new twin engined fighter . . . Cirencester aerodrome 30 machines + Airspeed Oxford, Hawker Fury and Hawker Harts.’

  Demanding rather more than he troubled to deliver, Johnny signed off: ‘Urgently send me bombs.’