On Monday, 6 May, two more Indian seamen called at Sackville Street, checking on the valves but dropping nothing explosive. The pair were traced to a cargo ship at Greenwich and allowed to remain at large, but failed to lead to other Nazi agents in London. Rolph, it was noted, appeared to be growing too close to Owens, yet MI5 failed to appreciate that these several visits by Lascar seamen indicated a private communication channel between Agent Snow and the Abwehr organisation in Antwerp.
The following day Robertson briefed Sam McCarthy at his London club. ‘I asked him to go down to The Marlborough some time round about 6 pm tonight. I gave him a description of Snow, and suggested he should approach him from the Canadian aspect.’ Mac would explain that he was thinking of moving to Richmond, and was short of funds. Tar advanced the hard-drinking former dope fiend a pound by way of beer money, and asked him to report on progress the next morning. ‘I gave him a rough outline of Snow’s character and pointed out that he was a tremendous talker.’
As Biscuit moved on Snow, speculation mounted that Germany was poised to invade Holland and Belgium. Dutch forces mobilised on 7 May, prompting an urgent signal from the London stelle to Wohldorf. ‘Have secret documents + RAF reports. Applied for exit permit. When can I meet you?’
Answer came there none. At dawn on Friday, 10 May, Hitler launched Operation Sichelschnitt, a broad ‘sickle stroke’ in which seventy-six German divisions steamrollered Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, at the same time penetrating into Northern France through the thick forests of the Ardennes. The Sitzkrieg was over. German paratroops again dropped from the sky to seize key bridges and airfields around The Hague and Rotterdam, while just eighty men in gliders neutralised the giant Belgian fortress at Eben-Emael near Liège. Galvanised at last, the British Expeditionary Force advanced into Belgium to meet the enemy head on, repeating a strategy adopted in August 1914. By the end of the day ailing Neville Chamberlain had resigned as Prime Minister, to be replaced by a far more robust war leader in the form of Winston Churchill who famously offered the British people ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’.
Electing to govern by virtual decree, Britain’s new premier immediately stepped up the internment of aliens and hostiles under Regulation 18B. The success of enemy paratroops in Holland inevitably heightened paranoia about the Fifth Column, flooding the press with lurid tales of fanatical Nazis dressed as priests, postmen and – bizarrely – nuns. Paradoxically, Agent Snow welcomed these alarmist developments. A clean sweep of rival agents under 18B meant that Hamburg would become wholly reliant on the London stelle, and reduced the risk of visits by sinister sleepers. Moreover, the onset of Blitzkrieg in Western Europe might bring the war to a rapid conclusion, with Colonel Johnny a feted hero on the winning side.
Because countries didn’t count.
Excepting Holland, where Ritter found himself arrested and detained on the eve of the German assault. As a result Wohldorf resumed radio contact with Owens only on 14 May, fully four days into the Sichelschnitt campaign. For MI5, the good news was that Doctor Rantzau wished to meet Johnny the following week. The bad news was that the centre of Rotterdam was razed by the Luftwaffe on the very same day, a blunt demonstration of air power that killed a thousand civilians and forced the Dutch government to capitulate. With Holland neutralised rather than neutral, the trawler treff was impossible to avoid.
By meeting Rantzau in the North Sea, Agent Snow stood to discover whether German paratroopers were set to ransack the Home Counties, or if a seaborne invasion was more likely. On 15 May Robertson and Richman Stopford hastened to the busy east coast port of Grimsby, where they met with Mr Leach of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries to discuss chartering a suitable boat. ‘We explained that we wanted to arrange for a trawler to go to a certain rendezvous in the North Sea, taking one or two people from our side who would meet a German submarine, or seaplane or trawler.’ Leach was told nothing about the Snow case, or the reason for the rendezvous, learning only that ‘there would be a short conversation, and possibly one or two from our side would not return.’
Leach recommended Sir Thomas Robinson & Son (Grimsby) Ltd, who readily agreed to lend MI5 a large fishing trawler named the Barbados. Built in 1905 and displacing 130 tons, the Barbados carried a crew of nine and was skippered by Captain Walker. ‘He is entirely trustworthy,’ noted Robertson. ‘He is going to tell the crew that they will be seeing funny things on this trip, but whatever they see will not be what they think it is.’ Tar also promised to pass Walker the German recognition signal as soon as it was known, having come to appreciate that ‘it would not be safe to rely on believing Snow once the voyage has begun.’
So far as the crew of the Barbados were concerned, the two strangers were ‘special observers’ from a government department. As with Owens, financial reward was the principal driver. ‘It is said they value money above most things. Each man will be promised a bonus of £5, the mate £10, and the skipper £20 – if the trip is satisfactorily carried out.’
After consulting with Leach and Walker, the treff was fixed for a point 120 miles due east of Grimsby, precisely midway between England and Holland and slightly south of the Dogger Bank. ‘We decided on this position because fishing any considerable distance outside the permitted grounds would arouse suspicion, and might lead to action against the ship on the part of our own aircraft. The trawlers generally fish in company, or at any rate not far from each other. The skipper will have to detach the ship from any company she may be in discreetly and if possible after dark.’
Owens buzzed the details to Wohldorf next day. ‘Name of ship Barbados. Meet me 53 degrees 40 minutes north 3 degrees 10 minutes east, 26 fathoms – midnight Tuesday 21st or Wednesday 29th May.’
As yet, it was still unclear whether Biscuit would even join Snow, let alone risk his skin by going on into Germany. On Saturday afternoon, as German armoured columns thrust ever deeper into France and the sound of distant gunfire rattled windows in Kent, Robertson met Owens and McCarthy in Richmond Park. Double-crossing his own double agent, Tar treated Mac as though he were a stranger and helped the pair concoct a shared past history in Canada. Afterwards he took Owens aside for a quiet solo briefing, taking care to stroke the Little Man’s vanity.
‘How’s McCarthy?’
‘On the level, seems to me.’
‘Should we send him into Germany?’
‘I reckon so. It’s just as well that he’s a greenhorn at this type of work. The less he knows, the safer he’ll be.’
‘I trust you’ve given him some money to settle his affairs.’
‘Settle them yourself,’ replied Owens, shrugging his shoulders. ‘He’s your agent now. Besides, I’m down to my last five quid.’
Robertson frowned. Owens received £250 each month from the Abwehr, bumped up by generous expenses; Lily Bade, now visibly pregnant, even had her own maid. As a British army captain with a regular commission Tar’s own monthly pay packet barely amounted to £25. ‘Snow said he was very short of money. Yet I had seen his notecase, which was quite half an inch thick.’
Robertson left the park with McCarthy, telling Owens that MI5 needed to vet his latest sidekick, but promising to return to Richmond as soon as Wohldorf buzzed over final instructions. As they drove into London McCarthy filled Tar in on his several conversations with the diminutive master spy.
‘I’ll go into Germany,’ Mac promised. ‘He told me not to worry because the Jerries will look after me, that they’re all fine people. The way Owens tells it, he’s working on squeezing as much dough as he can from your office. He keeps on saying, “Why shouldn’t Robbie pay?”’
‘Verisimilitude.’
‘Come again?’
‘For the sake of appearances your money has to come from Snow.’
Mac shook his head. ‘He reckons you’re on the take. Swears blind you’ve skimmed off £5,000 meant for him. And he’s definitely pro-Nazi. Says you and quite a few more at the office are due for the chop once the invasion kicks off.’
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This was ironic indeed. Already there was talk at the Scrubs of bumping off double-cross agents come Der Tag. Ultimately all of them were disposable – McCarthy included.
‘There’s more,’ Mac continued, unaware of the danger. ‘He wants to introduce me to the Doctor as a British agent, and said I should mention your name. I told him it sounded pretty risky. Not to worry, he says, because Rantzau knows all about his connections with Captain Robertson and MI5.’
Robertson considered this for a moment. Not half an hour earlier he had allowed himself a rare moment of self-congratulation on successfully double-crossing Owens with McCarthy. Now, even if the Little Man was merely running off at the mouth, that confidence seemed horribly misplaced. Suppressing his annoyance, Tar told the driver to proceed directly to Hood House on Dolphin Square.
At Flat 308 the name on the doorbell was Captain King, a preferred pseudonym of Maxwell Knight. ‘McCarthy and I went straight to Mr Knight’s flat and discussed the whole affair with him,’ noted Tar. ‘Mac was very anxious for us to allow him to go on with the scheme and go into Germany, but Knight and I both agreed that it would be far too dangerous to take this course. In any event, by doing so we should get no further with the case.’
Instead, the Barbados would set course for a false rendezvous. ‘This will make it appear to Snow that everything is going according to plan, but that Rantzau was unable to keep the rendezvous.’ Only Mac and Captain Walker would be wise to this deception.
Robertson apprised Guy Liddell, whose response was reliably complacent. ‘McCarthy has now made it clear that Snow is double-crossing us. Personally I think Snow just regards the whole business as a money-making concern and gives a little to both sides. Probably neither side really trusts him. He has not been in a position to give the Germans very much from this country, except information which we have planted on him.’
Nothing much save for the radar secret, along with unadulterated dope on key fighter aerodromes, war factories and the RAF’s strategic fuel reserve.
At seven o’clock, by prior arrangement, McCarthy called Owens at Marlborough Road and made a show of disparaging MI5. ‘Biscuit told Snow that he had only been given £2 by Robertson, whom he thought was a pretty revolting sort of bloke. Snow agreed.’
Soon the feeling would be mutual.
As Mac and Tar left Dolphin Square, Owens and Lily pitched up at Sackville Street, where William Rolph showed Lily an ornamental birdcage, and offered Colonel Johnny a priceless nest egg. With Panzer columns sweeping through France towards the Channel coast, and the Low Countries largely overrun, a swift German victory appeared not only possible but likely. Rolph was of Swiss origin, and like Owens untroubled by issues of national loyalty. Keen to curry favour with the winning side – and keep his creditors at bay – Rolph now offered Snow secret papers from MI5 in exchange for £2,000. The main document itself seemed unremarkable enough, being a menu card for a dinner held by the IP Club at Grosvenor House in May 1939. In the wrong hands, however, the card was priceless. For IP stood for ‘Intelligence People’, and the seating plan amounted to a veritable Who’s Who of MI5 and SIS, including Guy Liddell, Jasper Harker and the Director-General, Sir Vernon Kell.
And Thomas Argyle Robertson. Should the card fall into the hands of the Abwehr, let alone the Gestapo, the names of each and every diner would be added to a Sonderfahndungsliste, or special arrest list. At best, this would mean years in a concentration camp; at worst, being measured for a necktie fashioned from piano wire.
As yet, MI5 were unaware that Rolph had been corrupted. On Saturday evening, nursing deep misgivings, Robertson drove back to Richmond to issue Owens with final instructions. These included items of doctored intelligence based on Ritter’s last microdot questionnaire, as well as £100 in used notes for Captain Walker. With the treff fixed for midnight on Tuesday, Snow and Biscuit would leave from King’s Cross on Sunday morning and make their way to Grimsby by train. ‘I told Snow the whole trip was very problematical as we had no indication as to what type of vessel Rantzau would actually come in,’ Tar noted. ‘Therefore it is difficult to say whether the meeting will take place on board our trawler, or in Rantzau’s transport.’
Next day, Owens perfected his own deception. Breaking his journey to King’s Cross station he stopped off at the buffet at Charing Cross, where Rolph handed over the all-important IP menu card and upped the ante by offering to supply certain ‘blueprints’ of MI5. The pair travelled onwards by taxi, Rolph insistent that the Abwehr pay over the £2,000 in dollar bills, perhaps with an eye on escape to America. They parted company only at Russell Square, fearful of being spotted by Robertson, or watchers from B6.
Maintaining a discreet distance, Robertson watched as Snow and Biscuit pulled out of King’s Cross on the 11.10 to Peterborough, departing on a journey without maps and with no certain destination. The troubled head of B1A then returned to his office with the germ of a bright idea.
As the train steamed north through Hatfield and Huntingdon, Biscuit studied Snow with a critical eye. ‘Owens told me how pleased he was that we were on our way. He said it would not be long before he would be able to get his own back, scandalising Captain Robertson and two others who he said would soon be making swastikas. He then brought out a book and a dinner card marked IP Club, and said: “I’ll show you the damned names” and “Here’s another son of a bitch, a high man at MI5.”’
According to Owens, Robertson could expect to embezzle as much as £500 from the trawler treff. ‘They are all like that,’ he confided to Mac. ‘A mean lot of lousy, grafting bastards. My people pay well, they don’t bleed people and use them for mugs, no. But what mugs these wrongly-called intelligence people are.’
Snow then alluded to mystery blueprints. ‘He said he would be glad when the advance guard got here, and that they would know who to get and where to get them. Then he put the book away and told me, “I’m having you trained in sabotage and espionage. You will be brought back here without MI5 knowing, and you will have a big part. We’ll have a happy time when things start to happen.”’
At Peterborough the two agents changed trains for Grimsby. With time to kill, Owens set to prowling the platforms and soon spied a large wooden barrow loaded with crates of ammunition. Fearful and fascinated in equal measure, McCarthy watched as the Little Man scribbled down the destination address on a scrap of paper that he stuffed quickly into his pocket. Fears of Fifth Column infiltrators had lately reached fever pitch, stoked by sensational warnings from the Ministry of Information about fake refugees with machine guns, and ‘hairy-handed’ nuns. Yet here was an apparently genuine Nazi agent, behaving like a vaudeville spy but attracting nothing so much as a raised eyebrow.
Back in London, Robertson and Liddell took a bold decision to play for higher stakes. Hoping to capture – or kill – the elusive Doctor Rantzau, MI5 elected to stage a reverse Venlo. ‘Snow and Biscuit are to go out on the trawler and hang about the fishing ground until dusk,’ proposed Liddell. ‘Instead of going to the rendezvous the captain will sail to some other point and bring the boat home. This will keep Snow out of harm’s way and ensure that he does not get wind of any impending action. Meanwhile a submarine will play about in the vicinity, and if a U-boat turns up it will be torpedoed. If a trawler, it will be captured – we hope with Rantzau on board.’
CONGRATULATIONS indeed.
Such a sting would undoubtedly render Owens redundant as a viable double-cross asset, but the Little Man’s loyalties were in any case suspect and Rantzau would surely be a useful prize. With Snow and Biscuit already en route to Grimsby there was no time to lose. Full of enthusiasm for the audacious Venlo-payback scheme, Tar hastened over to the Admiralty, weighing the odds on the Senior Service lending him a spare submarine.
As the slow Grimsby train rattled through the flatlands of Lincolnshire Owens continued to behave conspicuously, noting down details of airfields, power stations and navigational landmarks. All, he promised McCarthy, would be handed over
to the Doctor at midnight on Tuesday. At length they alighted at Cleethorpes, a seaside resort five miles from Grimsby. Here Owens met with Mr Leach and Captain Walker, confirmed that the Barbados was ready to sail, and handed over the charter fee. Walker instructed the ‘special observers’ to be ready to sail from the fish dock at dawn. Their business done, the pair checked in at the Dolphin Hotel on Market Street and ate a hearty meal. Or Mac did, at least. Snow, as usual, grew increasingly tense, as though he were eating the last supper of a condemned man.
Afterwards Owens adjourned to the writing room to compose a letter to Lily, six months pregnant with her first child, and instructed McCarthy to wait in the bar. Ignoring this injunction, Mac slipped out and telephoned Robertson from another hotel nearby.
‘Biscuit rang me,’ wrote Tar, ‘and said that all the way up on the train Owens had been running down me and other officers in MI5, and saying what a rotten organisation it was. He also said that Owens had been making copious notes of everything he saw from the carriage window.’ Though disquieting enough, these disclosures were as nothing compared to Mac’s next revelation. ‘Apart from the information and photographs I had given him, Owens had on him an IP Club list.’
Robertson guessed immediately that the list had come from Rolph. While there was a certain bitter irony in a restaurateur attempting to sell a menu card to the enemy, confirmation that rogue Agent Snow intended to betray the names of half the intelligence establishment in Britain came as another devastating blow.
Phantom sleepers, blown fuses and unregulated treffs abroad. Daimler limousines and fancy town houses in Richmond. Maids for Lily Bade.
Squeezable mustard and Zeppelin shells.
It was now abundantly clear that Arthur Owens had spent two years inveigling the British secret service into a fraudulent triple-cross, trotting gaily from one mare’s nest to the next. ‘Snowy was double-crossing us,’ Tar conceded glumly, his heart made all the more heavy by a keen sense of personal betrayal. ‘He was pro-German in outlook, was acting for the Germans, and had told them everything that he was doing with us.’
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