Hitler's Spy

by James Hayward

  To reduce the risk of interception a circuitous flight plan was adopted, taking full advantage of low-level cloud. ‘I wore a flying suit over my civilian clothes in case we fell into enemy hands,’ Ritter recalled in his postwar memoir. ‘Not that I was worried. Johnny’s code was unbreakable, and varied from day to day. The weather was clear and visibility good. However, when we reached the agreed position there was no boat to be seen. I told the pilot to begin flying in a search pattern – but still we found nothing.’

  Long hours passed. As darkness fell over the grey-green surface of the Dogger Bank, Lieutenant Argles and his crew kept their eyes peeled for the faint silhouette of a distant seaplane, or the menacing shadow of a submarine conning tower. Meanwhile the changeable North Sea weather continued to close in and before long the navy men found their efforts thwarted by dense fog. No aircraft circled to fire off starlight flares, no gunboat crept close on muffled engines, no U-boat broke surface to flash signals in Morse. The appointed time came and went with no sign of Doctor Rantzau. After waiting for several more blind, silent hours Argles reluctantly decided to extinguish Operation Lamp.

  Shivering fearfully in the wheelhouse, his protesting stomach knotted tighter than a drum, Arthur Owens counted his blessings.

  Ritter had given up long before. ‘There was no trawler, and fortunately no enemy aircraft to shoot down our Dornier. Eventually, with fuel running low, we headed for home. The operation had been a failure. I was disappointed, and in my mind turned over every stage of the plan.’

  For all concerned, the intricate trawler treff was destined to remain a riddle wrapped up in an enigma. The following year, under close interrogation, Owens stubbornly insisted that Rantzau flew out to meet the Barbados not once but twice, firing green signal flares on the first occasion but thwarted by fog on the second. Fully thirty years later, Ritter’s own unreliable account contradicted the version accepted by MI5, contending there had been no fog, and no initial reconnaissance flight on Monday. According to the Doctor, Captain Walker had developed cold feet, his fear then infecting the crew and McCarthy.

  Zeppelin shells.

  In reality, Owens and Ritter prevaricated in order to conceal some secret means of communication to which neither was prepared to admit, even decades later. It seems unlikely that Owens could have contacted the Doctor after boarding the Barbados at Grimsby, which tends to suggest that Rolph was complicit. These tantalising intrigues aside, Ritter could count himself fortunate that his hand-picked Luftwaffe aircrew failed to locate the trawler second time around, since the quick-firing Oerlikon cannon would have made short work of the cumbersome Dornier 18.

  The Barbados arrived back in Grimsby shortly after six o’clock on Friday evening. Shattered by the rough sea voyage, and in the certain knowledge that his dual careers as Snow and Johnny were both sunk in the groggy shallows of the Dogger Bank, charcoal-eyed Owens was immediately returned to his cell on HMS Corunia. Meanwhile Robertson and Richman Stopford took a verbal report from Argles and Paterson, and after satisfying themselves that Owens had behaved himself correctly paid the Little Man a visit.

  ‘To put it mildly, he was in the most frightful mess,’ claimed Robertson. ‘Snow complained of a duodenal ulcer and really looked desperately ill. He was taxed by us for over two hours. Had he been a normal human being he would have broken down, but we could get very little satisfaction from him. Although he continued to deny emphatically that he was double-crossing us, it was quite clear that he was fully expecting to be put into prison.’

  Already Owens had rehearsed his defence with considerable care. Harking back to his successful reconnaissance of Kiel harbour in 1936, Snow now claimed that copies of the photographs had somehow reached Rantzau, who then confronted him in Germany and extracted a confession ‘on pain of death’. By way of unpleasant consequence, Owens had been ‘living in a reign of terror from the Gestapo’ for several years.

  This convenient alibi was nothing more than artful bluff, conjured up on board the Barbados as Owens contemplated a date with the hangman under the Treachery Act, in force now for twenty-four hours. A defence of duress would allow him to claim that his acts had been involuntary, committed against a backdrop of clandestine events on foreign soil that defied investigation and which might well sway an ordinary jury. Like Peal and Hinchley-Cooke four years earlier, Robertson and Stopford considered the merits of a criminal case long and hard. Since the IP menu card had not found its way into enemy hands, however, and Owens was indisputably a British agent, B1A were forced to conclude that there was ‘no possible chance’ of securing a conviction.

  Besides which, the new Treachery Act meant that espionage trials had suddenly become counter-productive. A live spy, even if he could not transmit messages, was always of some use as a reference source to MI5. Whereas a dead spy was no use at all.

  Robertson returned to London with Stopford on Saturday morning. Among several competing priorities in the disappointing aftermath of Operation Lamp was a searching interrogation of William Rolph. Unfortunately Snow’s errant business partner was found to be absent from the basement office on Sackville Street and from his service flat nearby. Only a determined effort by Stopford succeeded in running Rolph down by telephone, and secured his reluctant consent to a meeting next day.

  Owens travelled back on Saturday afternoon under armed escort. Although the new 18B Order drawn up five days earlier had not yet been served, he was placed under house arrest at Marlborough Road and instructed to contact Wohldorf that night. Following his customary weather report, together with a brazen request for additional funds to pay off the skipper of the Barbados, Owens demanded to know why Rantzau had failed to appear at the rendezvous.

  The operator acknowledged his signal but gave no useful reply. Once again Stelle X appeared to have lost confidence in Colonel Johnny.

  For his part, Robertson paid close attention to the new hidden microphone in the dining room and disconnected the private telephone line. Both as Snow and Johnny, the Little Man’s future – and freedom – were dangling by the slenderest of threads.

  On the far side of the Channel the Allied position grew equally precarious. A British counter-attack at Arras stalled with the loss of 40 precious tanks, the small Belgian army was close to collapse and too many French military formations were reluctant to fight with sufficient vigour. With the strategic ports of Calais and Boulogne about to fall into German hands, almost half a million Allied troops became trapped in a shrinking pocket around Dunkirk. Curiously, Hitler chose this moment to endorse a command which would spark much controversy and on Friday morning approved the so-called ‘halt order’ proposed by his senior commander, General Gerd von Rundstedt, who sought to preserve his armoured divisions in order to defeat the main French force in the south. Rotund Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring lent his weight to the argument, bragging fatuously that his bombers were more than capable of dealing with the Tommies and poilus bottled up in the north.

  For two days the Luftwaffe bombed and strafed without mercy, prompting Berlin to announce that the fate of the Allies in Flanders was sealed. King George VI responded by declaring Sunday a day of national prayer, and left Buckingham Palace to attend a packed service at Westminster Abbey, joined by Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘The last three days have been the worst I ever spent for some considerable time,’ Guy Liddell confided to his diary. ‘The news has been so bad that it made me feel physically sick.’

  At ten o’clock on Sunday morning Robertson and Stopford descended the short flight of steps at Sackville Street. Plainly agitated even as he answered the door, Rolph tried to distract his visitors with items of trivia gleaned from his wife, a busy socialite. Robertson allowed this clumsy charade to run its course, then informed Rolph bluntly that Agent Snow had attempted to sell out MI5 with a dinner list.

  ‘Rolph expressed astonishment. When questioned, he said that he could not understand how the IP card had got into Owens’ possession. We then asked him i
f he was prepared to turn out his drawers and his safe, where Owens said blueprints of MI5 were kept. This he did.’

  From inside the safe Rolph produced a brown paper package secured with a rubber band. Inside it Robertson found a medal presented to Rolph by the King of Belgium, as well as several older IP Club menu cards and two slim folders. On examining the latter, Tar found details of PMS2, a shady counter-intelligence unit set up during the First World War to monitor the British socialist movement. Rolph had occupied a senior position, though his section had been shut down in 1917 after the controversial trial of Alice Wheeldon, a pacifist suffragette framed for plotting to assassinate David Lloyd George with a poison dart. Wheeldon had died after going on hunger strike in prison. Then, as now, Rolph’s conduct had evidenced a worrying lack of scruple.

  Robertson’s patience was fast wearing thin. ‘After looking through these papers, and the papers in the drawers of his desk, we were unable to trace his copy of the May 1939 dinner list. By this time Rolph was becoming a little bothered and never gave us a straight answer to any of our questions.’

  A desk jockey rather than a field agent, Rolph was no match for Owens where quick-witted fibbing was called for. At first he denied that Snow and Lily had visited the office on Saturday evening, and instead blathered tangentially about soldering irons and coffee pot repairs, followed by supper in a cosy little restaurant where the maitre d’ was a close personal friend.

  After ten dissembling minutes Robertson decided to reveal his hand. ‘Look, we know for a fact that you were here at seven, because you answered the telephone when McCarthy called. Then Mac spoke to Snowy.’

  ‘All right. I admit that I saw them here on Saturday at seven.’

  ‘Did you give Owens the list?’

  ‘Certainly not – though I may have shown it to him to prove my credentials. Then . . . then he must have slipped it in his pocket.’

  This might have stood as a credible alibi had Rolph not blown it almost immediately, changing his story yet again. ‘Rolph said that Snow asked Lily to leave the room as he had some business to discuss. Afterwards Rolph went out to call Lily, and when he came back he saw the 1939 list lying on his table, and put in back in the drawer. He was immediately tripped up on this point, and then said that Snow must have come back to the office after it had been locked up and broken open the door.’ Robertson might as well have been describing his own exploits in snaring the communist mole John King, but for one inconvenient fact. ‘The break-in would have been an almost impossible feat, for Snow would have had to climb over the railings to access the basement, and did not have a key to the outside door.’

  By now the two MI5 men were ‘morally certain’ that Rolph had given the list to Owens, and made arrangements for the Little Man to be driven over from Richmond. While they waited Rolph entered a fugue state, becoming ‘rather fussed’ and confused, pacing endlessly from room to room. Stopford followed as best he could, observing as Rolph retrieved a small object from a drawer in his desk, then quickly tore it apart. Retrieving the fragments from a waste bin shortly afterwards, Stopford found an alphabet mounted on cork and cardboard, clearly intended as some sort of coding device.

  ‘He could give no satisfactory explanation,’ confirmed Tar, ‘except to say that in learning the buzzer he thought it better to learn with a code rather than straightforward lettering. The explanation is obviously fatuous.’

  Owens arrived half an hour later. Rolph, he insisted, had produced the IP list from his safe and quoted a price of £2,000, payable in dollar bills. He swore also that the two of them had devised the alphabet code together, and that Rolph had known all along about the trawler treff with Rantzau. Careful to avoid self-incrimination, Owens failed to mention that his business partner had already been numbered agent A.3554 by Stelle X.

  ‘Ultimately Rolph admitted he knew Snow was going in a boat. Stopford and I were both very badly impressed by the way he delivered his information. He told lies continuously, repeatedly changed his story, and only with the utmost difficulty was it possible to extract from him anything at all. We are both perfectly convinced that he gave the list to Snow. It is also quite clear that Rolph is exceedingly hard up and is being pressed for money by his various creditors.’

  The MI5 party finally left Sackville Street towards the end of the afternoon, taking with them four automatic pistols, a firearms certificate and a desk diary. Grudgingly, Robertson agreed with Stopford that the troublesome Snow case should now be shut down and the Little Man removed somewhere safe – perhaps even as far away as Canada. Meanwhile Owens was driven back to Marlborough Road, and dutifully buzzed his weather report at two minutes to midnight: ‘Visibility 4,000 yards. Cloud ceiling 3,000 yards. Wind velocity 1. Direction south-east. Temperature 62 Fahrenheit.’

  No mention at all of the gathering storm.

  Alone with his thoughts, and deprived of his firearms, Rolph had pause to reflect on the vicissitudes of fate, the new Treachery Act and the lethal toxicity of coal gas. Some while later he walked back to his flat in Dover Street, opened the tap on the gas oven and waited to die. Thanks to the high carbon monoxide content of unburned town gas, and the smallness of the room, his blood became saturated quickly, with asphyxia complete in no more than fifteen minutes, lending his corpse a curious pinkish hue.

  Dark indeed was the hour. Less than a mile away in Whitehall, Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay received orders from the Admiralty to implement Operation Dynamo, the hastily prepared plan for the evacuation of the BEF from the shrinking perimeter around Dunkirk. During the course of Sunday afternoon the German halt order had been lifted, and the key port of Calais captured. ‘Dynamo was to be implemented with the greatest vigour,’ recalled Ramsay, ‘with a view to lifting up to 45,000 of the BEF within two days, at the end of which it was probable that evacuation would be terminated by enemy action.’

  The last-ditch operation was scheduled to commence at 19.00 hours. Already, a curious flotilla of ships ranging from destroyers to passenger ferries and pleasure craft had been warned to assemble at backwater ports such as Sheerness and Ramsgate. Now this improvised armada weighed anchor and shaped course across the Channel, negotiating lengthy detours to avoid minefields and long-range artillery fire. Many of the little ships were still manned by their selfless civilian owners and crews. Like the king’s congregation at Westminster Abbey, everyone hoped for a miracle.

  At Dover Street the cold body of William Rolph lay undiscovered for several days. Even in death the Swiss double agent presented something of a quandary for MI5, since any whisper of suicide might lead the Abwehr to conclude that A.3554 had been compromised, and perhaps even murdered. After conducting a mandatory post-mortem, coroner William Bentley Purchase was prevailed upon to doctor the paperwork, certifying the cause of death as ‘rupture of aorta atheromatous and ulceration of aorta’ – a heart attack, in so many words, and therefore attributable to natural causes.

  Bentley Purchase was a firm friend of the intelligence services and three years later would again bend the rules for a far more significant corpse caper, when a dead Welsh tramp was recycled as ‘Major William Martin’ of the Royal Marines and planted on the Abwehr during Operation Mincemeat. The Barbados too now switched her identity. On 30 May, as the little ships of Operation Dynamo helped bring about the miraculous deliverance of 338,000 men from Dunkirk, the registration of the scruffy Grimsby steam trawler was quietly closed. Without further explanation GY71 became GY323 and returned to sea as Alsatian, surviving an otherwise uneventful war before being retired and scrapped in 1955.

  Donning kid gloves to interview expectant Lily Bade, Robertson quizzed her on the precise sequence of events at Sackville Street on 18 May. ‘As I expected, before I had finished the question she had practically answered it. It was quite clear that she had rehearsed this answer very carefully with Snow, and in all probability telling a lie.’

  Thanks to the bug at Marlborough Road, Tar knew perfectly well that Owens had taken Lily aside the p
revious evening and warned her that MI5 would be paying a house call.

  ‘You know what you’ve got to say?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Lily, far calmer than Owens. ‘Do you want me to repeat it?’

  ‘No – I think you know it all right.’

  Lily was nervous around Robertson, and not without reason. In a matter of weeks she would be giving birth to a daughter in comfortable surroundings underwritten by MI5 and the Abwehr. Without Owens, the former seamstress was merely an unmarried mother with no visible means of support. ‘I said that it would be in her interests to see that Snow played the game by me,’ Tar observed coldly. ‘As if he did not I would take steps to have him removed.’

  This was no idle threat. On confronting the Little Man face to face Robertson made no attempt to hide his displeasure, nor his sense of personal betrayal. ‘Snow was in bed at midday. I told him I was not at all satisfied with his conduct, but that much against my wishes I had been persuaded by McCarthy to carry on with the show. I said I would have nothing further to do with Snow personally, and if he wished to communicate with me he was to do so through Mac. Owens insisted that Rolph had double-crossed him, and asked if he could have some protection as he was afraid of the Gestapo.’

  Robertson responded with his own double bluff. ‘Just as I left the room I informed him that Rolph was dead. I left before he had any chance to question me or show any surprise.’

  For Owens, the travails of the past ten days had been profoundly disturbing. Robertson had threatened to have him killed if he refused to assist in the capture of Doctor Rantzau. Now Rolph had expired in circumstances that seemed highly suspicious. With France and the Low Countries under German occupation, further meetings with Ritter on neutral ground seemed nigh on impossible, as did the prospect of escape to the safety of the Reich. Canada, too, was out of the question. Aggrieved Captain Robbie would surely see to that.