Having nibbled cautiously at Biscuit, the ‘exceedingly common Bavarian type’ Doctor hastened home with the vital identity documents, leaving McCarthy to await further instructions and drink Döbler under many more tables. ‘Biscuit got so drunk in Lisbon,’ sneered Owens some time later, consumed by hatred of the rival agent who had tied him in knots on board the Barbados. ‘Made himself ridiculous and threw away money.’
Be that as it may, several days later the thirsty double agent took delivery of a brand new Afu short-wave transmitter and several thousand dollars in cash. With his mission accomplished, Biscuit returned home on a Japanese merchant ship, the Suwa Maru, eventually disembarking at Liverpool on 19 August after a full week at sea. ‘Biscuit has returned with an up-to-date wireless set in a suitcase and £950,’ Liddell reported with evident pleasure. ‘His whole visit seems to have been a thorough success.’
The Abwehr’s newfound confidence in the London stelle was confirmed when Wohldorf buzzed Owens on the new Afu transmitter to request twenty sets of specimen names and serials for forged ID cards. After consulting with the Registrar-General, the incomparably named Sir Sylvanus Percival Vivian, the Wireless Committee obliged with a dozen candidate identities. The first eight were genuine, and included Owens, Lily, Maurice Burton and Gwilym Williams. The remainder were wholly fictitious.
Meanwhile, Hitler issued a fresh Directive calling for the complete destruction of the Royal Air Force. As the air battle above the Channel intensified, the Luftwaffe also paid tentative visits to industrial targets around Birmingham, Liverpool and Southampton. This ongoing strategy of tension meant that London was spared for the time being, although at the end of July a searchlight battery in Richmond Park was sprayed with machine-gun fire, prompting the local golf club to draw up a set of emergency rules. Players were politely requested to collect bomb and shell splinters to avoid damage to mowers; balls moved by enemy action could be replaced as near as possible to their original position. Best of all: ‘A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb or shell or by machine-gun fire may play another ball from the same place.’
Penalty one stroke.
While not a club member himself, highly strung Arthur Owens was abnormally terrified of air raids and begged Tar to allow the dispatch of a lie intended to discourage the return of war to his doorstep. ‘New anti-dive bomber machine gun. Special sight. Very accurate. Mass produced.’
Snow buzzed in vain, and Biscuit docked at Liverpool too late to warn British intelligence of the Luftwaffe’s plans to ‘open the bird cage’ on 14 August. Codenamed Adlertag (Eagle Day), the command issued by Göring to his air fleets was typically grandiloquent: ‘Operation Adler. Within a short period you will wipe the Royal Air Force from the sky. Heil Hitler.’ The fat Reichsmarschall envisaged a campaign lasting no more than two or three weeks, by which massed waves of bombers would attack targets within 100 miles of central London, creeping gradually closer day by day, thereby forcing Britain to capitulate. Enigma decrypts betrayed a modicum of detail to Bletchley Park before bad weather forced a change of the German plan. As a result the RAF were largely unprepared when, on Monday, 12 August, two days early, the Luftwaffe attempted to blind the British fighter-control system by pinching out radar stations at Dunkirk, Dover, Rye, Pevensey and Ventnor, the latter perched on the edge of the Isle of Wight.
Eleven months earlier, Colonel Johnny had identified Chain Home as a priority target for Germany. ‘I repeat – do everything you can to jam these signals, or knock out the power source.’ A determined, accurate Luftwaffe strike threatened to punch open the vulnerable ‘channel’ revealed by Snow to MI5 at the time of the Munich Crisis in 1938. Now, with most of Continental Europe vanquished or supine, such a gap might even lose Britain the war.
‘If I’m successful,’ Owens had told Walter Dicketts on the eve of this landmark betrayal, ‘I’ll be able to do anything I like.’
Son of a bitch.
The attempt to blind Britain was tasked to an elite precision-bombing unit, Erprobungsgruppe 210, which operated Messerschmitt-110 heavy fighters from a forward airfield at Calais-Marck, and whose businesslike unit insignia framed the British Isles in the cross hairs of a gunsight. Early on Monday morning a force of sixteen aircraft sped across the Channel towards the Kent coast, splitting into four groups of four above the garden of England. Erpro’s unit commander, Hauptmann Walter Rubensdörffer, took the first section inland towards the Chain Home station at Dunkirk near Canterbury, where observers on the ground watched with dread fascination as the lead aircraft circled the target and released a ring of coloured smoke, through which one fighter after another dived to plaster the site with eight 500-kilogram bombs.
The same deadly pattern was repeated at Dover, Rye and Pevensey, wrecking buildings, cutting off electricity and shaking the foundations of the tall steel towers. All except Dunkirk went off-air, tearing a gap in the radar screen that stretched for almost one hundred miles. Through it swarmed several squadrons of gull-winged Stuka dive bombers, striking airfields at Hawkinge and Lympne without loss. Shortly before noon close on a hundred Junkers-88 bombers followed through with a fierce attack on Portsmouth docks, during which fifteen of the raiders peeled off to attack Ventnor from the blind landward side. A dozen direct hits put the radar off-air, setting fire to most of the buildings and obliging the RAF to rush mobile equipment to nearby Bembridge.
While the four mainland stations were back on air within twelve hours, a second visit by Stukas left Ventnor out of action for eleven whole days. Erpro 210 lost no aircraft on the Monday morning and returned to Kent in the afternoon, hitting the airfield at Manston particularly hard and triggering a collapse of morale there later described by some as a mutiny.
Humdinger.
Disappointingly, the humdrum message keyed on Snow’s transmitter that night failed to capture the drama of the moment. ‘Food situation normal.’
Despite inclement weather, the doors of the birdcage were again flung open on Adlertag proper the next day. Commencing at dawn, wave upon wave of German fighters and bombers pounded airfields, factories and dockyards across southern England, inflicting a good deal of damage on the ground but paying only cursory attention to radar installations. As a result the Luftwaffe failed to significantly impair the ability of Fighter Command to defend British air space, while the persistence of the ‘wireless cloud’ above southern England caused Göring to make a decisive error. ‘It is doubtful whether there is any point in continuing attacks on radar sites,’ he told senior commanders gathered at Carinhall, his luxurious hunting estate near Berlin, far removed from the field of the battle. ‘None of those attacked so far has been put out of action.’
At a stroke, the inept Reichsmarschall entirely negated the value of Arthur Owens’ biggest single contribution to the Nazi war effort. Further muddled thinking was evident as Eagle Day turned into night. In an effort to spread alarm and despondency among the general public, the Luftwaffe dropped bundles of espionage paraphernalia over the Midlands, including maps, rucksacks and rubber rafts. More arrived next day, suspended below parachute canopies stencilled with oversized Nazi eagles, and backed by claims on German radio that paratroops in British uniforms and civilian clothes had linked up with a homegrown Fifth Column. The scare triggered a round of exhaustive searches by police, troops and the Home Guard, though none of the ‘phantom parachutists’ were found, allowing the Ministry of Information to dismiss the entire exercise as a clumsy propaganda stunt.
So far as Ritter and Operation Lena were concerned, this ill-judged experiment in psychological warfare proved a disastrous own goal for it served to place the British public on a state of high alert about spies. Likewise, both for MI5 and the Wireless Committee, the Battle of Britain was no sort of Finest Hour. According to an unsubtle report keyed by Burton as Johnny on 14 August: ‘Home Defence staff anxious for invasion. Defence measures terrific. Large forces ready to attack you if invaded here.’ Buzzings such as this carrie
d the pungent whiff of propaganda, while a run of aviation dope was similarly crude: ‘Air Ministry friend informs plane production above expectation. Making new Super Spitfires. Increase in rate of fire very formidable. Supply dumps full of spares. British and American confidence in RAF greatly increased. New machines give good results.’
Unlike the junk passed for wireless transmission by British intelligence, which served only to confirm to the Abwehr that A.3504 was transmitting under control. Perhaps Ritter imagined that the Afu set handed to McCarthy in Lisbon was free of hostile interference. Desperate for evidence that the RAF was being ground down in a war of attrition, Ritter now instructed Owens to monitor key fighter stations such as Hornchurch, Croydon and North Weald and report back on bomb damage and numbers of serviceable aircraft. ‘Let McCarthy do nothing else.’
Robertson interpreted this signal to mean that Biscuit should concentrate exclusively on airfields. Predictably, Owens insisted that Rantzau in fact trusted McCarthy to do nothing at all.
Ein glas bier! for the Abwehr.
Kein glas bier for MI5.
Fortunately Operation Adler already showed signs of faltering after three days of ferocious aerial combat. The heroism of Fighter Command aside, Göring’s tactical decision to cease blitzing British radar stations was compounded by operational setbacks, including a disastrous raid on Croydon airport by Erpro 210, which cost the elite unit seven out of 23 aircraft dispatched, including that of its commander, Walter Rubensdörffer. On 15 August just 30 RAF fighters were lost in combat, set against punishing Luftwaffe losses of 75. Less happily, the raid on Croydon left 62 civilians dead, with residential streets in Kingston wrecked by bombs soon after and a crowded cinema hit in Wimbledon. Though Richmond remained untouched by aerial bombardment, alarmist rumours spread that a group of German parachutists was at large in the Old Deer Park. Popular reaction to this mounting savagery found expression in a single outraged newspaper headline: NAZI FRIGHTFULNESS IN SURREY.
Amidst the shock and awe of Operation Eagle a stork descended on Marlborough Road. On 15 August, as Croydon bled, Lily almost died giving birth to a daughter, Jean Louise Owens, during a lengthy and complex delivery. If, as seems likely, Agent Snow was ambivalent about fathering a third child on the wrong side of forty, in the midst of the Second World War, the difficult arrival of Jean Louise at least promised to plug the emotional hole left by the loss of Patricia, his daughter with Irene, still hopelessly estranged from her father. The birth suited MI5 too, excusing as it did the lack of hard intelligence relayed to Wohldorf by Colonel Johnny.
Seeing as Nikolaus Ritter had taken the trouble to carry baby clothes from Hamburg to Lisbon, Owens might have been expected to put his good news on air, using CONGRATULATIONS code. However, A.3504 was no longer drafting his own reports, and therefore the message keyed by Burton that evening was strictly business. ‘Croydon raid hit one oil tank, one components factory and landing ground. Getting more dope.’
Or rather, Biscuit got dope. True, Agent Snow was virtually a prisoner in Richmond, yet his rival McCarthy now harboured a planet-sized grudge against idle Arthur Owens, deeply resenting the fact that the Little Man lived in the lap of luxury while still receiving a monthly salary of £250 from Germany. Meanwhile, Mac did the work of both men and crawled home to a drab room in Paddington. On one visit to Marlborough Road the bullish Canadian went out of his way to needle Burton and Price, the resident minders, by leaving a generous £30 tip in the hallway ‘for the staff’. McCarthy then travelled up to Manchester to meet Charles Eschborn, who Tar hoped might take on Snow’s old klamotten. There, too, Mac caused grave offence, wheedling the photographer for inside information, then rubbishing much of his latest material.
‘Biscuit is succeeding in upsetting everyone,’ wrote a dissatisfied Robertson. ‘This is not adding to the smooth running of the case.’
Worse still, McCarthy was found to be hopeless in the field. Dispatched to Somerset at the end of August, McCarthy teamed up with the local Regional Security Liason Officer (RSLO), Captain Theakston, to scout suitable drop zones for incoming parachute agents. The pair eventually settled on Little Quantock Farm, nestling in the hills near Crowcombe, then notified the local Chief Constable and rounded off a long day with a session in the local pub. ‘I am certain that it would be unwise to let this man work in any country area alone,’ Theakston concluded in a bemused report. ‘He is completely lost, has no sense of direction, and is obviously out of place among country people.’
It hardly helped that Agent Biscuit was a belligerent drunk. Due to travel back to London by train the day after, Mac set out for the station but was back within the hour, having left his revolver under a pillow. Imbibing heavily on the long journey home, McCarthy became mired in a slough of despond. Of the £950 handed over by Henri Döbler in Lisbon, he had been permitted to retain just £100, from which penny-pinchers at MI5 had deducted the cost of his slow voyage home. Owens, meanwhile, was earning more than a cabinet minister, yet seldom even keyed his own wireless transmissions and often stayed in bed beyond noon.
What happened next was faithfully recorded in the duty log at Marlborough Road. ‘McCarthy turned up very drunk and threatened to murder Snow, Lily and the baby and all their connections unless he had some more money. He ultimately extracted a cheque for £200.’
Reporting to B1A the following morning, Burton confirmed that McCarthy appeared to be suffering from delirium tremens but was deadly serious about bumping Owens off. While his threats to kill Lily and two-week-old Jean Louise carried rather less weight, Burton also disclosed that Mac had become far too well known at The Marlborough, where ‘he gets very tight on double whiskies and shows off in a most disgusting manner.’
The Security Service was not amused, a duty officer noting peevishly that ‘Mac is due for a right royal raspberry.’
The timing of this latest double-cross crisis was exquisitely poor, since Wohldorf had warned Snow that an Abwehr agent would shortly arrive in Britain by parachute. ‘A suitable spot is being found,’ wrote Liddell. ‘The great difficulty is to get the man down alive and prevent the Home Guard from getting at him.’ After all, spies captured in public sight could not be turned and would have to stand trial. Dead spies were no use at all. Nor were dead-drunk Canadian receivers on the ground.
Ritter also faced something of a quandary. In just ten weeks he had managed to recruit and hastily train a half-dozen parachute agents for Operation Lena, at least three of whom looked promising on paper. One of these V-men was a close personal friend named Wulf Schmidt, a Dane from Jutland who had tramped the globe as a cattle hand and banana farmer. Another was Gösta Caroli, a stocky Swede of German origin, with the benefit of two years spent living in Birmingham pre-war, masquerading as a travel journalist but in fact reporting to Stelle X. Still more intriguing was Karl Goose, a special-forces officer educated in North America, and drafted in from the Abwehr’s very own Brandenburg commando unit.
‘With Lena the selection criteria were far more stringent than for ordinary agents,’ Ritter claimed later. ‘Aside from the fact that they had to be prepared to jump out of an aircraft, they had to be physically fit, no younger than 20 and no older than 30, and intelligent enough to view their tasks in a wider context. On landing, their chief priority would be to get the wireless transmitter working as quickly as possible.’
Ritter also created a clandestine Luftwaffe drop unit. Led by Hauptmann Karl Gartenfeld, a specialist in long-range reconnaissance and navigation, the small flight operated a twin-engined Heinkel-111 bomber, painted funereal matt black, its bomb bay adapted to drop agents rather than high explosives. The exacting insertion technique devised by Gartenfeld required a degree of bravery and skill on a par with that of Erpro 210. Flying low over the English Channel to avoid radar, the unwieldy Heinkel would climb steeply to 20,000 feet over hostile territory, press onward inland, then throttle back its twin Daimler-Benz engines for a quiet diving glide as the drop zone approached.
Disappointingly, the first Lena mission washed out. On the night of 1 September Ritter drove to an airfield near Rennes with his most experienced V-man, the Swede Gösta Caroli, who had left Britain only in December and would now return under the codename Nilberg. The two men shook hands on the tarmac, after which A.3719 hauled his transmitter and baggage into the belly of the sinister black Heinkel while Ritter retired to a hotel to await Gartenfeld’s return. Over the course of the next hour Caroli endured freezing temperatures in the cramped bomb bay, scarcely able to move, and green with fright at the prospect of a low-altitude jump over blacked-out enemy territory. But the drop was scrubbed. On crossing the English coastline Gartenfeld encountered searchlights and deteriorating weather, and elected to return to base with his human payload still on board.
At daybreak, McCarthy and the various reception parties positioned on the ground by MI5 left the Quantocks disappointed.
More Zeppelin shells, or so it seemed.
For the Abwehr, Caroli’s failure to leap into the clutches of MI5 masked a lucky escape. Regardless, the hastily planned espionage offensive would suffer another serious blow the following evening when Hilmar Dierks, the spymaster who had first recruited Owens back in 1936, was killed in a car accident after a night on the tiles with a trio of agents bound for Scotland. ‘He drank too much and had to be persuaded not to drive,’ lamented Ritter. ‘In spite of blackout regulations they were dazzled by the headlights of an oncoming car and hit a tree. Everyone else walked away with minor cuts and scratches. But Dierks was dead.’
To add insult to injury, Ritter then found himself beaten to the punch by a colleague, Kurt Mirow of Abwehr II in Cologne. During the early hours of Tuesday, 3 September, a party of four ill-prepared spies crept ashore at Romney Marsh in Kent. Trained to work in pairs, José Waldberg and Carl Meier made landfall at Dungeness, their companions Charles van den Kieboom and Sjoerd Pons arriving a few miles further along the coast at Dymchurch. After enjoying a liquid lunch and celebratory meal at Le Touquet the previous day the group had set out from Boulogne, crossing the Channel in a fishing smack under cover of darkness before transferring to dinghies and rowing ashore in the early hours. All were short-term reporting agents, with rations sufficient for no more than a week. The beaches on which they landed were among those targeted by Operation Sealion, the invasion front having been narrowed to a 40-mile strip between Eastbourne and Hythe.
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