Verisimilitude demanded that the rescue mission should actually take place. With his plan approved by noon, Robertson instructed Burton to send the following reply: ‘Can meet booking office High Wycombe railway station. Will wear white buttonhole. Password: Have you seen the stationmaster. What time?’
Still unwilling to trust Agent Snow, Tar called in Mac for a last-minute briefing. The following morning the volatile Canadian would make his own way to the busy market town, wait at the station at the appointed time, then walk Caroli along the main road towards London. Wary of lurking Nazi agents, or some sort of triple-cross, Tar warned McCarthy to keep his wits about him and not to let the recalcitrant Swede escape. Once watchers from B6 were certain that the pair had not been followed Caroli would be spirited away by car, leaving McCarthy to return to London alone.
The elaborate plan also took account of McCarthy’s perennial Achilles heel: booze. ‘Biscuit was not slow to appreciate that High Wycombe is a very large town, and that he had a fairish walk in front of him. In anticipation of his probable reaction to this unaccustomed exercise he was instructed not to visit any public houses en route.’
Biscuit could ill afford another right royal raspberry. On Monday morning, sporting a smart white buttonhole, Mac followed his instructions to the letter. The tall, bespectacled stranger appeared at eleven o’clock, and confirmed that he had seen the stationmaster. After a lengthy stroll along the A40 Caroli was driven back to Camp 020, leaving Mac to relay his report to Tar. Naturally enough, the version of events played back to the Abwehr was entirely different. Transmitting as Snow that evening, Burton informed Wohldorf that the ‘Swedish friend’ was being sheltered by McCarthy, having fallen ill after a week spent living in the open.
So far as Owens was aware this was perfectly true. ‘We don’t want to tie Summer to Snow,’ Tar explained, lighting on a pleasing seasonal metaphor. ‘For then they stand or fall together. Snowy readily assented to this and is willing not to meet Summer. As the “master mind” he is quite agreeable to being kept in the background.’
For services rendered McCarthy was handed a ten shilling note. Unaware that Stelle X was now being spoofed by British intelligence, Ritter expressed delight at the prompt rescue of Caroli. ‘Thanks for help to friend. Won’t forget. Expecting reports of his trip. Please try to give daily reports, no matter how little. Paramount importance constant observation of airports, planes etc. Friend knows.’
This opaque parting shot referred to Wulf Schmidt, the Dane who had bonded with Caroli during training for Operation Lena, and even entered into a rash wager to meet him again at the Black Boy Hotel in Nottingham on 20 September. Then a prominent landmark in the city, the building was an apt rendezvous for visiting German spies, boasting a Gothic façade and a Bavarian balcony, and enough gables, turrets and spires to shame mad King Ludwig. However, as Agent Leonhardt prepared to climb aboard Hauptmann Gartenfeld’s black Heinkel-111 and bale out over the Midlands, he had no inkling whatsoever that his friend Nilberg had already betrayed him to MI5.
This sudden expansion of the double-cross system spurred Guy Liddell to form a small steering group, comprising six senior officers from MI5, MI6 and the Wireless Committee. Soon this cabal became the Twenty Committee, so-called because in Roman numerals the figure twenty is represented by a double cross (XX). ‘We did much more than practise a large-scale deception,’ averred its chairman John Masterman, in peacetime an Oxford history don. ‘By means of the double agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country. This is at first blush a staggering claim, and in the first place we could not bring ourselves to believe that we did so. Nevertheless it is true, and was true for the greater part of the war.’
Constantly undermined by Agent Snow during the first year of war, MI5 had finally begun winning the double-cross game with the arrival of McCarthy’s Afu transmitter from Lisbon, and the fraudulent rescue of Gösta Caroli at High Wycombe on 16 September. Now, three days later, their confidence was further buoyed by the arrival of Wulf Schmidt, dropped by Gartenfeld over the Fens a half-dozen miles north of Cambridge. ‘It was only yards from a searchlight battery defending RAF Oakington,’ Schmidt recalled cheerfully many years later. ‘The crew were asleep when I landed.’
Codenamed Leonhardt by Ritter, Wulf Schmidt was a Danish national born in South Jutland in 1911, who had acquired a solid command of English following spells as a cattle hand in Argentina and a banana grower in the Cameroons. Like his colleague Caroli, Schmidt jumped attached to his suitcase transmitter and landed heavily after his canopy snagged in telegraph wires. Irked that his wristwatch was shattered, but confident of passing unnoticed in England, the next morning Schmidt hobbled into the nearby village of Willingham where he bought a new timepiece and a daily paper, ate breakfast in a café and bathed his swollen ankle under the village pump. Predictably enough, his foreign accent and smart blue suit soon raised eyebrows.
‘Someone must have been suspicious and reported me to the police,’ Schmidt confirmed, ‘because I was arrested as I slept in a field close to my parachute.’ By midday the V-man designated A.3725 had been transferred into the custody of the local Home Guard. Following a preliminary interrogation by Major Richard Dixon, the RSLO based in Cambridge, the dubious refugee with forged identity papers in the name of Harry Williamson was driven to Camp 020.
His chauffeur was Jock Horsfall, a former racing driver attached to MI5’s transport section who excelled at covering miles fast. On the way to Ham Common Horsfall took his powerful Citroën on a detour past Trafalgar Square, followed by the Houses of Parliament. ‘I had been told England was on the brink of collapse,’ noted Schmidt with dismay. ‘That there was no food in the shops, and that London was in ruins. None of it was true.’
Despite this dispiriting excursion Schmidt showed no sign of cracking at 020, displaying a haughty arrogance, adamant that he had arrived by boat three months earlier as a Danish refugee. As a result MI5 brought in several external officers to question the new arrival, one of whom was Colonel Alexander Scotland, an intelligence veteran charged with the interrogation of enemy prisoners of war at the so-called ‘London Cage’ in Kensington Palace Gardens. As recorded by Guy Liddell, what followed was decidedly un-British. ‘Malcolm Frost found Scotland in the prisoner’s cell. He was hitting Schmidt in the jaw and I think got one back for himself. We cannot have this sort of thing going on in our establishment. Apart from the moral aspect, I am quite convinced that these Gestapo methods do not pay in the long run.’
Liddell took the matter up with the Director of Military Intelligence, Paddy Beaumont-Nesbitt, and demanded that Scotland be barred from 020. Undeterred, a day later the slaphappy colonel returned to Latchmere House armed with a hypodermic syringe full of truth serum. Lying judiciously, Tin-Eye Stephens told Scotland that Schmidt was in no fit state to be interrogated further. A formal complaint about Scotland’s techniques was later made by Maxwell Knight to the Secretary of State for War.
Eschewing brutality, MI5 simply informed Schmidt that he had already been betrayed by his colleague Caroli, who would not be available to meet him in Nottingham. There was also the small matter of the Treachery Act and mandatory capital punishment. By way of a final trump card, Schmidt had landed with forged papers bearing telltale defects put across by McCarthy, and incriminating serials supplied by Owens.
‘His reaction was immediate and dramatic,’ wrote Stephens. ‘Schmidt lost all his previous composure, cursed “the swine Caroli” and blurted out that he would tell the whole truth.’ The Dane held back little, telling of his recruitment in Hamburg, his training under Doctor Rantzau, of meeting other Lena agents in Brussels, and revealing his intended mission. ‘He was persuaded that his betrayal had not begun with the capture of Caroli, but had been implicit in the cynical carelessness of his preparation and dispatch. In his new standpoint Schmidt seemed to be a sound XX prospect, and agreed to work as a double agent.’
‘No one ever asked me w
hy I changed my mind,’ Schmidt told intelligence historian Nigel West four decades later. ‘But the reason was very straightforward. It was simply a matter of survival. Self-preservation must be the strongest instinct in man.’
Thus late in the evening of 21 September the erstwhile banana farmer became Agent TATE, so called on account of his close resemblance to Harry Tate, the popular music-hall comic, lately deceased. Under Schmidt’s direction, MI5 returned to Willingham and recovered his transmitter from a field near Half-Moon Bridge. The device was then installed on the top floor of Latchmere House. Despite the dubious ministrations of Colonel Scotland, just two days after arriving at 020 the former National Socialist zealot buzzed Wohldorf to report that he had landed safely and was making his way to London. ‘Roads blocked with refugees. Most of them look Jewish.’
Absolute jake.
Still there was no invasion. Reporting on a meeting of the Twenty Committee, Guy Liddell alluded to a bold proposal by the then Director of Military Intelligence. ‘Paddy Beaumont-Nesbitt was rather in favour of encouraging them to come over. But on referring the matter to the Chiefs of Staff it was decided not to let them have the truth about the strength of our defences.’
Snow, Summer and Tate duly obliged, reporting on a coastline bristling with troops, anti-tank guns and machine-gun nests, backed up by mobile reserves and over a million Home Guards. The tallest of these tales, such as the supposed importation from Australia of 200 man-eating sharks for release into the Channel, were unlikely to perturb the planners of Operation Sealion. Nevertheless, the art of strategic deception now came of age. Established under the auspices of MI6, the Underground Propaganda Committee set about devising rumours known as ‘sibs’, including stories of crateloads of Tommy-guns and barge-busting super-mines – both fictions already transmitted to Wohldorf by Snow. In the wake of the Cromwell invasion alarm, stories also began to circulate that a landing had actually been attempted on the night of 7 September, leaving the Channel white with German dead. North American papers such as the New York Times proved particularly receptive, happily reporting that drifting Nazi corpses were disrupting fishing in Sweden, with a miserly reward of 75 cents offered for each body recovered with its uniform intact.
Rumours of up to 80,000 dead stormtroopers undoubtedly boosted morale in Britain, and at the same time helped to maintain vigilance in the face of a grave and ongoing threat. As with the material transmitted by MI5 double-cross agents, however, the fiction of the bodies on the beach also required some limited foundation in fact. The arrival of a dead Wehrmacht anti-tank gunner at Littlestone-on-Sea was reported in The Times, while in late September British troops were detailed to collect ripe German corpses between Hythe and St Mary’s Bay. One of those tasked with this macabre detail was Gunner William Robinson of 333 Coastal Artillery Battery, who helped retrieve a dozen bodies over a two-day period, then carted the remains to a field near New Romney.
‘They had been in the water a considerable time,’ Robinson recalled of this unpleasant fatigue. ‘We were given twenty Woodbines, which we collected each day, and additional pay of two shillings – which we collected some time later.’
For Germans, so it seemed, Romney Marsh was a must to avoid. Besides the two Scandinavian V-men, Caroli and Schmidt, the roll-call of detainees at Camp 020 still included the hapless quartet of spies who had arrived on the Marsh by boat. None of the four could be used as XX assets, and all faced trial under the 1940 Act. As a general rule the Twenty Committee opposed execution, arguing that ‘intelligence should have precedence over bloodletting’, and that the ‘human library’ of captive spies at Latchmere House was always useful as a reference source. Nevertheless, it seems probable that the trial and inevitable execution of the Romney Marsh Four was sanctioned in full by MI5, pour encourager les autres. The loss of Waldberg and his team also increased the chances of the Abwehr directing future agents towards Snow and the London stelle.
The night Blitz was far less convenient. While the B1A office in St James’s escaped largely unscathed, on 28 September the Luftwaffe attempted to spark a second Great Fire of London with tens of thousands of incendiaries, several of which landed on Wormwood Scrubs. The only human casualty was Jock Horsfall, MI5’s virtuoso of the wheel, who fell through the glass roof of C Wing, almost breaking his neck. Serious though this was, Horsfall’s injuries were as nothing compared to the damage inflicted on the precious Registry after the night-duty officer failed to locate the correct keys. ‘Hosepipes had to be worked through the barred windows and doors and the mess was simply awful,’ observed a clerk next day. ‘The half-burnt files were soaking wet and there was a disgusting smell of burnt wetness.’
The result was an unmitigated disaster for the Security Service. Fire and water badly damaged the central card index as well as hundreds of files, not all of which had yet been copied to microfilm. This entirely avoidable calamity prompted a hasty move from prison to palace. Standing in two thousand acres of landscaped parklands near Woodstock, Blenheim Palace was the monumental ancestral seat of the dukes of Marlborough – and the birthplace of Winston Churchill. Privileged evacuees from Repton School were hurriedly evicted and the tenth duke confined to a single wing, leaving MI5 staff incongruously split between grand staterooms and draughty Nissen huts. For shell-shocked survivors of the Scrubs, however, the enforced relocation to rural Oxfordshire was a godsend. Bombing, ack-ack barrages and sleep deprivation soon became torments of the past, with staff even treated to edifying tours of the Palace by Anthony Blunt, an art historian recruited into MI5 by Guy Liddell – and a Soviet spy to boot.
For Agent Snow, too, the Blitz paid dividends. Following the arrival of a UXB in his garden at Marlborough Road, the devastating fire at the Scrubs served only to underline the need to move Owens – and his transmitter – to a safer haven. This turned out to be Homefields, a detached house on Spinney Hill in Addlestone, owned by a Major Whyte of Section B23, who was among those transferred to Blenheim. ‘In view of the great difficulty in obtaining a suitable house it is submitted that the terms are favourable,’ advised Tar on receipt of the bill. In addition to rent of four and a half guineas a week there was also the cost of the housekeeper’s wages, and those of a gardener. ‘This will amount to an additional two guineas a week, in return for which all the vegetables in the garden will be available for the occupants.’
No pigsties or prison cells for Hitler’s chief spy in England. Yet again, the resilient Little Man had fallen firmly on his feet.
The evacuation of the London stelle into the leafy Surrey countryside also involved Lily Bade, baby Jean Louise, Maurice Burton and the pool of watchers from B6. Since Homefields was some distance from the nearest railway station, permission was obtained to spend £70 on a second car. With the war costing seven million pounds a day, and Abwehr cash running short, Robertson paused to undertake a searching review of Snow’s finances. As B1A understood matters, Owens earned a basic salary of £250 a month from Hamburg, plus generous expenses. These excluded food, drink and clothing, but did include rent. In picking up the tab for Homefields, therefore, MI5 were subsidising not only absent Major Whyte but also Hitler’s war of aggression against the British Isles.
‘I explained to Snow that the other side ought to pay for all the expenses incurred on their account. These include McCarthy’s salary, and all the mythical expenses they thought were being incurred. For example, journeys which are not taken because we already know the answer.’
After protracted negotiations, Owens agreed to hand over all monies received from Germany and request additional funds from Rantzau whenever B1A deemed it necessary. In return, the Abwehr master spy was permitted to keep his extravagant monthly salary, whereas MI5 would meet out-of-pocket expenses such as travel and Mac’s trifling wage. ‘This arrangement will suit us very well,’ reasoned B1A. ‘It relieves Snow of the money actually spent on running his organisation, and out of the sums notionally spent we ought to be able to build up a fund out of which we can pay
all those expenses chargeable to the other side.’
For Nikolaus Ritter, Operation Lena had yet to turn a profit. At the end of the month three more Lena agents reached Britain by sea, landing by dinghy on a remote stretch of the Banffshire coast after flying from Norway by seaplane. Ritter had inherited the team following the sudden death of Hilmar Dierks, killed in a car smash four weeks earlier. Incredibly, this accident left one of the spies a widow, since glamorous Russian émigré Vera Erikson had married Dierks a short while before, despite being younger than him by twenty years.
Unperturbed, Erikson promptly embarked on an affair with her co-agent Karl Drücke, after rejecting the advances of a rival V-man who tried to impress her by chewing on a wine glass.
The lovers’ mission to England was equally futile. Having lost their bicycles as they rowed ashore, Erikson and Drücke were detained within hours of landing. At Portgordon an alert stationmaster grew suspicious of their wet clothes and alerted the police after the pair purchased third-class rail tickets from a wallet stuffed with banknotes. A search of Drücke’s luggage revealed a familiar inventory of incriminating equipment, including an Afu transmitter and codes, a Mauser pistol, a torch stamped ‘Made in Bohemia’ and a half-eaten German sausage. Both spies carried forged ID cards bearing serials transmitted by Snow (along with telltale number 7s crossed in the Continental style) and pink ration books based on the example supplied by McCarthy. The third member of the party, Werner Walti, was arrested later that day at Waverley station in Edinburgh, reaching for his weapon as the police closed in but being quickly overpowered.
Unlike the Romney Marsh spies, Drücke and Walti were experienced espionage agents; both withstood harsh interrogation at Camp 020, and could not be turned. Declining to offer up full confessions, the two men claimed to be couriers, a fiction maintained even after Vera Erikson betrayed both of them. On trial for their lives at the Old Bailey nine months later, Drücke remained silent, while Walti swore that his mission involved nothing more significant than the delivery of a suitcase transmitter to Victoria station. Cross-examined by the Solicitor-General, Sir William Jowitt, Walti described his contact in London as a man in a grey pinstriped suit, with a scar on his forehead and a pidgin-English password: ‘I am coming from Glasgow.’
Hitler's Spy Page 18