Gösta Caroli spent the rest of the war at 020R, a secure internment camp near Huntercombe, finding a measure of peace by tending the kitchen garden. ‘Summer remained at heart a Nazi,’ reflected Tin-Eye Stephens. ‘Although now disciplined and not otherwise troublesome, his escape mania was a constant menace. He was the only prisoner at either camp who ever attempted to cut his way out through the formidable apron of wire surrounding buildings and compounds.’
Despite Summer’s sudden end, the double-cross system burst suddenly into bloom. That same month a British-born agent named George Kilburg (aka DRAGONFLY) returned from Lisbon with a sophisticated wireless hidden in a gramophone player, while in New York the fun-loving Yugoslav playboy Tricycle set about bilking the Abwehr for £20,000, a scam dubbed Plan Midas. The Twenty Committee also approved Plan 1, a scheme to fool the Germans into bombing a dummy munitions dump. Wulf Schmidt buzzed map coordinates to Wohldorf, after which Ritter recommended his loyal friend for an Iron Cross. The undeserved medal was eventually delivered to his family in Germany, though the Luftwaffe never troubled to bomb the imaginary target.
Indeed, Doctor Rantzau’s own career now assumed a downward trajectory. The deaths and disappearances of so many Lena agents raised concerns at Stelle X, causing rival officers to call loudly for his scalp. At the same time attention shifted from Europe to North Africa, where British and Commonwealth troops had routed the Italians and swept up 130,000 prisoners in just eight exhilarating weeks. Gravely humiliated, Mussolini begged help from Hitler. The result was the Afrika Korps, a new army for a new theatre of war, capably commanded by Erwin Rommel, soon to pass into legend as the Desert Fox.
On 20 January Ritter received orders to proceed to Tripoli, tasked with forming a special Sonderkommando to insert agents behind Allied lines in Libya and Egypt. Climate aside, the job looked a lot like a punishment posting, opposite yet equivalent to Robertson’s threatened exile to the sub-Arctic scrub of Jan Mayen Island. Before leaving Hamburg, however, the departing master spy found himself locked in a puzzling double-cross duel with Tar Robertson over airborne interception technology.
On the morning of 23 January Wohldorf alerted Owens that a ‘friend’ in England had acquired valuable intelligence on infrared. This experimental technology promised to help night fighters find their quarry in the dark, albeit dimly, since research on both sides tended to suggest that airborne interception (AI) radar would do the job far more effectively. In Blitz-torn Britain, operational trials with AI were concealed behind fibs and sibs that RAF pilots ate nothing but carrots, thereby ingesting large quantities of vitamin A and cultivating acute night vision. Soon gullible civilians seized on the idea, hoping to avoid bumps and bruises in the blackout.
This disquieting signal appeared to confirm earlier claims by Owens that Doctor Rantzau had a mole inside the Air Ministry. ‘Snow is rather inclined to put the thing on a high plane and meet this man himself,’ mused Guy Liddell. ‘My inclination is to bump him off. Eventually we decided to suggest that within the next twenty-four hours at a given time the unknown informant should drop his information through a letterbox.’
The letter box chosen was at 14 Craven Hill, a property in Bayswater leased by MI5 and occupied by Sam McCarthy. On the same afternoon that the message was received, Tar Robertson passed several hours with Owens and Dicketts at White’s. ‘I went to great pains to impress on Snow that information about the infrared process was of vital importance to this country, and must on no account be disclosed to the enemy.’
For once Owens did as he was told. ‘Informed infrared stunt of vital importance and great hope here,’ he buzzed Wohldorf next evening. ‘If you trust your friend and he is safe, suggest he put material through letterbox at specified time when I can arrange to receive it. Reply in time for material to be taken to Manchester, 10.15 train.’
A team of B6 watchers descended on Bayswater to stake out Mac’s letter box, and at the appointed time a cine-camera operator trained a telephoto lens on the door of Number 14. A floorwalker from Whiteley’s department store on Queensway aroused suspicion, but ultimately there was no delivery of dope, no secret documents and no hurried trip north to microdot photographer Charles Eschborn.
Nothing but Zeppelin shells, in fact. Without the benefit of an all-seeing infrared beam it was impossible to make out who was spoofing who.
Besides, there were bigger stunts to consider. During the closing phase of the Battle of Britain an eminent German geopolitical theorist named Albrecht Haushofer had posted a letter from Lisbon to Scotland’s premier peer, the Duke of Hamilton, a firm friend since the Berlin Olympics in 1936. An enthusiastic supporter of the pre-war Anglo-German Fellowship, Hamilton was now a Wing Commander in Fighter Command, and as a sitting member of the House of Lords was thought by Haushofer to wield considerable political influence. His letter dealt chiefly with family matters, but concluded with a guarded invitation to meet ‘somewhere on the outskirts of Europe’ for a one-to-one talk.
‘Archie Boyle is prepared to send Hamilton on some mission to Lisbon,’ confided Liddell to his diary on 11 January. ‘The whole case looks rather like a peace offer of some sort.’
Another Last Appeal to Reason, in fact. British intelligence did not yet know it, but Haushofer was acting on behalf of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who had also met Hamilton at the Berlin games and shared his passion for aviation. After sitting on the note for several months MI6 summoned the blue-blooded flyer to London for a meeting, which Tar Robertson also attended. Without consulting Lord Swinton, let alone the Prime Minister, the Twenty Committee subsequently invited Hamilton to treff with his old friend Haushofer in Lisbon. Preferring Spitfire sorties to cloak-and-dagger work, the Duke replied that he would do so only if ordered.
For the moment, Robertson and MI5 would have to remain content with sending a fake RAF officer to Portugal: disgraced desk pilot Jack Brown, aka Walter Dicketts, aka Agent Celery.
In stark contrast to Hamilton, Double Agent Dick was keen as mustard to begin his Iberian mission, having negotiated a handsome fee of £200, payable up front. On receiving the money from Robertson, the personable fraudster promised to place it on deposit until his mission was successfully concluded. ‘This,’ Tar noted drily, ‘seems too good to believe.’
As Dicketts prepared to leave the country, Agent Snow added a measure of XXX intrigue to an already complicated double-cross scenario. Besides Owens and Lily, and Dick and Kay, the Snow ménage at Homefields now included Ronnie Reed, the former BBC engineer now being groomed as a B1A case officer but left temporarily idle by the sudden end of Summer. Owens, resentful at yet another intrusion by MI5, muttered darkly in turn that Reed was grooming Kay for ‘mucky business’ while Dick was away.
‘Dicketts is convinced that Owens is mad,’ Tar sighed wearily. ‘He also confirmed the impression that Snow is double-crossing us, and has people everywhere. Possibly even in this department.’
Certainly Owens was insistent that all dope and samples should be ‘especially good’ in advance of the Lisbon treff, and not merely ersatz chicken feed. Frustratingly, however, there was still no sign of the infrared man, nor any encouraging updates on Summer or Biscuit. Indeed, the best intelligence continued to flow in the opposite direction. For on 3 February Colonel Johnny received yet another startling transmission from Rantzau: ‘Dropped man 31st thirty miles south of Peterborough. Was badly hurt leaving plane. Perhaps dead. If you hear anything please let me know.’
Ironically, the latest Lena parachute agent was already receiving medical treatment at Brixton prison. Defiantly alive, but nursing a broken ankle, ‘James Rymer’ of 33 Abbotsford Gardens, Woodford Green, was in fact Josef Jakobs, a dentist by training, who risked a low-altitude jump over fens on the last night of January and came to grief in a potato field near Ramsey. Surrounded by his equipment, Jakobs endured a long night of agony and at daybreak announced his presence by squeezing off shots from his Mauser pistol. Two smallholders responded and summoned the police, wh
o transported Jakobs into captivity on a horse-drawn cart, together with his transmitter, codes, maps and currency – and obligatory chunk of German sausage.
Plainly a spy, Jakobs was taken to Camp 020. After a short preliminary interrogation, conducted on a wheeled gurney, the truculent German was transferred to the hospital wing at Brixton. Questioned further, he claimed to have been imprisoned in the concentration camp at Oranienberg and had volunteered to jump over England with the object of making his way to America, where an aunt resided in Illinois. The story closely resembled that offered up by Kurt Goose, the Brandenburg commando captured in October, and briefly turned as Agent Gander.
‘It is difficult not to be sceptical about these people,’ wrote Liddell. ‘Firstly, it seems almost incredible that, if his story is true, the Germans could imagine he was going to be of any real value. Secondly, why did they give him an identity card with no letter prefix? We know that the Germans are extremely crude and sketchy in their methods, but a clerical error is difficult to believe. Did they intend that Jakobs would be captured, or send him over to test Snow in some way? The Germans must now be wise to the game of collaring an agent and forcing him to use his wireless set in our interests.’
Liddell was closer to the truth than others in B Division dared to admit, Robertson included. But what the Twenty Committee had no way of knowing was just how many unknown German agents might be at large in Britain, and which of the agents already turned were still considered reliable by the Abwehr. ‘We could not bring ourselves to believe that we did in fact control the German system,’ Masterman recalled of this baffling period. ‘Innumerable precautions had to be taken on the assumption that they had several and perhaps many independent agents of whom we had no knowledge, and that these could be used to check the reports of our own controlled agents.’
Like Jan Willem Ter Braak, still at large in Cambridge with a working Afu transmitter, and living just fifty yards from the local RSLO.
Owens’ credibility was partially restored a week later when he was asked to assist yet another agent in distress, this time Wulf Schmidt. After faithfully transmitting from England for sixteen weeks, and in the process winning an Iron Cross, verisimilitude dictated that the V-man codenamed Leonhardt should run short of money. Since Josef Jakobs was missing in action, along with £497 meant for Schmidt, Wohldorf again asked Johnny to help a friend in distress. ‘Please send hundred pounds to Mr Williamson, Radlett General Delivery, with fictitious addressor. Mail letter in London on Feb 11th.’
Schmidt was still residing with the Robertson family at Round Bush House, and received the money safely. For Jakobs, however, the breaks remained bad. ‘He was manifestly unemployable as a double agent,’ recalled Tin-Eye Stephens, ‘and blank as a tome of reference in the living counter-espionage library at 020. There was no good reason why he should continue to live.’
Lord Swinton, at least, would be pleased.
As these various strands unravelled Walter Dicketts set out for Lisbon, sailing from Liverpool on 4 February on board the SS Cressado, a cargo steamer bound for Gibraltar as part of convoy OG.52. As a commercial traveller in ‘sardines, corks, fruit and wolfram’, verisimilitude dictated that Dick should travel steerage; the Little Man would follow on Valentine’s Day, by air. If the Cressado was hardly the Queen Mary, the long sea voyage at least allowed Dicketts time to rehearse his mission as disgraced air force officer Jack Brown – and set up a profitable card school. ‘He is a first-class cribbage player,’ an observer told B1A, ‘and spent most of his time playing with the chief steward.’
No doubt giddy on gin fizz, Dick also dropped hints that he was an important government agent, whose business in Lisbon was strictly hush-hush. ‘As a matter of fact he got the captain to give him £10, for which he gave him a cheque from Barclays Bank.’
Back in London, Owens continued to clamour for high-grade intelligence and was rewarded with a counterfeit contact inside the War Office. The lucky officer concerned was an urbane lieutenant named Richardson, then acting as a personal assistant to General Sir Robert Haining, Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Richardson carried off his role with no little aplomb, joining Owens, Lily and Kay for a meal at the Anchor Hotel in Shepperton, then reporting back in bemused fashion to Gilbert Lennox, a deception specialist.
‘Owens seemed very keen to get my address and telephone number but I managed to avoid this. He appeared to be well-known at The Anchor, and at dinner there appeared to be no secret about the fact that he was an agent, or the fact that Mrs Celery’s husband was also an agent. Several toasts were drunk to Owens, wishing him luck on his forthcoming travels abroad. Apparently the hotel people at The Anchor had been instrumental in obtaining a maid for Lily, and, in turn, they were trying to get a nursemaid through him.’
Richardson found Owens’ table manners sorely lacking. ‘Owens has one peculiar habit. He only wears his false teeth when he is eating, and has a sort of sleight-of-hand trick of slipping the dentures into his mouth under cover of a handkerchief before a meal.’
True to form, Owens attempted to suborn Richardson, inviting him for cocktails the following Tuesday. The young lieutenant politely demurred. ‘I excused myself, as I thought I had probably done enough.’
Passing on his report to Robertson, Lennox observed that young Richardson seemed wasted in a Whitehall posting.
As Dicketts steamed onwards to Lisbon, Owens put the frighteners on Kay. ‘He told her that she could expect me to be away for six months or longer,’ Dick groused later, ‘and that I should be in a situation of great danger the whole time. He painted a very vivid picture of what I might be going through, and how only he could look after me. The poor girl was worried to distraction.’
With good reason. According to the scheme hatched by Robertson and Dicketts, renegade flyboy ‘Jack Brown’ would reach Lisbon ahead of Owens, meet Rantzau, usurp Snow, and proceed on to Germany if all seemed well. Regrettably, in war even the best-laid plans seldom survive first contact with the enemy – an aphorism doubly true of U-boats. Convoy OG.52 consisted of thirty merchant vessels, one of which, the SS Canford Chine, was torpedoed off the west coast of Ireland six days out, with the loss of all hands. Moreover, the need to avoid German bombers operating from the coast of Brittany necessitated a long, circuitous Atlantic passage, added to which the convoy encountered bad weather. The result was that the Cressado was delayed by a week, triggering panic in Addlestone and Hamburg.
Beside herself with worry, Kay demanded a meeting with Robertson at the Grosvenor Hotel. ‘She was of course very worried because she had not heard from her husband, and asked me a great many questions with regard to the possibility of him going into Germany. I said that this rested entirely with Snow and Rantzau, but that I was sure he would not take any unnecessary risks. This did not altogether convince Mrs Celery.’
When Robertson met Snow for a final briefing they were joined by Felix Cowgill of MI6, whose support was required in Lisbon. ‘I reminded Owens that he must be ready to discuss his North Sea trip with Rantzau, and gave him very brief outlines of Summer and Pogo. He is going to complain of the inadvisability of sending agents over here without previously warning him.’ For the rest, Tar spoke more in hope than expectation. ‘If it was at all possible he was to get information from Rantzau about any impending invasion since this would be of real assistance, as well as anything relating to secret weapons.’
Ten remarkable months after his last treff with Ritter, Agent Snow finally flew out from Whitchurch on 14 February, posing as a sales agent for a large manufacturing concern. After a long, anxious flight over a thousand miles of grey Atlantic waves Colonel Johnny touched down at Sintra airport and was faintly astonished to see the field ringed with Axis aeroplanes – Italian machines decked out in dazzling white, and Lufthansa trimotors adorned with crooked swastikas. Security was tight, with armed Portuguese guards beside each and every aircraft. No doubt Owens wished he had a pistol of his own. Lisbon was, as Mac had warned, full o
f rats.
Agent Snow took an antiquated taxi into Lisbon and checked in to the Metropole Hotel, an opulent deco establishment facing onto the smart Pedro IV Square. Still there was no sign of Dicketts. Following procedures rehearsed during earlier treffs on neutral ground, Owens left a cryptic note at the Grande Hotel Duas Nacoes, then returned to the Metropole to wait. In due course instructions came back to stand outside the main entrance at nine o’clock. His nerves winding tighter as the minutes ticked past, Colonel Johnny sought refuge in the hotel bar.
At nine-fifteen Henri Döbler drew up in a grey Opel saloon. Sprawled across the back seat was Major Nikolaus Ritter, gold tooth flashing behind the widest of smiles. As Döbler drove the two men through the glittering port city, worlds away from the inky blackout of London and Hamburg, Johnny and the Doctor swapped notes on events since their last treff in Antwerp in April 1940. ‘He asked me if I had sent £100 to this Williamson man as arranged,’ recalled Owens. ‘I said that as far as I knew it had been sent. “Well,” he said, “he is one of my best friends and I don’t want anything to happen to him.” The conversation then turned to more general matters, such as conditions in England, and Lily and the baby. I showed him some photographs, and he said his wife wanted to be remembered to me.’
This, at least, was how Snow reported their happy reunion to MI5. In reality, with the London stelle blown wide open and everything to lose, Owens delivered Dicketts to Ritter on a plate. In a comfortable apartment on the Rua dos Sapateiros, a bottle of Scotch loosened the Little Man’s tongue with remarkable speed. ‘I built Dicketts up,’ confessed Owens. ‘Told Rantzau all about his past history.’
Initially Ritter was not best pleased. ‘Owens immediately told me that his sub-agent was working for British intelligence. I asked why, if that were the case, he had taken the risk of bringing Dicketts to Lisbon. Owens replied that he dared not break off the relationship, as to do so would be regarded as a sign of guilt.’ Ritter noted that Johnny was ‘abnormally difficult’ to interrogate, and told his story in a confused, disjointed and reluctant manner. ‘Owens added that he had first met Dicketts approximately ten weeks before in a public house.’
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