Had Dicketts known that Owens had forfeited his peace dividend of £5,000 within minutes of landing at Whitchurch, he might well have abandoned his high-stakes triple-cross mission on the spot. As it was, Agent Celery now informed Horsfall that he, too, had something to declare. At five o’clock Tar Robertson received an alarming telephone message that called for immediate action. ‘Three 12,000-ton transports leaving Elbe with troops early morning of March 28th. Troops assembling on March 26th and are proceeding to the Netherlands.’
Transports and troops on the move. Invasion, perhaps, or a large seaborne raid. While there would be no repeat of the infamous Cromwell alarm of 7 September 1940, when bridges were demolished and church bells rung, Celery and Snow were hustled into separate cars and rushed back to London. Arrangements were made to accommodate Owens at 901 Nell Gwynn House, a Chelsea apartment leased by John Bingham, one of Max Knight’s assistants and later a prolific writer of thrillers. Dicketts was driven by Jock Horsfall in the speedy Citroën, which promptly broke down near Hungerford, forcing the party to stop overnight in a local hotel.
With Dick stuck in Berkshire, Robertson had no option but to pass the invasion alert to the Air Ministry and Admiralty in raw, undigested form. The following day two dozen Blenheim bombers flew coastal sweeps but spotted no enemy armada. Possibly several transports weighed anchor in the Elbe; possibly the stunt was a blind. Undeniably, the German invasion spoof known as Operation Shark was every bit as fictitious as the 200 man-eaters allegedly imported from Australia and released into the Channel in 1940.
Robertson and John Masterman set about grilling Owens first thing on Friday, arranging for a stenographer to make a verbatim transcript. The most pressing concern was his shock claim that Rantzau had known for some time that Johnny was operating under British control. If this was true, much – perhaps all – of the double-cross system was almost certainly blown. Like the IP Club menu fenced by William Rolph, it also raised concerns around the personal security of senior officers within MI5 and MI6.
‘When did Rantzau tell you this?’ Tar began.
‘As soon as I landed in Lisbon,’ lied Owens. ‘He said “I’ve got something very important to tell you. As your friend I want a truthful answer.” I said, “OK, you know me.” He said, “We have information that you are in contact with British intelligence.” I said, “That’s perfectly true, somebody squealed on me in England. I’ve been trying to tell you.” Then he said, “We know all about you. We’ve got two propositions, and if you help us we’ll see you are OK.”’
‘So, did you help them?’
‘I said I would. That’s why I’m alive here today.’
‘How did the Doctor respond?’
‘He said they’d outlined a plan of what they wanted me to do. By the way he spoke I don’t think he’d known it more than a week or ten days. He didn’t try any rough stuff or anything like that.’
‘No,’ said Masterman coolly. ‘In fact, he gave you ten thousand pounds.’
‘Five thousand for services rendered to date, plus a bonus for my loyalty. Besides, I had very heavy expenses in Lisbon.’
‘Did you tell Rantzau anything else?’
‘I gave him practically no information – we didn’t even bother with the questionnaire. I just told them Dicketts had everything, said I’d turned all the dope over to him.’
‘Did he ask about the man in Radlett?’
‘I said I sent £100 and took precautions. Apparently he’s the Doctor’s best friend so he doesn’t want anything bad to happen to him.’
‘What about Caroli?’
‘I said he’d beaten it, so far as I knew.’
‘And McCarthy?’
Owens shook his head. ‘Take it from me, his name is mud. Döbler likes him well enough, but not the Doctor. Wash Mac out. By the way, they reckon the South African who never showed up came down in a canal and sank.’
Robertson cleared his throat. ‘Let’s be clear on this, Snowy. You admitted to the Doctor that you’re operating under our control, but he’s not worried any more of his agents have been compromised?’
‘Not as far as I know. Charlie, Gwilym Williams – he thinks they’re all one hundred per cent.’
The men from the Twenty Committee exchanged looks. Quite plainly the Little Man was lying through his acrylic false teeth. Masterman coughed loudly. ‘That, to my mind, is absolutely incredible.’
‘The whole thing is most mysterious,’ agreed Owens. ‘He knows you’re in control of the whole of the wireless business, but I’m still to carry on. If a message is fake I’ve got to include certain words, like “on the level”, “on the up and up”, and so on. If those words are used then the message is fake.’
Tar cast his mind back to the confrontation with Owens aboard HMS Corunia after the crushing failure of Operation Lamp. There, too, the Little Man had claimed to be desperately ill. There, too, he had stubbornly refused to crack under prolonged interrogation.
‘What about Dicketts?’
‘Well, that’s the big plan. Plus he’s got instructions to buy a motorboat and pick up agents from one of the Channel Islands. Explosives and messages too. And his own transmitter.’
‘It would seem he was busier than you.’
‘Ah – I was that sick I could barely crawl around.’ Owens lit up his umpteenth cigarette, then touched his stomach gingerly and winced as if in pain.
‘You took your time telling us you were blown, Snowy,’ Tar continued evenly. ‘I assume you warned Dick before he left for Germany?’
‘Soon as he stepped off the boat. That’s why I say he isn’t playing straight. He had no hesitation in going to Berlin, no hesitation in the world. If I’d come straight out the blue, like him, I shouldn’t have gone. Then he comes back full of it, and he’s got something important from Goebbels and Schacht.’
‘You’re quite certain he’s working for the other side?’
‘Absolute gospel. He got into places I’ve never been asked to go. Why should a perfect stranger be treated like that? It doesn’t sound right to me.’
‘A double-crosser?’
‘An extremely dangerous man, take it from me. Whoever’s got the most money, he’ll work for. Plus he takes dope.’ Owens paused for a moment. ‘The thing is to find out what he’s got in those sealed packages.’
‘That’s all taken care of.’
‘Well, thank God for that. Because according to Dick, me and him have got to go round and see Mr Churchill and get the war settled.’
Robertson offered no reply. In the light of the Venlo fiasco in November 1939 the Prime Minister had refused point-blank to parlay with ambivalent Nazis who claimed to be working for peace. Though the Blitz continued to exact a horrifying toll, and Greece and the Balkans looked likely to fall, few in the know doubted the wisdom of letting Hitler invade the Soviet Union and lose the war on frozen battlefields a thousand miles to the east. Let the dictators destroy themselves.
As the hours wore on at Nell Gwynn House Owens’ answers became ever more tendentious, and the detail increasingly fuzzy. ‘Snow’s demeanour under interrogation gives every impression of telling the truth,’ concluded Masterman, weary yet bemused. ‘Which, indeed, he really thinks he is doing.’ But the chair of the Twenty Committee was a history don, not a clinical psychologist. And canny Agent Snow thought nothing of the kind.
Finally Robertson instructed Owens to draft a written summary of his stay in Lisbon, then drove with Masterman from Chelsea to Mayfair, where Dicketts had been installed in a flat off Berkeley Square. With his lucrative peace plan derailed by Customs officials at Whitchurch, the hapless triple agent hastily concocted a very different version of his German odyssey, involving robust interrogation and nerves of steel, followed by lobster suppers, scuffles in nightclubs and trifling encounters with pretty young ladies and junior aides.
For B1A and MI5, of paramount concern was whether Owens had warned Dicketts that his cover was blown before entering Germany. Tar sensed that he
knew the answer already. ‘Snow, being the little rascal that he is, preferred the security of his own neck to that of his friend Celery.’
Adopting tactics tried and tested at Camp 020, Robertson and Masterman sought to resolve the conundrum by putting the two spies together in a room for the first time since landing at Whitchurch. With a stenographer unlikely to keep pace, the confrontation was recorded direct onto acetate discs. The date, appropriately enough, was Tuesday, 1 April 1941.
All Fools’ Day.
‘You must both be aware of the seriousness of the position,’ began Masterman. ‘For us, Arthur, the essential point is the exact nature of your warning to Dick in Lisbon.’
Owens turned towards Dicketts. ‘You didn’t know I was blown?’
‘You never told me anything about it. When did you break it to me?’
‘I believe I warned you when you came up to my room at the hotel.’
‘I don’t care what your beliefs are,’ snapped Dicketts. ‘I want to know exactly.’
‘I told you in front of the Doctor, Dick. The whole shooting match – everything about me in connection with the British Secret Service.’ Owens gestured vigorously with his hands, as though he were back in the room at the Metropole. ‘Don’t you remember sitting there, the Doctor sitting there, and me sitting on the bed with Döbler?’
Dicketts glanced at Robertson. ‘I’m sorry, but I disagree with this story entirely. I encountered Rantzau for the first time at the villa in Estoril. And if I’d known anything about the Little Man getting found out I should never have gone into Germany.’
‘Well, I said it all right,’ the Little Man insisted.
‘And I’m quite convinced that the opposite is true, because on the last night you very nearly persuaded me not to go. You were very worried and shook my hand half a dozen times, telling me what you thought of me, that you would look after me. You were wavering, in my opinion.’
‘No, I wasn’t. I said you were a very brave man.’
‘Well, in that case you were sending me to my death. You could have done nothing about it.’
‘No, I wasn’t. Gospel.’
‘That’s my candid opinion, Arthur. If I’d known that the whole case was blown to the Doctor then I should not have left.’
‘Dick, you knew perfectly well.’
‘You’re bluffing.’
‘You know bloody well I’m not bluffing.’
Dicketts rolled his eyes. ‘Bearing in mind your mentality, I’d say your memory seems awfully short.’
‘Ah – so you think I’m mental, like you tell Captain Robbie?’
‘Actually, I think you’re a maniac, Arthur. A maniac who lives in an atmosphere of mystery.’
Over the course of several hours and two dozen acetate discs the pair failed even to reach agreement on whether gin fizz or sherry had been consumed at the Metropole, let alone whether Snow had sent Celery into Germany blindfold. ‘The riddle of the Sphinx and the doctrine of the Trinity are simple and straightforward affairs compared with this double enquiry,’ conceded Masterman at length. ‘More than ever I am convinced that Snow is a case not for the Security Service, but for a brain specialist.’
Owens knew nothing of the doctrine of the Trinity, only artful triple-cross. With the peace plan in tatters, however, and his secret war lost, Agent Snow hardly needed a brain specialist or any other doctor to confirm that he was living on borrowed time.
13
Snow On Ice
In an effort to discover whether Agent Snow was mad, let alone even genuinely ill, Robertson arranged for Owens to visit a specialist in Harley Street. ‘I remained in the consulting room while the doctor put his initial questions,’ Tar remarked. ‘Snow made a terrific song and dance about his various ailments, saying that he was sick and had a pain in his left side, and had been told by his local doctor he was suffering from a weak heart.’
Owens also boasted of being an alcoholic, blaming his poor memory and erratic behaviour on delirium tremens and a bottle of brandy a day. To this catalogue of woe was added the duodenal ulcer first alleged after Operation Lamp. The Harley Street specialist ordered a stomach X-ray, but after Owens and Lily left the consulting room he told Tar that there was ‘really nothing wrong with Snow at all. He had the constitution of an ox if he had been drinking as much as he said.’ The specialist added that in his opinion Snow was mentally sound, but very sly. ‘He himself would not trust him further than he could see him. The local doctor should have a word said to him, as he had had his leg pulled.’
While Owens sank brandy, Walter Dicketts quaffed vintage champagne. During a break in the seemingly endless round of debriefs and boardings, Dicketts drove Kay to Southend-on-Sea for an extravagant lunch at the Palace Hotel, lavishing two whole pounds. No matter that he was £5,000 down, or that MI5 doubted large parts of his narrative: having merely survived three weeks inside Germany was cause enough for celebration.
In order to secure a suitable table Dicketts masqueraded as Major Richard Blake, an identity dormant since 1931 when he had bounced a cheque at a garage in Taunton. Unfortunately the head waiter at the Palace, Alfredo Carminati, knew Dicketts of old and alerted the police while the ‘major’ slipped out to visit his mother. ‘The waiter and the manager were aware of his convictions,’ noted the local CID. ‘Much publicity had been given to the case in Hampshire when he was sentenced to eighteen months. In past criminal activities he frequently posed as an army officer.’
A somewhat equivocal character, Carminati was also able to produce a pair of gold cufflinks given to him by Dicketts twelve years earlier. Southend Constabulary feared the onset of a crime spree to rival Dick’s desperate capers a decade earlier, but quietly dropped their investigation after the matter came to the attention of MI5.
‘Celery entirely denied the accusation,’ wrote Tar’s new assistant, John Marriott. ‘His wife tried to book a table, but was told they were full and she must wait her turn. Then the head waiter came forward and greeted him like an old friend, addressing him as Captain. Dicketts gave the name of Woods as a man of Southend who might have informed on him out of malice.’
At least Agent Celery could afford to eat. For Jan Willem Ter Braak, the parachute agent still at large in Cambridge, the future looked decidedly bleak. After operating undetected for five months, the mysterious V-man now found himself running short of cash, and unable to buy food without an up-to-date ration book. With each day that passed his situation grew ever more desperate. Finally, on 29 March, the day before fake Major Blake dined in style in Southend, the bogus Dutch scientist quit his lodgings in Montague Road, owing rent arrears and with less than two shillings in his pocket. At the railway station Ter Braak deposited his suitcase transmitter in the left-luggage office, the method of disposal prescribed during training for Operation Lena, then solemnly retraced his steps towards the city centre.
On the morning of Tuesday, 1 April, an air-raid warden made a gruesome discovery in one of the public shelters on Christ’s Pieces, a small park close by Emmanuel College, criss-crossed by pathways and planted with ornamental trees. Sprawled untidily on the earthen floor was the emaciated body of a middle-aged man, neatly dressed in an overcoat, pinstripe suit and black homburg hat, his hands sheathed in leather gloves, his horn-rimmed spectacles knocked askew by a pistol shot to the head. Police were slow to investigate, suspecting a macabre April Fool. By midday, however, a gaggle of press reporters had converged on the scene, word having spread that the body was that of a Nazi spy.
‘The question of tightening up regulations will have to be gone into very seriously,’ wrote Liddell, profoundly vexed on learning that Ter Braak might easily have been arrested before Christmas. ‘In this case the police were entirely to blame. The joke of it is that Ter Braak has been living within 50 yards of our RSLO in Cambridge.’
The following day copies of the Cambridge News were hastily withdrawn after an urgent call from the Ministry of Information. For MI5, the discovery of the dead Lena agent
was profoundly worrying. On the one hand, detailed technical examination of his transmitter tended to suggest that it had not been used, while his ID papers, based on serials provided by Snow, were reliably flawed. On the other, his lifeless corpse raised the dread spectre of a parallel Abwehr network, as yet undiscovered. As it was, John Masterman could only speculate on ‘how much more happy and more useful’ Ter Braak’s career might have been within the bosom of B1A.
As if in answer to these prayers, within a week two young Norwegians named Glad and Moe paddled ashore on the Moray Firth, only to be captured immediately and turned as JEFF and MUTT. Neither carried papers based on material provided by Snow, and were straightforward sabotage agents with no connection to Lena or Ritter. Nevertheless, Arthur Owens sensed danger and called an urgent meeting with Robertson to discuss the threat of violent assassination.
‘From remarks made by the barman at The Otter it appears that a number of customers have formed the impression that people living at Homefields are working for British intelligence, and that there is a secret wireless transmitter at the address. Snow was in a frightful state about this. He said that the game was up, that he and all the people working with him were blown sky high, and that his life was in jeopardy along with those of his wife and child.’
Robertson argued that the Abwehr were unlikely to bother sending over an agent just to bump Owens off. ‘He was sent home still protesting, and I was very strongly of the impression that the whole of the story from Snow’s point of view was in the nature of a smokescreen.’
Or Zeppelin shells. Tar’s diagnosis was subsequently confirmed by the Harley Street specialist. The X-rays taken of Owens’ stomach revealed no trace of duodenal ulcers, nor any other internal trouble. ‘Apart from rather high blood pressure his health is good, and the doctor was unable to believe that Snow had been drinking to anything like the extent he would have us believe. He added that the local doctor in Surrey now says Snow is probably suffering from venereal disease, and has been sent up to St Thomas’ Hospital for examination.’
Hitler's Spy Page 24