The good doctor, it was noted, had run true to form. MI5 later calculated that the Abwehr had paid over at least £13,850 to Arthur Owens, worth more than a million pounds in terms of earnings today. ‘Although Snow’s career ended more or less disastrously his case was by no means unprofitable,’ maintained Masterman. ‘At the beginning of the war he gave us information which formed the basis of our knowledge of the Hamburg stelle, which was of considerable value when that office was the one principally concerned with work against this country. Similarly through McCarthy and latterly Dicketts he provided valuable information about the German organisation in Lisbon.’
The Selfridge’s shopper Mathilde Krafft might have been the only Nazi agent whose detection was solely attributable to Owens, yet the planting of false papers on almost every incoming V-man between September 1940 and May 1941 made most of them much easier to break at Camp 020 and flip for double-cross work by B1A. ‘The part which Owens played in these early cases shows that he was then regarded as the lynchpin of the Abwehr organisation in England,’ Masterman concluded. ‘Consequently we were able to form an impression of their methods which have been of incomparable value since.’
Unfortunately plans to resume controlled transmissions as Snow were abandoned after it was discovered that the last code issued to Owens in Lisbon, based on an obscure Penguin paperback, had been mislaid. In the final analysis much of the Little Man’s value to the British war effort was inadvertent, after the failure of Operation Lena cost Ritter his job at Stelle X, to be replaced by new case officers with little or no inkling that their agents and networks were rotten to the core.
For the 18B detainee known as Thomas Wilson there would be no immediate reward. Despite submitting regular petitions to the Home Office, Snow Junior was denied permission to join his father at Stafford or Dartmoor and instead served his time on the Isle of Man. Long estranged both from Arthur and Bob, Patricia Owens completed her studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and by 1943 had landed her first movie role in Miss London Ltd, a comedy vehicle starring Arthur Askey. As the war entered its fourth year the contrasting fortunes of the fallen spies and the rising starlet could hardly have been more pronounced.
At the same time the tide was turning in favour of the Allies. Following the humiliating surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in February 1943, and the rout of the Afrika Korps, British and American forces embarked on the liberation of Europe, landing first in Sicily, then gaining a toehold on the boot of Italy. With the eventual defeat of the Axis powers inevitable by the close of the year, the great majority of prisoners interned in Britain under 18B were released from custody, a process which culminated in the release of dilettante fascist Sir Oswald Mosley shortly before Christmas, provoking a storm of protest and demonstrations countrywide.
Snows Senior and Junior remained firmly under lock and key. Owens was furious, and broke two years of silence with an indignant letter to Tar Robertson. ‘I am not worried about the loss of my liberty,’ fibbed the former Colonel Johnny. ‘But I am worried that I am unable to help my mother country in these difficult times. I have done a considerable lot for this country and your department, although perhaps not seeing eye to eye in our methods in arriving at a given point. However, since Mosley is now released, together with Sir Barry Domvile, I must frankly say I am consumed with rage to have to waste my time here when I can be doing useful work.’
After two miserable years in Stafford and Dartmoor, countries had come to count after all.
Yet much of the useful work had already been done. The Allied success in Sicily owed much to Operation Mincemeat, a macabre deception scheme which drew on elements rehearsed in 1940 through Agent Snow. In order to convince the Germans that the Allies would land in Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily during the summer of 1943, the Twenty Committee lit upon the idea of tipping a dead British officer into the sea off the Spanish coast, apparently the victim of a plane crash, and still handcuffed to a briefcase containing plans for an attack on Greece. In truth these documents were convincing forgeries, and the corpse of ‘Major William Martin’ that of an insane Welsh vagrant named Glyndwr Michael, who had committed suicide by swallowing rat poison laced with phosphorus.
Some within the British intelligence community might have preferred to use the corpse of another unstable Welshman, still rattling the bars of his cage on the special wing at Dartmoor. Lingering resentments notwithstanding, Operation Mincemeat owed no small debt to rogue Agent Snow. The falsification of death certificates for Glyndwr Michael and ‘Major Martin’ followed the precedent set by the inconvenient suicide of William Rolph in May 1940, and was undertaken by the very same coroner, William Bentley Purchase. As for the central strategic deception, causing enemy troops to be diverted elsewhere, this echoed Snow’s false dope on landings at Trondheim during the Norwegian campaign. The crucial difference was that in May 1943 Operation Mincemeat was swallowed whole: German reinforcements were directed to Greece, Sardinia and Corsica, thus laying the ground for the successful Allied assault on Sicily, which was taken in just five weeks.
For Robertson, Masterman and the Twenty Committee this grisly stunt by ‘the man who never was’ embodied signal success. Where a live electrical engineer from Pontardawe had failed, a dead tramp from nearby Aberbargoed delivered famous victory.
A humdinger, in fact.
Owens knew nothing of Operation Mincemeat, and a visit by Masterman to the bleak wilds of Dartmoor in December gave the Little Man scant cause for celebration. ‘I told Snow that you were entirely unable to consider his request to be interned in the company of his son,’ he informed Robertson, who still declined to communicate with Owens direct. ‘On the other hand, I said I knew you wished to recommend his release as soon as you felt it was safe to do so, which might or might not be accepted. Snow expressed the liveliest gratitude for this information.’
Wisely abandoning rants about Oswald Mosley, Owens adopted an obsequious tone in his next note to Tar. ‘After being for three years in the closest contact with Germans and other foreigners, I have a very good insight into their mentality and outlook. I trust that you will be able to obtain something for me to do. Once again I thank you sincerely for your kindness, and take this opportunity of wishing yourself, Mrs Robertson and your daughter all the very best for Xmas and the New Year.’
Tellingly, Owens signed off with a simple letter T. Since fellow inmates on the special wing at Dartmoor included a sprinkling of Nazi undesirables transferred from Camp 020, it was safer to remain Thomas Wilson. Impecunious warders might, after all, be susceptible to bribes . . .
At Peel Camp on the Isle of Man, Snow Junior also came round to a better way of thinking. Blaming his earlier confession about sketching Fighter Command airfields on an ill-conceived ‘sense of adventure’, Bob also now admitted that his story of the German agent on Frith Street was cut from whole cloth. Despite these revelations, the intertwined cases of Snow and Snow Junior continued to divide opinion within MI5. ‘Tar is rather in favour of the release of the Little Man and his son,’ mused Guy Liddell. ‘Personally I am against this.’
The softer line taken by Robertson was due in part to the defection of Hans Ruser, the flag-flying diplomat befriended by Walter Dicketts in Lisbon. Ruser finally reached London in November 1943 via MI6, and was debriefed at Camp 020 with a view to undertaking double-cross work in Spain. Though the impression he had formed of Owens in Lisbon was distinctly unfavourable (‘he drank a lot of brandy, and looked like a very poor class of merchant seaman’), Ruser maintained that Agent Celery had shot his own fox. ‘It was all a big tangle,’ swore Ruser. ‘Dicketts told me one day, after a certain amount of drink, that he was a member of the British Secret Service – but that they must not know he was going on his mission to Berlin, as they had not sanctioned it.’
Dicketts, like Lily, was long since retired from the spy game. ‘Celery has apparently disappeared,’ jotted Liddell in February 1944. ‘Masterman tells me that there is a w
arning out for his arrest for embezzlement.’
Dick Moreton was back in business. Or was it Squadron Leader Norman? Or Major Richard Blake?
By now the case of Owens – father and son – had begun to elicit sympathy from senior figures at the Home Office. ‘My own inclination is to believe Owens Junior when he says he was lying,’ Sir Alexander Maxwell wrote to Sir David Petrie, still in post as Director-General of MI5. ‘He is obviously a most unreliable person, but the risk of him attempting to give information to the enemy or engaging in sabotage seems remote. It would help the Home Secretary to come to a decision if the Security Service would kindly arrange for some fuller statement to be given as to the specific reasons on which your recommendation for continued detention is based.’
The reason, quite simply, was D-Day. Thanks to a network of two dozen reliable double-cross agents such as Tate, Tricycle, Zigzag and the Spaniard Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed Garbo, the Twenty Committee now aimed to convince the German High Command that the Second Front would open not through Normandy but the Pas de Calais. Codenamed Fortitude, this bold strategic deception would be achieved by drip-feeding the enemy a false order of battle, including an imaginary First US Army Group (FUSAG) based in the south-east of England and under the notional command of firebrand General George Patton. This, it was hoped, would bottle up vital German reserves far to the north of the real landing beaches, including several crack Panzer divisions which might otherwise throw the Allies back into the sea.
‘In wartime,’ Churchill told Stalin at the Tehran Conference, ‘truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’
So important was Fortitude that the head of MI5 attended the Home Office in person to explain why Snow and Snow Junior should remain behind bars until the bridgehead in Normandy was secure. ‘We cannot accept the responsibility of having these two individuals at large and uncontrolled at a time of such great security importance,’ Petrie told Maxwell. ‘Special agents are being used extensively for deception purposes, and although the general theory and practice is well known it would be undesirable that this type of activity should be underlined at the present moment.’
One such special agent was Wulf Schmidt, the Iron Cross winner codenamed Tate by B1A and Leonhardt by the Abwehr. During one fallow period in 1943 the profane Dane received just fourteen messages from Wohldorf and came perilously close to being shut down. ‘You never let me know what you think of my work,’ Schmidt carped in an effort to buck up his controllers. ‘An occasional pat on the back would be welcome. After all, I am only human.’ Notionally employed on a farm near Radlett – and therefore far removed from the phantom American divisions in Kent – in the spring of 1944 Leonhardt put over to Hamburg that his employer had loaned him to a friend at Wye who needed help with the harvest. Verisimilitude demanded that Schmidt should actually relocate his transmitter to Kent, where an imaginary railway clerk at Ashford betrayed imaginary FUSAG movement orders, and observed 20,000 imaginary Canadian troops in Dover.
‘Tate’s reports from Wye were so much appreciated,’ crowed MI5, ‘that one Abwehr official, as we learned subsequently, was of the opinion that they could “even decide the outcome of the war”.’ It is no coincidence that Tar Robertson was awarded an OBE in the Birthday Honours List for June 1944.
The bodyguard of lies interposed via Operation Fortitude was undoubtedly the high-water mark of the entire Allied double-cross system and would continue to fool the enemy until August. Placing this achievement in context, John Masterman, a keen sportsman, was careful to acknowledge the colossal influence of Little Man Snow, MI5’s troublesome alpha agent. ‘Running a team of double agents is very like running a club cricket side. Older players lose their form and are gradually replaced by newcomers. Well-established veterans unaccountably fail to make runs, whereas youngsters whose style at first appears crude and untutored make large scores. If in the double-cross world Garbo was the Bradman of the later years, then Snow was the W. G. Grace of the early period.’
Indeed, by July 1944 Arthur Owens was back on the crease, acting as a stool pigeon on the special wing, intent on working his ticket. In his new role Snow blew the whistle on illicit communications between Dartmoor and the Isle of Man, which again threatened to compromise Tate and Summer and would lead to the dismissal of the camp commander. Snow also informed on the Norwegian agent Tor Glad (aka Jeff), already judged unreliable by B1A, and now said to be ‘building up a stock of information concerning MI5 which he intends to broadcast after the war’. According to Owens, the rogue Scandinavian threatened to slit his, Owens’, throat. Robertson, however, had heard it all before.
There were other glimpses of vintage Snow. During the early hours of 13 June the first V1 flying bomb to fall on London rattled over the weald of Kent before its noisy ramjet engine cut out over Bethnal Green, dropping the warhead on Grove Road and killing six civilians, two of them children. Within a fortnight German rocketeers had launched more than 2,000 of these primitive cruise missiles, killing 1,600 people, seriously wounding 4,500 more and damaging 200,000 homes. Renewed threats by Hitler to reduce London to a ‘garden of ruins’ no longer rang hollow. Wrenching his attention from the plight of Snow and Snow Junior, the Home Secretary warned of a ‘serious deterioration’ in civilian morale. Churchill in turn demanded robust offensive action, urging the Chiefs of Staff to obliterate the cunningly concealed launch sites in Northern France and ‘drench the cities of the Ruhr’ with poison gas.
Having bided his time, Owens chose this moment to divulge that the Doodlebugs themselves might carry chemical warheads. Referring back to his encounter with the four sinister scientists in Hamburg on the eve of war, Owens now warned of the lethal ‘acid vapour’ with ‘extraordinary corrosive powers’ that was capable of melting skin and disintegrating metals. Hints about deadly new chemical agents had also been dropped in Lisbon in 1941. Once again, a junior officer traipsed down to Dartmoor. ‘This substance was so dangerous that the Germans have not hitherto had any effective means of using it. Snow argues that the conception of the rocket has altered the whole position, and is convinced that the V1 is a combination of the rocket and this vapour.’
Within MI5, Snow’s latest dubious revelation raised the dread spectre of Zeppelin shells. ‘This story may be five per cent true,’ guessed Helenus Milmo, a newcomer to B Division and later a High Court judge. ‘I doubt if it is more, and have no idea where this five per cent lies.’
Five per cent, or one hundred per cent? Milmo knew nothing of the sinister scheme to poison British reservoirs in 1940, or that Ritter had prized Snow’s skills as a chemist. The lethal vapour described by Owens conceivably nodded towards Tabun and Sarin, two deadly nerve agents developed in Nazi laboratories, both of which might have been delivered by V1 and V2 missiles, together with deadly bacteria and radioactive waste. Thankfully London was spared these horrors, and Owens’ warnings about new forms of frightfulness were never put to the test. As always in the mysterious, unverifiable world of rogue Agent Snow, there was no way of separating the signal from the noise, or the real dope from the stunts and the spoofs.
For the Twenty Committee, the flying-bomb menace posed a very different problem. Within days of the opening barrage the Abwehr began to buzz urgent requests for details of V1 damage, pressing agents such as Tate, Garbo and Zigzag for arrival times and points of impact. Since accurate reporting would enable the enemy to improve their aim, MI6 scientist R. V. Jones suggested subtle manipulation of double-cross data fed back to Germany, with the object of ensuring that missiles fell short of central London. Residents of hard-hit southern suburbs such as Wandsworth, Croydon and Dulwich might not have approved but their sacrifice was not in vain. ‘Up to fifty per cent more casualties might have been incurred,’ reckoned Jones, whose own parents lived in Dulwich. ‘Up to 2,750 more killed, and up to 8,000 more seriously injured. Even if only a fifth of these figures is ascribed to the success of our deception, it was clearly worthwhile.’
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bsp; According to Masterman, the Doodlebug stunt also prolonged the working lives of several XX agents. ‘The deception was ample justification for keeping the agents alive after the invasion of France, more particularly as the less important agents were the most useful for this purpose.’ By the beginning of September 1944 most of the V1 launch sites in France had been overrun, and the threat much reduced. In ghastly contrast, bungling Nikolaus Ritter had allowed a thousand-plane raid to flatten Hanover. Fate, so it seemed, had delivered payback for Colonel Johnny’s betrayal of the radar secret in 1939, and the Luftwaffe’s failure to blind Chain Home at the start of the Battle of Britain.
A series of rapid advances during August and September 1944 carried the Allied armies almost to Brussels, prompting optimists to predict once again that the war could be over by Christmas. ‘I should very much like to arrange for the release of both Snow and his son before the end of hostilities,’ Robertson wrote to the Home Office, offering a philanthropic promise that MI5 would support the redundant agent until he was back on his feet. ‘Neither is now considered to be a potential menace to the security of this country, and since his internment in Dartmoor Snow has been of considerable use in furnishing bits of information which he has picked up from his fellow detainees.’
Having partially atoned for his sins, Hitler’s chief spy in England finally regained his liberty on the last day of August. John Marriott collected Owens from Dartmoor by car, noting that the Little Man showed ‘scarcely any gratitude’, emerging from the tall granite gatehouse with no ID card or ration book, and just two pounds ten shillings in his threadbare pockets. ‘I had very little conversation with him apart from trivialities,’ Marriott added. ‘Owens did ask if I knew where Lily was, stating that what he really wanted to know was the whereabouts of the child. I told him, truthfully, that I had no idea of where she was.’
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