Hitler's Spy

by James Hayward

  The abrupt termination of double agent Snow by MI6 now threatened his lucrative, elevated status as Hitler’s chief spy in England. Arthur Owens needed superior samples, and stronger dope. By sheer dumb luck, at the beginning of 1937 the embattled traitor would be assigned a brand new case officer, fresh to the Abwehr and Stelle X, whose vaulting ambition far outstripped his limited experience.

  By his own account, Nikolaus Ritter had spent much of the First World War in the United States as a German spy, only narrowly evading capture by stealing an aeroplane and barnstorming across the border to Mexico. In truth these exploits were just so many Zeppelin shells. A garrulous Rhinelander born in 1899, Ritter served as an infantry soldier on the Western Front, and reached New York only in 1924, filling a dozen haphazard years as the foreman of a textile works, a brush importer and a loan shark. Though the FBI would later vouch that Ritter acted as a dangerous ‘Gestapo agent’ in America for an extended period, keeping tabs on the aviation industry, the reality was that Ritter, like Owens, was an unscrupulous opportunist, with a history of failed business ventures and profligate tastes.

  Married with children by 1935, but stony broke, Ritter returned to the Fatherland to find his perfect English highly prized by the Abwehr, first in Bremen, then at air intelligence (I Luft) in Hamburg, a comfortable posting enhanced by a smart blue Luftwaffe uniform. However, the novice spymaster commonly known as ‘Doctor Rantzau’ was blithely dismissive of detail and overly fond of delegation. ‘He has a very American attitude to life,’ Owens remarked later, with evident approval. ‘He has wonderful schemes one moment, then scraps them the next in favour of another.’ Indeed, with his prominent gold tooth and fat cigars, and a broad American accent more appropriate to a Hollywood B-movie than Hitler’s secret service, Hauptmann Nikolaus Ritter seemed all too often to be acting out a role.

  For Owens, Doctor Rantzau’s arrival at Stelle X in January 1937 was a timely development indeed. Choosing to ignore the doubts voiced by Dierks, Ritter set his sole English agent a simple test. Eschewing naval matters, A.3504 was asked to provide plans of the RAF aerodrome at Northolt, fifteen miles west of central London, together with details of a new munitions factory in the Midlands. With his livelihood on the line, Owens spied hard for the first time since Kiel. The results were sufficiently impressive to convince Ritter that he might exploit the diminutive Welshman more fully than had his predecessor, a fresh start deserving of a brand new codename: JOHNNY.

  Sceptics at Stelle X came to prefer a more disparaging sobriquet: Der Kleine. The Little Man.

  The pair met for the first time in the summer of 1937, when Owens travelled to Hamburg on the pretext of drumming up battery sales. Posing as his interpreter, Ritter quickly gained the measure of Johnny’s peccadilloes, allowing Owens the run of Hamburg’s finest hotels, as well as indulging his fondness for beer and brandy at nightspots such as the Nagel, Hofbräuhaus and Münchner Kindl. Often the pair were joined by Ritter’s aristocratic secretary, Irmgard von Klitzing, who in turn provided a respectable blind date for Johnny – or a foreign princess, if all else failed.

  Neither role was required at the exotic Valhalla Club, situated on the infamous Reeperbahn sin strip, whose unique selling point was a network of table telephones. ‘Most of the tables were occupied by young single women,’ Ritter recalled fondly. ‘You simply dialled their number, and asked them to come over to your own table. Arthur didn’t speak any German so he asked me to do it, and chose three.’ Frustratingly for Owens, ice-cool Irmgard von Klitzing remained unavailable – and was soon embroiled in an affair with Ritter. His wife Mary Aurora Evans, a native of Clayton, Alabama, promptly sued for divorce.

  His fortunes restored, back in London Owens moved Irene and the children into a luxury apartment at Pullman Court, an upmarket apartment complex atop Streatham Hill. Completed in 1936, the boutique development comprised nine dazzling white blocks designed by Frederick Gibberd, who tempered harsh modernist lines with roof gardens, swimming pools and landscaped grounds. Compact and bespoke, the flats within were intended to appeal to the young professional classes, and thus chimed with Agent Snow’s self-image as an international man of affairs. Gibberd even designed a range of deco furniture for his tenants, although the sheer modernity of Pullman Court almost proved its downfall, with vocal locals initially fearful that the preponderance of single bedroom studio flats would encourage prostitution.

  For Arthur Owens, the prospect of living cheek by jowl with the demi-monde was very much a plus. The downside was that the chic apartment commanded a steep annual rent of £130, for which he came to rely almost exclusively on the Abwehr. Ditto the payments on a sleek white Jaguar SS100 Roadster, which retailed at an eye-watering £295. During this period Owens admitted to receiving average monthly payments of £20, paid in cash on his regular visits to Hamburg, and often bumped up by lavish expenses. In return, ‘Johnny’ operated as a one-man London stelle, travelling far and wide to photograph airfields and factories, and developing a network of informants – some real, but most imagined. Owens Battery Equipment also forged links with an ostensibly legitimate German firm named Auerbach, based in the Wandsbek district of Hamburg. In reality the company was yet another Abwehr front, named in honour of the famous cellar restaurant in Leipzig, where Goethe placed Faust for his first treff with Mephistopheles, the Devil Incarnate.

  Irony rooted in literature was entirely lost on Owens, who read books only to devise codes. ‘As an agent Johnny was highly reliable,’ averred Ritter. ‘Always delivering his material in person, and always on time. At first none of it was particularly sensational, but enough of it was new, and the precision of his reports inspired confidence. Most of it was based on trips into the field, and a network of sub-agents that he built up slowly. One worked in the Air Ministry, a couple more at RAF depots. All of them were Welsh, just like Johnny.’

  Absolute jake.

  During this honeymoon period Owens’ idiosyncratic methods alarmed Ritter only once, an event recorded in his circumspect postwar memoir. Arriving at the Auerbach office one day in 1937, Owens produced a small foil packet from his briefcase. Sealed inside the waterproof wrapping was a scrap of paper, covered in a jumble of spidery hieroglyphics.

  ‘What’s this?’ demanded Ritter. ‘Remember tradecraft, Johnny. A blind man could see that’s a code.’

  Owens shook his head, then tapped at his teeth with his forefinger. ‘I keep all the good dope hidden up here.’

  ‘Up where?’

  Dropping his jaw, Owens removed his false teeth, stuck the packet to the crown with a lick of saliva, then deftly replaced the denture. Faintly appalled, Ritter warned him against repeating this unappealing trick in the field. Owens ignored him, and would later confess to spitting out secret material on several occasions during dicey frontier crossings.

  As for Johnny’s Welsh network, few if any of these sub-agents actually existed, though one genuine mole might have been his brother-in-law, Fred Ferrett, who worked at the Short Brothers aircraft factory at Rochester. The suborning of impecunious service personnel also remained a profitable pastime for Stelle X, though Owens fought shy of direct approaches, arguing that he was already too valuable to risk arrest. Apparently Berlin agreed. ‘They have one hundred per cent confidence in me,’ bragged Owens. ‘I don’t know why. They just have, that’s all. I have not made any slips at all.’

  Nor, so it seems, did Major Ritter. ‘I was always very frugal with money,’ he insisted. ‘Besides which, our policy was to pay according to the value of the delivery. To begin with most of Johnny’s material was rather ordinary, and he seldom received more than £50. It was also a security precaution. Too many agents had been caught out in the past, because they began to live suddenly and conspicuously above their means.’

  In any event, high-rolling Johnny was already hopelessly ensnared. With payments from Expanded Metal now intermittent at best, rent arrears mounted on Pullman Court, attended by the threat of eviction. On 16 September 1937, Owens
rang his former case officer at MI6, Colonel Edward Peal, and requested a meeting, hoping to resume his career as a double agent on a double income. Peal cautiously agreed, but also invited Colonel Edward Hinchley-Cooke of MI5, the veteran interrogator charged with running Mad Major Draper.

  The man known as ‘Hinch’ to his closest colleagues took a strong and immediate dislike to the former Agent Snow, who seemed neither willing nor able to provide a coherent narrative of his dealings with the Abwehr. Referring obliquely to Rantzau and Auerbach, Owens hinted at ‘very good contacts’ in Germany in connection with U-boats, but bowled short on specifics and gave few straight answers. Profoundly irritated, Hinchley-Cooke told Owens that his dope was of ‘no value’ and warned him not to contact British military intelligence again. The frosty meeting lasted barely fifteen minutes, at the end of which the Little Man was instructed to sign a terse disclaimer, denying him compensation in case he ‘got into difficulties’ in his dealings with the Nazis.

  In neat type printed above his signature, the former MI6 freelance meekly confirmed that ‘I fully realise I am not employed and have not been employed since November 1936 by the British Intelligence Service.’

  Instead Owens found himself a marked man. ‘They have a man watching me,’ he complained soon after, considerably unnerved by the scrutiny of the Special Branch. ‘I have been followed everywhere, my house has been broken into.’ His son Bob, now aged eighteen, was questioned at his place of work by mysterious strangers. Come October, Hitler’s chief spy in England felt sufficiently harassed to ask Ritter to allow Irene and their daughter Patricia to emigrate to Germany. Despite these travails, however, Owens could still travel freely on his Canadian passport, and therefore this subtle persecution did little to curtail his espionage work. As a result, MI5 was forced to acknowledge that ‘substantially from the end of 1936 until the outbreak of war, Snow worked as a straightforward German agent, whose activities, though known to the authorities, were not interfered with in any important respect.’

  In fact MI5 might have nudged the Inland Revenue, who threatened Owens with bankruptcy over tax arrears of £55 at the beginning of 1938. Patents had lapsed, the Owens Battery Equipment Company lay dormant, and overheads in Britain exceeded income from Germany. Finally evicted from upmarket Pullman Court, Owens and his family moved ten miles south to Morden, a dreary suburb at the bottom end of the Northern Line. There Owens rented a maisonette at 23 Grosvenor Court, a boxy block on a busy main road. Granted, his new accommodation was handy for RAF fighter aerodromes at Biggin Hill, Kenley and Northolt, and rather harder for the Branch to surveil. However, the Jaguar Roadster was long gone, and there could be no mistaking the fact that Snow’s downward slide was fast becoming an avalanche.

  In an effort to avoid letter intercepts, Owens set up shop in the visitors’ writing room at Canada House. ‘I would be very glad if you will send along payment by return,’ he wrote to Ritter, desperate for funds. ‘The delay has been worrying me and my business people here. I am devoting nearly all my time and energy to this deal and am getting excellent results, and our business connection next year will be (as they say in US) a humdinger.’

  Frugal Doctor Rantzau was not so sure. ‘As to the last battery, I must say that the price of £75 is rather high. As you wrote yourself that you were trying to get it a little cheaper, I hope that you have been able to convince your manufacturer that he has to revise his price. However, on account of such a price reduction there must not be any reduction in the quality.’

  Quality remained an intractable problem. In March, when Hitler annexed his Austrian homeland, Owens chanced yet another approach to British intelligence, this time through the Admiralty. Again he was rebuffed and escorted from the building. With Rantzau unwilling to pay over the odds for substandard samples, Johnny’s London stelle badly needed to come up with a better pitch, and better product.

  A humdinger, in fact.

  Undertaken during the summer of 1938, Owens’ next manoeuvre seemed calculated to appeal both to the Abwehr and MI5. Four years earlier the British Union of Fascists had boasted 40,000 members and enjoyed a brief flirtation with political respectability, buoyed by its charismatic founder Sir Oswald Mosley, and epitomised by an infamous headline in the Daily Mail: Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Although mainstream support tailed off following thuggish scenes at a mass indoor rally at Olympia, Owens now set about infiltrating the party, hoping to recruit gullible rank-and-file members as sub-agents and access sympathetic moles in the armed services. Since the Special Branch maintained a number of well-placed informers inside the BUF, Owens’ conspicuous efforts were soon noticed, and fed back to MI5. ‘Our friend Snow is on the warpath again,’ noted Hinchley-Cooke with dismay. ‘Some definite action is required to clip his wings.’

  Even by the base standards of the BUF, Owens’ pitch to the Blackshirts was remarkably crude. ‘Snow spoke very freely about Thames House, St Ermin’s Hotel, the St James’s Park people and Colonel Peal,’ noted Albert Canning, the man in charge at the Branch. ‘He said that his work had revealed serious corruption in the British intelligence service, how it was run by Jews etc, and expressed his willingness to expose this “terrible racket”.’

  On the hackneyed pretext of working for peace, Owens warned that Jews were preparing an attack on Germany, hoping to trigger a ‘criminal’ war between England and the Reich. On the promise of funding from Hitler, he proposed setting up a chain of clandestine BUF radio stations to broadcast hate direct to a blinkered, complacent public who ‘must be told what is going on’. Still more ambitious, Owens also hinted at a coup d’état. ‘If the BUF had a reliable following who would “stick at nothing” to show the government how much they were in favour of Germany and detested the Jews, he could arrange for a cargo of arms for use in an attempt to seize power.’

  Such blunt overtures betrayed surprising ignorance of far right nationalist politics. While virtually all Blackshirts were staunch admirers of the new European dictators (Hitler, Mussolini and more recently Franco), and most professed to loathe communists and Jews, far fewer were prepared to countenance acts of treason against King and Country. The moment Owens began to boast openly of being ‘a direct personal agent of Hitler’ and solicit military and industrial intelligence, doors began to close. It hardly helped that Oswald Mosley hoped to set up his own commercial radio station, funded with Nazi money.

  ‘Owens is regarded with considerable suspicion by the few leading officials of the BUF cognisant with his approach,’ Canning concluded. ‘Some describe him as an agent-provocateur, and others as a knave or fool.’

  The vexatious petty traitor was both, leading MI5 to again consider charges under the Official Secrets Act. Ultimately the Little Man was dismissed as an impostor: several clandestine assignations at the Regent Palace Hotel were found to entail the debriefing of gullible young women rather than ruthless Nazi spies, while a colourful sidekick named Hellfire Williams quickly vanished from the scene. Undoubtedly Owens boasted one or two genuine contacts on the fringes of the military, and perhaps even inside the Air Ministry itself, yet most were invented, like the fictive Welsh ring. Unfortunately even imaginary agents seemed inclined to let Johnny down. Poking around in a chandlery one day, Owens purchased an instrument described as a pressure gauge from a British submarine and in due course took it to Hamburg, fibbing that his source worked in an Admiralty dockyard. In fact, as Ritter soon discovered, this latest ‘sample’ was merely an obsolete inclinometer from a scrapped Great War biplane.

  Owens laughed it off, excusing that he could hardly be held responsible for the honesty – or otherwise – of every contact. Ritter reminded Johnny that Stelle X still had no plans to open a museum.

  Whether or not Irene Owens knew of her husband’s undercover antics at the Regent Palace Hotel, or on the Hamburg Reeperbahn, their marriage of twenty years was rapidly turning sour. In July 1938 Owens took his family to Ostend, ostensibly to enjoy the long sandy beaches and cut-price casinos of the Bel
gian Riviera, then whisked Irene away to Germany, leaving Bob and Patricia in the care of the hotel manager. Owens’ main objective in taking his wife to Hamburg was to introduce her to Doctor Rantzau and demonstrate that his frequent business trips were entirely legitimate. But Irene was not much impressed. ‘It was clear to me straight away that there was little real affection between the two of them,’ noted Ritter. ‘They might have been similar in terms of physical appearance, but not in character. His wife hardly contributed to the conversation and seemed completely uninterested.’

  According to Irene, the scenario played out in Belgium that summer was infinitely more sinister. In a self-serving statement made to the Branch the following year, Irene insisted that while she and Owens were away, a German agent arrived in Ostend and attempted to ‘blackmail’ the children. The visitor was none other than Erwin Pieper, the elderly Abwehr spy who had introduced Owens to Hilmar Dierks back in 1936. Fortunately the hotel manager intervened and threatened to have Pieper arrested. ‘Peeper’ promptly disappeared.

  Owens told it differently, explaining that Pieper had attempted to bilk money from the hotel and was ejected from the lobby following a violent exchange. Whatever the truth behind events in Ostend, tension hung heavy in the air across Europe throughout the long, hot summer of 1938. This climate of fear was only heightened in September by the Munich Crisis, when events in Czechoslovakia prompted Owens to launch yet another bid to re-ingratiate himself with British intelligence.

  This time the former Agent Snow found MI5 unexpectedly receptive. Whereas the annexation of Austria by Hitler was seen as little more than the occupation of his own backyard, the addition of Czechoslovakia to his lengthening territorial shopping list marked a first real grab at Lebensraum, the sinister geopolitical policy by which living space (or ‘habitat’) would be seized in Eastern Europe, thereby creating an enlarged Third Reich known as Greater Germany. On 12 September the dictator delivered a violently anti-Czechoslovak speech at Nuremberg, citing wrongs committed against ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland frontier zone and threatening military action at the end of the month. A localised war seemed imminent, one likely to spread across Europe since both France and the Soviet Union had forged alliances with the Czechs that had far more bite than any protection offered by the young republic’s membership of the toothless League of Nations.