Hitler's Spy

by James Hayward

  As the beleaguered Czech government prepared to fight, and 38 million British civilians glimpsed the future through the mica eyepiece of flimsy rubber gas masks, issued free of charge by a failing government, Arthur Owens seized his chance. Presenting himself at Scotland Yard, Agent Snow offered up his most detailed statement to date. Besides admitting to acting as Hitler’s chief spy in England, Owens also volunteered that he would soon take delivery of a short-wave wireless transmitter. ‘It’s very small and powerful,’ the Little Man boasted, as if describing himself. ‘It has a transmitting radius of 12,000 miles and takes practically no current.’

  This disclosure burst like a bombshell at MI5, for at no time had Mad Major Draper been offered a secret radio. Despite remaining deeply suspicious of Owens, Colonel Hinchley-Cooke agreed to a meeting on 24 September, which lasted rather longer than fifteen minutes and was transcribed in full by a stenographer. For the most part Owens was typically evasive, though his rambling, tangential answers did include details of the Abwehr organisation in Hamburg, including cover addresses used by Doctor Rantzau, as well as the promised transmitter and wireless codes.

  ‘It will be the first one in the country,’ boasted Snow. ‘The thing’s so small you can take it up and work it in your hand.’

  ‘Is your Morse up to speed?’ asked Hinchley-Cooke.

  ‘I was in the Boy Scouts, and they’ve had me practising all hours. Sixty letters a minute will be fine and dandy.’

  ‘And they pay you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Thirty or forty pounds a month. It depends on the dope.’

  ‘Tell me more about Doctor Rantzau.’

  ‘Actually, there’s five or six different people.’

  ‘The more the merrier. Please give me their names.’

  Owens sucked on his gums. ‘Look – let’s leave all that business aside. I’ve got to tread carefully, see. My life’s not worth two hoots if there’s any slip made.’

  Hinch fixed Snow severely with a hard-eyed stare. ‘The point you don’t quite seem to realise is, you’ve been working against our instructions.’

  ‘And you people don’t seem to realise that I’m trying to work on the level!’ Owens snapped back, his bile rising momentarily. ‘I’ve always done everything I could for this country. Probably my methods are different from yours, but if you let me carry on I can bring in vital information.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Where the first bombs will fall, for a start.’

  Hinchley-Cooke began to listen very closely indeed. Fears that the Luftwaffe would raze Paris and London the moment war was declared had already reached MI5 from other sources, reviving nightmarish estimates of 3,000 tons of bombs on London in a single day, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties and a million cases of hysteria. Now, if Owens was to be believed, Hitler’s spies had identified a zone south-east of London which was poorly defended by searchlights and antiaircraft guns, providing the German air force with a safe corridor for a mass attack on London. The Abwehr, so he said, knew this dangerous gap as ‘The Channel’.

  In truth, Snow’s dope was a barrage of Zeppelin shells. The Luftwaffe would be in no position to launch mass raids on the British mainland until 1940, when the fall of France delivered forward bases on the Channel coast. Even then, it would manage to deliver more than a thousand tons of bombs just once in five years, on which occasion the death toll was limited to just twelve hundred. However, none of this could be predicted by nervous appeasers in September 1938, and the possibility remains that Owens’ tendentious warning was a masterful political bluff which helped serve to excuse the shameful Munich Agreement. Just five days later, on the eve of the German attack on Czechoslovakia, the governments of Britain, France and Italy sold this promising new democracy down the river, laying false claim to ‘peace with honour’ yet at the same time ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler, and surrendering additional territory to Poland and Hungary.

  ‘When Chamberlain returned from Munich waving his piece of paper we all had an acute sense of shame,’ admitted one serving MI5 officer, unwilling to read major victory into the betrayal of a minor country. ‘We felt, too, some relief that we were not to be subjected to an immediate aerial bombardment.’

  With grave misgivings, Hinchley-Cooke cautiously encouraged rogue Agent Snow to continue his work as an arm’s-length freelance. The promise of a powerful short-wave wireless transmitter could hardly be ignored. Nor could the fact that MI5’s alpha agent, Mad Major Christopher Draper, had recently been exposed as a ‘Nazi spy’ by the Fleet Street dailies and forced into hiding in Broadstairs.

  As a result, Double Agent Snow now became the responsibility of another case officer at MI5, far younger than either Hinch or Colonel Peal, yet infinitely more shrewd. The Little Man’s new handler was Captain Tommy ‘Tar’ Robertson, then in charge of a small sub-section within B Division specialising in wireless traffic but destined to become one of the greatest unsung heroes of the Second World War.

  2

  Colonel Johnny

  Just as Arthur Owens was no ordinary spy, so Thomas Argyle Robertson was a far from orthodox soldier. Schooled at Charterhouse, and a graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, Robertson spent only two years with the Seaforth Highlanders before resigning his commission, followed by spells in the City and police work in Birmingham. In 1933 he transferred to the Security Service, still aged only twenty-four, and in no time at all established an enviable reputation as a counter-intelligence officer par excellence.

  All that was required were a few rounds of drinks in a Mayfair saloon bar. Aside from Nazis, Blackshirts and the Irish Republican Army, during the last year of peace the long list of subversive organisations monitored by MI5 included the Communist Party of Great Britain, lately implicated in a spy ring at the huge Woolwich Arsenal. With the ‘red menace’ regarded as a clear and present danger, companionable Captain Tommy duped a suspect Foreign Office cipher clerk named John King over drinks at the Bunch of Grapes on Curzon Street. After King passed out drunk Robertson borrowed his keys, burglarised his office and recovered a batch of incriminating papers meant for dispatch to Moscow. Following a secret trial held in camera, the hapless mole was sent down for ten years.

  A sobering experience indeed.

  ‘Robertson was in no sense an intellectual,’ recalled John Masterman, a wartime colleague at MI5. ‘But he had certain qualities of a high order. A born leader, gifted with independent judgement, he had above all an extraordinary flair in all the intricate operations of his profession. Time and again he would prove to be right when others, following their intellectual assessments, proved to be wrong.’ Widely known as ‘Tar’ on account of his initials, smitten female staff at MI5 preferred a more irreverent sobriquet, with ‘Passion Pants’ derived from his penchant for dress trousers cut from the colourful blue-green Mackenzie tartan of his parent regiment.

  In the run-up to war diligent work by the Security Service led to the arrest of several low-level Abwehr operatives, including a hairdresser from Dundee named Jessie Jordan, and an Irish bricklayer, Joseph Kelly, who stole plans from a munitions factory near Chorley. Like thirsty communist mole John King, Kelly received a stiff ten-year sentence and Jordan four. MI5 were less fortunate with Walter Simon, a veteran spy also run by Nikolaus Ritter, who refused to crack under close interrogation and could only be deported.

  ‘Don’t come back,’ Colonel Hinchley-Cooke warned the elderly spook on the dockside at Grimsby. ‘You won’t be so lucky next time.’

  In contrast, fortune continued to smile on Hitler’s chief spy in England. Now in effect a triple agent, on the first day of January 1939 Owens travelled from Dover to Hamburg by boat, notionally on battery business but in fact to collect his shortwave transmitter. The winter crossing was particularly rough, prompting Owens to scrawl Irene a cursory note from the Hotel Graf Moltke. ‘There is quite a little snow here, although it is not very cold. Everything is very b
usy and business seems to be very fresh. There are a lot of batteries being sold. I hope your shoulder is better and the children behaving themselves OK. So cheerio, love to all.’

  Battery business was brisk indeed. After delivering appropriate samples to Stelle X, Ritter and a wireless specialist named Trautmann escorted Owens two hundred miles east to Stettin. There, at a spy school housed in a military barracks, Johnny clapped eyes on his first transmitter. Consisting of high-end component parts sourced in Germany, Holland and France, the set was small enough to fit inside an ordinary attaché case, making it easy to smuggle across borders, and came equipped with chargeable batteries for use in the field.

  ‘They said it was portable and that I should travel as much as I could,’ Owens told Tar some time later. ‘I could hire a car, and if there were machines, munitions or guns on any of the aerodromes they wanted to know at once. All I had to do was run out two wires as an aerial. The set takes practically no current, and cannot be checked up as regards the click of the Morse key.’

  In order to demonstrate home use a model apartment had been constructed at the Stettin school, with the long high-frequency aerial cunningly concealed behind the wallpaper. To Agent Snow, it must have seemed as though he had stumbled onto the set of the latest thriller by Alfred Hitchcock, and cast in the glamorous lead role. However, other aspects of his visit to the Baltic port impressed him rather less. His digs, for instance, at the Angel Pension, turned out to be a temperance hotel. For the thirsty Welshman this was almost as bad as Prohibition.

  Owens returned to London on 6 January, though his British handlers would hear nothing for more than a week. Only on the morning of 14 January did he trouble to call his designated contact, a flinty Special Branch inspector named William Gagen, to arrange a meeting at a Lyons Cornerhouse in Westminster. Over tea he furnished brief details of his trip to Stettin and a copy of his wireless code. Owens also revealed that he expected to receive the transmitter in a matter of days. ‘He said that he had not the time to explain its use then,’ noted Gagen, ‘but would soon be in a position to amplify his story.’

  The pair met again two days later, this time at the offices of Expanded Metal at Burwood House, where Owens revealed that the transmitter was now available for collection from Victoria station. Instructing Gagen to follow him at a discreet distance, Owens took a cab to the busy rail terminus and retrieved a small brown attaché case from the left luggage office, then conducted a brief examination of his own before handing it over to the bemused detective.

  ‘Owens stated his sole motive was to help this country,’ Gagen revealed in a lengthy typed report. ‘Messages from the transmitter will be picked up in Hamburg, Cologne and Stettin. It can be used with a 350 volt battery, or plugged into an ordinary lamp socket. He has arranged to send a trial transmission to Germany in the near future, and asks that the transmitter, code etc be returned to him on Saturday morning.’

  With that Owens vanished, explaining that he was off to ‘take some photographs’ in the north of England. Well aware that he was being played, Bill Gagen took the attaché case straight to MI5, where it was received with alacrity by Tar Robertson and Hinchley-Cooke. On lifting the lid Robertson found a Morse key, several coloured leads and a compact transmitter unit measuring just 12" × 6" × 4", with two powerful Miniwatt Dario valves and variable frequency control. Grudgingly, the intelligence men were forced to concede that the German set looked rather more jazzy than any comparable gadgetry in British service.

  The apparatus was subsequently examined in detail at the Post Office research laboratory in Dollis Hill. There a specialist from MI6 confirmed that it was far more sophisticated than any other previously encountered – and promptly broke it. One version holds that a resistor burned out; another that the set was dismantled too thoroughly to restore to working order. Whatever the truth, it was hardly an auspicious start. Then again, the boffins were unaware that the Abwehr’s own disparaging term for these early short-wave sets was klamotten: junk.

  Once it had been repaired, Gagen returned the transmitter to Agent Snow in the bar of a Morden pub. In return, Owens handed the detective a telephone number for Stelle X in Hamburg. Plainly Hitler’s chief spy in England was engaged in writing his own insurance policy against prosecution, confident that no jury was likely to convict a notional traitor who was actively collaborating with the Security Service. This left Owens free to do largely as he pleased, and for the next nine months A.3504 was able to run rings around British intelligence, who had no prior experience of running a wireless agent, nor any detailed knowledge of the internal workings of the Abwehr.

  Snow’s stratagems even ran to an attempt to turn a profit from his new klamotten. Intrigued by claims that messages buzzed on the set were undetectable in England, Owens took it to George Hamilton, his erstwhile sponsor at Expanded Metal, hopeful that another joint venture company might be formed to exploit the Abwehr’s cutting-edge short-wave technology. The set was subsequently examined by Hamilton’s brother Noel, a wireless wizard who had served as a junior staff officer at the Air Ministry. Unlike his ambivalent sibling, Noel Hamilton viewed Owens as positively dangerous, and tipped off his former colleagues at Adastral House.

  ‘Squadron Leader X (retired) is particularly anxious that he shall not be involved in any form of enquiry,’ noted a subsequent intelligence report. ‘Owens talks openly of his connection with a certain Colonel and Scotland Yard, and brags that he was partly responsible for the arrest of a woman in Aberdeen. Further, when “in his cups” he said that he worked on behalf of Germany as well, and that he held a secret service badge.’

  In an effort to test Snow’s mettle, Robertson and Hinch set him up with a stooge. Posing as a shady civil servant in need of quick money, a Special Branch detective took to drinking with Owens and filed a damning report at the end of March. Rehearsing the Zeppelin shells story by way of credentials, Owens boasted of transmitting to Germany on a regular basis, and expressed keen interest in obtaining military manuals as well as any juicy scandal involving senior political figures for use in Nazi propaganda. ‘Snow appears to have plenty of money and travels from place to place in taxi cabs. He makes no secret of the fact that he is paid by the Germans, and speaks very highly of them in every way.’

  Crucially, Owens expressed particular interest in dope on recent ‘secret experiments’ aimed at bringing down hostile aircraft. This new technology, he claimed, was referred to by those in the know as ‘the wireless cloud’, research into which had lately reached a critical stage.

  Here A.3504 was sniffing around radar, or radiolocation, at that time the most sensitive military secret in Britain. In 1935 the Air Ministry asked the scientist Robert Watson-Watt to investigate the feasibility of a ‘death ray’ that would utilise a powerful beam of electromagnetic waves to stop the engines of enemy aircraft, or boil the blood of the pilot. The Ministry even offered a standing prize of £1,000 to anyone able to demonstrate a ray weapon capable of killing a sheep at a thousand yards. Though this macabre bounty went unclaimed, Watson-Watt took note of the fact that aircraft in flight often interfered with wireless reception, and turned his thoughts from radio-destruction to radio-detection.

  The result was the early warning system known as Chain Home. In 1937 work began on a string of twenty four CH stations positioned between the Tyne and Southampton, capable of detecting hostile aircraft at a range of 80 miles, at altitudes up to 15,000 feet. By Easter of 1939 the radar chain was fully operational, shielding Britain by means of the invisible ‘wireless cloud’ beamed from lofty steel pylons 350 feet tall. Since these masts were highly conspicuous, inquisitive Luftwaffe commanders brought the giant airship Graf Zeppelin out of mothballs to reconnoitre the English coastline at a leisurely pace, hoping to pick up telltale radio signals. On her second trip in August 1939 the lumbering gasbag was buzzed by a pair of ageing Hawker biplanes from 612 Squadron, so that for a few short minutes the Luftwaffe’s stealthy investigation into future electronic warfare t
echnology came to resemble an air-show restaging of a Great War dogfight.

  To complicate matters, Germany was developing radar of her own. During an official visit to Britain at the end of 1937, Luftwaffe General Erhard Milch asked several pointed questions about radar over lunch at Fighter Command headquarters, at the same time dropping broad hints that scientists in the Reich were one step ahead. His boast held water on a technical level, but the tactical application of the ‘wireless cloud’ lagged far behind in Germany, where it was seen as little more than a highly accurate electronic gunsight.

  In the midst of this snooping on radar, libidinous Agent Snow found himself zapped by an altogether different kind of ray.

  For several years Owens had used the home of his brother-in-law at 112 Stratford Road in Plaistow as a cover address, often adopting the pseudonym ‘Thomas Wilson’. The spy game, it seems, was a family affair. Fred Ferrett probably fed Owens dope gleaned from his job at the Short Brothers aircraft factory in Rochester, which produced the Sunderland flying boat, while Irene was obliged to stand by as ‘Uncle Arthur’ attempted to groom her niece Alice as an East End Mata Hari. Alas, in May 1939 Fred Ferrett died of tuberculosis, leaving Irene and her sister distraught. True to form, amoral Agent Snow chose this ticklish moment to fall head over heels for Alice’s best friend, a shapely blonde seamstress named Lily Sophia Bade, who promised to be ideal sleeper material.