Hitler's Spy

by James Hayward

  Born in West Ham in May 1912, Lily was blonde, blue-eyed and curvaceously sexy – ‘well built’, according to an ungallant observer from the Special Branch – with a turned-up nose and unusually long fingernails. Youthful, lively and flirtatious, Lily Bade was a street-smart working-class girl on the make, keen to escape the confines of a large East End family and an overcrowded home. Owens in turn set about sweeping the 27-year-old dressmaker clean off her feet – if not quite literally, since Miss Bade was appreciably taller than Owens, and several stone heavier.

  Owens turned 40 on 14 April and it is tempting to view his sudden infatuation with a younger woman as symptomatic of midlife crisis. Moreover, his mother Ada was sixteen years younger than her husband William, so perhaps Owens’ vigorous pursuit of Lily owed something to learned behaviour. In any event, after twenty years of marriage to sullen Irene, vivacious Lily held the promise of a golden future, and seemed genuinely taken by the prospect of romance and intrigue at the side of Hitler’s chief spy in England. Tellingly, Lily’s mother Louisa Virgiels was of German extraction . . . In no time at all ‘Mr Wilson’ had added the Bade family home at 28 Caistor Park Road to his long list of dead-letter drops.

  Irene Owens was not amused. Nor was their daughter Patricia, now aged fourteen, and dead set on a legitimate career as an actress. Thus were sown the seeds of Agent Snow’s undoing.

  Owens spent the last week of April 1939 in Hamburg, swapping notes with Ritter on airfields, rearmament and marital travails. ‘Nikolaus was very fond of women,’ recalled one of his female agents, without great affection, ‘but naive in his relations with them.’ Like long-suffering Irene Owens, Ritter’s American wife Mary had recently found herself traded in for a younger model, namely Irmgard von Klitzing. Ritter’s second marriage proved a lavish affair, after which the happy Abwehr couple honey mooned in Italy and Yugoslavia. However, Owens thought Irmgard a snob, and mean with it – unlike Ritter himself, who was generous to a fault with Nazi money.

  On learning that Mary Aurora Evans wished to return to the United States, the wily Doctor exiled his ex-wife to Bremen and had her passport confiscated. The Alabama-born divorcée knew far more than was good for her about Rantzau’s nefarious activities in New York. Soon so too would the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Back in Morden, life at Grosvenor Court became increasingly intolerable. Owens now spent his evenings with Lily, haunting various bars and hotels around London, seeking fresh sources and sidekicks, and imbibing freely. Unfortunately reliable sub-agents were hard to find, and a scheme involving a lorry driver from Colliers Wood, whose long-haul routes promised excellent cover for trips with the portable transmitter, was dropped after MI5 raised objections. Consequently Owens kept quiet about Alexander Myner, an unemployed accounts clerk from Glasgow who specialised in procuring false passports, and his own son Bob, now aged nineteen and a trainee draughtsman. Following his father’s dubious example, Snow Junior set about mapping several RAF fighter airfields dotted around London, chief among them Biggin Hill and Kenley. This handiwork he then posted direct to Auerbach in Hamburg, knowing full well that the battery company was an Abwehr front.

  ‘He obtained the address from his father,’ Robertson discovered much later. ‘He addressed the packet to himself at one post office in London, collected it, and re-mailed it to Hamburg. He did so out of a sense of adventure, and received no payment. But a message was sent over to say that the Germans were very pleased with what had been done.’

  The apple seldom falls far from the tree. Meanwhile, in March, Hitler occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia, whose president Emil Hácha suffered a heart attack at the negotiating table, an ominous development followed in May by the so-called Pact of Steel, promising mutual assistance between Germany and Italy in the event of war. In Britain, civil defence organisations expanded rapidly, forcing regular blackout and respirator drills on an anxious public, once again raising the spectre of bombardment from the air and mass evacuation. In the race to rearm, all three services were freed from existing financial limitations, allowing the War Office to increase the size of the army to 32 divisions, and permitting the Air Ministry to order 700 new aircraft a month, the number of all-important Spitfire squadrons in Fighter Command rising from two to nine.

  Having suborned his own son, in the middle of July Owens also wrote to Ritter. Terrified in equal measure by the prospect of air raids, detention and his enraged wife Irene, Snow proposed quitting Britain for Germany on a permanent basis, with his mistress Lily in tow. Unsurprisingly, Ritter declined: with Europe sliding inexorably towards war, Johnny’s stelle was now the absolute cynosure of Abwehr activity in England.

  In Morden, hostilities broke out on 29 July. As the IRA outraged Britons with explosions at King’s Cross and Victoria, Owens dropped a bombshell of his own at Grosvenor Court by walking out on his wife and family. Irene’s shrill threats to expose her feckless husband as a traitor prompted an ugly scene. ‘Owens thoroughly searched the house, including her handbag,’ noted a subsequent police report. ‘He destroyed every possible scrap of evidence against himself before he left, and disposed of the wireless transmitting set. Owens has been drinking for some time past and has not been sober for weeks. He has threatened to shoot Mrs Owens and ruin her family should she give information about him.’

  In truth, Agent Snow had no gun, much less the nerve to execute the mother of his children. Now homeless, and wary of London hotels, the adulterous double-crosser was obliged to beg a spare room from shady passport agent Alex Myner, who lived with his wife at 12 Parklands in the leafy south London suburb of Surbiton. Lily joined him immediately, much enthused by the prospect of sharing life on the lam with a real live master spy. ‘We became intimate,’ she later revealed to Bill Gagen, the Special Branch inspector, choosing her words very carefully indeed. ‘On about 3 August Arthur asked me to go for a holiday with him to Germany. I agreed. He said I would need a British passport and gave me the money to pay for it.’

  Knowing full well that the trip was no mere summer vacation, Lily handed in her notice at Brownstones, the West End firm where she worked as a seamstress. These dubious holiday plans also found room for Alex Myner. ‘I told him I was only in casual work,’ explained the jobless clerk, short on money and scruples. ‘He intimated that he would introduce me to some of his business friends in Hamburg, with a view to representing them in this country.’

  This tale was as tall as Owens was short. Tellingly, Agent Snow gave MI5 no advance warning of his latest overseas excursion, and elected to travel by an unusual route at inconvenient hours. The trio gathered at Victoria coach station on the afternoon of 10 August and took a bus to Dover, then waited at the port for several hours before crossing by overnight boat to Ostend. Owens took care to keep a discreet distance from Lily and Myner, and as a result he alone was observed by the port authorities at Dover, neatly turned out in a light blue-grey suit, topped off by a brown felt hat with a snap brim.

  From Ostend the party took a train to Hamburg, arriving on Friday night and checking into the Berliner Hof, where Owens and Lily masqueraded as husband and wife. Ritter appeared the following morning, accompanied by another Abwehr officer introduced as Herr Schneider. ‘Rantzau spoke English fluently with a broad American accent,’ noted Myner, ‘but no business was discussed in my presence. Lily was handed a twenty Reichsmark note by Owens, who had received it from Schneider, telling her that she should go for a walk with me – which we did.’

  Left alone with Ritter and Schneider, Johnny was in for an unpleasant surprise. Demonstrating chilling sang-froid, Irene Owens had written two vengeful letters to the German spymaster known to her as Doctor Rantzau, each denouncing Arthur as a serving British spy. ‘My old wife was giving me trouble,’ Owens recalled later, in a rare example of understatement. ‘Tried to give me away to the Germans. Rantzau had proof in black and white.’

  Humdinger.

  Keeping his wits about him, Owens laughed off Irene’s accusations as
absurd, pointing to the presence of his sexy young mistress in Hamburg as corroborating evidence. Hell had no fury like a woman scorned, and so forth.

  This, at least, was the story played back to MI5. In fact, Ritter already knew of Johnny’s contacts with British intelligence and approved of them to the extent that Owens remained a free agent, rather than operating under British control. ‘Rantzau said to me, “You’re in a very nice position”,’ Owens admitted two years later, under close interrogation by MI5. ‘He seemed to think it was an ideal position from their standpoint. I had got a free hand to do more or less what I liked with the British organisation.’

  Double-cross it, for example. Despite Irene’s best efforts, Der Kleine’s tenure as Hitler’s chief spy in England remained secure. That same afternoon, Ritter entertained his British guests in a beer garden. ‘Lily was blonde like Johnny’s wife,’ the doctor observed approvingly. ‘But that was all they shared in common. Whereas Irene was small, quiet and mannered, his new friend Lily was large and robust, a whole head taller than Johnny, and several years younger. Gay, intelligent, and with a good deal of natural sex appeal. Johnny was clearly infatuated.’

  Unlike Lily Bade, Alex Myner was introduced to Stelle X as promising agent material, for whom Owens expected to receive a finder’s fee. Following an initial interview with Ritter, on Sunday the impecunious Scot was introduced to a junior officer named Leitz and told to report to the Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool Street four days hence. ‘Leitz indicated that he would give me some business,’ Myner explained in a subsequent statement, careful to avoid self-incrimination. ‘Nothing further of interest happened. I returned to London on Monday night, leaving Owens and the girl behind.’

  Owens and Lily stayed on in Hamburg for a week, during which Irmgard kept the pretty dressmaker amused while Ritter fettled Johnny as a wartime spy. Owens spent much of his time at the main Abwehr signals centre at Wohldorf, a short distance from Hamburg, where he got to grips with the new model Afu transmitter, technically superior and far more robust than the older klamotten, and brushed up on coding techniques. One such was based on the word CONGRATULATIONS and utilised simple numbers and squares; another made use of a best-selling novel by Alice Hobart, Oil for the Lamps of China. Photography and sabotage also featured on the curriculum, as well as instruction on basic meteorology. In the event that war broke out between Britain and Germany, A.3504 would buzz across daily weather reports, enabling the Luftwaffe to select optimum conditions for the destruction of London.

  Still more sinister, Owens learned of new forms of chemical warfare, after a Nazi scientist with a double chin let slip details of ‘a concentration of acid vapour’ that was highly lethal. Owens, as Ritter well knew, possessed a degree of skill as a chemist, and for the right price might be persuaded to deploy a doomsday weapon. ‘Being heavily concentrated this vapour hung around indefinitely, and had extraordinary corrosive powers which not only ate away the flesh of sheep in a very short time, but disintegrated metals.’

  Right hot.

  Blind to such frightfulness, Lily purchased a small blue hat with a veil. On 18 August, a Friday, the odd couple left Hamburg for Berlin, where Owens may have been formally presented at the Abwehr’s central headquarters on the Tirpitzufer. ‘Arthur was with me all the time in Berlin and nothing happened of particular interest,’ his mistress fibbed later. ‘Nothing happened in Hamburg which aroused my suspicions. I had no idea that he was engaged other than with business connected with the Expanded Metal Company Limited.’

  Beguiling Lily Bade was hardly so naive. On Sunday the lovers left Berlin for a three-day break at Timmendorfer Strand, the fashionable spa resort on the Baltic coast near Lübeck, a token of appreciation from Stelle X. Despite darkening political storm clouds, the high summer of 1939 was among one of the hottest and driest on record, bringing Mediterranean temperatures as far north as Stockholm. Better still, Arthur Owens could also now bask in the warm glow of an honorary military rank: Colonel Johnny. Soon, come Der Tag, antagonists such as Hinchley-Cooke might even have to throw up an occasional salute.

  No matter that his compulsive pursuit of high status and abundant wealth involved the betrayal of his country in shameful fashion. Countries, according to Owens, mattered not at all. For these few precious, balmy days on the beach with lovely Lily, it must have seemed to the Little Man that he was on the verge of a very big win indeed.

  This tainted summer idyll was destined not to last. Not content with denouncing her husband to Doctor Rantzau, Irene now repeated the trick at Scotland Yard. She had, she insisted, intended to inform the police of ‘this despicable business’ for some time, but had held back for the sake of the children. As if to emphasise the point, Bob sat meekly beside her, tight lipped on the subject of his own excursions to sketch aerodromes at Kenley and Biggin Hill. Now that Owens had threatened to shoot her, and heap shame on the Ferrett family name, Irene demanded draconian punishment – and police protection to boot.

  Her lengthy statement to a Special Branch inspector named Lansby read like bad vaudeville farce. ‘Through a millionaire named Hamilton he met an American Jew named Pieper and joined the German secret service. Owens has a very good knowledge of many British aerodromes and a wireless transmitting set with a minimum radius of 60 miles. It is alleged he is very clever and carries code messages covered in tin foil in his mouth, or in the petrol cavity at the end of a cigarette lighter.’

  Naturally enough, Irene was particularly piqued by his affair with sexy Lily Bade. ‘Owens has made her extravagant promises of reward. He said he would take her to Germany and, as far as is known, they may be there at present, although Owens is supposed to be at the Golden Sands holiday camp, Great Yarmouth.’

  In fact, Irene was no less devious than her husband, and no friend of MI5. Having informed the Branch that Snow ran a network of Nazi agents who worked to his orders, she found their names had slipped her mind. ‘Mrs Snow has promised to communicate with me when she remembers them,’ Lansby noted patiently. ‘If she finds any correspondence or addresses which her husband may have been left behind.’

  Time was running out – for Owens, and for Europe. On 23 August came news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, a bogus non-aggression treaty dividing Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. That Poland would be the next chunk of Lebensraum seized by Hitler had long been abundantly clear, and already the troubled republic had secured firm guarantees from Britain and France to defend her territorial integrity with military support. Five months later, the totalitarian accord between Hitler and Stalin signalled that war must inevitably follow, making the dog days of August 1939 an uncertain time to enjoy sand, sea and sunshine on Timmendorfer Strand. From Copenhagen to Cannes to Casablanca, holidaymakers hurriedly packed their bags and scrambled for the ports, anxious to return home before the blue summer skies grew dark with bombers, perhaps eclipsing civilisation itself.

  A driver from Stelle X collected Owens and Lily from their hotel and sped them to Flushing on the Dutch coast. From there the pair crossed the North Sea to Harwich on an overcrowded passenger ferry, though without the new Afu suitcase transmitter. Other fascist fellow travellers hastened in the opposite direction, notably William Joyce, the oily Blackshirt luminary soon to become infamous as radio propagandist ‘Lord Haw-Haw’.

  As Owens and Lily hastened home from the Baltic, Irene twisted the knife still further. ‘Have received information that the two parties mentioned are now in Hamburg,’ she told Scotland Yard in an unsigned letter. ‘No doubt they will return via Ostend, the latter part of the week. I also have the address of the man who is able to get any kind of passport, which a certain party may be travelling on as man and wife . . . That is all for now. You will know who this is from.’

  Among several enclosures was a visiting card for ‘passport agent’ Alex Myner, which confirmed his address as 12 Parklands, Surbiton. These details were noted, only to be overlooked in the chaotic run-up to war. On arriving in London the previous day O
wens and Lily went directly to Parklands, certain that hotel registrations would now be monitored. Rogue Agent Snow could, and should, have been detained immediately by the Branch on behalf of MI5. Instead, at 04.30 on the morning of 28 August, his temperamental klamotten installed in the bathroom at Parklands, Colonel Johnny made his debut test transmission to Germany. Trautmann and Wein, the wireless operators (‘funkers’) assigned to A.3504, stood by at Wohldorf, paying close attention as this historic first signal buzzed in through the ether.

  ‘Ein Glas Bier!’

  A glass of beer.

  With these few frivolous words the Abwehr’s London stelle was finally on air. Ritter was ecstatic. ‘These were the only German words that Johnny knew off by heart. On countless occasions Trautmann, Wein and myself had been amused to hear them uttered when drinking on the Reeperbahn, or in the Hofbräuhaus. Now the connection was established, and we were ready for the imminent European emergency.’

  Fortunately Owens followed his drinks order with a meaty main course. ‘Royal Navy reserve convoy leaving Portsmouth for Gibraltar today, seven-thirty.’

  CONGRATULATIONS indeed.

  As Agent Snow opened the batting, MI5 dropped the ball. Guy Liddell, the Deputy Director of B Division, and a talented amateur cellist to boot, chose this moment to open a war diary, which over the next few weeks would swing unsteadily between paranoid fancy and languid inertia. With Hitler’s chief spy in England still at large, and transmitting freely to Hamburg, Liddell’s entries at the end of August seemed somewhat complacent: ‘At the request of the Home Office we have agreed that nobody on our lists of Nazi Party members or suspects should be stopped at ports unless we have very special reasons for holding them.’ Elsewhere, a supposedly credible source swore that Hitler had got the jitters. ‘He even suggests that if the order were now given it is doubtful whether the Germans would march.’