Hitler's Spy

by James Hayward

  The best Hitler’s chief spy in England could hope for now was unconditional surrender to the Nazi regime, or a successful German invasion of the British Isles.

  8

  Nazi Frightfulness in Surrey

  The month of June 1940 saw the Allies lurch from one disaster to another, like punch-drunk victims of a violent mugging. Italy declared war on Britain and France in opportunistic fashion, spurring Stalin to trump Mussolini by ordering the Red Army into the Baltic states. Beaten on the field of battle, the French armed forces surrendered, only to suffer a double humiliation when Hitler insisted on staging the armistice ceremony in the forest at Compiègne where Germany had signed her own surrender in 1918.

  Of the 123,000 French troops rescued from Dunkirk just 7,000 stayed in Britain to fight on with General de Gaulle. Britain now stood alone, and was seemingly ripe for invasion. Already Churchill had vowed to fight the enemy on the beaches, in the fields, and in the streets and hills; now he sanctioned the use of mustard gas in the last resort, and dum-dum bullets rather sooner. Visiting a rifle range near Checkers, the defiant Prime Minister blazed away at targets with a favourite Mannlicher rifle. ‘He also fired his revolver with commendable accuracy,’ recalled his young private secretary, John Colville. ‘Despite his age, size and lack of practice, Winston acquitted himself well. The whole time he talked of the best method of killing Huns. Soft-nose bullets were the thing to use, and he must get some.’

  On 11 June Churchill also fired Sir Vernon Kell, the veteran Director-General of MI5, after thirty years in post. Kell was replaced by Brigadier Jasper Harker, a former Indian Police man described as ‘good-looking but not clever’, and who was highly rank-conscious. ‘The blow has fallen,’ mused an ambiguous Guy Liddell, who stepped into his shoes as head of B Division. Harker’s first act as new broom was to plaster the Scrubs with copies of a fatuous pamphlet, Go To It! This ill-judged opening gambit prompted two dozen overworked typists to tender their resignations and one staffer to remark that Harker was ‘a sort of highly polished barrel which, if tapped, would sound hollow. Because it was.’

  In the wake of the trawler fiasco Tar Robertson felt much the same way about Agent Snow. On the last day of May he instructed Owens to press Rantzau on the subject of future German intentions, and float the idea of a treff with McCarthy in Lisbon. ‘Getting worried,’ buzzed Colonel Johnny. ‘When is South African coming to help? Believe safer if my man meet you Portugal and bring papers. He will replace me when in Canada.’

  In fact Owens’ messages were now being keyed by Maurice Burton, with Snow little more than a brand name for MI5 disinformation. Unperturbed, Ritter replied straight away, keen to obtain certain secret documents promised at sea a week earlier and demanding to know if Johnny’s latest sidekick was reliable. ‘McCarthy hundred per cent friend,’ promised Owens, through gritted teeth. ‘Shall I try Portugal bringing all dope?’

  Previously a backwater for MI6, the fall of France transformed the port city of Lisbon into the espionage capital of Europe virtually overnight, with everything and everyone apparently for sale. Filled to overflowing with displaced persons and dubious characters, the single MI6 officer attached to passport control was swiftly overwhelmed, and soon reinforced by none other than Richman Stopford, who relinquished his role as Robertson’s assistant at B1A. Despite this improvement, Tar could hardly risk sending rogue Agent Snow abroad and so instructed McCarthy to travel alone. With seats on commercial flights to Lisbon unobtainable at short notice, Mac booked a ticket on a passenger ship due to sail from Southampton.

  ‘Friend representative wines,’ Johnny buzzed at the beginning of June, confirming Mac’s cover as a commercial traveller. ‘Stay one week.’ Yet precisely what happened next is unclear. On 17 June Wohldorf learned that McCarthy had sailed two days earlier. Accordingly Ritter set out for Lisbon, travelling via Berlin, Lyon and Madrid under diplomatic cover and freighted with a parcel of baby clothes for Lily, a gift from his wife Irmgard. However, a week later Owens revealed that Mac had been taken off the boat due to some unspecified illness. ‘Can you wait till McCarthy better? Cannot recommend anyone else. Secret documents safe. Visa for self week to ten days, probably more.’

  Had Biscuit crumbled, or had MI5? It might have been that picky Richman Stopford felt security was lacking in Iberia. Or perhaps hard-drinking McCarthy had dropped his guard and gone on a bender. Whatever the truth, for the second time in a month the Doctor found himself stood up by his chief spy in England, previously so reliable and punctual to a fault. Disenchanted, Ritter returned to Hamburg with the large cash payment intended for the London stelle. The baby clothes remained in Lisbon.

  The good Doctor’s anger would soon be displaced. Within a week of the collapse of France, with no pre-existing plan or armada, Hitler set his sights on a cross-Channel invasion of the British Isles. On 22 June all Abwehr stellen across Germany and Occupied Europe were warned that the gathering of intelligence on England was now priority number one. Since Owens was feeding back little in the way of useful information (‘Enquiries pending on coastal defences’), Stelle X was instructed to dispatch new reporting agents with minimum delay. ‘Johnny was unable to gather all the intelligence required on landing grounds,’ said Ritter by way of excuse, ‘and some of it was stale by the time it filtered through. So we sought out volunteers who were prepared to jump into England by parachute, or land from fishing boats. The training and insertion of these parachute agents was entrusted to me. There was no handbook to follow, and no time to lose.’

  Ritter christened this hasty scheme Operation Lena, while the broad-front invasion between Ramsgate and the Isle of Wight became Operation Sealion. Given that later Allied planning for the Normandy landings in 1944 took fully two years, the glorified river-crossing envisaged by the German high command stood less chance of success than a snowball in hell, just as the Abwehr’s so-called ‘espionage offensive’ faced equally long odds. Indeed, Germany had just three suitable spies in training, one of whom was the Afrikaaner already promised to Snow. This first party arrived off County Cork on the night of 7 July, with the two South African Germans named Tributh and Gärtner joined by Obed Hussein, the disaffected Indian who had bribed Lascar seamen to drop wireless valves at Sackville Street. Now Hussein hoped to blow up targets in London with nitrocellulose and thermite, cunningly concealed in tins of peas.

  After rowing ashore in Baltimore Bay the trio were arrested as they boarded a bus to Dublin. All three would spend the next seven years in Mountjoy Prison, the Abwehr war diary speaking of lessons hard learned: ‘Message received that agents landed in Operation Lobster have been detained. Equipment provided incriminating evidence. By director’s decision further sabotage acts are to be made direct against England.’

  At the same time Hitler issued Directive 16, describing as ‘hopeless’ Britain’s military situation. ‘England still shows no willingness to come to terms,’ carped the Führer, confused and aggrieved by such impudence. ‘I have therefore decided to prepare – and if necessary to carry out – a landing operation to eliminate the English motherland as a base from which the war against Germany can be continued.’

  Though Operation Sealion was largely an exercise in brinkmanship, verisimilitude demanded that preparations be completed by the middle of August, after which all or part of the British Isles would be placed under occupation in much the same way as France. But before the invasion fleet sailed it was imperative that the Luftwaffe should wrest air superiority from the Royal Air Force. So began the Battle of Britain, in which radar – the so-called ‘wireless cloud’ – held the key to victory. With MI5 controlling his radio, however, Colonel Johnny was no longer able to deliver any fresh intelligence coups. ‘Difficult due to new military areas and regulations,’ buzzed the impostor Burton from Marlborough Road. ‘Southern England all travellers questioned by sentries. Details you require scattered over country. All roads heavily guarded and mined.’

  Stelle X was already prepared, so that instr
uctions flashed from Wohldorf during the second week of July seemed calculated to deceive British military leaders. ‘Snow has been in communication with the other side,’ observed Liddell. ‘Some time ago we heard that the points for invasion were Anglesey, Scotland and the south-east coast. The latest message to Snow may mean that the Germans will go for Ireland first, and subsequently Wales. This may indicate a change of plan.’

  Or did it? Liddell was typically indecisive. ‘On the other hand it seems to be an indication that an attack here is not likely, or impending.’ In reality, the apparently incompetent Abwehr was playing the double-cross game rather more effectively than MI5.

  Matters became confused further still when MI6 reported that Spain, Portugal and Gibraltar were under threat. Worse still, code-breaking work at Bletchley Park remained painfully slow and haphazard, with Enigma ciphers used by the German army and navy all notably secure. In June intercepts of Abwehr traffic were suspended to allow valuable personnel to concentrate on Luftwaffe signals. These were at least readable, yet none of them indicated where Operation Sealion would actually beach.

  This was truly a looking-glass war. While the Abwehr fed Johnny contradictory hints about Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the disinformation played back on Snow’s transmitter by MI5 was correspondingly vague. ‘New super landmine adapted for marine use against barges with shallow draft. Tests show three barges destroyed at once . . . Orders given no evacuation in invaded areas. Orders to bomb English civilians if necessary. Tommy guns now issued to all British troops.’

  There would be no surrender. To emphasise the point, Churchill posed for a photograph cradling a Thompson sub-machine gun, the weapon of choice for Al Capone and John Dillinger, while also sporting a chalk-stripe suit and a fat cigar. In a rare instance of German wit, this ambiguous image soon appeared on a fake ‘Wanted’ poster dropped by the Luftwaffe, on which Britain’s ‘gangster’ PM was charged with ‘incitement to murder’.

  ‘The whole German machine seems to be concentrated on defeating us through propaganda,’ mused Liddell. ‘Practically nothing has happened in the way of sabotage. Neither Snow nor the incident of the two Afrikaaners and the Indian arriving in Ireland with two suitcases full of bombs suggests anything very thorough in the way of organisation.’

  Meanwhile Britain kept calm and carried on. During the third quarter of 1940 almost half a million adult males joined the armed forces, although most new recruits found themselves drilling with broomsticks, the army having lost much of its weaponry in France. Concrete ‘pillbox’ bunkers sprang up, signposts were torn down, sandy beaches sprinkled with mines, and open spaces scarred by tank traps and improvised obstacles. Restyled as the Home Guard by the end of July, a ramshackle citizens’ militia took delivery of uniforms consisting of little more than an armband, backed up by a million rounds of solid shotgun ammunition, said to be capable of ‘killing a leopard at 200 yards’.

  Preparations for Operation Sealion along the Channel coast continued apace, in a highly visible show of strength intended to force Britain to the negotiating table. Delivering a long speech to the Reichstag on 19 July, Hitler issued a so-called ‘last appeal to reason’, urging Britain to step back from the abyss. The gist of this interminable rant, whose length robbed it of impact, was that Germany wished only for peace with honour, and for Britain to acknowledge her rightful position in Europe. ‘I can see no reason why this war should go on,’ Hitler concluded, an unlikely pacifist. ‘Possibly Mr Churchill will again brush aside this statement of mine. In that case, I shall have relieved my conscience with regard to the things to come.’

  This blunt invitation to capitulate was widely reported, and distributed by the Luftwaffe as a propaganda leaflet, gifting needy Britons a supply of free lavatory paper. Perpetually defiant, Churchill maintained a forbidding silence, informing trusted aides that ‘I do not propose to say anything in reply to Herr Hitler’s speech, not being on speaking terms with him.’

  Throughout this tense interregnum Arthur Owens marked time in a gilded cage at Marlborough Road, a double agent in name only, his significance diminishing as Lily grew larger. The closure of the Sackville Street office had shut down direct communication with Ritter, leaving the Snow show in the horny hands of his sidekick-nemesis Sam McCarthy. Indeed, Biscuit’s eclipse of Agent Snow threatened to become total, so much so that some within MI5 were under the impression that the belligerent Canadian had already disposed of the Little Man in the middle of the North Sea.

  But if Snow was anxious, Robertson was desperate. Finally, at the end of July, McCarthy was given a second chance to travel to Lisbon to treff with Doctor Rantzau. He departed on the 24th, flying out from Britain’s last operational civilian airport at Whitchurch, a grass field outside Bristol, and again masquerading as a wine wholesaler. On arrival in Lisbon he booked into the Grande Hotel Duas Nacoes, where it quickly became apparent that everyone was a spy, or a racketeer – or both. ‘The hotel proprietor Wissman is a double-crosser,’ Mac reported afterwards, plainly in his element. ‘He proposed I should help two Jews to get to the USA. The price was 30,000 escudos, to be divided equally. The head porter is a Portuguese and in German pay. He could not be bought.’

  Preoccupied with Operation Lena, Ritter was delayed for fully twelve days, leaving Mac in the care of a local liaison named Henri Döbler. A former German army officer who had amassed a fortune in the Argentine, Döbler raced yachts and kept a glamorous Portuguese mistress, said to be close to Salazar, the country’s authoritarian leader. ‘He frequents the bars and hotels in Lisbon where English and American people go,’ Biscuit noted with approval. ‘Part of his work is sending explosives to the United States. He seems to be quite fond of drink, and on one occasion I was able to drink him under the table.’

  By the time Ritter reached Lisbon, the fake wine merchant’s face was well known in every expatriate bar from Estoril to Marvila. An alcoholic, more or less, McCarthy’s foibles were confirmed by Joan Miller, another of Max Knight’s countersubversion agents, who had recently brought down a spy ring centred on a cipher clerk named Tyler Kent at the American Embassy. ‘The life of an ordinary agent in wartime is hazardous enough,’ she explained. ‘With a double agent, though, the psychological pressures are almost unimaginable. The need for constant alertness, unremitting duplicity – none of these is conducive to ease of mind. There’s a danger of falling into a mental state akin to a kind of self-imposed schizophrenia. At the very least, the characteristics required are a steady nerve, a high degree of self-control and a relish for excitement.’

  McCarthy, dismissed as an ‘unedifying Canadian’ by Miller, found juggling all three qualities somewhat problematic. Nor was Ritter much impressed when he arrived on 5 August, discerning bug-eyes (‘like Basedow’s syndrome’) and the sweaty demeanour of a petty criminal. Biscuit, in turn, was disconcerted by the Doctor, judged to be an ‘exceedingly common Bavarian type’ with a penchant for swearing and filthy stories, quite unlike the urbane playboy described by Snow. ‘He speaks with a broad New York accent,’ Mac noted, sizing up the stocky, broad-shouldered lout with a critical eye. ‘But despite the discrepancies there is little doubt that the two doctors are identical.’

  Having taken twelve days to reach Lisbon, Ritter remained in the port for just twelve hours. ‘The Doctor said that he thought Owens’ work was falling off,’ McCarthy related with undisguised glee. ‘He had done some very good work in the past, but was getting a little slack.’ Sticking to the script dictated by Robertson, Mac excused the lack of Sealion intelligence by fibbing that Colonel Johnny was worried about Lily, whose pregnancy had developed complications, and was unable to get around much ‘owing to the fact that he had to be on the radio every night’. Yet again, Ritter promised that at least one new agent would soon arrive by parachute in England and asked McCarthy to locate a suitable drop zone.

  The crux of the treff remained the ‘secret documents’ promised by Snow two months earlier. There were no MI5 blueprints, and no menu cards
listing senior Intelligence People. Instead, after surrendering his passport to a photographer, who copied it front to back, Mac handed over a National Registration Identity Card along with an ordinary ration book. Counterfeit copies were desperately needed for the new Abwehr agents assigned to Operation Lena, whose misfortune it was that the documents delivered by Johnny’s ‘hundred per cent friend’ McCarthy had been carefully doctored by MI5 to include a number of telltale mistakes. The ID card, for example, was machine-folded, whereas genuine examples were folded by hand. The ration book, too, was non-standard, being of a type issued only to travellers, and pink instead of buff yellow.

  With luck, the next Nazi agent sent to Britain would land at a spot chosen by McCarthy, carrying incriminating papers guaranteed to secure a conviction under the Treachery Act. That, or a rapid conversion to the double-cross cause, thus expanding the XX network. For the first time since the outbreak of war, the vexed case of Agent Snow looked set to deliver a positive result for MI5.

  Absolute jake.

  Mindful of the threatened invasion, McCarthy put across an ‘extremely exaggerated and totally inaccurate’ picture of British ground defences. Rantzau was dismissive and told Mac to concentrate instead on gathering information about RAF fighters and forward airfields, urging also that Owens’ son Bob take a job in an aircraft factory. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the North Sea debacle. ‘Rantzau said he was there on the Thursday night, and that it was their plane which had circled over the trawler on Monday. From what I could gather, it seemed that Snow knew it was the Doctor and that he was coming on Monday.’

  Ritter’s parting shot took the form of a warning, opaque and ominous in equal measure. Göring’s Luftwaffe, he said, planned to ‘open the birdcage’ on 14 August. ‘But the big show will not begin then, and will start later.’