Hitler's Spy

by James Hayward

  Unlike the aborted mission of Gösta Caroli, who was controlled from Stelle X, MI5 received no advance warning of the four Cologne agents via Snow’s transmitter. Even blessed with this advantage, however, each would be captured within hours, their comic misadventures soon passing into the invasion folklore of 1940.

  Waldberg and Meier were particularly inept, dropping their maps and codes overboard even before reaching dry land, then dozing off beneath an abandoned lifeboat. As dawn broke the two spies moved inland onto Romney Marsh, where they holed up beneath a large holly bush and pondered how best to proceed. Both were severely hungover, so that thirst became a major distraction. After several parched hours Meier decided to walk into Lydd in search of a drink, and immediately aroused suspicion by asking for a bottle of ‘champagne cider’ in the Rising Sun pub at nine-thirty in the morning, well outside normal licensing hours. On being challenged by alert locals, Meier pretended to be a Dutch refugee and foolishly let slip that he was not alone.

  Meanwhile Waldberg rigged their transmitter in a tree and managed to send off two messages, one reporting ‘no mines, few soldiers, unfinished blockhouse’, the other vowing to ‘resist thirst until Saturday – long live Germany’. A third signal, scribbled later and probably not transmitted, disclosed that Meier had already been captured. That night Waldberg was also detained, following a thorough sweep by police and troops.

  Kieboom and Pons failed to match even this modest achievement. After landing on the shore beneath the Napoleonic fort at Dymchurch Redoubt the two slept for an hour in an empty bungalow, then unpacked their transmitter and set about ferrying their kit across the narrow coast road. Towards dawn a patrolling sentry from the Somerset Light Infantry glimpsed a flicker of movement in the long grass opposite the beach. Upon further investigation, Private Tollervey found himself confronted by a Eurasian-looking man with ‘slit eyes’ and ‘smooth, coloured skin’. Kieboom (whose mother was Japanese) was soaking wet and wore binoculars draped around his neck, along with a pair of white shoes. Tollervey marched the bedraggled ex-clerk to a nearby seaside villa which served as battalion headquarters, where Kieboom demonstrated a tighter grasp of fieldcraft by flushing his linen codes and secret ink down the lavatory.

  Pons was arrested a half-hour later, after approaching a group of bystanders to ask where he was. ‘They were given no contacts in this country,’ noted Guy Liddell with grim satisfaction. ‘In fact, they were singularly badly directed. To anybody with any knowledge of conditions here it should have been apparent that none of them could hope to succeed.’

  Questioned at Seabrook police station, the Romney Marsh Four confessed to being Nazi espionage agents. They were next transported to Latchmere House, the forbidding interrogation centre established by MI5 on Ham Common, just two miles south across Richmond Park from Snow’s London stelle on Marlborough Road. During the Great War the large Victorian mansion had been used as an asylum for shell-shocked infantry officers and still boasted a functional padded cell. Now known simply as Camp 020, and liberally seeded with listening devices, this uncompromising home for hostiles was run by a fearsome monocled commandant, Colonel Robin ‘Tin-Eye’ Stephens, whose interrogation team included Edward Hinchley-Cooke, Owens’ former nemesis at MI5.

  ‘The initial onslaught was against Waldberg,’ remarked Stephens, ‘described by his companions as the enthusiast of the party.’ A classified document until 1999, Tin-Eye’s eccentric official history of Camp 020 omits to mention that prisoners were sometimes obliged to strip naked and stand to attention for several hours, while an openly unimpressed female secretary took shorthand notes. ‘Meier and Pons spoke readily enough in their spleen against the shabby preparation of their adventure by the German secret service. Kieboom required less gentle persuasion. All four had been given a short-term operational mission: to report on troops, airfields, anti-aircraft defences, ships and civilian morale. They had been assured that their precarious life in England would be short, and that the German armies would soon rescue them.’

  Since Waldberg had used his transmitter unsupervised, none of the four could safely be used as double-cross agents. According to Stephens – though no one else – Kieboom agreed to contact his German controllers and fib that the party had gone into hiding after Pons caught a bullet. With bitter irony, Pons alone would escape execution after the hapless quartet were sent for trial at the Old Bailey under the unforgiving Treachery Act.

  With battalions of spies descending on Kent, Tar Robertson had no option but to try to mend fences with Agent Snow. On the evening of 3 September, as the spy sweep concluded on Romney Marsh, Robertson paid the Little Man a visit at Marlborough Road. ‘I asked if he would be prepared to continue working with McCarthy. Snow consented to do this, but said that Mac behaved extremely badly and was most abusive. Not only to him, but to people in the local pub, and this created a very bad impression with all concerned. I said that in future Mac was going to take all his instructions directly from me, and I would instruct him when I wanted him to go down to Richmond.’

  Arthur Owens was tickled to death. After three months in double-cross purgatory, living under virtual house arrest, Hitler’s chief spy in England was set to stage a comeback to shame Lazarus.

  Unlike the Swede codenamed Nilberg. Late on Wednesday evening Gösta Caroli clambered back on board Hauptmann Gartenfeld’s matt black Heinkel-111 and steeled himself for another nauseous, sub-zero white-knuckle ride. By a curious coincidence, Adolf Hitler chose precisely the same moment to address a mass rally of nurses and female workers at the vast Sportpalast in Berlin, seeking to ramp up the war of nerves and sending his audience into transports of delight. ‘In England the people are filled with curiosity,’ teased the Führer playfully. ‘They keep asking – why doesn’t he come? Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!’

  In truth only one man was coming. Shortly after midnight Caroli finally hit the silk over Northamptonshire, landing hard and fast on farmland near the remote village of Denton. Gartenfeld had warned A.3719 to deploy a secondary parachute for his heavy transmitter equipment, but the Swede chose to ignore this advice and jumped from 5,000 feet with the Afu set strapped to his chest. His descent was correspondingly rapid, the wireless connecting with his chin on impact and knocking him senseless. Several hours later, at 6.30 a.m., Caroli regained consciousness, cut himself free from his harness and dragged his gear into a ditch. Still concussed and decidedly groggy, Agent Nilberg then fell asleep.

  Towards the end of the afternoon a labourer working in Twenty-Acre Meadow noticed a pair of feet protruding from a hedge. The mysterious sleeper was duly reported to Cliff Beechener, a tenant farmer and local Home Guard volunteer. After fetching a shotgun, Beechener set off to investigate and quickly deduced that Caroli was a foreigner by virtue of an unusually large knot in his necktie and his curious orange leather shoes.

  ‘It occurred to me that I would not think much of a chap with shoes like that,’ Beechener joked forty years later. ‘On closer inspection I saw he was lying on a parachute. I took him to the house and made a call to the police, and I remember the sweat pouring off him. I had the BBC news on the wireless. Stuart Hibberd was reading about the RAF bombing Hamburg, and the poor chap put his head in his hands. He said he had a wife and family there.’

  By nightfall Caroli was in police custody in Northampton. Having arrived by parachute with a wireless transmitter, incriminating maps, £200 in cash and a Mauser automatic pistol, the Swede could hardly deny that he was a German spy. Due to intransigence and petty rivalries, however, fully forty-eight hours would pass before Ritter’s first parachute agent was handed over to MI5, thereby confirming Guy Liddell’s worst fears about losing track of incoming agents as they fell to earth. As a result, Caroli was transferred to Camp 020 only on Saturday, 7 September.

  ‘For all his Swedish identity he was a fanatical Nazi,’ vouched Tin-Eye Stephens. ‘The first interrogation elicited the names of several Abwehr officers in Hamburg, his controlling stelle, and e
lsewhere. He claimed to have been recruited for his mission only some two months earlier, but admitted that he had been in England, working as a journalist for a Swedish press agency, in 1938 and 1939.’

  There was also the small matter of his forged identity papers. These were made out in Caroli’s own name, but carried telltale serial numbers buzzed by Snow three weeks earlier. ‘Pressure on Caroli reached its most acute stage when he was asked to disclose details of other agents who might follow in his footsteps,’ boasted Stephens. ‘He prevaricated, then gave slightly. There was another agent, due to arrive by the same means in a matter of days.’

  The V-man waiting in the wings was the Dane Wulf Schmidt, codenamed Leonhardt by Ritter. Caroli was deeply reluctant to betray his colleague, for the pair had struck up a close friendship during training for Operation Lena, besides which the Swede was genuinely loyal to the Hitler regime. Under intense psychological pressure, however, not least the threat of trial and execution, Agent Nilberg revealed all in exchange for a shrewd promise by MI5 to spare the lives of both men.

  For all involved in the double-cross system the breaking of Gösta Caroli at Camp 020 was a eureka moment. Within two short days Robertson, Liddell and MI5 had found themselves gifted with a new XX agent, codenamed SUMMER by B1A, along with a head start on a second Nazi spy whose name, background and physical description were now a matter of record. For Tar in particular, it was the first piece of truly good news since Sunday, 3 September 1939.

  Cliff Beechener found less to celebrate. Having relieved Caroli of £200 in cash, a windfall he dutifully handed over to the police, the enterprising farmer later tried to claim back the money, citing an obscure ruling from 1768 which held that a British subject was entitled to keep any property confiscated from an enemy of the king.

  The police referred the matter to MI5, from whence there came no reply.

  9

  Summer and Snow

  On the morning of 7 September, Black Saturday, code-breakers at Bletchley Park ascertained that the Luftwaffe were again preparing for action on a grand scale. By the middle of the afternoon Chain Home radar plots confirmed that approximately 350 bombers and 600 fighters were poised to cross the Channel, a vast formation one and a half miles high and occupying 800 square miles of sky. Having travelled from Carinhall to assume personal command of the renewed aerial assault, Göring watched from a collapsible chair perched on the cliffs at Cap Blanc Nez, the sense of imperious valedictory picnic underscored by a nearby table groaning under the weight of sandwiches and champagne.

  The target, finally, was London. ‘The moment is a historic one,’ the chubby Reichsmarschall crowed above the hum of a thousand aero engines. ‘The Führer has decided to deliver a mighty blow!’

  As the huge aerial armada formed up in the skies above Northern France, intelligence gleaned from the growing menagerie of spies at Camp 020 seemed to confirm that the British Isles were about to be invaded. Waldberg, the leader of the Romney Marsh Four, had hoped to hold out until Saturday, thirst permitting. Caroli, too, anticipated liberation within a fortnight. Furthermore, two miles to the north across Richmond Park, Snow’s new Afu transmitter hummed with a series of urgent requests from Stelle X: ‘Where are troops, tanks etc stationed for counter-attack? What kind, how many? Fortifications near coast between Isle of Wight and Margate – guns – anti-aircraft – barbed wire – mines – are they flooded at high tide? Are they stronger where coast is steep, or where it is flat?’

  On any view, the disparate fragments gathered by the Joint Intelligence Committee during the course of Saturday afternoon promised Armageddon by air and sea.

  Finally Hitler was coming.

  At five-twenty that afternoon, as the first German bombs began to fall on the East End, Churchill assembled his Chiefs of Staff in Whitehall. Weighing the evidence provided by Ultra, radar, MI6 and Agent Snow, as well as additional data on moonlight and tides, and the rising number of landing barges in the Channel ports, it was decided to bring Britain’s defences to the highest possible state of alert. At 20.07 GHQ Home Forces flashed the ominous codeword ‘Cromwell’ to Eastern and Southern Commands, signifying that invasion was imminent and probable within twelve hours. Regular troops stood to as instructed, while in several areas eager Home Guards set church bells tolling in the mistaken belief that landings were already in progress. Bugles sounded on the cliffs at Dover, and in Lincoln a party of Royal Engineers attempted to blow up the railway station. Countless sticks of German paratroops were reckoned to have been shot on the wing, Mass Observation recording one wild rumour that 500 had landed near Newport, all but one of them dispatched in three seconds flat.

  Meanwhile London endured its first night of aerial Blitz. Fresh from his own interrogation of the Romney Marsh spies at Camp 020, Maxwell Knight watched the conflagration from the roof of Dolphin Square. ‘By the evening the East End was ablaze,’ wrote his faithful assistant Joan Miller. ‘With M by my side I watched the docks burning. The heat and smoke were appalling, and the sky was lit with an unearthly glow. Before morning, a thousand Londoners would have died in this unspeakable attack.’

  To this grim tally the Luftwaffe almost added Double Agent Snow. Having failed to buzz weather or damage reports for two days, Owens resumed contact with Wohldorf on the evening of 11 September in a state of high dudgeon. ‘Richmond – what hell? Windows gone, time bomb in garden.’

  On Monday, Owens’ safehouse at 14 Marlborough Road had almost been destroyed by a brace of German air raids, the first in the wee small hours, the second at six in the evening. ‘It became very noisy during the early morning and bombs began to drop all round,’ wrote Marie Lawrence, a youthful diarist and near neighbour. ‘Then suddenly a plane came right overhead and there was the noise of the big gun in the park, then a whistling sound as the bomb came down. It was the most awful thing I have ever known. I laughed and cried as we sat in the bogey hole.’

  A stick of bombs straddled Marlborough Road, some of them fitted with delayed-action fuses. If anything, the evening raid was even more severe after the RAF split up a large daylight attack, causing rattled Luftwaffe crews to jettison bombs across several London suburbs. ‘The noise was terrific and bombs were flying everywhere,’ Marie Lawrence continued, once again seeking shelter below stairs. ‘Whistle upon whistle, bang after bang. As we sat in the cupboard the floors and windows shook and seemed to go in and out. Every second we thought was our last.’

  The arrival of an unexploded bomb in Snow’s garden forced the evacuation of the London stelle for two whole days. ‘As there had been a great number of bombs dropped round him,’ noted Robertson drily, ‘Owens expressed a wish to move to a quieter place. I said I would have a look round.’

  Erpro 210, the radar specialists, were also busy, visiting the Vickers aircraft factory at Brooklands just as the afternoon shift clocked on, killing 83 and wounding more than 400. Production was brought to a standstill, though this devastating strike cost the unit its second commanding officer in as many weeks. Other Luftwaffe raiders hit the Hawker Hurricane works at Kingston, and Shorts near Rochester – both targets to which Owens had paid close attention, and had discussed at length during treffs with Ritter.

  Had MI5 known the true extent of Snow’s treachery, Hitler’s chief spy in England might have been left to defuse his own UXB. Instead, his Afu transmitter was now employed to deflect attention away from London, with details of fictive targets buzzed over to Wohldorf, beginning with a dummy munitions plant erected near Stafford.

  Although the Blitz would continue for 57 consecutive nights, the fierce air battle above southern England finally began to peter out. On 15 September, a Sunday, the RAF claimed 186 German aircraft destroyed in a single day, set against the loss of just 13 British pilots. In truth, only 56 enemy raiders had been shot down, yet the figures hardly mattered. The defeat of the last mass raid put up by the Luftwaffe in daylight marked another critical turning point. The unfastened ‘birdcage’ of Operation Eagle had failed to force
Britain to capitulate. Electing to postpone Operation Sealion, Hitler turned his attention instead to the Soviet Union.

  On the very same Sunday that Fighter Command won the Battle of Britain, MI5 turned another corner in the double-cross war. After reluctantly agreeing to act as an XX agent, the sour Swede Gösta Caroli was escorted from Camp 020 to Aylesbury, where an attempt was made to establish wireless contact from a pigsty behind the home of the Chief Constable of Buckinghamshire. ‘We could not take any chances on the Germans “fixing” a location,’ wrote Caroli’s controller Ronnie Reed, a former BBC engineer. ‘If an agent told them he was transmitting from Aylesbury, he would actually have to be located at or close to Aylesbury.’

  Since the pigsty was too low, and the aerial too short, Caroli and Reed tried again from a cell at Aylesbury police station. With contact finally established, Agent Nilberg informed Hamburg that he had sustained injuries on landing and was now living rough in the countryside between Oxford and Buckingham. With bad weather closing in, the message continued, he proposed to seek shelter by posing as a refugee.

  At 11.15 on the morning of 15 September, Snow received an anxious signal from Wohldorf. ‘Swedish friend in fields near Oxford. How can he contact you at once please? Standing by for your answer.’

  Robertson immediately conferred with his superiors in B Division. It was, he insisted, impossible to overestimate the significance of this latest development. ‘There is a strong possibility that this single spy Caroli may be the forerunner of a whole battalion. Upon the action now taken really depends all the months of work spent on Snow.’