by John Bryden
One of the advantages to using a recently published popular novel to provide enciphering keys is that a spy can get his copy from a library or book store in the target country, sparing him the danger of triggering suspicions by having it in his possession crossing the border. By telling MI5 that he had brought his copy of The Dead Don’t Care into England instead of getting it there, and by having it out in the open in his flat, Owens was waving his actual secret cipher under British noses.
At this point it is pertinent to examine the backgrounds of the two protagonists in this MI5-Abwehr confrontation, beginning with Robertson.
He was a Scot, apparently so proud of his heritage that he was partial to wearing tartan “trews” (tight-fitting pants) to the office, and he was usually referred to by his initials — T.A.R. — standing for Thomas Argyle Robertson. According to a biographical note in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Studies, he was a graduate of Sandhurst (Churchill’s military alma mater) and commissioned into the Seaforth Highlanders. He joined MI5 in 1931 and “took part in intelligence activities in both military and political spheres,” which probably means he was used to infiltrate left-wing organizations. At the start of the war, he was in charge of the one-man section B3, responsible for investigating reports of suspicious wireless activity and lights and pigeon sightings.21
Robertson’s German opponent, Owens’s spymaster in Hamburg, was very different. In his early forties, a veteran of the trenches of 1914–18, Major Nikolaus Ritter, a.k.a. DR. RANTZAU, spent over a decade in the United States as a businessman in the textile industry before returning to Germany in 1936. He spoke, read, and wrote English fluently, liked the Americans, and was well-educated, well-travelled, and savvy. He had been assigned to Ast Hamburg by Admiral Canaris personally, and in 1937 returned to the United States to organize the Abwehr’s espionage assets there. This put him into contact with Frederick Joubert Duquesne, a South African with a deep hatred of the British. Duquesne’s mother had died in a British concentration camp during the Boer War (1899–1902), and he had made getting revenge his life’s work. He had been a most successful spy and saboteur in England during the First World War, so Major Ritter was not lacking for a good tutor.22
Supplementing whatever advice Duquesne had to offer was a sensational book just then released in New York that claimed to tell the full story of Germany’s espionage and sabotage activities in the United States from 1915 to 1918. Written by Captain Henry Landau, Britain’s former spy chief for Belgium and Holland, The Enemy Within went into great detail about the personalities and the techniques of the German secret service in America, with lurid descriptions of such spectacular events as the 1916 Black Tom explosions in New York Harbor in which over one thousand tons of munitions were set alight. Naming some of the more notorious German agents of the period — Kurt Jahnke, Franz von Papen, Franz von Rintelen, and so on — it was billed as the book “that will cause reverberations in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin.” It must have felt decidedly odd to Ritter to be reading it while on a mission to America to set up spy rings for the next war.
Captain Landau would also have been of particular interest to Ritter because his wartime mandate had covered the same two countries Ritter was to operate in, Belgium and Holland, and he had written another excellent book about these adventures, entitled All’s Fair: The Story of the British Secret Service Behind German Lines. It is a classic, for Landau operated from neutral Holland and ran hundreds of spies in occupied Belgium whose lives absolutely depended on his good judgment and knowledge of spycraft.
If Ritter added Colonel Walter Nicolai’s Geheime Mächte and Herbert Yardley’s 1934 memoir on U.S. wartime code-breaking, The American Black Chamber, to his background reading — as he surely did — then he would have been well-prepared for the task Canaris had given him. Indeed, when he returned to Germany in the fall of 1937, he left behind a fully functioning espionage organization with agents in two of America’s most sensitive defence industries — the Norden Company and Sperry Corporation. Others were similarly well-placed and by 1939 were producing excellent results.
Given this background, Ritter must have found it hard to believe that Owens had penetrated British intelligence so easily. It might have been reasonable for the British to allow an agent of impeccable background to make personal, private visits across the Channel to the enemy, but surely not someone they knew so little about. The diminutive Welshman — whom Ritter code-named JOHNNY but nicknamed Der Kleiner (“Little Guy”) — had spent much of his life in Canada, and that is all, even by late 1943, that MI5 knew.23
Robertson appears to have been unconcerned by this. When objections to sending weather observations to the Germans gathered momentum in the Air Ministry, propelled by the misgivings of the director of Air Intelligence, Commodore K.C. Buss, he discounted the concerns. There was no need to worry, he wrote in one of his many notes to file, because the Germans were only getting “details of temperature, velocity, direction of the wind, height of cloud and visibility,” but not the actual state of affairs — that is, whether it was snowing or raining. This suggests a rather implausible level of ignorance with respect to weather forecasting.24
In mid-February 1940, Commodore Buss was suddenly demoted and replaced by Major A.R. Boyle, now given the rank of air commodore. This settled the weather issue. Boyle had always supported Robertson’s contention that Owens had to be given high-quality intelligence in order to maintain credibility with the Germans. The concerns raised by Commodore Buss faded.25
The fifty-three-year-old “Archie” Boyle seemed to be a proper successor to Buss. During the First World War he had done some flying, and in the late 1930s was attached to the intelligence branch of the Air Ministry. He had been under-secretary for the Royal Air Force when war was declared, and when Robertson first approached him, he had just been “put into uniform” and made deputy to the director of RAF Intelligence. Yet, for all this, he was sometimes surprisingly deficient in good judgment. At one meeting, when Robertson showed him some aerial photographs he was proposing Eschborn send the Germans, Boyle approved them, despite an aide pointing out that the buildings shown had their skylights painted over, a sure sign that the pictures had been taken from the air after the start of the war, and hence Eschborn could not have obtained them. Boyle and Robertson sent them anyway.26
To Robertson, at least according to his many notes to file, the real aim was to use Owens to catch other German spies. The two agents besides Owens so far identified through contact with DR. RANTZAU did not count. Eschborn had given himself up beforehand, and the other, Mathilde Krafft, was nothing more than a middle-aged woman with German sympathies who had been asked by Hamburg to mail Owens small sums of money. This was a thin return on running Owens as a double agent, and Robertson accused him of falling down on the job since no other spies in England had contacted him.27 Ritter must have been surprised by this complaint when Owens told him of it, for it is a basic principle of good spycraft that agents sent into enemy territory are not to know each other, so that one arrest does not lead to others. But by now there had been many examples of MI5 not knowing the basics.28
MI5’s perceived ineptitude was a valuable item of intelligence in its own right. The way MI5 handled Owens showed that its counter-espionage expertise was very, very slight. Only absolute neophytes would let a freelance pre-war agent like Owens, whose background was unauthenticated, roam the countryside unsupervised in wartime. Robertson was to write this to file:
I taxed him [Owens] on the subject of getting information for himself and not relying on us to give it to him. I naturally made the proviso that any information he obtained should be immediately sent to us. He has apparently started getting around a bit because he told me he paid a visit to Croydon Aerodrome and to Kenley. He said he was glad he had been to Kenley because the place had changed considerably since he was last there. He saw no machines out on the field and was proposing at a later date to make a good story and send it over.29
&nbs
p; And again, incredibly:
On Monday he went to Harrogate and thence to Grantham…. The following day he went to Newcastle and thence to West Hartlepool…. On that day he paid a visit to Wattisham aerodrome…. He said he had been able to obtain a little information about an aerodrome at Dishford, near Thirsk, Grantham and Wallisham aerodromes…. He did not find out anything about the 13th Fighter Group at Newcastle….30
It seems never to have occurred to Robertson that Owens might be giving him less than a full account of what he was seeing, that he might have another transmitter hidden away, that he might be in contact with an undiscovered spy, or he might be sending secret letters to a cover address outside the country that MI6 was unaware of. These possible scenarios seem never to have occurred to Liddell, Robertson’s direct boss, either.
On the other hand, Owens had little need of these devices so long as he was able to take what he saw personally back to his German controllers across the Channel.31 This recklessness, plus the infantile codenames — CHARLIE for Charles Eschborn and GW for Gwyllem Williams — could only have led the Germans, and Major Ritter in particular, to seriously doubt MI5’s competence.
5
February–April 1940
One of the reasons why Admiral Canaris had been so opposed to Hitler’s military adventures and sabre-rattling in the 1930s was fear that Great Britain would be drawn into any war he started, with the United States inevitably following. He did not think Germany could win if that happened because the U.S. economy was the biggest in the world, giving it enormous military capacity. Hitler being Hitler, however, a confrontation with the Anglo-Americans was likely sooner or later. Canaris’s task was to figure out how to deal with it.
The “sooner” arrived in the spring of 1940. A twenty-nine-year-old cipher clerk in the U.S. embassy in London, Tyler Kent, outraged by what he saw as Roosevelt’s disregard for the will of Congress, took to stealing copies of the secret correspondence between the president and Winston Churchill, then head of the Admiralty. These messages were of the most sensitive nature, for they showed the president was keen to help Britain, under the table if necessary, despite America’s official policy of neutrality. Kent amassed some 1,500 documents with the vague idea of someday releasing them to the public as proof of the president’s perfidy. He kept them in his apartment.
Nothing much would have happened except that Kent divulged his secret to a White Russian named Anna Wolkoff who had strong fascist sympathies. The information and documents she pried out of him she passed to the Italian embassy — Italy was then still neutral — which passed them in turn on to Berlin, where they inevitably reached Canaris. It was one of the top espionage successes of the war in that the security shields of the United States and Britain were breached at the highest level.1 Canaris now could be sure that Roosevelt was on side with Britain and would go to war against Germany if the opportunity presented itself.
MI5, it should be said, did catch on to Kent through some exceptional counter-espionage work by Maxwell Knight’s B2 section, but too late. Kent and Wolkoff were arrested, but the intelligence bird had flown. Canaris had gained valuable knowledge that he probably shared with Hitler in the hope of dampening his ambitions. More important to the war, however, was what he himself eventually did with the information.
That was in the future. His current and ongoing problem was how to contain the Nazis in the face of Hitler’s determination to expand Germany’s frontiers in Europe, by war if necessary. Something of the Abwehr chief’s thinking is evident from how he organized and staffed the outlying Abwehr offices, especially those in Spain and Portugal — the usual espionage battleground when Britain was at odds with a European power. His main consideration appears to have been to make sure the key positions were filled by anti-Nazi officers who were personally loyal to him.
The head of KO Portugal (Lisbon) was Kremer von Aünrode, alias Albrecht von Karsthof, a former intelligence officer with the Austrian General Staff. He was from Trieste, a city that was lopped off from Austria and given to Italy with the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War. This made him definitely not a Nazi, and likely no friend of Italy either. He was especially close to Canaris.
KO Spain (Madrid) was the largest and unquestionably the most important of the Abwehr branches in neutral countries and its chief was an old naval comrade from Canaris’s First World War days, Captain Wilhelm Leissner, alias Gustav Lenz. Canaris brought Leissner out of retirement in 1935 to help manage the Abwehr’s covert assistance to the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War and kept him on as Germany slid to war itself. On Leissner’s staff was Canaris’s nephew, Joachim Canaris, responsible for evaluating espionage reports from Britain, and a little later, Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal, who had worked for Canaris during the Spanish Civil War and whose father had been military attaché to Paris and Rome before being dismissed by the Nazis.2
It can be safely assumed that all the key officers at KO Spain and KO Portugal were Canaris loyalists, and the same held true for Holland, where Traugott (Richard) Protze, another friend from his naval days, ran a separate intelligence office in The Hague that reported directly to Berlin. Alexander Waag, leader of KO Switzerland until July 1940, was connected to Canaris through his wife.3
These postings in countries where the English-speaking secret services would mount most of their operations ensured that Canaris could deal with them as he saw fit, and perhaps in ways that would never be accepted by the Nazis. It made possible informal talks with enemy opposite-numbers with less fear of being discovered by the Nazis, and quid pro quo exchanges of favours and information in order to satisfy political bosses impatient for results. The espionage struggle in Spain and Portugal was a polite game of billiards in comparison to the slashing and hacking that had gone on between the Soviets and the White Russians in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s.
Add the KOs in Norway, Sweden, and Greece to the aforementioned and Canaris had Germany surrounded by an anti-Nazi espionage and intelligence-gathering network that could control the flow of overseas intelligence being fed to Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, and through it to the client intelligence agencies of the army, navy, and air force, the army high command (the Oberkommando des Heeres [OKH]), and Hitler’s headquarters (the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht [OKW]).
This was a necessary tactic, so long as the intelligence chief of the army, with the misleading title Oberquartiermeister IV, remained outside the circle of general staff officers opposed to Hitler. The chief, General Kurt von Tippelskirch, was a no-nonsense officer of the old school who had spent four years of the First World War in a French prisoner-of-war camp. He was not a Nazi, but he could not be relied upon to work against the regime.
Similarly, there was the delicate problem that while the heads of the main departments of the Abwehr were all loyal to Canaris and committed anti-Nazis, this was not necessarily the case with the Berlin section heads. For instance, the officer in charge of Abw I Luft/E (E = England), Major Friedrich Busch, was a fervent Nazi,4 and the German air force, the Luftwaffe, was generally pro-Hitler. Once Major Busch, who was no fool, received an intelligence report of genuine value, Canaris could try stopping him from forwarding it only at his own peril. This was especially awkward in that air intelligence was at a premium.
It was the development of the bomber that had made the difference. It had seen only limited use during the First World War, but its effect in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, on the town of Guernica was enough to make those in the 1930s concerned about such things think that it might more quickly and cheaply subdue an enemy country than victories on the battlefield; it appeared to be the perfect terror weapon.
The raid on Guernica was conducted by an assortment of German and Italian bombers on loan to the Nationalist forces and was intended to assist a ground attack. The bombers missed their proper targets and destroyed three quarters of the town of five thousand instead. Resistance collapsed and the world was horrified. Guernica, thanks to the brush
of Pablo Picasso, became the subject of one of the most powerful and famous war paintings of the twentieth century. All the experts agreed. In the next war, cities and civilians would be the primary targets.
Indeed, such was the alarm that the League of Nations followed up by unanimously passing a resolution declaring the “intentional bombing of civilian populations” to be illegal, and that, in time of war, the targets of air attacks “must be legitimate military targets and identifiable.” The European powers, plus Japan and the United States, urgently looked to develop their own air defences and bombing capability. This created a huge market for espionage, particularly in the areas of bomb aiming, aircraft detection, armament, fighter aircraft, and ground-to-air defence. The Abwehr’s response was to switch its military intelligence-gathering emphasis from naval to air, beginning with the establishment in 1937 of an AbtI/Luft (air espionage) section at Ast Hamburg manned by Nikolaus Ritter. His first spy was Arthur Owens, turned over to him from the naval section, and in July he received orders directly from Canaris to expand his espionage effort to the United States, with particular emphasis on stealing plans for the bombsight being developed by the Norden Company. Apparently, the Luftwaffe wanted to improve its aim.5
In 1939, Ritter received as his deputy a civilian lawyer, Dr. Karl-Heinz Kramer, who was to do seemingly good work for Ast Hamburg by developing spies in England through then neutral Hungary. These spies may never have existed, however, because later in the war Kramer became spymaster in Stockholm to the JOSEPHINE and HEKTOR networks in England, which supplied much intelligence to Hitler’s headquarters, most of it misleading since the networks did not exist. Kramer’s spies were his own invention and he wrote their messages himself. Kramer was to become very much a part of the “counter-activity” that was the mark of the anti-Nazi conspiracy in the Abwehr.6
