by John Bryden
One way or another, by the late summer of 1940, Owens was still only one double agent with only one transmitter. If German bombing was to be significantly influenced when the Luftwaffe turned from airfields to urban industry and infrastructure, more wireless double agents reporting the weather were going to be needed. The Luftwaffe was still sticking to the 1938 League of Nations resolution that only allowed the bombing of military targets in built-up areas if they were identifiable. The extra distance to the Midlands and Britain’s western ports increased the risk. Churchill could not hope to draw the Luftwaffe off London to other distant cities without it having up-to-date data on local weather conditions, especially visibility. The German bomb aimers were supposed to be able to see what they were doing.
Major Ritter, by extraordinary coincidence, rose to the occasion when he dispatched the Lena spies, whose capture was so certain.
The question is: Did the Abwehr somehow know beforehand that Ritter would be playing perfectly into Churchill’s strategy. It cannot be answered. Theoretically, Canaris could guess that the British would want to take the pressure off London, but in the end, it was Hitler’s decision to expand the bombing campaign. Canaris’s proper response would have been to try to provide more and better weather information to the Luftwaffe. It would save airmen’s lives.
Experience with Arthur Owens had shown that MI5 was willing to allow a wireless double agent to send the weather. It was just a matter of providing the British with more such agents. The pre-mission wireless chat and poorly forged identity papers ensured that those Ritter did send would be caught. Some were bound to have their transmitters played back under control. Caroli and Schmidt, summer and TATE, were used in just this way, with the bonus that in addition to the weather, they also sent bomb-damage reports. MI5 understood them to be pre-invasion spies in an operation code-named Unternehmen Lena. On the other side of the Channel, Ritter had a different name for it: Unternehmen Isar.20
One might argue that the intelligence triumvirate of Churchill, Menzies, and Boyle could more easily have dealt up front with MI5, but the bottom line was, those in the organization could not be trusted. MI6 could fairly guess that MI5 had been penetrated by the Germans and the Soviets if it considered the Registry fire in September 1940 and the episode involving William Rolph and the secret list of right-wingers he provided to Owens.
The Rolph incident was the trap door for Vernon Kell, MI5’s chief since the First World War. Churchill and Menzies would have been familiar with PMS2, the shadowy organization set up by Kell during the First World War to disrupt the Labour Movement. They were insiders themselves of that political era, and would have been aware of PMS2’s persistence underground since then, and of its links to right-wing extremists in the upper classes. It would have been possible, then, that Rolph’s list included the Nazi-leaning Edward VIII, forced to abdicate in 1936 and banished to the Bahamas with his American paramour, Wallis Simpson. Rolph had been a key player in the early days of PMS2, and the fact that MI5 was still using him, and that he had been caught trying to sell names to the Nazis, was surely reason enough to consider MI5 compromised. Churchill was correct to fire Kell and to send in Lord Swinton to clean house.
Then there was the Registry fire. It would have been a deaf and dumb intelligence officer, surely, who would have not instantly thought sabotage! The Registry was beyond comparison the most valuable counter-intelligence asset the British had. Checking names against its index was the most efficient way to keep individuals of known fascist or communist sympathies out of sensitive government or military positions. In time of war, this was vital. The destruction of the Registry card index would have smelled of sabotage to MI6 as strongly as the smoke from the fire.
No documents have been found to show it, but the Security Executive (Swinton) must have ordered an investigation. This could have been done by Scotland Yard, and, if so, certain things would have immediately caught notice. First, the decision to photograph the card index: this obviously created the possibility of illicit copies being made. When it was found after the fire that the copying had been done badly, with many pictures ruined, and the rest of the index in no state to be used for many months, suspicion must have sharpened. Victor Rothschild, who had overseen the copying, would have been looked at very, very carefully.
Inquiries would have soon linked Rothschild with Guy Burgess, and with a particularly suggestive result: The “D” in Section D of MI6 where Burgess worked stood for “destruction.” It was the sabotage division of MI6 run by Major Laurence Grand. Further inquiry would have turned up Burgess’s communist past, for he had been originally accepted into MI6 by no less than MI6’s counter-espionage chief Valentine Vivian, who believed him when he told him he had left his Cambridge communist days behind.21 As for Burgess himself, making arson look like something else was part of the Section D syllabus.
It was not a smoking gun, but Burgess, in fact, was kicked out of Special Operations Executive (SOE),22 the successor to Section D, but nothing so direct was done with Rothschild. If the Registry fire was sabotage, and Rothschild was a suspect, evidence needed to be collected. Moreover, the proper counter-espionage procedure under such circumstances was not to jump too quickly, but to wait and watch. The rapid and uncontrolled expansion of MI5 in 1940 would have made it easy for Scotland Yard or MI6 to insert an undercover agent of their own. This was exactly what Admiral Canaris was doing at the time in Germany. The Abwehr was primarily an overseas espionage agency, but it had informants in the main military and Nazi secret services. MI6 had much reason to be doing the same.
Liddell, however, would have been the prime suspect. He was the one who gave the job of copying the index to a newcomer to MI5 rather than to a trusted staff member. It was a clerical task that surely did not require the oversight of a Cambridge-educated scientist. Some months after Burgess was let go from SOE, Liddell approached the head of MI5’s F Division (counter-subversion) with the proposal that its chief, John Curry, take Burgess on. He told Curry that Burgess had been a communist at one time but had “completely abandoned” his past. His “extraordinary knowledge,” however, could be useful against Britain’s Communist party. Curry did not bite.23
It is not known if this attempt to bring Burgess into MI5 got back to MI6, but Liddell would have definitely been under deep suspicion anyway. It would have been remembered that he had been part of the transfer to MI5 of Scotland Yard’s remnant anti-communist section in 1931, after it had been found to have been penetrated by the Soviets. In a very small world where nobody could be absolutely sure of anyone’s loyalty, this, plus Liddell being seen with Burgess in the Reform Club,24 would surely have been enough for MI6 to want to deal with MI5 very delicately. Distrust was surely a key factor in MI6 taking over the Radio Security Service, in controlling the distribution of ISOS, and in developing its own Registry. This reorganization was completed by May 1941.
That May also marked the end of the Blitz. The bombers stopped coming. A month later, Boyle transferred to SOE as director of security and intelligence — on the face of it a demotion. Menzies would have pushed for the move. SOE was expanding rapidly, but the destruction of the Registry made it impossible to vet the people being recruited. This was an open invitation to the enemy, both fascist and communist. Boyle was in position to be Menzies’s eyes and ears in the new organization.
Meanwhile, with few bombers to deceive, the XX Committee became a sideshow of largely hare-brained deception schemes of little consequence to the war. The same can be said of Robertson’s B1A section and the remaining double agents like Williams and Schmidt.25
Ever since Ian Colvin’s book Chief of Intelligence (1951), there has been much talk but little hard evidence to prove that MI6’s Stewart Menzies and Canaris had been in contact with each other. The MI5 files reviewed for this book settle the matter: on his two trips to Germany in the spring of 1941, the mysterious Walter Dicketts (celery) had been Menzies’s emissary.
Consider the following.
&
nbsp; Based on documents that survive in the MI5 files, in the early spring of 1940, Owens chanced upon Dicketts in a pub, where, during casual conversation, they mutually discovered their respective careers in secret intelligence, Dicketts for a branch of Air Intelligence during the First World War and Owens for MI5 in the current one. Owens had earlier come upon Sam McCarthy in the same way, and Dicketts, like McCarthy, accepted his offer to join him in working for the Germans.
Like any conscientious secret agent in enemy territory, Owens was constantly trolling for traitors. Both men had presented themselves as disgruntled down-and-outs ready to sell out their country for money — just the types Owens was looking for. He certainly found such a person in William Rolph, who would have been a great catch if Owens had gotten away with it. McCarthy and Dicketts, however, were planted on him, by MI5 in the first instance — as we have seen — but, without MI5 knowing, by MI6 in the second.
According to Robertson’s and Liddell’s notes from that time, they saw Dicketts merely as a nuisance individual who had cropped up unexpectedly, but whose previous experience “in a branch of Air Intelligence” could be useful in MI5. Due to the fact that the director of air intelligence did not see him as a security risk, and after some discreet inquiries, he was taken on.27
At his second-last meeting with Major Ritter in Antwerp before the 1940 invasion of Holland and France, Owens told the German he had acquired an informant in MI5.26 This was Dicketts.
Walter Arthur Charles Dicketts, however, was no former desk-bound intelligence officer shuffling paper, and never had been. The forty-one-year-old Londoner was a globe-trotting adventurer who had been a teenage spy during the First World War. In 1915, Mansfield Cumming’s MI1(c) — the predecessor to MI6 — had arranged for him to be loaned to the French as a messenger boy in the Arsenal in Paris, and he had managed to steal specification drawings for the famed French “75” field gun. His spy career continued until the end of the war, and probably after, when he went off to roam the Far East, followed in the 1920s by a spin around England, France, and the United States as a racing-car driver. He was a compulsive con man, impersonator, and bigamist, who changed identities — and wives — like ties. He took only gin, straight. He was a real-life James Bond; except that he married the women he made love to, four of them anyway, including a fifteen-year-old.27
During his interrogation at Latchmere House in 1943, German embassy employee Hans Ruser recalled that when one day he was about to leave for the airport at Barcelona with the diplomatic bag, the Abwehr counter-espionage officer at Lisbon KO, a Major Kramer, asked that he take an Englishman with him who Canaris “was interested in.” During the drive across Spain, Ruser naturally probed his passenger to find out how he had caught the attention of the chief of Germany’s secret intelligence service. He pestered him to the point that Dicketts finally told him he was a “leftist” on a peace mission. Then, one evening over drinks, he admitted to being a member of the British Secret Service, later (after sobering up, perhaps) urging Ruser not to tell a soul. This much Dicketts revealed to MI5 upon his return to England in March, minus any mention of Ruser or Canaris. It would appear he was covering himself for his indiscretion.
Ruser further disclosed that he met Dicketts again on the latter’s second trip to Lisbon, and that Dicketts was on his way to Germany a second time. This had been withheld from MI5 by MI6, inviting the deduction that Dicketts was on a mission for the latter that the former was not to know about.
One can make an educated guess as to why, in the spring of 1940, MI6 would have wanted to put its own agent on to Owens. The ciphers he said the Germans had given him were too simple to be believable, so there was a game going on somewhere. And was Owens himself legit? MI6 quickly had that answer when Owens recruited Dicketts as a spy. What else was going on could only be determined by having Dicketts get inside MI5 to have a look. That was accomplished, too.
MI6 may have had another incentive for these actions. The kidnapping of Stevens and Best at Venlo had disabled two of MI6’s main links to anti-Nazi elements in the German army and Abwehr. If Dicketts could one day go along with Owens on one of his trips to see his German controller, there might be an opportunity to re-establish contact. MI6 would not want MI5 in on that. It had not shared with its sister service the fact that Venlo had been preceded by talks with German army generals at the highest level.
As for Owens, he must have been on top of the world when he was sent to Portugal to meet Ritter in June 1940, just after squirming out of the dangerous situation caused by McCarthy ratting on him. Robertson had accepted that he wasn’t a double-crosser, despite the evidence against him over the IP List. Instead of being arrested, he was sent on a mission to Lisbon to explain away the failed North Sea rendezvous, and presumably bearing MI5’s usual “chicken feed.” As so often before, he also had secret intelligence of his own in the form of spectacular information on Britain’s air defences, from a spy inside MI5, no less — Dicketts, a.k.a. E-186. Owens promised Ritter that he would bring this incredible new agent with him on a future visit so that Ritter could size him up himself.28
In February 1941, when Owens and Dicketts finally set out for Lisbon, Britain was losing the war. The bombing of British cities was horrendous, and German submarines were crippling British shipping. Despite spreading out the bombing and Churchill’s public bravado, the war was not going to last too much longer. Dicketts letting slip to Hans Ruser during their drive across Spain that he was a “British secret service” agent on a peace mission rings true. It also explains why Owens abruptly quit the double-agent business without being able to coherently tell his MI5 bosses why. During Ritter’s initial meeting with both agents, he discovered, surely to his shock and horror, that Dicketts was no cheap traitor.
We do not know exactly how he caught on. According to Ritter’s 1972 memoir, he had greeted both men with skepticism. Owens got defensive. Then, prodded by Dicketts, he said he had been authorized by MI5 to offer Ritter $200,000 in gold if he would come back to England with them. If true, it gave away absolutely that both Owens and Dicketts were working for the British. It is unlikely that Ritter would at that point have allowed either of them to leave Portugal.29
It may be that it was at this point, in Owen’s presence, that Dicketts disclosed that he was a member of British secret service on a peace mission. Ritter’s immediate show of interest would have shocked Owens. He thought he had been working for the Nazis. Worse, Dicketts might be telling the truth, which meant he was undercover in MI5, and had been all along. Dicketts would therefore know for sure that Owens was a two-time traitor; back in Britain, it might not be jail this time around, but the hangman. When he did return to London, Owens certainly behaved like a frightened man, and did all he could to discredit Dicketts.
There is separate evidence that Stewart Menzies, with or without Churchill’s knowledge, was behind this overture to the Abwehr — a month before Owens and Dicketts set out, if Dusko Popov is to be believed.
As MI5’s newest double agent, Popov was summoned to meet with Menzies and (partially repeating an earlier quotation) was told by him:
I want to know much more about everybody who is intimately connected with Canaris, and also with Dohnányi and Oster….
It may be helpful if I explain the reasons behind this request. We know that Canaris, Dohnányi and Oster are not dyed-in-the-wool Nazis. They are what might be termed loyal officers, or patriotic Germans. In 1938 Churchill had a conversation with Canaris. Unofficially — he wasn’t in office then. Churchill came to the conclusion that Canaris was a sort of catalyst for the anti-Hitler elements in Germany. That’s why I want to know more about the people he attracts. Eventually, I may want to resume the conversation that Churchill initiated. In that event, I must be in a position to evaluate the strength of those around Canaris.
I nodded my understanding. Menzies was contemplating a dialogue with Canaris or those close to him with a view to ousting Hitler.30
Popov’s anecdote,
with his conclusion that a dialogue was being sought with Canaris, was published in 1974 when there was no serious suggestion anywhere that Britain had asked for the Abwehr’s help in mid-war.
Indeed, Dicketts identifying himself as being on a mission for the British secret service explains why he was not, to use Masterman’s words in The Double-Cross System, “painfully executed by the Germans in Germany.” Instead, on that first trip to Germany he met with Dr. Schacht, a long-time opponent of the regime, and with the “Baron,” Canaris’s mentor and closest confidant, and returned safely to England with word that “secret peace talks” were possible. Menzies, remembering the many warnings about Hitler received from the Abwehr and German civilian officials before the war, would have taken this to mean that despite Hitler’s successes Canaris and others around him were still hoping to overthrow the Nazis.31
Menzies sent Dicketts back to Portugal in May, and he went on to Germany a second time, without MI5 being told of it (then or after). Presumably, he brought with him the British response, though what this was is unknown. It probably touched on the fact that Britain could not hope to carry on alone much longer. If the United States did not soon take up the cause, Britain would have no choice but come to terms with Hitler.
That may have been too awful to contemplate for Churchill, but it was infinitely worse for Canaris and others in the German army opposed to the Nazis. Hitler had just brutally attacked and conquered Yugoslavia. Russia was next. If Britain pulled out of the war, the Nazis would never be budged from power, whether Hitler was dead or alive.
Who apart from Ritter was at this second meeting is unknown, but it may have included Canaris. From March to August, the messages pertaining to his movements that were being intercepted and read by MI6 (but not by MI5) show him to have been skipping from one Abwehr office to another in southeastern Europe in connection with the invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia. The messages for late May and the month of June, however, are missing from the collection, suggesting that they were either sent in a more secure cipher or MI6 has withheld them.32 Either way, the targeted secrecy indicates Canaris was involved in something of great importance during that period.
