Fighting to Lose (12 page)

Commander Denniston could have told all this to Gill and Trevor-Roper, but he did not. Colonel Simpson, as the former head of the British Army’s wartime equivalent of Room 40, could certainly have explained it to Captain Robertson, except that the previous month he had been transferred out of MI5 to General Wavell’s army in the Middle East.9 Neither the Radio Security Service nor MI5 — as far as available documents show — were ever directly told that the ciphers of the type used by the Abwehr messages being intercepted had been compromised for years.

Probably to Denniston’s complete surprise, with Hitler’s invasion of Norway it was found that the
Theseus
was using these same simple ciphers to relay back to Germany the reports of spies on shore. Some of these deciphered messages were given to Churchill, again head of the Admiralty, and it undoubtedly caused him to remember the glory days of Room 40 when the signals of the German High Sea Fleet were being read. He ordered that the
Theseus
not be disturbed. When it was all over, and Norway lost, Gill again urged Strachey to get busy on the traffic that still was coming in from spies across the Channel, evidently in France, Belgium, and Holland. Strachey’s output was so meagre, however, that Gill offered him one of his own staff to help move things along.10

Meanwhile, MI6’s clandestine wireless service was coming of age. Its chief, Gambier-Parry, had been the marketing manager in Britain for the American radio and appliance maker Philco, and had recruited from the company a wireless engineer by the name of Harold Robin who developed a portable transmitter that weighed less than ten pounds. This, plus the introduction of super-secure one-time pads for enciphering messages, enabled MI6 to begin to deploy its own clandestine wireless observers in the field, rather than just in embassies, one such team reporting from a mountainside during the Norway crisis. This was a milestone in the modernization of MI6.11

Gambier-Parry’s operational headquarters was in Bletchley Park, a stately property MI6 acquired near the start of the war to house the expanding Government Code & Cipher School. He hired experienced signals personnel co-opted from the army and navy, and growth was so rapid that before long the team had to be moved to new premises five miles away at Whaddon Hall. Its official designation was MI6 (Section VIII).12

Having a more professional wireless operation than the Radio Security Service, with its handful of signals personnel relying on Post Office and amateur radio listeners, MI6 (VIII) was capable of doing a far better job of tracking the clandestine wireless activity coming from the countries bordering Germany.13 It may be that one reason that Strachey was breaking so little for Gill was that his decrypts were going first to MI6.

MI5, by contrast, remained slow to grasp the technical aspects of wireless technology. When someone wondered why the Germans were not worried about the British locating their agent’s transmitter by taking bearings on its signal, Owens was told to raise the matter during his meeting with DR. RANTZAU in Antwerp at the beginning of April, and to ask whether he should be sending on different frequencies. Not necessary, DR. RANTZAU replied; it was very difficult to pinpoint the locations of illicit wireless sources. There had been one transmitting in the Wilhelmshaven area, he said, but despite all efforts it had been impossible to run it down.14

This was nonsense. A radio signal is strongest along the line of sight, a fact that enables a transmitter to be located simply by turning the aerials of two or more receivers toward where the signal is strongest and then drawing lines on a map to where they intersect. This was called direction finding (DF), the ancestor of the twenty-first century’s Global Positioning System (GPS), and could be done over long distances or from close up by mobile receivers. The technique had been known during the First World War and was still being used by both sides to locate enemy warships at sea and enemy army and air force units on land. It was also used by government agencies like Britain’s Post Office, Canada’s Department of Transport, and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to pinpoint the location of unlicensed wireless sets.

Obviously, in order to survive in enemy territory, it is helpful for a spy to change frequencies and call signs as often as practical, but the most important necessity is to send from different locations. DR. RANTZAU was not asked the most crucial question: Was it safe for JOHNNY — the name Ritter preferred to use for Owens — to always be sending from the same place? The Germans themselves were soon to provide the answer when Britain’s sabotage agency, Special Operations Executive, began landing its agents into occupied Europe. Their wireless transmissions were DF’d and they were caught by the score.15

The only MI5 officer with the technical clout to challenge DR. RANTZAU’s advice — Colonel Simpson — had left.16 In his absence, Robertson chose to believe his German opponent. This is all the more ironic in that just at this time Denniston forwarded to him a report from the French direction-finding service, which had picked up the SNOW transmitter’s signal and had identified it as coming from around London. “I shall be very glad,” Robertson wrote Major Cowgill of MI6, “if you will reply to the French telling them that we know all about the station, and that they need worry no further.”17

Yet, if the French could hear the SNOW transmitter and get bearings on it, surely Robertson should have thought the Germans would assume the British could, too. It appears he was blind to this logic. If he asked for Gill’s opinion, it is not on the record.18

DR. RANTZAU did concede that it might be a good idea if JOHNNY changed his call sign from time to time. According to Owens, Ritter went out and bought two copies of the book
The Dead Don’t Care
by Jonathan Latimer, one for him to keep and the other for Owens. He then explained how every day they could both use them to derive a new call sign to locate the page and line where the letters could be found.19

In fact, Major Ritter was providing Owens with the means to secretly encipher his own messages, and in a way that was unlikely to be discovered. An agreed-upon published text — book, magazine, newspaper — enables spy and spymaster to construct an enormous number of fresh cipher keys. All they need to do is decide on which pages to find the key letters or key words on particular days. Provided the messages are then enciphered by the substitution method, rather than by transposition, they can be very difficult to break.

Owens may have been playing games here. When leaving Germany for Britain just before the war, he had been assigned the novel
Oil for the Lamps of China
by Alice Hobart for his cipher keys.20 It could be he never used it because it was not consistent with his reading tastes, and would have stood out in his possession. The invasion of Holland and Belgium was impending, however, and he was going to really need his own secret cipher, especially if he had access to a transmitter through another spy, or he had his own hidden away.

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