Fighting to Lose (19 page)

Frank’s description of the Doctor is as follows:

Aged 41, height 5’8”, round face, florrid complexion, high cheek bones, clean shaven, fair hair parted on the right side, irregular teeth, no gold visible (this is a distinguishing mark given us by SNOW); has one tooth on the left side of his mouth which protrudes so that it forces his upper lip over the gum when he laughs or talks with emphasis. Speaks with a broad New York accent, swears, is fond of telling filthy stories, and is exceedingly common.19

Robertson wrote that he thought this to be the same person, although it is hard to see how he accounted for the discrepancy of the gold tooth, or the mention that RANTZAU behaved like an ugly American. In his memoir after the war, Ritter told of going to Lisbon only once in 1940, and it was in June to meet Owens. It would seem that McCarthy met with Ritter’s proxy.

Just at this time, MI5 was bottoming out: staff at all levels were in a state of passive rebellion; Vernon Kell’s replacement, Brigadier Jasper Harker, could make no headway with his new chiefs; the influx of thousands of refugees had tipped security processing to Tilt. Many of the experienced officers were ready to quit. Robertson’s little double-cross effort was one of the few patches of calm in the rising tide of administrative breakdown. Counting Eschborn, Owens, and now McCarthy, he had three double agents reporting to the Germans — CHARLIE, SNOW, and FRANK (renamed BISCUIT) — plus DRAGONFLY, a developing double agent also with links to Ast Hamburg.

This was a meagre enough showing after ten months of war, but with Churchill in the wings chomping furiously on his cigar and prodding Lord Swinton, at least it was something.

SNOW’s wireless messages during July contained a modest amount of disinformation with respect to Britain’s invasion defences, combined mainly with accurate daily weather observations for London. There were a few items of general intelligence, however. Among A-3504’s weather reports relayed by teletype from Hamburg to Berlin was this:

SECRET

An OKW Abw I Luft/E

3504 meldet an 29.7, 23:30 aus London

SS
Britannia
in Huskinson Dock Liverpool with American Munitions.
Georgic
Canada Dock.20

The SS
Britannia
was a medium-sized passenger ship of the Anchor Line. According to the war ethics of the day, if a passenger vessel was understood to be carrying war materials, it absolved an enemy of moral responsibility for the heavy loss of innocent lives that would come from attacking it. This was general knowledge in 1940, for it was the justification the Germans claimed for sinking the
Lusitania
during the First World War.

Six months later, the
Britannia
was met by the Hamburg-based commerce raider
Thor
off the west coast of Africa. It was sunk by gunfire: 127 crew and 122 passengers perished. Some of those who survived sailed their lifeboats 1,600 miles to the coast of Brazil, an epic of human endurance.

More pertinent, when McCarthy travelled to Lisbon, he had taken along some reports supposedly from Owens. These he delivered, along with his own and those of E-186. One from Owens described bomb damage to Southampton in considerable detail. And then this:

An OKW Abw I Luft/E

3504 meldet an 30.7 aus London uber Lissabon

[Translation]

Part of the administrative staff of the RAF has been quartered in Thames House near Lambeth Bridge. Visible from afar as a big white building.

McCarthy supplied his own version:

Neuer V-Mann von I Luft (3554) meldet bei personlichen Treff in Lissabon 3.8.40

[Translation]

The headquarters for all aircraft production and Beaverbrook’s office are in Thames House near Lambeth Bridge. Big white building. Not to be missed.

The actual item — according to Robertson — that Commodore Boyle authorized was this: “Ministry of Aircraft Production is at Thames House, believe moving to Harrogate. Beaverbrook is the Minister.”21

The messages were surely an invitation to German bombers if ever there was one, and how they got past Robertson is a mystery. However, Hitler had not yet authorized the bombing of inland urban targets.22 Even when he did, the Luftwaffe never acted on the messages and Thames House was spared. McCarthy, of course, could not have foreseen that outcome.

As it so happened, the German secret services, both Nazi and the Abwehr, had good reason not to want to raze Thames House. It had been learned from the interrogations of Stephens and Best, the two MI6 men kidnapped at Venlo, that it was the headquarters of MI5.23 If this was true, both the Abwehr and Heydrich’s Gestapo could hope to meet their enemy opposite numbers in the not-too-distant future, a much-preferred alternative to killing them. The reason? Hitler had decided on invasion.

It was August 1. Thus far, the Luftwaffe’s attacks had been limited to coastal shipping and Britain’s southern ports. Churchill, however, had decreed a fight to the finish, and so it would be. Small craft of all types were requisitioned by the Germans from along the coasts of the occupied countries and assembled in the ports and small harbours on the French side of the Channel. German army planners began calculating the logistics of the crossing and how a landing force of several divisions could be sustained while fighting inland toward London. Hitler gave it the name
Unternamen Seelöwe
— Operation Sealion. It would be the first cross-Channel invasion of England since William the Conqueror nearly eight hundred years earlier. First, however, Britain had to be defeated in the air.

Churchill coined the phrase “Battle of Britain,” and it came to be applied to the epic struggle between the young pilots of the RAF and the Luftwaffe that lasted from the second week of August to the middle of September. They were evenly matched in energy, zeal, courage, and capability. Their aircraft, especially the fighters, were comparable in armament and performance, the famous Spitfire perhaps having a slight edge over the German Bf-109. Britain had an additional edge in that its pilots were fighting over their own territory, and could be rescued if shot down. And then there was radar, of course. The electronic eyes that could see the German bomber formations assembling over France enabled the defenders to gather enough fighters to make their daylight forays over England costly — too costly in the end.

It is one of the great mysteries of the war. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring did open the battle with attacks on the Chain Home radar installations, the radio masts being readily visible from the air. Bunkers had not been provided for the on-site staff, so there were immediate casualties and some stations went blind. Then, for some reason, Göring eased up on the attacks, concentrating on airfields and RAF infrastructure instead. All historians agree it was a decisive mistake. Had he put out the RAF’s eyes first, he would have won the battle.

The fighter-to-fighter struggle in the sky over southeast England was at its height when McCarthy arrived back in London on August 20. He had played his part. A-3554 had been established as a spy reporting from the Bristol area, initially on his own, later through A-3504. FRANK was rechristened BISCUIT, soon to become primarily a notional double agent because when A-3504’s messages included reports from A-3554, McCarthy was not needed to write them.

McCarthy may have had his own thoughts as to the origin of those Thames House messages. In the days following his return, with the contrails of the enemy criss-crossing the sky over the sunny fields and towns of southeast England, he would get drunk every so often, phone Owens up, and offer to come over and kill him.24

8

September–October 1940

In early September 1940, after failing to defeat the RAF over England, Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring shifted emphasis to bombing cities, and gradually to bombing by night. The British called it the Blitz, and London, Birmingham, Coventry, and other industrial and commercial centres suffered an autumn rain of incendiaries and high explosives.

On November 14, Coventry was devastated by some five-hundred-plus bombers. Birmingham was savagely hit on November 19. On Christmas Eve, 526 died in the fires in Manchester. The bombers were still under orders to go after British war-related industry, as per the 1937 League of Nations resolution that limited bombing to military targets, but as factories were inevitably embedded in urban areas, massive civilian damage and casualties were bound to occur. Public support for the war, however, solidified, and it deeply touched Churchill. His young aide, John Colville, noted in his diary:

Friday, Sept. 20, 1940

He [the PM] is becoming less and less benevolent toward the Germans — having been much moved by examples of their frightfulness in Wandsworth which he has been to see: a landmine caused very great devastation there — and talks about castrating the lot. He says there will be no nonsense about a “just peace.” I feel sure this is the wrong attitude — not only immoral but unwise….1

But the effects of the bombings were indeed frightful. According to some from the Wandsworth district who endured it,

When a bomb lands you get an outward explosion and then equally as much damage is done when it is drawn in again. Often you found places with walls sucked off. It was as if you were looking into a doll’s house with the back off. You could see everything there. The staircase was still there. The beds and all the furniture were still there….

If the bombs dropped in places where a lot of people had been killed they were telling us how many bodies had been picked up. How many limbs they had found — how many heads — horrible things like that….2

For Göring, however, cities were more lucrative than airfields. They were large, built-up areas, and when bombs missed their designated military targets, they still were not wasted.

Göring also had some incentive to switch to bombing London by night. On August 12, A-3504 had sent along this:

12.8.40 SECRET To OKW-Abw I Luft/E

Searchlight sites are to be found on top of the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England and Selfridges near Marble Arch.3

If this information was true, the bomber pilots needed only to position themselves according to the lights to stand a good chance of landing a dose of high explosive on one of Britain’s great monuments — the Parliament at Westminster perhaps (actually hit), or St Paul’s Cathedral (buildings destroyed across the street), or Trafalgar Square (cratered, but Nelson’s Column remained okay). The loss of a few of these would be a great blow to British morale.

The message cannot be easily explained. It was sent when the air battle over England was primarily by day, and when the German aim was still to defeat the RAF by attrition and by destroying its infrastructure. Attacks on urban areas and widespread night bombing did not get underway until the autumn.

What is also odd is that Robertson continued to have Owens tour the countryside as before, visiting air bases to see what he could see. This may have made sense when Owens was meeting his German controllers on the Continent face-to-face, but it was hardly necessary when contact was limited to wireless.

Nevertheless, even as British and German pilots duelled in the skies over England that desperate summer and fall of 1940, Owens continued to count aircraft at aerodromes:

27.8.40

[Unknown MI5 staffer]

I asked if it was all right for SNOW to go out this afternoon and see if he can get any information about aerodromes or air raid damage. Captain Robertson said anything he could get in this line could be sent over.

Rang Burton and told him SNOW was to go out, suggesting Northolt and other places he could manage. Also told him to try and find what damage had been done last night.

Obtained two items of chicken feed from Major Sinclair — one about new plane trap formed by shooting wire from guns and the other about new pom-pom gun. Passed this on to Burton, who reported that they had seen 33 Spitfires, 3 Hurricanes, 2 Blenheims, one unidentified biplane, all marked YD, and all camouflaged and under cover at Northolt….

As this Northolt news seemed rather a lot of good information, I consulted Major Sinclair, who said he thought I should ring up D of I (Air) and make sure it was all right to send this. I rang up flying officer Baring, and explained that Captain Robertson was away on leave and, in connection with the SNOW case, I wanted to know whether it was all right to pass on the above information which had been observed by our agent from the road.