Fighting to Lose (34 page)

There is good evidence as to what at this time was prompting the Abwehr’s interest in things nuclear. While most of the files at the Abwehr’s Asts and branch offices were deliberately burned toward the end of the war, the card index of Nest Bremen survived. The card for R-2232, identified as the spy Hans Dahlhaus, describes him as having submitted a report on U.S. atomic experiments on July 29, 1941, not long after he had returned to Germany from an extended espionage tour of the United States. He had posed as a tobacco salesman and had developed a considerable network of sub-agents.10

His report is lost, but one can make a good guess as to some of its content. Up until the fall of 1940, before a publication ban took effect, the scientists working on sustainable nuclear fission published their findings. The March and April 1940 issues of
Physical Review
carried articles that identified the lighter isotope of uranium, U-235, as being most likely to split in an ongoing chain reaction leading to a massive burst of energy and, theoretically, to an explosion of unprecedented magnitude. The problems were how to separate enough of the isotope from natural uranium and how to prove the chain-reaction effect without blowing oneself up. This much was accessible to Dahlhaus even without having an agent inside the relevant scientific circles.11

What the FBI made of what BLUM said is not recorded. Uranium was featured in the popular press as a kind of miracle super-fuel, but the concept of releasing energy by splitting atoms in lightning-speed chain reactions leading to colossal explosions had not yet got much beyond a tiny circle of mathematicians and physicists. One would think that the FBI was still well out in the wilderness as to what BLUM was talking about.

Others were not. Roosevelt had been encouraging research on uranium since 1939, and on October 9, 1941, received a briefing on the prospects of developing a uranium super-bomb from his scientific adviser, Dr. Vannevar Bush. He was told of British enthusiasm for U-235, that ten kilograms should be enough to flatten a city if the predicted runaway nuclear chain reaction took place, and the technology to separate that much of the isotope from regular uranium was likely to be hugely expensive. The discussion touched on how little was known of what the Germans might be doing. The president told Bush to do a cost analysis of what it would take in scientific and industrial organization to prove that a U-235 chain reaction was feasible. Roosevelt would then decide what to do next.

In the meantime, strict secrecy would prevail. Knowledge of Bush’s assignment would be restricted to the vice-president, Henry Wallace, to the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, to the army chief of staff, General Marshall, and to James R. Conant, chairman of the National Defence Research Council. On November 27, Bush submitted his report.12

On December 6, two days after the FBI’s report on Mosquera was received by the White House13 and the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Dr. Bush secretly met with a small group of senior scientists. The president had given the order, he told them. There was to be an all-out effort to determine whether concentrated uranium-235 would produce a nuclear chain reaction fast enough to explode. Money was no object. “If atomic bombs can be made, then we must make them first,” Dr. Bush quoted the president as saying.14

And so it was. The day before the Japanese dropped the first bombs that opened the war with the United States, the Americans began the process toward the two bombs that would end it — one for Hiroshima, the other for Nagasaki.

Back in England, remote as if on the dark side of the moon from these happenings in America, MI5 was fussing about its entitlements. By taking over the Radio Security Service earlier in the year, MI6 had acquired an absolute monopoly on the distribution of ISOS (decrypts of Abwehr wireless traffic), and Felix Cowgill had clammed up about anything else to do with TRICYCLE. He was unmoved by requests from the XX Committee and deaf to Major Robertson’s plea that he at least give “some small indication” as to how Popov was doing. Liddell had no luck either, Cowgill archly declaring that he was disappointed that his MI5 colleagues did not seem to think he was competent to run a double agent on his own.15

There was good reason for MI5 to be anxious. It had sent Popov to the United States with the question still unresolved as to whether Arthur Owens had really confessed to the Germans, which would have blown nearly all of MI5’s double agents, including Popov. The folly of notionally linking them together through the payments of Plan
Midas
had sunk in. As one MI5 officer was to write:

J.H.M. has advanced the theory that if SNOW on his last visit to Lisbon blew his traffic as he said he did, it follows as a natural consequence that the Germans realize TATE and RAINBOW to be under control, and further that they regard TRICYCLE as blown and may also believe that BALLOON and GELATINE are controlled agents. The logical consequence is perfectly clear, if the Germans believe that SNOW’s traffic for two and a half months before his visit to Lisbon was controlled by us they must assume since SNOW paid TATE in that period that TATE has been a controlled agent. They must also assume that RAINBOW, who TATE subsequently paid, is also controlled …16

B1A staff and members of the XX Committee had been agonizing over the problem for months, chasing the faint hope that somehow it would turn out that Owens had lied about giving everything away.

In fairness, at the beginning of the summer Robertson had received spectacular confirmation that all of his double agents were okay, including Popov. When SNOW went off the air for good in April, the Germans appeared to accept s A-3504’s explanation that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and sent back proposing that A-3725 — Schmidt — be the Plan
Midas
paymaster instead.17 Then, when he supposedly received the £20,000 of German money Popov brought to the United States, the only spies the Germans named for him to pay were RAINBOW, the dance-band spy, and MUTT and JEFF, the inept pair of Norwegian saboteurs captured in Scotland earlier in the year. Astoundingly, MI5 took this to mean that there were no other spies in Britain to be paid — in other words, that there were no unknown German spies at large.18

This was very wrong. Most of the Abwehr’s files, at headquarters in Berlin and in all the Asts, Leitstellen and KOs of Europe, disappeared at the end of the war, probably systematically burned as happened at Ast Hamburg.19 Nest Bremen was the exception. Some of its records were salvaged, and they show that beginning in August 1943, and speeding up to September 1944, Bremen officials burned the reports of most of their agents in England and the United States. All that is to be learned of the spies Bremen employed against England — eight, at least, in 1943–44 alone — is the code numbers on their file cards. Occasionally a name emerged, but this was only due to the diligence of the U.S. Naval Intelligence officers who combed through the unburnt files matching fragment to fragment.

The destruction at Bremen was done methodically. The agent number and subject matter of each file was recorded before being given to the flames. Thus, one can gather that spies who were German citizens or who took the oath of secrecy were guaranteed postwar anonymity. Important agents recruited in the occupied countries were also protected. A Captain Van der Vliet, for example, codenamed DELPHIN, reported on England from March 1942 to January 1944. His reports were destroyed in August and one can appreciate why. The Allied landings in Normandy had been successful and Holland was about to be liberated. The Dutch authorities would naturally want to seek out for punishment those of their countrymen who had worked for the Germans. Allowing Captain Van der Vliet’s real name to slip by was an oversight.

Another Dutch spy was codenamed NOLL. The records that remain of him reveal only that he spoke Dutch and English fluently, that he was a recruiter of agents for England, and that he took the oath of secrecy on April 17, 1941. This latter item is significant. The German oath committed one to secrecy until death, so Eghman was undoubtedly an important spy. The date that he took it indicates he was active against England long after the capture of the
Lena
spies and well within the period during which the British claimed there were no genuine enemy agents at large in Britain. Documents destroyed for 1943–44 include those of agents in England numbered 2215, 2220, 2254, 2351, 2596, 2778, and 2866.20

And those were only the records obtained from Bremen. Any Abwehr office was entitled to send a spy anywhere if it happened upon a suitable person, coordination being managed by Berlin.

TATE subsequently reported to the Germans that he paid RAINBOW and MUTT £500 each, leaving a balance of £19,000, a huge sum. He was then notionally employed as a farm hand, who had days off only on weekends, which gave him an excuse for not spending the rest of the money.21 This story is so feeble that it is hard to accept that it was put forward in earnest. Meanwhile, RAINBOW was sent instructions on a microdot — the first the British had seen — and received an elaborate questionnaire seeking bomb-target information. MI5 took all this to mean that German faith in B1A’s double agents was unshaken.

In November, there was renewed cause for uneasiness. MI6 sent over a report that said that between the time of SNOW’s arrival in Lisbon in February and CELERY’s arrival by ship a week later — when all the fuss with Owens started — an Abwehr official had boasted that on board the ship was “an agent whom the Germans regarded as a valuable means of planting false information on the British.” This could only be CELERY — Walter Dicketts — then posing as an unhappy former RAF intelligence officer prepared to go over to the Germans.22

It was a hard chestnut. Dicketts was a veteran of the First World War, and had been recommended by the director of Air Intelligence (Boyle) himself. He had been an MI5 officer for almost a year. Various people in B Division offered various theories. It seemed impossible that he could be actually working for the Germans. If he was, then he was a triple agent. And so on, and on.23

It was J.C. Masterman, the XX Committee chairman, who finally put an end to the debate. On November 26, fully eight months after the problem first arose, he prepared a 2,200-word review of the evidence and concluded that the many contradictions could never be resolved because the main witness, Arthur Owens, had all along been working for both sides:

In this regard it is important to remember that we are apt to think of a “double agent” in a way different to that in which the double agent regards himself. We think of a double agent as a man who, though supposed to be an agent of Power A by that power, is in fact working in the interests and under the direction of Power B. But in fact the agent, especially if he started before the war, is often trying to do work for both A and B, and to draw emoluments from both.

This seems to me probably true of SNOW. Perhaps he was 75 percent on our side, but I should need a lot of evidence to convince me that he has not played for both sides. It is always possible that he was paid money under another name and that this money waits for him in America. His later letters to LILY give some warrant for this view, as does his desire to be sent to Canada. We must not exclude the possibility that the DOCTOR [RANTZAU] regards him as a man who has been working at the same time for both sides and who could be bribed or frightened into doing his better work for the Germans.24

Painfully convoluted, it nevertheless was a remarkable admission. Even if Owens was working only 25 percent for the Germans, it meant that on all those unsupervised trips to the Continent in 1939–40 he could have been telling the Germans anything at all, including who else was a double agent. MI5’s “double-cross system” had been compromised from the beginning, and Masterman acknowledged it. Yet, in his famous book
The Double-Cross System
(1972), he reversed himself and portrayed Owens as working only for the British.

It is not known how widely Masterman’s memo was circulated, but Guy Liddell certainly saw it. The subsequent actions — or lack of them — must be seen as his decisions.

First, the slippery Dicketts was cleared of all suspicion and given a £200 honorarium for his good work. He hung around London for the next year and a half, then disappeared.

Second, Masterman actually recommended restarting the SNOW transmitter, which was perfectly possible in that Owens had never sent his own messages and so was not needed. On the other hand, were SNOW to remain shut down while the Germans understood him to be only off-air temporarily, then it would look as though he had been arrested. Liddell opted for shutting it down, which inevitably meant discontinuing CHARLIE (Eschborn) and BISCUIT (McCarthy). They were too closely tied to SNOW not to go.

Third, TRICYCLE, TATE, RAINBOW, BALLOON, GELATINE, MUTT, and GW, and his Spanish sub-agents, PEPPERMINT and CARELESS, were retained, even though the first six were linked to SNOW by Plan
Midas
. TATE (Wulf Schmidt) was additionally and fatally linked to SNOW because of the piece of paper with Arthur Owens’s name and address on it that was found on him when he was originally arrested.25