Fighting to Lose (9 page)

Indeed, even in the mid-1930s, when Nazi Germany and fascist Italy became ever more clearly threats to Britain’s interests, MI5’s response was anti-subversion rather than counter-espionage, the principal effort being to infiltrate homegrown German- and Italian-leaning fascist organizations. Up to the outbreak of war, only one officer, Colonel W.E. Hinchley-Cooke, was working full-time on German counter-espionage, while Italy did not even rate attention. “There was a natural tendency not to take the military threat from Italy very seriously,” noted one MI5 officer looking back at those early days.30

The tools MI5’s two dozen or so officers had to work with were basic: a plainclothes team of six to shadow suspects; Home Office warrants (HOWs) giving permission to open mail and listen in on telephone conversations; paid and unpaid informers; and a huge collection of files on individuals who had come to notice, generally for something they had done or said that was “Bolshi.” This latter was the Registry, and accounted for eighty of the 103 mainly female, mainly clerical staff who backed up the officers who led the various sections. It kept thousands of names and the “person files” (PFs) that went with them. It served as memory bank to both MI5 and MI6.31

MI5 did get a chance to move forward with the times. In mid-1938, with tensions mounting over Hitler’s threats to Czechoslovakia, Lieutenant-Colonel Adrian Simpson was appointed adviser to MI5 on matters to do with wireless interception. He had been chief of MI1(b), the code- and cipher-breaking agency of the army (the War Office) during the previous war, and a senior executive with the Marconi Telegraph Company since.32 Advances in technology had made the wireless transmitter a practical and available alternative to the mails for spies reporting to their home countries, and Simpson proposed that MI5 set up a wireless listening section capable of detecting their transmissions. It was to consist of fixed stations and mobile units to close in locally.

MI5 rejected the idea, however, being firmly of the view that German agents would only be using the mails or couriers to send in their reports. The matter was turned back to the War Office, which responded by creating MI1(g), a new military intelligence section consisting of a veteran First World War signals officer and two or three staff who were given space in Wormwood Scrubs along with MI5 and the Telegraph Censorship Department. There they received reports from three fixed Post Office wireless receiving stations with direction-finding capability and twenty-seven “volunteer interceptors” — amateur radio operators scattered across the country. MI5’s role was to make the appropriate inquiries when suspicious transmissions were located, and to call in the police where warranted.33 This was the responsibility of B3, a one-man section of MI5 that also looked after reports of suspicious lights and carrier-pigeon sightings.

In contrast, when prodded by the Foreign Office, MI6 undertook to develop its own secret wireless service. The task was given in 1938 to a former First World War signals officer, Captain Richard Gambier-Parry, whose first priority was to develop quick and secure communications for key diplomatic posts abroad. He began by recruiting experienced wireless operators from the merchant marine. He put them through additional training with Scotland Yard’s wireless section and outfitted them with the best available sending and receiving sets, mostly of American manufacture. He had operators in the embassies in Prague, Paris, and The Hague in time to wireless back to London the reaction in those capitals to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler to carve up Czechoslovakia.34

The different ways in which MI5 and MI6 reacted to suggestions regarding wireless would turn out to be a fair indication of the mentalities of the two services on the eve of war.

3

September 1939–April 1940

Arthur Owens was a weasel. No doubt about it. The forty-year-old Welshman with Canadian citizenship elicited instant dislike on first encounters. He was bony-faced, scrawny, and small, with nicotine-stained fingers and transparent, irregular, mismatched ears. “A typical Welsh underfed Cardiff type,” the police description concluded.1

British intelligence was reminded that Owens was not so savoury by the arrival at Scotland Yard of Mrs. Owens in mid-August 1939, there to denounce her husband as a genuine German agent. Yes, she told her interviewers, she knew all about him working for the British while pretending to spy for the Germans, except, she said, he really was spying for the Germans. Now, according to his wife, he had gone off to Hamburg again, this time with a girlfriend, but no, that was not why she had decided to report him. He had been trying to get their son into his spy ring, and when she protested, he had threatened to shoot her. So here she was, doing her duty by disclosing that he was now in Germany with the most recent RAF code book.2

Everything Mrs. Owens said was true. MI6 had originally acquired Owens as a secret agent in 1936. He had first presented himself to Naval Intelligence Division of the British Admiralty as an electrical engineer who often visited Germany and who might be able to bring back the occasional tidbit of military interest. The navy sent him along to MI6, which took him up on the offer.

All seemed well for some months, until a letter from Owens to a known German secret service cover address was intercepted. It was written in open code and appeared to be talking about “toothpaste” (torpedoes) and “shaving cream” (submarines). A Major Vivian of MI6 discussed it earnestly with his superiors and it was thought that perhaps Owens was playing the Germans along and that he would reveal all shortly.3 Six months later he did.

Owens claimed that one of his informants in Germany, a man named Pieper,4 had turned out to be working for the German secret intelligence service (the Abwehr) and had proposed that he do so too. After several cloak-and-dagger meetings, he agreed, figuring it would enable him to better help the British by reporting what was asked of him. The Germans, he assured his listeners, only wanted him to work as a “straight” spy; there was no thought of using him as a double agent.

Owens, of course, was offering to be a double agent for the British, and while MI6 officially turned him down, it used him in that capacity anyway. For the next two years, he was allowed to collect information for the Germans so long as he occasionally reported his activities and contacts to Scotland Yard’s counter-intelligence division, Special Branch. His letters continued to be intercepted, but they never contained anything of importance.5

In January 1939, Owens reported that he had received a transmitter from the Germans. It had been deposited for him in a left-luggage locker at Victoria Station in London, and he brought it in to Scotland Yard, where it was examined. It was given back to him; however, his intercepted letters indicated that he could not get it to work. It was probably disabled at MI5’s request, for this was the Security Service’s first “concrete” indication that Germany intended to have its spies communicate by wireless, and it was not set up to handle the eventuality.6

Nothing much happened for the next six months. Owens continued to report occasionally to Special Branch and his correspondence continued to be monitored, but nothing harmful was found. Much later, however, it was discovered that the Germans had given him a second cover address and that Owens’s son had used it to send them sketch maps of the aerodromes at Biggin Hill and Kenley. Owens could have been secretly using this channel, too.7

Mrs. Owens then made her appearance at Scotland Yard. Among other things, she indicated that her husband really did have a working transmitter and that he drove out into the countryside to use it. She said his secret cipher was based on the word
congratulations
, each letter being assigned a number. He had since disposed of the transmitter, she added, and the last time she saw him, he had been drinking heavily, depressed by the growing certainty of war. He was thinking of coming over to the British once and for all.8

Arrangements were made to arrest Owens whenever he showed up again.

On September 4, the day after Britain declared war over Germany’s invasion of Poland, Owens telephoned his usual contact at Scotland Yard to say that he wanted to cut his ties with the Germans. They arranged to meet at Waterloo Station, but this time there was no going off for a private chat. Instead of one inspector, there were two policemen and a bus ride to Wandsworth Prison. As the doors of that venerable institution opened to receive him, Owens offered as proof of his loyalty the address of his girlfriend’s flat. His wireless set, he said, would be found in the bathroom.

Colonel Simpson and B3’s Captain Thomas Robertson (thirty years old and probably MI5’s youngest officer) accompanied police to the flat that evening. The wireless set was duly found, but it was a receiver only, apparently put together by Owens himself. The landlord, however, reported that he had earlier buried a package in the garden at the request of Owens’s girlfriend. He had assumed it contained belongings related to the breakup of Owens’s marriage. When it was dug up, it contained a transmitter.9

The next day, Robertson and a Colonel J.S. Yule turned up at Wandsworth Prison and tested Owens on his Morse Code–sending ability. He was not very good. A few days later, Robertson returned with a Mr. Meakin, a civilian wireless operator from MI1(g)., and with his transmitter. As Owens had left it with Scotland Yard, it was understood not to be working, but working it was. He had been using it to send messages to Hamburg as recently as two weeks earlier.10 Now, here it was, being set up in the prison with hopes of him being able to contact Germany. Owens must have thought he was lost. As the set was warming up, his hand went out to it, felt at the base, and it died.

The risk of electrocution was worth it. Captain Robertson and Mr. Meakin were not wireless technicians. They took it away to be fixed, returning the next day to try again.11

Having yanked himself back from the abyss, Owens set about bridging it. He told Captain Robertson that his first message should be: “All ready. Have repaired radio. Send instructions now. Awaiting reply.” This was sent at intervals over the next two days, but with Mr. Meakin rather than Owens on the telegraph key. On September 11, the Germans finally answered.12

Reception was too poor to develop the contact, so the next morning Owens was removed to the police jail at Kingston-on-Thames and the transmitter was set up in an unfurnished top-floor flat in town where the aerial could be strung in the attic. Owens had said the next message should be “Must see you Holland at once. Bring weather code. Radio town and hotel. Wales ready.” He explained that at his last meeting with the Germans in Hamburg, it was arranged that as soon as the war started he was to send daily weather reports, as well as go to Wales to see if he could recruit some willing saboteurs from among the Welsh nationalists.

The second message was repeated morning and afternoon, with Mr. Meakin again on the telegraph key. The German reply, when it came, was too garbled to understand, and when the Hamburg station kept signalling for acknowledgement, Meakin broke off. Nevertheless, real contact with the enemy had been achieved. It must have been a huge thrill for young Captain Robertson.13

The triumph was illusory. Every Morse operator’s natural sending rhythm — or “fist” as it was called — is unique and hard to imitate. The German army signals personnel who trained Owens would have known instantly that it was not he who was on the telegraph key, especially as they had just recently received several of his messages. Mr. Meakin should have been alert to this problem, but he was only a civilian volunteer on assignment to the then very mysterious “secret service.” He was probably not inclined to press upon Robertson an opinion about anything.14

The
congratulations
code used would also have alerted the Germans. The cipher actually given to Owens was based on the best-selling novel
Oil for the Lamps of China
by Alice Hobart, the keyword being derived from the page that matched the date of a message.15 The delays in replying to Meakin’s first transmissions were probably due to the Germans debating whether to answer when it was so obvious it was the enemy sending.