Hitler's Spy (11 page)

‘In South Wales, about thirty.’

‘And are they willing to commit acts of sabotage on behalf of the Reich?’

‘Where our interests coincide.’

Evidently satisfied, Witzke went on to suggest that supplies for the Welsh ring might best be delivered by U-boat. The explosives would be landed in bulk but broken down into smaller parcels,
concealed in bottles, canned goods and so forth. This made storage easier and prevented deterioration.

‘Dynamite?’ asked Williams. ‘TNT?’

Witzke shook his head. ‘You’ll be mixing the ingredients yourselves. Three parts potassium chlorate to one part sugar, detonated by sulphuric acid.’

Williams glanced at Owens. ‘He’s the chemist, not me.’

‘I’ve laid on some basic instruction tomorrow. Then, in a month or so, you can come over to Germany for a more comprehensive sabotage course. And collect a
wireless too, if you want one.’

‘Wash that out,’ snapped Owens, keen to protect his own patch. ‘All signals traffic between England and Germany goes through me.’

Ritter raised a calming hand, then reached into his pocket and slid a buff manila envelope across the table towards Williams. Peering inside, Williams counted £50 in Bank of England notes.
The former policeman hesitated, torn between the demands of his novel new role as a double-cross asset and his relatively law-abiding past.

‘Take it!’ urged Ritter, his gold tooth flashing. ‘Only fools and fanatics work for free. Whenever you need more, simply call on Johnny.’

Arthur Owens bit his lip, after which Ritter derived further amusement by booking his Welsh Nationalist cadre into the Hotel London. The next day Leutnant Witzke took the pair to a flat in the
centre of Antwerp, where a Flemish Nazi instructed them in the art of mixing explosives, laced with elementary tips on arson. At the end of the session Owens was handed a number of detonators
concealed in a block of wood. The would-be saboteurs then retired to the Taverne Sonia, where Witzke was evidently a regular, and soon became exceedingly drunk.

The next day, while Witzke nursed his hangover, Owens conferred in private with Ritter and Brasser. As played back to MI5, at his second wartime treff Agent Snow discussed only trivia, including
troop movements, petrol rationing and the ‘jitterbug’ effect of propaganda broadcasts by captured RAF aircrew. In fact Owens delivered up solid intelligence on the strength of fighter
squadrons at Northolt and Croydon, Short Sunderland flying boats based at Pembroke Dock and the
embarkation of 80 tanks at Avonmouth, bound for France. The location of several
key war factories was also revealed, including a Rolls-Royce aero engine store in Didcot and a synthetic fuel plant at Methyr.

None of these disclosures stood approved by Tar Robertson or the newly formed Wireless Committee. By way of reward, for these revelations and his betrayal of British radar secrets a month
earlier, Owens received an extravagant cash payment of £470 – the price of a modest house in 1939.

Henceforth, explained Ritter, Owens should expect regular payments through a woman in Bournemouth. Another sleeper agent in Manchester named Charles Eschborn was able to process tiny microdot
photographs. ‘He’s entirely reliable,’ vouched the Doctor. ‘Besides which, the Gestapo are holding one of his brothers in Dachau.’

Next Ritter handed Owens a postage stamp. ‘Your new questionnaire in microdot form,’ he explained. ‘A little on the sticky side, you might say. But much easier to smuggle
across frontiers than paper or film.’

‘I’ve just the place,’ grinned Owens, reaching to remove his false teeth.

Ritter looked quickly away.

Their business concluded, agents Snow and G.W. returned to Brussels, checked back into the Savoy, and boarded a ferry at Ostend on Wednesday. The two men found British newspapers full of scorn
for a speech delivered by Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, holding England responsible for the outbreak of a second Great War and portraying the Reich as the injured party. On
disembarkation at Folkestone Owens was tailed discreetly by a Special Branch detective, who reported an emotional reunion with Lily on the platform at Victoria but failed to spot Williams at
all.

Exhausted, Gwilym Williams went directly to Swansea, where he was debriefed at home by Richman Stopford. ‘G.W.
still looks rather tired,’ remarked Tar’s
assistant, ‘but his report, attached, is excellent. Everyone is very friendly with Snow, and he is apparently trusted by them all. They refer to him as their number one man in England. So far
as Williams can judge, the whole affair is a genuine effort on the part of the Germans, and he sees no sign of wool being drawn over his eyes. But then, he might not.’

In fact, Williams understood the case – and the man – all too well. ‘He thinks that Snow’s object is to get all he can out of the Germans, yet do enough to keep on the
right side of us.’

Whether G.W. was prepared to risk going into Germany for sabotage training was another matter entirely. After seeking assurances that his wife and daughter would be looked after should he fail
to return, Williams pointed out that his private enquiry business would slide in his absence and demanded a salary. ‘I congratulated him warmly,’ hedged Stopford, ‘and said that
his services would not be overlooked. He has spent £30 and been too rushed to keep accounts. Taking into account the German money he is still £45 to the good.’

However, £45 hardly compared to the £470 flaunted by Agent Snow. Already something of Owens’ mercenary approach to the spy racket had rubbed off on the dubious ex-copper from
Swansea.

Colonel Johnny nursed doubts of his own. Williams gave every appearance of incorruptibility, like a lily-white G-man from the FBI, and as such was of no value as an Abwehr stooge. Debriefed by
Robertson, Owens set about devaluing G.W. as a double-cross asset, claiming that Doctor Rantzau had found him ‘too nervous’ in Antwerp and wanted Johnny to take personal control of
sabotage operations in Wales. With G.W. in charge, fibbed Snow, there would be no U-boat, no explosives – and no cash payment of £30,000.

Owens obscured his own treachery by fibbing that the Abwehr had informants inside the Air Ministry and the
Admiralty, and that new V-men (
vertrauens
, or
‘trusted’) were on their way to London. ‘Snow has returned from Brussels and is to receive instructions regarding the appointment of agents,’ Guy Liddell wrote with
unwarranted confidence. ‘He also mentioned that they are anxious for him to go to Canada sometime in the near future, possibly with the object of organising a similar show for them out
there.’

For all of a fortnight the going seemed good at B1A. At the beginning of November Snow travelled to Manchester to meet Charles Eschborn, standing back as the hapless photographer was quietly
lifted by the Branch and flipped as double agent CHARLIE. Unfortunately for MI5 Eschborn was small fry, besides which Owens ignored protocol by co-opting Lily for his northern mission. By the
middle of the month Tar found his patience worn perilously thin. ‘I told Owens we were not at all satisfied with the way things were developing, and taxed him on the fact that we had been at
war for over two months, yet so far he had not been contacted by anybody, he had not received the promised wireless set, and we had not received a list of contacts.’

Ironically, Tar also took Snow to task over his reliance on facts and chicken feed provided by British intelligence, rather than obtaining dope of his own. No one, it seems, perceived any vice
in Owens worse than laziness, or gave serious consideration to the notion that the Little Man might actually be working for Germany and double-crossing MI5.

Humdinger.

Like Alice en route to Wonderland, the British secret service found itself locked in an endless downward spiral. At the beginning of November the veteran director of MI6, Admiral Hugh
‘Quex’ Sinclair, died after sixteen years in post, creating a power vacuum at the heart of the intelligence establishment. Just five days later, a humiliating debacle in Holland laid
bare the dangers inherent in allowing unreliable amateurs to operate abroad. On 9 November German agents
snatched two MI6 officers from a Dutch frontier post at Venlo, at the
same time killing a Dutch intelligence officer. One of the men abducted was Major Richard Stevens, who ran the MI6 station in The Hague, the other a flamboyant expatriate businessman named
Sigismund Payne Best, part of a sketchy SIS shadow network known as Z. The pair fancied they had established contact with a group of highly placed German patriots, who offered to fly a like-minded
general to London for secret peace talks. The endgame, so they thought, was a military coup in Berlin and the arrest of Adolf Hitler. MI6 even provided the conspirators with a wireless transmitter,
unaware that they were in fact negotiating with double-cross agents from the
Sicherheitsdienst
– a sister agency of the Gestapo, and sworn rivals of the Abwehr.

The violent denouement saw Best and Stevens abducted in broad daylight and hustled across the border into Germany, a humiliating coup that grabbed headlines worldwide as ‘The Venlo
Incident’. Both men cracked under interrogation, and were forced to endure the grinding miseries of Sachsenhausen and Dachau. ‘With memories of past cowardice in a dentists’
chair,’ Best admitted, ‘my estimate of my fortitude under torture was modest in the extreme.’

Inevitably, British intelligence agencies now viewed all German initiatives with deep suspicion, and Gwilym Williams’ proposed trip to a spy school inside Germany was put on hold.
‘Venlo will be a great blow to SIS and also ourselves,’ Liddell commented. ‘It seems not unlikely that a member of the Dutch general staff, Colonel Sas, previously reported as a
German agent, was responsible for giving the whole show away.’

Sas was innocent, and the blundering continued apace. Towards the end of November MI6 received a mystery package from Oslo containing detailed intelligence on German electronic warfare
technology, including guided missiles, navigational beams and even rocket research on an obscure
Baltic island called Peenemünde. This astonishing windfall also confirmed
that enemy radar had been responsible for bouncing the disastrous Bomber Command raid on Wilhelmshaven on 4 September. ‘It was probably the best single report received from any source during
the war,’ lamented SIS scientist R. V. Jones. ‘But the leading doubter implied that the whole thing was a plant. All I could do was to keep my own copy, and in the few dull moments of
the war I used to look it up to see what should be coming along next.’

Meanwhile, as Arthur Owens continued to buzz humdrum weather reports from rented rooms in Kingston, undermining MI5 at every turn, Richman Stopford found himself inexorably drawn towards the
ladies’ underwear department at Selfridges.

The upmarket Oxford Street department store became an unwitting battlefield in the secret war after Owens received his salary for November. Three of the four £5 notes posted from
Bournemouth were found to be marked with a telltale rubber stamp, ‘S & Co Ltd’, which Lily recognised as belonging to Selfridges. After checking with the chief cashier, Stopford, a
former banker, ascertained that the notes in question had crossed the counter on 14 November, when staff recalled serving a woman aged about sixty, said to be well spoken and possessed of a
charming manner. During a subsequent case conference at MI5 the mystery customer was provisionally identified as Mathilde Krafft, a housekeeper employed by a naval officer living near Southampton,
whose own bank records were found to match payments recently made to Snow.

Mail intercepts suggested that Krafft planned a return trip to London on 7 December. Accompanied by two counter girls from Selfridges, Stopford staked out platform 13 at Waterloo, then followed
Krafft to a ‘somewhat suspect’ travel agency at Moorgate, where a firm identification was obtained. ‘She was dressed in a very dark fur coat and wore a bunch of violets,’
said Stopford. ‘Moderately well dressed for an elderly lady, with a
typical German
hausfrau
appearance, and a rather active look in her eyes.’

Krafft’s biography was somewhat bizarre. German by birth, she had married a wealthy English coconut planter in Fiji but was now a widow with British nationality, and an adopted daughter
named Editha Dargel. Even after Editha was deported on account of pro-Nazi agitation, Krafft continued to distribute Abwehr funds wired from the Sparkasse Bank in Hamburg, unaware that her cover
now hung in shreds. Rather than have her arrested, Tar Robertson decided to keep the coconut widow under careful observation.

Despite having sacrificed Eschborn and Krafft to burnish his own reputation with MI5, a stunt not likely to have been authorised by Ritter, rogue Agent Snow still managed to blot his copybook,
dispatching Lily to Manchester to liaise with Charlie while holding back funds earmarked for new microphotography equipment. Once again, Robertson was obliged to read Owens parts of the riot act.
‘I pointed out that as Snowy was the head of their organisation in this country it was up to him to get the thing going. In order to keep him up to the mark, I said I would speak to him every
evening and ask how he had got on. I also took Owens through his accounts. From what I can see he has done England for as much money as he can possibly get.’

Money, and a mansion to rival Sloane Avenue or Pullman Court. Tired of cramped conditions at Norbiton Avenue, and still fearful of raids on the Hawker aircraft factory, Owens and Lily moved
three miles north to Richmond, taking the lease on a substantial four-storey property at 14 Marlborough Road. Aside from the fact that the leafy suburb was more upmarket than nondescript Norbiton,
the proximity of Richmond Park also facilitated clandestine meetings, thus avoiding the steady flow of visitors that made the first safehouse untenable. At the fancy new London stelle on
Marlborough Road Snow’s B6 watchers occupied the lower floors, while Owens and Lily
seized Lebensraum on the second and third. Once again the wireless aerial was
concealed in the attic. Unbeknownst to Snow and his mistress, Robertson also installed a bugging device in the dining room.