Hitler's Spy (18 page)

While Owens sweated bullets in his cell, Argles and his crew worked at a feverish pace to ready the
Barbados
for action.
Besides sourcing suitable wireless
equipment, the most time-consuming task was the installation of the deadly Oerlikon quick-firing cannon, whose powerful recoil required a robust yet discreet steel mounting, something like that of
a Great War Q-ship. Richman Stopford took care of other more mundane details, arranging with the Ministry of Shipping to charter the trawler for a further week and taking steps to ensure that her
name and registration number would be changed after she returned to Grimsby. ‘This is to be done in order to save the lives of the crew on their future fishing expeditions in the North
Sea,’ Tar minuted. ‘It is quite plain that GY71 will be a marked ship after this trip.’

Late on the evening of Wednesday, 22 May the
Barbados
cast off once again and steamed out into the North Sea. HMS
Salmon
was already in position, submerged at periscope depth
five miles from the rendezvous point and briefed to intercept enemy hostiles. With the ageing trawler capable of no more than ten knots, the outward journey lasted eight tense, uncomfortable hours,
during which weather conditions steadily deteriorated. As the iron-grey sky and sea merged into one, and the
Barbados
began to pitch heavily, so too did Snow’s stomach.

Racked by nausea, and haunted by visions of draconian laws and dangling nooses, Owens poured out his heart in an emotional letter, addressed jointly to Lily and his loyal son Bob, Snow Junior.
This lachrymose note was entrusted to Lieutenant Argles, who in due course passed it to Robertson. ‘The letter was written under a great strain,’ remarked Tar. ‘Argles considered
he was quite genuine, as it had been made quite clear to Snow that if he made a false step he would never see land again. From what they told me, Owens had a pretty rough passage, but at the same
time appeared to be most anxious to get hold of Rantzau either alive or dead, and was willing to play the game as far as he possibly could.’

Some line.

Three hundred miles east, on the picturesque North Sea island of Sylt, Major Nikolaus Ritter relied once more on the Luftwaffe to convey him to his watershed treff with
Colonel Johnny.

On Thursday afternoon the Doctor again journeyed from Hamburg to List, where a maritime reconnaissance unit designated
Kustenfliegergruppe
506 operated Heinkel 115 floatplanes from the
sheltered harbour. While these planes were sturdy enough, the North Sea treff required a larger aircraft type with greater range, prompting Ritter to obtain a huge twin-engined Dornier 18 flying
boat with an impressive airborne endurance of twelve hours and a range of 2,000 miles. In order to reduce weight, and thus fuel consumption, the handpicked crew from KfG 506 agreed to strip out
their protective armour plating. This gambit was a brave one, since the lumbering Dornier 18 boasted the dubious distinction of having been the very first Luftwaffe aircraft type shot down by the
RAF.

To reduce the risk of interception a circuitous flight plan was adopted, taking full advantage of low-level cloud. ‘I wore a flying suit over my civilian clothes in case we fell into enemy
hands,’ Ritter recalled in his postwar memoir. ‘Not that I was worried. Johnny’s code was unbreakable, and varied from day to day. The weather was clear and visibility good.
However, when we reached the agreed position there was no boat to be seen. I told the pilot to begin flying in a search pattern – but still we found nothing.’

Long hours passed. As darkness fell over the grey-green surface of the Dogger Bank, Lieutenant Argles and his crew kept their eyes peeled for the faint silhouette of a distant seaplane, or the
menacing shadow of a submarine conning tower. Meanwhile the changeable North Sea weather continued to close in and before long the navy men found their efforts thwarted by dense fog. No aircraft
circled to fire off starlight flares, no gunboat crept close on muffled engines, no U-boat
broke surface to flash signals in Morse. The appointed time came and went with no
sign of Doctor Rantzau. After waiting for several more blind, silent hours Argles reluctantly decided to extinguish Operation Lamp.

Shivering fearfully in the wheelhouse, his protesting stomach knotted tighter than a drum, Arthur Owens counted his blessings.

Ritter had given up long before. ‘There was no trawler, and fortunately no enemy aircraft to shoot down our Dornier. Eventually, with fuel running low, we headed for home. The operation
had been a failure. I was disappointed, and in my mind turned over every stage of the plan.’

For all concerned, the intricate trawler treff was destined to remain a riddle wrapped up in an enigma. The following year, under close interrogation, Owens stubbornly insisted that Rantzau flew
out to meet the
Barbados
not once but twice, firing green signal flares on the first occasion but thwarted by fog on the second. Fully thirty years later, Ritter’s own unreliable
account contradicted the version accepted by MI5, contending there had been no fog, and no initial reconnaissance flight on Monday. According to the Doctor, Captain Walker had developed cold feet,
his fear then infecting the crew and McCarthy.

Zeppelin shells.

In reality, Owens and Ritter prevaricated in order to conceal some secret means of communication to which neither was prepared to admit, even decades later. It seems unlikely that Owens could
have contacted the Doctor after boarding the
Barbados
at Grimsby, which tends to suggest that Rolph was complicit. These tantalising intrigues aside, Ritter could count himself fortunate
that his hand-picked Luftwaffe aircrew failed to locate the trawler second time around, since the quick-firing Oerlikon cannon would have made short work of the cumbersome Dornier 18.

The
Barbados
arrived back in Grimsby shortly after six
o’clock on Friday evening. Shattered by the rough sea voyage, and in the certain knowledge that his
dual careers as Snow and Johnny were both sunk in the groggy shallows of the Dogger Bank, charcoal-eyed Owens was immediately returned to his cell on HMS
Corunia
. Meanwhile Robertson and
Richman Stopford took a verbal report from Argles and Paterson, and after satisfying themselves that Owens had behaved himself correctly paid the Little Man a visit.

‘To put it mildly, he was in the most frightful mess,’ claimed Robertson. ‘Snow complained of a duodenal ulcer and really looked desperately ill. He was taxed by us for over
two hours. Had he been a normal human being he would have broken down, but we could get very little satisfaction from him. Although he continued to deny emphatically that he was double-crossing us,
it was quite clear that he was fully expecting to be put into prison.’

Already Owens had rehearsed his defence with considerable care. Harking back to his successful reconnaissance of Kiel harbour in 1936, Snow now claimed that copies of the photographs had somehow
reached Rantzau, who then confronted him in Germany and extracted a confession ‘on pain of death’. By way of unpleasant consequence, Owens had been ‘living in a reign of terror
from the Gestapo’ for several years.

This convenient alibi was nothing more than artful bluff, conjured up on board the
Barbados
as Owens contemplated a date with the hangman under the Treachery Act, in force now for
twenty-four hours. A defence of duress would allow him to claim that his acts had been involuntary, committed against a backdrop of clandestine events on foreign soil that defied investigation and
which might well sway an ordinary jury. Like Peal and Hinchley-Cooke four years earlier, Robertson and Stopford considered the merits of a criminal case long and hard. Since the IP menu card had
not found its way into enemy hands, however, and Owens was indisputably a British agent, B1A were
forced to conclude that there was ‘no possible chance’ of
securing a conviction.

Besides which, the new Treachery Act meant that espionage trials had suddenly become counter-productive. A live spy, even if he could not transmit messages, was always of some use as a reference
source to MI5. Whereas a dead spy was no use at all.

Robertson returned to London with Stopford on Saturday morning. Among several competing priorities in the disappointing aftermath of Operation Lamp was a searching interrogation of William
Rolph. Unfortunately Snow’s errant business partner was found to be absent from the basement office on Sackville Street and from his service flat nearby. Only a determined effort by Stopford
succeeded in running Rolph down by telephone, and secured his reluctant consent to a meeting next day.

Owens travelled back on Saturday afternoon under armed escort. Although the new 18B Order drawn up five days earlier had not yet been served, he was placed under house arrest at Marlborough Road
and instructed to contact Wohldorf that night. Following his customary weather report, together with a brazen request for additional funds to pay off the skipper of the
Barbados
, Owens
demanded to know why Rantzau had failed to appear at the rendezvous.

The operator acknowledged his signal but gave no useful reply. Once again Stelle X appeared to have lost confidence in Colonel Johnny.

For his part, Robertson paid close attention to the new hidden microphone in the dining room and disconnected the private telephone line. Both as Snow and Johnny, the Little Man’s future
– and freedom – were dangling by the slenderest of threads.

On the far side of the Channel the Allied position grew equally precarious. A British counter-attack at Arras stalled with the loss of 40 precious tanks, the small Belgian army was close to
collapse and too many French military formations were
reluctant to fight with sufficient vigour. With the strategic ports of Calais and Boulogne about to fall into German
hands, almost half a million Allied troops became trapped in a shrinking pocket around Dunkirk. Curiously, Hitler chose this moment to endorse a command which would spark much controversy and on
Friday morning approved the so-called ‘halt order’ proposed by his senior commander, General Gerd von Rundstedt, who sought to preserve his armoured divisions in order to defeat the
main French force in the south. Rotund Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring lent his weight to the argument, bragging fatuously that his bombers were more than capable of dealing with the Tommies
and
poilus
bottled up in the north.

For two days the Luftwaffe bombed and strafed without mercy, prompting Berlin to announce that the fate of the Allies in Flanders was sealed. King George VI responded by declaring Sunday a day
of national prayer, and left Buckingham Palace to attend a packed service at Westminster Abbey, joined by Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘The last three days have been
the worst I ever spent for some considerable time,’ Guy Liddell confided to his diary. ‘The news has been so bad that it made me feel physically sick.’

At ten o’clock on Sunday morning Robertson and Stopford descended the short flight of steps at Sackville Street. Plainly agitated even as he answered the door, Rolph tried to distract his
visitors with items of trivia gleaned from his wife, a busy socialite. Robertson allowed this clumsy charade to run its course, then informed Rolph bluntly that Agent Snow had attempted to sell out
MI5 with a dinner list.

‘Rolph expressed astonishment. When questioned, he said that he could not understand how the IP card had got into Owens’ possession. We then asked him if he was prepared to turn out
his drawers and his safe, where Owens said blueprints of MI5 were kept. This he did.’

From inside the safe Rolph produced a brown paper package secured with a rubber band. Inside it Robertson found a medal presented to Rolph by the King of Belgium, as well
as several older IP Club menu cards and two slim folders. On examining the latter, Tar found details of PMS2, a shady counter-intelligence unit set up during the First World War to monitor the
British socialist movement. Rolph had occupied a senior position, though his section had been shut down in 1917 after the controversial trial of Alice Wheeldon, a pacifist suffragette framed for
plotting to assassinate David Lloyd George with a poison dart. Wheeldon had died after going on hunger strike in prison. Then, as now, Rolph’s conduct had evidenced a worrying lack of
scruple.

Robertson’s patience was fast wearing thin. ‘After looking through these papers, and the papers in the drawers of his desk, we were unable to trace his copy of the May 1939 dinner
list. By this time Rolph was becoming a little bothered and never gave us a straight answer to any of our questions.’

A desk jockey rather than a field agent, Rolph was no match for Owens where quick-witted fibbing was called for. At first he denied that Snow and Lily had visited the office on Saturday evening,
and instead blathered tangentially about soldering irons and coffee pot repairs, followed by supper in a cosy little restaurant where the maitre d’ was a close personal friend.

After ten dissembling minutes Robertson decided to reveal his hand. ‘Look, we know for a fact that you were here at seven, because you answered the telephone when McCarthy called. Then Mac
spoke to Snowy.’

‘All right. I admit that I saw them here on Saturday at seven.’

‘Did you give Owens the list?’

‘Certainly not – though I may have shown it to him to prove my credentials. Then . . . then he must have slipped it in his pocket.’

This might have stood as a credible alibi had Rolph not
blown it almost immediately, changing his story yet again. ‘Rolph said that Snow asked Lily to leave the room
as he had some business to discuss. Afterwards Rolph went out to call Lily, and when he came back he saw the 1939 list lying on his table, and put in back in the drawer. He was immediately tripped
up on this point, and then said that Snow must have come back to the office after it had been locked up and broken open the door.’ Robertson might as well have been describing his own
exploits in snaring the communist mole John King, but for one inconvenient fact. ‘The break-in would have been an almost impossible feat, for Snow would have had to climb over the railings to
access the basement, and did not have a key to the outside door.’