Hitler's Spy (20 page)

After rowing ashore in Baltimore Bay the trio were arrested as they boarded a bus to Dublin. All three would spend the next seven years in Mountjoy Prison, the Abwehr war diary speaking of
lessons hard learned: ‘Message received that agents landed in Operation Lobster have been detained. Equipment provided incriminating evidence. By director’s decision further sabotage
acts are to be made direct against England.’

At the same time Hitler issued Directive 16, describing as ‘hopeless’ Britain’s military situation. ‘England still shows no willingness to come to terms,’ carped
the Führer, confused and aggrieved by such impudence. ‘I have therefore decided to prepare – and
if necessary
to carry out – a landing operation to
eliminate the English motherland as a base from which the war against Germany can be continued.’

Though Operation Sealion was largely an exercise in brinkmanship, verisimilitude demanded that preparations be completed by the middle of August, after which all or part of the British Isles
would be placed under occupation in much the same way as France. But before the invasion fleet sailed it was imperative that the Luftwaffe should wrest air superiority from the Royal Air Force. So
began the Battle of Britain, in which radar – the so-called ‘wireless cloud’ – held the key to victory. With MI5 controlling his radio, however, Colonel Johnny was no longer
able to deliver any fresh intelligence coups.
‘Difficult due to new military areas and regulations,’
buzzed the impostor Burton from Marlborough Road.
‘Southern
England all travellers questioned by sentries. Details you require scattered over country. All roads heavily guarded and mined.’

Stelle X was already prepared, so that instructions flashed from Wohldorf during the second week of July seemed calculated to deceive British military leaders. ‘Snow has been in
communication with the other side,’ observed Liddell. ‘Some time ago we heard that the points for invasion were Anglesey, Scotland and the south-east coast. The latest message to Snow
may mean that the Germans will go for Ireland first, and subsequently Wales. This may indicate a change of plan.’

Or did it? Liddell was typically indecisive. ‘On the other hand it seems to be an indication that an attack here is not likely, or impending.’ In reality, the apparently incompetent
Abwehr was playing the double-cross game rather more effectively than MI5.

Matters became confused further still when MI6 reported that Spain, Portugal and Gibraltar were under threat. Worse still, code-breaking work at Bletchley Park remained painfully slow and
haphazard, with Enigma ciphers used by the German army and navy all notably secure. In June intercepts of Abwehr traffic were suspended to allow valuable personnel to concentrate on
Luftwaffe signals. These were at least readable, yet none of them indicated where Operation Sealion would actually beach.

This was truly a looking-glass war. While the Abwehr fed Johnny contradictory hints about Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the disinformation played back on Snow’s transmitter by MI5 was
correspondingly vague
. ‘New super landmine adapted for marine use against barges with shallow draft. Tests show three barges destroyed at once . . . Orders given no evacuation in invaded
areas. Orders to bomb English civilians if necessary. Tommy guns now issued to all British troops.’

There would be no surrender. To emphasise the point, Churchill posed for a photograph cradling a Thompson sub-machine gun, the weapon of choice for Al Capone and John Dillinger, while also
sporting a chalk-stripe suit and a fat cigar. In a rare instance of German wit, this ambiguous image soon appeared on a fake ‘Wanted’ poster dropped by the Luftwaffe, on which
Britain’s ‘gangster’ PM was charged with ‘incitement to murder’.

‘The whole German machine seems to be concentrated on defeating us through propaganda,’ mused Liddell. ‘Practically nothing has happened in the way of sabotage. Neither Snow
nor the incident of the two Afrikaaners and the Indian arriving in Ireland with two suitcases full of bombs suggests anything very thorough in the way of organisation.’

Meanwhile Britain kept calm and carried on. During the third quarter of 1940 almost half a million adult males joined the armed forces, although most new recruits found themselves drilling with
broomsticks, the army having lost much of its weaponry in France. Concrete ‘pillbox’ bunkers sprang up, signposts were torn down, sandy beaches sprinkled with mines, and open spaces
scarred by tank traps and improvised obstacles. Restyled as the Home Guard by the end of July, a ramshackle citizens’ militia took delivery of uniforms consisting of little more than an
armband, backed up by a million rounds of solid
shotgun ammunition, said to be capable of ‘killing a leopard at 200 yards’.

Preparations for Operation Sealion along the Channel coast continued apace, in a highly visible show of strength intended to force Britain to the negotiating table. Delivering a long speech to
the Reichstag on 19 July, Hitler issued a so-called ‘last appeal to reason’, urging Britain to step back from the abyss. The gist of this interminable rant, whose length robbed it of
impact, was that Germany wished only for peace with honour, and for Britain to acknowledge her rightful position in Europe. ‘I can see no reason why this war should go on,’ Hitler
concluded, an unlikely pacifist. ‘Possibly Mr Churchill will again brush aside this statement of mine. In that case, I shall have relieved my conscience with regard to the things to
come.’

This blunt invitation to capitulate was widely reported, and distributed by the Luftwaffe as a propaganda leaflet, gifting needy Britons a supply of free lavatory paper. Perpetually defiant,
Churchill maintained a forbidding silence, informing trusted aides that ‘I do not propose to say anything in reply to Herr Hitler’s speech, not being on speaking terms with
him.’

Throughout this tense interregnum Arthur Owens marked time in a gilded cage at Marlborough Road, a double agent in name only, his significance diminishing as Lily grew larger. The closure of the
Sackville Street office had shut down direct communication with Ritter, leaving the Snow show in the horny hands of his sidekick-nemesis Sam McCarthy. Indeed, Biscuit’s eclipse of Agent Snow
threatened to become total, so much so that some within MI5 were under the impression that the belligerent Canadian had already disposed of the Little Man in the middle of the North Sea.

But if Snow was anxious, Robertson was desperate. Finally, at the end of July, McCarthy was given a second chance to travel to Lisbon to treff with Doctor Rantzau. He departed on the 24th,
flying out from Britain’s last operational civilian airport at
Whitchurch, a grass field outside Bristol, and again masquerading as a wine wholesaler. On arrival in
Lisbon he booked into the Grande Hotel Duas Nacoes, where it quickly became apparent that everyone was a spy, or a racketeer – or both. ‘The hotel proprietor Wissman is a
double-crosser,’ Mac reported afterwards, plainly in his element. ‘He proposed I should help two Jews to get to the USA. The price was 30,000 escudos, to be divided equally. The head
porter is a Portuguese and in German pay. He could not be bought.’

Preoccupied with Operation Lena, Ritter was delayed for fully twelve days, leaving Mac in the care of a local liaison named Henri Döbler. A former German army officer who had amassed a
fortune in the Argentine, Döbler raced yachts and kept a glamorous Portuguese mistress, said to be close to Salazar, the country’s authoritarian leader. ‘He frequents the bars and
hotels in Lisbon where English and American people go,’ Biscuit noted with approval. ‘Part of his work is sending explosives to the United States. He seems to be quite fond of drink,
and on one occasion I was able to drink him under the table.’

By the time Ritter reached Lisbon, the fake wine merchant’s face was well known in every expatriate bar from Estoril to Marvila. An alcoholic, more or less, McCarthy’s foibles were
confirmed by Joan Miller, another of Max Knight’s countersubversion agents, who had recently brought down a spy ring centred on a cipher clerk named Tyler Kent at the American Embassy.
‘The life of an ordinary agent in wartime is hazardous enough,’ she explained. ‘With a double agent, though, the psychological pressures are almost unimaginable. The need for
constant alertness, unremitting duplicity – none of these is conducive to ease of mind. There’s a danger of falling into a mental state akin to a kind of self-imposed schizophrenia. At
the very least, the characteristics required are a steady nerve, a high degree of self-control and a relish for excitement.’

McCarthy, dismissed as an ‘unedifying Canadian’ by Miller,
found juggling all three qualities somewhat problematic. Nor was Ritter much impressed when he
arrived on 5 August, discerning bug-eyes (‘like Basedow’s syndrome’) and the sweaty demeanour of a petty criminal. Biscuit, in turn, was disconcerted by the Doctor, judged to be
an ‘exceedingly common Bavarian type’ with a penchant for swearing and filthy stories, quite unlike the urbane playboy described by Snow. ‘He speaks with a broad New York
accent,’ Mac noted, sizing up the stocky, broad-shouldered lout with a critical eye. ‘But despite the discrepancies there is little doubt that the two doctors are identical.’

Having taken twelve days to reach Lisbon, Ritter remained in the port for just twelve hours. ‘The Doctor said that he thought Owens’ work was falling off,’ McCarthy related
with undisguised glee. ‘He had done some very good work in the past, but was getting a little slack.’ Sticking to the script dictated by Robertson, Mac excused the lack of Sealion
intelligence by fibbing that Colonel Johnny was worried about Lily, whose pregnancy had developed complications, and was unable to get around much ‘owing to the fact that he had to be on the
radio every night’. Yet again, Ritter promised that at least one new agent would soon arrive by parachute in England and asked McCarthy to locate a suitable drop zone.

The crux of the treff remained the ‘secret documents’ promised by Snow two months earlier. There were no MI5 blueprints, and no menu cards listing senior Intelligence People.
Instead, after surrendering his passport to a photographer, who copied it front to back, Mac handed over a National Registration Identity Card along with an ordinary ration book. Counterfeit copies
were desperately needed for the new Abwehr agents assigned to Operation Lena, whose misfortune it was that the documents delivered by Johnny’s ‘hundred per cent friend’ McCarthy
had been carefully doctored by MI5 to include a number of telltale mistakes. The ID card, for example,
was machine-folded, whereas genuine examples were folded by hand. The
ration book, too, was non-standard, being of a type issued only to travellers, and pink instead of buff yellow.

With luck, the next Nazi agent sent to Britain would land at a spot chosen by McCarthy, carrying incriminating papers guaranteed to secure a conviction under the Treachery Act. That, or a rapid
conversion to the double-cross cause, thus expanding the XX network. For the first time since the outbreak of war, the vexed case of Agent Snow looked set to deliver a positive result for MI5.

Absolute jake.

Mindful of the threatened invasion, McCarthy put across an ‘extremely exaggerated and totally inaccurate’ picture of British ground defences. Rantzau was dismissive and told Mac to
concentrate instead on gathering information about RAF fighters and forward airfields, urging also that Owens’ son Bob take a job in an aircraft factory. Inevitably, the conversation turned
to the North Sea debacle. ‘Rantzau said he was there on the Thursday night, and that it was their plane which had circled over the trawler on Monday. From what I could gather, it seemed that
Snow knew it was the Doctor and that he was coming on Monday.’

Ritter’s parting shot took the form of a warning, opaque and ominous in equal measure. Göring’s Luftwaffe, he said, planned to ‘open the birdcage’ on 14 August.
‘But the big show will not begin then, and will start later.’

Having nibbled cautiously at Biscuit, the ‘exceedingly common Bavarian type’ Doctor hastened home with the vital identity documents, leaving McCarthy to await further instructions
and drink Döbler under many more tables. ‘Biscuit got so drunk in Lisbon,’ sneered Owens some time later, consumed by hatred of the rival agent who had tied him in knots on board
the
Barbados
. ‘Made himself ridiculous and threw away money.’

Be that as it may, several days later the thirsty double agent
took delivery of a brand new Afu short-wave transmitter and several thousand dollars in cash. With his
mission accomplished, Biscuit returned home on a Japanese merchant ship, the
Suwa Maru
, eventually disembarking at Liverpool on 19 August after a full week at sea. ‘Biscuit has
returned with an up-to-date wireless set in a suitcase and £950,’ Liddell reported with evident pleasure. ‘His whole visit seems to have been a thorough success.’

The Abwehr’s newfound confidence in the London stelle was confirmed when Wohldorf buzzed Owens on the new Afu transmitter to request twenty sets of specimen names and serials for forged ID
cards. After consulting with the Registrar-General, the incomparably named Sir Sylvanus Percival Vivian, the Wireless Committee obliged with a dozen candidate identities. The first eight were
genuine, and included Owens, Lily, Maurice Burton and Gwilym Williams. The remainder were wholly fictitious.

Meanwhile, Hitler issued a fresh Directive calling for the complete destruction of the Royal Air Force. As the air battle above the Channel intensified, the Luftwaffe also paid tentative visits
to industrial targets around Birmingham, Liverpool and Southampton. This ongoing strategy of tension meant that London was spared for the time being, although at the end of July a searchlight
battery in Richmond Park was sprayed with machine-gun fire, prompting the local golf club to draw up a set of emergency rules. Players were politely requested to collect bomb and shell splinters to
avoid damage to mowers; balls moved by enemy action could be replaced as near as possible to their original position. Best of all: ‘A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous
explosion of a bomb or shell or by machine-gun fire may play another ball from the same place.’