Hitler's Spy (22 page)

Disappointingly, the first Lena mission washed out. On the night of 1 September Ritter drove to an airfield near Rennes with his most experienced V-man, the Swede Gösta Caroli, who had left
Britain only in December and would now return under the codename Nilberg. The two men shook hands on the tarmac, after which A.3719 hauled his transmitter and baggage into the belly of the sinister
black Heinkel while Ritter retired to a hotel to await Gartenfeld’s return. Over the course of the next hour Caroli endured freezing temperatures in the cramped bomb bay, scarcely able to
move, and green with fright at the prospect of a low-altitude jump over blacked-out enemy territory. But the drop was scrubbed. On crossing the English coastline Gartenfeld encountered searchlights
and deteriorating weather, and elected to return to base with his human payload still on board.

At daybreak, McCarthy and the various reception parties positioned on the ground by MI5 left the Quantocks disappointed.

More Zeppelin shells, or so it seemed.

For the Abwehr, Caroli’s failure to leap into the clutches of MI5 masked a lucky escape. Regardless, the hastily planned espionage offensive would suffer another
serious blow the following evening when Hilmar Dierks, the spymaster who had first recruited Owens back in 1936, was killed in a car accident after a night on the tiles with a trio of agents bound
for Scotland. ‘He drank too much and had to be persuaded not to drive,’ lamented Ritter. ‘In spite of blackout regulations they were dazzled by the headlights of an oncoming car
and hit a tree. Everyone else walked away with minor cuts and scratches. But Dierks was dead.’

To add insult to injury, Ritter then found himself beaten to the punch by a colleague, Kurt Mirow of Abwehr II in Cologne. During the early hours of Tuesday, 3 September, a party of four
ill-prepared spies crept ashore at Romney Marsh in Kent. Trained to work in pairs, José Waldberg and Carl Meier made landfall at Dungeness, their companions Charles van den Kieboom and
Sjoerd Pons arriving a few miles further along the coast at Dymchurch. After enjoying a liquid lunch and celebratory meal at Le Touquet the previous day the group had set out from Boulogne,
crossing the Channel in a fishing smack under cover of darkness before transferring to dinghies and rowing ashore in the early hours. All were short-term reporting agents, with rations sufficient
for no more than a week. The beaches on which they landed were among those targeted by Operation Sealion, the invasion front having been narrowed to a 40-mile strip between Eastbourne and
Hythe.

Unlike the aborted mission of Gösta Caroli, who was controlled from Stelle X, MI5 received no advance warning of the four Cologne agents via Snow’s transmitter. Even blessed with this
advantage, however, each would be captured within hours, their comic misadventures soon passing into the invasion folklore of 1940.

Waldberg and Meier were particularly inept, dropping their
maps and codes overboard even before reaching dry land, then dozing off beneath an abandoned lifeboat. As dawn
broke the two spies moved inland onto Romney Marsh, where they holed up beneath a large holly bush and pondered how best to proceed. Both were severely hungover, so that thirst became a major
distraction. After several parched hours Meier decided to walk into Lydd in search of a drink, and immediately aroused suspicion by asking for a bottle of ‘champagne cider’ in the
Rising Sun pub at nine-thirty in the morning, well outside normal licensing hours. On being challenged by alert locals, Meier pretended to be a Dutch refugee and foolishly let slip that he was not
alone.

Meanwhile Waldberg rigged their transmitter in a tree and managed to send off two messages, one reporting
‘no mines, few soldiers, unfinished blockhouse’
, the other vowing
to
‘resist thirst until Saturday – long live Germany’
. A third signal, scribbled later and probably not transmitted, disclosed that Meier had already been captured. That
night Waldberg was also detained, following a thorough sweep by police and troops.

Kieboom and Pons failed to match even this modest achievement. After landing on the shore beneath the Napoleonic fort at Dymchurch Redoubt the two slept for an hour in an empty bungalow, then
unpacked their transmitter and set about ferrying their kit across the narrow coast road. Towards dawn a patrolling sentry from the Somerset Light Infantry glimpsed a flicker of movement in the
long grass opposite the beach. Upon further investigation, Private Tollervey found himself confronted by a Eurasian-looking man with ‘slit eyes’ and ‘smooth, coloured skin’.
Kieboom (whose mother was Japanese) was soaking wet and wore binoculars draped around his neck, along with a pair of white shoes. Tollervey marched the bedraggled ex-clerk to a nearby seaside villa
which served as battalion headquarters, where Kieboom demonstrated a tighter grasp of fieldcraft by flushing his linen codes and secret ink down the lavatory.

Pons was arrested a half-hour later, after approaching a group of bystanders to ask where he was. ‘They were given no contacts in this country,’ noted Guy
Liddell with grim satisfaction. ‘In fact, they were singularly badly directed. To anybody with any knowledge of conditions here it should have been apparent that none of them could hope to
succeed.’

Questioned at Seabrook police station, the Romney Marsh Four confessed to being Nazi espionage agents. They were next transported to Latchmere House, the forbidding interrogation centre
established by MI5 on Ham Common, just two miles south across Richmond Park from Snow’s London stelle on Marlborough Road. During the Great War the large Victorian mansion had been used as an
asylum for shell-shocked infantry officers and still boasted a functional padded cell. Now known simply as Camp 020, and liberally seeded with listening devices, this uncompromising home for
hostiles was run by a fearsome monocled commandant, Colonel Robin ‘Tin-Eye’ Stephens, whose interrogation team included Edward Hinchley-Cooke, Owens’ former nemesis at MI5.

‘The initial onslaught was against Waldberg,’ remarked Stephens, ‘described by his companions as the enthusiast of the party.’ A classified document until 1999,
Tin-Eye’s eccentric official history of Camp 020 omits to mention that prisoners were sometimes obliged to strip naked and stand to attention for several hours, while an openly unimpressed
female secretary took shorthand notes. ‘Meier and Pons spoke readily enough in their spleen against the shabby preparation of their adventure by the German secret service. Kieboom required
less gentle persuasion. All four had been given a short-term operational mission: to report on troops, airfields, anti-aircraft defences, ships and civilian morale. They had been assured that their
precarious life in England would be short, and that the German armies would soon rescue them.’

Since Waldberg had used his transmitter unsupervised, none
of the four could safely be used as double-cross agents. According to Stephens – though no one else
– Kieboom agreed to contact his German controllers and fib that the party had gone into hiding after Pons caught a bullet. With bitter irony, Pons alone would escape execution after the
hapless quartet were sent for trial at the Old Bailey under the unforgiving Treachery Act.

With battalions of spies descending on Kent, Tar Robertson had no option but to try to mend fences with Agent Snow. On the evening of 3 September, as the spy sweep concluded on Romney Marsh,
Robertson paid the Little Man a visit at Marlborough Road. ‘I asked if he would be prepared to continue working with McCarthy. Snow consented to do this, but said that Mac behaved extremely
badly and was most abusive. Not only to him, but to people in the local pub, and this created a very bad impression with all concerned. I said that in future Mac was going to take all his
instructions directly from me, and I would instruct him when I wanted him to go down to Richmond.’

Arthur Owens was tickled to death. After three months in double-cross purgatory, living under virtual house arrest, Hitler’s chief spy in England was set to stage a comeback to shame
Lazarus.

Unlike the Swede codenamed Nilberg. Late on Wednesday evening Gösta Caroli clambered back on board Hauptmann Gartenfeld’s matt black Heinkel-111 and steeled himself for another
nauseous, sub-zero white-knuckle ride. By a curious coincidence, Adolf Hitler chose precisely the same moment to address a mass rally of nurses and female workers at the vast Sportpalast in Berlin,
seeking to ramp up the war of nerves and sending his audience into transports of delight. ‘In England the people are filled with curiosity,’ teased the Führer playfully.
‘They keep asking – why doesn’t he come? Be calm. He’s coming! He’s coming!’

In truth only one man was coming. Shortly after midnight Caroli finally hit the silk over Northamptonshire, landing hard and fast on farmland near the remote village of
Denton. Gartenfeld had warned A.3719 to deploy a secondary parachute for his heavy transmitter equipment, but the Swede chose to ignore this advice and jumped from 5,000 feet with the Afu set
strapped to his chest. His descent was correspondingly rapid, the wireless connecting with his chin on impact and knocking him senseless. Several hours later, at 6.30 a.m., Caroli regained
consciousness, cut himself free from his harness and dragged his gear into a ditch. Still concussed and decidedly groggy, Agent Nilberg then fell asleep.

Towards the end of the afternoon a labourer working in Twenty-Acre Meadow noticed a pair of feet protruding from a hedge. The mysterious sleeper was duly reported to Cliff Beechener, a tenant
farmer and local Home Guard volunteer. After fetching a shotgun, Beechener set off to investigate and quickly deduced that Caroli was a foreigner by virtue of an unusually large knot in his necktie
and his curious orange leather shoes.

‘It occurred to me that I would not think much of a chap with shoes like that,’ Beechener joked forty years later. ‘On closer inspection I saw he was lying on a parachute. I
took him to the house and made a call to the police, and I remember the sweat pouring off him. I had the BBC news on the wireless. Stuart Hibberd was reading about the RAF bombing Hamburg, and the
poor chap put his head in his hands. He said he had a wife and family there.’

By nightfall Caroli was in police custody in Northampton. Having arrived by parachute with a wireless transmitter, incriminating maps, £200 in cash and a Mauser automatic pistol, the Swede
could hardly deny that he was a German spy. Due to intransigence and petty rivalries, however, fully forty-eight hours would pass before Ritter’s first parachute agent was
handed over to MI5, thereby confirming Guy Liddell’s worst fears about losing track of incoming agents as they fell to earth. As a result, Caroli was transferred to Camp 020
only on Saturday, 7 September.

‘For all his Swedish identity he was a fanatical Nazi,’ vouched Tin-Eye Stephens. ‘The first interrogation elicited the names of several Abwehr officers in Hamburg, his
controlling stelle, and elsewhere. He claimed to have been recruited for his mission only some two months earlier, but admitted that he had been in England, working as a journalist for a Swedish
press agency, in 1938 and 1939.’

There was also the small matter of his forged identity papers. These were made out in Caroli’s own name, but carried telltale serial numbers buzzed by Snow three weeks earlier.
‘Pressure on Caroli reached its most acute stage when he was asked to disclose details of other agents who might follow in his footsteps,’ boasted Stephens. ‘He prevaricated, then
gave slightly. There was another agent, due to arrive by the same means in a matter of days.’

The V-man waiting in the wings was the Dane Wulf Schmidt, codenamed Leonhardt by Ritter. Caroli was deeply reluctant to betray his colleague, for the pair had struck up a close friendship during
training for Operation Lena, besides which the Swede was genuinely loyal to the Hitler regime. Under intense psychological pressure, however, not least the threat of trial and execution, Agent
Nilberg revealed all in exchange for a shrewd promise by MI5 to spare the lives of both men.

For all involved in the double-cross system the breaking of Gösta Caroli at Camp 020 was a eureka moment. Within two short days Robertson, Liddell and MI5 had found themselves gifted with a
new XX agent, codenamed SUMMER by B1A, along with a head start on a second Nazi spy whose name, background and physical description were now a matter of record.
For Tar in
particular, it was the first piece of truly good news since Sunday, 3 September 1939.

Cliff Beechener found less to celebrate. Having relieved Caroli of £200 in cash, a windfall he dutifully handed over to the police, the enterprising farmer later tried to claim back the
money, citing an obscure ruling from 1768 which held that a British subject was entitled to keep any property confiscated from an enemy of the king.

The police referred the matter to MI5, from whence there came no reply.

9

On the morning of 7 September, Black Saturday, code-breakers at Bletchley Park ascertained that the Luftwaffe were again preparing for action on a grand scale. By the middle of
the afternoon Chain Home radar plots confirmed that approximately 350 bombers and 600 fighters were poised to cross the Channel, a vast formation one and a half miles high and occupying 800 square
miles of sky. Having travelled from Carinhall to assume personal command of the renewed aerial assault, Göring watched from a collapsible chair perched on the cliffs at Cap Blanc Nez, the
sense of imperious valedictory picnic underscored by a nearby table groaning under the weight of sandwiches and champagne.

The target, finally, was London. ‘The moment is a historic one,’ the chubby Reichsmarschall crowed above the hum of a thousand aero engines. ‘The Führer has decided to
deliver a mighty blow!’

As the huge aerial armada formed up in the skies above Northern France, intelligence gleaned from the growing menagerie of spies at Camp 020 seemed to confirm that the British Isles were about
to be invaded. Waldberg, the leader of the Romney Marsh Four, had hoped to hold out until Saturday, thirst permitting. Caroli, too, anticipated liberation within a fortnight. Furthermore, two miles
to the north across
Richmond Park, Snow’s new Afu transmitter hummed with a series of urgent requests from Stelle X:
‘Where are troops, tanks etc stationed
for counter-attack? What kind, how many? Fortifications near coast between Isle of Wight and Margate – guns – anti-aircraft – barbed wire – mines – are they flooded at
high tide? Are they stronger where coast is steep, or where it is flat?’