Hitler's Spy (25 page)

A case for his prosecution under the Treachery Act was drawn up but not pursued. Gander escaped death by the skin of his teeth, yet just three days after his arrival at Camp 020 Robertson and B
Division once again found themselves battling to prevent the conspicuous execution of captive Nazi agents. ‘Lord Swinton came down today and cross-examined us about the spy cases,’
complained Liddell. ‘The Prime Minister has evidently been asking why we had not shot some of them.’

A personal appointee of Churchill, Ernest Swinton headed the Security Executive and was hell-bent on reforming MI5. Imperious and intolerant, he had even recruited a business-efficiency expert,
all of which smacked of Mussolini and trains running on time. ‘I am still in ignorance of what Swinton’s
position is,’ carped Liddell, polishing his gloves
and preparing for battle. ‘All we know is that he appears to think he is head of MI5, and to some extent even of SIS. He quoted some minute and said that in future nobody was to be offered
his life without his authority. I told him that information was really by far the most important matter to be considered.’

Ironically, as MI5 argued to save lives, Gösta Caroli attempted to take his own. Like the troublesome Snow menage, the Swede codenamed Summer had also been evacuated from Blitz-torn London,
taking up residence at The Old Parsonage in Hinxton, an isolated village a dozen miles south of Cambridge. Supremely secluded, the safehouse offered plenty of space for aerials and minders, to whom
Caroli began speaking too freely about his pre-war espionage career. ‘Inevitably Summer found his way back to Camp 020,’ wrote Tin-Eye Stephens, who set about fresh interrogation.
‘He remained at heart a Nazi, and made an attempt at suicide by cutting the arteries in his wrists with a razor blade. He was found in his cell in a pool of blood, but prompt action saved his
life.’

On recovering, Caroli admitted that he had spied in the Midlands from October 1938 onwards, living in Handsworth while posing as a journalist and sending back regular reports on utilities,
harbours and factories. He had left England only in December 1939; an attempt to return at the beginning of 1940 came to grief when his transport was torpedoed in the North Sea. That Caroli had not
been entirely frank during his initial questioning was a cause for concern, but after several sessions with the in-house psychiatrist at 020, Dr Harold Dearden, he was allowed to return to the
‘Home for Incurables’ at Hinxton.

John Masterman wrote of a lesson hard learned. ‘A double-agent is a tricky customer and needs the most careful supervision. His every mood has to be watched, and his every reaction
studied. Only unremitting care and some psychological
finesse could coax a converted parachutist along safe lines and into a better way of thinking.’

Since Caroli was plainly unstable, Robertson decided to employ a stand-in to compile Summer’s field reports. His choice was none other than Walter Dicketts, the veteran confidence
trickster who had attempted to sell Snow a phoney patent for squeezable mustard six months earlier, only to stumble headlong into a nest of counterfeit Nazi spies.

During the intervening period Dicketts had tried and failed to rejoin the air intelligence branch, lurching always from one financial crisis to another. ‘So long as he is not given large
sums of money to play about with he should be perfectly satisfactory,’ Robertson had assured MI6, to no avail. The hapless crook then suffered a serious accident in the blackout, collecting
three broken ribs and a dislocated thumb. By the beginning of October, however, Dicketts was sufficiently recovered to begin XX work for B1A. ‘The news you gave me yesterday is the best I
have had for a very long time,’ he wrote to Tar from a seedy bedsit in Maida Vale. ‘I am anxious to start work and very pleased to hear that you may be able to arrange an advance of
£50. The money is a godsend as I am again really at desperation point. I have fourteen pawn tickets and nothing left to pawn.’

Awarded the curious cryptonym CELERY, on a salary of £10 per week, Dick moved into the Home for Incurables at Hinxton, stepping gladly into Caroli’s mustard-coloured shoes. His first
spoof espionage tour, in November, visited Nottingham and Grantham, where he infiltrated the British Manufacturing & Research Company (‘I could very easily have destroyed part of the
factory if I had had two Mills bombs in my pocket’) and surveilled various aerodromes. A week later he was in Birmingham, poking around the Webley small-arms factory, followed by a trip to
Bristol, where he found morale dangerously low after heavy bombing.

‘There is more raid panic in Bristol than in any other of the large manufacturing towns I have visited,’ Dicketts concluded. ‘I made a comprehensive tour
of the aircraft factory, and as I had a badge on and was walking briskly without hat or coat, I was not questioned.’ For the unreformed confidence trickster, adept in the dark art of false
identities, the Celery role was a cakewalk.

At the Addlestone Home for Incurables, Agent Snow was also observed to be ‘feeling his oats’ once more after a long period of quiescence, anxious to return to active double-cross
duty. The increasing importance of Tate (Schmidt) and Summer (Caroli) further threatened his tenure as Hitler’s chief spy in England, and might yet exhaust his usefulness to Robertson and
MI5. This in turn raised further alarming possibilities, for meddlesome Lord Swinton was now insistent that even redundant spies should be considered for prosecution, regardless of any past
services rendered.

Fortunately for Owens, Ritter kept Colonel Johnny in play by pressing for a treff in Lisbon or Canada. For MI5 this latest proposal raised a multitude of ticklish concerns. ‘Snow must be
watched very carefully,’ advised Liddell. ‘The question of putting a microphone into his new house is being considered.’

Concerns were also raised that Owens’ wireless operator, Maurice Burton, was in danger of going native in the wilds of Surrey. ‘Snow and Burton are always going out to the local pub
drinking,’ noted one visitor to Homefields. ‘Burton is running round with a girl, who he says comes from Winchester, and who he has known for a very long time. The reason for this is
apparently to create a good impression locally and not arouse suspicion.’

Unlike boozy ex-dope smuggler Sam McCarthy. While engaged in a spoof spy tour of the Midlands the volatile Canadian aroused the suspicions of the owner of a Grantham hotel, who reported his
guest to the police. Displaying
commendable initiative, an inspector named Curry listened in on his telephone calls, then posed as a Fifth Column agent to entrap the
mysterious stranger. After responding favourably to Curry’s overtures, McCarthy found himself lifted as a German spy, a victim of verisimilitude run wild.

This latest manifestation of ‘excessive zeal’ saw Agent Biscuit ordered to lie low by MI5. ‘This message was sent to the other side,’ scoffed Liddell. ‘They replied
asking where Lielow was.’

Surprisingly, the previously dormant Welsh Ring now stirred to pull off a spectacular coup. In September Agent G.W., the former police inspector Gwilym Williams, received a letter from a Spanish
journalist named Piernavieja del Pozo, who requested a meeting in London. Owens buzzed Wohldorf to check his credentials and learned that del Pozo was an emissary from Witzke, the hard-drinking
‘Commander’ with whom Snow and G.W. had mixed bathtub explosives in Antwerp a year earlier. A rendezvous was duly arranged for 10 October near the Spanish Embassy in Belgrave
Square.

Less a treff, more an
encuentro
.

Del Pozo, it transpired, was a fascist Falangist with film-star good looks, installed in a plush suite at the Athenaeum on Piccadilly and writing up ‘unbiased’ reports on an island
under siege for the Spanish press. Astonishingly, what was in effect an Abwehr stunt had been sponsored by the British ambassador in Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare, with the ludicrous result that an
enemy sympathiser was invited to visit airfields, dockyards and the headquarters of 7 Corps. At his meeting with Williams, the dilettante spy nicknamed POGO by MI5 handed over a fresh questionnaire
together with a tin of talcum powder containing £3,900. This enormous sum, the equivalent of £175,000 today, was intended for A.3504, Colonel Johnny.

Humdinger.

G.W, however, had other ideas. ‘Williams is very incensed at having the money taken away from him and threatened to
resign,’ noted Liddell. ‘Marriott
managed to calm him down. He is a rather unpleasant type who is obviously on the make.’

As the case developed Williams was encouraged to dispatch doctored reports via the Spanish diplomatic bag, though del Pozo soon shot his own fox by giving an indiscreet interview to the
Daily Express
. ‘I am pro-German and think Hitler will win this war,’ Pogo told their reporter, wearing pyjamas at noon and somewhat refreshed. ‘You may be fighting
against dictatorship, but you will have to adopt dictator’s methods if you want to win.’

Disastrously, the
Express
article confirmed that del Pozo was sending back secret reports through official channels. After the talkative Señor asked to visit ‘troops in the
trenches at Dover’ and take part in a Bomber Command raid on Berlin, Guy Liddell devised a cunning plan. ‘Pogo’s bomber would return to some Home for Incurables, where he would be
kept for the remainder of the war. A notice would appear in the papers to the effect that three of our bombers did not return. In this way we should not endanger the position of Snow or
G.W.’

The ambitious plan fell through after del Pozo was prevailed upon to moderate his tone. ‘I have seen Britain stage a comeback which we in Spain did not expect,’ he explained in a
subsequent – doctored – piece for the
Express
, having experienced a Damascene moment (or been flipped) in his rooms at the Athenaeum. ‘She has the means and the
determination to wage a long war and to fight to the end for victory.’

Pogo had bounced, Rolph had vanished and McCarthy sent into exile in Lielow. A controlled request from Agent Snow to treff in Northern Ireland was politely rejected by Ritter, who no doubt
recognised another bold attempt by MI5 to engineer a reverse Venlo and add the elusive Doctor Rantzau to the living library at Camp 020. The conspicuous failure of Operation Lena was equally
disconcerting and served to aggravate doubts sown first by the abortive trawler treff in May, then by Owens’
subsequent no-show in Lisbon in July. Moreover, much of the
wireless dope feeding back was blatant propaganda.

What on earth was going on in Perfidious Albion?

In an effort to discover the truth, on the night of 2 November Gartenfeld dropped another parachute agent into England. Masquerading as a Dutchman named Jan Willem Ter Braak, the latest V-man
touched down near Haversham in Buckinghamshire, just a few miles north of the top-secret code-breaking station at Bletchley Park. While his real name, Engelbertus Fukken, suggested a predisposition
to misfortune, there were no sprained ankles, no prowling Home Guards and no imprudent forays into public houses. Ter Braak simply abandoned his parachute in a field and made his way unobtrusively
to Cambridge. There he obtained lodgings at 58 St Barnabas Road, conveniently close to the railway station, and explained to his landlords, a couple named Sennitt, that he was a scientist who had
fled to Britain after the German invasion of Holland.

This story was entirely plausible, and his false identity papers passed unremarked. These, too, were based on serials transmitted by Snow in August, marking Ter Braak as a Lena agent dispatched
from Stelle X. Why then did Nikolaus Ritter decide to send another V-man to Cambridge when Gösta Caroli was already in position, seven miles south of the city in sleepy Hinxton? In all
likelihood, Ter Braak’s mission included checking up on the ‘Swedish friend’ with an injured ankle, just as the tall, bespectacled stranger had called on Snow at Norbiton Avenue
in October 1939.

Certainly Ter Braak was of a higher calibre than previous Lena agents. Despite flawed papers the fake Dutch scientist was able to rent an office on Rose Crescent, plumb in the centre of the
city, where he installed his suitcase transmitter. Stranger still, Ter Braak was living within fifty yards of MI5’s RSLO in Cambridge, Major Richard Dixon.

Wulf Schmidt’s situation was even more intimate. During his
first few weeks as a XX agent Tate remained under lock and key at Camp 020, with his Afu set housed in a
nearby equestrian centre. Now Wohldorf learned that Leonhardt had found lodgings in Barnet, and established contact with Caroli. Both statements were true – up to a point. The meeting with
Caroli took the form of an anguished confrontation at 020, while his digs were an MI5 safehouse called Round Bush House near Radlett. Indeed, so pleasant were his new surroundings in Hertfordshire,
and free from German bombs, that Schmidt soon found himself joined by Tar Robertson and his wife Joan, together with their young daughter Belinda and a nanny. Soon Schmidt was helping with
household chores, and honed his skills as a photographer by taking family snaps. The only catch was his colourful language, which favoured expletives such as
scheisse
, and
Götz
von Berlichingen
, an oath derived from Goethe meaning ‘kiss my arse’.

For the Romney Marsh Four life was rather less comfortable. At the end of November Waldberg, Meier, Pons and Kieboom filed into the dock at the Old Bailey, each charged with assisting the enemy
under the Treachery Act. Although the four spies faced trial by jury the hearing was held in camera, with Court Number One securely locked and guarded, its windows covered over with sheets of brown
paper. So keen were the Security Executive to obtain convictions that the case was presented in person by the Solicitor General, Sir William Jowitt. ‘They were not difficult cases to
prosecute,’ Jowitt wrote. ‘The only possible defence the accused could put forward was that they had been forced by the Germans to undertake espionage, and were resolved to give
themselves up directly they landed. This was the line of defence in fact adopted.’