Hitler's Spy (36 page)

‘Tate’s reports from Wye were so much appreciated,’ crowed MI5, ‘that one Abwehr official, as we learned subsequently, was of the opinion that they could “even
decide the outcome of the war”.’ It is no coincidence that Tar Robertson was awarded an OBE in the Birthday Honours List for June 1944.

The bodyguard of lies interposed via Operation Fortitude was undoubtedly the high-water mark of the entire Allied double-cross system and would continue to fool the enemy until August. Placing
this achievement in context, John Masterman, a keen sportsman, was careful to acknowledge the colossal influence of Little Man Snow, MI5’s troublesome alpha agent. ‘Running a team of
double agents is very like running a club cricket side. Older players lose their form and are gradually replaced by newcomers. Well-established veterans unaccountably fail to make runs, whereas
youngsters whose style at first appears crude and untutored make large scores. If in the double-cross world Garbo was the Bradman of the later years, then Snow was the W. G. Grace of the early
period.’

Indeed, by July 1944 Arthur Owens was back on the crease, acting as a stool pigeon on the special wing, intent on working his ticket. In his new role Snow blew the whistle on illicit
communications between Dartmoor and the Isle of Man, which again threatened to compromise Tate and Summer and would lead to the dismissal of the camp commander. Snow also informed on the Norwegian
agent Tor Glad (aka Jeff), already judged unreliable by B1A, and now said to be ‘building up a stock of information concerning MI5 which he intends to
broadcast after
the war’. According to Owens, the rogue Scandinavian threatened to slit his, Owens’, throat. Robertson, however, had heard it all before.

There were other glimpses of vintage Snow. During the early hours of 13 June the first V1 flying bomb to fall on London rattled over the weald of Kent before its noisy ramjet engine cut out over
Bethnal Green, dropping the warhead on Grove Road and killing six civilians, two of them children. Within a fortnight German rocketeers had launched more than 2,000 of these primitive cruise
missiles, killing 1,600 people, seriously wounding 4,500 more and damaging 200,000 homes. Renewed threats by Hitler to reduce London to a ‘garden of ruins’ no longer rang hollow.
Wrenching his attention from the plight of Snow and Snow Junior, the Home Secretary warned of a ‘serious deterioration’ in civilian morale. Churchill in turn demanded robust offensive
action, urging the Chiefs of Staff to obliterate the cunningly concealed launch sites in Northern France and ‘drench the cities of the Ruhr’ with poison gas.

Having bided his time, Owens chose this moment to divulge that the Doodlebugs themselves might carry chemical warheads. Referring back to his encounter with the four sinister scientists in
Hamburg on the eve of war, Owens now warned of the lethal ‘acid vapour’ with ‘extraordinary corrosive powers’ that was capable of melting skin and disintegrating metals.
Hints about deadly new chemical agents had also been dropped in Lisbon in 1941. Once again, a junior officer traipsed down to Dartmoor. ‘This substance was so dangerous that the Germans have
not hitherto had any effective means of using it. Snow argues that the conception of the rocket has altered the whole position, and is convinced that the V1 is a combination of the rocket and this
vapour.’

Within MI5, Snow’s latest dubious revelation raised the dread spectre of Zeppelin shells. ‘This story may be five per cent true,’ guessed Helenus Milmo, a newcomer to B
Division and later a
High Court judge. ‘I doubt if it is more, and have no idea where this five per cent lies.’

Five per cent, or one hundred per cent? Milmo knew nothing of the sinister scheme to poison British reservoirs in 1940, or that Ritter had prized Snow’s skills as a chemist. The lethal
vapour described by Owens conceivably nodded towards Tabun and Sarin, two deadly nerve agents developed in Nazi laboratories, both of which might have been delivered by V1 and V2 missiles, together
with deadly bacteria and radioactive waste. Thankfully London was spared these horrors, and Owens’ warnings about new forms of frightfulness were never put to the test. As always in the
mysterious, unverifiable world of rogue Agent Snow, there was no way of separating the signal from the noise, or the real dope from the stunts and the spoofs.

For the Twenty Committee, the flying-bomb menace posed a very different problem. Within days of the opening barrage the Abwehr began to buzz urgent requests for details of V1 damage, pressing
agents such as Tate, Garbo and Zigzag for arrival times and points of impact. Since accurate reporting would enable the enemy to improve their aim, MI6 scientist R. V. Jones suggested subtle
manipulation of double-cross data fed back to Germany, with the object of ensuring that missiles fell short of central London. Residents of hard-hit southern suburbs such as Wandsworth, Croydon and
Dulwich might not have approved but their sacrifice was not in vain. ‘Up to fifty per cent more casualties might have been incurred,’ reckoned Jones, whose own parents lived in Dulwich.
‘Up to 2,750 more killed, and up to 8,000 more seriously injured. Even if only a fifth of these figures is ascribed to the success of our deception, it was clearly worthwhile.’

According to Masterman, the Doodlebug stunt also prolonged the working lives of several XX agents. ‘The deception was ample justification for keeping the agents alive after the invasion of
France, more particularly as the less important agents
were the most useful for this purpose.’ By the beginning of September 1944 most of the V1 launch sites in France
had been overrun, and the threat much reduced. In ghastly contrast, bungling Nikolaus Ritter had allowed a thousand-plane raid to flatten Hanover. Fate, so it seemed, had delivered payback for
Colonel Johnny’s betrayal of the radar secret in 1939, and the Luftwaffe’s failure to blind Chain Home at the start of the Battle of Britain.

A series of rapid advances during August and September 1944 carried the Allied armies almost to Brussels, prompting optimists to predict once again that the war could be over by Christmas.
‘I should very much like to arrange for the release of both Snow and his son before the end of hostilities,’ Robertson wrote to the Home Office, offering a philanthropic promise that
MI5 would support the redundant agent until he was back on his feet. ‘Neither is now considered to be a potential menace to the security of this country, and since his internment in Dartmoor
Snow has been of considerable use in furnishing bits of information which he has picked up from his fellow detainees.’

Having partially atoned for his sins, Hitler’s chief spy in England finally regained his liberty on the last day of August. John Marriott collected Owens from Dartmoor by car, noting that
the Little Man showed ‘scarcely any gratitude’, emerging from the tall granite gatehouse with no ID card or ration book, and just two pounds ten shillings in his threadbare pockets.
‘I had very little conversation with him apart from trivialities,’ Marriott added. ‘Owens did ask if I knew where Lily was, stating that what he really wanted to know was the
whereabouts of the child. I told him, truthfully, that I had no idea of where she was.’

Tar Robertson knew full well. In July 1942 Lily Sophia Bade had married a precision turner named Brian Funnell who worked in a local aircraft factory and took on Jean Louise as his
own. Only then was the blushing war bride allowed to leave Homefields, but would remain in Surrey under the watchful eye of the Security Service. Snow would never see his mistress
again, nor Jean Louise, the daughter born on Eagle Day in August 1940 as the Luftwaffe opened the birdcage.

With no visible means of support, and nowhere to go, B1A were forced to support Owens for six long months. Released simultaneously with his father, Bob Owens showed greater initiative, setting
up home in Kingston and marrying patient Lavinia Cantello at All Saints Church, Norwood, on 21 October. Owens Senior attended the ceremony, acting as a witness under his real name and stating his
occupation as ‘retired’.

At the B1A office in St James’s this was all too apparent, since Owens remained resolutely unemployed, and unemployable. ‘Snow has not contrived to find himself a job,’ Tar
despaired. ‘I am satisfied that as long as he feels that we shall look after him, he will be content to drift along without making any effort.’

Attempts to place Owens with an engineering or chemical concern came to nothing, and by the end of January 1945 the accumulated cost of maintaining the former Colonel Johnny had risen to
£215. His patience exhausted, Tar ran through the accounts from day one, then sought permission to buy Owens off with a lump-sum payment of £500. ‘Snow must stand on his own
feet,’ he told Guy Liddell, ‘but not cast on to the world without means. The intelligence dividend we received from the conduct of his case is impossible to express in terms of money,
but it was a large one. In addition his case put into our hands the sum of £13,850 in cash. We do not know with accuracy how much money Owens retained for himself by direct appropriation from
the Germans, but the payments and expenses we made amounted to less than £4,000. On a pure financial basis the case has been profitable to us.’

These figures were arbitrary at best, and took no account of
funds that might have been paid into a secret American account to which Owens occasionally alluded, or of the
large debit column opened by his betrayal of radar in 1940. Despite five years of secrets and lies, Robertson, Masterman and Liddell stayed firm in their belief that Hitler’s chief spy in
England had passed nothing of value to the other side, and therefore the proposed gratuity of £500 stood approved. It was no humdinger, nor right hot, and hardly compared with the
£50,000 offered for a Spitfire in 1939. Yet even a miserly one per cent was better than a poke in the eye, or the disagreeable fate of the sixteen Nazi spies executed under the unyielding
provisions of the Treachery Act by the time hostilities ceased.

Idle Arthur Owens was tickled to death.

On the morning of Tuesday, 6 March 1945, as Russian forces bombarded the fortress city of Breslau and American tanks rolled through the shattered suburbs of Cologne, the Little Man reported to
Room 055, a forbidding basement deep in the bowels of the War Office. Still personally aggrieved, Tar Robertson did not trouble to attend the final debriefing of Agent Snow and chose instead to
delegate the task to Len Burt, a former Scotland Yard detective, and Edward Cussen, recently returned from grilling disgraced
Jeeves and Wooster
author P. G. Wodehouse in Paris.

Cussen handed Owens a copy of the Official Secrets Act, predicating various felonies and misdemeanours:
‘I undertake upon my honour to abstain from any disclosure which I recognise
will entail the risk of jeopardising the interests of Great Britain, her Allies and the Powers associated with her.’

Owens signed without demur, for countries did not matter. This formality complete, Burt presented former Agent Snow with a cheque for £500. ‘I told Owens that it had been decided to
give him a gratuity, which it was hoped would assist to establish himself in some future employment. He appeared particularly pleased and said he did not expect it, and in all
circumstances felt that he had been generously treated. He intimated that he intended investing the money.’

Burt followed this golden handshake with a cold shoulder. ‘I gave Owens to understand that it was very desirable that he should completely disassociate himself from this department, and
pointed out the penalties should he be foolish enough to write his reminiscences.’

The obloquy and odium ran deep. ‘I told Owens that if at any time he should want to contact us, which was most unlikely, he should communicate with me personally and no one
else.’

Not Tar.

Not Biscuit.

Not Celery.

Not Lily Bade.

Without further ado, Colonel Johnny was escorted to the doors of the War Office and cast out onto the busy Whitehall pavement.

There, in the pale spring sunlight, Snow melted away.

Arthur Owens
(aka SNOW aka JOHNNY aka Thomas Wilson) took up with a woman called Hilda White and moved to Great Amwell in Hertfordshire. The former Agent Snow
changed his surname to White by deed poll in October 1946; a son, also called Graham, was born in November. In low water by 1948, Owens borrowed £5 from his eldest son Bob and relocated to
the Republic of Ireland, later setting up shop in Wexford to sell radios and batteries. Snow’s birth name and a version of his dubious wartime career were first made public by
John
Bull
magazine in October 1957, though his embarrassment – if any – did not endure, since Hitler’s chief spy in England died of myocarditis (cardiac asthma) two months later,
on Christmas Eve. Diligent research by Madoc Roberts traced an unmarked grave to plot 57, Section O, in the cemetery at St Ibar, Crosstown, a few miles outside Wexford. It may be noted, however,
that Tar Robertson informed intelligence historian Nigel West that ‘Mr White’ died in Ireland far later, in 1976. And so the mystery continues. In 1992 the BBC broadcast
Snow
,
a television drama based on the scant information then available, with Michael Maloney in the title role. Heavily weeded, the official Snow files were released by MI5 to The National Archives in
2001, 35 volumes having shrunk to just 10.

Lily Bade
(aka LILY) continued to live at Homefields under MI5 supervision – and the shadow of detention under 18B. In July 1942 she married Brian
Funnell, a precision turner at a local aircraft factory, and subsequently lived quietly, dying (as
Lily Butler) in West Ham in 1993. Her daughter with Owens, Jean Louise
Pascoe, born in August 1940, is still alive at the time of writing.

Graham ‘Bob’ Owens
(aka SNOW JUNIOR) remained close to his father. Soon after the war the pair developed a fuel additive called Wenite, although
this failed to catch on despite continued rationing. Following publication of
The Game of the Foxes
and
The Double-Cross System
Graham Owens wrote to the then Prime Minister,
Edward Heath, in a futile effort to restore his father’s reputation. Snow Junior died in Portsmouth in 1981.