Hitler's Spy (5 page)

According to Irene, the scenario played out in Belgium that summer was infinitely more sinister. In a self-serving statement made to the Branch the following year, Irene insisted that while she
and Owens were away, a German agent arrived in Ostend and attempted to ‘blackmail’ the children. The visitor was none other than Erwin Pieper, the elderly Abwehr spy who had introduced
Owens to Hilmar Dierks back in 1936. Fortunately the hotel manager intervened and threatened to have Pieper arrested. ‘Peeper’ promptly disappeared.

Owens told it differently, explaining that Pieper had attempted to bilk money from the hotel and was ejected from the lobby following a violent exchange. Whatever the truth behind events in
Ostend, tension hung heavy in the air across Europe throughout the long, hot summer of 1938. This climate of fear was only heightened in September by the Munich Crisis, when events in
Czechoslovakia prompted Owens to launch yet another bid to re-ingratiate himself with British intelligence.

This time the former Agent Snow found MI5 unexpectedly receptive. Whereas the annexation of Austria by Hitler was seen as little more than the occupation of his own backyard, the addition of
Czechoslovakia to his lengthening territorial shopping list marked a first real grab at
Lebensraum
, the sinister geopolitical policy by which living space (or ‘habitat’) would
be seized in Eastern Europe, thereby creating an enlarged Third Reich known as Greater Germany. On 12 September the dictator delivered a violently anti-Czechoslovak speech at Nuremberg,
citing wrongs committed against ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland frontier zone and threatening military action at the end of the month. A localised war seemed imminent, one
likely to spread across Europe since both France and the Soviet Union had forged alliances with the Czechs that had far more bite than any protection offered by the young republic’s
membership of the toothless League of Nations.

As the beleaguered Czech government prepared to fight, and 38 million British civilians glimpsed the future through the mica eyepiece of flimsy rubber gas masks, issued free of charge by a
failing government, Arthur Owens seized his chance. Presenting himself at Scotland Yard, Agent Snow offered up his most detailed statement to date. Besides admitting to acting as Hitler’s
chief spy in England, Owens also volunteered that he would soon take delivery of a short-wave wireless transmitter. ‘It’s very small and powerful,’ the Little Man boasted, as if
describing himself. ‘It has a transmitting radius of 12,000 miles and takes practically no current.’

This disclosure burst like a bombshell at MI5, for at no time had Mad Major Draper been offered a secret radio. Despite remaining deeply suspicious of Owens, Colonel Hinchley-Cooke agreed to a
meeting on 24 September, which lasted rather longer than fifteen minutes and was transcribed in full by a stenographer. For the most part Owens was typically evasive, though his rambling,
tangential answers did include details of the Abwehr organisation in Hamburg, including cover addresses used by Doctor Rantzau, as well as the promised transmitter and wireless codes.

‘It will be the first one in the country,’ boasted Snow. ‘The thing’s so small you can take it up and work it in your hand.’

‘Is your Morse up to speed?’ asked Hinchley-Cooke.

‘I was in the Boy Scouts, and they’ve had me practising all hours. Sixty letters a minute will be fine and dandy.’

‘And they pay you?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘How much?’

‘Thirty or forty pounds a month. It depends on the dope.’

‘Tell me more about Doctor Rantzau.’

‘Actually, there’s five or six different people.’

‘The more the merrier. Please give me their names.’

Owens sucked on his gums. ‘Look – let’s leave all that business aside. I’ve got to tread carefully, see. My life’s not worth two hoots if there’s any slip
made.’

Hinch fixed Snow severely with a hard-eyed stare. ‘The point you don’t quite seem to realise is, you’ve been working against our instructions.’

‘And you people don’t seem to realise that I’m trying to work on the level!’ Owens snapped back, his bile rising momentarily. ‘I’ve always done everything I
could for this country. Probably my methods are different from yours, but if you let me carry on I can bring in vital information.’

‘Such as?’

‘Where the first bombs will fall, for a start.’

Hinchley-Cooke began to listen very closely indeed. Fears that the Luftwaffe would raze Paris and London the moment war was declared had already reached MI5 from other sources, reviving
nightmarish estimates of 3,000 tons of bombs on London in a single day, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties and a million cases of hysteria. Now, if Owens was to be believed, Hitler’s
spies had identified a zone south-east of London which was poorly defended by searchlights and antiaircraft guns, providing the German air force with a safe corridor for a mass attack on London.
The Abwehr, so he said, knew this dangerous gap as ‘The Channel’.

In truth, Snow’s dope was a barrage of Zeppelin shells. The Luftwaffe would be in no position to launch mass raids on the British mainland until 1940, when the fall of France delivered
forward bases on the Channel coast. Even then, it would
manage to deliver more than a thousand tons of bombs just once in five years, on which occasion the death toll was
limited to just twelve hundred. However, none of this could be predicted by nervous appeasers in September 1938, and the possibility remains that Owens’ tendentious warning was a masterful
political bluff which helped serve to excuse the shameful Munich Agreement. Just five days later, on the eve of the German attack on Czechoslovakia, the governments of Britain, France and Italy
sold this promising new democracy down the river, laying false claim to ‘peace with honour’ yet at the same time ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler, and surrendering additional territory
to Poland and Hungary.

‘When Chamberlain returned from Munich waving his piece of paper we all had an acute sense of shame,’ admitted one serving MI5 officer, unwilling to read major victory into the
betrayal of a minor country. ‘We felt, too, some relief that we were not to be subjected to an immediate aerial bombardment.’

With grave misgivings, Hinchley-Cooke cautiously encouraged rogue Agent Snow to continue his work as an arm’s-length freelance. The promise of a powerful short-wave wireless transmitter
could hardly be ignored. Nor could the fact that MI5’s alpha agent, Mad Major Christopher Draper, had recently been exposed as a ‘Nazi spy’ by the Fleet Street dailies and forced
into hiding in Broadstairs.

As a result, Double Agent Snow now became the responsibility of another case officer at MI5, far younger than either Hinch or Colonel Peal, yet infinitely more shrewd. The Little Man’s new
handler was Captain Tommy ‘Tar’ Robertson, then in charge of a small sub-section within B Division specialising in wireless traffic but destined to become one of the greatest unsung
heroes of the Second World War.

2

Just as Arthur Owens was no ordinary spy, so Thomas Argyle Robertson was a far from orthodox soldier. Schooled at Charterhouse, and a graduate of the Royal Military Academy at
Sandhurst, Robertson spent only two years with the Seaforth Highlanders before resigning his commission, followed by spells in the City and police work in Birmingham. In 1933 he transferred to the
Security Service, still aged only twenty-four, and in no time at all established an enviable reputation as a counter-intelligence officer par excellence.

All that was required were a few rounds of drinks in a Mayfair saloon bar. Aside from Nazis, Blackshirts and the Irish Republican Army, during the last year of peace the long list of subversive
organisations monitored by MI5 included the Communist Party of Great Britain, lately implicated in a spy ring at the huge Woolwich Arsenal. With the ‘red menace’ regarded as a clear and
present danger, companionable Captain Tommy duped a suspect Foreign Office cipher clerk named John King over drinks at the Bunch of Grapes on Curzon Street. After King passed out drunk Robertson
borrowed his keys, burglarised his office and recovered a batch of incriminating papers meant for dispatch to Moscow. Following a secret trial held in camera, the hapless mole was sent down for ten
years.

A sobering experience indeed.

‘Robertson was in no sense an intellectual,’ recalled John Masterman, a wartime colleague at MI5. ‘But he had certain qualities of a high order. A born leader, gifted with
independent judgement, he had above all an extraordinary flair in all the intricate operations of his profession. Time and again he would prove to be right when others, following their intellectual
assessments, proved to be wrong.’ Widely known as ‘Tar’ on account of his initials, smitten female staff at MI5 preferred a more irreverent sobriquet, with ‘Passion
Pants’ derived from his penchant for dress trousers cut from the colourful blue-green Mackenzie tartan of his parent regiment.

In the run-up to war diligent work by the Security Service led to the arrest of several low-level Abwehr operatives, including a hairdresser from Dundee named Jessie Jordan, and an Irish
bricklayer, Joseph Kelly, who stole plans from a munitions factory near Chorley. Like thirsty communist mole John King, Kelly received a stiff ten-year sentence and Jordan four. MI5 were less
fortunate with Walter Simon, a veteran spy also run by Nikolaus Ritter, who refused to crack under close interrogation and could only be deported.

‘Don’t come back,’ Colonel Hinchley-Cooke warned the elderly spook on the dockside at Grimsby. ‘You won’t be so lucky next time.’

In contrast, fortune continued to smile on Hitler’s chief spy in England. Now in effect a triple agent, on the first day of January 1939 Owens travelled from Dover to Hamburg by boat,
notionally on battery business but in fact to collect his shortwave transmitter. The winter crossing was particularly rough, prompting Owens to scrawl Irene a cursory note from the Hotel Graf
Moltke.
‘There is quite a little snow here, although it is not very cold. Everything is very busy and business seems to be very fresh. There are a lot of batteries being sold. I hope your
shoulder is better and the children behaving themselves OK. So cheerio, love to all.’

Battery business was brisk indeed. After delivering appropriate samples to Stelle X, Ritter and a wireless specialist named Trautmann escorted Owens two hundred miles east
to Stettin. There, at a spy school housed in a military barracks, Johnny clapped eyes on his first transmitter. Consisting of high-end component parts sourced in Germany, Holland and France, the
set was small enough to fit inside an ordinary attaché case, making it easy to smuggle across borders, and came equipped with chargeable batteries for use in the field.

‘They said it was portable and that I should travel as much as I could,’ Owens told Tar some time later. ‘I could hire a car, and if there were machines, munitions or guns on
any of the aerodromes they wanted to know at once. All I had to do was run out two wires as an aerial. The set takes practically no current, and cannot be checked up as regards the click of the
Morse key.’

In order to demonstrate home use a model apartment had been constructed at the Stettin school, with the long high-frequency aerial cunningly concealed behind the wallpaper. To Agent Snow, it
must have seemed as though he had stumbled onto the set of the latest thriller by Alfred Hitchcock, and cast in the glamorous lead role. However, other aspects of his visit to the Baltic port
impressed him rather less. His digs, for instance, at the Angel Pension, turned out to be a temperance hotel. For the thirsty Welshman this was almost as bad as Prohibition.

Owens returned to London on 6 January, though his British handlers would hear nothing for more than a week. Only on the morning of 14 January did he trouble to call his designated contact, a
flinty Special Branch inspector named William Gagen, to arrange a meeting at a Lyons Cornerhouse in Westminster. Over tea he furnished brief details of his trip to Stettin and a copy of his
wireless code. Owens also revealed that he expected to receive the transmitter in a matter of days. ‘He said that he had not the time to explain its use then,’ noted Gagen, ‘but
would soon be in a position to amplify his story.’

The pair met again two days later, this time at the offices of Expanded Metal at Burwood House, where Owens revealed that the transmitter was now available for collection
from Victoria station. Instructing Gagen to follow him at a discreet distance, Owens took a cab to the busy rail terminus and retrieved a small brown attaché case from the left luggage
office, then conducted a brief examination of his own before handing it over to the bemused detective.

‘Owens stated his sole motive was to help this country,’ Gagen revealed in a lengthy typed report. ‘Messages from the transmitter will be picked up in Hamburg, Cologne and
Stettin. It can be used with a 350 volt battery, or plugged into an ordinary lamp socket. He has arranged to send a trial transmission to Germany in the near future, and asks that the transmitter,
code etc be returned to him on Saturday morning.’

With that Owens vanished, explaining that he was off to ‘take some photographs’ in the north of England. Well aware that he was being played, Bill Gagen took the attaché case
straight to MI5, where it was received with alacrity by Tar Robertson and Hinchley-Cooke. On lifting the lid Robertson found a Morse key, several coloured leads and a compact transmitter unit
measuring just 12" × 6" × 4", with two powerful Miniwatt Dario valves and variable frequency control. Grudgingly, the intelligence men were forced to concede that the German set looked
rather more jazzy than any comparable gadgetry in British service.

The apparatus was subsequently examined in detail at the Post Office research laboratory in Dollis Hill. There a specialist from MI6 confirmed that it was far more sophisticated than any other
previously encountered – and promptly broke it. One version holds that a resistor burned out; another that the set was dismantled too thoroughly to restore to working order. Whatever the
truth, it was hardly an auspicious start. Then again, the boffins were unaware that the Abwehr’s own
disparaging term for these early short-wave sets was
klamotten
: junk.