Hitler's Spy (16 page)

As yet, it was still unclear whether Biscuit would even join Snow, let alone risk his skin by going on into Germany. On
Saturday afternoon, as German armoured columns
thrust ever deeper into France and the sound of distant gunfire rattled windows in Kent, Robertson met Owens and McCarthy in Richmond Park. Double-crossing his own double agent, Tar treated Mac as
though he were a stranger and helped the pair concoct a shared past history in Canada. Afterwards he took Owens aside for a quiet solo briefing, taking care to stroke the Little Man’s
vanity.

‘How’s McCarthy?’

‘On the level, seems to me.’

‘Should we send him into Germany?’

‘I reckon so. It’s just as well that he’s a greenhorn at this type of work. The less he knows, the safer he’ll be.’

‘I trust you’ve given him some money to settle his affairs.’

‘Settle them yourself,’ replied Owens, shrugging his shoulders. ‘He’s your agent now. Besides, I’m down to my last five quid.’

Robertson frowned. Owens received £250 each month from the Abwehr, bumped up by generous expenses; Lily Bade, now visibly pregnant, even had her own maid. As a British army captain with a
regular commission Tar’s own monthly pay packet barely amounted to £25. ‘Snow said he was very short of money. Yet I had seen his notecase, which was quite half an inch
thick.’

Robertson left the park with McCarthy, telling Owens that MI5 needed to vet his latest sidekick, but promising to return to Richmond as soon as Wohldorf buzzed over final instructions. As they
drove into London McCarthy filled Tar in on his several conversations with the diminutive master spy.

‘I’ll go into Germany,’ Mac promised. ‘He told me not to worry because the Jerries will look after me, that they’re all fine people. The way Owens tells it,
he’s working on squeezing as much dough as he can from your office. He keeps on saying, “Why shouldn’t Robbie pay?”’

‘Verisimilitude.’

‘Come again?’

‘For the sake of appearances your money has to come from Snow.’

Mac shook his head. ‘He reckons
you
’re on the take. Swears blind
you
’ve skimmed off £5,000 meant for him. And he’s definitely pro-Nazi. Says you
and quite a few more at the office are due for the chop once the invasion kicks off.’

This was ironic indeed. Already there was talk at the Scrubs of bumping off double-cross agents come
Der Tag
. Ultimately all of them were disposable – McCarthy included.

‘There’s more,’ Mac continued, unaware of the danger. ‘He wants to introduce me to the Doctor as a British agent, and said I should mention your name. I told him it
sounded pretty risky. Not to worry, he says, because Rantzau knows all about his connections with Captain Robertson and MI5.’

Robertson considered this for a moment. Not half an hour earlier he had allowed himself a rare moment of self-congratulation on successfully double-crossing Owens with McCarthy. Now, even if the
Little Man was merely running off at the mouth, that confidence seemed horribly misplaced. Suppressing his annoyance, Tar told the driver to proceed directly to Hood House on Dolphin Square.

At Flat 308 the name on the doorbell was Captain King, a preferred pseudonym of Maxwell Knight. ‘McCarthy and I went straight to Mr Knight’s flat and discussed the whole affair with
him,’ noted Tar. ‘Mac was very anxious for us to allow him to go on with the scheme and go into Germany, but Knight and I both agreed that it would be far too dangerous to take this
course. In any event, by doing so we should get no further with the case.’

Instead, the
Barbados
would set course for a false rendezvous. ‘This will make it appear to Snow that everything is going according to plan, but that Rantzau was unable to keep
the
rendezvous.’ Only Mac and Captain Walker would be wise to this deception.

Robertson apprised Guy Liddell, whose response was reliably complacent. ‘McCarthy has now made it clear that Snow is double-crossing us. Personally I think Snow just regards the whole
business as a money-making concern and gives a little to both sides. Probably neither side really trusts him. He has not been in a position to give the Germans very much from this country, except
information which we have planted on him.’

Nothing much save for the radar secret, along with unadulterated dope on key fighter aerodromes, war factories and the RAF’s strategic fuel reserve.

At seven o’clock, by prior arrangement, McCarthy called Owens at Marlborough Road and made a show of disparaging MI5. ‘Biscuit told Snow that he had only been given £2 by
Robertson, whom he thought was a pretty revolting sort of bloke. Snow agreed.’

Soon the feeling would be mutual.

As Mac and Tar left Dolphin Square, Owens and Lily pitched up at Sackville Street, where William Rolph showed Lily an ornamental birdcage, and offered Colonel Johnny a priceless nest egg. With
Panzer columns sweeping through France towards the Channel coast, and the Low Countries largely overrun, a swift German victory appeared not only possible but likely. Rolph was of Swiss origin, and
like Owens untroubled by issues of national loyalty. Keen to curry favour with the winning side – and keep his creditors at bay – Rolph now offered Snow secret papers from MI5 in
exchange for £2,000. The main document itself seemed unremarkable enough, being a menu card for a dinner held by the IP Club at Grosvenor House in May 1939. In the wrong hands, however, the
card was priceless. For IP stood for ‘Intelligence People’, and the seating plan amounted to a veritable
Who’s Who
of MI5 and SIS, including
Guy
Liddell, Jasper Harker and the Director-General, Sir Vernon Kell.

And Thomas Argyle Robertson. Should the card fall into the hands of the Abwehr, let alone the Gestapo, the names of each and every diner would be added to a
Sonderfahndungsliste
, or
special arrest list. At best, this would mean years in a concentration camp; at worst, being measured for a necktie fashioned from piano wire.

As yet, MI5 were unaware that Rolph had been corrupted. On Saturday evening, nursing deep misgivings, Robertson drove back to Richmond to issue Owens with final instructions. These included
items of doctored intelligence based on Ritter’s last microdot questionnaire, as well as £100 in used notes for Captain Walker. With the treff fixed for midnight on Tuesday, Snow and
Biscuit would leave from King’s Cross on Sunday morning and make their way to Grimsby by train. ‘I told Snow the whole trip was very problematical as we had no indication as to what
type of vessel Rantzau would actually come in,’ Tar noted. ‘Therefore it is difficult to say whether the meeting will take place on board our trawler, or in Rantzau’s
transport.’

Next day, Owens perfected his own deception. Breaking his journey to King’s Cross station he stopped off at the buffet at Charing Cross, where Rolph handed over the all-important IP menu
card and upped the ante by offering to supply certain ‘blueprints’ of MI5. The pair travelled onwards by taxi, Rolph insistent that the Abwehr pay over the £2,000 in dollar bills,
perhaps with an eye on escape to America. They parted company only at Russell Square, fearful of being spotted by Robertson, or watchers from B6.

Maintaining a discreet distance, Robertson watched as Snow and Biscuit pulled out of King’s Cross on the 11.10 to Peterborough, departing on a journey without maps and with no certain
destination. The troubled head of B1A then returned to his office with the germ of a bright idea.

As the train steamed north through Hatfield and Huntingdon, Biscuit studied Snow with a critical eye. ‘Owens told me how pleased he was that we were on our way. He
said it would not be long before he would be able to get his own back, scandalising Captain Robertson and two others who he said would soon be making swastikas. He then brought out a book and a
dinner card marked IP Club, and said: “I’ll show you the damned names” and “Here’s another son of a bitch, a high man at MI5.”’

According to Owens, Robertson could expect to embezzle as much as £500 from the trawler treff. ‘They are all like that,’ he confided to Mac. ‘A mean lot of lousy,
grafting bastards. My people pay well, they don’t bleed people and use them for mugs, no. But what mugs these wrongly-called intelligence people are.’

Snow then alluded to mystery blueprints. ‘He said he would be glad when the advance guard got here, and that they would know who to get and where to get them. Then he put the book away and
told me, “I’m having you trained in sabotage and espionage. You will be brought back here without MI5 knowing, and you will have a big part. We’ll have a happy time when things
start to happen.”’

At Peterborough the two agents changed trains for Grimsby. With time to kill, Owens set to prowling the platforms and soon spied a large wooden barrow loaded with crates of ammunition. Fearful
and fascinated in equal measure, McCarthy watched as the Little Man scribbled down the destination address on a scrap of paper that he stuffed quickly into his pocket. Fears of Fifth Column
infiltrators had lately reached fever pitch, stoked by sensational warnings from the Ministry of Information about fake refugees with machine guns, and ‘hairy-handed’ nuns. Yet here was
an apparently genuine Nazi agent, behaving like a vaudeville spy but attracting nothing so much as a raised eyebrow.

Back in London, Robertson and Liddell took a bold decision
to play for higher stakes. Hoping to capture – or kill – the elusive Doctor Rantzau, MI5 elected to
stage a reverse Venlo. ‘Snow and Biscuit are to go out on the trawler and hang about the fishing ground until dusk,’ proposed Liddell. ‘Instead of going to the rendezvous the
captain will sail to some other point and bring the boat home. This will keep Snow out of harm’s way and ensure that he does not get wind of any impending action. Meanwhile a submarine will
play about in the vicinity, and if a U-boat turns up it will be torpedoed. If a trawler, it will be captured – we hope with Rantzau on board.’

CONGRATULATIONS indeed.

Such a sting would undoubtedly render Owens redundant as a viable double-cross asset, but the Little Man’s loyalties were in any case suspect and Rantzau would surely be a useful prize.
With Snow and Biscuit already en route to Grimsby there was no time to lose. Full of enthusiasm for the audacious Venlo-payback scheme, Tar hastened over to the Admiralty, weighing the odds on the
Senior Service lending him a spare submarine.

As the slow Grimsby train rattled through the flatlands of Lincolnshire Owens continued to behave conspicuously, noting down details of airfields, power stations and navigational landmarks. All,
he promised McCarthy, would be handed over to the Doctor at midnight on Tuesday. At length they alighted at Cleethorpes, a seaside resort five miles from Grimsby. Here Owens met with Mr Leach and
Captain Walker, confirmed that the
Barbados
was ready to sail, and handed over the charter fee. Walker instructed the ‘special observers’ to be ready to sail from the fish dock
at dawn. Their business done, the pair checked in at the Dolphin Hotel on Market Street and ate a hearty meal. Or Mac did, at least. Snow, as usual, grew increasingly tense, as though he were
eating the last supper of a condemned man.

Afterwards Owens adjourned to the writing room to compose a letter to Lily, six months pregnant with her first child, and instructed McCarthy to wait in the bar. Ignoring this
injunction, Mac slipped out and telephoned Robertson from another hotel nearby.

‘Biscuit rang me,’ wrote Tar, ‘and said that all the way up on the train Owens had been running down me and other officers in MI5, and saying what a rotten organisation it was.
He also said that Owens had been making copious notes of everything he saw from the carriage window.’ Though disquieting enough, these disclosures were as nothing compared to Mac’s next
revelation. ‘Apart from the information and photographs I had given him, Owens had on him an IP Club list.’

Robertson guessed immediately that the list had come from Rolph. While there was a certain bitter irony in a restaurateur attempting to sell a menu card to the enemy, confirmation that rogue
Agent Snow intended to betray the names of half the intelligence establishment in Britain came as another devastating blow.

Phantom sleepers, blown fuses and unregulated treffs abroad. Daimler limousines and fancy town houses in Richmond. Maids for Lily Bade.

Squeezable mustard and Zeppelin shells.

It was now abundantly clear that Arthur Owens had spent two years inveigling the British secret service into a fraudulent triple-cross, trotting gaily from one mare’s nest to the next.
‘Snowy was double-crossing us,’ Tar conceded glumly, his heart made all the more heavy by a keen sense of personal betrayal. ‘He was pro-German in outlook, was acting for the
Germans, and had told them everything that he was doing with us.’

Only by capturing Rantzau could MI5 hope to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. With the two spies due to sail at dawn, Robertson decided to roll the dice. ‘Biscuit was instructed to
go on with the scheme and to act as though nothing had happened.’

Arriving back at the Dolphin, McCarthy learned from the porter that Owens had fallen into a blue funk and was hunting
high and low for his missing companion. Happy to
prolong his agony, Mac repaired to a pub on the seafront, where Owens located him ten minutes later. ‘He thought I had taken a run-out powder at the last minute and was plainly
relieved,’ Mac noted coolly. The pair then set about imbibing a week’s worth of drink. ‘It was nearly midnight before we retired. In the hotel lobby was a coat rack, two naval
coats hung there. Owens searched through the pockets – though I didn’t see him get anything.’

The whiff of farce grew more pungent upstairs. Bidding McCarthy goodnight on the landing, Owens threw up a pantomime Nazi salute, topped off with a whispered ‘Heil Hitler’.

With these unsober gestures Colonel Johnny’s fate was sealed.

7

On the evening of 20 May 1940 a reconnaissance unit from the 2nd Panzer Division reached the French coast at Noyelles-sur-Mer, little more than a stone’s throw from the
historic battlefield at Crécy, where Englishmen with longbows had routed an entire French army during the Hundred Years’ War. Having advanced almost sixty miles in a single day, the
black-clad tank men were justly proud of their achievement. Standing on top of their turrets to gaze out across the English Channel, lungs filled with tangy salt air, the exhaustion of ten
consecutive days of Blitzkrieg was momentarily displaced by the ecstatic realisation that the Allied armies were now divided in two.