Hitler's Spy (19 page)

By now the two MI5 men were ‘morally certain’ that Rolph had given the list to Owens, and made arrangements for the Little Man to be driven over from Richmond. While they waited
Rolph entered a fugue state, becoming ‘rather fussed’ and confused, pacing endlessly from room to room. Stopford followed as best he could, observing as Rolph retrieved a small object
from a drawer in his desk, then quickly tore it apart. Retrieving the fragments from a waste bin shortly afterwards, Stopford found an alphabet mounted on cork and cardboard, clearly intended as
some sort of coding device.

‘He could give no satisfactory explanation,’ confirmed Tar, ‘except to say that in learning the buzzer he thought it better to learn with a code rather than straightforward
lettering. The explanation is obviously fatuous.’

Owens arrived half an hour later. Rolph, he insisted, had produced the IP list from his safe and quoted a price of £2,000, payable in dollar bills. He swore also that the two of them had
devised the alphabet code together, and that Rolph had known all along about the trawler treff with Rantzau. Careful to avoid self-incrimination, Owens failed to mention that his business partner
had already been numbered agent A.3554 by Stelle X.

‘Ultimately Rolph admitted he knew Snow was going in a boat. Stopford and I were both very badly impressed by the way he delivered his information. He told lies
continuously, repeatedly changed his story, and only with the utmost difficulty was it possible to extract from him anything at all. We are both perfectly convinced that he gave the list to Snow.
It is also quite clear that Rolph is exceedingly hard up and is being pressed for money by his various creditors.’

The MI5 party finally left Sackville Street towards the end of the afternoon, taking with them four automatic pistols, a firearms certificate and a desk diary. Grudgingly, Robertson agreed with
Stopford that the troublesome Snow case should now be shut down and the Little Man removed somewhere safe – perhaps even as far away as Canada. Meanwhile Owens was driven back to Marlborough
Road, and dutifully buzzed his weather report at two minutes to midnight:
‘Visibility 4,000 yards. Cloud ceiling 3,000 yards. Wind velocity 1. Direction south-east. Temperature 62
Fahrenheit.’

No mention at all of the gathering storm.

Alone with his thoughts, and deprived of his firearms, Rolph had pause to reflect on the vicissitudes of fate, the new Treachery Act and the lethal toxicity of coal gas. Some while later he
walked back to his flat in Dover Street, opened the tap on the gas oven and waited to die. Thanks to the high carbon monoxide content of unburned town gas, and the smallness of the room, his blood
became saturated quickly, with asphyxia complete in no more than fifteen minutes, lending his corpse a curious pinkish hue.

Dark indeed was the hour. Less than a mile away in Whitehall, Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay received orders from the Admiralty to implement Operation Dynamo, the hastily prepared plan for the
evacuation of the BEF from the shrinking perimeter around Dunkirk. During the course of Sunday afternoon the German halt order had been lifted, and the key port
of Calais
captured. ‘Dynamo was to be implemented with the greatest vigour,’ recalled Ramsay, ‘with a view to lifting up to 45,000 of the BEF within two days, at the end of which it was
probable that evacuation would be terminated by enemy action.’

The last-ditch operation was scheduled to commence at 19.00 hours. Already, a curious flotilla of ships ranging from destroyers to passenger ferries and pleasure craft had been warned to
assemble at backwater ports such as Sheerness and Ramsgate. Now this improvised armada weighed anchor and shaped course across the Channel, negotiating lengthy detours to avoid minefields and
long-range artillery fire. Many of the little ships were still manned by their selfless civilian owners and crews. Like the king’s congregation at Westminster Abbey, everyone hoped for a
miracle.

At Dover Street the cold body of William Rolph lay undiscovered for several days. Even in death the Swiss double agent presented something of a quandary for MI5, since any whisper of suicide
might lead the Abwehr to conclude that A.3554 had been compromised, and perhaps even murdered. After conducting a mandatory post-mortem, coroner William Bentley Purchase was prevailed upon to
doctor the paperwork, certifying the cause of death as ‘rupture of aorta atheromatous and ulceration of aorta’ – a heart attack, in so many words, and therefore attributable to
natural causes.

Bentley Purchase was a firm friend of the intelligence services and three years later would again bend the rules for a far more significant corpse caper, when a dead Welsh tramp was recycled as
‘Major William Martin’ of the Royal Marines and planted on the Abwehr during Operation Mincemeat. The
Barbados
too now switched her identity. On 30 May, as the little ships of
Operation Dynamo helped bring about the miraculous deliverance of 338,000 men from Dunkirk, the registration of the scruffy Grimsby steam trawler was quietly closed. Without further explanation
GY71 became GY323 and returned to sea
as
Alsatian
, surviving an otherwise uneventful war before being retired and scrapped in 1955.

Donning kid gloves to interview expectant Lily Bade, Robertson quizzed her on the precise sequence of events at Sackville Street on 18 May. ‘As I expected, before I had finished the
question she had practically answered it. It was quite clear that she had rehearsed this answer very carefully with Snow, and in all probability telling a lie.’

Thanks to the bug at Marlborough Road, Tar knew perfectly well that Owens had taken Lily aside the previous evening and warned her that MI5 would be paying a house call.

‘You know what you’ve got to say?’

‘Yes,’ replied Lily, far calmer than Owens. ‘Do you want me to repeat it?’

‘No – I think you know it all right.’

Lily was nervous around Robertson, and not without reason. In a matter of weeks she would be giving birth to a daughter in comfortable surroundings underwritten by MI5 and the Abwehr. Without
Owens, the former seamstress was merely an unmarried mother with no visible means of support. ‘I said that it would be in her interests to see that Snow played the game by me,’ Tar
observed coldly. ‘As if he did not I would take steps to have him removed.’

This was no idle threat. On confronting the Little Man face to face Robertson made no attempt to hide his displeasure, nor his sense of personal betrayal. ‘Snow was in bed at midday. I
told him I was not at all satisfied with his conduct, but that much against my wishes I had been persuaded by McCarthy to carry on with the show. I said I would have nothing further to do with Snow
personally, and if he wished to communicate with me he was to do so through Mac. Owens insisted that Rolph had double-crossed him, and asked if he could have some protection as he was afraid of the
Gestapo.’

Robertson responded with his own double bluff. ‘Just as I left
the room I informed him that Rolph was dead. I left before he had any chance to question me or show
any surprise.’

For Owens, the travails of the past ten days had been profoundly disturbing. Robertson had threatened to have him killed if he refused to assist in the capture of Doctor Rantzau. Now Rolph had
expired in circumstances that seemed highly suspicious. With France and the Low Countries under German occupation, further meetings with Ritter on neutral ground seemed nigh on impossible, as did
the prospect of escape to the safety of the Reich. Canada, too, was out of the question. Aggrieved Captain Robbie would surely see to that.

The best Hitler’s chief spy in England could hope for now was unconditional surrender to the Nazi regime, or a successful German invasion of the British Isles.

8

The month of June 1940 saw the Allies lurch from one disaster to another, like punch-drunk victims of a violent mugging. Italy declared war on Britain and France in
opportunistic fashion, spurring Stalin to trump Mussolini by ordering the Red Army into the Baltic states. Beaten on the field of battle, the French armed forces surrendered, only to suffer a
double humiliation when Hitler insisted on staging the armistice ceremony in the forest at Compiègne where Germany had signed her own surrender in 1918.

Of the 123,000 French troops rescued from Dunkirk just 7,000 stayed in Britain to fight on with General de Gaulle. Britain now stood alone, and was seemingly ripe for invasion. Already Churchill
had vowed to fight the enemy on the beaches, in the fields, and in the streets and hills; now he sanctioned the use of mustard gas in the last resort, and dum-dum bullets rather sooner. Visiting a
rifle range near Checkers, the defiant Prime Minister blazed away at targets with a favourite Mannlicher rifle. ‘He also fired his revolver with commendable accuracy,’ recalled his
young private secretary, John Colville. ‘Despite his age, size and lack of practice, Winston acquitted himself well. The whole time he talked of the best method of killing Huns. Soft-nose
bullets were the thing to use, and he must get some.’

On 11 June Churchill also fired Sir Vernon Kell, the veteran Director-General of MI5, after thirty years in post. Kell was replaced by Brigadier Jasper Harker, a former
Indian Police man described as ‘good-looking but not clever’, and who was highly rank-conscious. ‘The blow has fallen,’ mused an ambiguous Guy Liddell, who stepped into his
shoes as head of B Division. Harker’s first act as new broom was to plaster the Scrubs with copies of a fatuous pamphlet,
Go To It!
This ill-judged opening gambit prompted two dozen
overworked typists to tender their resignations and one staffer to remark that Harker was ‘a sort of highly polished barrel which, if tapped, would sound hollow. Because it was.’

In the wake of the trawler fiasco Tar Robertson felt much the same way about Agent Snow. On the last day of May he instructed Owens to press Rantzau on the subject of future German intentions,
and float the idea of a treff with McCarthy in Lisbon.
‘Getting worried,’
buzzed Colonel Johnny.
‘When is South African coming to help? Believe safer if my man meet
you Portugal and bring papers. He will replace me when in Canada.’

In fact Owens’ messages were now being keyed by Maurice Burton, with Snow little more than a brand name for MI5 disinformation. Unperturbed, Ritter replied straight away, keen to obtain
certain secret documents promised at sea a week earlier and demanding to know if Johnny’s latest sidekick was reliable.
‘McCarthy hundred per cent friend,’
promised
Owens, through gritted teeth.
‘Shall I try Portugal bringing all dope?’

Previously a backwater for MI6, the fall of France transformed the port city of Lisbon into the espionage capital of Europe virtually overnight, with everything and everyone apparently for sale.
Filled to overflowing with displaced persons and dubious characters, the single MI6 officer attached to passport control was swiftly overwhelmed, and soon reinforced by none other than Richman
Stopford, who relinquished his role as Robertson’s assistant at B1A. Despite this improvement, Tar
could hardly risk sending rogue Agent Snow abroad and so instructed
McCarthy to travel alone. With seats on commercial flights to Lisbon unobtainable at short notice, Mac booked a ticket on a passenger ship due to sail from Southampton.

‘Friend representative wines,’
Johnny buzzed at the beginning of June, confirming Mac’s cover as a commercial traveller.
‘Stay one week.’
Yet
precisely what happened next is unclear. On 17 June Wohldorf learned that McCarthy had sailed two days earlier. Accordingly Ritter set out for Lisbon, travelling via Berlin, Lyon and Madrid under
diplomatic cover and freighted with a parcel of baby clothes for Lily, a gift from his wife Irmgard. However, a week later Owens revealed that Mac had been taken off the boat due to some
unspecified illness
. ‘Can you wait till McCarthy better? Cannot recommend anyone else. Secret documents safe. Visa for self week to ten days, probably more.’

Had Biscuit crumbled, or had MI5? It might have been that picky Richman Stopford felt security was lacking in Iberia. Or perhaps hard-drinking McCarthy had dropped his guard and gone on a
bender. Whatever the truth, for the second time in a month the Doctor found himself stood up by his chief spy in England, previously so reliable and punctual to a fault. Disenchanted, Ritter
returned to Hamburg with the large cash payment intended for the London stelle. The baby clothes remained in Lisbon.

The good Doctor’s anger would soon be displaced. Within a week of the collapse of France, with no pre-existing plan or armada, Hitler set his sights on a cross-Channel invasion of the
British Isles. On 22 June all Abwehr stellen across Germany and Occupied Europe were warned that the gathering of intelligence on England was now priority number one. Since Owens was feeding back
little in the way of useful information (
‘Enquiries pending on coastal defences’
), Stelle X was instructed to dispatch new reporting agents with minimum delay. ‘Johnny
was unable to gather all the intelligence required on landing
grounds,’ said Ritter by way of excuse, ‘and some of it was stale by the time it filtered through.
So we sought out volunteers who were prepared to jump into England by parachute, or land from fishing boats. The training and insertion of these parachute agents was entrusted to me. There was no
handbook to follow, and no time to lose.’

Ritter christened this hasty scheme Operation Lena, while the broad-front invasion between Ramsgate and the Isle of Wight became Operation Sealion. Given that later Allied planning for the
Normandy landings in 1944 took fully two years, the glorified river-crossing envisaged by the German high command stood less chance of success than a snowball in hell, just as the Abwehr’s
so-called ‘espionage offensive’ faced equally long odds. Indeed, Germany had just three suitable spies in training, one of whom was the Afrikaaner already promised to Snow. This first
party arrived off County Cork on the night of 7 July, with the two South African Germans named Tributh and Gärtner joined by Obed Hussein, the disaffected Indian who had bribed Lascar seamen
to drop wireless valves at Sackville Street. Now Hussein hoped to blow up targets in London with nitrocellulose and thermite, cunningly concealed in tins of peas.