Hitler's Spy (2 page)

Snow.

Shabby, scapegrace little man Snow. Running with the hare while hunting with the hounds. Hiding in plain sight, always playing both ends against the middle.

Shrugging off a powerful sensation of déjà vu, Major Robertson reached for his green-handset scrambler phone and asked the girl on the switchboard for a Weybridge number.

The die was cast.

1

By his own account, Arthur Owens’ extraordinary career as a double-cross agent was triggered by Zeppelin shells. A quarter century before the Luftwaffe delivered the
Tausendtonnengeschenk
on London, marauding German airships were sent to harry the capital with pinprick raids, causing little material damage but confirming a Hunnish reputation as
barbarians and ‘baby killers’. Barely sixteen when the first Zepps arrived in 1915, and thus too young to take to the air in an Avro or Sopwith, or charge over the top from a trench,
Owens would later lay claim to feelings of profound outrage.

Profound, yet wholly unpatriotic. By his own account, after his father’s engineering firm devised a ‘special shell’ which brought down Zeppelins in droves the War Office denied
the company any credit, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of pounds. A more elaborate version of the same story found room for corrupt officials, titanic legal battles in the High
Court and the confiscation of a private yacht by vindictive government agents. This, so the little Welshman said, had left him feeling ‘very bitter’ towards England.

Tall tales of political and personal betrayal provided the perfect backstory for Hitler’s chief spy in England. That the Zeppelin shells story was entirely untrue also served to set the
scene for Owens’ picaresque rise as a secret agent, whose erratic
moral compass and predilection for intrigue and fantasy would, by 1940, bring his country to the brink
of disaster.

With his sharp features, beady eyes and nicotine-stained fingers, Arthur Graham Owens was nobody’s idea of a gentleman spy. The youngest son of a master plumber, the future Agent Snow was
born in the small Welsh industrial town of Pontardawe on 14 April 1899. His father, William Thomas Owens, had moved his business from Bristol to Glamorganshire fifteen years earlier, just as
coal-rich Pontardawe began to boom and bloom as a micro ‘tinopolis’, exporting tinplate and galvanised steel to all four corners of the globe. Though his small engineering business was
dwarfed by the forges and mills thrown up by the ironmasters, entrepreneurial William Owens expanded his company as the town grew, graduating from manufacturing humble plumbing supplies to
cast-iron radiators and acetylene gas equipment, styling himself as an inventor and patentee.

In middle age William Owens took a second wife, Ada, who was some sixteen years his junior. Like William, Ada was a native of Somerset, making the Owens household at 224 Dyffryn Road culturally
rather more English than Welsh, aspirant middle class, with a small complement of domestic staff. Their youngest son Arthur received a solid education at Pontardawe County School, where he showed a
talent for sciences, and then served an apprenticeship with a firm of electrical engineers in nearby Clydach, no doubt with a view to bringing new skills to the family business. Short of stature,
as well as social graces, the young scion was nevertheless talkative, quick witted and blessed with a keenly inventive mind. But for primogeniture, William Owens & Company would almost
certainly have been his eventual inheritance.

However, these formative years were overshadowed by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. With his flair for mechanics, Arthur dreamed of joining the Royal Flying
Corps, the newest and most glamorous of the three armed services; later he would hint at having held a commission and flown fast Sopwith Camels. In truth Owens was too undersized for
military service, and too highly strung. There were no pilot’s wings, and no Zeppelin shells. Condemned to remain in dreary Pontardawe for the duration of the conflict, surrounded by
collieries, mills and begrimed mundanity, the little man determined to escape and seek his fortune elsewhere.

With his half-brothers held in reserved occupations, the name Owens appears nowhere on the Pontardawe war memorial. Nevertheless, genuine tragedy touched the family in the summer of 1918 when
Ada succumbed to a brain haemorrhage. Now an elderly widower, William sold up and took his money back to Bristol, where he purchased a comfortable town house in the affluent suburb of Clifton.
Arthur moved too, describing himself as a ‘manufacturing chemist’ of independent means, and stepping out with a petite blonde from Knowle named Irene Ferrett. Possibly Irene fancied
that Arthur had been a scout pilot; certainly her diminutive beau was inclined towards flights of fancy and magical thinking. The couple married in September 1919 and moved into the large town
house at 23 Gordon Road, living an indolent, carefree lifestyle until the following January, when William Owens, master plumber turned gas magnifico, succumbed to chronic kidney disease.

Zeppelin shells or no, the profits from large wartime contracts meant that Owens Senior left his heirs a substantial estate. Rather than return to industrial Glamorgan, or further his career as
a chemist or engineer, Arthur instead moved to Mumbles, a popular seaside resort near Swansea, where he hoped to cash in on the postwar holiday boom by setting up a confectionery business. While
her husband honed his skills as a humbug merchant, Irene nursed their son, born Graham Robert in September 1920 but known always as Bob. For many entrepreneurs the tourism bonanza delivered easy
money, yet
Owens was financially irresponsible and proved incapable of living within his means. In little more than a year the pretender from Pontardawe had managed to run
through the bulk of his inheritance, and found himself fending off disgruntled creditors.

Never knowingly heroic, the little man cut and ran. Like tens of thousands of other Britons during this turbulent postwar period, Arthur Owens chose to make a new life in Canada, where
English-speaking WASPs were once again being encouraged to ‘fill up the vast waste spaces’ after the war in Europe had forced a lull in westward immigration. The family sailed from
Bristol in October 1921 and eventually settled in Ontario, where Arthur gained employment as a public utility engineer. In 1925 Irene gave birth to a daughter, Patricia. After five years the couple
became naturalised Canadian subjects, and Owens entered into a business partnership with an Australian named John Mercer. Applying his inventive skills to battery technology Owens claimed to have
perfected a new type of lead oxide paste for use in accumulators, which the pair registered as a potentially lucrative industrial patent.

Seeking to emulate his prosperous father, but with no real capital of his own, Owens required backing to bring his innovations to market. Unfortunately the North American economy was becalmed in
the midst of the Great Depression, during which patents came to be perceived as monopolistic and harmful, and their efficacy eroded by antitrust laws. Fatefully, during 1933 Owens received
expressions of interest from George Hamilton, a wealthy investment banker based in London, who preferred the more cosmopolitan sobriquet of G. C. Hans Hamilton. With a varied portfolio of business
interests, Hamilton sat on the board of directors of The Expanded Metal Company, a large industrial concern with plant and laboratories in West Hartlepool and a smart Westminster office at Burwood
House. Lightweight but durable, the company’s patent metal mesh supported several iconic landmarks, notably the Eiffel
Tower, the Forth Road Bridge and the Kohl Building
– one of the few structures left standing in San Francisco after the devastating earthquake of 1906.

The opportunities afforded by Expanded Metal beat tinpot Pontardawe hands down. In August of 1933, six months after Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany, Owens obtained a Canadian passport and
sailed from Halifax to Southampton. Convinced that urbane George Hamilton might make him a millionaire, Owens signed on as a salaried consultant with Expanded Metal, which in turn would invest in a
new company formed to exploit Owens’ patents and restore the fortune shamefully squandered on novelty rock in Mumbles. Back in Ontario, the family sold up and broke their long journey home
with a stay in New York. Father and son returned first, arriving in London at the beginning of January 1934. Irene and Pat followed six weeks later, travelling in style on board the
Berengaria
, the flagship liner of the Cunard fleet.

Back in Europe there were already worrying signs that the great inventor was reverting to type. In filling out her boarding card, Irene gave her London address as 112 Stratford Road, a modest
terraced property in Plaistow occupied by an elder brother named Fred. Arthur, meanwhile, selected the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane, impatient to return to the high-rolling lifestyle lost a
dozen years earlier. By the time his wife and daughter reached London the aspirant tycoon had taken rooms in Sloane Avenue Mansions, a smart apartment block in Kensington. No matter that much of
his work would involve extended spells in humdrum West Hartlepool, mixing and testing oxide pastes; to Arthur Owens Expanded Metal seemed a ‘right hot’ prospect, this being only one of
the snappy transatlantic phrases that peppered his lively, energetic patter.

Humdinger.

Absolute jake.

One hundred per cent.

In order to better exploit his innovations, Hamilton and Owens set up Owens Battery Equipment Limited, a new company part-owned by Expanded Metal but operating from separate
offices on Copthall Avenue in the heart of the City of London. Unfortunately this arrangement would go badly awry. According to Owens, and much against his advice, Hamilton attempted to combine
oxide paste with an untried process involving expanded (rather than solid) lead sheets. Although the Admiralty expressed firm interest in fitting the new model accumulators in its submarines, the
expanded plates proved too fragile. As a result Owens Battery Equipment lost this lucrative contract and was obliged instead to seek sales abroad.

This setback steered Owens into murky waters. While notionally a banker and company sponsor, George Hamilton had held a commission in the Manchester Regiment during the Great War and still
retained certain links with the War Office. Through him Owens was introduced to the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, and over lunch at the Army and Navy Club found himself invited to furnish
the Admiralty with any useful snippets of information (‘dope’) that he might pick up while on business trips to Germany. Seduced by the notion of secret agency, Owens’ first
mission took place in January 1936, when he returned with information of ‘distinct value’ on coastal motorboats operated by the German navy, lately rebranded the
Kriegsmarine
(‘war navy’) by the new Führer.

No record exists of the amount paid to Owens for this dangerous favour, though it is unlikely to have been more than a few pounds. Subsequently he was passed on to the Secret Intelligence
Service (MI6), whose primary function was the collection of information abroad. SIS assigned Owens a starchy case officer named Edward Peal, who codenamed his latest asset SNOW, a partial anagram
of his surname. Colonel Peal and MI6 had no reason to doubt that Owens was anything other than a promising freelance agent, whose corporate credentials gave him
perfect cover
for work inside Germany, once again a potential enemy. So far as the little man was concerned, the glamorous spy game satisfied his cravings to become a ‘big nut’, while at the same
time keeping his sponsor Hans Hamilton sweet.

Agent Snow’s first assignment for SIS was a trip to the Baltic port of Kiel, where he snapped several Kriegsmarine warships lying at anchor. Worryingly, however, this mission almost came
unstuck on his return to Britain, when zealous customs officials seized his Leica camera – a high-end model, and German to boot. Owens blithely confessed to being a spy, then volunteered the
telephone number of an MI6 office at Thames House on Millbank to prove his credentials. Plainly discretion was a weak point for garrulous Agent Snow.

So too was money. Displaying judgement just as poor as his insistence on expanded lead plates, Hamilton now introduced Owens to a chemical engineer named Erwin Pieper. German by birth, the
elderly man whom Owens insisted on calling ‘Peeper’ carried an American passport and claimed to be fluent in nine languages. Once the two men were alone, Pieper offered to sell Owens
details of an unspecified ‘invention’ devised by a serving German naval officer. Although this scheme came to nothing, the pair would soon meet again – this time in Germany.

‘Pieper told me that he had several other propositions which he thought worth quite a little money,’ Owens explained later. ‘From that meeting we became quite friendly and
confidential. I then mentioned that I would like him, if he saw his way clear, to get me information in Germany. He agreed to do this, and I paid him money for his expenses.’

This, at least, was the version Owens played back to Colonel Peal. In fact Pieper began to pump Owens for dope, at the same time promising that spying for Germany would offer greater rewards.
This much was true, for between the wars the effectiveness of MI6 was badly undermined by a chronic lack of
resources. In 1936 SIS consisted of just 200 staff worldwide, and
struggled to run its overseas operations on a miserly annual budget of £200,000. Moreover, careers in MI6 were non-pensionable, so that overworked, underpaid personnel were at risk of
corruption. At the end of the year an errant passport control officer in The Hague put a bullet through his head, having embezzled almost £3,000 from Jewish visa applicants desperate to leave
Europe for the safe haven of Palestine. Worse still, a duplicitous source inside Germany stung SIS to the tune of £10,000 for a worthless Luftwaffe order of battle.

Humdinger.

Whether Owens ever saw spying as anything other than a lucrative financial opportunity seems doubtful. Questioned by sceptical British intelligence officers in 1938, the capable inventor
maintained that he had ‘seen right from the beginning exactly what has been in the wind’, and had recognised the existential danger facing Western Europe. ‘I was told that the
first job would be to organise a system in Germany to get information out. Probably my system is different from yours, but I have always had one object in view and that was to help this country
when I could.’