Hitler's Spy (23 page)

On any view, the disparate fragments gathered by the Joint Intelligence Committee during the course of Saturday afternoon promised Armageddon by air and sea.

Finally Hitler was coming.

At five-twenty that afternoon, as the first German bombs began to fall on the East End, Churchill assembled his Chiefs of Staff in Whitehall. Weighing the evidence provided by Ultra, radar, MI6
and Agent Snow, as well as additional data on moonlight and tides, and the rising number of landing barges in the Channel ports, it was decided to bring Britain’s defences to the highest
possible state of alert. At 20.07 GHQ Home Forces flashed the ominous codeword ‘Cromwell’ to Eastern and Southern Commands, signifying that invasion was imminent and probable within
twelve hours. Regular troops stood to as instructed, while in several areas eager Home Guards set church bells tolling in the mistaken belief that landings were already in progress. Bugles sounded
on the cliffs at Dover, and in Lincoln a party of Royal Engineers attempted to blow up the railway station. Countless sticks of German paratroops were reckoned to have been shot on the wing, Mass
Observation recording one wild rumour that 500 had landed near Newport, all but one of them dispatched in three seconds flat.

Meanwhile London endured its first night of aerial Blitz. Fresh from his own interrogation of the Romney Marsh spies at Camp 020, Maxwell Knight watched the conflagration from the roof of
Dolphin Square. ‘By the evening the East End was ablaze,’ wrote his faithful assistant Joan Miller. ‘With M by my side I watched the docks burning. The heat and smoke were
appalling, and the sky was lit with an unearthly glow. Before morning, a thousand Londoners would have died in this unspeakable attack.’

To this grim tally the Luftwaffe almost added Double Agent Snow. Having failed to buzz weather or damage reports for two days, Owens resumed contact with Wohldorf on the evening of 11 September
in a state of high dudgeon.
‘Richmond – what hell? Windows gone, time bomb in garden.’

On Monday, Owens’ safehouse at 14 Marlborough Road had almost been destroyed by a brace of German air raids, the first in the wee small hours, the second at six in the evening. ‘It
became very noisy during the early morning and bombs began to drop all round,’ wrote Marie Lawrence, a youthful diarist and near neighbour. ‘Then suddenly a plane came right overhead
and there was the noise of the big gun in the park, then a whistling sound as the bomb came down. It was the most awful thing I have ever known. I laughed and cried as we sat in the bogey
hole.’

A stick of bombs straddled Marlborough Road, some of them fitted with delayed-action fuses. If anything, the evening raid was even more severe after the RAF split up a large daylight attack,
causing rattled Luftwaffe crews to jettison bombs across several London suburbs. ‘The noise was terrific and bombs were flying everywhere,’ Marie Lawrence continued, once again seeking
shelter below stairs. ‘Whistle upon whistle, bang after bang. As we sat in the cupboard the floors and windows shook and seemed to go in and out. Every second we thought was our
last.’

The arrival of an unexploded bomb in Snow’s garden forced the evacuation of the London stelle for two whole days. ‘As there had been a great number of bombs dropped round him,’
noted Robertson drily, ‘Owens expressed a wish to move to a quieter place. I said I would have a look round.’

Erpro 210, the radar specialists, were also busy, visiting the
Vickers aircraft factory at Brooklands just as the afternoon shift clocked on, killing 83 and wounding more
than 400. Production was brought to a standstill, though this devastating strike cost the unit its second commanding officer in as many weeks. Other Luftwaffe raiders hit the Hawker Hurricane works
at Kingston, and Shorts near Rochester – both targets to which Owens had paid close attention, and had discussed at length during treffs with Ritter.

Had MI5 known the true extent of Snow’s treachery, Hitler’s chief spy in England might have been left to defuse his own UXB. Instead, his Afu transmitter was now employed to deflect
attention away from London, with details of fictive targets buzzed over to Wohldorf, beginning with a dummy munitions plant erected near Stafford.

Although the Blitz would continue for 57 consecutive nights, the fierce air battle above southern England finally began to peter out. On 15 September, a Sunday, the RAF claimed 186 German
aircraft destroyed in a single day, set against the loss of just 13 British pilots. In truth, only 56 enemy raiders had been shot down, yet the figures hardly mattered. The defeat of the last mass
raid put up by the Luftwaffe in daylight marked another critical turning point. The unfastened ‘birdcage’ of Operation Eagle had failed to force Britain to capitulate. Electing to
postpone Operation Sealion, Hitler turned his attention instead to the Soviet Union.

On the very same Sunday that Fighter Command won the Battle of Britain, MI5 turned another corner in the double-cross war. After reluctantly agreeing to act as an XX agent, the sour Swede
Gösta Caroli was escorted from Camp 020 to Aylesbury, where an attempt was made to establish wireless contact from a pigsty behind the home of the Chief Constable of Buckinghamshire. ‘We
could not take any chances on the Germans “fixing” a location,’ wrote Caroli’s controller Ronnie Reed, a former BBC engineer. ‘If an agent told them he was
transmitting from Aylesbury, he would actually have to be located at or close to Aylesbury.’

Since the pigsty was too low, and the aerial too short, Caroli and Reed tried again from a cell at Aylesbury police station. With contact finally established, Agent Nilberg informed Hamburg that
he had sustained injuries on landing and was now living rough in the countryside between Oxford and Buckingham. With bad weather closing in, the message continued, he proposed to seek shelter by
posing as a refugee.

At 11.15 on the morning of 15 September, Snow received an anxious signal from Wohldorf.
‘Swedish friend in fields near Oxford. How can he contact you at once please? Standing by for
your answer.’

Robertson immediately conferred with his superiors in B Division. It was, he insisted, impossible to overestimate the significance of this latest development. ‘There is a strong
possibility that this single spy Caroli may be the forerunner of a whole battalion. Upon the action now taken really depends all the months of work spent on Snow.’

Verisimilitude demanded that the rescue mission should actually take place. With his plan approved by noon, Robertson instructed Burton to send the following reply:
‘Can meet booking
office High Wycombe railway station. Will wear white buttonhole. Password: Have you
seen
the stationmaster. What time?’

Still unwilling to trust Agent Snow, Tar called in Mac for a last-minute briefing. The following morning the volatile Canadian would make his own way to the busy market town, wait at the station
at the appointed time, then walk Caroli along the main road towards London. Wary of lurking Nazi agents, or some sort of triple-cross, Tar warned McCarthy to keep his wits about him and not to let
the recalcitrant Swede escape. Once watchers from B6 were certain that the pair had not been followed Caroli would be spirited away by car, leaving McCarthy to return to London alone.

The elaborate plan also took account of McCarthy’s perennial
Achilles heel: booze. ‘Biscuit was not slow to appreciate that High Wycombe is a very large town,
and that he had a fairish walk in front of him. In anticipation of his probable reaction to this unaccustomed exercise he was instructed not to visit any public houses en route.’

Biscuit could ill afford another right royal raspberry. On Monday morning, sporting a smart white buttonhole, Mac followed his instructions to the letter. The tall, bespectacled stranger
appeared at eleven o’clock, and confirmed that he had seen the stationmaster. After a lengthy stroll along the A40 Caroli was driven back to Camp 020, leaving Mac to relay his report to Tar.
Naturally enough, the version of events played back to the Abwehr was entirely different. Transmitting as Snow that evening, Burton informed Wohldorf that the ‘Swedish friend’ was being
sheltered by McCarthy, having fallen ill after a week spent living in the open.

So far as Owens was aware this was perfectly true. ‘We don’t want to tie Summer to Snow,’ Tar explained, lighting on a pleasing seasonal metaphor. ‘For then they stand or
fall together. Snowy readily assented to this and is willing not to meet Summer. As the “master mind” he is quite agreeable to being kept in the background.’

For services rendered McCarthy was handed a ten shilling note. Unaware that Stelle X was now being spoofed by British intelligence, Ritter expressed delight at the prompt rescue of Caroli.
‘Thanks for help to friend. Won’t forget. Expecting reports of his trip. Please try to give daily reports, no matter how little. Paramount importance constant observation of
airports, planes etc. Friend knows.’

This opaque parting shot referred to Wulf Schmidt, the Dane who had bonded with Caroli during training for Operation Lena, and even entered into a rash wager to meet him again at the Black Boy
Hotel in Nottingham on 20 September. Then a prominent landmark in the city, the building was an apt rendezvous for visiting German spies, boasting a Gothic
façade and
a Bavarian balcony, and enough gables, turrets and spires to shame mad King Ludwig. However, as Agent Leonhardt prepared to climb aboard Hauptmann Gartenfeld’s black Heinkel-111 and bale out
over the Midlands, he had no inkling whatsoever that his friend Nilberg had already betrayed him to MI5.

This sudden expansion of the double-cross system spurred Guy Liddell to form a small steering group, comprising six senior officers from MI5, MI6 and the Wireless Committee. Soon this cabal
became the Twenty Committee, so-called because in Roman numerals the figure twenty is represented by a double cross (XX). ‘We did much more than practise a large-scale deception,’
averred its chairman John Masterman, in peacetime an Oxford history don. ‘By means of the double agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country. This
is at first blush a staggering claim, and in the first place we could not bring ourselves to believe that we did so. Nevertheless it is true, and was true for the greater part of the
war.’

Constantly undermined by Agent Snow during the first year of war, MI5 had finally begun winning the double-cross game with the arrival of McCarthy’s Afu transmitter from Lisbon, and the
fraudulent rescue of Gösta Caroli at High Wycombe on 16 September. Now, three days later, their confidence was further buoyed by the arrival of Wulf Schmidt, dropped by Gartenfeld over the
Fens a half-dozen miles north of Cambridge. ‘It was only yards from a searchlight battery defending RAF Oakington,’ Schmidt recalled cheerfully many years later. ‘The crew were
asleep when I landed.’

Codenamed Leonhardt by Ritter, Wulf Schmidt was a Danish national born in South Jutland in 1911, who had acquired a solid command of English following spells as a cattle hand in Argentina and a
banana grower in the Cameroons. Like his colleague Caroli, Schmidt jumped attached to his suitcase
transmitter and landed heavily after his canopy snagged in telegraph wires.
Irked that his wristwatch was shattered, but confident of passing unnoticed in England, the next morning Schmidt hobbled into the nearby village of Willingham where he bought a new timepiece and a
daily paper, ate breakfast in a café and bathed his swollen ankle under the village pump. Predictably enough, his foreign accent and smart blue suit soon raised eyebrows.

‘Someone must have been suspicious and reported me to the police,’ Schmidt confirmed, ‘because I was arrested as I slept in a field close to my parachute.’ By midday the
V-man designated A.3725 had been transferred into the custody of the local Home Guard. Following a preliminary interrogation by Major Richard Dixon, the RSLO based in Cambridge, the dubious refugee
with forged identity papers in the name of Harry Williamson was driven to Camp 020.

His chauffeur was Jock Horsfall, a former racing driver attached to MI5’s transport section who excelled at covering miles fast. On the way to Ham Common Horsfall took his powerful
Citroën on a detour past Trafalgar Square, followed by the Houses of Parliament. ‘I had been told England was on the brink of collapse,’ noted Schmidt with dismay. ‘That
there was no food in the shops, and that London was in ruins. None of it was true.’

Despite this dispiriting excursion Schmidt showed no sign of cracking at 020, displaying a haughty arrogance, adamant that he had arrived by boat three months earlier as a Danish refugee. As a
result MI5 brought in several external officers to question the new arrival, one of whom was Colonel Alexander Scotland, an intelligence veteran charged with the interrogation of enemy prisoners of
war at the so-called ‘London Cage’ in Kensington Palace Gardens. As recorded by Guy Liddell, what followed was decidedly un-British. ‘Malcolm Frost found Scotland in the
prisoner’s cell. He was hitting Schmidt in the jaw and I think
got one back for himself. We cannot have this sort of thing going on in our establishment. Apart from the
moral aspect, I am quite convinced that these Gestapo methods do not pay in the long run.’

Liddell took the matter up with the Director of Military Intelligence, Paddy Beaumont-Nesbitt, and demanded that Scotland be barred from 020. Undeterred, a day later the slaphappy colonel
returned to Latchmere House armed with a hypodermic syringe full of truth serum. Lying judiciously, Tin-Eye Stephens told Scotland that Schmidt was in no fit state to be interrogated further. A
formal complaint about Scotland’s techniques was later made by Maxwell Knight to the Secretary of State for War.

Eschewing brutality, MI5 simply informed Schmidt that he had already been betrayed by his colleague Caroli, who would not be available to meet him in Nottingham. There was also the small matter
of the Treachery Act and mandatory capital punishment. By way of a final trump card, Schmidt had landed with forged papers bearing telltale defects put across by McCarthy, and incriminating serials
supplied by Owens.