Hitler's Spy (24 page)

‘His reaction was immediate and dramatic,’ wrote Stephens. ‘Schmidt lost all his previous composure, cursed “the swine Caroli” and blurted out that he would tell
the whole truth.’ The Dane held back little, telling of his recruitment in Hamburg, his training under Doctor Rantzau, of meeting other Lena agents in Brussels, and revealing his intended
mission. ‘He was persuaded that his betrayal had not begun with the capture of Caroli, but had been implicit in the cynical carelessness of his preparation and dispatch. In his new standpoint
Schmidt seemed to be a sound XX prospect, and agreed to work as a double agent.’

‘No one ever asked me why I changed my mind,’ Schmidt told intelligence historian Nigel West four decades later. ‘But the reason was very straightforward. It was simply a
matter of survival. Self-preservation must be the strongest instinct in man.’

Thus late in the evening of 21 September the erstwhile banana farmer became Agent TATE, so called on account of his close resemblance to Harry Tate, the popular music-hall
comic, lately deceased. Under Schmidt’s direction, MI5 returned to Willingham and recovered his transmitter from a field near Half-Moon Bridge. The device was then installed on the top floor
of Latchmere House. Despite the dubious ministrations of Colonel Scotland, just two days after arriving at 020 the former National Socialist zealot buzzed Wohldorf to report that he had landed
safely and was making his way to London.
‘Roads blocked with refugees. Most of them look Jewish.’

Absolute jake.

Still there was no invasion. Reporting on a meeting of the Twenty Committee, Guy Liddell alluded to a bold proposal by the then Director of Military Intelligence. ‘Paddy Beaumont-Nesbitt
was rather in favour of encouraging them to come over. But on referring the matter to the Chiefs of Staff it was decided not to let them have the truth about the strength of our
defences.’

Snow, Summer and Tate duly obliged, reporting on a coastline bristling with troops, anti-tank guns and machine-gun nests, backed up by mobile reserves and over a million Home Guards. The tallest
of these tales, such as the supposed importation from Australia of 200 man-eating sharks for release into the Channel, were unlikely to perturb the planners of Operation Sealion. Nevertheless, the
art of strategic deception now came of age. Established under the auspices of MI6, the Underground Propaganda Committee set about devising rumours known as ‘sibs’, including stories of
crateloads of Tommy-guns and barge-busting super-mines – both fictions already transmitted to Wohldorf by Snow. In the wake of the Cromwell invasion alarm, stories also began to circulate
that a landing had actually been attempted on the night of 7 September, leaving the Channel white with German dead.
North American papers such as the
New York Times
proved particularly receptive, happily reporting that drifting Nazi corpses were disrupting fishing in Sweden, with a miserly reward of 75 cents offered for each body recovered with its uniform
intact.

Rumours of up to 80,000 dead stormtroopers undoubtedly boosted morale in Britain, and at the same time helped to maintain vigilance in the face of a grave and ongoing threat. As with the
material transmitted by MI5 double-cross agents, however, the fiction of the bodies on the beach also required some limited foundation in fact. The arrival of a dead
Wehrmacht
anti-tank
gunner at Littlestone-on-Sea was reported in
The Times
, while in late September British troops were detailed to collect ripe German corpses between Hythe and St Mary’s Bay. One of
those tasked with this macabre detail was Gunner William Robinson of 333 Coastal Artillery Battery, who helped retrieve a dozen bodies over a two-day period, then carted the remains to a field near
New Romney.

‘They had been in the water a considerable time,’ Robinson recalled of this unpleasant fatigue. ‘We were given twenty Woodbines, which we collected each day, and additional pay
of two shillings – which we collected some time later.’

For Germans, so it seemed, Romney Marsh was a must to avoid. Besides the two Scandinavian V-men, Caroli and Schmidt, the roll-call of detainees at Camp 020 still included the hapless quartet of
spies who had arrived on the Marsh by boat. None of the four could be used as XX assets, and all faced trial under the 1940 Act. As a general rule the Twenty Committee opposed execution, arguing
that ‘intelligence should have precedence over bloodletting’, and that the ‘human library’ of captive spies at Latchmere House was always useful as a reference source.
Nevertheless, it seems probable that the trial and inevitable execution of the Romney Marsh Four was sanctioned in full by MI5,
pour encourager les autres
. The loss of Waldberg and
his team also increased the chances of the Abwehr directing future agents towards Snow and the London stelle.

The night Blitz was far less convenient. While the B1A office in St James’s escaped largely unscathed, on 28 September the Luftwaffe attempted to spark a second Great Fire of London with
tens of thousands of incendiaries, several of which landed on Wormwood Scrubs. The only human casualty was Jock Horsfall, MI5’s virtuoso of the wheel, who fell through the glass roof of C
Wing, almost breaking his neck. Serious though this was, Horsfall’s injuries were as nothing compared to the damage inflicted on the precious Registry after the night-duty officer failed to
locate the correct keys. ‘Hosepipes had to be worked through the barred windows and doors and the mess was simply awful,’ observed a clerk next day. ‘The half-burnt files were
soaking wet and there was a disgusting smell of burnt wetness.’

The result was an unmitigated disaster for the Security Service. Fire and water badly damaged the central card index as well as hundreds of files, not all of which had yet been copied to
microfilm. This entirely avoidable calamity prompted a hasty move from prison to palace. Standing in two thousand acres of landscaped parklands near Woodstock, Blenheim Palace was the monumental
ancestral seat of the dukes of Marlborough – and the birthplace of Winston Churchill. Privileged evacuees from Repton School were hurriedly evicted and the tenth duke confined to a single
wing, leaving MI5 staff incongruously split between grand staterooms and draughty Nissen huts. For shell-shocked survivors of the Scrubs, however, the enforced relocation to rural Oxfordshire was a
godsend. Bombing, ack-ack barrages and sleep deprivation soon became torments of the past, with staff even treated to edifying tours of the Palace by Anthony Blunt, an art historian recruited into
MI5 by Guy Liddell – and a Soviet spy to boot.

For Agent Snow, too, the Blitz paid dividends. Following the
arrival of a UXB in his garden at Marlborough Road, the devastating fire at the Scrubs served only to
underline the need to move Owens – and his transmitter – to a safer haven. This turned out to be Homefields, a detached house on Spinney Hill in Addlestone, owned by a Major Whyte of
Section B23, who was among those transferred to Blenheim. ‘In view of the great difficulty in obtaining a suitable house it is submitted that the terms are favourable,’ advised Tar on
receipt of the bill. In addition to rent of four and a half guineas a week there was also the cost of the housekeeper’s wages, and those of a gardener. ‘This will amount to an
additional two guineas a week, in return for which all the vegetables in the garden will be available for the occupants.’

No pigsties or prison cells for Hitler’s chief spy in England. Yet again, the resilient Little Man had fallen firmly on his feet.

The evacuation of the London stelle into the leafy Surrey countryside also involved Lily Bade, baby Jean Louise, Maurice Burton and the pool of watchers from B6. Since Homefields was some
distance from the nearest railway station, permission was obtained to spend £70 on a second car. With the war costing seven million pounds a day, and Abwehr cash running short, Robertson
paused to undertake a searching review of Snow’s finances. As B1A understood matters, Owens earned a basic salary of £250 a month from Hamburg, plus generous expenses. These excluded
food, drink and clothing, but did include rent. In picking up the tab for Homefields, therefore, MI5 were subsidising not only absent Major Whyte but also Hitler’s war of aggression against
the British Isles.

‘I explained to Snow that the other side ought to pay for all the expenses incurred on their account. These include McCarthy’s salary, and all the mythical expenses they thought were
being incurred. For example, journeys which are not taken because we already know the answer.’

After protracted negotiations, Owens agreed to hand over all
monies received from Germany and request additional funds from Rantzau whenever B1A deemed it necessary. In
return, the Abwehr master spy was permitted to keep his extravagant monthly salary, whereas MI5 would meet out-of-pocket expenses such as travel and Mac’s trifling wage. ‘This
arrangement will suit us very well,’ reasoned B1A. ‘It relieves Snow of the money actually spent on running his organisation, and out of the sums notionally spent we ought to be able to
build up a fund out of which we can pay all those expenses chargeable to the other side.’

For Nikolaus Ritter, Operation Lena had yet to turn a profit. At the end of the month three more Lena agents reached Britain by sea, landing by dinghy on a remote stretch of the Banffshire coast
after flying from Norway by seaplane. Ritter had inherited the team following the sudden death of Hilmar Dierks, killed in a car smash four weeks earlier. Incredibly, this accident left one of the
spies a widow, since glamorous Russian émigré Vera Erikson had married Dierks a short while before, despite being younger than him by twenty years.

Unperturbed, Erikson promptly embarked on an affair with her co-agent Karl Drücke, after rejecting the advances of a rival V-man who tried to impress her by chewing on a wine glass.

The lovers’ mission to England was equally futile. Having lost their bicycles as they rowed ashore, Erikson and Drücke were detained within hours of landing. At Portgordon an alert
stationmaster grew suspicious of their wet clothes and alerted the police after the pair purchased third-class rail tickets from a wallet stuffed with banknotes. A search of Drücke’s
luggage revealed a familiar inventory of incriminating equipment, including an Afu transmitter and codes, a Mauser pistol, a torch stamped ‘Made in Bohemia’ and a half-eaten German
sausage. Both spies carried forged ID cards bearing serials transmitted by Snow (along with telltale number 7s crossed in the Continental style) and pink ration books based on the example supplied
by
McCarthy. The third member of the party, Werner Walti, was arrested later that day at Waverley station in Edinburgh, reaching for his weapon as the police closed in but
being quickly overpowered.

Unlike the Romney Marsh spies, Drücke and Walti were experienced espionage agents; both withstood harsh interrogation at Camp 020, and could not be turned. Declining to offer up full
confessions, the two men claimed to be couriers, a fiction maintained even after Vera Erikson betrayed both of them. On trial for their lives at the Old Bailey nine months later, Drücke
remained silent, while Walti swore that his mission involved nothing more significant than the delivery of a suitcase transmitter to Victoria station. Cross-examined by the Solicitor-General, Sir
William Jowitt, Walti described his contact in London as a man in a grey pinstriped suit, with a scar on his forehead and a pidgin-English password: ‘I am coming from Glasgow.’

Nikolaus Ritter can hardly have imagined that Sam Stewart or Alexander Myner were still viable V-men. Could it be that the ‘friend’ Walti expected to meet was in fact a short
Welshman with brown boots, shifty eyes and nicotine-stained fingers, coming from Pontardawe?

10

Newly promoted to the rank of major, Nikolaus Ritter dispatched his third parachute agent to England on the night of 3 October 1940. On paper at least, Kurt Karl Goose was
eminently qualified for Operation Lena: after three years spent in the United States as a geology student, his English-language skills had earned him a place in the Abwehr’s highly secretive
Brandenburg commando unit, who specialised in false flag operations behind enemy lines. Less impressively, as Goose dropped through the bomb doors of Gartenfeld’s Heinkel-111 he lost control
of his bowels, and therefore landed in Northamptonshire in a state of some disarray.

Seeking shelter from a downpour in an agricultural shed, the elite special-forces commando was accused of stealing eggs by a market gardener and marched off at the point of a pitchfork. By
nightfall Goose was doing bird in a cell at Wellingborough police station and admitted to being a parachute agent. The following day the first Brandenburg commando to fall into British hands was
driven to Camp 020.

But for inclement British weather things might have turned out differently. Despite the fact that Goose was dropped in the same area as Gösta Caroli, MI5 received no advance warning, and
his papers had been forged with a degree of care. True, these looked far too new, but his ID card was not based on
serials provided by Snow and was clean of telltale
Continental figures. In the debit column, Goose had retained his German army pay book and a Luftwaffe uniform in the belief that, if captured, he could expect to be treated as an ordinary prisoner
of war. This hope was forlorn, since trial by court martial only entitled him to be shot instead of hanged.

The new arrival readily agreed to work as a double-cross agent, using the droll codename GANDER. ‘Goose is a poor fish who never wanted to be a spy,’ observed Liddell, bemused.
‘He joined his regiment, and when a sergeant asked who spoke English he rather foolishly put up his hand.’

Unaccountably, Gander had been issued with a one-way transmitter and was therefore unable to receive any incoming messages. Whether or not this was some inscrutable Abwehr ploy, Kurt Goose was
allowed to fulfil his original mission under the supervision of Ronnie Reed, (mis)reporting on weather and morale in the Midlands for a period of several weeks. The case was closed down in
November, Goose having ‘blotted his untidy copybook’ by attempting to bribe one of the guards at Latchmere House into posting a letter to the German embassy in Dublin.