Hitler's Spy (27 page)

Owens was right to be afraid of a lynch mob. By now MI5 had finalised plans for the evacuation of less reliable XX agents to North Wales in the event of a German invasion, still regarded as a
clear and present danger. Under Plan Hegira, Arthur Owens, Wulf Schmidt and a half-dozen others would be dispersed to various hotels around Llandudno, a complex operation jokingly referred to as Mr
Mills’ Circus. The local RSLO even took to using appropriate animal metaphors in correspondence with B1A: ‘I have now completed arrangements for the accommodation of the animals, the
young and their keepers,’ Captain Finney wrote gaily. ‘It has been impossible to arrange cheaper accommodation in boarding houses, as naturally the proprietors of these want definite
dates.’

Some double-cross agents, like Sam McCarthy and Gwilym Williams, were considered sufficiently trustworthy to make their own way to safety. Those who were not – chiefly Owens and Schmidt,
but also Lily Bade and Snow Junior – would be arrested and driven to Wales under armed escort. Twelve sets of
handcuffs were borrowed from Scotland Yard, together with
half a dozen Webley .455 revolvers and 54 rounds of soft-nosed ammunition – for in the last resort the circus animals would be shot.

‘If there is danger of any of the more dangerous cases falling into enemy hands they will be liquidated forcibly,’ Robertson told Tin-Eye Stephens. ‘As Snow is a great believer
in German efficiency it is highly probable that he would attempt to join the Germans immediately, and could blow our whole show.’

Although necessary, this brutal approach was tempered with mercy. On Christmas Eve, Wulf Schmidt was driven from Round Bush House to the Old Parsonage at Hinxton, where he and Gösta Caroli
were permitted to enjoy the festive holiday together, albeit under heavy armed guard. Despite having slashed his wrists ten weeks earlier, the Swede seemed to have shaken off the ‘black mood
of despair’ diagnosed at Camp 020 and been coaxed into ‘a better way of thinking’ by the ‘unremitting care and psychological finesse’ applied in the light of his
suicide attempt.

Then, with the season of goodwill over and gone, Caroli attempted to throttle his guard and took to his heels.

11

Shortly after lunch on 13 January 1941, Gösta Caroli was surprised but pleased to find himself under the supervision of a single military guard. ‘I was sitting
playing a card game when Summer suddenly attacked me,’ Sergeant Paulton explained afterwards. ‘He sprang from behind with a piece of rope about 20 inches long and tried to garrotte me.
I naturally struggled, and succeeded in throwing myself sideways.’ The two men fell on the floor in front of the fireplace. ‘Still holding the rope like a pair of reins, Caroli got his
knee into the small of my back and told me not to struggle.’

Exhausted by the struggle, Paulton blacked out momentarily, enabling the desperate Swede to tie his hands. ‘He expressed regret for his treatment of me, and said that I would only have to
wait to six o’clock. He said that he had to do it. He knew it was a hanging job, but he could not go on. I told him I could not lie tied on the floor all that time, and asked him to put me on
the Chesterfield. Then I asked him to put a pillow under my head – this he did.’

It was fortunate indeed that Tar Robertson had chosen Round Bush House over The Old Parsonage as his family home. Running through Paulton’s pockets, Caroli located the keys to the safe in
the study, from which he removed his ID papers, two quartz transmitter crystals and £5 in petty cash. A
wider sweep of the house netted maps, matches, a torch and a
child’s magnetic compass, as well as a chunk of cold beef from the larder, along with tins of sardines, pilchards and pears. By now twenty minutes had elapsed. Packing his escape kit into a
suitcase, Caroli left the house through the kitchen, taking care to close the shutters and doors behind him.

Paulton lay still, then wriggled off the sofa and stood upright. ‘In the half-light I spotted my penknife on the table, and groping behind my back I succeeded in picking it up and set to
work.’ After cutting himself free, Paulton crept into the study and called Major Dixon, the RSLO in Cambridge.

Dixon told Paulton to alert the London office. Even as they spoke the still-shaken minder was alarmed to see Caroli pass by the window, pushing a Douglas motorcycle and struggling to carry a
collapsible canvas canoe. The machine belonged to another guard (whose unauthorised absence had triggered Summer’s bid for freedom) and was stored in an outbuilding. Paulton made a note of
the registration number, then watched as Caroli coaxed the engine into life, wobbled slowly down the drive and disappeared in the direction of Newmarket.

It was hardly the Great Escape. Nonetheless, if V-man Nilberg managed to reach the coast, and paddle back to Holland, the entire double-cross system would sink like a stone. Luckily Caroli was
no T. E. Lawrence, and after repeatedly toppling off the unfamiliar machine he decided to surrender to a cordon of police at Newmarket station. By nightfall the recidivist Swede was back behind
bars at Camp 020. ‘Clearly Summer can never be allowed to use his transmitter again,’ Liddell noted with genuine regret. ‘We have all come to the conclusion that somehow or other
he must be eliminated. This is not, however, an easy matter.’

Via Snow’s transmitter, Ritter learned only that their mutual ‘Swedish friend’ had sent a letter to McCarthy, warning that he was being watched by the police and meant to hide
by enlisting
on a merchant vessel. In the interests of verisimilitude Caroli’s wireless set was left in the cloakroom at Cambridge station, then offered to Sam Stewart.
After Wohldorf confirmed to Snow that the shady shipping agent was still ‘believed to be all right’, Stewart found himself interned for the duration under Regulation 18B.

Gösta Caroli spent the rest of the war at 020R, a secure internment camp near Huntercombe, finding a measure of peace by tending the kitchen garden. ‘Summer remained at heart a
Nazi,’ reflected Tin-Eye Stephens. ‘Although now disciplined and not otherwise troublesome, his escape mania was a constant menace. He was the only prisoner at either camp who ever
attempted to cut his way out through the formidable apron of wire surrounding buildings and compounds.’

Despite Summer’s sudden end, the double-cross system burst suddenly into bloom. That same month a British-born agent named George Kilburg (aka DRAGONFLY) returned from Lisbon with a
sophisticated wireless hidden in a gramophone player, while in New York the fun-loving Yugoslav playboy Tricycle set about bilking the Abwehr for £20,000, a scam dubbed Plan Midas. The Twenty
Committee also approved Plan 1, a scheme to fool the Germans into bombing a dummy munitions dump. Wulf Schmidt buzzed map coordinates to Wohldorf, after which Ritter recommended his loyal friend
for an Iron Cross. The undeserved medal was eventually delivered to his family in Germany, though the Luftwaffe never troubled to bomb the imaginary target.

Indeed, Doctor Rantzau’s own career now assumed a downward trajectory. The deaths and disappearances of so many Lena agents raised concerns at Stelle X, causing rival officers to call
loudly for his scalp. At the same time attention shifted from Europe to North Africa, where British and Commonwealth troops had routed the Italians and swept up 130,000 prisoners in just eight
exhilarating weeks. Gravely humiliated, Mussolini
begged help from Hitler. The result was the Afrika Korps, a new army for a new theatre of war, capably commanded by Erwin
Rommel, soon to pass into legend as the Desert Fox.

On 20 January Ritter received orders to proceed to Tripoli, tasked with forming a special
Sonderkommando
to insert agents behind Allied lines in Libya and Egypt. Climate aside, the job
looked a lot like a punishment posting, opposite yet equivalent to Robertson’s threatened exile to the sub-Arctic scrub of Jan Mayen Island. Before leaving Hamburg, however, the departing
master spy found himself locked in a puzzling double-cross duel with Tar Robertson over airborne interception technology.

On the morning of 23 January Wohldorf alerted Owens that a ‘friend’ in England had acquired valuable intelligence on infrared. This experimental technology promised to help night
fighters find their quarry in the dark, albeit dimly, since research on both sides tended to suggest that airborne interception (AI) radar would do the job far more effectively. In Blitz-torn
Britain, operational trials with AI were concealed behind fibs and sibs that RAF pilots ate nothing but carrots, thereby ingesting large quantities of vitamin A and cultivating acute night vision.
Soon gullible civilians seized on the idea, hoping to avoid bumps and bruises in the blackout.

This disquieting signal appeared to confirm earlier claims by Owens that Doctor Rantzau had a mole inside the Air Ministry. ‘Snow is rather inclined to put the thing on a high plane and
meet this man himself,’ mused Guy Liddell. ‘My inclination is to bump him off. Eventually we decided to suggest that within the next twenty-four hours at a given time the unknown
informant should drop his information through a letterbox.’

The letter box chosen was at 14 Craven Hill, a property in Bayswater leased by MI5 and occupied by Sam McCarthy. On the same afternoon that the message was received, Tar Robertson passed several
hours with Owens and Dicketts at White’s. ‘I went to great pains to impress on Snow that
information about the infrared process was of vital importance to this
country, and must on no account be disclosed to the enemy.’

For once Owens did as he was told.
‘Informed infrared stunt of vital importance and great hope here,’
he buzzed Wohldorf next evening.
‘If you trust your friend
and he is safe, suggest he put material through letterbox at specified time when I can arrange to receive it. Reply in time for material to be taken to Manchester, 10.15 train.’

A team of B6 watchers descended on Bayswater to stake out Mac’s letter box, and at the appointed time a cine-camera operator trained a telephoto lens on the door of Number 14. A
floorwalker from Whiteley’s department store on Queensway aroused suspicion, but ultimately there was no delivery of dope, no secret documents and no hurried trip north to microdot
photographer Charles Eschborn.

Nothing but Zeppelin shells, in fact. Without the benefit of an all-seeing infrared beam it was impossible to make out who was spoofing who.

Besides, there were bigger stunts to consider. During the closing phase of the Battle of Britain an eminent German geopolitical theorist named Albrecht Haushofer had posted a letter from Lisbon
to Scotland’s premier peer, the Duke of Hamilton, a firm friend since the Berlin Olympics in 1936. An enthusiastic supporter of the pre-war Anglo-German Fellowship, Hamilton was now a Wing
Commander in Fighter Command, and as a sitting member of the House of Lords was thought by Haushofer to wield considerable political influence. His letter dealt chiefly with family matters, but
concluded with a guarded invitation to meet ‘somewhere on the outskirts of Europe’ for a one-to-one talk.

‘Archie Boyle is prepared to send Hamilton on some mission to Lisbon,’ confided Liddell to his diary on 11 January. ‘The whole case looks rather like a peace offer of some
sort.’

Another Last Appeal to Reason, in fact. British intelligence
did not yet know it, but Haushofer was acting on behalf of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who had also
met Hamilton at the Berlin games and shared his passion for aviation. After sitting on the note for several months MI6 summoned the blue-blooded flyer to London for a meeting, which Tar Robertson
also attended. Without consulting Lord Swinton, let alone the Prime Minister, the Twenty Committee subsequently invited Hamilton to treff with his old friend Haushofer in Lisbon. Preferring
Spitfire sorties to cloak-and-dagger work, the Duke replied that he would do so only if ordered.

For the moment, Robertson and MI5 would have to remain content with sending a fake RAF officer to Portugal: disgraced desk pilot Jack Brown, aka Walter Dicketts, aka Agent Celery.

In stark contrast to Hamilton, Double Agent Dick was keen as mustard to begin his Iberian mission, having negotiated a handsome fee of £200, payable up front. On receiving the money from
Robertson, the personable fraudster promised to place it on deposit until his mission was successfully concluded. ‘This,’ Tar noted drily, ‘seems too good to believe.’

As Dicketts prepared to leave the country, Agent Snow added a measure of XXX intrigue to an already complicated double-cross scenario. Besides Owens and Lily, and Dick and Kay, the Snow
ménage at Homefields now included Ronnie Reed, the former BBC engineer now being groomed as a B1A case officer but left temporarily idle by the sudden end of Summer. Owens, resentful at yet
another intrusion by MI5, muttered darkly in turn that Reed was grooming Kay for ‘mucky business’ while Dick was away.

‘Dicketts is convinced that Owens is mad,’ Tar sighed wearily. ‘He also confirmed the impression that Snow is double-crossing us, and has people everywhere. Possibly even in
this department.’

Certainly Owens was insistent that all dope and samples should be ‘especially good’ in advance of the Lisbon treff, and
not merely ersatz chicken feed.
Frustratingly, however, there was still no sign of the infrared man, nor any encouraging updates on Summer or Biscuit. Indeed, the best intelligence continued to flow in the opposite direction. For
on 3 February Colonel Johnny received yet another startling transmission from Rantzau:
‘Dropped man 31st thirty miles south of Peterborough. Was badly hurt leaving plane. Perhaps dead. If
you hear anything please let me know.’

Ironically, the latest Lena parachute agent was already receiving medical treatment at Brixton prison. Defiantly alive, but nursing a broken ankle, ‘James Rymer’ of 33 Abbotsford
Gardens, Woodford Green, was in fact Josef Jakobs, a dentist by training, who risked a low-altitude jump over fens on the last night of January and came to grief in a potato field near Ramsey.
Surrounded by his equipment, Jakobs endured a long night of agony and at daybreak announced his presence by squeezing off shots from his Mauser pistol. Two smallholders responded and summoned the
police, who transported Jakobs into captivity on a horse-drawn cart, together with his transmitter, codes, maps and currency – and obligatory chunk of German sausage.