Hitler's Spy (33 page)

‘Proof of what?’

‘He had a letter from my wife back in August of thirty-nine. Two letters, if I remember correctly.’

‘You had no reason to suppose Rantzau actually knew anything about the transmissions. Yet you gave it away at once.’

‘Definitely a slip on my part, yes.’

‘A slip with disastrous consequences. Surely you see that a person who’s capable of making such a big mistake isn’t much use to us?’

‘Then let Dicketts carry on.’

‘But you’ve already told us Dick’s a double-crosser. A very dangerous man, so you said. Think it over very carefully, Arthur.’

‘Yes. I see.’

‘Just as I don’t see that we need to meet in person again,’ Tar said brusquely, rising to his feet. ‘If you’ve anything more to add by all means put it in
writing.’

On this frostiest of notes the embattled head of B1A left the room, leaving Owens to wonder whether prison lay in store, or Camp 020. Instead the diminutive traitor was driven back to
Addlestone, where Lily also gave him the cold shoulder, and Ronnie Reed buzzed a brief final message to Wohldorf.
‘Impossible to carry on. Will call you 11.30 to see if any further
instructions. If not am going to pack up and hide gear.’

Wohldorf told Colonel Johnny to make his own arrangements, and resume transmissions whenever he could. In the meantime an operator would continue to listen for him on even days.

Good night, old boy.

So, cheerio.

With this forlorn exchange ended the extraordinary career of double agent Snow, formerly Hitler’s chief spy in England and now a candidate for the gallows. ‘There was general
agreement that it might be necessary to remove Owens from the country,’ Masterman minuted after the Twenty Committee met to discuss the closure of the case. ‘Or, alternatively, to shut
him up.’

Much to the surprise of all concerned, Walter Dicketts vowed to defend Owens against charges under the 1940 Act. ‘Celery made a very revealing remark,’ declared John Marriott, who
visited Dick in Guildford to confirm that enquiries into
‘Major Blake’ and his dining arrangements were being quietly dropped. ‘He maintained that all he
had said about Lisbon was absolutely true, and that Owens was lying – but that he would take it very much to heart if the Little Man got into trouble as a result.’

Truly, it seemed, there was honour amongst thieves. In Tripoli, Ritter learned of Johnny’s downfall a fortnight later. ‘Hamburg told me a message had come from Owens to the effect
that he was too ill to continue his work. This had an ominous ring, though this time I had left for North Africa and was therefore out of touch with day-to-day developments in the case.’

After waiting in vain for Captain Jack Brown to bring Churchill to his senses, Berlin quietly released the same trial balloon via the Japanese Foreign Office on 29 April. ‘The nations
called upon to settle world peace are Germany, Japan, the British Empire and the United States,’ trumpeted its unofficial organ, the suitably obscure
Japan Times Advertiser
.
‘The strongest powers must have the greatest opportunities of developing the world. This is the law of nature, and attempts to maintain the status quo by dominant powers who continue to
function only through alliances must break down.’

London, the seat of the dominant power in question, offered no formal response. Instead, Churchill telegraphed an admirably undiplomatic reply during a stirring speech on the fall of Greece.
‘No prudent and far-seeing man can doubt that the eventual and total defeat of Hitler and Mussolini is certain. There are less than 70,000,000 malignant Huns, some of whom are curable and
others killable, most of whom are already engaged in holding down Austrians, Czechs, Poles and the many other ancient races they now bully and pillage. The people of the British Empire and of the
United States number nearly 200,000,000 . . . They are determined that the cause of freedom shall not be trampled on, nor the tide of world progress turned backward by the criminal
dictators.’

Malignant Huns, trampling bullies, killable criminal dictators. The Reich had wasted time and money on Walter Dicketts and his sly sponsor Snow; the Duke of Hamilton, a
gentleman supposedly, had not even troubled to reply. How, now, might increasingly twitchy Nazi feelers reach out to the sizeable peace lobby that surely existed in Britain?

Like Dicketts, Wulf Schmidt was also left in limbo by the fall of Snow. The double agent codenamed Tate by MI5, and Leonhardt by the Abwehr, still resided with Tar Robertson and his family at
Round Bush House, but was compromised by the £100 sent by Owens to Radlett in February. In a bid to test his continued credibility, the Dane was instructed to buzz Wohldorf with yet another
urgent request for funds. ‘If Tate is not helped at once he must throw up the sponge,’ reasoned Masterman, glumly contemplating a double-cross doomsday. ‘We shall only be able to
decide what is to be done according to the Doctor’s reply.’

Rantzau, however, was in Tripoli with Rommel, and temporarily indisposed. In his absence Hamburg suggested dropping an interim payment from Gartenfeld’s Heinkel-111, with more to follow
via Watford post office. MI5 got as far as instructing the RAF to avoid shooting down Luftwaffe intruders over Hertfordshire on the night in question, then backtracked when the money bomb plan was
suddenly abandoned. Now Schmidt would receive £500 via a parachute courier.

‘We have bought two bloodhounds and their keeper,’ noted Guy Liddell, keen to avoid a repeat of previous errors. ‘They will be available to all regions for tracking down
parachutists.’

Robertson was already on the scent. Wohldorf warned Schmidt to expect a visit from ‘the man from the Phoenix’, a notorious Hamburg club frequented by agents in training during 1940.
Schmidt professed ignorance, though fortunately the human reference library at Camp 020 still contained Josef Jakobs, the V-man dropped near Ramsey in January, who duly
obliged with a detailed description of the Phoenix friend, since codenamed ROBOTER (‘robot’) by his Abwehr controllers at Stelle X.

The mastermind behind the revised money-drop scheme was none other than Nikolaus Ritter, still in North Africa but determined to protect his friend Schmidt, as well as his own backside. ‘I
arranged for the next agent dispatched to England to contact Leonhardt to make a routine payment, and to report what the situation really was.’ If Schmidt was still reliable, a satisfactory
report would come back. ‘But if he were controlled, Roboter would be arrested, and the British faced with the choice of allowing him to return to Germany immediately, as instructed, or keep
him and thereby acknowledge Leonhardt’s true position. Either way, I should know where I stood.’

Viewed objectively, the intricate plan hatched by Ritter to test Schmidt stood no more chance of success than Jan Willem Ter Braak’s mission to Cambridge, which had ended in starvation and
suicide. The ‘robot’ assigned this unenviable task was Karel Richter, a Sudeten German who had served in the Czech air force before a spell as a mechanic on transatlantic liners.
‘Schmidt is our master pearl,’ Ritter promised Richter, mixing his metaphors in fine style. ‘If he is false, then the whole string is false.’

For eighteen months the fate of the double-cross system on either side had hinged on an intemperate Welsh fantasist with false teeth and delusions of grandeur. Now it depended on a former banana
farmer from South Jutland with an unmerited Iron Cross and a love of profanity.

Götz von Berlichingen.

For the Twenty Committee, the imminent arrival of ‘the man from the Phoenix’ seemed to confirm that Agent Snow was innocent of treason, and had lied about exposure in Lisbon.
Masterman conjectured that Owens was a burned-out
case, and with Britain undefeated desired a comfortable retirement with a foot in both camps. Although this confidence was
entirely misplaced, the Little Man could at least be spared the rope – if not prison. On the morning of Monday, 21 April, nine days after Agent Snow’s final transmission to Wohldorf,
Masterman placed a call to the Chief Constable of Surrey, requesting immediate service of the 18B Order drawn up a whole year earlier. A police superintendent named Curry drove from Weybridge to
Addlestone directly and placed Owens under formal arrest. Without further ado, the redundant triple agent was then conveyed a hundred miles north to Stafford Gaol.

A good kick in the pants, as Ritter might say.

No record exists of the reaction of Lily Bade to their forced separation. Perhaps the scene at the safe house on Spinney Hill was highly emotional, marked by bitter tears and desperate pleas.
More likely, the revelation that Owens was suffering from a sexually transmitted disease meant that his departure from Homefields fell short of a fond farewell.

Owens arrived at Stafford still bearing identity papers in the name of Thomas Wilson. ‘He is a man who has done some work for us,’ MI5 informed the governor, remaining purposefully
vague, ‘but we are very dissatisfied with certain things he has done lately, and are unable to trust him. We wish to be informed of any requests for visits, or any petition he may make to any
government department. Otherwise we wish him to be treated as an ordinary prisoner.’

Conditions at Stafford were far from ordinary. A grim, sprawling fortress built at the end of the nineteenth century, the prison had been taken over by the War Office in 1914 to serve as a
military gaol, then left empty after 1923 when falling crime rates rendered it surplus to requirements. Thanks to Defence Regulation 18B, the sudden round-up of hostiles and aliens in May 1940
created an acute shortage of secure accommodation.
To help cope with the surge in demand a large wing at Stafford called the Crescent was hastily reopened, despite the fact
that the building was now semi-derelict and imbued with a cold, dank atmosphere, smelling of mildew and gas.

It was a long way from Homefields, and double suites in luxurious foreign hotels. ‘Big iron staircases, bare, and railings everywhere,’ recalled one 18B inmate, without affection.
‘No two cells were the same shape or size. In fact I think it must have warped from the damp and age.’

Hitler’s chief spy in England was soon joined behind bars by a far more important Nazi emissary. Shortly after sunset on Saturday, 10 May, the pilot of a Messerschmitt-110 twin-engined
fighter baled out of his aircraft over Eaglesham, eight miles south of Glasgow, jumping low in fading light and cracking an ankle. Challenged by a ploughman armed wielding a hay-fork, the lone
airman identified himself as Hauptmann Alfred Horn and asked to be transported to Dungavel House, eleven miles distant, where he wished to talk to the Duke of Hamilton. Horn was instead handed over
to the local Home Guard, who detained him in a scout hut. Only after the prisoner was delivered to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow did it become clear that Alfred Horn was in fact Rudolf Hess,
Hitler’s Deputy Führer.

The arrival of the Nazi number two in Scotland represented a last desperate bid to conclude peace with Britain ahead of Operation Barbarossa, the German assault on the Soviet Union. Let down by
Dicketts, Snow and the Duke of Hamilton, then goaded sorely by Churchill, Hess had contrived to fly a thousand miles from the Messerschmitt works airfield at Augsberg, coming within an ace of
landing at Dungavel, the Hamilton family estate in the Scottish Borders, which boasted a small private landing strip. As well as displaying impressive skills as an aviator, Hess arrived backed by
shock and awe. That same night the Luftwaffe delivered a devastating raid on London, with 500
aircraft pounding the capital in relays for hours, killing 1,400 people and
rendering another 12,000 homeless. Göring’s savage attack marked the end of eight months of Blitz on London. These were the politics of pressure, the psychology behind them all too
clear.

Unsurprisingly, the Deputy Führer’s flying visit met with no more success than Walter Dicketts’ ignominious crash landing at Whitchurch. Informed of his arrival during the
screening of a Marx Brothers film at Chequers, Churchill dismissed the event as lacking ‘any serious importance’, then took the prompt and highly symbolic step of imprisoning Hess in
the Tower of London. When Hess failed to return to Germany he was swiftly disowned by Hitler, who blamed his friend’s adventure on a fit of temporary insanity, thereby confirming the
realpolitik
around ‘loss of face’ articulated to Dicketts by Nazi intermediaries in Hamburg and Berlin.

Whether Hitler sanctioned the Hess peace mission remains mired in controversy. Certainly Guy Liddell denied all knowledge. ‘Today’s sensational news is the arrival of Rudolf
Hess,’ he rejoiced in his diary, before reviewing Haushofer’s letter and the mooted treff in Lisbon. ‘The Air Ministry eventually decided not to send Hamilton. Hess may have come
with some kind of peace offer. The Germans may have thought they could only convince us of their sincerity by sending a man of high standing. The statement about Hess being mad would merely have
been put out to cover up the fact that they are putting out peace feelers.’

Lord Swinton, in charge of the Security Executive, waxed incandescent, and fired off a furious letter to David Petrie, the new Director-General of MI5. Mercifully unaware of Dicketts and his
sealed packages from Hjalmar Schacht, Swinton expressed ‘outrage’ at having been kept in the dark about the Haushofer-Hamilton letter. His ire mattered little, since the Hess initiative
was deemed of ‘no particular point’ by MI5, and
his flight conceivably a reverse Venlo encouraged by ingenious rivals at MI6. However, within weeks
Churchill’s sidelined security overlord would threaten to bring down the entire XX system just as surely as renegade Agent Snow, while at the same time triggering one of the most ignoble
episodes in British penal history.

Forty-eight hours after Hess landed in Scotland, Karel Richter was dropped over Hertfordshire by Hauptmann Gartenfeld, landing in a field near London Colney. Just five miles separated
Roboter’s drop zone from Round Bush House near Radlett, where Wulf Schmidt (aka Tate) still lived with the Robertson family, along with a wireless operator named Russell Lee. This close
proximity was entirely deliberate, yet Richter struggled to cover even this short distance. The young Sudetenlander spoke imperfect English, mixing his Vs and Ws, and carried flawed papers based on
serials provided by Snow. After hiding in woodland for an entire day, Richter set out on foot along the A405, where a passing lorry driver asked for directions and grew suspicious on receiving an
incoherent reply. Prompt intervention by a War Reserve constable ensured that the dubious foreigner carrying £551 and $1400 in cash was soon in custody at Camp 020.