Hitler's Spy (6 page)

Once it had been repaired, Gagen returned the transmitter to Agent Snow in the bar of a Morden pub. In return, Owens handed the detective a telephone number for Stelle X in Hamburg. Plainly
Hitler’s chief spy in England was engaged in writing his own insurance policy against prosecution, confident that no jury was likely to convict a notional traitor who was actively
collaborating with the Security Service. This left Owens free to do largely as he pleased, and for the next nine months A.3504 was able to run rings around British intelligence, who had no prior
experience of running a wireless agent, nor any detailed knowledge of the internal workings of the Abwehr.

Snow’s stratagems even ran to an attempt to turn a profit from his new klamotten. Intrigued by claims that messages buzzed on the set were undetectable in England, Owens took it to George
Hamilton, his erstwhile sponsor at Expanded Metal, hopeful that another joint venture company might be formed to exploit the Abwehr’s cutting-edge short-wave technology. The set was
subsequently examined by Hamilton’s brother Noel, a wireless wizard who had served as a junior staff officer at the Air Ministry. Unlike his ambivalent sibling, Noel Hamilton viewed Owens as
positively dangerous, and tipped off his former colleagues at Adastral House.

‘Squadron Leader X (retired) is particularly anxious that he shall not be involved in any form of enquiry,’ noted a subsequent intelligence report. ‘Owens talks openly of his
connection with a certain Colonel and Scotland Yard, and brags that he was partly responsible for the arrest of a woman in Aberdeen. Further, when “in his cups” he said that he worked
on behalf of Germany as well, and that he held a secret service badge.’

In an effort to test Snow’s mettle, Robertson and Hinch set him up with a stooge. Posing as a shady civil servant in need of quick money, a Special Branch detective took to drinking with
Owens and filed a damning report at the end of March. Rehearsing the Zeppelin shells story by way of credentials, Owens boasted of transmitting to Germany on a regular basis,
and expressed keen interest in obtaining military manuals as well as any juicy scandal involving senior political figures for use in Nazi propaganda. ‘Snow appears to have plenty of money and
travels from place to place in taxi cabs. He makes no secret of the fact that he is paid by the Germans, and speaks very highly of them in every way.’

Crucially, Owens expressed particular interest in dope on recent ‘secret experiments’ aimed at bringing down hostile aircraft. This new technology, he claimed, was referred to by
those in the know as ‘the wireless cloud’, research into which had lately reached a critical stage.

Here A.3504 was sniffing around radar, or radiolocation, at that time the most sensitive military secret in Britain. In 1935 the Air Ministry asked the scientist Robert Watson-Watt to
investigate the feasibility of a ‘death ray’ that would utilise a powerful beam of electromagnetic waves to stop the engines of enemy aircraft, or boil the blood of the pilot. The
Ministry even offered a standing prize of £1,000 to anyone able to demonstrate a ray weapon capable of killing a sheep at a thousand yards. Though this macabre bounty went unclaimed,
Watson-Watt took note of the fact that aircraft in flight often interfered with wireless reception, and turned his thoughts from radio-destruction to radio-detection.

The result was the early warning system known as Chain Home. In 1937 work began on a string of twenty four CH stations positioned between the Tyne and Southampton, capable of detecting hostile
aircraft at a range of 80 miles, at altitudes up to 15,000 feet. By Easter of 1939 the radar chain was fully operational, shielding Britain by means of the invisible ‘wireless cloud’
beamed from lofty steel pylons 350 feet tall. Since these masts were highly conspicuous, inquisitive Luftwaffe commanders
brought the giant airship
Graf Zeppelin
out
of mothballs to reconnoitre the English coastline at a leisurely pace, hoping to pick up telltale radio signals. On her second trip in August 1939 the lumbering gasbag was buzzed by a pair of
ageing Hawker biplanes from 612 Squadron, so that for a few short minutes the Luftwaffe’s stealthy investigation into future electronic warfare technology came to resemble an air-show
restaging of a Great War dogfight.

To complicate matters, Germany was developing radar of her own. During an official visit to Britain at the end of 1937, Luftwaffe General Erhard Milch asked several pointed questions about radar
over lunch at Fighter Command headquarters, at the same time dropping broad hints that scientists in the Reich were one step ahead. His boast held water on a technical level, but the tactical
application of the ‘wireless cloud’ lagged far behind in Germany, where it was seen as little more than a highly accurate electronic gunsight.

In the midst of this snooping on radar, libidinous Agent Snow found himself zapped by an altogether different kind of ray.

For several years Owens had used the home of his brother-in-law at 112 Stratford Road in Plaistow as a cover address, often adopting the pseudonym ‘Thomas Wilson’. The spy game, it
seems, was a family affair. Fred Ferrett probably fed Owens dope gleaned from his job at the Short Brothers aircraft factory in Rochester, which produced the Sunderland flying boat, while Irene was
obliged to stand by as ‘Uncle Arthur’ attempted to groom her niece Alice as an East End Mata Hari. Alas, in May 1939 Fred Ferrett died of tuberculosis, leaving Irene and her sister
distraught. True to form, amoral Agent Snow chose this ticklish moment to fall head over heels for Alice’s best friend, a shapely blonde seamstress named Lily Sophia Bade, who promised to be
ideal sleeper material.

Born in West Ham in May 1912, Lily was blonde, blue-eyed
and curvaceously sexy – ‘well built’, according to an ungallant observer from the Special Branch
– with a turned-up nose and unusually long fingernails. Youthful, lively and flirtatious, Lily Bade was a street-smart working-class girl on the make, keen to escape the confines of a large
East End family and an overcrowded home. Owens in turn set about sweeping the 27-year-old dressmaker clean off her feet – if not quite literally, since Miss Bade was appreciably taller than
Owens, and several stone heavier.

Owens turned 40 on 14 April and it is tempting to view his sudden infatuation with a younger woman as symptomatic of midlife crisis. Moreover, his mother Ada was sixteen years younger than her
husband William, so perhaps Owens’ vigorous pursuit of Lily owed something to learned behaviour. In any event, after twenty years of marriage to sullen Irene, vivacious Lily held the promise
of a golden future, and seemed genuinely taken by the prospect of romance and intrigue at the side of Hitler’s chief spy in England. Tellingly, Lily’s mother Louisa Virgiels was of
German extraction . . . In no time at all ‘Mr Wilson’ had added the Bade family home at 28 Caistor Park Road to his long list of dead-letter drops.

Irene Owens was not amused. Nor was their daughter Patricia, now aged fourteen, and dead set on a legitimate career as an actress. Thus were sown the seeds of Agent Snow’s undoing.

Owens spent the last week of April 1939 in Hamburg, swapping notes with Ritter on airfields, rearmament and marital travails. ‘Nikolaus was very fond of women,’ recalled one of his
female agents, without great affection, ‘but naive in his relations with them.’ Like long-suffering Irene Owens, Ritter’s American wife Mary had recently found herself traded in
for a younger model, namely Irmgard von Klitzing. Ritter’s second marriage proved a lavish affair, after which the happy Abwehr couple honey mooned in Italy and Yugoslavia. However, Owens
thought Irmgard a snob, and mean with it – unlike Ritter himself, who was generous to a fault with Nazi money.

On learning that Mary Aurora Evans wished to return to the United States, the wily Doctor exiled his ex-wife to Bremen and had her passport confiscated. The Alabama-born divorcée knew far
more than was good for her about Rantzau’s nefarious activities in New York. Soon so too would the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Back in Morden, life at Grosvenor Court became increasingly intolerable. Owens now spent his evenings with Lily, haunting various bars and hotels around London, seeking fresh sources and
sidekicks, and imbibing freely. Unfortunately reliable sub-agents were hard to find, and a scheme involving a lorry driver from Colliers Wood, whose long-haul routes promised excellent cover for
trips with the portable transmitter, was dropped after MI5 raised objections. Consequently Owens kept quiet about Alexander Myner, an unemployed accounts clerk from Glasgow who specialised in
procuring false passports, and his own son Bob, now aged nineteen and a trainee draughtsman. Following his father’s dubious example, Snow Junior set about mapping several RAF fighter
airfields dotted around London, chief among them Biggin Hill and Kenley. This handiwork he then posted direct to Auerbach in Hamburg, knowing full well that the battery company was an Abwehr
front.

‘He obtained the address from his father,’ Robertson discovered much later. ‘He addressed the packet to himself at one post office in London, collected it, and re-mailed it to
Hamburg. He did so out of a sense of adventure, and received no payment. But a message was sent over to say that the Germans were very pleased with what had been done.’

The apple seldom falls far from the tree. Meanwhile, in March, Hitler occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia, whose president Emil Hácha suffered a heart attack at the negotiating
table, an ominous development followed in May by the
so-called Pact of Steel, promising mutual assistance between Germany and Italy in the event of war. In Britain, civil
defence organisations expanded rapidly, forcing regular blackout and respirator drills on an anxious public, once again raising the spectre of bombardment from the air and mass evacuation. In the
race to rearm, all three services were freed from existing financial limitations, allowing the War Office to increase the size of the army to 32 divisions, and permitting the Air Ministry to order
700 new aircraft a month, the number of all-important Spitfire squadrons in Fighter Command rising from two to nine.

Having suborned his own son, in the middle of July Owens also wrote to Ritter. Terrified in equal measure by the prospect of air raids, detention and his enraged wife Irene, Snow proposed
quitting Britain for Germany on a permanent basis, with his mistress Lily in tow. Unsurprisingly, Ritter declined: with Europe sliding inexorably towards war, Johnny’s stelle was now the
absolute cynosure of Abwehr activity in England.

In Morden, hostilities broke out on 29 July. As the IRA outraged Britons with explosions at King’s Cross and Victoria, Owens dropped a bombshell of his own at Grosvenor Court by walking
out on his wife and family. Irene’s shrill threats to expose her feckless husband as a traitor prompted an ugly scene. ‘Owens thoroughly searched the house, including her
handbag,’ noted a subsequent police report. ‘He destroyed every possible scrap of evidence against himself before he left, and disposed of the wireless transmitting set. Owens has been
drinking for some time past and has not been sober for weeks. He has threatened to shoot Mrs Owens and ruin her family should she give information about him.’

In truth, Agent Snow had no gun, much less the nerve to execute the mother of his children. Now homeless, and wary of London hotels, the adulterous double-crosser was obliged to beg a spare room
from shady passport agent Alex Myner, who lived with his wife at 12 Parklands in the leafy south
London suburb of Surbiton. Lily joined him immediately, much enthused by the
prospect of sharing life on the lam with a real live master spy. ‘We became intimate,’ she later revealed to Bill Gagen, the Special Branch inspector, choosing her words very carefully
indeed. ‘On about 3 August Arthur asked me to go for a holiday with him to Germany. I agreed. He said I would need a British passport and gave me the money to pay for it.’

Knowing full well that the trip was no mere summer vacation, Lily handed in her notice at Brownstones, the West End firm where she worked as a seamstress. These dubious holiday plans also found
room for Alex Myner. ‘I told him I was only in casual work,’ explained the jobless clerk, short on money and scruples. ‘He intimated that he would introduce me to some of his
business friends in Hamburg, with a view to representing them in this country.’

This tale was as tall as Owens was short. Tellingly, Agent Snow gave MI5 no advance warning of his latest overseas excursion, and elected to travel by an unusual route at inconvenient hours. The
trio gathered at Victoria coach station on the afternoon of 10 August and took a bus to Dover, then waited at the port for several hours before crossing by overnight boat to Ostend. Owens took care
to keep a discreet distance from Lily and Myner, and as a result he alone was observed by the port authorities at Dover, neatly turned out in a light blue-grey suit, topped off by a brown felt hat
with a snap brim.

From Ostend the party took a train to Hamburg, arriving on Friday night and checking into the Berliner Hof, where Owens and Lily masqueraded as husband and wife. Ritter appeared the following
morning, accompanied by another Abwehr officer introduced as Herr Schneider. ‘Rantzau spoke English fluently with a broad American accent,’ noted Myner, ‘but no business was
discussed in my presence. Lily was handed a twenty Reichsmark note by Owens, who had received it from
Schneider, telling her that she should go for a walk with me –
which we did.’

Left alone with Ritter and Schneider, Johnny was in for an unpleasant surprise. Demonstrating chilling sang-froid, Irene Owens had written two vengeful letters to the German spymaster known to
her as Doctor Rantzau, each denouncing Arthur as a serving British spy. ‘My old wife was giving me trouble,’ Owens recalled later, in a rare example of understatement. ‘Tried to
give me away to the Germans. Rantzau had proof in black and white.’

Humdinger.

Keeping his wits about him, Owens laughed off Irene’s accusations as absurd, pointing to the presence of his sexy young mistress in Hamburg as corroborating evidence. Hell had no fury like
a woman scorned, and so forth.