Snow (13 page)

When J
OHNNY
mentioned the batteries it was explained that they intended to send over some trial shipments from Holland via Belgium, and that if these trial runs were successful the Germans would begin sending explosives and parts for wireless sets. During his stay he was taken around the
SOCONAF
factory, where it was arranged to send him details of freight rates, and the prices of batteries and accumulators. There was very little mention of the South Wales sabotage plot on this trip, but that was put down to the fact that no method had yet been established of making the necessary deliveries of materiel.

While he was in Antwerp, arrangements were made for J
OHNNY
to meet Mrs Keller alone at the railway station, where she told him that she had visited England and knew a number of people in Farnborough and in what she termed ‘the Fascist Party’. Having explained this, she entrusted him with an open envelope containing a typewritten card addressed to Eugen
Horsfall
, Wyke Cottage, Wyke Corner, Feltham, Sussex. The letter gave Horsfall details of a new address for a Mrs Whinfield, and referred to books which he was going to discuss with her. J
OHNNY
was instructed to post the letter when he returned to England, together with an unsigned postcard. He was also given a piece of paper with a request for a copy of
Raphael’s
Astronomical
Ephemeris of the Planet’s Places
, which was to be sent to SOCONAF in Antwerp. Naturally, MI5 assumed that this was all some sort of code, noting that Mrs Muriel Whinfield was the wife of Colonel H. G. Whinfield, a retired officer who had stood as a BUF parliamentary candidate before the war.

This link appeared to confirm a connection between the Abwehr and the BUF, and MI5’s files included a dossier on the Whinfields’ son Peter who had been arrested in Switzerland and detained in January 1940 because of his activism on behalf of the BUF.

When in conversation with Rantzau, Owens later recalled that he could hear the voices of other agents coming and going but, frustratingly, he said he could not see them. Many of the voices had spoken in French and were assumed to be agents working in France, but on one occasion, on Saturday morning, he did see the arrival of a French girl. He reported that she was very good-looking, about 26- or 27-years-old, 5’7’ to 5’8’ with very dark hair, brown eyes, slim build, a very good figure and wearing a small black hat. She was said to be on very good terms with Rantzau, and Owens thought that he would recognise her if he saw her again.

Owens returned to England on 13 February 1940 and, when questioned by MI5, produced his new questionnaire concerning troop movements and deployments, the whereabouts of shipping and details of aircraft at RAF aerodromes. The Germans were also still keen to know about Canadian armament factories, personnel in Toronto and Ottawa, and the training that Canadian soldiers received in the United Kingdom. The other matter that concerned MI5 was the possibility of the Germans breaching the reservoirs mentioned in the questionnaire, but this was later ruled out due to the technical difficulties of having to deploy a torpedo launched from an
aeroplane
. The pressures involved would mean that the weapon would probably explode before reaching its target. This did not eliminate the possibility of sabotage by a ground-based agent, or the use of weapons laced with bacteria that could be dropped into the water.

Upon being shown a photograph by MI5, S
NOW
immediately recognised the subject as Sam Stewart and he was warned to exercise the greatest
caution
in his dealings with him. S
NOW
was told to befriend Stewart in order to earn his confidence and collect as much information about him as possible. So a week later, on 20 February, Owens visited Stewart at his office where he was plied with cigarettes and treated like a millionaire.

Once again, back in Britain, Owens adopted the role of ‘Thomas Graham’ and contacted C
HARLIE
in Manchester to ask him to attend a meeting in Matlock on very short notice. When C
HARLIE
reached the rendezvous he found that Graham was accompanied by his wife and had news from
Germany
. Graham told C
HARLIE
that the Doctor was going away for about two months so it would be April before Graham had any further contact with him, but assured him that when the Doctor returned he might have
something
for C
HARLIE
to do. In the meantime, C
HARLIE
would be contacted by someone called the Commander, and that he had received a message by wireless instructing him to destroy airfields. Graham also told C
HARLIE
that he wanted to hire or purchase a small boat, and gave his approval to his request to buy whatever camera equipment he needed to produce the required documents. In return for all this C
HARLIE
supplied Graham with information about shipping movements in Liverpool and a list of ships
presently
in the docks.

Upon his return to London Owens reported his activities in the north to MI5, and it was decided that a message should be sent to Germany: ‘Satisfactory trip North. Am expecting to arrange for boat at Hull soon. My
Welshmen have been called up; must have explosives and assistance with regard sabotage at airports. Am ready.’

This message was MI5’s way of finding out what the Abwehr had planned in terms of the delivery and use of explosives for acts of sabotage. In an effort to make the sabotage plan viable, MI5 contacted Air Commodore Archie Boyle and asked if he would mind an explosion at one of his aerodromes in the near future. His reply was that, as far as he could see, there would be no objection at all.

On the night of 27 February, Owens’ wireless set burnt out due to
dampness
caused by snow blown into the flat. It was too badly damaged for Owens’ wireless operator, Maurice Burton, to repair, so it was sent to the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill where technicians worked on it. The next day, 28 February, Burton monitored a signal from Hamburg which expressed concern because of a lack of response from J
OHNNY
and in an effort to avert German suspicions MI5 instructed Owens to send a cable via SOCONAF in Antwerp which read: ‘Business satisfactory. Technical fault developed. Machine being repaired.’

Owens was also to get in touch with Sam Stewart and arrange to meet him, so that he had an eye-witness to corroborate his report that all was well and he was still at liberty.

In a further attempt to support S
NOW
and to facilitate the import of German batteries and accumulators containing bombs and transmitter parts, it was decided that Owens should establish a firm in London to import these items. Owens was to be joined in the company by a man picked by MI5 who had experience in this line of work. Owens then sent an order on 4 March 1940 to SOCONAF in Antwerp which was to be censored in the usual way to avoid suspicion:

In preparation for the sabotage plot, MI5 again contacted Air Commodore Boyle to ensure everything was ready once the explosives arrived and asked if he would agree to three separate explosions at three different aerodromes over a period of a fortnight. Undeterred, Boyle replied that he would get onto it straight away.

In early March 1940 Major Robertson arranged to meet S
NOW
at The Barn public house below the Star and Garter Hotel in Richmond. Robertson took his wife Joan with him and, because he was in uniform, he sent her in to ask Owens and Lily to come out and see him. The pair duly appeared and it was arranged that Owens should follow Robertson in his car. As Robertson drove off slowly, waiting for S
NOW
, a car got between him and Owens. In an effort to let Owens catch up with him Robertson pulled over and as he did the car pulled in behind him. Robertson noticed that the young driver of the car got out and went to examine his petrol tank, but as he did so Robertson gained the impression that his real reason for leaving his car was to keep an eye on Robertson through his back window. At this point, as Owens had nearly caught him up, Robertson drove off leaving the young man behind, but nevertheless convinced that the young man had been following him.

Robertson later discussed the matter with his wife and Owens and
established
from Owens that the young man had entered the public house two or three minutes after his arrival, had ordered a beer and sat at the window overlooking the car park where Owens was parked. The young man then left but some time later, when Robertson’s wife arrived, the young man had once again entered the bar and sat in the window seat with a view of the car park. Later he left, leaving some of his beer behind, which Robertson’s wife found odd. What worried Robertson most was Owens reaction to all this strange behaviour, which was an attitude of complete calm. Robertson simply could not work out how an enemy agent would know to follow him unless someone had tipped them off that he would be there, and the only person who knew that he was going to be at the public house that day was Owens. As a result of this episode Robertson began to wonder whether Owens was double-crossing him.

D
URING EARLY
1940 a number of articles were published in the British press on the theme of illicit wireless broadcasts and the measures taken by the authorities to detect clandestine transmitters. This campaign provided MI5 with the opportunity to persuade the Abwehr that Owens should be entrusted with new codes. The plan called for S
NOW
to express anxieties about his safety in his messages, and to include the claim that he had seen a mobile GPO detector van near his flat.

S
NOW
was expected to go to Antwerp on 4 April and he intended to take the relevant newspaper cuttings with him. He had recently been to see Sam Stewart who had said that he would travel with Owens when he next went abroad, but MI5 decided that Owens should not tell Stewart that he intended to go to Antwerp as a test to see if Stewart found out about the trip from some other source.

This mission would be critical, for as well as delivering answers to the Abwehr's questionnaire, Owens would have to remember the explanation for the failure of his wireless. He was also told to pretend to be angry because of the Abwehr's failure to deliver any explosives, and to point out that an opportunity had been lost because the importation of accumulators into Britain had recently been banned. He was also to tell them that petrol rationing was restricting his movements, and that the sources he had in place at aerodromes and factories were being called up and moved frequently, making contact with them difficult.

MI5 realised the danger that Owens was putting himself in by making yet another visit to the continent, and through continual, almost daily, contact with him the consensus was that he could be trusted, with one officer
reporting
: ‘He is a stupid little man who is given to doing silly things at odd moments, but I am perfectly convinced that he is quite straightforward in the things which he gives me and the answers to my questions.'

S
NOW
flew out of Shoreham airport to Brussels on 4 April 1940 and, having landed safely, made his way to Antwerp where he booked in at the Hotel de Londres. He was then picked up by a large green American convertible and driven to a flat outside Antwerp where he met Dr Rantzau who was back from his long trip to America, and had quite a few changes to announce in the way he wanted J
OHNNY
to operate. However, before he could outline these changes, J
OHNNY
complained about not having been given spare parts for his radio, which were supposed to have been sent in the accumulators from SOCONAF. He also explained about British measures to find illegal transmitters and asked for a change in his wavelength. He was told by the Commander that spare parts such as valves would be delivered to him at his Sackville Street offices by an Indian. The parts, he said, would either be left in a wireless that would be brought to him for repair, or delivered in an ordinary parcel.

According to S
NOW
's subsequent report, the Commander always stayed at the Taverne Sonia when he visited Antwerp, where he would become tremendously drunk.

Rantzau had new security procedures for J
OHNNY
which involved changing his call sign every day. In order to make this possible J
OHNNY
was given the Methuen edition of
The Dead Don't Care
by Jonathan Latimer which would act as his key. Rantzau then explained that J
OHNNY
was to add the day's date to the number of the month in order to produce a page number. By taking the last three letters of that page and reversing them, he would acquire the daily call sign. Rantzau also tried to allay J
OHNNY
's fears concerning illicit transmissions by asserting that radio direction-finding was a very difficult undertaking, and mentioned that the Germans had been trying to trace a short-wave transmitter operating from Wilhelmshaven without success. He also explained that it was difficult to change the wavelength because to do so would require an adjustment to the length of his aerial. A compromise suggestion was that J
OHNNY
could move the dial on the transmitter by a degree or two, which should help disguise his position from anyone trying to track a particular signal.

The Germans claimed they were still very keen to carry out the sabotage of an aerodrome or an arms factory and had found a way of smuggling the explosives into Britain. The idea was that SOCONAF would purchase twenty batteries from a company in Denmark. These would then be imported into Belgium via Hamburg and there the Germans would substitute twenty
different
batteries which contained explosives. J
OHNNY
would then buy these
batteries from the Belgum-based firm and import them into Britain. J
OHNNY
pointed out, as had been suggested by MI5, that many of the people whom he had recruited as saboteurs had now been called up, leaving him
short-handed
. Rantzau responded by revealing that he had arranged for J
OHNNY
to receive some help from a South African whom the Germans had trained. This man was to work his way into an aircraft factory where he would try to obtain plans and aircraft parts, which he would then deliver to J
OHNNY
. Having collected the information or aircraft parts, a trawler would set out for the North Sea which would be met by the Germans. Rantzau disclosed that since the
Kriegsmarine
only had ninety U-boats left, and it was proving difficult to train replacement crews, it would be dangerous and expensive to deploy a submarine and instead he intended to use a seaplane.

Rantzau then turned to another way of communicating with J
OHNNY
which would involve the use of microdots concealed in SOCONAF's headed paper. One would be placed in the top loop of the ‘&' between ‘
Consignation
' and ‘d'Affrètement' which would be virtually invisible to anyone casting a casual eye over the letter, or even to someone who was looking for cryptic messages or codes in the body of the letter.

There was also to be a change in the way that J
OHNNY
was paid. He was given £369 in cash but was informed that an account had been opened in his name with the Guaranty Trust Company in New York with a deposit of £750, on which he could draw using a cheque book. The reason for this was apparently Rantzau's concern that J
OHNNY
should not spend too much German money in England, thus helping the British economy.

J
OHNNY
tried to draw Rantzau out on the matter of Samuel Stewart whom, he said, he had seen in England twice; Rantzau said that he did not have any specific business for the two men to do together but suggested they should of course stay in touch. Rantzau apologised for not having a reply from
C
HARLIE
's family, but said he could pass on the news that they were all well.

S
NOW
later reported that the Germans intended to start bombing
activities
in the North Sea, and as such would welcome any shipping news from the Liverpool area. Rantzau told J
OHNNY
that they also intended to carry on their attacks on neutral shipping because ‘a sailor who has been attacked by machine-gun fire from an aeroplane would not be very willing to return to his job.'

S
NOW
came to believe that part of the reason that the South Wales
sabotage
plan had gone quiet was that the Germans had become suspicious about Gwilym Williams, and he was asked a number of questions concerning a
letter he had written which contained language that was considered to be of a quality far above the kind that the Germans would have expected a man like him to write.

The biggest surprise for J
OHNNY
occurred when he was asked to find
someone
who could become his replacement. He was to groom this individual who, having been proved trustworthy, would go to Germany where they would be trained in general espionage and in particular sabotage. Having completed the course this person was to return to Britain and take over the reins from J
OHNNY
. As for J
OHNNY
himself, he was to be given an
espionage-related
job in Germany, and Rantzau pointed out to J
OHNNY
that he ‘cannot last forever.' When Owens returned to Britain, he did so carrying a new questionnaire, and a new job offer.

Owens also reported that two bombs had been placed the
City of Sydney
when the ship had docked in Amsterdam, and it was now en route to Mauritius. Owens had been asked to find out the position of the ship and to wireless her course to Antwerp, but was instructed by MI5 to say that the steamship's owners refused to give him the information. However, Guy Liddell ascertained that the ship was never in Amsterdam and advised that they should not act on Owens' information.

Upon his return to London S
NOW
underwent a lengthy debriefing by MI5, and one of the issues he raised was bomb damage sustained recently during an RAF night raid on Sylt and the Hindenburg Dam, a causeway which linked the island to the mainland. The attack had lasted several hours and the House of Commons had been informed about the progress of the mission by the Admiralty which had been in direct touch with the bombers taking part in the raid. Publicly, the Germans had downplayed the raid's impact, even arranging a tour of the mainly ‘undamaged' site to a group of selected journalists. Having put so much effort into this massive attack, and having made sure that Parliament had been aware of it, it was considered important for morale and the hopes of the British people that the attack on Sylt should be deemed to be a success. Accordingly, it was left to Owens with his access to the Abwehr to bring home the answer, and on 16 April T. A. Robertson wrote a memo to Air Commodore Boyle:

This item is of particular interest because it is an early example of S
NOW
's information being circulated in Whitehall as part of the intelligence picture of Germany, and he himself is obviously being characterised as a trusted individual acting as a conduit to a reliable source offering accurate data about bomb damage, an important topic at a time when the RAF's aerial reconnaissance capability was in its infancy.

It was clear from Rantzau's renewed enthusiasm and his previous threat that on his return the war would really start, that the Germans were edging closer to mounting sabotage missions in Britain. However, Owens' supply of
information
, while certainly useful, posed some problems. For instance, Owens' report about German plans to attack Britain's water supply created a dilemma. If the military authorities suddenly decided to guard previously unprotected reservoirs, German suspicions might be raised. The difficulty lay in the vague nature of the report which left it unclear whether a particular reservoir had been made a target, or if the threat was more general. Furthermore, there was a question over the type of attack to be anticipated. Would there be an explosion or a bacteriological contamination? Detailed analysis of the questionnaires that Owens brought back from his visits with Dr Rantzau would perhaps supply the answers, but more importantly these questionnaires gave MI5 the opportunity to include fabricated material in the prepared answers. It was through this planting of fake information that MI5 could gain the military advantage and prosecute their fight against the Abwehr's sabotage campaign.

The questionnaires disclosed not only the Germans' priorities but also indicated some vulnerability in the enemy's knowledge, and these weaknesses could be exploited in the answers that S
NOW
passed on to the Germans. MI5 realised that this process would also work in reverse, and that if S
NOW
were to tell the Germans that the British wanted particular information, then this was likely to be treated as significant by the enemy. MI5 put this strategy into action in April 1940 when it was decided that S
NOW
should communicate to the Germans that the War Office had just made an urgent request for photographs showing the area surrounding Bergen in Norway. In fact, the British planned to land troops at Trondheim, some 665 kilometres north of Bergen, so the purpose was to deceive the enemy. Owens was to receive this information from C
HARLIE
who supposedly was ideally-placed to hear of such requirements. To facilitate the transaction, Richman Stopford
contacted C
HARLIE
and told him to reach ‘Graham' with a message that ‘he had heard confidential gossip and gave it as such for what it was worth, that the War Office were urgently asking for detailed photographs of Bergen.'

By sending this information through J
OHNNY
, the Abwehr's most trusted agent in Britain, it was hoped that the Germans would believe it and
concentrate
their troops around the Bergen area, thus allowing a relatively easy landing for the actual attack on Trondheim. To ensure the trail of
information
was covered as carefully as possible, it was left to Stopford to first give this information to C
HARLIE
and tell him to pass it on to ‘Thomas Graham'. The expedient of employing S
NOW
as a cut-out meant that he could stand up to cross-examination about C
HARLIE
's source if he was challenged.
Furthermore
, Owens was to be away when the attack actually took place, so C
HARLIE
was told to try and phone Mr Graham at home during this period to tell him that the information about Bergen was false and that the attack would actually be on Trondheim. Of course, MI5 knew that it would be impossible for C
HARLIE
to get hold of Graham, but this ruse was intended to ensure that his credibility was preserved.