Authors: Madoc Roberts
At this point, Walter Dicketts, codenamed C
ELERY
, was brought into the room to join Owens and White.
‘I want to make this quite clear,’ said White. ‘I am sure you are both aware of the seriousness of the position. Therefore I want to hear from you S
NOW
what you have just told me exactly, the nature of your warning to C
ELERY
in Lisbon.’
‘Yes’ said Owens. ‘Mr Dicketts knew exactly that the Doctor knew I was in touch with the British Intelligence before he left for Germany. That is right isn’t it?’
‘I had gathered as much but I didn’t know,’ said Dicketts.
‘You didn’t know?’ asked Owens.
‘I had very grave suspicions but I didn’t know.’
‘You mean to tell me that you didn’t know.’
‘I’m telling you. I have been told after working out my whole report that you informed me that you had blown the whole project to the Doctor. And had warned me accordingly. You never made any such statement. When did you break it to me?’
‘I believe I warned you when I saw you in the room.’
‘You believe you did. I don’t want to know what your beliefs are, I want to know exactly.’
‘Do you remember me telling you in front of the Doctor. I remember this definitely, telling you in front of the Doctor, that the Doctor knew everything about me in connection with the British Secret Service. Don’t you remember you sitting there, the Doctor sitting there, me sitting on the bed with Doebler and I said to you, “The Doctor knows everything, you understand.” I definitely did.’
‘I say that you didn’t, and I am also informed that you warned me personally that you had blown the entire party to the Doctor, you tried to assure me that you were the only person who could look after me, to put my whole trust in you and that you would see me back again as you had given your word of honour and you wavered on the last day and were obviously very nervous and you said to me on the pavement when I was getting into the taxi to go to Estoril station, “You are a very brave man, Walter, don’t go if you don’t want to.”’
‘To go to Estoril station?’ asked Owens.
Unfortunately the record of this conversation cannot tell us whether Owens’ last statement was deliberately evasive, flippant or whether he had genuinely misunderstood what Dicketts was saying. Either way, the disagreements between the two men continued with Dicketts suggesting that Owens had been a more active protagonist in the events that occurred in Lisbon than had previously been suggested.
White decided to move the interrogation onto the matter of money.
‘Now I’m going to ask a few questions of each of you. When did you tell C
ELERY
that you had received £10,000?’
‘The first day I met him,’ replied Owens.
‘You mean in the first meeting at the hotel. Do you agree with that?’
‘No,’ said Dicketts.
‘I showed him the money,’ insisted Owens.
‘When do you think he told you?’ asked White.
‘He told me he had £5,000 then,’ said Dicketts.
‘I said I had £50,000,’ said Owens.
‘£50,000?’ queried White.
‘No, I said that I had American money and here I’d got fifty thousand. That’s fifty thousand dollars,’ said Owens.
‘Well, it was nearly all in English money. You had a small bundle of dollars and…’ said Dicketts.
‘Large sum of money anyway,’ observed Owens.
‘£5,000. The other £5,000 comes at a different date,’ recalled Dicketts.
‘When did you tell C
ELERY
that you had received this £5,000?’ asked White.
‘I didn’t tell him how much I had. I said 50,000,’ replied Owens.
Owens’ point was that the Germans were not quibbling about money: as far as he was concerned it was a sign of the high esteem in which they held him. For White, the money that Owens was given had further ramifications. ‘But this is people who are giving you money at the same time that they know that you are under the control of the British. How did you explain that? It seems curious on the face of it the moment they know you are under British control they give you this large sum of money as a reward.’
‘I see your point,’ agreed Owens. ‘The point is this though, I don’t exactly know what I said but I showed him the money anyhow and what I said about it I just don’t remember now. Whether I made any explanation or not I can’t.’
‘Do you remember?’ asked White, turning to Dicketts.
‘You made no explanation at all. He simply said, “Look what they think of me and how they feed me.” And he had it under a bundle of dirty washing locked up first of all in the wardrobe which I thought was very unwise.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ insisted Owens.
‘Oh, yes you did. Later you put it in a suitcase. First you had it pushed under a dirty shirt. You said it was the best place to keep it.’
‘No, I had it in my case first and I had it in the wardrobe afterwards. It was in my case first. I remember that definitely.’
‘… you lifted the shirt up, I can see you doing it now,’ insisted Dicketts.
‘In my case.’
‘In your wardrobe. I said you ought to put it in the safe and you said the safe was too small.’
‘Well, look, where it was and how much it was isn’t really material because it was such a large sum of money. I must be absolutely clear on this. You must have thought it strange or C
ELERY
must have thought it strange that the moment you declare that the whole thing is known that you are under control of the British you received this large sum of money,’ said White.
The disagreement went back-and-forth for some time before White stepped in once more. ‘Wait a minute both of you. The points of disagreement here are largely minor ones. May I ask just one question which is personal? May you not have been under the influence of drink at that time and not recollect these minor points?’
‘No, definitely not,’ insisted Owens.
White then tried to calm things down by offering a summary of what has been agreed and disagreed. He proposed that they both agreed that Owens had said ‘Look what they have given me,’ and showed a large sum of money. Where they disagreed, was whether Owens had phoned Doebler or Doebler had phoned Owens – which White described as a minor point – and whether there was time for Arthur Owens to discuss why he had been given the money. Dicketts also maintained that he had not been told about the second £5,000 until he got back from Germany. This took the dispute between the two men to a new level.
‘I told you that the first time I met you,’ said Owens.
‘You never mentioned the thing,’ said Dicketts.
‘By God, I’m certain of that.’
‘It was when I came back again that you mentioned the second £5,000.’
‘I’m not selling – to Christ you’re a liar – to cover yourself as much as you…’
‘I’ve nothing to cover myself on at all,’ replied Dicketts.
‘You’re a bloody liar.’
‘Why do you bluff?’ demanded Dicketts.
‘I’m not bluffing. You know bloody well I’m not bluffing.’
‘I know perfectly well that you are bluffing.’
‘You know I’m not.’
‘Or else giving you the benefit of your mentality, your memory is very short.’
‘So you think I’m crazy like you tell me these people think I’m mental?’
‘You said to me that you were very simple,’ said Dicketts.
The dialogue between the pair can at times appear quite comical, but it is worth remembering that these two men were fighting for their lives. If either one were to be found to have committed treason in time of war, then they could be executed. It would also appear that the tactic of putting these two agents with their distinctly different stories into a room together was only producing a slanging match. However, letting them attack each other in this way had the effect of getting the two men to let down their respective guards.
Dicketts’ mission in Lisbon had been two-fold: not only did he have to convince the Doctor that he was a genuine German agent, but he was also telling Owens, during their private moments, that he was a genuine German agent, in order to find out where Owens’ loyalties truly lay. MI5’s decision to ask him to do this was understandable due to their suspicions about which side Owens was actually on, but it could also have created a good deal of confusion in the mind of Owens as to what side Dicketts was really on.
Dicketts’ argument was that he wouldn’t have gone into Germany had he known that Owens was a genuine German spy, but he was also saying that Robertson had told him that Owens might be working for the Germans before he left for Lisbon.
‘And did you say that you were one hundred percent for the Doctor in every way?’ asked White.
‘Yes, in every way,’ replied Dicketts.
‘How did you understand that statement? Did you understand he was a double-crosser?’
‘Yes I took it that way naturally.’
‘Had you the impression he took it that way?’ asked White.
‘Yes.’
This clearly was not an ideal position for the two agents to find themselves in. From Owens’ account he had experienced the bombshell of the Doctor accusing him of being found out by the British Security Service, and then the man who had been sent out as his ally appeared to have been a genuine German agent who was double-crossing the British. Dicketts, whose first mission this had been, had endured a terrible journey and had arrived with his head full of suspicions, not only about the Doctor, but also about Owens whom he thought might be working for the enemy. He also had instructions to play the role of a genuine German sympathiser, which only complicated an already dangerous situation. MI5’s questions to the two men always focused on the belief that one of the two agents was not telling the truth;
they never seem, to consider that their tactics may have been a
considerable
handicap to the whole mission. Neither did they seem to acknowledge that this tactic may have played a part in making the post-mission analysis incredibly difficult to disentangle.
Having wavered back and forth, Owens seems to have decided that he did tell Dicketts that he had been confronted by Rantzau with the fact that he had been walked in on by MI5. This had little bearing on the hypothesis that MI5 was considering, as it still seemed most likely to them that the Doctor had not in fact confronted Owens in this way.
As a result of the lack of certainty regarding what had really happened in Lisbon, MI5 came up with four possible hypothesis and a course of action for the future of Owens and the double-cross system – if indeed they had one.
Their first hypothesis was that the Doctor never accused Owens of working for British Intelligence and that everything was running as it was before. This would explain the acceptance of C
ELERY
, the £10,000 and the explosives. The only problem with this theory is that it left unexplained why Owens would make this claim. The possibility they considered was that Owens may have thought that things were getting too dangerous and he was finding it difficult to keep up his pretence with both sides. Owens could then take the
considerable
amount of money he had made over the period he had worked as a spy and retire. It also left open the possibility that at the end of the war he could claim that he had done good service for Britain until his cover was blown. This would also keep his options open in case the Germans won the war because he could then make a similar claim about the services he had performed for them.
The one element of Owens’ interrogation which was reasonably consistent was his jealousy of Walter Dicketts and the treatment he had received from the Germans. By revealing that the Doctor had found him out Owens had effectively ended any possibility of Dicketts taking his place.
An alternative variation of this theory was that the Doctor had not accused Owens of working for MI5, but of being lazy. MI5 thought that this might explain Owens’ invention of his story about the Doctor and his inability to explain why he had not told Dicketts about this. If Owens was upset by this sort of accusation and then became jealous of the way Dicketts was being treated then this could explain why he said that he couldn’t remember whether he had told Dicketts what he claimed had happened. This scenario again brought Dicketts’ usefulness to an end but didn’t leave Owens open to the accusation of betraying him.
The second hypothesis was that Owens was telling the truth about what
the Doctor had said and that he had admitted that this was true. However the Doctor decided that he would gain nothing from bringing his
relationship
with his most prized asset in Britain to an end. The Doctor would also stand to lose a good deal of prestige with his masters if he had to tell them that he had lost his main agent. This theory relied on the Doctor paying Owens to keep quiet about what had happened in Lisbon. Dicketts was then taken to Germany where he was questioned and it was discovered that he knew nothing about Owens being walked in on. Dicketts could then still be used by the Doctor as an agent and the Doctor’s £10,000 would have been well spent in buying a replacement for J
OHNNY
. This also meant that agent C
ELERY
could still be useful to MI5 in exactly the same way as agent S
NOW
had been up to this point. This assumed that Owens thought Walter Dicketts was unlikely to return from Germany and was therefore convinced that he had joined the Germans when he came out alive.
The third hypothesis assumed that Owens confessed to the Doctor that he was working for MI5 and may even have told Dicketts that the Doctor knew this. The Doctor then gave C
ELERY
the option of earning the same sort of money as Owens – which he accepted and went into Germany to train as an Abwehr agent. The Doctor would be doing to MI5 exactly what they were doing to him, with Dicketts turned into a German double agent. Dicketts would then have been told not to tell J
OHNNY
that he was working for
Germany
and the Doctor could run him quite separately from Owens.
The fourth hypothesis was probably the most worrying for MI5 because it proposed that Owens had been working for Germany for a long time and had told them that MI5 thought he was working for them. They even wondered if he could be communicating information to the Doctor by a means of which MI5 was unaware. This would explain why the Doctor only carried out a cursory questioning of Owens after he discovered that he had been exposed by MI5. The Doctor already knew that Owens was
pretending
to work for MI5 while he was primarily working for Germany. In this version of events Owens was a traitor and had been from the beginning; the only question which remained was where this left Dicketts. The only way to check up on C
ELERY
’s account of his time in Lisbon and his trip to Germany would be through interrogating him carefully. If his story remained logical and consistent then they would have to believe him that Owens never told him about the Doctor’s accusations.