Snow (10 page)

MI5 made the decision not to tell C
HARLIE
that ‘Graham’ was one of their own agents, and had deliberately left S
NOW
with the impression that C
HARLIE
was an authentic enemy spy. This strategy was intended to test the true loyalties of both spies, but it was a tactic not without risk. The intention was to test the integrity of both men and see who reported contact with the other, but, with the survival of his brother at stake, the options were not quite so clear-cut for C
HARLIE
, who had no reason to suppose that ‘Graham’ was not precisely who he claimed to be: a representative of the German Secret Service.

Lily accompanied Owens on the mission to Manchester and he duly checked into the Queen’s Hotel under the name of Thomas Graham. He
chose this alias because his father’s name was Thomas, and his own middle name was Graham. Owens then contacted C
HARLIE
by telegram, asking him to come to the hotel as soon as possible as he had a message from his family. C
HARLIE
understood the coded message instantly, made his way to the hotel and on arrival was told by Owens that he had come from ‘the Doctor’, whom C
HARLIE
had met in Cologne, when apparently he had called himself ‘Reinhart’. C
HARLIE
replied that he did not know anyone by that name, but he did know a Doctor Hansen, prompting Owens to explain that he knew the Doctor under a variety of names.

Owens briefed C
HARLIE
on a mission he was to carry out which involved going to Liverpool to photograph the docks and other strategic sites which he was then to reduce in size and send by post to ‘Mr T. Graham, c/o
British
Columbia House, Regent Street, London W.1’. The package was to be accompanied by a covering letter bearing the date written in full. However, he was instructed to abbreviate the month if there was a problem. The
conversation
then turned to C
HARLIE
’s brother whom C
HARLIE
said had been sending material to Germany for the past eighteen months, and had been taking too many risks by sending the information he collected too openly. Allegedly, the brother had claimed to have plenty of sources and that he could get any information he wanted.

Owens gained the impression from C
HARLIE
that the two brothers had been active spies for a very long time, and that although each knew what the other was doing, up to a point, they were in fact acting independently. Considering that C
HARLIE
had been under the impression that Owens was a genuine Nazi spy, it is easy to see how both sides reported equally distorted versions of the encounter. Upon his return to London, Owens telephoned the War Office extension 393, the number he had been given for Robertson, and asked to speak to him so he could submit his report. However, the man on the other end had replied ‘Is that you Lynovski?’ so Owens had put the phone down and reported the incident later to MI5. The episode served to unnerve Owens, or so he said, but there was no obvious explanation for what had happened.

Despite this minor mishap, MI5 encouraged the link between C
HARLIE
and Owens, and when C
HARLIE
reported the visit he was told that he would be given suitable information to pass on to Thomas Graham. He was assured that MI5 knew the address at Columbia House and had a good idea who Graham might be, without disclosing that ‘Graham’ was actually an agent operating under control. At this point C
HARLIE
confessed that he did not
much care what happened to his brother, whom he knew to be pro-Nazi, and that he would be willing to sign an undertaking to prove his own loyalty to Britain. C
HARLIE
was then told to arrange another visit from Graham so he could pass on the information that MI5 would give him.

Once again, adopting the guise of Thomas Graham, Owens duly went to Manchester in mid-November 1939 and met C
HARLIE
again. His information included items about a change in the secret arrangement for grain convoys, and details of recent troop movements from Ireland to
England
. The troops were believed to be mainly Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery who were destined for training centres in England, and he also revealed that eleven ships escorted by two destroyers had left Liverpool on 19 November. This material had been provided by C
HARLIE
on his own initiative, and in the circumstances would have been bound to give cause for doubt about his true loyalties. Even having been reassured that MI5 was on to ‘Mr Thomas’, C
HARLIE
had persisted in passing him potentially valuable military information.

During their second encounter, C
HARLIE
complained that his
photographic
equipment was not good enough to produce the required
microphotographs
, but he gave an assurance that he would experiment with it and see what he could do. When a further meeting with C
HARLIE
was scheduled, Owens decided that instead of going up to Manchester himself, he would send Lily and a girlfriend of hers instead. She duly reported back that
C
HARLIE
was worried about taking the required photographs because a member of the local press had recently been in trouble with the authorities for taking a harmless photograph of a sunset.

Baffled by this unexpected development, MI5 called Owens in to explain his decision to send Lily to Manchester in his place, and to point out that this could have been risky. Owens replied that he did not enjoy the journey, and that he wanted to be in the flat in case a radio message was received that night. He also said that he had total trust in Lily not to discuss sensitive matters with C
HARLIE
in front of the friend. Finally, Owens was told that if he intended to do anything like this again, he should inform MI5 first, and it was also pointed out to him that as the head of the organisation in this country it was his responsibility to get things moving and if necessary he should radio Germany to ask permission to progress matters. As a result of this episode, Owens was told that MI5 intended to keep a watch on both his flat and his movements and, ever one to put a positive interpretation on matters when his faults were exposed, he agreed that this would be a good
idea in order to verify the identity of any enemy agents who might try to reach him.

On 12 December 1939 C
HARLIE
was once again visited by Stopford in the guise of ‘Mr Head’ to check up on any contacts he may have had. He was also given a roll of photographic film containing a plan of an aircraft factory in Speke and two aerial views, and was instructed to develop the film and report to ‘Graham’ that he had received the plan from a friend, a draughtsman in Liverpool. He was to say that he had asked the friend if he could copy it for the records of the Manchester Amateur Photographic Society, on the understanding that it would not be published until after the war. If ‘Graham’ asked where he obtained the aerial photographs, C
HARLIE
was to refuse to say, claiming that the source was too secret. C
HARLIE
said that he did not want to take any German money from ‘Graham’, but it was agreed that any cash should be put into a fund from which he would buy himself some photographic equipment once the war was over. C
HARLIE
then asked for £50 to buy a Leica camera and lens for the microphotography, and he was given some more shipping information, which he was to say had come from someone at Morris & Jones, the tea merchants with offices in Liverpool and Cardiff. Thus, having received a comprehensive briefing, C
HARLIE
then wrote to ‘Graham’ asking him to come to Manchester as ‘he had some especially interesting photographs from the exhibition that he would like to show him’.

MI5 persisted in encouraging the link between C
HARLIE
and S
NOW
because it was judged that for as long as neither realised the other was working for the British authorities, the reporting of each could act as a litmus test to ensure each other’s integrity. However, human nature being what it is, and the two putative German agents each anxious to impress the other, the operation was not going entirely according to plan. However, S
NOW
’s value lay in the many sides to his character, and one of the benefits derived from tolerating his unpredictable behaviour was the occasional solid counter-intelligence lead. One of them, a dividend derived from S
NOW
’s visit to Rantzau, was a reference to a woman who was the Abwehr’s paymistress in Britain. All money paid to Owens by mail was the subject of scrutiny by MI5 and it had been noticed that on a recent £5 note there was a rubber stamp mark ‘S. & Co. Ltd’. In researching the origins of this note Richman Stopford visited the department store Selfridges in Oxford Street, London and met the chief cashier, Mr King, in an effort to try to trace the note’s history. Stopford learned that the note had arrived in the store on the
same day that Owens had been paid, and there were only three ways this could have happened. It was either paid out against a cheque or draft, given in exchange for higher denomination notes, or given in exchange for notes or coins of a lower denomination. Having checked with Selfridges’ bank, Stopford concluded that the note had not been paid out against a cheque. Stopford then questioned the four head office cashiers who could have changed a note of a higher denomination, but none of them remembered having done so. The only option left was the three store cashiers whose numbers were marked on the rubber stamps. One of them remembered taking in a £5 note at about that time in part payment for a purchase from an assistant. Having found the assistant in question, Stopford discovered that the note had come from a tall lady with grey hair who had been wearing spectacles. She had been dressed in black, with black furs and had carried a large dark attaché case. The assistant had found the lady to be particularly charming and well-spoken, and this description was confirmed by another assistant who had handled the stamped note. She worked in the underwear department and told Stopford that on the day in question a lady, aged about sixty and six feet tall with grey hair, of rather stoutish build, who was very charming in manner and well-spoken, had taken seven £1 notes out of a purse which she had concealed in her stocking. The woman then asked if she could have a £5 note in exchange for five ones, as she was anxious to send it away by post. A third assistant told Stopford that the lady had a rather full face but did not use lipstick or nail varnish ‘as she was not that type’. The lady had told her that she was doing her Christmas shopping early, and had bought a pair of pyjamas for her niece and a slip for herself. She had then put the items into a cheap-looking case which was probably bought from a shop like Marks & Spencer.

Two of Owens’ previous payments had been mailed from the
Bournemouth
and Southampton area, so a picture was emerging of someone who drew £1 notes from her own bank and then travelled up to London to
launder
the money by changing it into £5 notes. MI5 then made a comparison between the Selfridges list of customers with addresses in Bournemouth and Southampton, and traced the note’s serial number to the Midland Bank branch at 59 Old Christchurch Road in Bournemouth, and found the name of Mrs Mathilde Krafft, a local resident whose telephone number was Parkstone 893.

Mrs Krafft was then placed under surveillance, her mail was intercepted and she was observed to visit her niece, Mrs Editha Dargel, on the continent
for eight weeks. According to MI5’s records Dargel had been deported earlier in the year because of her pro-Nazi activities. On 4 December 1939 Krafft received a letter from Wm H. Muller & Company, a travel and shipping firm of Electra House, 78 Moorgate, London, EC2, which requested a meeting. Three days later when Mrs Krafft visited the offices of Muller & Company, Stopford was in a car parked outside, accompanied by two of the sales
assistants
from Selfridges. They positively identified her as the woman who had changed the banknotes. Stopford later reported:

A widow of German extraction, Mrs Krafft was discovered to have made bank withdrawals coinciding with the cash payments received anonymously in the mail by S
NOW
. Interception of her mail revealed that she was in
correspondence
with a niece in Copenhagen and planned to travel to Fiji, where she had inherited a coconut plantation from her late husband. Then there was an embarrassing fiasco when, at MI5’s request, the Secret Intelligence Service made some not very discreet enquiries about her niece in Denmark, which would become a great cause for concern. Guy Liddell noted in his diary that: