Snow (6 page)

Evidently preparations for the delivery of the transmitter were
approaching
completion, and Owens arranged a trip to Hamburg to carry out the final tests. Upon his return he arranged several meetings with MI5 and, after the usual cautions, revealed that the transmitter was to be delivered before 17 January 1939, and that he had received the code to be used. Owens described having seen a demonstration of the transmitter in action, explained how the code worked and offered copies of the transmitter’s technical manual. He then produced a Victoria Station cloakroom ticket, numbered: k.7845, and the key to an attaché case, explaining how the radio could be redeemed.

Without Owens being told, the transmitter was recovered immediately from Victoria Station by Special Branch detectives and taken to
Hinchley-Cooke
who examined it and then had it returned. The ticket was then handed back to Owens, who declared his intention to go and collect the transmitter. Unaware that MI5 had already retrieved the case, Owens asked that
someone
should follow him at a discreet distance while he visited the cloakroom and claimed the case. Having signed a letter acknowledging receipt of the transmitter, Owens transferred it with its accessories to another case, and asked that it be delivered to Hinchley-Cooke.

This was an historic moment, for it was the very first time that MI5 had acquired a portable foreign transmitter capable of exchanging messages over quite long distances on variable frequencies. The hardware, ingeniously custom-fitted into a innocuous-looking suitcase, was far smaller than
anything
similar manufactured in England, and represented tangible proof that
the Germans were engaged in espionage in London. This was significant because since Herman Goertz had been convicted in March 1936, not a single major spy had been detected and prosecuted anywhere in Great Britain. Years later it would emerge that Hitler himself, embarrassed by the sensational newspaper publicity attracted by Goertz, had placed a ban on all further risky operations that could jeopardise Anglo-German relations.

While MI5 was subjecting S
NOW
’s wireless to a technical appraisal, and drafting a report detailing the information he said he had gleaned from his German contacts, he described a further dramatic development. Without any advance warning, while Owens had been walking home from the
Underground
station at Morden on the evening of 22 January, he said he had been approached by a stranger who had introduced himself by saying that he had brought a message from Dr Rantzau. He was to expect a telegram that would read ‘Require samples immediately’, and this would mean that Germany’s frontier would be closed within forty-eight hours, and that he was to visit a series of aerodromes listed on a questionnaire and report on the state of their readiness. Now, it appeared, the Nazis were contemplating a surprise attack on Great Britain, in direct contradiction of the peace terms agreed by Neville Chamberlain only four months earlier in Munich.

Having dropped this bombshell on MI5, Owens announced that he would await further instructions at the Grand Hotel, West Hartlepool, one of his regular haunts when on his travels. He further explained that he intended to write to Rantzau saying ‘regarding the samples, I have a car ready to call on all your customers’ which would be his way of confirming to Rantzau that he was in place and ready to collect all the required information.

Later that very same day, MI5 received a report from the Air Ministry about a retired squadron-leader named Walter Dicketts who had reported having met the Welshman in a pub. Dicketts claimed that Owens had talked openly about his connection with ‘a certain colonel of the CID, Scotland Yard’ and that Owens had been heard to brag about how he was responsible for the arrest of a woman agent in Aberdeen. This, of course, was unquestionably a hideously indiscreet reference to Jessie Jordan, the Aberdeen hairdresser who had been identified as managing a post office for the German intelligence service, receiving mail from the continent and the United States, and then rerouting it to Hamburg.

Dicketts also alleged that further, when ‘in his cups’ Owens said that he held an SS badge, and that he was paid £5 per week from German sources. He went on to describe how ‘some peculiar things have been happening.
Firstly, the gentleman in question arrived with a camera and told me that he was going to take photographs of certain coastal defence batteries here and when I asked him what for, he said “to take over to the other side.”’

MI5 acknowledged the Air Ministry’s report by declaring that Owens was known to be ‘a bad lot’ but asked that nothing should be done to draw him out, while requesting that anything else heard should be passed on. Meanwhile, MI5 developed the photographs that Owens had taken under German instruction and, returning them to him, cautioned that ‘the
development
and the sending of photographs abroad may be construed as an offence against the Official Secrets Act.’ As a result of this warning, Owens decided not to send the photographs and ‘expressed his regret that the authorities did not want to use him’.

If Owens was disappointed by MI5’s refusal to exploit his photos, he was certainly not ready to take the hint and abandon what was obviously
becoming
an increasing dangerous occupation. The international temperature once again was rising, with German troops moving into the Sudetenland.

The extent of Owens’ dislike for those in power was made evident on 24 March when he was found to be trying to get hold of information about political scandals in which leading politicians, in particular Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, were involved. Supposedly this information was to be used by the Germans as propaganda in an effort to destabilise the British government. Once again, S
NOW
had seized the initiative and taken MI5 by surprise, but was any case officer to distinguish between fact and fiction? It certainly occurred to MI5 that as a scientist, Owens was well-qualified when it came to collecting information regarding military innovations, and at one juncture he was thought to be seeking information on a new British explosive believed to be more powerful than anything yet invented. He was also after details of the new Sunderland bomber, and of secret experiments concerning ‘the wireless cloud’ which was to be used to bring down enemy aircraft.

Even if Owens was unable to supply the information requested, the very fact that the Germans were actively pursuing these topics was disquieting. Over the past year Hitler had annexed Austria in the
Anschluss
, occupied the Sudetenland, and most recently, in March 1939, seized Bohemia and Moravia. In doing so he had acquired a huge, modern, mechanised army, whereas the British army, still without conscription, could muster just two combat-ready divisions for deployment to France if necessary. If the
reference
to a ‘wireless cloud’ was an indication that the country’s highly secret
research into centrimetric radar was now a target for German intelligence collection, the implications were deeply troubling.

On his return from one of his trips to Hamburg, Owens reported to
Scotland
Yard that he had seen a letter from a man named Paddy from Ireland that had referred to an ‘instrument’ at Biggin Hill which was to be loaned to Paddy and then returned soon afterwards. At the same meeting Owens told Special Branch about the copy of a letter he had seen in Hamburg which had recommended that ‘Lieutenant Stokes of Oldham aerodrome was a very good man to make contact with as he is in debt and lives above his means.’ Once again, Owens seemed to be an enthusiastic informant, purveying information that contained leads to genuine counter-intelligence cases. This was MI5’s lifeblood, but the doubts persisted.

On 11 August Owens was kept under discreet observation by
Metropolitan
Police detectives as he embarked on a steamer at Dover, destined for Ostend and, having ascertained that his final destination was Hamburg, MI5 learned that by the time he reached that city he was travelling with a woman whom he called his wife. This was an illusion that evaporated a week later, on 18 August, when Jessie Owens walked into Scotland Yard with her son Robert and denounced her husband, telling the police he was engaged in espionage for the Nazis.

This event was one of the many crucial turning-points in the S
NOW
case, and was entirely unexpected. According to Mrs Owens, she had wanted to tell the police about his activities for some time, but had restrained herself for the sake of her children. She told detectives that although they had
quarrelled
and he had left her, this altercation was not the reason that she had come to the police. She was informing on her husband because recently he had tried to persuade their son Robert, her brother’s step-daughter and another friend to join him in what she called ‘this despicable business’ and that he had threatened to shoot Jessie if she reported him.

She also told the police that his business, the Owens Equipment
Company
, which had been established to sell his battery inventions, was now only a front for his other activities, and that Owens had been working for the British intelligence services when he was first approached by the Germans. He had set up a subsidiary of his company in Germany which was then used as a cover for his frequent visits to Hamburg, and she said that the letters he sent and received in the name of this company contained messages written in code. The company was, she alleged, also used as a method for paying him for services he performed for the Germans.

Jessie went on to describe the nightmares of her so-called holiday to Germany with her husband and their children. Initially they all had gone to Ostend, but Owens had received a letter instructing him to travel to
Hamburg
. They had been directed to leave their children Robert and Patricia in the care of the hotel manager and, having reached Hamburg they had met Dr Rantzau, whom she described as ‘one of the chiefs of the German Secret Service’. Rantzau then had made what she described as ‘feeble and
amateurish
’ attempts to inveigle Jessie into becoming an agent. She also reported that in their absence a man named Peiper had visited the hotel in Ostend and had attempted to ‘blackmail’ the children. Alone, and far from home, it was only the protection of the hotel manager that had saved them. On her return, hearing what had happened, Jessie had threatened to have Peiper arrested.

Jessie also claimed that Owens then tried to recruit her brother’s
step-daughter
and her friend Lily Bade, who had a German mother, and the step-daughter was now willing to give evidence against Owens. She alleged that Lily may well have believed her husband’s extravagant promises, such as taking her to Germany with him, and expressed her belief that it was Lily who had accompanied Owens on his current visit to Germany, despite his assurance to Jessie that he was taking a brief holiday at the Golden Sands holiday camp in Great Yarmouth.

Jessie also reported that her husband had tried to entice his own son, then aged only eighteen, to go to Germany with him where he had told Robert that he would be employed as a draughtsman. She believed that this had been nothing more than a ruse because Owens’ real intent had been to persuade Robert to work for the German Secret Service.

Jessie told the police all about the radio transmitter, and how Owens had put it in his car and driven to sensitive military sites and reported back information about them to his German masters. She also knew about the code that Owens used to send these messages, and she was able to give them details about his key word which she said was ‘CONGRATULATIONS’, the letters of which stood for numbers. Jessie claimed to have found some RAF codebooks in the house and told the police that she had destroyed them ‘so that they should not fall into German hands’. She also alleged that Owens might still have in his possession other RAF codebooks which were recently reported as stolen. She warned that he was very clever, and that he carried coded messages in tin foil either in his mouth or in the cavity at the end of his cigarette lighter. She added that he was the chief of a group of agents who operated under his orders, and that he had even asked Jessie’s
brother, who worked for the arms manufacturer, Short Brothers, for secret information – a request that had been refused.

Unwittingly, Jessie Owens may have revealed what had motivated her husband’s first approach to MI5 after he returned to Britain with
information
contained in the German mouth capsule. According to her, Owens had been warned by a railway employee that he was being followed and, fearing he was likely to be searched, had chewed up the incriminating evidence and spat it out of the railway carriage window. She said that he had been very scared by this incident and feared that he was about to be unmasked, so he had approached the police to pre-empt their intervention. She also asserted that her husband had been drinking heavily for some time, and had not been sober for weeks. She declared that she was willing to assist the authorities as far as possible, as she feared her husband might be violent. The police ended the interview with a promise that an eye would be kept on her home and, six days later, on 24 August, she sent a letter to the police with further information.

The Special Branch report of Owens’ departure noted that when he left for Hamburg there was no mention of him having been accompanied by a woman.

Jessie’s catalogue of complaints about her husband did not contain much that was not already known to MI5, but it did at least serve to confirm the depth of his duplicity, and seems to have prompted a general review of his current status. Not surprisingly, the recommendation was made that in the event of hostilities, Owens should be taken into custody as a self-confessed spy.