Snow (8 page)

After the success of his first transmission, it was decided that Owens should be allowed to make the trip to Holland. The detention order was lifted and Owens’ passport was returned to him by Robertson. Arthur Owens was back in business and, on top of this, Lily was released from prison and given instructions to get everything she required for their new flat.
Simultaneously
, Hinchley-Cooke arranged with Superintendent Albert Foster of Special Branch for two police officers to keep a watch on the couple. MI5 also warned ‘that on no account when he returns to this country is he to give the impression that he is on a special mission, but is to conform in every way to the requirements of the immigration authorities.’

Before his departure, Owens pointed out that Dr Rantzau would expect him to provide the name and address of a member of the Welsh
Nationalist
Party whom he could contact, and MI5 made arrangements to find a
suitable nominee. The man they picked was Gwilym Williams, a retired Swansea police officer who had been born in Morriston near Swansea in March 1887 and had joined the police in Salford in 1907, where he remained for three years before transferring to the Swansea constabulary. During the First World War he had served with the 2
^nd
Battery, the Royal Garrison Artillery. He had an imposing physical presence and was five foot ten inches tall, with brown hair and brown eyes. His police personnel file described him as having a ‘fresh complexion’ with three round scars on his right leg and a mole on his left elbow.

As a young man Williams had run away to sea where he had educated himself, having left school an illiterate. However, while away he was said to have picked up as many as seventeen languages, which included Welsh, French, Spanish and German, doubtless attributes that increased his value to MI5. He had often been employed by the police as a court interpreter, and his background, including his marine knowledge, would prove useful as MI5 tried to prepare S
NOW
’s army of notional sub-agents. Physically strong, having been captain of the Swansea police’s water polo team, he had been known to swim from Swansea pier to the Mumbles pier and back, a distance of six miles. He was also one of those likely to be called upon whenever there was trouble on the docks.

Williams had reached the rank of chief inspector when, in January 1939, he retired from the police, but within the year he was to begin a new career as an MI5 double agent. Part of Williams’ task was to ensure that Owens was as loyal to the British war effort as he claimed, but before they left to see Rantzau, Owens went to Swansea to prepare himself for the encounter.

On his next visit to Hamburg, via Tilbury and Flushing, Owens gave the name of the Welsh Nationalist to Dr Rantzau who set about investigating his background. Rantzau wanted Owens to bring the man with him on the next visit, where a meeting would be arranged at the Savoy Hotel in Brussels. Owens was handed a coin to give to the man as a form of identification and in the meantime Rantzau was going to investigate the best way to ship the explosives, rifles and ammunition to South Wales by U-boat and Owens was to supply them with a suitable landing-site. Owens learned that the Germans had between three and four hundred submarines with a range of up to nine thousand miles, each armed with sixteen torpedoes.

During his visit Owens received an assurance from Dr Rantzau that, to protect him, he would be given advance notice of air-raids planned for his district. The Doctor also told Owens they intended to destroy the new
Hawkers factory near Owens’ house in Kingston, and advised him to buy a gas mask. Although he had not been informed of any details, Owens later reported to MI5 that, if all else failed, the Germans would resort to
bacteriological
warfare.

Owens also learned that the Germans had information about transport aircraft and seaplanes based at Felixstowe where they were to have armaments fitted. From there they were to be taken to the Harland & Woolf shipyards in Belfast. Each plane was capable of carrying forty fully-equipped soldiers, and the Germans believed that they were to be used to deliver troops across their frontiers, so they were anxious about the numbers to be built. All this new information was relayed to the Naval Intelligence Division.

Owens also reported that the Germans could not understand why there was no heavy artillery supporting the British troops stationed along the Franco-Belgian frontier. When this item was passed to the War Office, the military intelligence analysts concluded that the Germans would take this apparent deployment of troops to mean that the British were planning to move these troops quickly through neutral Belgium or Holland. In
consequence
, the military intelligence analysts anticipated that the Germans might decide to move first.

The final piece of information that Owens brought home concerned a British pilot, Squadron-Leader Murray, who had made a forced landing near Hanover. In September 1939 Owens learned that he was being held in a concentration camp outside Hamburg.

The most consistent German demand was for weather reports, but the military authorities were reluctant to supply any information that would aid the enemy and encourage air-raids. When the Air Ministry was approached for advice on this sensitive topic, MI5 was informed that a decision on this matter was beyond its remit and was a policy issue which should properly be taken to the War Cabinet. Nevertheless, MI5 was anxious to build Owens’ credibility and instructed him to send an immediate report on weather conditions in London.

On 26 September 1939 the Director of Air Intelligence, Air Commodore Buss, telephoned MI5 to say that the matter of the weather reports had been discussed, and that there was no objection to them being allowed to go out for the present, as long as nothing unusual happened. The information that they were to supply included an approximation of visibility at ground level; details of cloud cover including the height of any clouds; the velocity of the wind and its approximate direction; the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.
MI5 wanted to avoid providing exact measurements, explaining that the information should appear to have been collected by an amateur observer, and not an expert meteorologist as this might betray the deception that Owens was working alone. The Air Ministry’s nominee assigned the task of collecting the information would pass it on to Owens using the codewords ‘Atmosphere Calling’.

Owens was instructed by the Germans to commence his transmissions at 10.00 p.m. exactly, but on 26 September there was quite a panic. On that evening MI5’s radio operator, Maurice Burton, reported that he had made his way to Owens’ flat carrying the key to the radio room which he kept so as to prevent S
NOW
from making unauthorised contact with Germany. On his arrival at 9.35 p.m. he had seen a car draw up outside the house and three men and a girl alight. He recognised two of them as Owens and Lily, but the identities of the other men were unknown to him. Accordingly, he had made his way to a nearby subway and telephoned Robertson, but while there, he had noticed a girl hanging about, and became aware that he was also being followed by a man. Robertson told Burton that the car was probably a police surveillance vehicle so, reassured, he had made his way back to the flat. As he returned he had made a note of the girl who was still hanging about and described her as fairly thickset, short, aged about 25–30, wearing a dark blue felt hat and dark coat.

Back at the flat Burton discovered that Owens’ companions had indeed been Special Branch detectives, and was informed that the man trailing him was one of their colleagues who had been told to follow anyone acting suspiciously in the vicinity. By the time all this muddle had been clarified there had been only ten minutes left in which to prepare the equipment, so there had been a great rush to get the transmitter ready and it was only just in time that the message had been sent, using the CONGRATULATIONS keyword, which had read: LEAVING FOR WALES. WILL RADIO ON FRIDAY NIGHT AT 12. SEEING WW. PLEASE REPLY. The signal had been acknowledged, and the reply was: NEED MILITARY AND
GENERAL
NEWS URGENTLY DAILY. Owens then sent the weather report, and Hamburg terminated the exchange of signals with ‘Goodnight, old boy’.

This near fiasco, in the minutes leading up to an important transmission, had occurred because MI5 and Special Branch had failed to coordinate their activities, and the result was a large shiny car parked outside the house and seven people present during the vital transmission. The MI5 report on the incident noted that ‘the good lady in the flat opposite did in fact put her
head out of the door to see who all the people were going up and down her back stairs.’ Accordingly, it was decided that in future only the minimum possible number of people should be seen entering and leaving Owens’ flat.

To develop the link to the Abwehr further, MI5 told Owens to study a map of Wales and mark the likely places where arms might be delivered by U-boat. Owens explained that the Germans would make their first attempt once they were sure that conditions in the Bristol Channel were not too dangerous, and the landing would then happen somewhere between
Penmaen
in Oxwich Bay and Rhossili Bay, north of Worms Head. The Abwehr’s objective was the sabotage of ammunition dumps and the steel works at Briton Ferry, near Port Talbot, and if this attempt failed the secondary task was to go further up the coast to Linney Head and sabotage military
positions
and supplies in Pembroke Dock and the Milford Haven seaplane base where there were believed to be large fuel stocks.

Owens then turned his attention to the Welsh Nationalist who would accompany him on his next trip to see Dr Rantzau. Insisting that the nominee should be able to speak German because he did not, and therefore was unable to understand Rantzau when he addressed his staff, Owens stressed that whoever MI5 picked should be able to ‘look, speak and act like a Welshman, and should at least have a slight smattering of the Welsh language.’ He had already ascertained through experiment that the
Germans
had no knowledge of the Welsh language, but they knew what it sounded like and would not be easily taken in by an imposter. To meet these requirements Scotland Yard suggested that a Special Branch officer who looked Welsh and spoke fluent German could go along, but it was considered unlikely that the detective would be able to learn enough Welsh in the fortnight available.

Owens then revealed that he had been asked by Rantzau for specific
information
about the number of troops heading for the coast that might indicate a large-scale deployment across the Channel. Having established that the majority of these troops had left England to join the British Expeditionary Force in France, Rantzau then disclosed details of a plan to drop German paratroops over England who would be lightly armed with machine-guns. Apparently Rantzau fully realised that these troops would stand no chance of victory, and would probably cause very little damage, but he believed the sight of enemy troops in German uniform on British soil would have an immense impact on morale. Owens explained that ‘Rantzau has lived a lot in America and has acquired the American outlook of showmanship.’

Naturally, MI5 sought to learn as much as possible about the Abwehr’s spymaster, and initially Owens was the organisation’s principal source of information about him. He was described by Owens as six foot tall,
well-built
, clean-shaven, broad shouldered, with fair hair and a gold tooth on the top right side of his mouth. He had the general appearance of an American and his true name, as MI5 would eventually discover, was Nikolaus Ritter, a German who had emigrated to the United States but had returned to Germany ten years later after his New York textile business had failed in the Depression, but this was not the whole story.

While in the United States Ritter had recruited two important sources: Everett Roeder, who worked for the Sperry Gyroscope Company in
Brooklyn
, and Hermann Lang, an engineer employed on the design of the Norden bombsight, then thought to be the world’s most accurate system of delivering bombs to their targets. The 27-year-old Lang, who had lived in New York since emigrating from Germany as a teenager in 1927, worked in Carl
Norden
’s office in Manhattan and, when approached by Ritter in the autumn of 1937, had willingly agreed to copy the mechanism’s blueprints at his home in Queens. The copies were then concealed in an umbrella and smuggled back to Germany by a steward aboard the
Reliance
, a Hamburg-Amerika line ship. Ritter’s coup in obtaining the bombsight’s plans established his reputation as the Abwehr’s master spy.

Although both spies would eventually be compromised by another of Ritter’s recruits, William Sebold, who acted as an FBI double agent, the technical information acquired by the Abwehr’s network was considered by Berlin to be exceptionally valuable. Furthermore, by appealing to the patriotism of German emigrants, Ritter had accomplished his task without having to pay large sums to his subordinates. Thus, in the opening months of the war in Europe, Ritter’s standing in the organisation was high, and he supervised a widespread spy-ring across the Western hemisphere serviced by a team of couriers based on German liners sailing to and from Hamburg.

Owens had developed a high regard for Rantzau and admired his intellect, sometimes appearing to be in awe of the Doctor’s power both inside
Germany
and abroad, and he asserted that Rantzau had infested Brussels with his spies, and could do what he liked there. When asked by Owens how he crossed borders, Rantzau had laughed and said that he could go anywhere. His cover in Brussels was that of a director of a big hemp manufacturing company based in Germany who travelled to Belgium to sell his product. Recently, Rantzau had married his secretary, a Fraulein Busch, who was
reputed to be as clever as he was and, known as ‘the Baroness’, was actively involved in her husband’s work.

Owens had spent plenty of time in the Doctor’s company, and their conversations had ranged widely, the two men appearing to have gained the other’s trust. Owens recalled that on one occasion the topic of
biological
warfare had come up, and he described how he had been asked for the location of reservoirs, and especially those that supplied water to London. Although it would be very much a last resort, Rantzau had insisted that if all else failed the Germans were going to engage in bacteriological warfare, and they would drop bombs charged with bacteria into the selected reservoirs.