Authors: John Bryden
The next day (September 13), Robertson proposed to his superiors that Owens be allowed to go to Holland to meet the Germans as arranged. They agreed.16
The decision must have astonished Owens. When war was declared, he really had no choice but to turn himself in, as he was certain to be arrested anyway. Yet, he could hardly have dreamed that he would succeed so well in pitching himself as a double agent as to be permitted to go back across the Channel to the enemy, alone. Nevertheless, he was immediately released from jail and allowed to move into the flat with his girlfriend, Lily. On September 15, two “watchers” shadowed him down to the docks and to the ferry terminal. That was as far as the surveillance went; MI5’s mandate did not extend beyond British territory.17 (It must be remembered that in 1939, only Germany, France, and Britain were at war in Europe. Belgium, Holland, and Denmark were neutral, so the regular cross-Channel ferry services were still running.)
It seemed to work like a charm. Owens returned a few days later and told of meeting his spy chief, DR. RANTZAU, and giving him a yarn about having found a Welsh separatist who would be only too happy to plant bombs for Hitler. RANTZAU, who looked like an American, and whose smile, Owens said, was illuminated by a gold tooth, was enthusiastic and wanted the man brought over to the Continent at once so that he could be trained in Germany for raising Cain in Wales. Owens displayed the coin RANTZAU had given him that would be the Welsh traitor’s secret sign. Weapons would be shipped by submarine. From MI5’s perspective, Owens’s test mission as a double agent had been a brilliant success.18
At this point in the war, MI5 knew next to nothing about the German secret services. Admiral Canaris was little more than a name, and MI5 did not know that his organization had three distinct divisions and that each ran its own agents.19 And, had the MI5 officers read the espionage literature generated by the previous war, they would have realized that no responsible spymaster would risk a valuable spy successfully in place by having him engage in penny-ante fireworks.
DR. RANTZAU — whose real identity was Major Nikolaus Ritter — was the Abt I Luft (Air Espionage) chief at Ast Hamburg, and three days after he met Owens, supposedly at a hotel in Rotterdam, the following teletype message was sent by Hamburg to Berlin (A-3504 is Owens):
To: OKW Abw I Luft/E and Ii
3504 reports on 18.9.39
[Translation]
Liaison engineer of the War Ministry with Philips in Holland told me the following: A new ultrashortwave receiver has been built which is being set up along the whole east coast of England. With this one can flawlessly pick up the shortwave radio transmissions that are produced by the sparking between the spark plugs and magnets of aircraft motors. With this one can with reasonable certainty fix the distance and the number of the [aircraft] motors….
Ast Hamburg B Nr. 1252/39 I Luft geh20
Owens did not get it quite right, but right enough. At the meeting with the Germans, he tipped them off to what was then Britain’s most vital military secret: the development of a radio device that was being installed along the coast to give early warning of approaching aircraft. The device was later to become most famously known by its acronym — radar (from radio detection and ranging).
It was a huge espionage coup.21 Radar works by bouncing radio waves off a distant target and determining its range by measuring the return time of the reflections. The message suggests it involved picking up radio emissions from aircraft motors, but the Abwehr’s technology section (Abw Ii) would have recognized the mistake. What was important was that Owens’s information indicated that the British were building a coastal radio-beam system that would enable aircraft to be detected and tracked at long range. The Germans were working on radar themselves, but this told them that the British were dangerously farther ahead. An operational system would be of tremendous advantage to the British should it come to a clash in the sky between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force. This report and seventeen others from Owens were sent to Berlin the same day.
Robertson was not alone to blame for this security catastrophe. He had sought and obtained advice and approvals from Maxwell Knight, of MI5’s Section B2 (Counter-subversion), which included the fledgling double-agent section, as well as from the B Division chief, Brigadier Jasper Harker, and his deputy, Captain Guy Liddell. While it is likely Owens picked up the radar information himself, it is also possible it was given to him with some of the other messages for passing along to the Germans. MI5 at the time had no staff of its own “with any technical or scientific knowledge or training.” Robertson’s bosses, if unaware that an electronic air-defence system was actually being built, may have thought the item harmless fodder.22
For their part, despite the quantity of intelligence they garnered, the Germans must have been suspicious. There is a mocking ring to the report Owens made on his return. He spoke of DR. RANTZAU’s dark plan to undermine the morale of British troops by having secret agents talk down Britain’s chances in pubs, of a “general meeting of German spies from all over the world” to take place in Spain, and of submarines being gathered to attack the troop transports and other vessels concentrating in the Thames Estuary and between Folkestone and Dover — suicidal in those shallow waters. All this Robertson passed on by telephone, followed by letter to MI6, Naval Intelligence, and other interested parties.
Owens also reported being told that the Germans were massing troops at the rate of six hundred thousand a day on the Dutch frontier with the intention of striking through Holland and Belgium. This was a significant deception. Most of the German forces were still in Poland and the German army general staff was terrified lest the French and British perceive the weakness and attack.23
Because DR. RANTZAU insisted that Owens begin wireless transmissions immediately, Captain Robertson was given the lead in developing the case. He had the transmitter installed in a lockable room in Owens’s flat and arranged for Mr. Meakin to operate it as before. The idea was for Owens to be on hand so that replies could be put in his words.
Owens said DR. RANTZAU wanted him to begin immediately with local weather observations. Robertson sought the necessary clearances. This meant going to the deputy director of intelligence in the Air Ministry, Major A.R. Boyle, who said that it was a decision that would probably have to come from the War Cabinet. While waiting, on September 23 Robertson had a first weather report transmitted anyway, but it was deliberately inaccurate. Abwehr records show that it was spotted as false immediately.24
The code Owens said the Germans gave him for his weather reports is another indication that they were suspicious and were not taking him all that seriously:
WEATHER REPORTS
Visibility: Code letter “V”
That will comprise V1, V2, V3, V4, etc.
Height Clouds: Code letter “H”
This will be transmitted in 500 yds, e.g.,
1 = 500 yds
2 = 1,000 yds
Speed of wind: Code letter “W”
From 0–9 represents approximately 0–50 m.p.h.
Rain: Code letters “RN”
Fog: Code letters “FG”
Snow: Code letter “SN”
For safety, all codes going out will be prefixed by the letter “X,” e.g.,
Partly cloudy will be X.P.C.
Half cloud “X.H.C.”
Total cloud “X.T.C.”
Temperature: Transmit every night
Code letter “F”
(Fahrenheit not centigrade)
Code word for numbers: HAPPY CHRISTMAS25
Two months later, when it was clear that MI5 knew virtually nothing about codes and ciphers, the Germans gave these codes the dignity of a little more complexity by adding extra letters (nulls) and eliminating some of the “X” prefixes.26
The “code” Owens said he was to use for his espionage reports was not much better. It was a single-transposition cipher whereby the message was written letter by letter horizontally in a rectangular crossword-type box, and then taken off by the vertical columns. The keyword was
congratulations
— just as Mrs. Owens had said. It could be broken by anagramming and was rated by cryptanalysts of the day as more puzzle than cryptogram. This suggests that Owens made it up from a library book or the Germans gave it to him as the code he would say he was using if caught.27
Surprisingly, Robertson did get the okay to send the weather observations. On September 26, he was told that the chief of the Air Staff and the deputy chief had “no problem” with the proposal. This seems odd because knowing what cloud cover to expect was useful information for enemy aircraft wanting to venture over the Channel. Germany’s slow-moving Stuka dive-bombers were especially easy prey to roving British fighters. But these were the very early days of the war and the skies over England and the Channel were still mostly empty and serene. Yet it seems odd that the agreement of the navy was obtained, much less that of the War Cabinet. Winston Churchill was then First Lord of the Admiralty.28 He should have objected, surely.
Three weeks later, Owens made a second trip to the Continent, this time with some answers to a list of questions the Germans had given him, and accompanied by a former MI5 informant, Gwyllem Williams, posing as a rebellious Welsh nationalist.29
Three days later, on October 22, Ast Hamburg informed Berlin by teletype that, according to A-3504 (a spy’s real name was not given in such messages for security reasons), the new barrage balloons the Germans had asked about involved nothing more than the addition of stabilizer fins so that they would ride easier in the wind. This was given to Owens to pass along.30
Owens offered another item that may have been his own. He suggested that a large “Blue Diamond Line” vessel lying between Pembroke and Swansea was vulnerable to sabotage. This could only be a reference to one of the transatlantic liners operated by the Blue Star Line, perhaps even the
Arandora Star
, which was sunk by a German U-boat with great loss of life the following July. Liners, because of their troop-carrying capacity, were the equivalent of capital ships in time of war. If Owens was not making this up, it was delectable information. Major Ritter now really began to play the game.
Owens had a great story to tell MI5 on his return. He and Williams had been contacted at their hotel in Brussels and had travelled to Antwerp by train. The secret rendezvous was in the offices of a shipping firm in the city’s dockyard area. Present were three men: DR. RANTZAU; a man introduced as “the Commander”; and another man, who was not introduced, but who only watched and said nothing. There was also a woman — “tall, thin, fair hair — wearing a dark green dress and coat, aged thirty-eight to forty, height five foot six.” Owens could have had in mind Mata Hari, the famous femme fatale spy of the First World War popularized in the 1920s in both books and film. The meeting might have been a scene from the movie
Mata Hari
(1931), starring Greta Garbo and Lionel Barrymore.
He told them that Williams had been interviewed in an adjacent room by “the Commander,” and that Owens had stayed with the others. When put together, the two men’s stories tallied, Robertson noted in his report. Their main impression was that DR. RANTZAU and the Commander were grateful for the excellent answers to the questions Owens had been given, and now wanted to move quickly to foment mutiny and mayhem in Wales. The Commander, Owens judged, was in charge of all sabotage activities in Britain and knew the south coast of Wales intimately, leading him to believe there should be no problem getting explosives ashore by submarine. There were hints that the Germans were already co-operating in Ireland with the Irish rebels, the IRA, prompting Robertson to write in parentheses, “This is extremely interesting as it is a fairly concrete example that the IRA are being run by the Germans.”
DR. RANTZAU also said there was a spy in the Air Ministry and another in the Admiralty, and for Owens to expect payment in England for his services, potentially putting another two enemy agents in MI5’s sights. The Germans were anxious to learn more about aerodromes near Gloucester, what was going on at the Avonmouth Docks (Bristol), and hoped that Owens could soon arrange to go back to Canada to organize “a similar show” there.31
Furthermore, the Germans were pleased with the weather observations now coming in, and provided Owens with another list of questions. DR. RANTZAU also gave him a miniature photograph the size of a postage stamp bearing a message to a German agent in Britain. MI5 joyfully seized upon this as an example of German espionage technology, not realizing that the memoir of Germany’s First World War spy chief, Colonel Walter Nicolai, published in England in 1924, reported that German intelligence had been using photographic microdots as small as one millimetre square.32 As for the German agent, he was a fifty-year-old Britain-born businessman of German parents named Charles Eschborn, and he had surrendered to police the day after Owens.
Eschborn had told a compelling story. He admitted he had done a little spying for the Hamburg Abwehr during the previous months, but that it had been at the urging of one of his much younger twin brothers, one of whom was living with him in Manchester, the other of whom was in Germany. When war was declared, Eschborn was gripped by remorse, and so threw himself on the mercies of the British authorities. It worked, especially because Eschborn had served in the British Army in the First World War. His brother was interned while he was allowed to go free.