Free Fighting to Lose by John Bryden Page B

suspicious transmissions were located, and to call in the police where warranted.33 This was the responsibility of B3, a one-man section of MI5 that also looked after reports of suspicious lights and carrier-pigeon sightings.
    In contrast, when prodded by the Foreign Office, MI6 undertook to develop its own secret wireless service. The task was given in 1938 to a former First World War signals officer, Captain Richard Gambier-Parry, whose first priority was to develop quick and secure communications for key diplomatic posts abroad. He began by recruiting experienced wireless operators from the merchant marine. He put them through additional training with Scotland Yard’s wireless section and outfitted them with the best available sending and receiving sets, mostly of American manufacture. He had operators in the embassies in Prague, Paris, and The Hague in time to wireless back to London the reaction in those capitals to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler to carve up Czechoslovakia.34
    The different ways in which MI5 and MI6 reacted to suggestions regarding wireless would turn out to be a fair indication of the mentalities of the two services on the eve of war.



3

    September 1939–April 1940
    Arthur Owens was a weasel. No doubt about it. The forty-year-old Welshman with Canadian citizenship elicited instant dislike on first encounters. He was bony-faced, scrawny, and small, with nicotine-stained fingers and transparent, irregular, mismatched ears. “A typical Welsh underfed Cardiff type,” the police description concluded.1
    British intelligence was reminded that Owens was not so savoury by the arrival at Scotland Yard of Mrs. Owens in mid-August 1939, there to denounce her husband as a genuine German agent. Yes, she told her interviewers, she knew all about him working for the British while pretending to spy for the Germans, except, she said, he really was spying for the Germans. Now, according to his wife, he had gone off to Hamburg again, this time with a girlfriend, but no, that was not why she had decided to report him. He had been trying to get their son into his spy ring, and when she protested, he had threatened to shoot her. So here she was, doing her duty by disclosing that he was now in Germany with the most recent RAF code book.2
    Everything Mrs. Owens said was true. MI6 had originally acquired Owens as a secret agent in 1936. He had first presented himself to Naval Intelligence Division of the British Admiralty as an electrical engineer who often visited Germany and who might be able to bring back the occasional tidbit of military interest. The navy sent him along to MI6, which took him up on the offer.
    All seemed well for some months, until a letter from Owens to a known German secret service cover address was intercepted. It was written in open code and appeared to be talking about “toothpaste” (torpedoes) and “shaving cream” (submarines). A Major Vivian of MI6 discussed it earnestly with his superiors and it was thought that perhaps Owens was playing the Germans along and that he would reveal all shortly.3 Six months later he did.
    Owens claimed that one of his informants in Germany, a man named Pieper,4 had turned out to be working for the German secret intelligence service (the Abwehr) and had proposed that he do so too. After several cloak-and-dagger meetings, he agreed, figuring it would enable him to better help the British by reporting what was asked of him. The Germans, he assured his listeners, only wanted him to work as a “straight” spy; there was no thought of using him as a double agent.
    Owens, of course, was offering to be a double agent for the British, and while MI6 officially turned him down, it used him in that capacity anyway. For the next two years, he was allowed to collect information for the Germans so long as he occasionally reported his activities and contacts to Scotland Yard’s counter-intelligence division, Special Branch. His letters