Free Hitler's Spy by James Hayward Page A

pilots scored two hits on the German pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer
, both bombs failed to explode, while other crews mistakenly attacked friendly vessels in the North Sea. Bad weather compounded the debacle, with at least one Wellington
missing Kiel by a hundred miles and unloading its bombs over neutral Denmark. Ironically, two of the air gunners from 9 Squadron who failed to return were members of the British Union of
Fascists.
    The chief cause of this calamity was radar. Germany’s early warning system might not have been as complete or efficient as the British Chain Home, yet their Freya apparatus was
technologically superior, and a mobile unit had tracked the raiders as they approached across the North Sea. None of this was known to British intelligence, who feared instead that the raid had
been defeated by radiolocation of a different kind. In his diary Guy Liddell confided: ‘Tar Robertson’s section reports that warning signals by an enemy agent were intercepted before
the raid on Kiel somewhere in the vicinity of Driffield, from which the raid started. This seems to call for some action to clear all areas in the vicinity of aerodromes and I am taking this
up.’
    More suspicious signals were detected at Driffield two nights later. Owens remained under lock and key in Wandsworth, with a watertight alibi, yet Tar remained convinced that the Welshman was
holding back. ‘There are inconsistencies in Snow’s interpretation of various points in the transmission code, and it is my impression that he is not telling us by any means all he
knows.’
    MI5 now stood at the Rubicon. Owens could be detained indefinitely under Regulation 18B, or even put on trial, yet both options would render him useless as an intelligence asset. Pursuing a
bolder agenda, the Little Man might yet become the Adam agent of a viable double-cross system, planting disinformation on the Abwehr and unravelling their British espionagenetwork from within. Yet these were uncharted waters, stirred by uncertain tides. During the Great War each and every spy caught in Britain had been promptly dispatched by firing squad
at the Tower of London, while Mad Major Draper, loyal and keen though he was, had achieved little of consequence. Then again, Draper had never been entrusted with a wireless transmitter, or been
appointed Hitler’s chief spy in England.
    Nonetheless, the Security Service knew that a double-cross game could win actual battles. Late in August 1914 the War Office had sent 3,000 Royal Marines to Ostend in an effort to stiffen the
crumbling Allied line, a force quickly transformed by wild rumour into 30,000 ferocious Russians, shipped via Archangel and Aberdeen ‘with snow on their boots’. At the same time MI5
shadowed a German spy named Carl Lody, whose letters home were intercepted and read. One such informed his masters of the ‘great masses of Russian soldiers’ passing through Edinburgh
‘on their way to London and France’. Lody put the number at 60,000, a fiction which MI5 saw no harm in allowing to reach Berlin. The Germans subsequently diverted precious reserves, and
in consequence – some said – lost the Battle of the Marne.
    Twenty-five years later – almost to the day – MI5 decided once more to steal a march on their German counterparts. With Snow on their boots.
    There was no time to lose. On Friday afternoon Robertson transferred Snow’s klamotten from the Scrubs to Wandsworth, where it was set up in an empty cell by a wireless expert from GCHQ
named Meakin. At six o’clock that same evening Owens was invited to resume wireless contact with the Abwehr signals centre at Wohldorf. At short notice, a prison warder named Maurice Burton,
who happened to be proficient in Morse, was briefed to listen in. His expert ear would ensure that the message buzzed by Owens corresponded to the text agreed by Robertson, and was clean of obvious
cheats (‘tells’) whichmight alert Stelle X to the fact that