Free Snow by Madoc Roberts

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 newHawkers 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