Free Snow by Madoc Roberts Page B

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 wasreputed 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.