Double Agent Celery

MI5's Crooked Hero

Carolinda Witt

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526716149
• eBook ISBN: 9781526716163
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

This personal biography reveals the incredible true story of the British secret agent who posed as a Nazi spy during WWII.

With Britain braced for a German invasion, MI5 recruited Walter Dicketts, a former officer of the Royal Naval Air Force—and a known con artist—as a double agent. Codenamed Celery, Dicketts was sent to Lisbon with the mission of persuading the Germans he was a traitor and then extracting crucial secrets. Once there, the Nazis brought Dicketts to Germany, where he had to outwit his interrogators in Hamburg and Berlin before returning to Britain as, in the Nazis' eyes, a German spy.
Even before he left for Germany, Celery knew that he had been betrayed by a fellow agent. Yet somehow he not only got back to Lisbon, but persuaded a German Intelligence Officer to defect before spending nine months undercover in Brazil.
A mixture of hero and crook, Dicketts was smart, worldly and charismatic. Sometimes rich and sometimes poor, his private life was a complicated web of deception. Using both family and official documents, as well as police records, newspaper articles and personal memories, Carolinda Witt—Dicketts's granddaughter—unravels the incredible yet true story of Double Agent Celery.

Chapter 1

A Fateful Meeting

‘I’ve always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem.’ Benedict Cumberbatch

In late January 1940, the River Thames froze over in the severest winter since 1894. As the temperatures began to rise in March, Londoners felt an increasing sense of impending doom. They knew the improved weather conditions meant a greater risk of invasion by the Germans and their city would experience the first real shocks of the war.

On the morning of Saturday, 16 March, a tall man in his late 30s with ‘black hair, well-greased’ and neatly brushed back, strode purposefully down Friars Style Road in leafy Richmond and entered the brick arches of the Marlborough public house.1 He was casually dressed in a light brown tweed sports coat, grey flannel trousers and a light raincoat. He shoved open the saloon doors in front of him and entered. After his eyes had adjusted to the dimly lit interior, he made his way to the bar and ordered a gin.

His name was Walter Dicketts. He was an ex-RNAS officer who ran away from school at 15, enlisted in the First World War, became a pilot and worked in Air Intelligence towards the end of the war. When he tried to enlist again in the current war, his application had been rejected due to some fraudulent activities in his past – despite having been clean for over a decade. Dicketts was frustrated by the whole business, as he knew himself to be an experienced and useful man who desperately wanted to do his bit for his country – if only the authorities would give him a chance. In the meantime, he was running very short of cash.

He and a small thin man with brown hair exchanged polite greetings at the bar and began a casual conversation. The other man’s face was bony and he had large, wide-set brown eyes, with one eye slightly higher than the other, giving him a rather shifty-looking appearance. His ears were small and ‘almost transparent’ and his fingers were stained with nicotine.2 Speaking softly, without any discernible accent, he introduced himself as Thomas Wilson.

Their conversation began like that of most strangers with small talk and casual discussion. They discovered they had both travelled widely to places like America, Canada and most of the countries in Europe, and from then on their interest in each other was genuine. They swapped anecdotes about the places they had seen and the cuisines they had tasted, and for a moment the reality of war seemed very far away.

In many ways, theirs was a meeting of like minds. They had so much in common, including the flaws in their personalities which would soon become apparent. Dicketts was nearly 40 and Wilson a year older. They were opportunistic survivors in a world where wealth and influence remained largely in the hands of the upper classes. Consummate salesmen, they loved money and took the sort of risks to obtain it that most people wouldn’t even consider. Even in their private lives there were parallels - both their marriages had ended with a great deal of bitterness and they were currently living with younger women they referred to as their wives.

There were differences too; Dicketts was well-educated and the son of a successful stockbroker’s clerk, who commuted to London from their comfortable, white-painted seaside home, a short stroll from the beach at Southend-on-Sea. Wilson was the son of a master plumber from Cilybebyll, a small rural village nestled in the coal-mining valleys of South Wales, surrounded by mountains, beautiful countryside, spectacular views and winding country lanes.

Physically, they couldn’t have been more different. Dicketts was tall and handsome, with a pronounced dimple on his chin and a charming smile. He had a deep, rather loud voice and was a totally convincing, erudite and interesting companion – a combination of traits which had duped many others in the past. Wilson was small and thin, and he was an equally engaging and entertaining companion who could also be boastful, indiscreet, shrewd and artful.

Wilson insisted on paying for everything and ignored Dicketts’ protestations to the contrary; by the time it came to leave, he was calling his new friend Dick, and Dicketts was calling him Tom. They lived within walking distance of the pub and agreed to return later that evening, bringing their wives with them. The attractive young women in their mid-20s made an immediate impression when they arrived. Wilson’s mistress Lily was tall and blonde with a ‘natural sex appeal’,3 and Kay Dicketts had brown wavy hair, dark eyebrows and painted red lips.4

At 10 pm, Wilson invited the Dicketts to play darts with them at his flat in Marlborough Road, where they stayed until 1.00 am the following morning. By this stage they had drunk a considerable amount of alcohol. Wilson asked Dicketts to meet him back at the pub later that day, where they discussed general business matters. Wilson told him he had a large amount of money which he kept fluid in several bank accounts, and was currently buying gold and diamonds as the pound was bound to fall later. ‘What do you do for a living, Dick?’

Dicketts said he was surviving on very small means, but he had a proposed patent for ready-made mustard in tin containers similar to toothpaste. Wilson immediately said, ‘That’s an excellent idea and if my partner agrees I’ll finance it.’5

Dicketts was surprised by his quick response. It sounded too good to be true, but he was running very short of funds and Wilson appeared to have a lot of cash lying around. He was right to be suspicious – his new friend was not all that he was pretending to be. Even the name Wilson was false. His real name was Arthur Owens and he was Snow, Britain’s first double agent. As for the likelihood of his ever being truly interested in the mustard tube idea, the chances were very small indeed. Owens’ unprofitable battery business was a front for his clandestine activities as a spy, and both he and his partner William Rolph worked for MI5.

A more likely prospect is that he thought Dicketts’ background as a disenfranchised ex-RAF man from the last war was exactly the type of man his German spymaster, Nikolaus Ritter, would be interested in. Owens knew he would have to play him very carefully. First he would boost his ego and spend lots of money on him. Once Dicketts knew there was plenty of cash available, Owens would see if he could be bought - and then if he could be trusted. In the meantime, he would dig into Dicketts’ past to see if he could compromise him in any way.

It was an interesting game, as both men were well-matched. Owens didn’t realize it yet, but Dicketts wasn’t whom he appeared to be either. He was a serial confidence trickster with a string of convictions behind him for obtaining money by false pretences. He was a charming shape-shifter who could appear to be anything or anyone he wanted. The whole mustard tube concept could have been a ploy to get Owens to part with all that money he was throwing around so generously.

Owens began the process of recruitment. He took Dicketts and Kay to see a show at the theatre, and then back to his and Lily’s flat for drinks and supper. When the meal was over, he pulled Dicketts aside and said he had taken a great liking to him: ‘I’d like to invite you and Kay to join us on a five-day motor trip to Devon and Bournemouth over Easter – at my expense.’

‘That’s very kind of you to ask, but I’m afraid I’ll have to decline as I haven’t got the funds to do so,’ Dicketts said.

‘Don’t be silly, you can have whatever money you like from me.’

Dicketts refused again, so Owens suggested they sign an agreement with regard to the mustard patent and wrote him a cheque for £25 as a preliminary payment. The sharp-eyed Dicketts immediately noticed his signature was in a different name to Wilson, but before he could say anything, Owens quickly pointed to it and said, ‘I’ll explain that another time.’

Dicketts had to keep his smile and suspicions to himself. His new friend was adopting a strategy he was more than familiar with, and it was amusing to be on the other side for once. He had used twenty-two aliases at the high point of his criminal career. What did Wilson want, he wondered? After all, he didn’t have any cash or assets, so why was he being so generous? He must be involved in something murky and wanted Dicketts to do something he couldn’t - or wasn’t prepared to do.

During their time away, the foursome became very friendly and stayed at the mansion-like Lansdowne Hotel in Bournemouth, the iconic Castle Hotel in Dartmouth with its picture-postcard views of the harbour, and Boltons in the ancient fishing village of Brixham in Devon. Dicketts noticed that on each occasion, he signed the registration forms as T. Wilson.

The day after their return, Owens took Dicketts to meet his partner at their office in Sackville Street, near Piccadilly Circus, who told him the mustard patent was already on the market. Dicketts became very upset at this and said he knew it wasn’t true.

‘Don’t worry. I can use you in other ways. Money is no object,’ Owens reassured him.

The following day, having succeeded in getting Dicketts to depend on him for money, Owens moved onto the next part of his plan– collusion. He told him in the strictest confidence that he was the key man in the British Secret Service; the whole house where he lived belonged to him and he had a bodyguard of three men living in the ground-floor and basement flats.

‘How much money do you need to come and work for me, carrying on normal business under my direction as a cover?’ Owens asked. ‘But before you answer, you mustn’t alter your standard of living or move to a better address - and you mustn’t say anything to anyone.’6 It was almost too easy; Dicketts readily agreed and was given a salary of £10 a week plus expenses and £50 to pay off some of his debts.

Although Dicketts needed the money, he had another agenda too. If Owens really was working for British intelligence, he might get the opportunity to work for SIS again. He would have been shocked to discover that he already had the attention of MI5, Britain’s secret police and counter-espionage division, who were listening to their conversations through a hidden microphone in agent Snow’s apartment. They had observed his comings and goings, and wondered who he was and whether his sudden appearance was as innocent as it seemed.

They already knew a great deal about Snow, as he was the first British double agent to be recruited at the beginning of the war. He had initially come into contact with British intelligence during 1936 when, in the course of running his battery business, he travelled widely throughout Europe. When he returned from his trips, he reported any intelligence he had gathered to SIS on an informal basis. When his business began to fail, Owens decided to become a paid spy and received payments from both the German and the British Secret Service until the outbreak of the Second World War, when he was arrested by MI5.

Owens’ relationship with both SIS and MI5 was characterized by mistrust and usefulness. Owens was a difficult character whose ‘principal characteristics were vanity and inherent untruthfulness’.7 At the time of his meeting with Dicketts in March 1941, the fledgling British double-cross team had very few agents - and of those, Snow was the most important. His German radio had been confiscated by MI5 on the outbreak of war, and they were now controlling it. As far as the Germans were concerned, they believed the radio was still being operated by Snow and continued to send him requests for information. This was a godsend for MI5, who could deduce from the Germans’ questions what information they needed and what they already knew. It was like having an open window into the headquarters of the Abwehr, and to lose it would be disastrous.

If Dicketts was a German spy sent to check up on Snow, then their entire double-cross system was at risk and they would have to start again from scratch. MI5’s watchers gave Dicketts the codename Celery, and told Special Branch to find out who he was and why he was in contact with Snow.

MI5 discovered a great deal of information about Dicketts’ criminal background between the years 1920-1931. But they knew nothing of his early background or his struggle to adjust to normal life, having served as a boy soldier during the First World War. They knew nothing of his work in the social services, or his efforts and success in going clean in the decade leading up to the Second World War. Any view they formed of Dicketts was based on the limited information they had about him, and none of that was good. Yet there was so much more to him than that.

At midnight on 4 August 1914, there were crowds standing outside the offices of the Southend Standard, waiting for news of England’s declaration of war against Germany following the latter’s unprovoked invasion of Belgium. Britain’s newly appointed Secretary of State of War, Lord Kitchener, warned the government that the outcome of the war would be decided by ‘the last million men that Britain could throw into battle’.8

The war that many believed would be over by Christmas began that day and ended four years later, with the signing of the Armistice on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

On 6 August 1914, Kitchener issued his first call to arms for 100,000 volunteers, aged between 19 and 35. The scale of the response was astounding: around 30,000 men enlisted every day, swamping the military recruiters, who were forced to enlist local dignitaries and magistrates for assistance. By the end of September, over 750,000 men had volunteered, and by January 1915, nearly a million.

Walter Dicketts was living with his parents at Southend-on-Sea, where he attended the local gra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedicaiton
• Contents
• Dramatis Personae
• Abbreviations
• Illustration: Walter Dicketts Family Tree
• Author’s Note
• Foreword by Nigel West
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 A Fateful Meeting
• Chapter 2 From Batteries to Spying
• Chapter 3 About Turn
• Chapter 4 A New Kind of Spy
• Chapter 5 Loyal Rogue
• Chapter 6 Parachutes and Dinghies
• Chapter 7 Penetrate the Abwehr
• Chapter 8 Escape From Germany
• Chapter 9 Who to Believe?
• Chapter 10 Aftermath
• Chapter 11 South America Beckons
• Chapter 12 A New Life
• Chapter 13 Lost and Found
• Postscript by Katherine Ritter
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Endnotes
• Select Bibliography
• Picture Credits
• Plate section