Spying for Hitler

The Welsh Double Cross

John Humphries

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780708326442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Segunda Guerra Mundial

After Dunkirk the British Army was broken, the country isolated and invasion imminent. German Military Intelligence was sat the task of recruiting collaborators from among Welsh nationalists to sabotage military and civilian installations ahead of the landing. Strategic deception was one of the few weapons left. To fool the Germans into believing Britain was ready and able to repel invaders when in fact it had only the weapons salvaged from Dunkirk, MI5 invented an imaginary cell of Welsh saboteurs led by a retired police inspector.

ONE
OPERATION CROWHURST

WHEN INSPECTOR GWILYM WILLIAMS retired shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War his only claim to fame after twenty-nine years in the Swansea Constabulary was a commenda­tion for stopping a runaway horse. That was until September 1939 when MI5’s counter-espionage branch sent him to Belgium to infiltrate German military intelligence (the Abwehr) by posing as a Welsh nationalist fanatic and leader of a group of extremists pre­pared to collaborate in sabotaging the British war effort. Williams avoided politics even after retiring for fear that to become involved would breach the terms and conditions affecting his pension. But he did agree to join Plaid Cymru on the instructions of his MI5 control­ler in order to reinforce a cover story that would thrust him into the cockpit of the espionage war between Britain and Germany.1

Apart from a career as a policeman, Williams had no obvious qualifications for his new role as one of the founding members of MI5’s Double-Cross System, the section inside counter-espionage’s B Branch for turning captured enemy spies into British double agents. Before setting out on his mission the only coaching Williams received was in memorising the names of prominent members of the Welsh nationalist party until able to recite them like a catechism. His cover story for offering his services to the Abwehr was that it was too good a chance to miss: that his Welsh nationalist friends had been waiting years for such an opportunity. If asked who had sent him Williams was to say he was replacing ‘WW’, the code name for an agent the Germans believed they had inside Plaid Cymru, una­ware that the man was in fact a British MI5 officer. He was to tell his interrogators that no one apart from WW knew of his visit to Brussels. If faced with any awkward questions from Abwehr offic­ers MI5 advised Williams to create some additional thinking time to reply by asking ‘What?’ or ‘I beg your pardon?’ so that the question had to be repeated. This was the only training Williams received for the first exercise in strategic deception undertaken by MI5 following the outbreak of war.2

On leaving the police force Williams had become a private inquiry agent investigating divorce cases not very different to his own after his first wife was caught by police colleagues fornicating with a soldier in a shop doorway late at night. It was the First World War and Williams was serving in France with the Military Foot Police, otherwise known as the ‘Redcaps’, sometimes portrayed with pistol in hand forcing shell-shocked ‘Tommies’ back to the trenches. Demobbed in 1919, his marriage in ruins, Williams had a variety of lodgings before marrying divorcée Mrs Winifred Amelia Thomas in 1932 and moving into 43 Mount Pleasant, an elegant semi-detached house on one of those steep roads climbing out of Swansea Bay like the fingers of an upraised hand. His first wife Catherine spent the rest of her life as an evangelist for the Baptist Church, living in a caravan in the grounds of a school.3

Born in Morriston, Swansea in 1887, Williams at 5 feet 10 inches was not a tall man in a force where many police officers stood well over six feet. His great passion was long distance swimming, and he was often seen ploughing the six miles across the bay from the pier to Mumbles Head, and back, before reporting for duty.

He drank too much on occasions and was reprimanded for being drunk on duty and deserting his beat, and was twice accused of assaulting residents. One householder complained that P.C. 92 punched him when he opened his front door after Williams rattled the knob while patrolling his beat, his superintendent later discover­ing him drunk and fast asleep in uniform on a sofa in the kitchen at his lodgings. The aggrieved householder dropped the complaint, suddenly discovering his bloodied and swollen face was sustained by slipping off the kerb! The only other apparent blot on Williams’s police record followed a confrontation with staff from an Italian café late at night. Grabbing one by the scruff of the neck, P.C. 92 called him an ‘Italian bastard’ before pushing him backwards down a flight of steps. A formal complaint was made but not pursued.

Pounding the beat on cold, damp nights left its mark and Williams retired with bronchial problems, but not on a full pension, the Swansea chief constable refusing to count his two years service in the Salford Constabulary before transferring to Swansea. Whether or not money was short, soon after leaving the force Williams began his new career as a licensed private detective. At least his recruitment by MI5 would mean no more grubby divorce work.4

Operation Crowhurst, the plot to infiltrate a British agent mas­querading as a Welsh extremist into German military intelligence, was an audacious attempt by MI5 to manipulate Hitler’s belief that nationalist sentiment in Wales, Scotland and Ireland might be har­nessed in support of German invasion plans. Hitler had encour­aged his intelligence service to cultivate links with the Welsh as part of a scheme to persuade the former Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George to sue for peace. The Führer had been greatly impressed by the ‘Welsh Wizard’ when they met three years before the outbreak of war at Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in September 1936. The two men spent several hours together, Lloyd George afterwards describing the Nazi leader as the ‘George Washington of Germany’ and applauding him for the public works programme that lifted Germany out of the Great Depression. Hitler was, according to some accounts, mesmerised by Lloyd George, and unable to take his eyes off the man credited with winning the First World War. They talked mostly about the Communist threat, which Hitler said was the prin­cipal reason for German rearmament. An elated Lloyd George after­wards described Hitler as ‘indeed a great man … a born leader’.5 On his return to England he wrote effusively in the Daily Express of his admiration for the Führer, ‘a magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose’ who had no desire to attack any country in Europe. Not unnaturally this endorsement was disquieting for those who regarded Hitler as the greatest threat to peace.6

‘Hitler had done great things for his country,’ Lloyd George told A. J. Cummings, Editor of the News Chronicle. ‘He is unquestionably a great leader. There is not the slightest doubt that the workers and particularly the younger generation are absolutely devoted to him. He has affected a remarkable improvement in the working condi­tions of both men and women. Of that there can be no manner of doubt. And they appreciate it. They look upon him as a Monarch.’7

Lloyd George was also critical of the British government for ‘bullying’ Saunders Lewis and his two accomplices by jailing them for setting fire to the RAF bombing school on the Llŷn Peninsula in 1936, reinforcing Hitler’s conviction that this was someone with whom he could do business – and Welsh nationalism something to subvert.8

In early 1940 an American intelligence agent after infiltrating the staff of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the German intelligence chief, eavesdropped on a conversation between Hitler and Dr Robert Ley, head of the Nazi trade union movement Deutsche Arbeitsfront. During this the Führer spoke of the need for a secret understand­ing with Lloyd George, and personally urged the speeding up of contacts with Welsh nationalists opposed to the war in the hope of destabilising the Churchill government. That Lloyd George might be persuaded to lend his name to the peace movement is also men­tioned by the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in the Documents on German Foreign Policy captured at the end of the war.9

The man charged by Hitler with subverting Welsh national­ism was Major Nikolaus Ritter (alias Dr Rantzau), head of German counter-espionage at the Abwehr’s Hamburg Ast. In return Rantzau was authorised to promise self-government to Wales as part of a German peace treaty with England.10

Rantzau was the Abwehr’s rising star for his part in the German espionage ring that stole blueprints of a top secret aircraft bomb-aiming device, the Norden Bombsight. One of the most closely-guarded secrets of the American armaments industry, the aerial sighting device enabled bombardiers to focus on targets more accurately. After a German immigrant working in the Manhattan factory manufacturing the bombsight obtained copies of the blue­prints, Rantzau smuggled them out of America wrapped inside an umbrella.11 Aged about fifty, six feet tall with broad shoulders, fair hair, and grey eyes set in a round florid face, Rantzau was regarded by some of his associates as ‘common’ because of his fondness for telling dirty stories. Physically his most distinguishing feature was a gold tooth slightly protruding from the top right side of his mouth. Having spent a large part of his life in the United States, Rantzau spoke perfect English with a strong American accent. He used sev­eral aliases but preferred ‘The Doctor’ which was how he was known to his agents and British adversaries.

In the United States Rantzau failed as a textile manufacturer, but married a rich American, and raised two children before returning to join the Nazi Party, and divorce his wife. By 1938 he was mar­ried to his secretary, a woman twenty years his junior, the couple living in one of the more fashionable parts of Hamburg. Known as the ‘Baroness’ at the Hamburg Opera House where she had a private box, Frau Rantzau spoke perfect English but was unattractive with thin features and a pointed nose, and ‘exceedingly tight with money’ when paying her husband’s agents, according to the most important of those, Arthur Graham Owens.

Born in Pontardawe in 1899 but a naturalised Canadian, Owens began spying for the British, then switched to the Germans but by the outbreak of war was back on side as a double agent after his wife informed on him to MI5. Unaware of Owens’s latest defection Rantzau had instructed him to deliver a potential Welsh nationalist collaborator for interrogation by the Abwehr in Brussels.12

Owens was ‘Snow’ to the British Secret Service for whom he started spying during business trips to the Continent until late 1936 when Rantzau offered ‘Johnny’ (his Abwehr code name) a better deal. An unashamed mercenary, Owens was nonetheless a professional familiar with all the paraphernalia of espionage – secret codes, pass­words (‘Ginger’ for ‘Operation Crowhurst’), secret inks, exploding fountain pens, and booby-trapped cigarette lighters.

While claiming to be 42, he had by all accounts the physique of a man ten years older, this attributed by a doctor to a lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking. His MI5 file is even less flattering, describ­ing a typically Welsh ‘underfed Cardiff type, very short, bony face, ill-shaped ears, almost transparent, disproportionately small for size of man’, with the disconcerting habit of only inserting his false teeth when he ate. He spoke ‘uneducated English’ with a Welsh accent, and usually wore a brown felt hat and a shifty look. Beneath thick dark brown hair parted on the left, was a pale, cleanly shaven face, thin lips and short, pointed nose. According to both British and German intelligence, he was ‘very partial to women’. Jumpy and excitable, his mind touched with the eccentricities of a Walter Mitty, Owens pre­ferred to be known as ‘Heinrich Sorau’ when working and socialising with Abwehr agents.13

But what he lacked in appearance was redressed first by the generosity of Britain’s MI5 and afterwards by Germany’s Abwehr in funding a passion for trawling the clubs of pre-war Soho. Lily Bade, born in West Ham of German parents, was his latest catch, the young mistress six inches taller than ‘Uncle Arthur’ – her pet name for Owens who stood just five feet three inches in his socks.14

After serving his engineering apprenticeship with a company at Clydach, he had married Jessie Ferrett in Bristol in September 1919 and moved to Mumbles, Swansea. Not long after their son Robert was born the following year the family migrated to British Columbia settling eventually in Toronto where Owens with money inherited from his father opened a battery business. When that ran out, the family, now including a daughter Patricia, returned to Britain in 1934 by which time Owens, according to MI5 was a natu­ralised Canadian.15

Back in London and with the support of a wealthy Canadian backer he started Owens Battery Equipment with customers in Germany, Holland and Belgium. At first the bits and pieces of techni­cal information picked up on business trips to the continent he gave freely to MI5 until deciding it was time to be paid for his trouble. This was agreed and a veteran intelligence officer Col. Peel appointed as his handler. Having had unfortunate experiences of Irish national­ists, Peel took an instant dislike to the cocky Welsh nationalist. As a young army intelligence lieutenant Peel was a member of the ‘Cairo Gang’, a group of British Intelligence agents sent to Dublin during the Anglo-Irish war to spy on the IRA. So named because they met in Dublin’s Café Cairo, most of the group were assassinated by the IRA on 21 November 1920 in a revenge killing for the Croke Park mas­sacre when the Royal Irish Constabulary fired indiscriminately into a Gaelic football crowd. Peel, one of the few ‘Cairo Gang’ survivors, regarded Owens with disdain, a shifty Welshman without a patriotic bone in his small body.16 His condescending attitude only fuelled Owens’s intense dislike for the English, this manifesting itself in a display of Welsh nationalism rooted in the dubious grievance that the English had cheated his family of thousands of pounds by steal­ing its design for a shell to shoot down Zeppelins. His inherent dis­like of the English, together with a persistent shortage of money were the reasons Owens gave for transferring his services to the Germans after deciding MI6 was not paying enough.17

The opportunity to switch sides arose during a business trip to Belgium and a meeting with Abwehr agent Conrad Pieper at the impressive Metropole Hotel on the Place de Brouckere, Brussels, the swankiest in the city, the lobby all polished oak beneath ornate chandeliers, and Owens’s preferred working environment.18 It was late 1936 and Germany had already reclaimed the Rhineland to resolve one of the chronic issues of German reparations, its resolu­tion neither unexpected nor particularly disconcerting for those who regarded the Rhineland as Germany’s natural backyard. An accom­modating British Government chose to do nothing until Belgium and France were threatened. Even after the next domino fell – the occupation and annexation of Austria by Germany in March 1938 – the general outlook for Europe remained benign and any difficulties seemed negotiable. The British public’s increasing distaste for Nazism did not always chime with the Churchillian conviction that conflict was inevitable. Others saw the threat but believed a strong and inde­pendent Germany freed from the ruinous injustices of the Versailles Treaty remained the best hope for a lasting peace. The journey along the path of appeasement culminated in the signing of the Munich Agreement by Chamberlain in September 1938, ceding to Germany the Sudetenland, the territory in western Czechoslovakia occupied by ethnic Germans the majority of who willingly surrendered their autonomy to rejoin the Fatherland.

When Owens met Pieper at the Metropole Hotel in Brussels the consequence of this chain of events was still a smudge on the hori­zon. Since it was in the nature of pre-war espionage for freelances to follow the money the Welshman accepted an expenses paid trip to another swish establishment, the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten on the Alster in Hamburg as the guest of the Abwehr...