Snow (30 page)

According to Boon, Owens had been talking to one of the warders, and had uncovered some gripes about pay and conditions. This discontented officer was now supposed to be in his pay and had even taken a letter out of the prison to Lily. The warder had given Owens a small saw on the basis
that he should give it back the following day. Boon had taken the saw and broken it, returning all of the broken saw apart from a very small piece of the blade which he kept hidden. Boon claimed that he suspected Owens was a traitor who would desert him as soon as they had escaped. Boon told the MI5 officers that the reason Owens wanted to escape was that in the event of invasion the prisoners in Stafford would be shot. Owens had also used soap to take an impression of one of the guard’s keys, and was planning to make a copy.

Having given his account, Boon was sent back to his cell where he retrieved a cardboard replica of the key that would be used to make the copy, and the small portion of the saw blade that he had kept. Boon was told to make note of any further developments and to report them to the governor.

By October 1941, MI5’s John Gwyer had completed a comprehensive review of the S
NOW
case to decide how best to proceed with the double-cross system. Gwyer concluded that Owens, for all his faults, had provided ‘an immense amount of detail, which subsequent cross-checking has shown to be true’. He therefore recommended that, as in Owens’ case, it was invaluable to place someone close to the German command, even if this person could not be trusted. The value of such an agent lay in their delivery of accurate background knowledge which more than offset the problems caused by the agent not being completely trustworthy. So long as the agent was not given any truly sensitive information, then he would not be able to cause too much damage. MI5 reasoned that even if the agent was double-crossing his case officers, he would deliver information which could be checked because he would not lie about information believed to be unimportant. In time this trivial information would be integrated with other items, building up a picture of the way the German Secret Service operated. Gwyer believed that sending over a spy who might be double-crossing MI5 was more
advantageous
than handling a more dependable type of man because the spy would be more likely to want to make contact with senior German Secret Service personnel. On his return the spy would unconsciously reveal the sort of information that MI5 wanted. The big surprise of Gwyer’s review was that MI5 might still be able to exploit Owens, and Gwyer ended his report by observing, ‘I believe that on this view it might even be worthwhile sending S
NOW
back again to Lisbon since he would almost certainly get an interview with the Doctor which is a thing that a much more reliable man might perhaps fail to secure.’

Gwyer had made a very logical and potent point; however, MI5 still considered it a step too far to release Owens, but neither did it want to lose the man who had been its most important asset in the genesis of the double-cross system. MI5 realised that Owens’ transmitter still offered an opportunity to stay in touch with Rantzau, either by supervising Owens closely or by having someone mimic his Morse style. There were, of course, problems with this proposal because if such a scheme was to succeed the Germans would have to be fooled into believing that J
OHNNY
had
recovered
from his mysterious illness and was back in business. MI5 would need to be prepared to give the appropriate answers to the questions the Germans would be bound to ask about what had happened when S
NOW
and C
ELERY
had returned to Britain. Further, this meant that MI5 would need to establish precisely what Owens had said to the Doctor while he was in Lisbon. If Owens had revealed that his radio communications had been blown, then it followed that other agents they were running, such as T
ATE
, were also compromised.

MI5 decided to proceed on the basis that Owens’ motive was jealousy of Dicketts: his intention had been to undermine Dicketts, and the way he had accomplished this had been by revealing to the Doctor that Dicketts had been working for the British. MI5 also had to decide which code to use and what to do about the new codewords which Owens had brought back, to let the Germans know when the messages he was sending contained fake information. These technical difficulties meant that MI5 deferred
reactivating
the S
NOW
case until there was a chance to interrogate Owens one more time.

However, MI5 did not want S
NOW
to know that he was being considered for reactivation and, having weighed up the pros and cons of the matter, it was decided that Owens should be interrogated by John Gwyer under the pretence that he was an expert on the German Secret Services who wanted to talk to him about certain German officers he might have met. This tactic proved to have the benefit of putting Owens at ease with Gwyer, because he was not presented as someone who was there to judge Owens. However, there were also serious disadvantages to the tactic because it meant that Gwyer could not interview Owens in detail without raising Owens’ suspicions about his true motives.

Always concerned that Owens should not pass on any sensitive
information
that he had picked up while working as a double agent, MI5 wanted to keep Owens’ whereabouts as secret as possible, but in November 1942 he
was accidentally included in a group of prisoners from Stafford prison that was transferred to Dartmoor. Most of them were detained under Section 12(5)(A) of the Aliens Act, but among them was Owens who had been held under Regulation 18(b). There was some doubt about the legality of whether someone held under this rule could be kept in a convict prison like Dartmoor, and after some discussion it was decided that the move was after all legal, and Owens need not to be returned to Stafford. MI5 was not concerned by the unintentional transfer of Owens, although he would be the only British subject at Dartmoor. MI5 felt that the conditions there were probably better than at Stafford, and the governor could be made aware of his responsibilities concerning a prisoner like Owens. The Home Office report on the move stated that the slip ‘seems to indicate some slackness but as he has been transferred to Dartmoor he may as well stay there’.

Owens did not share MI5’s attitude about the benefits of Dartmoor and made several applications for a transfer. By January 1943 his whereabouts had become known to Robert, also still an 18(b) detainee held at House 1, Peveril Internment Camp M, near Peel on the Isle of Man. Robert seems to have understood the legal complexities of his father’s move to a prison like Dartmoor and asked the permission of the Commander of Camp M to write to the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison.

On considering Robert’s request, Major W. H. Coles of the Home Office advised against such a move, noting that the cases of father and son
overlapped
and it would therefore be undesirable for them to be ‘thrown
unnecessarily
into each other’s company in present circumstances.’ The principal concern was that if young Robert was to find himself in the company of other inmates he would be bound to pick up information of a potentially sensitive nature. In the eyes of the authorities, this would make Robert even more of a danger than he had been before, and therefore the likelihood of his release would be severely reduced. Accordingly, the Home Office responded that ‘in the circumstances we can only advise, really as much in the boy’s
interest as anything else, that he should be told that his application has been considered but cannot be acceded to.’

On 26 June 1943 Robertson made the long trip to Dartmoor to interview Owens who, far from pleading for his release, expressed a keen desire to stop leaks from internment camps which, he had learned, had become a problem. Actually, Owens was seeking a transfer from Dartmoor to an internment camp, and the one he had in mind was on the Isle of Man where his son Robert happened to be. Robertson, however, had other matters he wanted to discuss, and raised the topic of German secret weapons. MI5 had picked up talk of rocket guns and wondered whether Owens had come across any information on this subject. Owens told Robertson that the Doctor had once mentioned a huge gun which could fire a shell up to 120 miles, but this was not a rocket gun.

During their discussion, Owens revealed that one of his fellow prisoners was Jurgen Borreson, a Dane who had been captured in Greenland where he had supposedly been on a hunting trip, but had actually been setting up a meteorological station in the Arctic. Owens explained that Borreson had been working for German Intelligence across Europe and in Norway and Finland before his capture. Apparently he had friends in high places and had told Owens that he knew the names of many British and German agents. Robertson found Owens’ account of Borreson’s activities the usual garbled mess, but knew Owens well and thought that through his close contact with the enemy agents kept at Dartmoor he might just pick up a piece of information that could prove useful.

Robertson’s visit seems to have given Owens a new lease of life and a sense of duty, and he took on the new role he had given himself as a
stool-pigeon
with considerable enthusiasm. Thereafter Owens wrote regular letters to Robertson using only the initial ‘T’ whenever he thought that he had picked up a useful piece of information. Having gained Borreson’s confidence, Owens was able to gather information such as the secret code on his passport which had allowed him to move freely across borders, and the deployment of tanks at Dieppe. Owens reported that Borreson had been particularly active in Finland and Owens was able to let MI5 have useful information about Finnish counter-intelligence and claimed that Borreson had told him about a secret agreement that existed between the German intelligence service and Finnish counter-espionage before the first Russo-Finnish War. Boresson’s mission had been to gather intelligence about the Russian military situation and to recruit agents willing to go
into Russia itself and conduct espionage operations. Owens supplied MI5 with the names of agents working in the command centre at Stettin and an agent who was currently working as a consul in the United States. Equally important for MI5 was the assertion that Borreson had information about German rocket experiments in Heligoland. Owens reported that Borreson became more talkative after receiving letters from home and advised MI5 to let him have as many letters as possible.

Thus Owens delivered extremely useful information about Borreson, and his report of rocket experiments in Heligoland attracted particular
attention
. Borreson was not very technically-minded and did not give a very clear account of the information he had picked up from a Dr Erdman who knew a good deal about the experiments, but technical matters were of course Owens’ forte, and he believed that he had ‘arrived at a fairly accurate and important picture of what had been done.’

Owens described the rockets as being in excess of six feet in height and said they were fired from a long tube. When the rocket reached a certain altitude a section of it was ejected, fins were extended and the rocket ignited its exhaust. Owens believed that what he was describing was Germany’s most important secret and, potentially, an incredibly powerful weapon. He promised to try and find out as much as he could about these rockets at a time when the Allies were increasingly preoccupied with identifying the secret weapons that Hitler had referred to in several public speeches. A Whitehall committee, codenamed Crossbow, had been empanelled under a Cabinet minister, Duncan Sandys, to investigate all reports of Nazi rockets, and Owens’ contribution became part of the intelligence jigsaw-puzzle being addressed by intelligence analysts in London.

In August 1943 Owens wrote to Robertson to tell him that a combination of letters received by Borreson and bad news from Denmark, along with Owens’ own cautious efforts, had led the detainee to crack and reverse his Nazi views. As a result, Borreson was now willing to expose the inner
workings
of the German Secret Services in Stettin and Hamburg, and to disclose the names of agents in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Russia. Owens finished his letter with his usual self-deprecating style:

In early January 1944 Robertson put into motion the train of events that would eventually lead to the release of Owens and his son. Owens’ recent contributions from Dartmoor were interpreted as a sign that he was no longer a serious threat to the security of the country and, having had time to review the case, Robertson was now of the opinion that Owens probably had not told Dr Rantzau that he had been under British control when he was in Lisbon. MI5 had learned that Dr Rantzau had been sacked from the Abwehr following the collapse of his main asset in Britain, and had been prevented from taking up a prestigious job in Brazil. Instead, when J
OHNNY
had fallen silent, Rantzau had been despatched to North Africa.

The Home Office agreed with Robertson’s assessment of both Arthur and Robert Owens, and decided that they should both be released from
detention
. Imposing restrictions on the two was considered, but MI5 felt this would not be necessary and recommended that, given the good work that Owens had done recently, both men should be helped to find jobs. It was believed that Robert probably was not suitable for military service because his knowledge might compromise operations if he fell into enemy hands, so arrangements were made to exclude him from the call-up.