It took the German Blitzkrieg only six weeks in the spring and early summer of 1940 to overwhelm France. As Churchill famously said to the House of Commons after its capitulation, ‘The Battle of France is over… the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’
The Germans had not paid much attention to the military in Britain before this point of the war, but now were in desperate need of high-grade intelligence about the state of the nation’s defences. German military intelligence, the Abwehr, only had one agent in Britain at the time: Arthur Owens, a hard-drinking Welshman who had worked on various Admiralty contracts before the war. Unknown to the Abwehr, however, Owens had confessed his German links to the British Secret Intelligence Service, who decided to keep him on as a German agent but wrote the reports he sent to Berlin, feeding the Germans with disinformation they wanted to get to the enemy.
In the summer of 1940, several new agents were quickly recruited by the Abwehr, and even more quickly trained in the crafts of spying and sent to Britain. Some dropped by parachute, others came by boat, others entered as refugees. Most had an introduction to Owens, so were rapidly picked up by MI5. Others were so poorly prepared they were easy to spot. One Dutchman came to Britain by boat, but had not been told about British licensing laws – so on arrival he went to the local pub at 9am, and demanded a glass of cider. The landlady reported him to the police, who immediately arrested him.
