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also forged links with an ostensibly legitimate German firm named Auerbach, based in the Wandsbek district of Hamburg. In reality the company was yet another Abwehr front, named in honour of the
famous cellar restaurant in Leipzig, where Goethe placed Faust for his first treff with Mephistopheles, the Devil Incarnate.
    Irony rooted in literature was entirely lost on Owens, who read books only to devise codes. ‘As an agent Johnny was highly reliable,’ averred Ritter. ‘Always delivering his
material in person, and always on time. At first none of it was particularly sensational, but enough of it was new, and the precision of his reports inspired confidence. Most of it was based on
trips into the field, and a network of sub-agents that he built up slowly. One worked in the Air Ministry, a couple more at RAF depots. All of them were Welsh, just like Johnny.’
    Absolute jake.
    During this honeymoon period Owens’ idiosyncratic methods alarmed Ritter only once, an event recorded in his circumspect postwar memoir. Arriving at the Auerbach office one day in 1937,
Owens produced a small foil packet from his briefcase. Sealed inside the waterproof wrapping was a scrap of paper, covered in a jumble of spidery hieroglyphics.
    ‘What’s this?’ demanded Ritter. ‘Remember tradecraft, Johnny. A blind man could see that’s a code.’
    Owens shook his head, then tapped at his teeth with his forefinger. ‘I keep all the good dope hidden up here.’
    ‘Up where?’
    Dropping his jaw, Owens removed his false teeth, stuck the packet to the crown with a lick of saliva, then deftly replaced the denture. Faintly appalled, Ritter warned him against repeating this
unappealing trick in the field. Owens ignored him, and would later confess to spitting out secret material on several occasions during dicey frontier crossings.
    As for Johnny’s Welsh network, few if any of these sub-agents actually existed, though one genuine mole might have been his brother-in-law, Fred Ferrett, who worked
at the Short Brothers aircraft factory at Rochester. The suborning of impecunious service personnel also remained a profitable pastime for Stelle X, though Owens fought shy of direct approaches,
arguing that he was already too valuable to risk arrest. Apparently Berlin agreed. ‘They have one hundred per cent confidence in me,’ bragged Owens. ‘I don’t know why. They
just have, that’s all. I have not made any slips at all.’
    Nor, so it seems, did Major Ritter. ‘I was always very frugal with money,’ he insisted. ‘Besides which, our policy was to pay according to the value of the delivery. To begin
with most of Johnny’s material was rather ordinary, and he seldom received more than £50. It was also a security precaution. Too many agents had been caught out in the past, because
they began to live suddenly and conspicuously above their means.’
    In any event, high-rolling Johnny was already hopelessly ensnared. With payments from Expanded Metal now intermittent at best, rent arrears mounted on Pullman Court, attended by the threat of
eviction. On 16 September 1937, Owens rang his former case officer at MI6, Colonel Edward Peal, and requested a meeting, hoping to resume his career as a double agent on a double income. Peal
cautiously agreed, but also invited Colonel Edward Hinchley-Cooke of MI5, the veteran interrogator charged with running Mad Major Draper.
    The man known as ‘Hinch’ to his closest colleagues took a strong and immediate dislike to the former Agent Snow, who seemed neither willing nor able to provide a coherent narrative
of his dealings with the Abwehr. Referring obliquely to Rantzau and Auerbach, Owens hinted at ‘very good contacts’ in Germany in connection with U-boats, but bowled short on specifics
and gave few straight answers. Profoundly irritated, Hinchley-Cooke told Owens that his dope was of ‘no value’and warned him not to contact British military
intelligence again. The frosty meeting