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lasted barely fifteen minutes, at the end of which the Little Man was instructed to sign a terse disclaimer, denying him compensation in case he ‘got
into difficulties’ in his dealings with the Nazis.
    In neat type printed above his signature, the former MI6 freelance meekly confirmed that
‘I fully realise I am not employed and have not been employed since November 1936 by the
British Intelligence Service.’
    Instead Owens found himself a marked man. ‘They have a man watching me,’ he complained soon after, considerably unnerved by the scrutiny of the Special Branch. ‘I have been
followed everywhere, my house has been broken into.’ His son Bob, now aged eighteen, was questioned at his place of work by mysterious strangers. Come October, Hitler’s chief spy in
England felt sufficiently harassed to ask Ritter to allow Irene and their daughter Patricia to emigrate to Germany. Despite these travails, however, Owens could still travel freely on his Canadian
passport, and therefore this subtle persecution did little to curtail his espionage work. As a result, MI5 was forced to acknowledge that ‘substantially from the end of 1936 until the
outbreak of war, Snow worked as a straightforward German agent, whose activities, though known to the authorities, were not interfered with in any important respect.’
    In fact MI5 might have nudged the Inland Revenue, who threatened Owens with bankruptcy over tax arrears of £55 at the beginning of 1938. Patents had lapsed, the Owens Battery Equipment
Company lay dormant, and overheads in Britain exceeded income from Germany. Finally evicted from upmarket Pullman Court, Owens and his family moved ten miles south to Morden, a dreary suburb at the
bottom end of the Northern Line. There Owens rented a maisonette at 23 Grosvenor Court, a boxy block on a busy main road. Granted, his new accommodation was handy for RAF fighter aerodromesat Biggin Hill, Kenley and Northolt, and rather harder for the Branch to surveil. However, the Jaguar Roadster was long gone, and there could be no mistaking the fact that
Snow’s downward slide was fast becoming an avalanche.
    In an effort to avoid letter intercepts, Owens set up shop in the visitors’ writing room at Canada House.
‘I would be very glad if you will send along payment by
return,’
he wrote to Ritter, desperate for funds.
‘The delay has been worrying me and my business people here. I am devoting nearly all my time and energy to this deal and am
getting excellent results, and our business connection next year will be (as they say in US) a humdinger.’
    Frugal Doctor Rantzau was not so sure.
‘As to the last battery, I must say that the price of £75 is rather high. As you wrote yourself that you were trying to get it a little
cheaper, I hope that you have been able to convince your manufacturer that he has to revise his price. However, on account of such a price reduction there must not be any reduction in the
quality.’
    Quality remained an intractable problem. In March, when Hitler annexed his Austrian homeland, Owens chanced yet another approach to British intelligence, this time through the Admiralty. Again
he was rebuffed and escorted from the building. With Rantzau unwilling to pay over the odds for substandard samples, Johnny’s London stelle badly needed to come up with a better pitch, and
better product.
    A humdinger, in fact.
    Undertaken during the summer of 1938, Owens’ next manoeuvre seemed calculated to appeal both to the Abwehr and MI5. Four years earlier the British Union of Fascists had boasted 40,000
members and enjoyed a brief flirtation with political respectability, buoyed by its charismatic founder Sir Oswald Mosley, and epitomised by an infamous headline in the
Daily Mail
:
Hurrah for the Blackshirts!
Although mainstream support tailed off following thuggish scenes at a mass indoor rally at Olympia, Owens now set about infiltrating the party, hoping torecruit gullible rank-and-file