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advertisements that had attracted Draper – by arresting one of the three women implicated. One, Mrs Brandy, was traced to Dublin; Mrs Duncombe disappeared from her London address, and Jessie Jordan, a hairdresser of German parentage in Aberdeen, was taken into custody successfully .
    Altogether MI5 had identified no fewer than thirty individuals to whom the Germans had made a pitch. Twenty-one were British, and most of them had made no attempt to collect intelligence of value to the Germans, but simply passed on items of little significance in a bid to get maximum reward for minimum effort. They had received no training at all, and the Abwehr’s methodology had appeared inept. Half of the cases involved individuals who were never in a position to procure intelligence of any value, but among them were four ex-officers, four businessmen and four members of the armed forces. Almost all had reported the approach to the authorities immediately.
    The Germans had managed their recruitment campaign by responding to ads in the classified columns of the newspapers inserted by men seeking jobs. The Germans also placed advertisements themselves in British papers offering jobs for commercial and technical experts. Eleven of the thirty approached told MI5 about the German offer; nine were exposed by mail intercepts, five were denounced by private individuals whose suspicions had been aroused, one was reported by an immigration officer, and one was denounced by an anonymous informant; the other two were uncovered by accident. Of the eleven agents who reported they had been recruited by the Germans (who would probably have escaped detection), half had been recruited through an intermediary.
    Three Post Office boxes, registered in the names of different women, yielded a great deal of information. Mrs Duncombe in London received intelligence collected in France, while Mrs Jessie Jordan was used as a mail-drop in the United States for another spy, Sergeant Guenther Rumrich. When Rumrich’s brother was arrested in Prague he was found to be in possession  of the address of a Mrs Brandy in Dublin, and this was the third mail-drop. Clandestine examination of her correspondence showed that she was receiving accurate and therefore dangerous intelligence messages from a French merchant navy officer named Aubert who was arrested at the end of 1938 and shot.
    Once Owens’ photos had been studied by experts, he was called to a meeting at the Naval Intelligence Division’s suite of offices in the Admiralty on 7 April 1938, attended by Hinchley-Cooke and other MI5 officers, but the photographs were returned to him and he was required to sign a receipt for them. He was then reminded that he had been warned that the British intelligence services did not wish to have any dealings with him, and was escorted out of the building with a warning not to return.
    While the Admiralty remained keen to learn more about the Kriegsmarine ’s U-boats, there was rather less interest in the remainder of the German fleet, as all the evidence available confirmed that Germany had stuck rigidly to the terms of the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, and possessed just two old battleships, two battle-cruisers, two pocket-battleships, eight cruisers and twenty-two destroyers. Their movements were easy to monitor and there was nothing to suggest that Hitler’s rearmament plans for the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe had been extended to the Kriegsmarine . Whatever Owens’ photos purported to show, it could not have been news to the NID analysts.
    Owens’ next move was to contact the British Union of Fascists and in July 1938 he told the organisation that he had returned to Britain in 1934 to do unspecified technical work for the government, after which he joined the intelligence service and was engaged in espionage in Germany. To prove his bona fides, Owens alluded to various companies that he claimed were fronts for the Security Service, such as Indexes Ltd, Kell Products Ltd, and