Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  But there was more to Victor than the search for pleasure. His mother’s attempt to instil in him a sense of the responsibility that came with his name had left him terrified that he might not live up to it. He knew that people sneered, as only the British could, at his wealth. Having been blessed with every advantage, a Rothschild who wasn’t a success was without excuse. ‘I don’t like failing at jobs I do,’ he said. ‘In fact I’m very determined not to fail. The idea of my walking out of a job or being sacked is repugnant to me.’

  Victor Rothschild, c. 1930

  Victor in particular had not just money, but intellect. Now, at Cambridge, he found he could put that intellect to work. He determined to follow his father and his uncle – and his sister, for Miriam, who as a girl had been denied a formal education, was proving to be a brilliant self-taught scientist – into the study of natural history.

  This was not, of course, what the family intended for him or needed from him. Rózsika pleaded with Victor to at least try banking. He gave it six months and, bored, returned to his laboratory in Cambridge. He was happy enough to spend the family money, but Victor simply wasn’t very keen on being a Rothschild.

  The family duties weren’t to be escaped quite as easily as that, though. The death of his uncle Walter in 1937 meant that Victor became the third Baron Rothschild, and a significant personage in the country. He was uneasy with that. Although he now had a seat in the House of Lords, he didn’t speak there, even when he privately opposed the Munich Agreement.

  Instead, he began to prepare for war. At the start of 1939, now aged 28, he visited the US, telling friends he was going for more piano lessons from Teddy Wilson. The more significant part of the trip was an invitation to the White House from the president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. While in Washington, he met a series of other leading government officials. J. Edgar Hoover invited him to tour the FBI, and he met the head of the US Chemical Warfare Service.

  Rothschild owed this particular encounter to his scientific patron, Sir Harold Hartley. The two had first met a decade earlier, when Hartley had examined Rothschild for a scholarship to Cambridge. Hartley was an Oxford don, a chemist who, having joined the Army at the outbreak of the First World War, was assigned the task of protecting his fellow soldiers from German gas attacks. He would spend the next three decades advising successive governments on chemical warfare.

  Hartley recognised that Rothschild’s mind would be of use in the coming fight, and when war broke out, he invited the young man to become his assistant. The work was important, but Rothschild was the wrong kind of scientist: he was a biologist, and the field was physical chemistry. He began looking around for something else to do. He occupied part of his mind by recruiting a tutor to improve his grasp of pure mathematics, doing exercises in his spare time. By now Rothschild was thinking about the military possibilities of sabotage, and through the intelligence connections he had already made, secured a meeting with Guy Liddell of MI5 in February 1940.

  Liddell took an immediate liking to Rothschild, and set him a problem. ‘I told him that broadly speaking we wanted to give an answer to the factory manager who said, “You tell me that in the event of trouble sabotage may take place on a wide scale. What do you expect me to do about it?”’

  Rothschild didn’t know, but he said that he would get to work on the question.

  He started sketching out a solution when the two men met again the following month, and by April 1940, Liddell, who was on the lookout for interesting minds that he could put to work, had invited Rothschild to join the Security Service full-time. Rothschild replied that he ‘will have as much as five days a week free’. He was hired on a ‘part time’ basis, working initially for three days a week. The aristocrat scientist was now an aristocrat spy-hunter.

  Liddell was pushing fifty, with two decades in the secret world and a series of successful cases under his belt. His professional success relied partly on his ability to hold his tongue and gently guide his superiors towards conclusions. On the face of it, he had little in common with Rothschild, not yet thirty and a proud man accustomed both to high living, and to telling people exactly what he thought – with an abruptness that some of those closest to him thought was actually a mask for shyness. But the two quickly became friends, dining together regularly. In an effort to free himself of his family burdens, Rothschild had sold most of his family’s estates, but he opened one house he’d kept, in the grounds of Tring Park, to fellow MI5 staff members who needed relief from the Blitz. Liddell was a frequent guest.

  They shared a love of music. While Rothschild had his piano, Liddell was a fine cellist. He told friends that in the previous war he’d owned three cellos, stored in different places so that he could get to them in the event of advance or retreat.

  But the two men also had private sadnesses in common. In 1926, Liddell had married the aristocratic Calypso Baring, heiress to another banking family. Theirs must briefly have seemed a charmed life. Over the next five years, they had four children. Her father commissioned Sir Edwin Lutyens to design them a house on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, overlooking the Thames. The project was the height of style, to which Calypso added an eccentric touch by papering some of the walls with front pages of The Times. The marriage wasn’t to last. In 1935, Calypso left Liddell for her stepbrother in California. The couple would spend the subsequent years in a custody battle, and the marriage was dissolved in 1943.

  Rothschild too was unhappily married. He’d met Barbara Hutchinson in 1931, and they’d married in 1933. They had different expectations of what marriage was. For all his discomfort with his heritage, Rothschild had grown up around women who stayed at home and focused on the family. Barbara’s had been a more bohemian upbringing. Her mother was a cousin of the writer Lytton Strachey, and the young Barbara had been exposed to more modern ideas than previous Rothschild wives. There was passion in the marriage, and three children, but also frequent fighting. Barbara increasingly complained she found Victor cold, and began a series of affairs in search of warmth. ‘I never thought he cared,’ she told a friend later. ‘But he remembers every man – some I’d forgotten myself.’

  Perhaps what most united Rothschild and Liddell, though, was their approach to their work: patient, methodical, dedicated. All his life, Rothschild had been viewed through the prism of his family, its bank and its wealth. In Liddell, he met someone who was interested in his mind.

  To be a Rothschild was to be rich and powerful, but it meant something else as well. In 1934, shortly after his marriage, Victor and some friends had stopped on a whim at a well-known London restaurant. ‘Soon after I had entered, a man whom I took to be the manager came up and said: “Excuse me, sir, are you a Jew?”’ Rothschild saw no point in denying it – ‘my appearance is hardly Aryan’ – so he replied that he was. ‘He then said that he was sorry but in that case he would not serve me and I would have to leave. No explanation was offered.’

  No explanation was needed. His great-grandfather, Lionel de Rothschild, had been elected to the House of Commons five times as a Liberal between 1847 and 1857, but had been forbidden to take his seat each time because he was Jewish. His obstinacy – and that of the electors in the City of London who kept voting for him – was rewarded in 1858, when the government changed the law. But that was only the lower chamber of Parliament. A decade later, Queen Victoria expressly rejected the suggestion that Lionel be given a seat in the House of Lords, saying she could not consent to making ‘a Jew a peer’. It wasn’t until 1885 that the Queen changed her mind, making Lionel’s son Nathaniel the first Baron Rothschild. But that didn’t mean acceptance. Five years later, when Victoria visited Waddesdon Manor, the home of Nathaniel’s brother-in-law, the Queen had her lunch with only her daughter present, while her host ate with the other guests in the next room.

  Victor’s father Charles had had his own formative experiences. ‘If I ever have a son he will be instructed in boxing and ju-jitsu before he enters school,’ he wrote to a friend, a decade after h
e left Harrow. ‘Jew hunts such as I experienced are a very one-sided amusement.’

  The restaurant manager might have been encouraged in his refusal to serve Jews by events in Germany, where Hitler had just taken power – indeed, Victor made the link at the time – but England had no need to import anti-Semitism from the continent. It was a centuries-old force that had seen every Jew expelled from the country in the thirteenth century, not to return for more than 350 years. It could be found in the work of England’s greatest writers: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. The English hadn’t invented anti-Semitism, but they’d invented their own forms of it.

  In the 1930s, Oswald Mosley’s rhetorical attacks on Jews as a separate group who used their wealth to undermine the national interest weren’t that far out of line with many people’s private views. Although a sense of British politeness meant that Jewish jokes had disappeared from music hall stages once large numbers of refugees began arriving from Germany and Austria in the mid-1930s, the sentiments behind them were still expressed in conversation. Jews were not entirely to be trusted. They observed different religious days, and ate different foods. They lived in the same areas as each other, and stuck to the same types of work – much of it, such as banking and diamond-dealing, highly lucrative. Like Roman Catholics, they owed allegiance to something other than King and Country: one didn’t have to believe in an international conspiracy to note that Jews in one country seemed very interested in the welfare of Jews in other countries. The result was a muted suspicion that permeated all levels of society. While there were no longer any legal barriers for Jews, they would struggle to get into the better regiments in the Army.

  Victor wasn’t a religious man, but he accepted his status, an attitude summed up in his instructions to a waiter: ‘I am Lord Rothschild. I do not eat pork. Bring me a ham sandwich.’ He wasn’t just a Jew, he was a Rothschild. That meant he was the de facto head of Anglo-Jewry. He observed Jewish holidays because it was expected of him. He had persuaded Barbara to convert to Judaism before their marriage so as to spare his mother’s feelings, and so that their children would be accepted as Jewish. And although he was shy of public speaking, in the 1930s he recognised his duty to stand up for those fleeing Hitler, and organised relief funds for the Jews of Europe.

  But to millions, the very name Rothschild was shorthand for Jewish scheming. Everyone knew the story of how his great-great-grandfather, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, had made a fortune by rushing from the scene of Britain’s victory at the Battle of Waterloo and spreading rumours of defeat, before going to the stock exchange and buying up shares in the depressed market. When the good news arrived, his profit was a million pounds. Everyone of quality had a view of what they saw as the family’s vulgar extravagance, the houses piled with oranate eighteenth-century French furniture, the fine pictures that were hung, over-varnished, in over-gilded frames. Rothschilds might have more money than anyone else, they might sit in the House of Lords, but England’s gentry could still sneer at them.

  The claims of excess were undeniable, but the Waterloo story was a lie – an archetypal anti-Jewish slur. Nathan hadn’t been in Belgium watching Wellington fight Napoleon, he’d been in London. He probably did get early wind of the victory, but if so, it seems he took it straight to the government. One story tells that he was unable to convince Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, of the truth: official reports were still that the battle was going France’s way. Whatever the truth of that, Nathan had felt that having informed the government, his duty was done, and he went to the stock exchange, convinced that his sources were more reliable than the government’s. The market wasn’t in fact depressed, but it did rise when official news of the victory came in. Nathan made a profit, but nothing close to the claimed million pounds.

  The story was so famous, so aligned with the legend of amoral Jews profiting from the blood of Gentiles, that in 1940 it was the subject of a Nazi propaganda film. Die Rothschilds had the Waterloo trades as a central moment in a Jewish scheme to enslave Europe. The film closed with an image of a Star of David burning across the continent.

  For Victor, the war was one of personal as well as national survival. He was well aware that if the Nazis reached Britain, he and his children would be at the top of their list for arrest and murder. ‘He is quite ruthless where Germans are concerned,’ Liddell observed after their first meeting, ‘and would exterminate them by any and every means.’ He was determined at least to avoid torture: when invasion seemed imminent, he equipped himself with a suicide pill.

  MI5 had responded to its wartime staffing crisis by encouraging those officers it did have to recruit anyone they thought suitable. That tended to mean lawyers and academics – agile thinkers used to asking questions and approaching problems in creative ways.

  But there was one area where Liddell knew they were deficient: science. The dons and barristers were ill-equipped to understand the complexities involved in this new high-technology warfare of factories and machines. As Liddell noted, they were struggling to communicate with the manufacturers. Rothschild could see why. He viewed his new colleagues as ‘scientifically sub-human’, people who ‘did not know the difference between sulphuric acid and a sonar wave’.

  Rothschild’s advantage was that he was a polymath. He had studied English at Cambridge alongside his biology, and discovered a taste for collecting eighteenth-century books and manuscripts. The fact that he felt at home in both science and the arts perfectly qualified him to be MI5’s bridge to what he called ‘technical’ people.

  Though he was given a uniform, and the rank of colonel, such things counted for little at MI5. The less formal atmosphere suited Rothschild. Life as a junior officer in the regular military would have been a struggle for someone who had been a guest of Roosevelt and royalty. While Rothschild was used to working hard, he was also used to doing it under his own direction. As an intelligence officer, he had the freedom to act as he pleased, and his self-assurance was a positive benefit when it came to having to deal with the top level of government.

  Four months after he joined MI5, in August 1940, Rothschild became concerned about a group of Germans working in one of the factories supervised by Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister for Aircraft Production. Beaverbrook’s overriding concern was to get every available pair of hands to work on building planes for the ongoing Battle of Britain. To that end he was pleased to have skilled German engineers playing their part. Rothschild’s job was to keep the same factories safe from sabotage or attack, and started from a point of suspicion of any German. Beaverbook regarded MI5 as excessively anxious on the subject of security. MI5 regarded the man they called ‘the Beaver’ as cavalier about it.

  Rothschild went to see the Beaver, to demand that eight German engineers be removed from a factory in Poole. He reported the conversation back.

  ‘I am surprised that somebody with your name, your liberal views, your position and reputation, should go in for this witch-hunting,’ Beaverbrook told him, in Rothschild’s account. ‘Those poor Jews have been hunted out of Germany, and now when they come here they are hunted back into concentration camps. You should not be involved in this persecution and you should not be in MI5 witch-hunting.’

  Rothschild replied that the people in question weren’t Jews. ‘They are what is known as Aryan,’ he said drily.

  ‘They are Jews,’ Beaverbrook said.

  ‘They are not,’ Rothschild told him.

  ‘They are Jews,’ Beaverbrook insisted, unused to being contradicted.

  ‘They are not,’ said Rothschild, certain of his ground.

  Beaverbrook gave up on this aspect, but not the whole matter. After agreeing to look at Rothschild’s evidence, he appealed to his fellow peer to quit MI5: ‘You should not be in that organisation with witch-hunters. It ought to be abolished.’ The workers, he argued, were too closely watched to be able to commit sabotage, and even if they were able to communicate the location of their factories to Berlin, it would be diffic
ult for the Germans to bomb them accurately. ‘I do not think there is any danger from Nazi spies in this country,’ he concluded. ‘I do not think it matters if they are at large.’

  Rothschild thought it mattered a great deal. Three weeks after Liddell had asked him to think about sabotage, the men dined together, and Rothschild laid out the problem in a way that the MI5 man had simply never thought about before. Every tank, gun and aeroplane was manufactured from thousands of precision-engineered components, made by hundreds of suppliers. A flaw in any single piece could delay production or cause the final weapon to fail. For an organisation used to thinking about counter-espionage in terms of catching individuals and protecting military targets, the prospect of having to secure all the stages in a modern manufacturing process, from the smallest workshop to the final assembly line, was a daunting one. But Rothschild had already worked it out.

  ‘He thought we should first try and classify our vulnerable points and factories in this country and place them in groups,’ Liddell recorded afterwards. ‘We should then get the opinions of some of the managers as to how it would be possible to put the works out of action or damage the products without undue risk of detection.’

  Then there was the question of protecting technology. Rothschild described to Liddell a ‘rocket bomb’ that was under development. ‘I gather that this is a somewhat epoch-making invention,’ a clearly baffled Liddell noted. ‘It is the first that I have heard of it. It is obviously very desirable that every possible step should be taken to prevent a leakage about this information to the Germans. We shall probably find that it is being made in a small tin shack in a corner of a field and that anybody can get inside with the aid of a tin-opener.’

  The day after that meeting, Liddell spoke to an official at the Ministry of Supply, and realised he wasn’t the only person who hadn’t thought about the problem. The official saw ‘no danger in the employment of German firms and Germans’ and had given no thought to the possibilities of espionage or sabotage.