Walter offered to put up with any restriction in exchange for his freedom: he suggested he could register daily at a police station, and agree not to travel more than five miles from his home. He signed off with an emphasis on what was at stake: ‘My sister’s life may probably depend upon your decision.’
If Walter was melodramatic, his concern for his sister was genuine. But his pleas cut no ice with MI5. They had good reason to be suspicious of Siemens, and good reason to be suspicious of him. Besides, they already knew all about his sister.
They knew in particular that Dorothy was thirty-five years old, unmarried, and unhappy about it. She worked from home, designing blouses. This was not work that brought her into contact with many potential husbands. So she had to resort to other means to meet men.
In October 1939, as they turned their attention to Walter, MI5 had begun intercepting the Wegeners’ post. The Home Office Warrant system was the Security Service’s main and most powerful investigatory tool. A six-sentence note was sent to the Home Secretary, setting out the reasons to suspect both Walter and Dorothy. Two days later, the warrant came back with his signature. Under an agreement put in place by Churchill when he had been Home Secretary three decades earlier, this piece of paper allowed MI5 to read every letter sent to the Wegeners.
This was a labour-intensive business. Few people had telephones in their homes, so the post was the only way to communicate over any distance. That meant a lot of letters. In a secret office in London, rows of technicians – wearing rubber gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints – sat with rows of constantly boiling kettles, steaming open envelopes, photographing the contents, and then resealing the letters.
At first, the intercept on the Wegeners revealed little of interest. Long before Walter was arrested, MI5 knew about Dorothy’s mental condition: they had read the letter the hospital had sent her brother at the start of February. They had also discovered something else rather interesting about her: in May 1940, she began getting letters from strange men. Most only signed their first names: ‘Trevor’, ‘Arnold’, ‘Bill’.
Dorothy, it turned out, had joined a correspondence club. For five shillings a year, she was sent the names and addresses of six men who had joined the same club. They could write to each other, and take things from there. ‘The reasons that persons join correspondence clubs are usually financial (swindling), sexual or owing to loneliness,’ MI5 noted.*
Dorothy’s motives fell somewhere between the second and third categories. And in her willingness to correspond with strangers, Rothschild thought he’d found a way into the Siemens spy ring.
Rothschild felt that with some staff at the company having fled the country, and others having been arrested, remaining subversives at Siemens ‘would be keeping extremely quiet’. He wanted to put an agent in touch with them, in the hope that he could tempt them to reveal themselves. Dorothy’s correspondence club offered a way to do that. The medium was one in which people were already acting covertly, so it lent itself to the sharing of confidences.
First, they would need an introduction. They set about talking to Dorothy’s correspondents. In what must have been alarming moments for the men, each was approached in turn and asked what he was doing writing to her. The first man they spoke to was, unsurprisingly, married. The second ‘was unable to explain his reasons for indulging in this correspondence’. The third was simply ‘unsuitable’, though he did hint that there had been ‘some form of fascist propaganda’ in Dorothy’s letters.
They found what they wanted with the fourth man.† He claimed, implausibly, to have been ‘writing to Dorothy merely out of curiosity’. But whatever his motives, Rothschild decided that he ‘appeared reliable’, and put a question to him: would he give them an introduction to Dorothy? He agreed. Under MI5’s direction, he wrote to her saying that a friend of his, ‘Jack King’, was anxious to write to her. Dorothy responded enthusiastically.
It’s possible that the name ‘Jack King’ was a private joke.** Nancy Mitford’s novel Wigs on the Green, published a few years earlier, had satirised Oswald’s Mosley’s supporters – and her own sisters – as followers of the fascist ‘Captain Jack’. ‘King’, meanwhile, was one of Maxwell Knight’s aliases. But when it came to creating the lure for Dorothy, Rothschild worked with great seriousness to build a man in whom Dorothy could place her trust. His assistants, the two Tesses, offered different insights into a woman’s mind.
Theresa Clay was closer to Dorothy in age, but her life had been one of academia, travel and intense, unconventional relationships. Teresa Mayor’s life was more conventional, though by that stage, only slightly. She and Patricia Rawdon-Smith had been bombed out of their flat, and Rothschild had offered them rooms in a house he had rented but wasn’t using on Bentinck Street, near Selfridges. Their fellow tenants were two of Rothschild’s friends from Cambridge, men who were also working for British intelligence: Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess.
The last was never one to restrain his appetites, but war, the Blitz and the threat of imminent death provoked him to reckless abandon. He brought home ‘a series of boys, young men, soldiers, sailors, airmen’, according to one account. When the police warned Rothschild that they suspected his house of being a male brothel, he laughed it off. ‘How easily in these darkened streets,’ he observed, ‘the amateur can be confused with the professional.’
All this was a long way from the life of Dorothy Wegener, who had fled the bombing of London to a quiet village near Canterbury, in Kent. But Rothschild and his team began creating her fantasy man. He needed a respectable job, but it also needed to be one that would allow him to express anti-Semitism – this seemed to them the best way to draw out the sympathy they were sure Dorothy felt for fascism. The perfect solution had the advantage of being another joke: Jack would be an employee of Rothschild’s bank. In order to give him a reason to discuss engineering, he would work in die-casting at the Royal Mint, which the bank owned. Victor had worked there in his six-month attempt to be a conventional Rothschild, and was now offering the Mint scientific advice.
The plan was for Jack’s approach to the subject of fascism to be a gradual one. But the Rothschild team’s first letter sowed the seeds. With a shyness that was supposed to endear him to Dorothy, he admitted he’d never written to a stranger like this before. But he offered one passing observation: ‘In the part of London where I work, the bombs have been pretty bad.’
In the atmosphere of 1940, with people being arrested for spreading ‘alarm and despondency’, even such an apparently bland remark, put in writing, could be enough to land the person who said it in front of the courts. Rothschild wanted Jack to have an air of naivety that would engender trust. He also wanted to prepare the ground for future, more explicit anti-war statements.
Dorothy responded in kind. ‘I had some very narrow escapes and suffered very severe shocks,’ she wrote of the Blitz. ‘I found living alone during air raids too terrible for words.’
For Rothschild, this was the signal to go further. ‘The firm for which I work is owned by Jews,’ he had Jack write. ‘Sometimes when I have time to think I remember what one hears so often about them.’
Dorothy again responded. ‘I assume that you do not like Jews,’ she replied. ‘Well neither do I. What I do so dislike about them is the way in which they exploit people.’
Rothschild had mixed feelings about the alacrity with which Dorothy had taken the bait. He wanted to ensure that she wasn’t simply trying to please her new friend. So Jack’s reply attempted to cool things down.
‘I felt rather guilty about having written to you about Jews in my last letter,’ he said. ‘But I know you will keep what I say to yourself and your letter seems so understanding that I feel I can say it to you. I hope it is not wrong of me to dislike them like that, but there seem so many countries and people everywhere who agree. But I sometimes feel a little ashamed of it. What do you think?’
Dorothy knew what she thought.
‘You can feel ve
ry proud of your dislike,’ she said. ‘Nearly everybody hates them. Only they will not admit it, they are too cowardly to do so. I utterly loathe and detest them, and I feel more than certain that the Jews and nobody else are purely responsible for this war. If England had not had such an influx of Jewish refugees, she would not have entered this war. Jews have complete monopoly of everything here at the moment and I sometimes think the British Empire is in pawn to the Jews.’
Rothschild didn’t record his feelings on reading these words. The head of the family that more than any other epitomised what Dorothy hated, he was at once the possessor of much of the power she attributed to him, and completely powerless. He sat in the House of Lords, he could send money around the world or withhold it, he was even part of the secret state. But none of that was enough to keep his own family safe. His sister Nica, who had married a Frenchman, had been in the chateau they shared near Paris when the city fell to the Germans in June 1940. With her children, she fled for the coast and then to England, barely escaping in time. Her mother-in-law refused to leave, and was arrested by the Nazis. She would die in Auschwitz. Victor’s French cousin Philippe would learn after the war that his estranged wife had died in Ravensbrück. Victor’s aunt was beaten to death with meat hooks on a railway station outside Buchenwald.
Their fates were unknown to Rothschild as he considered Dorothy’s response. But he had been closely involved with the cause of German Jews, and had a better sense than many British people of the Nazis’ capacity for acting on their hatred.
His next step was to see whether Dorothy’s hatred of Jews did indeed translate into support for Germany.
‘I know very little about how these things were dealt with in Germany but one hears that the Chosen race were too badly treated over there,’ Jack wrote. ‘I rather doubt it. The leaders in Germany were quite right and if only we had as much sense this pointless war might never have taken place.’
‘Why Germany and England must always be at loggerheads is beyond me,’ replied Dorothy. ‘If only common sense had prevailed here, this awful war would never have taken place. But there is not the slightest doubt that this war was made for the last stand for Jewish capitalism.’
*
‘Jack’ and Dorothy had been corresponding for three months now. It was time for them to meet. Dorothy jumped at the chance. Her letters hinted that there was more she wanted to say, but that she feared her post was being opened. In this, she was actually wrong. MI5 had cancelled the Home Office Warrant on her in September, possibly to prevent exactly this kind of suspicion.
Rothschild was not going to manage the operation on a day-to-day basis. That job would be done by Clay. She had the scientific approach that Rothschild valued, and was better equipped than him to judge how the relationship with Dorothy should be handled. That left the question of who would do the handling.
Jack was going to have to be more than a name on a page. They needed someone with experience of undercover work, who would be able to pass plausibly among fascists. Jack Curry, who had passed the Siemens file to Rothschild, now also passed him his protégé, Eric Roberts. The Leeds case had shown that Roberts had the temperament and ability for exactly this kind of job. More than that, he was tall, athletic, good-looking – if losing his hair – without being intimidatingly handsome, and about the same age as Dorothy. She was expecting to meet a romantic prospect, and he fitted the bill.
Despite the differences in their backgrounds, Roberts and Rothschild got on well. Both men liked a joke, either played on someone else or against themselves. Both felt driven, for different reasons, to prove themselves. Rothschild, frustrated by people’s focus on his name, was more interested in whether people could get things done than where they had gone to school.
As the two men discussed the next moves in approaching Dorothy, a couple of problems presented themselves. Rothschild and Clay had written the part of Jack King as an expert engineer, something that came naturally to two eminent scientists. It was a less easy role for Roberts to play. He had largely managed to avoid technology during his career at the Westminster Bank, but had eventually been ordered on a machine accountancy course. The highlight had been the moment that the tabulator he was operating had caught fire, requiring a white-coated mechanic to put out the blaze with a fire extinguisher.
In April 1941, Roberts paid a visit to the Royal Mint’s wartime operation on the Rothschild estate at Tring. In a nineteenth-century silk mill, painted in camouflage colours, with an anti-aircraft gun on the roof, engineers used the expertise they had gained minting coins to make precision parts for artillery and planes. The MI5 man did his best to take it all in, but Rothschild subsequently summarised his agent’s level of understanding of die-casting: ‘total ignorance’. Roberts’s best hope was that none of the Siemens spies would attempt to engage him in technical small talk.
Then there was the question of Roberts’s handwriting. It was nothing like that in the letters that Dorothy had been reading. In an attempt to work around the problem, Jack wrote to Dorothy that he’d injured his hand, and would be typing his letters. Roberts, meanwhile, set about learning to copy Jack’s signature. The ruse troubled Rothschild. ‘At any moment, this may cause serious difficulties,’ he pondered.
Despite these problems, Roberts liked Rothschild and Clay, and in him they too saw the professional agent that they needed. Not that he needed to deploy many of his impressive powers of deception on Dorothy Wegener. She wasn’t, he swiftly concluded, clever enough to see through him. In any case, she was too smitten with her new soulmate.
She quickly opened her heart to him. She asked him to call her ‘Annalisse’, her favourite German name. She explained she was eagerly looking forward to Hitler’s invasion; she had a swastika flag ready to hang on her house when the moment came, and was particularly pleased that the police had failed to find this when they arrested Walter. They had also missed some very incriminating letters, she confided.
If Dorothy wasn’t going to detect Roberts, nor did she seem to be in a position to lead him to the Siemens spy ring, as Rothschild had hoped. But she did bring Roberts into her circle of likeminded friends. Within months, he had twenty more suspects. One was interned, and others had been locked up before being released. Eight were connected with Siemens. The material he was accumulating was all hearsay, but it was promising.
‘Dorothy is not an intelligent woman,’ Rothschild observed. But this proved to be an advantage in using her as a cipher. Roberts, he reported, ‘can put ideas and queries into her mind’, leading her to ask the right questions of the ‘trickier and more experienced Nazi sympathisers with whom she comes into contact’.
Her very nature meant she could get away with this. ‘No one suspects Dorothy of being an agent for the British Secret Service, the fear which is constantly in the minds of all Nazi sympathisers, because she is so stupid and so obvious.’
When one of her friends told her they had strong suspicions that her new man wasn’t who he claimed to be, Dorothy simply told the MI5 man, putting him on his guard.
Rothschild dismissed any thought of prosecuting Dorothy, and indeed MI5 began to become rather protective of her. Their difficulty was managing her expectations of Roberts. She had joined the correspondence club to meet a man, and she’d met rather a nice one. It was becoming clear that she expected more from him than cups of tea and discussions about fascism, and more than he felt, as both an MI5 officer and a married man, that he could offer. He told her that he was putting aside thoughts of marriage until the war was over, and began announcing business trips to the Midlands whenever he felt she was becoming too keen.
‘Dorothy is a neurotic and lonely woman who has unfortunately become much attached to “King”,’ Rothschild wrote. ‘It is obvious that at some future date their relationship will have to be severed, and we do not want to do this in a way which will cause unnecessary distress.’
But first, Rothschild wanted Roberts to do what he’d come for: penetrate the Siemens ri
ng. Dorothy might not know who they were, but her guileless nature could still help to draw them out. It was time to set a trap.
This would involve a Vickers tank, a blueprint and, thanks to Dorothy, a jar of marmalade.
For weeks, Roberts, in the character of ‘Jack’, had been telling Dorothy that he wished he could help Germany. But what could ordinary people like them do? She sympathised: she felt exactly the same way. If only, he mused, someone could offer them advice. But he didn’t know who to ask. Dorothy agreed: she didn’t know either.
Rothschild and Clay believed her. ‘It is doubtful if Dorothy knows any German agent in this country,’ they concluded. But might a German agent know her? To get them to reveal themselves, what was needed was a tasty piece of bait.
In the middle of 1941, ‘Jack’ came to Dorothy in a state of high excitement: he had discovered something important. Through his work at the Royal Mint he was, as she knew, an expert in die-casting. With the country transformed into a huge factory for highly engineered guns, planes, tanks and ships, this process of moulding precisely shaped pieces of metal was vital to the war effort. It was his skills in this area that kept taking him away on business, to Dorothy’s frustration.
Roberts explained that his most recent trip had been to the Kryn & Lahy metalworks in Letchworth, north of London. This plant specialised in the production of aircraft parts, advertising the ‘Stronger Steel’ from its foundry as outperforming that of lesser rivals. But in Roberts’s telling, it was having problems casting small components for tanks and he had been asked to advise. While discussing the problem, he had seen a blueprint for a Vickers tank lying unattended. Unwatched for a moment, he had grabbed it and smuggled it out of the factory.
Agent Jack Page 13
