Roberts showed Dorothy his precious contraband. He was now guilty of espionage. If the loss was noticed, and he was suspected, his home might be searched. Could she keep it for him? More than that, could she get it to Berlin?
Dorothy was excited: at last she had a clear opportunity to help Germany, and hit back at Britain for the way it had treated her father and brother. She would try her best.
She began making discreet enquiries among the friends that she knew were sympathetic to the German cause. Did anyone know a way to get the blueprint out of the country? She had no success.
Roberts, in an effort to increase the pressure on her, wrote complaining about her failure. He had taken a great risk and nothing had come of it. Dorothy redoubled her efforts. Now, as Rothschild and Clay had hoped, a fish rose to the bait. Unfortunately it was the wrong fish.
Soon after Dorothy had begun introducing Roberts to her circle, he started to develop suspicions about one of them. The man was ‘virulently anti-British and so childishly pro-German’. Roberts, a professional infiltrator, could spot an amateur. He had told Rothschild they were dealing with an informer. If he wasn’t one of MI5’s, he must be someone passing information to the local police. But when Rothschild confronted the force, he got nothing except ‘bland denials’.
The tank plan changed all that. Shortly after Roberts handed it to Dorothy, the Kent Constabulary called MI5: they’d just been told that a suspected fascist near Canterbury had got hold of the blueprint for a tank. They were going to search her house at once. Just as with the Leeds case, Roberts found an operation in jeopardy because of the conflicting aims of the different arms of the British state.
Rothschild couldn’t simply tell the police to ignore the tip-off. That would only reveal that MI5 was up to something, and put Roberts under suspicion. Instead, he needed to find a way to sabotage the police’s operation without it looking deliberate.
He opted for that most reliable of routes to failure: the government’s love of bureaucracy. Doubtless to the frustration of the Kent detectives who hoped to capture a nest of Nazi spies, MI5 asked them to begin by taking statements ‘in the ordinary police way’ from their informant and his wife. Rothschild may only have been hoping to stall the investigation, but the result was better than he could have hoped for: the police informant’s wife was so outraged to discover that her husband was informing on her friends that she immediately went to Dorothy and warned her.
Dorothy was terrified, and in her panic she went to a friend. Doris Engert – everyone called her Bobby – was staying with her half-brother Edward, who ran a garage up the road, in Whitstable. They’d both been born in Harrogate, in Yorkshire, to a German father. Edward’s wife, Friedel, had moved to Britain from Germany a decade earlier, and had briefly become a celebrity for making a failed attempt to paddle a kayak around the coast of Britain.
Right on the Kent coast, Whitstable was a bad place for a German to be living at the start of the war. Both Edward and Friedel were immediately interned, and their two daughters whisked off to boarding school. After six months, they were released, to find their business vandalised in their absence. Even if Friedel hadn’t been sympathetic to the Nazis before, she certainly was now. By the time Roberts met her in 1941, she was hoarding petrol that she planned to offer to the invaders when they arrived.
Roberts’s assessment of Bobby was simpler: ‘rabidly pro-Nazi’. When Dorothy asked her for help, she summoned her father.
Martin Engert was a retired pastry chef in his seventies, but when he got his daughter’s message, he came at once. His willingness to travel all the way down from the north of England ‘struck us as peculiar if not significant’, Rothschild observed. Roberts found him to be ‘an astute old man, entirely in sympathy with the Nazi regime’.
He offered ‘some sound advice’ to the amateur conspirators on how to avoid detection by the police and MI5. Much of this related to what they should put into writing: Engert correctly told them that the interception of letters was MI5’s main weapon. Therefore they should stop discussing subversive matters by post. Dorothy was told not to sign letters as ‘Annalisse’, and to stop referring to the blueprint directly. They devised an endearingly transparent code: the ‘tank plan’ would henceforth be known as the ‘picture of the T.P.’.
There remained the question of what to do with the picture of the T.P. But Dorothy had an idea. She proposed to roll it up inside a sealed container and hide it in the middle of a large jar of marmalade. It was an idea that stuck in Roberts’s mind. The following year, when his friend Jimmy Dickson wrote an internal MI5 guide to searching a property, he advised that ‘pots of jam, syrup, etc should be held up to a strong light’.
When he’d heard that Martin Engert travelled to advise Dorothy and ‘Jack’, Guy Liddell had noted in his diary that ‘the Wegener case is boiling up to a climax’. This, it seemed, was going to be the moment when Roberts made a connection with a German network. But Martin, however sympathetic he might have been to the cause, had no more idea than Dorothy about how to get the blueprint to Germany. The case had, abruptly, gone off the boil.
After a year spent winning the confidence of Dorothy and her friends, the only spy that Rothschild’s team had positively identified had been working for Kent Police. The tank blueprint remained in Dorothy’s care, at the mercy of her preserve-focused schemes of concealment. There was, it was becoming clear, no Siemens Kriegsnetz.
To have spent the best part of a year hunting for a ring of expert spies only to realise that it didn’t exist was a disappointment to Rothschild, Clay and Roberts. And while it was good news for Britain’s security, even this wasn’t unalloyed. Roberts had found that while they lacked a formal network, there were certainly people at large in Britain who felt more loyalty to Germany. As MI5 was about to discover, some of them were both dangerous and determined.
* Not all such clubs were motivated by vice. In 1935, a letter in Nursery World magazine began with a plea: ‘Can any mother help me?’ The author, writing under a pseudonym, explained that she had no neighbours, couldn’t afford a wireless, and that once her children were in bed, she was alone and desperately bored. The response inspired the Cooperative Correspondence Club, a private magazine sent from member to member, with each writing her thoughts on the pages, and submitting a fortnightly article for the next edition. It would go on to run for more than five decades.
† More than seven decades later, the section of the file dealing with this man is still redacted. He might have been Trevor, Arnold, Bill or someone else entirely. There is a hint in the Wegener file that MI5 was especially interested in a Trevor Williams in the summer of 1940.
** It is also possible to read some of the files as suggesting that King was the real name of the MI5 officer writing the letters. But although Eric Roberts had operated under his own name in his days undercover in the BUF, it’s hard to see why Rothschild would have adopted such a policy at this point.
8
‘No organised body’
In November 1941, Liddell was summoned to an unusual meeting. He slipped into the New Public Offices on Great George Street, home to the Treasury and other government departments, and after showing his identification, climbed a set of steps. Walking past a Royal Marine on guard duty, he made his way to Staircase Fifteen, a wide set of steps that spiralled down into the basement of the building. More Marines guarded the route.
He was entering one of the most secret places in Britain: the Cabinet War Rooms, built to allow the work of government to go on even as the bombs were falling. Night and day in a poorly ventilated, cramped space, foggy with cigarette smoke, military planners and Churchill’s staff worked and slept side by side.
Liddell was there to speak to the Inter-Service Committee on Invasion. This ad-hoc group had been called together under the chairmanship of Major General Dick Dewing to do one job: imagine themselves as the German General Staff and devise a plan for the invasion of Britain. Dewing had been chief of staff to the
commander-in-chief of British forces in the Far East until that July, when the strain and the climate of Singapore got the better of him, and he was invalided home. This job marked his return to duty.
The imminent threat of invasion had disappeared that July after Germany’s surprise attack on Russia – Hitler lacked the forces to launch an assault on Britain at the same time. The Nazis had hoped to be in Moscow by September, and for a while it seemed that might happen. But the Soviets had rallied, and the German forces were now overstretched and exhausted. Nonetheless convinced that his opponents were close to collapse, Hitler had ordered an assault on Moscow, and the Fourth Panzer Group was now advancing. Meanwhile in the Western Desert campaign in Libya, British and Commonwealth forces had spent much of the year in retreat from Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and the strategically important port of Tobruk was under siege. The day that Liddell made his way into Churchill’s bunker, the British Eighth Army had launched Operation Crusader, aimed at relieving Tobruk.
Dewing’s committee had asked Liddell for a briefing on the state of Fifth Column operations in Britain. A year and a half after Sir Nevile Bland had terrified the government with his warnings about German parlour maids guiding in paratroops, it was time for a sober assessment. In the summer of 1940, with an invasion apparently imminent, it had been easy to believe that the German war and intelligence machine was all-powerful. But that was before MI5 started picking up the Nazi spies.
The first to arrive were four Dutchmen, who rowed ashore in two dinghies on 3 September 1940, having been brought most of the way to England’s south coast in a fishing trawler. Only one of them spoke fluent English. His brief career as a Nazi spy began with him asking for a bath at the Rising Sun pub in Lydd, Kent, and ended with him paying half a crown for half a pint of beer – ten times too much. By that stage, the landlady of the Rising Sun was already certain that the stranger with the foreign accent was an enemy agent, and had summoned help. Within twenty-four hours of landing, he and his three companions had been captured. Liddell had been unimpressed. ‘They were singularly badly directed,’ he wrote at the time. ‘To anybody with any knowledge of conditions in this country it should have been apparent that none of these people could hope to succeed.’ Three of them were hanged that December, the fourth escaping execution because he persuaded the court he’d been coerced by Germany.
It was a sign of things to come. As subsequent German agents arrived – nine more that September, and another twelve in the last three months of the year – their common feature was their low quality. MI5 had advance warning of many of those who were coming, thanks to its nascent Double Cross operation. This saw captured German agents offered the chance to escape punishment if they agreed to work for the British, sending false information back to Berlin. If correctly carried through, this process was so quick that the Abwehr was unaware its agent had been turned.
But even without notice from Germany that a new agent was on the way, many were caught on arrival. Typical was one parachutist who landed near Northampton at the start of October 1940, attracted immediate suspicion from locals, and was marched to the police at the point of a pitchfork. Liddell described him as ‘a poor fish who never wanted to be a spy. He joined his regiment and when a sergeant asked who spoke English he rather foolishly put up his hand. Before he knew where he was, he was an indifferent spy dropped down from the air into Northampton.’
The quality of the spies they were capturing was a puzzle to the British. Liddell noted a conversation with Major General Kenneth Strong, head of the German section of military intelligence. ‘Strong has a great regard for German efficiency and cannot bring himself to believe that they could have been so stupid as to send these men over here without having schooled them properly.’
But over the year that followed, the reason for the Germans’ behaviour became clear, and Liddell set it out to Dewing’s committee: Germany hadn’t bothered to build up a spy network in Britain in the 1930s because it didn’t need one.
‘I began by explaining what the pre-war set-up had been in this country and how the main effort had all been concentrated a) on propaganda through various organisations and societies to keep us out of the war and b) on estimating our industrial mobilisation capacity through the machine tool industry and other similar means,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘Since all these activities had been perfectly legal it had not been necessary for the Germans to establish any very deep-seated underground organisation.’
Liddell’s description didn’t exclude the possibility that companies like Siemens had been involved in intelligence-gathering before war broke out. In fact, it specifically included it: because it had been possible to do that kind of work within the law, there’d been no need to set up a network to work illegally.
In his analysis, German planners hadn’t given much thought to the idea of invading Britain until after their successes in the Netherlands and Belgium in the summer of 1940. ‘It was then that they began to take stock of the position here,’ he explained. ‘They probably found themselves rather badly equipped and there followed a number of hastily improvised and crude performances in the shape of parachutists and people arriving by rubber boat.’
While he allowed for the possibility that not every German spy had been caught, he didn’t think they’d missed many. Finally, he turned to the idea of a Fifth Column, and here again his message was reassuring. ‘From time to time we came across isolated cases or small groups of Fifth Columnists who were undoubtedly prepared to assist the enemy but never seemed to have any real plan or means of doing so,’ he explained. ‘We felt fairly confident that there was no organised body of the kind which was receiving direction from the Germans.’
Just because the Fifth Column panic had abated, though, it didn’t mean there weren’t developments to concern Liddell. In the next two weeks, two cases would illustrate the kind of problem MI5 still faced. The first involved a clandestine meeting the evening after Liddell addressed the Dewing committee, in room 513 of the Cumberland Hotel, overlooking Marble Arch in London.
The woman was in her late thirties, slim and pretty, with her dark hair brushed off her forehead. ‘Good evening, John,’ she said in her slight German accent, as he let her in. ‘Feel that bag,’ she continued, evidently pleased with herself.
The man was a little younger, with spectacles and his hair combed back. He invited her to take off her coat and make herself comfortable. Then he took her handbag, hefted it, and smiled. ‘It is suspiciously heavy,’ he replied in the unmistakable clipped tones of the upper classes.
The woman laughed. ‘I have a present for you.’
‘That is awfully nice of you. I must pay you.’
‘No, no!’ she protested. ‘I don’t want paying for them.’
‘But someone must pay for them.’
The woman, Irma, again refused. She went to show him the bag’s contents, but John suggested they wait until after they had been served dinner. It wouldn’t do to be interrupted by the hotel staff.
‘Was it difficult to get these?’ he asked.
‘No, I pinched the whole lot.’
As they waited for dinner to arrive, Irma chatted, describing how she’d taken her mother to dinner at a Lyons Coffee House at the weekend, and cheated the Jewish waiter out of his tip. ‘I put some of those little tin medals that you get under the plate,’ she explained. ‘I laughed all the way home when I visualised his face when he lifted the plate.’
There was a knock at the door, and the waiter came in with room service. As he set out their dinner at the table, John and Irma made small talk. And down the corridor in room 517, three men wearing headphones put down their notebooks for a moment.
Back in room 513, as they ate their meal, John and Irma were discussing production at the small munitions factory in west London where Irma worked as a typist: 33,000 shell casings so far that week. They wondered whether the German army would reach Moscow. ‘They might get there in the spring,’ Irma said. ‘When I heard the appeal o
ver the wireless from Berlin to send parcels to soldiers, I sat there and cried like a child. I remember when we used to send parcels when I was a child in the last war.’
Finally, Irma announced it was time to ‘settle down to business’. From her bag she pulled a tin of blackcurrant throat pastilles. ‘I had them for my cold,’ she explained. ‘They did not do me any good.’ She opened the box. There were no cough sweets inside, only small pieces of machined metal.
‘This is the igniter,’ Irma began. She showed him a shell casing. ‘The fuse goes through there. The high explosive goes here, and it is closed here.’
The shell casing was for the ammunition for an Oerlikon 20 mm cannon, the Royal Navy’s anti-aircraft weapon of choice. Irma had stolen the casing and the other parts that week, concealing them up her sleeve.
That wasn’t all: she had notes of the destination of the shells, the lorry that would take them, and the locations of other factories.
‘This is the goods,’ John said with enthusiasm. ‘This is the goods.’
The listeners in 517 had heard enough. They moved swiftly down the corridor and burst into room 513. As Irma and John stared, one of them introduced himself: Inspector William Rogers of Special Branch. ‘I believe you have brought certain munitions and information about them into this room which might be of use to the enemy,’ he said.
Irma was defiant. ‘What will you do with that man?’ she asked. John, she said, was part of a Nazi spy ring, and she had arranged the meeting to entrap him. ‘I did this in order to hand them over to the police,’ she said. She asked Inspector Rogers to take charge of her so that John wouldn’t shoot her, and accepted her arrest calmly.
Hearing this, John made a bid to escape, but the two detective sergeants behind Rogers grabbed him. He fought desperately to get free, but he was handcuffed and dragged away.
John’s struggle went on until he was out of sight, and then the sergeant undid his cuffs, and congratulated him on a job well done. He was, in reality, the Honourable John Bingham, son of the sixth Baron Clanmorris. He had been working in newspapers before the war, and had volunteered for active service. But his poor eyesight meant he wasn’t allowed to fight, and so Maxwell Knight persuaded him he’d be of more use as an MI5 officer.
Agent Jack Page 14
