Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  Eileen was involved with the British Union Service Corps, a group that was, according to MI5, ‘composed solely of women of the most extreme views’. At the start of 1940, it was planning demonstrations outside government meetings and ‘imitating the militant suffragettes, lying down in the road to impede traffic’. It was also looking at more violent action: Gleave and Stokes were told to investigate the possibility of burning down a wooden synagogue near their home.

  Much of this was just talk, but the Jesmond Avenue foursome were prepared to act on their beliefs. At the end of May 1940, as ships were lifting British troops off the beach at Dunkirk, Bernard and Ron addressed a meeting in Wembley, arguing against fighting Germany. They were arrested, and a week later appeared at Wealdstone Petty Sessions, charged with conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace. Ron was fined £10, and Bernard £2. They were ordered to pay at once, or go to prison. Eileen had the money in her handbag.

  Like many wartime newlyweds, Marita and Bernard were soon forced apart, though not for the usual reason of military call-up. At the end of 1940, Bernard was interned in Brixton Prison, south London, for the political act of trying to arrange meetings in support of fascism.

  Marita was growing increasingly disillusioned with the BUF. The organisation had been smashed by internment, with many leading members now languishing on the Isle of Man. Those that remained were divided about whether their duty was to their country or their politics. The main focus of activity, certainly for Gleave, was raising money to support the families of the interned men.

  For the new Mrs Perigoe, this was all a waste of time. There was a war on, and she wanted to help Germany win it. In order to do this, she concluded, she needed to stay as far away from the BUF as possible: anyone closely involved with it was bound to be under MI5 surveillance.

  By February 1941, she had moved out of Gleave’s house. She wrote to her friend enclosing money that was owed, and saying she wouldn’t write again. At this point, her profile was low. MI5 knew Marita Perigoe’s name, and believed that she, like Gleave, was putting her efforts into collecting money for BUF family members.

  But Perigoe was looking for a way to do far more than that for the cause of fascism. What she needed was a secure connection to Berlin.

  Roberts met her around the end of 1941, through the wife of another internee. Jeffrey Roy was ‘said to have committed himself very deeply’ to the cause of fascism, and in 1941 was in Brixton Prison. His wife had found a way of smuggling letters out, and was now acting as a courier for people who wanted messages to move uncensored by the authorities. That had brought her into contact with both the Perigoes and the Wegeners.

  At this point, Roberts too was looking for new opportunities, and more excitement. It was becoming clear that he wasn’t going to find a nest of Siemens spies, and keeping Dorothy Wegener at an appropriate distance was becoming harder and harder. He was working with her to smuggle a wireless to her brother Walter on the Isle of Man, hidden in a box of biscuits. Walter claimed he knew how to convert it from a routine receiver into a transmitter. An MI5 interception team would spend some cold, damp weeks on the island in January and February, listening for his signal and hoping it would reveal a new covert connection, but Plan Quasi-Dormouse, as it was christened, went nowhere.

  Marita Perigoe made an immediate and deep impression on Roberts. She was the opposite of Dorothy. ‘Not a neurotic nor feminine type,’ the B1C report on her said. ‘She is a masterful and somewhat masculine woman. Both in appearance and mentality she can be described as a typical arrogant Hun.’ Perigoe told Roberts that she found BUF members to be too often stupid or unreliable – a view with which he had some sympathy. It wasn’t clear whether she included her husband Bernard in that assessment.

  It was Perigoe – ‘this crafty and dangerous woman’ – who was the catalyst for the January discussion with Liddell. ‘A woman of this type, with so much misdirected ingenuity, might do great harm to the security and war effort of this country,’ Rothschild argued, ‘unless she were controlled.’

  So he proposed that MI5 give her a controller.

  Until now, Roberts had played Jack King as a helpless Nazi sympathiser, trailing his coat in the hope of being recruited by an established network. Liddell afterwards recorded Rothschild’s plan as it had been explained to him: ‘At a convenient moment, Roberts should reveal that he is an agent of the Gestapo who is contacted periodically by a man whose identity he does not know, and that his business here is to check up on the reliability of certain people whom the Germans think might be ready to assist them in time of invasion.’

  It was a total switch. No one had tried to recruit Jack King, so Jack King was going to recruit others. Or rather Perigoe was going to recruit them for him; she looked like she might be rather good at that.

  The kind of people Rothschild was looking for were ‘persons who might give food, hiding and lodging to parachute troops’. He noted that ‘the ways in which a disloyal person can be of use to invading forces have been so much publicised in the press, in books about the Fifth Column and in official publications that no tuition need, unfortunately, be given to disloyal persons who wish to help the enemy’.

  One of MI5’s responsibilities was the identification of people who might need to be rounded up in a hurry: the Invasion List.* Rothschild hoped that Roberts would be able to provide names that they had previously missed. But he had another hope, too.

  Roberts’s conversations with Dorothy Wegener and her contacts had revealed that in the event of a German attack, many of them had no intention of sitting at home waiting to be arrested. ‘It seems that certain of them already know about the invasion list and if and when the time comes they do not propose to be just where the police can find them,’ Liddell wrote. ‘It may therefore be a good thing to get them organised so that we know where to put our fingers on them.’

  One option was to tell the Fifth Column to rendezvous at various locations in the event of invasion, where they could all be pulled in at once.

  Another idea drew its inspiration from the XX Committee. Among the first schemes it had considered was the ‘Blue Boot Plan’. MI5 feared that invading German troops might disguise themselves as British forces. The plan was to use this fear to their advantage, by telling Germany that, to counter such a problem, all British forces were to paint their right boots blue in the case of invasion. To add plausibility to the plan, troops were to be issued with tins of blue paint. The hope was that an undercover German would attempt to mimic this aspect of the disguise, thus revealing himself.

  In the same way, Rothschild and Clay planned to issue Fifth Column members with some kind of secret badge, probably ‘some innocuous object like the Union Jack’, which they would start wearing when ordered. Police would then be told to round up everyone wearing the badge.

  The operation was a long way off Rothschild’s official brief, of investigating and then countering sabotage, but Rothschild, Clay and Roberts were keen to pursue it. The memo on the case offered an awkward justification, that ‘sabotage and the security of certain very secret weapons were of special interest’ to Rothschild’s B1C section, and so they were ‘anxious to find out to what extent disloyal persons interested themselves in such matters’. It was a shaky explanation, but Liddell was relaxed about MI5 officers roaming away from their remit, because the results could be inspired. Tar Robertson’s Double Cross operation would soon go far beyond what had been originally intended.

  Rothschild’s plan wasn’t just bold, it was elegant. He wanted, in effect, to mirror Double Cross. That involved using fake or turned agents to deceive their genuine German controllers. The ‘Fifth Column’ operation, as it was labelled, would see a fake controller deceiving genuine subversives. The Germans were desperate for intelligence, and there were Britons desperate to give it to them, and, in the middle – allowing both sides to believe they were in touch, while in reality keeping them apart – would be MI5.

  In a way, the idea had been suggeste
d months earlier, by Walter Wegener. Sitting in the Isle of Man camp, he had come to the same conclusion as Liddell about the Fifth Column: that it didn’t exist in any useful form. Certainly he had found no evidence of it among his fellow interned fascists. According to Dorothy, he’d told her that the ‘the fools entrusted with the formation of the Fifth Column had bungled their job badly’. She set out his proposal to Roberts. ‘Before Germany could do a decent job in this country, a resolute organisation was needed. Walter was certain that such an organisation would be worth many thousands of parachutists and when the right moment came these men must be prepared to risk everything and to strike. He suggested that some should sabotage factories and engineering works, some concentrate on spreading rumour and defeatism, and others must be prepared to give the maximum help to the Germans at the time of invasion.’

  Of those being released from internment, seven out of ten were, by Walter’s estimate, still supportive of Germany. What they needed was someone to organise them, and Walter had suggested that Jack King would be the perfect man for the job.

  Roberts’s knack for winning people’s complete trust had worked with the Wegeners. But Perigoe was a lot sharper than either of them, or Reginald Windsor, or Gunner Philip Jackson, and she was going to be asked to believe not that he was an enthusiastic fascist sympathiser, but that he was actually a cunning and dangerous Nazi agent, operating far behind enemy lines.

  Roberts approached the subject carefully. For weeks, he dropped hints to Perigoe that he might have a secret. Initially, MI5 had planned to give him no proof of his claim to be a German spy ‘except perhaps a draft on the Swiss Bank Corporation for several hundred pounds’. Feeling that wasn’t enough, they decided to forge him some documents. Lacking the capability to do this inhouse, they enlisted the help of the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS.

  The small piece of paper they received back, dated March 1939, looked impressive. The script was heavy Gothic, and even those who couldn’t read German couldn’t mistake the words at the bottom, next to the stamp of an eagle over a swastika: ‘Gestapo-Einsatzgruppe London’. Those who could understand the words would learn that Jack King was entitled to cross the border between the Reich and areas under German protection.

  Jack King’s faked Gestapo pass

  Suitably equipped, Roberts made his pitch to Perigoe. He didn’t claim to be a German – when he’d joined MI5 two years earlier, he’d said that his grasp of that language was only ‘slight’ – simply an Englishman who was working for the Nazis.

  If Perigoe was delighted to have finally found her conduit to Berlin, she was less enthusiastic about what Roberts told her next.

  ‘He said he was not a representative of the German Secret Service, which is concerned with the acquisition of intelligence, and he was not interested in espionage or sabotage,’ according to the official report. ‘His job in this country was to check up on persons who might be loyal to the Fatherland. He would relay those names to Germany for use in time of invasion, particularly from the point of view of giving food, lodging and hiding to invading forces.’

  This posture was considered vital by MI5. The obvious defence for any suspect they identified through an approach like this was entrapment: that they had only done what they were doing because the agent from MI5 had encouraged them. This was the danger Roberts had had to avoid in Leeds. With Dorothy Wegener, he had consciously risked this by asking her to conceal the tank blueprint. But in that case Rothschild and Clay had already decided they wouldn’t be seeking her prosecution.

  The line between observer and provocateur wasn’t always easy to see in practice. The previous September, one of Knight’s agents, Marjorie Mackie, had been sent to Bristol to help local police investigate the Revd George Henry Dymock, rector of St Bede’s church. The 62-year-old vicar was a known fascist, and Mackie, codename M/Y, approached him and proposed they write a seditious pamphlet together, for secret circulation. Dymock’s response gave the police a reason to search the church premises, where they found fascist uniforms.

  The police were pleased, but the Home Office was outraged. It refused to intern Dymock, and instead imposed a movement restriction on him. Officials ‘took exception to the agent provocateur methods of MI5’, Liddell recorded in his diary. One of them warned that Home Secretary Herbert Morrison ‘would strongly disapprove of the use of agents in this way’.

  Liddell was furious in return. ‘If these methods cannot be employed to investigate the fifth column field we cannot be responsible for its investigation at all,’ he said. ‘Quite clearly the ordinary methods will lead us nowhere, and it is clearly part of our duty to find out exactly where doubtful elements would stand in time of invasion. This can only be achieved by provocation.’

  Liddell’s response to this problem was to limit what he told the Home Office. ‘Intelligence matters were usually of such complexity that the less ministers had to do with them the better,’ he later recalled. ‘It was far better to get things settled, if possible, on a lower level; ministers had not really got the time to go into all the details. If therefore they were required to make a decision, it is as likely as not that it would be the wrong one!’

  In particular, he didn’t tell them about Rothschild’s Fifth Column operation. A year after Roberts’s change of role, MI5 started sending Churchill a monthly report about its activities, in an effort to impress the prime minister. A conscious decision was taken to leave out mention of counter-subversion operations. It wasn’t that they thought Churchill would necessarily disapprove, but ‘the PM might speak to the Home Secretary about it, and if the latter was not also informed, we should find ourselves in trouble’, Liddell wrote in his diary.**

  Jack King’s role as a gatherer of names rather than an organiser of espionage or sabotage might have kept Roberts on the correct side of the ethical line that Liddell had drawn, but it created operational problems. It was hard to explain. Why wouldn’t the Gestapo want British people to collect intelligence? Why would it be against its supporters carrying out acts of sabotage?

  One of that year’s hit films was The Next of Kin. The Ealing Studios production was a propaganda film, but a well-made one, with battle scenes that audiences found shocking, both for their grittiness, and for their outcome. The plot was simple: German spies work to discover a British commando unit’s plans for a cross-Channel raid. Liddell had enjoyed it – ‘extremely well done’, he wrote in his diary.

  His admiration wasn’t surprising: the film articulated the MI5 view of a Britain divided between large numbers of loyal citizens forever shooting their mouths off, and a small number of people who wanted a German victory and were willing to do something about it.

  The movie showed no fewer than eight apparently loyal British citizens working for the Nazis. These Fifth Columnists were from all walks of life: a second-hand book dealer, a dentist, an air-raid warden. The head agent described himself as a loyal German, with a German mother. Another was forcing a third to work for her by supplying her with drugs. For the rest, their motives are unclear. But the message is clear. Encouraged by the sinister ‘Number 23’, a German spy played by Mervyn Johns, this network was able to establish the date and location of the commando attack, with disastrous results for the British.

  For Perigoe, this kind of propaganda was an inspiration: it was exactly the role in which she saw herself. But now that she’d found her own Number 23, he was asking her to sit still. It didn’t seem right. A fellow fascist in whom she confided pointed out that what Jack King had told her ‘was exactly the technique that an MI5 agent would use’. This wasn’t enough to scare Perigoe off, but the seed of doubt had been planted.

  The other problem with Roberts’s instruction to his recruits to avoid spying and sabotage was more basic: they ignored it.

  * What exactly MI5 or the government imagined they would do with the names on this list had the Germans invaded is an interesting question. At such a moment, with every fighting man required to push the enemy back into the s
ea, would they have had the capacity – or the will – to keep these people secure? It is worth noting the words of one of the Auxiliaries – men recruited to form a guerrilla resistance force within Britain if Germany landed: ‘We would have killed without compunction. Our patrol might have made that decision about local people, Quislings or collaborators for example.’ (McKinstry, Operation Sealion, 2014)

  ** It is possible that Churchill was told informally. Duff Cooper, the politician he’d appointed to oversee the Security Service, was briefed about the operation. And Churchill knew Rothschild personally. But it’s also possible that the Fifth Column operation was judged to be the kind of secret you don’t share with the prime minister.

  10

  ‘Somewhat melodramatic ideas’

  Some men’s wars took them to the jungles of Burma, or the deserts of North Africa, or up the beaches of Normandy. Eric Roberts’s war took him from one end of the Marylebone Road to the other. The road serves as an informal boundary along the northern side of central London, running east–west, with Euston station at one end and Paddington at the other. Roberts’s branch of the Westminster Bank had been on the north side of the thoroughfare, next to Euston. In July 1942, he temporarily established the headquarters of the Fifth Column half a mile south-west, in the basement of an antiques shop.

  Marylebone High Street, which runs south from the Marylebone Road, is slightly misleadingly named. It would be about the right size for the main street in a small town, and indeed – two centuries earlier, before London overwhelmed it – that was what it had been. Now it was dwarfed by nearby city-sized thoroughfares such as Oxford Street. Although the area had been rebuilt towards the end of the previous century, the road managed to keep a lot of its neighbourhood feel, with smaller shop fronts than the vast expanses favoured in more prestigious locations. It felt like a hidden corner of the metropolis.