Denton Antiques was at the bottom of a narrow four-storey building that looked as though it had been squeezed in between its two taller neighbours. It had been an antiquarian book dealer, but was now increasingly selling chandeliers – a tricky business in wartime, with the shop window shattered at least once by a bomb blast. The basement itself was a low, dark, narrow room, without natural light, that was mainly used for storage by the shop above. The back door opened onto a tiny yard with an outside toilet.
Kenneth Denton outside his antiques shop
The choice of a location that felt hidden away was deliberate: ‘the organisation has certain somewhat melodramatic ideas about Secret Service work’, a note on the case reported, drily. It helped that the shop’s owner, Kenneth Denton, could be relied on to be discreet. He had, like Roberts, become a Special Constable during the General Strike, and he was now working full-time for the police – more than full-time, he barely came home, sleeping instead on a camp bed at the station. He had been told that his basement was needed for meetings of a secret group, and he went along with it, periodically calling his wife Elizabeth and telling her to shut up shop early, so that the Fifth Column could meet unmolested.
A few weeks later, the base of operations shifted to more comfortable quarters, a small flat in Park West, a large modern block near Paddington. On the sixth floor, Apartment 499 had a tiny entrance area, with a cupboard, a door to a bathroom opposite and then, to the right, the door to the only other room. This was about twelve feet wide and fifteen feet long, with two windows looking out over the courtyard below. At one end, behind shutters, there was a small kitchen area. As a place to live, it would have suited a single person who didn’t expect to do much entertaining, but set up as a sitting room and base of operations for an intelligence network, it was perfectly pleasant, and certainly nicer than the basement of Denton Antiques. It also, crucially, had a shared entrance that could be used without passing a doorman, allowing members of the Fifth Column to come and go unobserved. In this flat Roberts would host Perigoe and her growing army of recruits, usually alone or in pairs.
She was, it turned out, formidably effective at recruitment. At the start of July 1942, a few months into the operation, Roberts’s network had already grown to an impressive size. A case summary listed seventeen of the ‘more interesting’ people Perigoe had brought to his attention. Many were women, and many lived near her in Wembley.
First, there was her friend Eileen Gleave. A long-time fascist, she also loathed Churchill, remembering his support for the disastrous Gallipoli adventure in the previous war. ‘I lost a cousin through him,’ she told Roberts, ‘and I’ve never forgiven him.’ In April 1942, Roberts filed a brief but potent report: ‘Gleave would, in time of invasion, be prepared to raid the Wembley Home Guard arms depot in order to assist the enemy. She is ardently pro-Nazi and the sort of person who really would carry out what she said she would do.’
Although she was trying to keep a low profile, through her fascist connections Gleave was known to be in contact with the Duke of Bedford, a strong advocate of seeking terms with Germany. The duke was an ongoing headache for MI5, who were generally inclined to see him as a ‘comparatively harmless crank’ (although one 1941 report went rather further, calling him ‘a sexual pervert, physical coward and a rebel against all authority’). He was a sympathiser with fascism, but the assessment was that his main obsession was a new monetary policy that he’d developed, and that he was being used by men ‘much more astute and unscrupulous than himself’. There was a running debate with the Home Office about the advantages and disadvantages of interning someone who was a senior member of the aristocracy and the fourth richest man in England.
Eileen Gleave, 1947
But Gleave offered a new way to get information on him. Roberts told her that the Gestapo was interested in the duke and his associates as potential sources of disaffection, and tasked her with spying on them on his behalf.
There were also some of Perigoe’s Wembley neighbours, a middle-aged couple called Edgar and Sophia Bray, who were mainly motivated by their hatred of communism – Sophia was Russian by birth. Edgar was an accountant and astrologer, who had seen in the stars that neither Britain nor Germany would win the war. He feared instead that the two sides would fight each other to exhaustion and that Russia would then overrun Europe. Sophia meanwhile had told Perigoe that she was willing to do ‘anything’ to help Germany – she would even ‘go there and scrub the floors’, if that was what was needed.
Edgar was generally viewed as an eccentric, even by Sophia, but that didn’t stop him from picking up useful intelligence. In June 1942, he was out for a swim in a reservoir near his home, when he was suddenly ordered to leave the water: the Army wanted to test an amphibious vehicle. He pretended to leave, but instead climbed the banks and watched the trials. He was intrigued to see that the craft had wing floats that it used when it was in the water, and he counted thirty men getting out of it afterwards.
When he told Sophia, she was determined to pass the information on. She was aware of her friend Marita’s claim to have a Gestapo contact, but having grown up in Russia, she was instinctively suspicious of secret police traps. She had questions about Jack King. If the Germans were organised enough to have someone like him operating in Britain, why did they need to drop spies in by parachute, as she kept hearing they were doing? It seemed likely to her that King was in fact an agent of MI5. In any case, hadn’t he said that he wasn’t there to gather intelligence? She felt that the best way to get news of these trials to Berlin was via the Spanish embassy in London. In every one of these assertions she was, of course, entirely correct.
When Perigoe reported all this to Roberts, he knew he needed to move fast. If Sophia passed the information on the amphibious trials to the Spanish embassy, it was indeed entirely possible that it would find its way to Germany. Spain was neutral in the war, but its fascist government’s sympathies were all with Hitler. Rothschild spent much of his time dealing with sabotage attacks on ships passing through Gibraltar carried out by German agents based in Spain.
Apart from the immediate intelligence issue, the Fifth Column operation depended in part on Roberts being Perigoe’s only channel to Germany. If Sophia found another route, there was a danger that Perigoe would start using it, too. The last thing he wanted to do was encourage her to build a network only for her to start sending its fruits somewhere else.
So he subtly shifted his position: gathering intelligence wasn’t his job, but of course he could get information to Germany. He had passed Edgar’s story on to his ‘chief’, who was suitably grateful, and had pledged to send it up the chain. There was no need for Sophia to do anything else.
He seemed to have convinced Perigoe, and she told Sophia not to worry about going to the Spaniards. But he remained unsure that he’d prevented her from sending the information anyway.
Sophia seemed to blow hot and cold on whether to trust Roberts. At the end of July 1942, she told Perigoe she was ‘willing to hide German agents and give them food’. But two months later, discovering that an airfield at Burnley was a dummy, she passed on the details only reluctantly, saying she was still inclined to write to the Spanish embassy instead. But then Sophia found others difficult to read, too. She regarded Edgar as a ‘hopeless puzzle’, Roberts reported. Sophia and Perigoe thought he was more concerned with his allotment than spying – ‘a man would not be interested in gardening and espionage at the same time’.
Perigoe assessed which of her friends might be privy to useful information. Hilda Leech – whom she described unkindly as ‘a fat woman of 45’ – was married to a bank clerk and had served on Harrow Council. She now worked as a clerk at the oil company Shell Mex. Perigoe persuaded her to begin providing weekly information on the amount of petroleum stored in dumps around the country.
Her commitment went further than this. A few months after Leech joined the Fifth Column, Perigoe was chatting to Roberts when she suddenly remembered someth
ing. ‘I forgot to tell you,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a contribution for you.’
Roberts was taken aback, as Perigoe handed him some cash. ‘Who from?’ he asked. He counted it. ‘Five pounds contribution?’ That was nearly two months’ wages for a British soldier.
‘Yes.’
He looked at the notes again. ‘Who are they from?’
‘Leech.’
‘Mrs Leech?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nonsense.’ He was still bewildered. ‘What for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘The Gestapo funds?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. Well, thanks very much.’
MI5 officers who were involved in Double Cross delighted in seeing how much money they could persuade Germany to send them. Roberts foresaw only trouble if he tried the same trick with the Fifth Column. ‘Now look,’ he said, when he had regained his usual composure. ‘We mustn’t start this sort of thing. You must tell Mrs Leech that the Gestapo funds do not want augmentation from outside sources. It leads to all sorts of trouble, because there is all sorts of elementary book-keeping that would have to be made.’ It wasn’t the most convincing excuse, but it was the best that the momentarily stunned Roberts could manage.
There were others on Perigoe’s list: a local Roman Catholic priest was ‘sincerely pro-German’ but had said he had to report Fifth Column organisations to his superiors, making him an unsuitable recruit. He was passed on to another section of MI5 for investigation, as was a ‘violently pro-Nazi’ man who was suspected of having a wireless transmitter. Roberts tried to discourage her from recruiting one young man, whom she described to him as weak-minded. She was in turn horrified at his excess of conscience. ‘Marita explained that everything should be done to help the cause, and if somebody could be useful, he should be used.’
Having set up the Park West flat as a private place where people could speak freely, there remained the question of how to collect evidence against the Fifth Column. MI5 didn’t have its own bugging team. Instead, it relied on the people in the land who knew the most about the electronic transmission of the human voice: the General Post Office. As well as handling letters, the GPO was responsible for Britain’s telephone network.
At MI5’s request it would deploy engineers to conceal microphones. Usually, as with Irma Stapleton and Philip Jackson, at the other end of the wire would be detectives wearing headphones and taking shorthand. But that was labour-intensive. It was an acceptable way of dealing with one or two meetings which would lead to a prosecution, but for the Fifth Column operation, Rothschild took a different approach.
In the US, the FBI had just had a great success rounding up and convicting a Nazi spy ring in New York. The Abwehr had strong-armed a German-American named William Sebold to work for them. But Sebold was a bad choice: he’d gone to the US authorities. The FBI had pulled out all the stops. They set Sebold up in an office, into which they built a small room for an agent to sit behind a two-way mirror. The agent operated a film camera and a new Presto sound recording system. The technique was so novel that, when the case came to court, the recordings weren’t deemed admissible. Instead the jury had to watch a silent film of one of the spies removing his secrets from where he’d stored them – in his sock – and handing them over.
MI5 couldn’t run to the expense of the FBI’s elaborate set-up, but Rothschild did adopt one part of it: the sound recordings. At the start of the war, the GPO had foreseen the need for better recording equipment, and had developed a machine that looked like a twin-turntable record player. It would record conversations by cutting grooves onto 12-inch cellulose discs, spinning at 50 revolutions per minute, which needed to be changed about every ten minutes. After each meeting of the Fifth Column, the recordings were transcribed and compared with Roberts’s own report. And if they wanted to, Rothschild and Clay could listen to the recordings themselves, and experience the feeling of being inside the room as Roberts did his work.
A Post Office twin-turntable portable disc recorder
What they heard in the early days of the operation was an atmosphere of constant distrust.
‘All disloyal persons are extremely suspicious of so-called members of the German Secret Service or Gestapo as they are well aware that this technique is used by all security services to find out who is loyal and who is not,’ a July 1942 case summary read. ‘It would not be an exaggeration to say that during thirty per cent of Jack’s time with the fifth column, members firmly believe that he is in MI5.’
Roberts tried to assuage Perigoe’s doubts by turning them into a joke. ‘Look at Marita, she looks at you with half-closed eyes,’ he laughed to Gleave, after Perigoe had questioned who he was really working for. She was, he said, ‘so terribly suspicious’.
Perigoe was defensive: ‘Well, I haven’t asked you if you were working for anything for some time, so I thought I’d better.’
‘You asked me about MI5 on Saturday,’ Roberts pointed out.
‘Did I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I have to do that fairly regularly, don’t I?’
Roberts even made a joke out of the idea that they were being bugged, when that was precisely what was happening. The first time he invited Perigoe and Gleave to the Park West flat, he stepped out of the room, calling casually back: ‘Oh, Marita, whilst I’m out of the room, you can amuse yourself with the microphone.’
She replied in the same spirit: ‘I’ve looked for them already.’
But this was only partly a joke. In the months to come, when she was left alone, Perigoe would launch genuine searches for a bug. Was it under the carpet? Behind the photograph of Churchill? In the vents, high up on the wall, that let in air from outside?
For Roberts, humour was a way to ease tension, making difficult situations into the subject of shared jokes. He teased Perigoe about her ‘threats to bump me off’, suggesting that she would stab him with a penknife, or poison him. And like the microphones in the flat, this was a joke with an edge: by August 1942, Perigoe had talked about killing him at least once. Afterwards, she denied it had happened, and then tried to laugh it off. But Roberts had seen the ‘virulent’ look on her face. He knew that if she concluded he was deceiving her, his life would be at risk. This operation was a far more serious business than hiding blueprints in marmalade with Dorothy Wegener.
As Roberts tried to assess how much Perigoe really suspected him, he was also worrying about other threats to his safety. He continued to be concerned that his colleagues at MI5 were too complacent about the possibility of German penetration. MI5’s confidence in this area was based on the success of the Double Cross operation. German communications, decrypted by Britain’s codebreakers at Bletchley Park, suggested their reports were being believed.
But if MI5 was capable of hoaxing the Abwehr, it was possible that the Abwehr was capable of playing an even larger hoax back to Britain. If Germany had realised its spies had been turned, there was great value in not revealing this: a report that is intended to mislead can reveal the truth, if you know that the person who sent it to you is lying.
There were a very small number of people in the Office that Roberts really didn’t trust. Not that he simply disliked, but that he felt might not be entirely what they seemed. But he wasn’t sure, and he knew that he was doing a job that made men doubt everyone. He was uncertain what to do with his suspicions.
Some traitors are driven by a desire for revenge, some by a desire for money, and some by ideology. Perigoe fell into the final camp, but, after Roberts suggested it several times, she did agree to be paid expenses by what she thought was the Third Reich. Every Thursday evening, a letter would be posted from a different part of London, containing another envelope, which in turn contained two pound notes. ‘She feels secure because the money is in a double envelope, so that if any curious person at the GPO were to hold the letter up to the light, he would not see the pound notes inside.’ Thanks to inflation, it was worth around the same as Knig
ht had offered Roberts eight years earlier when he’d sent him into the BUF.
Just because she was taking money from him, though, Perigoe didn’t feel obliged to obey Roberts’s instructions. In particular, now that she had found a conduit to Germany, she was determined to prove her worth as a spy. ‘It has been found impossible to control her,’ a note in her file read. ‘On more than one occasion she has spontaneously committed acts of espionage, involving considerable ingenuity, against our instructions.’
There wasn’t much call for picture restoration in 1942 – most of Britain’s art treasures were in storage, far from where bombs might fall – so Perigoe worked as a secretary at the Fortiphone company, which made hearing aids (‘the amazing FOCUSSED Golden-Tone transmits all sounds’, the newspaper ads promised). This wasn’t at first glance an auspicious position for a secret agent, but she saw opportunity everywhere. One of the managers was a keen officer in the Home Guard, who did his dictation for that job while at work. In April 1942, he was busy preparing for a weekend overnight war game, in which he was responsible for transporting troops and ammunition. Perigoe noticed that his secretary, who was typing up his orders, was using fresh carbon paper in her typewriter, and knew this was her chance. Once his secretary had finished typing, Perigoe popped her head round the door and asked if she could borrow some carbon paper. As she’d hoped, she was handed the closest ones, which now bore a negative imprint of the manager’s Home Guard memo, something that she took great delight in pointing out to Roberts when she handed them over.
The incident and the intelligence involved were trivial, but Maxwell Knight, among others, was impressed. He commented that he ‘would very much like to have her as one of his own agents’, to which the reply came that she was already working for MI5, even if she didn’t know it.
Knight had a strong belief in the secretary as spy, and he would always try to secure such roles for his agents. ‘No official or other single individual ever has the same opportunity for obtaining information covering a wide area,’ he wrote. ‘If it were possible for any business magnate or government official to be able to see into the mind of his secretary, he would be astounded at the amount of knowledge concerning the general affairs of the business or department.’
Agent Jack Page 17
