Emma and Charles were very worried by Bernard’s threats of blackmail. At the start of 1943, he was temporarily moved from the Isle of Man back to Brixton Prison, making it easier for them to visit him. Charles believed his son’s character had altered as a result of his treatment by the government. Emma tried to suggest to Marita that Bernard might have been joking, but Marita knew she didn’t really believe it.
By deciding to join the Fifth Column, though, they had given Marita a card to play back at Bernard. If he went to the authorities, not just his wife but also his parents now faced treason charges. That would mean imprisonment and even hanging. Roberts might not have been a real Gestapo man, but his chief operative was using Gestapo tactics.
Whether it was this threat or the gentler persuasion of his parents that won him round, Bernard had a gift for Marita when she next visited him. In his characteristically extreme style, he had written a five-page signed statement in which he agreed to obey the orders of the Gestapo without question. As he observed himself, it would be enough to get him a death sentence.
His conversion to the cause seemed genuine, though. When he was sent back to the Isle of Man, he began providing Marita with a steady supply of information on internees. He had, unwittingly, become MI5’s source on the island. This was an important function: the Home Office, typically squeamish about intelligence-gathering, had forbidden the use of paid informants in the camps, and MI5 knew it couldn’t trust those who volunteered information, either out of spite or to ingratiate themselves. Bernard’s status as an unconscious informant made him more reliable. It also meant that Roberts was once again passing on information on the people he’d been monitoring before the war, people who had probably identified him as a spy and who would be liable to take revenge if they ever met him.
Those fascists who hadn’t been interned also posed a threat to Roberts, which was why he had told Perigoe to steer clear of past members of the British Union. She treated this instruction as she’d treated his order not to engage in espionage – she ignored it.
In March 1943 she presented him with two potential recruits, Lizbeth Raven Thomson and her friend, a Miss Scott. This was a problem. Lizbeth was the wife of Alexander Raven Thomson, the former director of policy of the BU – someone on whom Roberts had been filing reports as far back as 1935. Lizbeth was just the kind of person who might point out that Jack King, Gestapo agent, had, until 1940, been Eric Roberts, bank clerk.
Roberts told Perigoe that the two women were unsuitable recruits: Raven Thomson was likely to be under police surveillance. He reproved Perigoe. It was ‘unwise’ of her to have become mixed up with them.
Perigoe hit back. ‘She asked me what we meant by constantly discouraging initiative,’ Roberts reported. ‘It was obvious that the people in question were genuinely Nazi. She alleged that I had adopted a completely incomprehensible attitude towards these people.’
When Roberts repeated that Raven Thomson was probably being followed by police, he was met with scorn. ‘Marita replied that I was so scared that it was a wonder anything was done at all. I protested that it was for her own safety. Marita said it was a curious thing that no objection was raised to an approach where non-Fascists were concerned.’ This was true. Roberts had slipped up.
Perigoe’s suspicions clearly still lingered. She now mentioned that she believed there was an MI5 man named ‘Roberts’ active who was responsible for interning fascists. It was because of remarks like this that MI5 was increasingly concerned for its agent’s safety. But an agent who had spent so long operating unofficially wasn’t going to leave his and his family’s safety up to others. Roberts had his own plan.
Marita had told him of another rumour among the internees, of a German agent who was operating in Britain. The truth of this was a matter for another section of MI5, but Roberts didn’t want her trying to make contact with anyone else. He decided to turn his two problems into one solution.
He expressed his doubts about the German agent rumour. It sounded like the kind of ruse that MI5 might dream up in order to trap people like her. As they discussed it, Perigoe began to wonder: was it possible that the German agent was in fact the MI5 man ‘Roberts’? That was certainly possible, he told her. Having one of their people pretend to be a German spy in order to lure out unsuspecting fascists was exactly the sort of thing MI5 might do. It might be best to steer well clear.
In Hastings, meanwhile, Perigoe’s mother-in-law Emma was finding working for the Gestapo rather invigorating. She was particularly pleased by the effects of German bombing. ‘She keeps on telling me how funny it is the way things work out,’ Marita remarked. ‘All those people [who] were so nasty to her – they’ve all been bumped off in raids. She spends all day recounting to me all the horrible things they did to her. You’ve only got to dislike someone well enough, I suppose, and the Luftwaffe annihilates them.’
Roberts considered this, then responded as best he could: ‘Do you feel like some tea?’
‘Very much,’ Marita replied.
Emma Perigoe was far from alone in taking pleasure in the bombing of her home town. Marita Perigoe and Eileen Gleave had also discussed with Roberts where the bombs should be directed to in their own neighbourhoods. ‘You think Harrow and Wembley would be two good districts to bomb?’ Roberts had asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Gleave had replied. Perigoe gave a more considered response. ‘It depends what part of Wembley,’ she said, explaining that in one district morale was low, and a few more bombs might push people into revolt against the government. ‘They are all working people, labourers, working very hard on a very low food ration. And they don’t like it at all.’
Kohout, too, was frustrated that bombing in his area hadn’t been more concentrated. Roberts assured him it soon would be: ‘I think it is about time Watford had a little attention,’ he said, doing his best impersonation of a menacing Nazi.
But for Roberts, the most shocking example came one Sunday afternoon in April 1943, when Perigoe, Gleave and Nancy Brown came to the Park West flat. After chiding him over the state of the flat – Gleave said the bathroom was ghastly, and Perigoe urged him to get a charwoman in to clean – Brown gave Roberts the name of a Margaret Doyle in Wales who was a likely recruit – ‘a terrific Jew-hater’. They then got on to discussing the news from Brighton. Brown excitedly described a Luftwaffe attack.
‘They were watching the RAF doing their exercises by the Aquarium,’ she said. ‘And someone said “Oh, look at those planes,” and they looked out to sea and saw some big black planes flying in over the top of the water – couldn’t hear a sound – and just as they got to the end of the pier they seemed to turn their engines on and they flew straight up like that, branched out and started machine-gunning and cannon-firing and dropped a lot of bombs! You know, it was almost cruel, they were such very good near misses. One of them, you remember my telling you about the guns on top of Telephone House?’
Roberts said he did.
‘Well, one large bomb fell two houses to the right, to the north of it, demolishing a block of flats and a Baptist church! Oh it was marvellous, it really was a near miss.’
The source of Brown’s delight became clear as she went on. ‘One bomb fell in the municipal market, and that made me quite sure it must be because I – from what I said.’ She was laughing. ‘Because do you remember my telling you about the ARP headquarters?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you see, there was a very near miss there because the bomb fell on the corner of the municipal market, which is bang next door to the ARP HQ.’
She came to the question of injuries. ‘A greengrocer had his head blown off, and umpteen casualties through cut glass and things.’
Another bomb had fallen on a school clinic. ‘It killed a clerk there and badly injured two of the girls, and killed one expectant mother and about two children.’
Even the fact that she had been caught up in the raid herself didn’t dampen Brown’s enthusiasm. ‘I’d no sooner sat dow
n in Ward’s to have my coffee when suddenly: “Crack! Crack! Crack!” And everybody dived to the back of the shop because they felt quite sure the bullets were coming in at the windows and we were all huddled together. And then “Boomp!”’ – she banged the table – ‘“Boomp! Boomp!” And the windows blew in and out and the doors blew in and out. And when we came out we could see great columns of smoke coming up.’
Roberts watched the women. ‘I looked in vain at the faces of these three women for any signs of contrition,’ he reported afterwards. ‘Nancy Brown looked a fine, healthy specimen of an Englishwoman, but it was obvious that the deaths of these people meant absolutely nothing to her. I thought of the excellent impression that this woman would make on an Advisory Committee or the Home Office or a jury. She sat there pleased and happy to think that the news she had given me resulted in the deaths and damage of that last raid.’
There was a benefit to Roberts of her delight, though. One of the problems of a deception operation was trying to convince the person being deceived that their work was having an effect. The Double Cross team put great effort into making German intelligence believe that its agents in Britain were carrying out sabotage operations – hence the midnight detonations of empty sheds. The Fifth Column group discovered they didn’t need to go to such lengths. Their recruits reported information, and within a few months, the Luftwaffe bombed somewhere close to the location of the report. The minds of the Fifth Columnists connected these attacks, and proved the value of their work.
For Emma Perigoe and Nancy Brown, there was little incentive to doubt the link – quite the reverse. The excitement of a bombing raid was only increased by the thought that these huge explosions, the destruction and the death, might in some way be their own doing.
Nancy completed her report: ‘It was a very successful raid.’
14
‘Oozing with gratitude’
When Marita Perigoe had first suggested Kohout as a recruit, she had identified his friend Adolf Herzig, a German who worked in the same factory, as well. And Kohout too had thought that Herzig would want to join. But although he was sympathetic to their goals, Herzig remained reluctant at first. Perigoe had more success with his wife, Luise.
Shortly after the Fifth Column began operating in 1942, Luise worried that she was pregnant. She had two daughters already and did not want any more, so she consulted Perigoe, a woman of the world. Perigoe told Roberts that she’d given Luise some ‘very simple advice’ about dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Abortion was illegal, although it was far from uncommon, either through expensive clinics or, at the lower end of the market, back street operators.
‘You don’t think you took too much of a risk?’ Roberts asked.
‘Good gracious no. Why should it be a risk?’
‘If anything goes wrong, what is your position?’
Perigoe assured him it would be fine. Roberts relaxed. ‘Do you think she’ll be grateful to you for it?’
‘I should think she’d be oozing with gratitude.’
And so, it seemed, she was. Luise Herzig began to pass information to Marita about the German Club. This group met in the German Catholic Church on Adler Street in Whitechapel, after the Sunday service. It was supposed to be a social and non-political group for people to socialise with others who shared their homeland. Before the war, it had had close to 400 members. Now it was less than half that number – many people felt that attendance might be misunderstood as sympathy for Germany.
The police were assured that the club’s activities were innocent, but neither they nor MI5 had anyone on the inside. Nor would it be easy to put someone in. Its membership was small, and anyone trying to join would be likely to face scepticism. To attempt to recruit one of the existing members would risk revealing their interest. In Luise Herzig, Roberts had found the answer. She didn’t need to win people’s trust, because she already had it. She didn’t need to feign enthusiasm for the Nazis, because she already felt it. And she couldn’t reveal she was spying for MI5, because she didn’t know it.
By the start of 1943, Herzig was supplying reports directly to Roberts. She thought she was carrying out the work the Gestapo wanted: identifying men and women who might be helpful to Germany in the event of an invasion. There were several in the club. Mrs Rutzler, for instance, was furious about the bombing of Germany. ‘She swore that Britain would get it back tenfold if it was the last thing the Nazis did,’ Roberts wrote, passing on what Luise had told him. ‘Mrs Rutzler expressed admiration for the Nazi regime and bitterly attacked the Jews responsible for British policy.’
There was ‘a sister from a Hendon convent who expressed strong pro-Nazi sentiments and rebuked a young German girl who claimed that German propaganda was a tissue of lies.’ And Herr Spiegelhalter, a watchmaker. ‘He contends that Britain engineered this war on behalf of the Jews.’
Luise had also helped to persuade her husband to come on board. In June, Kohout brought his friend to meet Roberts. Adolf Herzig ‘is now working wholeheartedly for us’, an MI5 note on the operation read. ‘Herzig came to the conclusion that in the event of a second front in Western Europe, information regarding communications would be of great value to the enemy. He is therefore doing a series of maps of communications in the Watford district. This is of a much higher grade than anything we have had before.’
Roberts was again struck by the gap between his recruits’ apparent nature and their true character. ‘Herzig looks honest and decent and nobody would suspect a naturalised citizen of Herzig’s type of encouraging any subversive activity,’ he reported. ‘If he had been interned, he would have been released within a short time. He represents the best type of open, honest, sincere German, a useful citizen, a devoted father and an ardent Civil Defence worker.’
Luise Herzig’s recruitment drive didn’t stop with her husband. She suggested a friend, Mrs Wynne – ‘she’s very keen’ – who lived in Wallasey, a town just outside Liverpool on the north-west coast of England. Conveniently, her house overlooked the River Mersey, where convoys of ships would assemble to make the dangerous run across the Atlantic to America.
‘She says the very thing what people want, she can see from her window,’ Herzig reported in her flawed English. ‘She can see some of the army ships getting ready, and sometimes she saw even the destroyers come along.’
Mrs Wynne was around seventy. ‘She is a very old woman,’ Kohout explained to Roberts, ‘but very well educated. Well, my personal opinion is that if anybody approaches her she will kiss him. That is my personal opinion. I have met her dozens of times, and she always said, “If I could do something to make the finish of the war . . .”’
After her initial enthusiasm, Mrs Wynne got cold feet. When Luisa visited her in June 1943, her report led Clay to tell Rothschild that Wynne had ‘more or less backed out’. But there was still cause for optimism: Mrs Wynne’s husband Fred took Luise for a drink, and explained that he had been deliberately muddling orders at his shipping firm, in an effort to damage the British war effort. Clay’s report on him also said he and ‘two trusty friends’ had spent the past year engaged in an unspecified ‘anti-Semitic campaign’.
Other recruits also had second thoughts. One, Harry Knott, was initially keen when Eileen Gleave approached him, until his wife caught him marking military targets on his Bartholemew’s half-inch map of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. When he told her that he was trying to help the Germans, Mrs Knott called him a ‘dirty traitor’, and threatened to leave with their children if he didn’t cut off all connection with the Fifth Column immediately.
‘Oh, I was furious,’ Gleave told Roberts and Perigoe. ‘I told him off. I said, “Can’t you stand on your own feet? Do you have to do exactly as your wife tells you all the time?”’
‘But why did he have to mess around with these things while she was there?’ Perigoe asked, exasperated.
‘She’s there all the time,’ Gleave complained. ‘I told him what I thought of him when he came round
, I don’t mind telling you. I said: “No wonder the British Union didn’t get anywhere with the people that have been in it.”’
Knott had carried out one small act of rebellion against his wife: he gave Gleave the map, and a list of military bases to finish marking on it.
Roberts generally took a forgiving view of people who backed out, something else that made Perigoe suspicious of him. ‘Marita remarked that she sometimes wondered how I came to occupy the position I held as I was so humane to people,’ he reported in May 1943. ‘She had noticed that where it was possible to make an excuse for a person, I generally did so. If things were left to her, she would be genuinely ruthless. It did not pay to be soft.’
Roberts defended himself, saying his policy was to make allowances for foibles. Besides, he explained, it wasn’t their job to make converts. They were looking for willing volunteers, who showed initiative.
His approach to the potential recruits who were brought to him was certainly gentle. ‘I’m compelled to be quite frank with you, and I think it’s the best way,’ he told one man. ‘Well, I’m a German agent.’ His job was to identify people who would cooperate with the Nazis, ‘so that in the event of an occupation, we shall know who to leave alone and who not to leave alone. Well, if you would like to help us in any way at all, I shall be very grateful to you. There’s no pressure.’
But Perigoe’s criticisms worried Roberts. The following month, Kohout proudly produced a revolver, which he’d bought illegally. The last thing Roberts wanted was an armed Fifth Columnist. It was one thing for Perigoe to talk about poisoning him or killing him with a penknife, but how hard would it be to pull a trigger? Roberts persuaded Kohout to sell him the pistol.
Agent Jack Page 23
