Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  Rita reported this back to Kohout, who reported it to Roberts. The Austrian added that the last piece of information had been troubling to his contacts: what if MI5 was watching them all the time, and waiting to pounce? Given that this was precisely the situation, it was even more troubling to Roberts. One reason why the Fifth Columnists trusted him was that they had all by now incriminated themselves to him, and not been arrested. If they started to think that they were deliberately being left alone, it wouldn’t be long before they suspected he was playing them false.

  Clay now put her colleagues on a tighter leash, urging Burke to be more circumspect in her enquiries. Burke, writing to Hughes a fortnight later, said she’d been told he could communicate discreetly with the local police, but must instruct them not to share information with the Americans.

  A year into the Fifth Column operation, Marita Perigoe’s natural aptitude for espionage, combined with her industrious approach and her commitment to the Nazi cause, meant it was proving more successful than Rothschild and Clay could have hoped. Her MI5 file grew thicker at the rate of a volume a month. Just as Liddell had suggested, they were finding fascists that other searches had missed, and gathering evidence that these people were truly hostile to Britain. But that created a new problem: what to do with them all?

  16

  ‘The more violent it was, the better’

  By the summer of 1943 it was becoming clear that a German invasion of Britain was no longer a real concern. Two thousand miles away, on Germany’s Eastern Front, Nazi forces had begun the year with defeat at Stalingrad. The initiative was now with Russia’s generals, who were slowly pushing the invaders out.

  Meanwhile in the Mediterranean, British and US forces successfully landed on Sicily. Three years after Hitler’s armies swept across Europe and seemed on the brink of taking Britain next, they were retreating everywhere.

  The Fifth Column felt the effects of these German defeats deeply. ‘The recent Allied successes have had a profound effect upon the group and its numbers are beginning to realise that Germany may lose the war,’ an MI5 report of August 1943 read. ‘As a result, they vary between the deepest depression and efforts to readjust themselves to the idea of a post-war world which will not be dominated by a victorious Germany. They are therefore beginning to formulate tentative plans to enable them to make the best of what to them is a major tragedy.’

  Kohout and Adolf Herzig had already started thinking about the next war. Kohout explained to Roberts that in two decades, Germany would be ready to fight again, and at that point would need spies. His own experience had shown how effective a man inside the right industrial sector could be, but it also showed the importance of implanting them early. ‘Kohout’s scheme, which he is working out in considerable detail, deals with industrial espionage and plans to penetrate industry with Germans,’ the report said. ‘Herzig’s ideas are similar, and he has suggested organising the Germans in this country on a secret basis.’

  Neither had much time for the British fascist movement, but they saw that its members could be exploited for Germany’s purposes.

  The British members of the Fifth Column had come to fairly similar conclusions. In hindsight, it was clear that it had been a mistake for Mosley to seek election to Parliament, and that he would have done much better to organise the British Union as ‘a secret rebel association with the objective of grabbing power by force’.

  This informed their planning for the future. ‘Eileen Gleave would join any movement that was intelligently planned to gain power ultimately by force,’ Roberts wrote. ‘Marita thought that the pro-Nazis and convinced National Socialists, unknown to us and probably to the authorities, would undergo a reaction similar to Eileen Gleave and search for some outlet.’ Eileen herself told Roberts that ‘if Germany lost the war, it was her intention to join the first movement with “guts” and the more violent it was, the better’.

  Perigoe felt that the first objective of any subversive group they formed should be ‘the penetration of the Home Office. She did not think it would be very difficult.’

  While they waited for signs that people were ready to join them, the Fifth Columnists agreed that the best way of encouraging the British people to rise against their government was to identify a common target for hatred. And they knew who that target should be.

  ‘Hilda Leech had lent Marita Perigoe a book by Arnold Leese dealing with Jewish ritual murder, and stated that it would open Marita’s eyes to the type of people these Jews were,’ Roberts reported. ‘Marita thought the book a trifle exaggerated but pointed out that the circulation did a lot of good stirring up trouble and suspicion about the Jews, especially among the uneducated.’

  Fred Wynne, Luise Herzig’s friend in Wallasey, ‘said that it was necessary for every sensible person to refrain from doing anything at the moment that would bring them to the attention of the police. He alleged that he and several friends were systematically spreading anti-Semitic propaganda, and he hoped that their efforts would bear fruit when the war finished.’

  These feelings weren’t just voiced by subversives. Sir William Strang, one of Britain’s most senior diplomats, had got to know one of the Fifth Columnists, and begun voicing his private opinions to her. ‘Strang said that he personally hated the Jews and regarded the Bolshevists and the Jews as the two great enemies of all that was decent,’ Roberts reported, adding six days later: ‘Strang alleged that the Bethnal Green tube disaster was caused by a Jewish pickpocket gang, the ringleader of which netted £200.’

  This was an astonishing statement. In March 1943, 173 people, 62 of them children, had been crushed to death as they tried to get into the east London underground station to take shelter from an expected bombing raid. Fearing the damage to morale, the government had suppressed news of the disaster as much as it could. The actual cause was some combination of a woman tripping as she went down stairs wet from the rain and a rush from above as the crowds trying to get into the station were spooked by the unexpected sound of a new type of anti-aircraft battery firing from a nearby park.

  There was talk in the aftermath that it was the work of fascists, or Jews, according to the taste of the person spreading the rumour. But the blame for the tragedy, if it lay anywhere, rested with the authorities, for failing to ensure the safety of a shelter that was being used by hundreds of people. Strang, as a senior civil servant, was in a position to know this. Instead it seemed he was passing on a classic anti-Semitic tale – the scheming Jew, plotting and profiting from the death of Gentiles. Rothschild’s response to this behaviour, from a man who was responsible for relations with the governments-in-exile of occupied Europe, was less outrage than a weary sigh.

  ‘The members of the Fifth Column are well aware of how to exploit economic disorganisation and the present growing anti-Semitism,’ he wrote. ‘These facts are unfortunately not apparent to many people in responsible positions who spread anti-Semitism, not realising they are playing into the hands of this type of British National Socialist.’

  What worried Rothschild and Clay was that the Fifth Column might be right about the undercurrents of change coming in British society. It was easy to see why. Fascism had risen partly in response to communism. Britain’s alliance with the Soviet Union was rehabilitating communism. Might this not inspire exactly the reaction that Perigoe and her friends hoped for?

  ‘There is likely to be a turn to the Left after the war, and this will intensify fascist sympathies, not only amongst toughs and disgruntled people, but also among industrialists who can supply the money and thus produce a situation similar to that which brought Hitler into power,’ Rothschild and Clay wrote.

  As well as making plans for post-war activism, Eileen Gleave was trying to get her domestic arrangements under control. She had broken things off with Ron Stokes, and given up a tentative bid to reconcile with her husband. She now wanted a divorce, to allow her to marry a serviceman, Cyril, with whom she’d become involved. Special Branch, in one of their periodic
updates of her situation, thought the man in question was unaware of her political views ‘and would not hesitate to break with Gleave if he became aware of her connection with fascism’.

  That didn’t stop her from trying to do some spying on the side when she went to visit her fiancé’s family in South Wales. On the way, she gossiped with a sailor about his next convoy and with a soldier about his posting, enjoying the fact that she was doing so under a poster that warned ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. She noted that the iron and steelworks at Port Talbot would be a ‘lovely target’ and that there was a big works next to the railway station at Neath.

  In May 1943, Sir David Petrie, the director-general of MI5, demanded to be brought up to date on the case. He wanted to see what Roberts was bringing in. Rothschild became defensive. It was, he replied, ‘exceedingly difficult’ to pick out individual reports. ‘So many of the hundreds we have contain interesting nuances,’ he wrote. ‘These, however, are difficult to appreciate without a vast amount of reading.’ His fear was that Petrie would weigh in behind those who thought the case a large political risk for a trivial intelligence gain.

  Rothschild set out to prove four things: the ‘total disloyalty’ of the Fifth Column members; Roberts’s care never to push someone who was ‘on the fence’ into joining; the value of the intelligence; and the usefulness of keeping the Fifth Columnists busy. Reports featured Kohout, Brown, and Perigoe and her in-laws.

  He was helped by a piece of intelligence that Perigoe had just brought in. She’d been to visit friends in Derby, and knowing that her host was a senior man at Rolls-Royce, had gone through his desk. His company’s contribution to the war was the Merlin engine, which powered Spitfires and Hurricanes as well as Lancaster bombers, so she hoped he might have some intelligence to share.

  To Perigoe’s delight, there was an envelope marked ‘Secret’, containing the minutes of a meeting of the government’s Aeronautical Research Council. Pulling out the invisible ink that Roberts had given to her, Perigoe copied down the entire report, including, Roberts noted, ‘exact experimental results and details arrived at by the research sections of each of the aero-engine manufacturing firms in this country’. Neither Perigoe nor Roberts could make much out of the report, which he said ‘appeared to be about contra-rotary screws or blades’.

  Rothschild and Clay had their own thoughts about the future of the Fifth Column. They saw two options. The first was to prosecute as many members as they could, once it was clear that victory in the war was imminent. The goal would be to expose the extent of the treachery of British fascism, and to discredit the movement. The second option was rather more ambitious.

  MI5 had filled the demand for a Fifth Column by creating one, Rothschild reasoned, so why couldn’t it fill a demand for a new fascist party as well? He suggested running a rival to the British Union, which would ‘absorb the majority of ex-BU members and the fanatical anti-Semites and anti-Communists’. This party could, he then argued, be broken up at the point it became dangerous.

  There was a practical problem with this. The operation was currently run around Roberts, ‘whose genius at this type of work has made it possible’. Once the war was over, though, many of his old BU contacts would be released from internment, and would immediately point out that he was Eric Roberts, not Jack King. The only way Rothschild and Clay could see their idea working would be for Roberts to use others as fronts, and to stay in the background himself, perhaps posing ‘as an agent of an underground German Nazi Party’.

  The idea certainly didn’t lack ambition, but for MI5 to have actually run a subversive political party that it was also supposed to have been monitoring would have taken the Security Service well beyond the bounds of what any of its political masters would ever have accepted. Even for a supporter of the operation like Liddell, who took the view that ‘there is nothing to which exception can be taken in war time’, the rules were different during peace. The idea was vetoed. Meanwhile, the internal pressure to end the operation immediately hadn’t gone away. Dick White, Liddell’s deputy, favoured prosecution.

  But Liddell couldn’t see the advantage in prosecuting. The Fifth Column operation cheaply and efficiently rendered harmless people who might otherwise be dangerous to the country, while keeping MI5 informed about their activities. As an alternative to any of the suggestions he’d been offered, he proposed putting more agents into the group, ones who, unlike Roberts, would be able to drift alongside Perigoe, Gleave and the others into whatever new fascist body emerged.

  ‘I am quite sure that after the war we shall have a good deal of trouble from both the left and the right,’ Liddell mused, ‘and somebody should be thinking about putting in agents at the bottom and writing them off for a year or two when they may rise to a position of some importance or to the post of secretary to some important leader.’

  White’s problem, Liddell thought, was that he missed the point of the operation. ‘Dick I think has still got a general impression that the case is not of much importance and that we are dealing with a pack of hysterical women,’ he wrote, recording a remark that was a reminder of the way many men in MI5 viewed the opposite sex. ‘Personally I think there is more to it than that. The basic ideas of the people we are dealing with are Fascist and they are working with the tools of anti-Semitism, and anti-communism, both of which may have a considerable appeal. I feel that if we just liquidate this case without putting in some straight agents, we may be losing an opportunity.’

  Roger Hollis, in charge of monitoring subversive groups, including fascists, also wanted to shut the operation down. ‘He cannot get out of his liberal mind that this is a serious form of provocation,’ Liddell recorded. ‘In a very mild sense it is, but in the absence of other methods, I do think it is desirable to ascertain something about evilly-intentioned persons.’ Hollis’s position on his fellow Britons was simultaneously cynical and optimistic. ‘Roger’s view is that the country is full of evilly-intentioned persons, but that there is no necessity to drag them out of their holes. They had much better be left to rot in obscurity, and will be swamped by the common sense of the community as a whole.’

  As the operation continued, so did the debate within MI5 about its future.

  On a Tuesday evening in January 1944, Clay, Rothschild and Liddell talked over the situation. Although, or perhaps because, Roberts was the central MI5 officer in the case, he wasn’t present. Rothschild was partly preoccupied by a wave of fires on troop ships and transports at ports down Britain’s west coast. An officer from B5, the Security Service’s investigative branch, had been sent to establish if these were coincidence or malicious – the locations of the fires suggested Irish Republicans might be to blame. A suspect device left after one of the fires was on its way to London for Rothschild to study. In the wider war, Allied forces had landed at Anzio, near Rome, and seemed to threaten the city.

  The question facing the group that evening was what to do with the names that Roberts was collecting? In a note to Liddell, Rothschild complained that the case was operating in a ‘false atmosphere’, with Hollis and MI5’s director-general David Petrie doubtful about its value. He set out a defence of the operation against their criticisms.

  Was MI5 guilty of encouraging and equipping subversives? ‘Yes, to a limited extent, but it is known that these people would have started reorganising and becoming interested in subversive matters in any case.’

  Weren’t the people they were looking at ‘unimportant or unbalanced’? Perhaps, but the question was whether they provided useful information. Hilda Leech, who was both of these things, had nevertheless been invited to join the inner council of the Imperial Fascist League, a group that was supposed to be defunct. She would now be supplying information about it to MI5 without knowing it.

  Rothschild proposed that the operation should continue after the war, and that he and Clay should continue running it. His motives were partly personal. He’d been bitten by the intelligence bug, and he knew there was unlikely to be
much call for the defusing of Nazi bombs once the war was over. An ongoing operation would give him a reason to stay involved. ‘We do not consider that Jack would work satisfactorily for any case officers other than Miss Clay and myself,’ he argued. ‘This is not said through any spirit of egotism. It is a commonplace for agents to become attached to persons who have been running them for a number of years and to resent any transfer, and we are fairly certain from general but not specific conversations on this subject with Jack that any transfer would be impracticable.’

  Whatever the motives, this view of Roberts’s feelings wasn’t wrong. He hadn’t lost his suspicion that the Office had been penetrated, and Rothschild, Clay and Liddell were among the only people in the building that he fully trusted.

  In particular, he had lost faith in Maxwell Knight, his first mentor in espionage. Knight had long insisted on running his section from his flat in Dolphin Square. This had merely been eccentric in the 1930s, but now that MI5 was a large bureaucracy, it had left him out of touch. Meanwhile the man who had been a master agent-runner was proving to be a poor manager.

  Nearly twenty years after he had been entranced by Knight as a teenager, Roberts was now a grown man, with a successful espionage career in his own right. He had married and started a family. Knight, by comparison, seemed stunted, his second marriage ended. The Tyler Kent intelligence coup was now a long time ago. Looking back, Roberts believed he had been deceived by Knight’s ‘personal magnetism’, only to discover that he ‘proved to be an egg shell of a man’.