Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  And even then, with Germany in retreat, Roberts was still recruiting. In October, Liddell recorded that Joe Bates, an East Ender whose German father had been interned in the previous war, had joined: ‘He is about as highly pro-Nazi as anyone we have come across.’

  Liddell’s desire to restrict knowledge of the Fifth Column operation even within government created its own problems. In December 1944, he received a disturbing report. It was more than eighteen months since he’d been told that the senior diplomat Sir William Strang was among the people who were talking, unconsciously, to the Fifth Column. Strang had now been promoted to the role of British Ambassador to the European Advisory Commission, which was planning the post-war shape of the continent.

  Roberts had reported Strang’s anti-Semitic views the previous year. But opinions, however unpleasant, were one thing. Now it seemed he was confiding more. Perigoe reported on a conversation Strang had had with Tamara Wilson Crowe, an unmarried teacher who at the start of the war had been vice-principal of a school near Hastings, and was now in touch with Perigoe. ‘It looks a little as if he may be having an affair with her,’ Liddell wrote in his diary. ‘He has told her about his visit to Moscow, about Stalin’s refusal to join in the Tripartite Conference, and about a secret mission which he is now to undertake in Brazil.’

  This was a conundrum. On the face of it, Strang was a security risk. Whether or not the married 51-year-old diplomat was indeed sleeping with Wilson Crowe, he was certainly telling her more than he ought to be. He had stopped short of divulging the purpose of his mission to Brazil, but he had been rude about conditions in Russia. And he was privy to a lot of secrets. Earlier in the war, Liddell had worked closely with Strang on issues around foreign embassies in London. Even if he hadn’t been informed about the Triplex operation, it was probable that he had guessed what was happening. Strang’s superiors ought to be informed, and Strang himself ought to be warned to break things off with Wilson Crowe.

  But to do so carried risks: Strang might reveal to Wilson Crowe that their conversation had been reported, thus exposing Roberts. And it would be difficult to reveal the issue without revealing internally where the information had come from. An embarrassed Strang might be tempted to seek revenge by attacking the operation as a whole. In these circumstances, the Home Office would be unlikely to defend a controversial exercise run without its knowledge.

  ‘I do not see what I can do with this information without jeopardising the sources,’ concluded Liddell.

  Besides, what was the benefit? Strang’s indiscretions had hit a dead end: that was one of the purposes of the Fifth Column. He could tell Wilson Crowe what he liked, and she could tell Perigoe, but nothing would get closer to Berlin than the Office in St James’s.

  In Suffolk, the Creasys continued to flourish. They were ‘making money hand over fist’, Roberts reported after a conversation with Herzig. Ronald’s black market operation had expanded beyond agricultural goods and into spirits. He was selling whisky to the American troops at four pounds ten shillings a bottle – more than twice the average weekly wage of a British man. Asked if he was worried about the police, he ‘replied vaguely that there were ways and means’. A clue to what those might be came later in the conversation, when he explained that the lower ranks of the police force ‘appreciated business initiative’. They had appreciated it enough to warn him that Special Branch were going to pay him a visit just before D-Day, and he had taken a trunkful of fascist memorabilia, including his prized recording of the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ to his father’s house.

  But if business was good, there was a new source of strain in the Creasy marriage.

  On 15 April 1945, John Randall, a 24-year-old lieutenant in the Special Air Service, was on a reconnaissance mission near Lüneburg in northern Germany when he and his driver noticed large iron gates standing open at the start of a track leading into the woods to their left. Curious to see what this signified, they drove through them. Thirty yards down the road, they found themselves surrounded by prisoners in striped uniforms. Looking at them, Randall realised these were no ordinary prisoners. They were skeletal, starving. Further on he could see others, almost naked, trying to salvage clothes off corpses on the ground. They were so emaciated it was impossible to tell if they were men or women. The memories would never leave him, but what he found it hardest to escape was the smell: a mixture of rotting flesh and excrement. This was Belsen concentration camp.

  There were 60,000 mainly Jewish prisoners alive when the British Army found the camp, and another 13,000 corpses unburied. Liberation didn’t mean rescue: such were the conditions in the camp, with typhus, dysentery and tuberculosis rampant, that the former inmates continued dying at the rate of hundreds every day. Many were so starved that their bodies were unable to cope with food even when they were given it. In the following month, nearly 14,000 more would die.

  The British brought cameras in with them, and the footage, of skeletal corpses lying scattered on the ground, or in mass graves, of prisoners staring about them, apparently in a daze, or weeping as they kissed the hands of their liberators, had a deep effect when it was shown in British newsreels.

  Not on everyone: Ronald Creasy told Herzig that, while obviously conditions in the camp had been hard, most of the people there were the ‘sweepings of the Polish ghettos’ and that it was ‘sentimental nonsense’ to suggest that these ‘Asiatic sub-men’ deserved any better. But for Rita, it was the final straw. She told her husband that the Nazi regime was ‘rotten through and through’, and that she hoped they would never come to power in Britain.

  For one member of the Fifth Column, at least, enough was enough.

  18

  ‘The Gestapo department’

  In June 1945, Liddell took a fortnight’s holiday. The war against Germany was over. Victory had changed his workload, but not diminished it. British intelligence officers were now spread across Europe, interrogating their defeated counterparts, trying to understand why operations had succeeded or failed, and what the Germans had been doing without the Allies’ knowledge. One young MI6 man, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was attempting to definitively answer the question on everyone’s minds: what had been the fate of the Führer? While the US and Britain were confident he was dead, by his own hand, the Russians refused to publicly accept this.

  Peacetime brought with it a large administrative burden. Many MI5 staff now wished to return to civilian life. Their exits needed to be managed, their caseloads transferred. For some, demobilisation was complicated by their inability to discuss what they had been doing for the past five years. Liddell was concerned to see them all properly settled.

  Others, including Rothschild and Clay, wished to stay in the secret world. Rothschild, perhaps realising that peacetime spying would be less exciting, didn’t intend to work full-time. Rather, he sought some kind of consultative role on the scientific side that would allow him to keep his security clearance, and his membership of this most elite of clubs, without the tedium of day-to-day office work. Clay was turning her mind back to her research at the Natural History Museum, but also wished to stay inside MI5.

  And then there was the Fifth Column. How should they be demobilised? For months, the question of what should be done with them had been allowed to drift, a reflection of the general unease that senior MI5 officers felt about the case.

  Roberts was now monitoring around 500 people, though only a small number of these believed themselves to be working for Germany. The defeat of fascism in Germany didn’t mean that British fascists were ready to give up. Roberts was estimated to be filing a side of foolscap paper in reports every day.

  The question of what was to be done with all these people fell into two parts. The unconscious agents needed to be monitored, but this was straightforward. They could be watched in the way that MI5 had watched suspicious people throughout its history. For most, this would be passive, adding the occasional note to their files when they cropped up in a report on someone else, or touched the offi
cial world in some capacity. These records would sit waiting against the possibility that they once again became people of interest. A few would be the subject of more intense surveillance, ranging from periodic checks by Special Branch up to the labour-intensive interception of their post and telephone calls.

  All this was the ordinary peacetime work of the Security Service, the monitoring of subversive groups. But what of the conscious agents? These people were traitors. They had spent the war years gathering intelligence for the enemy, with great energy and ingenuity. The precedents from similar cases were clear: Irma Stapleton had been jailed on the basis of three meetings, and one act. Gunner Philip Jackson had been sentenced to death for a letter and one evening’s conversation. The leading Fifth Column members were on another scale. The files on Marita Perigoe ran across multiple volumes, hundreds of pages. There were recordings of Nancy Brown delighting in the bombing of women and children. Hans Kohout had passed piles of top secret intelligence to a man he thought was sending it to Germany. Surely the prosecution of these people was not simply an option, but a moral duty?

  The first argument against prosecution, that it would expose a valuable agent, no longer carried the weight it had in 1941, during the row about the Leeds fascists. The war was over, Germany was defeated. There never had been a ring of German spies to uncover, and there certainly wasn’t one now.

  Bound up in this was the question of Roberts’s own future. Unlike Rothschild’s ponderings about what he might find most interesting, this was of urgent practical importance to Roberts: he had a family to support. The Westminster Bank had kept his job open for him during the war, but this offer was expiring.

  Petrie, the director-general, seemed to think Roberts could go back to his pre-war relationship with the service: working at the bank by day, doing what else he could in the evenings. ‘This may be rather difficult,’ Liddell observed.

  It certainly would. Roberts wanted to stay inside MI5. He’d worked at the Westminster Bank for fifteen years, bored and unappreciated. War had given him a chance to test himself, to deal in secrets and deception. And he had proved to be exceptionally good at it. That had been what the sacrifices had been for, the weeks away from home, the humiliation of his children being teased for having a father who was a coward. Had he done all that just to go back to where he started?

  Added to this was a question of safety. There was good reason to think that the internees on the Isle of Man had worked out that the British Union man Eric Roberts had been a mole. The Leeds group had been held alongside some of those he’d known before the war. Bernard Porter, the Epsom District Leader, lived less than three miles from Roberts’s home at Tattenham Corner. During the war, it had been possible to control the movements of these men, but now there was good reason for Roberts to think that his family was in danger of reprisals. Whatever his future, protecting them was his first priority, and he took it seriously. On visits to London, he would tell Audrey and the children to walk at a distance behind him, in case he was spotted by someone he knew. He was reluctant to go and visit Audrey’s mother in Wembley, home of many of the Fifth Column members.

  Kohout, too, was worrying about his family. When the war had ended, the town of St Pölten, Austria, where his wife Auguste and their son Ernest had spent the previous six years, was captured by the Russians. It seemed that getting home would be little easier than it had been before the peace. Auguste persuaded a Frenchman to smuggle a letter out when he was repatriated, and asked him to post it to her husband. It arrived in July. Uncertain how to get a reply to her, Kohout met Roberts, and asked if the German SS could pass his wife a message, urging her to come to Britain as soon as possible.

  He had another favour to ask, too. ‘Kohout said that it would be terribly difficult for him to persuade his wife and son that he had played a decent part on behalf of Germany in this war without some visible evidence to that effect,’ Roberts reported. ‘It was a matter of the utmost importance to him personally that his wife and in later years his son should believe in him.’ Would he be able to get some mark of his services?

  Roberts, once again finding himself in a similar position to that of the man he was deceiving, was noncommittal, but sympathetic.

  There was another area of agreement between the two men. Like Roberts, Kohout didn’t want to leave his espionage career behind him. He now proposed to join the Communist Party, and see if he could get himself recruited by Soviet intelligence, as an industrial spy. In reality, he explained, he would be working for the Gestapo. In reality, Roberts considered, Kohout would be working for British intelligence, under the impression he was a double agent when in fact he was, what, a triple agent?

  ‘On the face of it, Kohout’s tentative proposals seemed genuine enough,’ Roberts told his superiors. ‘Kohout worships money, however, and I believe that if he succeeded in contacting Soviet intelligence and he was offered a substantial sum for British Admiralty or other secrets it would be doubtful if the matter would be submitted to us. Kohout would argue in his own mind that by selling the British to the Russians, he would be doing no harm to Germany. I think that he would probably give a faithful report of everything except offers of money.’

  The idea appealed to some of MI5’s communist-watchers. While questioning Kohout’s chances of being successfully recruited by the Soviets, one noted that if he was, ‘he will in effect become a very satisfactory type of double agent, as there will be very little risk of his becoming compromised’.

  The idea made its way up the chain of command, to Roger Hollis, the head of F section, and a long-time critic of the Fifth Column. He might not have been able to stop Roberts’s wartime efforts, but he could certainly nip this idea in the bud. ‘I do not think it desirable or necessary,’ he wrote.

  Three weeks after Liddell returned from his break, there was a meeting to discuss the future of both the Fifth Column and Eric Roberts.

  Far from launching a prosecution, Clay and Rothschild were still arguing that the operation should keep running. Their case was bolstered by a note from Graham Mitchell of F3, MI5’s fascist department. A section that had treated the Fifth Column with suspicion when Rothschild launched the operation, had now become dependent on it. Referring to Roberts by his codename ‘SR’, the note explained he was now supplying information on ‘almost all the persons of major F3 interest who have their residence, employment or associations in London’. There were cases of ‘major interest’ that they would have been unaware of but for his work. ‘Of those British subjects in or near London who from other sources have been known to harbour pro-German sentiments or a fascist political outlook, there is almost none on whom SR has not supplied something relevant, detailed and vivid,’ it said. His reports contained ‘no excess verbiage: it is all condensed and it is all immediately relevant’.

  There was more praise to come. ‘If SR’s services were to be lost, F3 would be deprived of its most valuable single source of information.’ It named thirteen different cases on which he was the main source, from Oswald Mosley down.

  And there was a final point. Germany had been defeated, but for how long? A country that had started two world wars in the space of a single lifetime couldn’t be trusted not to start a third. It might look unlikely in 1945, with the country in ruins and divided, but hadn’t that been the case in 1918?

  ‘The loss of SR’s services would jeopardise future security, not only in respect of a native fascist revival, but also in respect of the growth of a long-term German underground movement preparatory to a third attempt at world domination,’ Mitchell’s note concluded.

  This chimed with Liddell’s own instincts. As early as 1943, he had confided to his diary his worries about prosecuting the case. It would mean revealing the operation to the public. Worse, it would mean revealing it to the Home Office. To both these audiences, Liddell feared it would create a ‘bad impression’.

  ‘I am quite sure that defending counsel would make a great song and dance about the whole case and that
we should be dubbed as the “Gestapo Department”,’ he wrote, showing a good eye for a headline.

  Rothschild meanwhile had sought advice on the feasibility of prosecution. B5, the investigative branch of MI5 with which he’d worked on his sabotage cases, was headed by Leonard Burt, a policeman that the Security Service had borrowed from Scotland Yard.

  From his perspective as a criminal investigator, Burt thought a prosecution of the Fifth Column would be difficult on practical grounds: the recordings from the Park West flat wouldn’t be admissible in court, so the only evidence MI5 had was the word of Roberts. Defence lawyers would set out to show that he had provoked their clients into active disloyalty, and there was a strong chance that a judge and jury might suspect this was true.

  ‘A prosecution is out of the question,’ a note for the meeting written by Clay and Rothschild concluded. So too was any kind of public or private embarrassment of the Fifth Column. ‘Exposure, though humiliating to perhaps a hundred fascists, would not destroy the fascist movement in the UK; it would drive them underground.’

  Liddell agreed. Rothschild and Clay would get to continue their operation. F3 would get to keep its source. Roberts would get to keep his job. Sir Edward Reid, MI5’s banking expert, visited the Westminster Bank, and secured for Roberts another year’s leave, giving both him and MI5 the chance to see whether peacetime work suited him.

  There was some discussion of rewarding Roberts. At one stage the sum of twenty thousand pounds – more than three-quarters of a million in today’s money – was suggested, but rejected by Liddell as ‘too much’. Rothschild wrote to Harker suggesting a year’s salary, and an official honour, an MBE. The honour never came, and there’s no record that the money did either.

  And the Fifth Columnists were to carry on, blissfully unaware of the vast amount of evidence MI5 had of their guilt, and the fact that they had been protected by official embarrassment about the way that evidence had been collected.