Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  In fact, it was unintentional: the bombs had been meant for an oil depot and an aircraft factory down the Thames. But Churchill retaliated with a raid of more than ninety bombers on Berlin. The prime minister’s assistant private secretary, John Colville, feared Germany would respond in turn with a ‘big raid’ on London.

  Despite the threat of bombing, the Roberts family had decided not to leave Epsom for the country. Eric still had family in Cornwall that Audrey and the boys could have gone to stay with, but his wife wanted to stay relatively close to her mother and sisters in north London. Audrey and the children would have to trust themselves to the Anderson shelter that Eric, never a handyman, had paid some builders to put up in the back garden.

  Turning to the matter in hand, Roberts took stock. He had won the Leeds group’s trust. He had established that they were committed to fascism and willing to talk about overthrowing the government by force. But how dangerous were they really? Was Windsor and Gannon’s arson attack on Dawson’s a one-off or the start of something bigger? Had it even actually happened, or was it simply the boast of a fantasist?

  More importantly, how much of this talk had been inspired by Lewis? After two and a half days in Windsor’s company, Roberts had concluded that, although he was undoubtedly keen to be involved in sabotage, ‘he was a person of such vague mentality that it was extremely difficult to decide how many of his plans were of his own devising and how many had been put into his head’. If ideas had been put there, Roberts had a good idea who was responsible. Lewis hadn’t impressed him as an undercover operator – ‘too inept to be much use’, MI5’s file observed. At best, he was probably too committed to proving himself right about the Leeds group to be a reliable judge of how much danger they actually posed.

  But Roberts was sure that Lewis had been encouraging Windsor in his plots. If this were true, it was a serious problem. MI5 couldn’t simply round up people it was worried about. Indeed MI5 had no formal powers of action at all. The British state had reconciled itself to the need for something as un-British as a secret police by having one, but not acknowledging it. So the Security Service could investigate, but once it had identified a suspect, it was supposed to work with the police – usually Special Branch detectives who dealt with sensitive cases – and the Director of Public Prosecutions, to put them on trial like any other criminal. And just as in ordinary criminal trials, the prosecution would fail if it became clear that MI5 officers or their informants had persuaded the defendants to break the law.

  Lewis might have been the person to expose the Leeds group, but if he had overstepped the mark, as Roberts feared, he might also have made their prosecution impossible.

  In an effort to undo this damage, Roberts set about testing Windsor’s resolve. When the pair met that day, Windsor, now convinced that the man from London was genuine, ‘talked somewhat wildly of various things which he intended to do to help the enemy’.

  In response, Roberts gave the shopkeeper a chance to back out. He warned him of the dangers in what he proposed, and especially of espionage. Three months earlier, Parliament had rushed through the Treachery Act in two days. This forbade, among other things, ‘any act which is designed or likely to give assistance to the naval, military or air operations of the enemy’, if it was done ‘with intent to help the enemy’. It was a line that Windsor had already crossed. The new law also made it easier to convict someone of treachery, requiring only a single witness. And it specified just one penalty: death. If Windsor were caught, it would mean the noose.

  But Windsor wouldn’t be dissuaded. The work needed to be done, he told Roberts. ‘He did not like leaving the dirty work for other people to do if he was not prepared to do it himself.’

  With Windsor’s commitment confirmed, Roberts headed to his next appointment of the day. Three months short of her twentieth birthday, Angela Crewe was a shop assistant living with her parents a mile up the road from Windsor’s shop. She had got to know him some weeks earlier, having declared herself ‘pro-German and anti-Jew’. She now told Roberts that she wanted to be a spy. Posters were already appearing around the country warning that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. But where the government saw threat, young Angela saw opportunity. She would collect that careless talk and send it to Germany, if only she could find a messenger. She showed Roberts two cameras that she was contemplating using to photograph aerodromes.

  Roberts was troubled. He thought her probably ‘more stupid than dangerous’, and even more emphatically than with Windsor, he warned her of the dangers of what she proposed. He asked her why she wished to do this to her country. ‘Because I am a National Socialist and a follower of Oswald Mosley,’ she replied, before adding that she would also like to be paid.

  When he saw that he couldn’t dissuade her, Roberts changed course. If Crewe was determined to pass information to Germany, he should make sure she didn’t succeed. Acting on what seems to have been a flash of inspiration, he suggested that he might know a way to get secrets to Berlin. He was, he revealed, much more than a fellow fascist: he was a German agent. This was information she must keep in the utmost confidence.

  Crewe was thrilled. She promised to use her charms to obtain information from some of the soldiers posted locally and send it to him in London. Roberts gave her an address, and she promised she would prove herself.

  His final meeting was with a soldier. Robert Jeffery was a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Stationed near Windsor’s shop, he was among those who came to pass their time in the back room. It had been in the course of one of these visits that he had mentioned that his father had owned a sweetshop, and revealed he shared Windsor’s loathing of cut-prices stores. Windsor had sensed a sympathetic mind, and begun setting out the case for fascism to the soldier.

  By the time he met Roberts, Jeffery was a convert to the cause, although his motives were at least partly financial. He’d already offered to steal chemicals that could be used to make bombs from the hospital where he worked, but, upon meeting the man from London, he asked how much he’d be prepared to pay for weapons. Roberts suggested a price of 30 shillings for a service revolver and ammunition. Jeffery agreed, and added that he could definitely get a service gas mask for 21 shillings. He promised to write to Roberts in code, with any number he gave being the number of revolvers he’d stolen. ‘After thanking him for his offer of help, I left him,’ Roberts wrote.

  Back in London, Roberts’s masters at MI5 were impressed with their new recruit’s work. Guy Liddell, the head of counterespionage, recorded ‘melodramatic developments’ in his diary. ‘There is now a definite conspiracy to obtain military information through a young girl who is friendly with an officer and to pass this information to the Germans. There is also a scheme to obtain arms and explosives.’ The machinery of the secret state swung into action. Orders were imposed to intercept and copy Windsor’s, Crewe’s and Charnley’s letters.

  MI5 drew several conclusions from Roberts’s report. First, the decision earlier in the year to ban the BU and round up its members seemed to have succeeded in its aim of putting the organisation out of action. ‘The Leeds group are quite isolated and in spite of all their efforts have failed to contact fascists elsewhere,’ a case summary read. ‘They are also considerably hampered by lack of funds.’

  Second, ‘although they are so anxious to help the Germans, they have no contact with Germany’. While it was quite possible that the Germans were approaching individual BU members, ‘the BU as an organisation is not in touch with the German Secret Service’. This made sense to the men in London. They assumed that the Abwehr – Germany’s intelligence service – had been setting up networks in Britain before the war, but that their recruits would have been told to drop political activities.

  Third, and more worryingly, ‘the case of Miss Crewe in particular shows how an otherwise perfectly normal and decent person can be completely subverted by Nazi doctrines. It is unlikely that the majority of BU members are fanatics of this type, but the movemen
t undoubtedly contained a fair number.’

  As it seemed unlikely that the Leeds group were going to lead MI5 to bigger fish, the most sensible thing was to lock them up before they hurt anyone. Knight set off to see Sir Edward Tindal Atkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions.*

  Atkinson had little time for traitors. However, he advised Knight that what Roberts had brought back from Leeds wasn’t enough. The only evidence against the group was the word of an undercover MI5 man, corroborated by Lewis, who seemed an unreliable witness. He’d need more before he could prosecute under the wartime emergency powers. As he’d helped draft the relevant legislation, there was no point in Knight arguing.

  Roberts had already written to Windsor since his return to London, and now he awaited a response. Nearly three weeks after he’d left Leeds, two letters arrived: one from Windsor, and the other from Angela Crewe in which she sent the locations of factories near Leeds. ‘This information is amateurish and would probably be of little use to the Germans,’ a report noted. Obviously convinced by Roberts’s claim to be acting for the Germans, she begged him to give her specific work to do.

  Windsor’s letter was in code. ‘The organ is working quite well,’ he wrote. ‘In fact a friend of mine, a Mr Wells, intends calling upon you re the service it’s giving him. Its activity is slow but sure and is most reliable. If nothing develops in the next week, shall try my utmost to come down and see you.’

  A week later, Windsor wrote again, announcing that he would visit London on 25 September. But MI5 wasn’t the only organisation in chaos in 1940: delays in the post meant the letter didn’t arrive until the 26th, and Roberts missed the proposed meeting.

  The check on Windsor’s mail, meanwhile, had turned up a disappointing lack of incriminating communication. An explanation for this came out of the blue, when another military recruit contacted MI5 to report Windsor as suspicious. The most troubling thing about this account was that it revealed Windsor had been told by a friend in the Post Office that his letters were being opened. The checks had begun after Roberts’s visit. Surely Windsor would make the connection?

  The following month more communication failures led to missed meetings in London with Gannon and Charnley, so it was with relief that Roberts received a letter from Windsor at the end of October inviting him to visit Leeds again. In his letter Windsor said that ‘Mr Jay’ had left the city some time ago, but ‘gave me an Xmas sample for your approval’. With high hopes that it would be a stolen Army revolver – proof of a crime – Roberts set off for Yorkshire.

  On Tuesday, 5 November, Roberts arrived in Leeds. It was Bonfire Night, but the blackout meant no bonfires, and no fireworks either. For many children, this was the privation that particularly hit home. One Leeds shopkeeper reported children asking if he had any rockets in stock ‘just to look at’. The indoor fireworks he was offering instead – small pyrotechnics that floated to the ceiling before burning out, or fizzed and wriggled into snakes on a plate – were poor substitutes.

  The Daily Mirror depicted Hitler as a guy on top of a bonfire, with the caption ‘Fireworks supplied by the RAF’. The reality was less cheerful. In the House of Commons, the prime minister reported on the progress of the war: 14,000 civilians had been killed and 20,000 wounded by the bombing so far, mainly in London. Churchill also warned that the fighting could last another three years.

  The day after he arrived in Leeds, Roberts went to see Windsor and Gannon. They lost no time in bringing their visitor up to speed on their activities since August. ‘We’ve done a job!’ Gannon told him. Asked for more details, they explained how they’d set fire to a factory. Feigning enthusiasm, Roberts requested to be taken to see the evidence. The Leeds men were suddenly reticent, but Roberts insisted, and so the three boarded a tram.

  In many ways, the war was being good to Leeds. Despite Windsor and Gannon’s efforts, there had been little bombing there – the local joke was that the Luftwaffe couldn’t see through the clouds of industrial smoke hanging over the city. And the demands of war had brought back manufacturing work after the decline of the 1930s. The Avro aircraft plant north-west of the city was reckoned to be the largest factory in Europe. It was carefully camouflaged to look like farmland from the air, with hedgerows, scattered buildings, even a duck pond.

  The place to which Windsor and Gannon were taking Roberts was part of a much longer tradition. The wool trade had been important in Yorkshire for centuries, and clothmaking had been crucial to the development of Leeds. With the industrial revolution had come giant mills on the western side of the city, taking in wool from all over the world and turning it into cloth. Having struggled in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the mills now had a purpose once again: hundreds of thousands of men needed uniforms.

  Windsor and Gannon were taking Roberts to Stanningley, one of these mill districts, but they had a small problem: they were lying to him. Gannon had simply got carried away with his claim to have ‘done a job’, and when Roberts had asked for more details, Windsor had suggested Stanningley because he knew there had been a fire there. Unfortunately, he didn’t know where. As their tram got closer to its destination, Roberts sensed ‘some hesitation on the part of both men’, and he wondered again if Windsor and Gannon were more fantasists than dangerous fanatics.

  They hopped off the tram and Windsor went into a shop, hoping to find out where the fire had been. To his horror, the shopkeeper didn’t know, so he and Gannon led Roberts aimlessly between the mills, in the hope they might spot something. In the end, Roberts put them out of their misery. He pointed to some new buildings, and asked if that was the site of their arson. Windsor and Gannon gratefully agreed that it was, and described how they’d started the fire during a recent blackout.

  As they made their way back into the city, the conversation became ‘somewhat strained’. But what Roberts initially took for embarrassment was actually suspicion. Finally, Windsor and Gannon challenged him: when they hadn’t heard back from him about their proposed September visit to London, they’d decided to go and find him. They’d had two clues: the address he had given them, and the place he said he’d worked. Although Roberts was working under his own name, he wasn’t so foolish as to have given his own address. Instead he’d used that of his MI5 colleague and drinking partner Jimmy Dickson.

  Windsor and Gannon had found no sign of Roberts at Dickson’s Fulham flat. They’d had more success at the Euston Road branch of the Westminster Bank. People there knew Eric Roberts all right. But they hadn’t seen him since he joined the Army. Windsor protested: he’d seen Roberts not two months earlier, and he hadn’t been in the Army then. But the bank staff insisted that Roberts had left long before that, about six months ago. ‘It was very mystifying,’ Windsor observed later.

  For Roberts, this was a moment far more dangerous than the interrogation by Charnley. On that occasion he had escaped detection because he had, in a way, the truth on his side. Here, he was caught in a lie. His former colleagues at the Westminster Bank had inadvertently given him away. Combined with Windsor’s discovery that his post was being opened, surely the game was up?

  But there was one possible glimmer of hope. If Windsor and Gannon had drawn the obvious conclusion from their trip to London – that Roberts was, in some capacity, working for the government – they would hardly have taken him to see evidence of an arson attack, even a fictional one. That meant that whatever their doubts about him, they wanted him to dispel them.

  Roberts didn’t record what he said to Windsor and Gannon that day. He simply reported that, in the course of the tram journey back into the city centre, he ‘succeeded in allaying their suspicions on these points’. Their desire to believe in the man from London was a huge asset, as was Roberts’s skill at inhabiting the role he played. But for all his coyness about the conversation, this moment was a sign to his MI5 employers of the extraordinary extent of his abilities as an undercover operator. Eric Roberts could make people trust him, even when they had no business doing so.
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  Having decided to put their faith in Roberts, Windsor and Gannon again wanted to impress him. The conversation turned to their favourite subject – arson. Gannon had identified Morley’s plumbing supplies warehouse, just off City Square in the centre of Leeds, as a target. He’d already made two attempts to burn it down, but each time he felt he’d been let down by his assistant. The first time he’d taken Walter Longfellow, a sheet-metal worker who was in the group, and a can of petrol. But his companion had become scared at the last minute and ran away. The second time he’d enlisted Private Jeffery, who was also supposed to be stealing guns for Roberts. But although they’d successfully pushed a home-made incendiary bomb through the building’s letter box, it hadn’t ignited properly. ‘The attempt had been further wrecked by a sudden spasm of weakness of the knees on Jeffery’s part, followed by a swift run for safety,’ Roberts reported drily. Two days later the soldier had been transferred to Lincoln, sixty miles away. Windsor complained that although he’d given Jeffery money to fund fascist activities, they hadn’t heard from him since. They suspected he’d lost his nerve.

  But Gannon wasn’t downhearted. He was sure the warehouse would burn furiously if they could get a blaze started, and he had two more home-made firebombs. Windsor had another idea to help Germany: they should make a map of Leeds, marking munitions factories, railway junctions and other targets for Roberts to pass to Berlin. Gannon, excited, had his own suggestion: in his search for places to set fire to, he’d noticed that bomb shelters were constructed from timber, which would burn beautifully. Windsor agreed they’d be good targets, and ‘proposed that shelters should be chosen with an eye to old buildings which would blaze well, either above or at the side’.