Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  The two men were now throwing out all sorts of ideas, although Roberts ‘strongly discouraged’ Gannon’s proposal that they try to contact local agents of the Irish Republican Army – the previous year had seen a bombing campaign by republicans against English cities. The conversation moved on, with Gannon proposing to burn a military parking depot.

  It was clear to Roberts that the Leeds group had become more determined since his last visit. While much of their talk was fanciful, they were determined to set fire to something, and even a fire set by a fool could kill.

  The following evening he met Windsor and Gannon again. The shopkeeper, Roberts reported, ‘felt they ought to do something ambitious’. He liked the idea of trying again at the warehouse Gannon had mentioned. ‘His great wish was to cause a big blaze in the centre of Leeds to attract the attention of Jerry planes.’ The pair insisted Roberts come with them to take a look at their proposed target.

  In September, City Square had been at the heart of ‘War Weapons Week’, an effort to persuade people to help finance the war effort. A barometer board had been set up in front of a local landmark, the statue of the Black Prince, to show how many bombers had been bought. On the first day alone, £1.4 million was raised – seventy bombers. Now Windsor and Gannon were planning to strike back. As they approached Morley’s warehouse, ‘they kept reiterating the fact that once alight it would make a splendid beacon for the Germans’.

  Gannon slipped down an alley at the side of the building and came back in a state of high excitement. The door didn’t seem to be padlocked. They could break in and start a fire there and then. Windsor agreed, pointing out once again that the place was full of straw packaging, which would make excellent kindling.

  That was the last thing Roberts wanted them to do. He urged caution, suggesting they take time to prepare and plan. To his immense relief, while the two men were considering his plea, a policeman appeared in the distance. Windsor and Gannon agreed it might be wiser to wait.

  Over the following days, the group was busy. Gannon announced he had got hold of a Michelin map and he committed ‘with some glee’ to work with Windsor to mark ammunition factories on to the maps. He had also bought a small saw, of which he was very proud, for hacking through the lock on the door at Morley’s.

  The men were keen to reassure Roberts of their loyalty to fascism. Windsor had decided that a defeat for National Socialism in Germany would mean its defeat in Britain. Gannon said that he’d studied British Union policy deeply, and that he had denied himself ‘every little pleasure in order to save for the movement’. He told Roberts that ‘his most treasured possessions’ were his collection of BU pamphlets and his copy of Mosley’s 1938 manifesto, ‘Tomorrow We Live’.

  On Sunday 10 November, they met in the back room of Windsor’s shop, joined by Longfellow, the timorous sheet-metal worker, who explained that while he was keen to help, his wife was dying, and so he couldn’t come with them on the actual attack. But Windsor and Gannon were ready: they would set fire to Morley’s the following day. They planned carefully, drawing up a map of the warehouse approaches and testing Gannon’s hacksaw on a nail, to see how long it would take to cut through a padlock. Then came the high point. Gannon produced one of his home-made firebombs. He’d managed to get hold of some gunpowder – possibly from some now-forbidden fireworks – and placed it in a piece of paper, then wrapped a cloth around it and secured it with a rubber band, to make a ball about three inches in diameter. A fuse stuck out of the top. It looked like the kind of bomb a villain would throw in a cartoon.

  The men decided to test it. They placed the bomb in the grate of the fireplace, lit the fuse, retreated to the corners of the room, and watched eagerly. The fuse burned down, and then there was a flash and a foul smell, but no fire. Despite this, ‘it was decided that in straw a fire would certainly start’.

  Roberts told the gang that he would be returning to London on the Tuesday morning, the day after their proposed attack. If they wanted to give him maps to send to Germany, they needed to have them ready by then.

  They set about their task with relish. Windsor and Longfellow numbered important sites on the map, while Gannon wrote out descriptions of the targets in a notebook. They agreed that Gannon would take the map, notebook and other material, including fascist literature and a list of likely supporters, with him when they set fire to the warehouse the following day. Once their mission was completed, they would split up, and he would meet Roberts at the Red Lion Hotel to hand the material over. When they’d finished, Windsor took everyone through the plan for the following evening from start to finish. Watching him coordinate it all, Roberts was, despite himself, at least a little impressed with his organisational skills.

  They carefully cleared the room of evidence, and agreed to meet the next day at 8 p.m.

  In the meantime, Roberts had his own preparations to put in place. Working with MI5’s local man, one Major Hordern, he arranged for the police and firefighters to be lying in wait that night. He would signal them by flashing a torch, and they would pounce and arrest the whole gang. Everything was ready.

  Before his rendezvous with the would-be arsonists, Roberts had a meeting with Sydney Charnley. Two months earlier, Charnley had been accusing Roberts of being a police spy. Now he was sure Roberts was a genuine fascist.

  He wasn’t coming on that night’s raid, as he was doubtful about both the means and the end. ‘He did not really favour the sort of activities which were being carried out by the others,’ Roberts reported. Like many of Mosley’s followers, Charnley was a patriot at heart, and his loyalty to King and Country was clashing with his loyalty to fascism. ‘He did not want to see a German victory unless such a victory could tally with a National Socialist victory in England.’ But he did need money, and he had a proposal: he would work for Roberts, and for the fascist cause, for two pounds five shillings a week. Charnley, Roberts wrote, ‘salvaged his conscience by the thought that if he did work in this fashion, although he was working indirectly for the Germans he would not be working against his own country’. Roberts committed himself to nothing.

  When he met Gannon and Windsor that evening, they were in a state of high excitement. They’d brought with them a 47-year-old clerk called Albert Miller who was keen to meet Roberts – a feeling that wasn’t entirely reciprocated. Miller took them to his office, where he had a postcard of Mosley pinned up behind the door, and, in Roberts’s words, ‘wasted a lot of time explaining what he had done for fascism’. Roberts was beginning to tire of Windsor’s endless stream of enthusiastic fascists.

  Miller, like Charnley, had his doubts about the evening’s enterprise. He offered to provide the others with an alibi, but he warned about the danger of ‘Watchers’, and when that didn’t work, proposed they target a Jewish business instead of Morley’s. Finally, he suggested they telephone the plumbing warehouse to at least ensure that there wasn’t a nightwatchman present. Windsor thought this would be a sensible precaution, and so they set out to find a phone box.

  After cultivating them for weeks, Roberts didn’t want to give his conspirators an excuse to pull out at this point. As they approached the phone box, he pushed ahead, and made the call himself. Someone did pick up at the other end, but Roberts said nothing, simply hanging up and telling his companions that there had been no answer. The operation was on.

  As they approached the warehouse, Roberts tried to see where the police were lying in wait, hoping they hadn’t left signs of their presence. To his relief, there was nothing to spook Windsor and Gannon. They approached the warehouse door, and found it locked. Gannon produced his saw and set to work.

  This was the moment for the police to pounce. Roberts pulled out his torch and shone it on the door, on the pretext of helping Gannon to see. No one came. Feigning incompetence, Roberts flashed the torch around. Still no one came. Windsor cursed Roberts for a fool who would give them all away, and confiscated the torch.

  By now Roberts was worried: the police were
supposed to be catching Windsor and Gannon in the act. As important, they were supposed to be stopping them from starting a fire. Roberts might be a fake, but Gannon’s firebomb was real, and so was the straw inside the warehouse.

  Fortunately, Gannon was discovering that padlocks are harder to saw through than nails. Despairing of his saw, he pulled his firebomb from his pocket, lit the fuse, and shoved it through the letter box. He and Windsor walked away as calmly as they could manage and, having agreed a later rendezvous at the Red Lion, Roberts made off in the other direction, still expecting the police to pounce.

  But there were no running footsteps, no shouts. Instead, Windsor and Gannon disappeared into the blackout and a confused and frustrated Roberts walked round the warehouse only to find the police lying in wait on the other side, patiently watching a different door.

  The trap had failed. Some of the policemen had, they admitted, seen Windsor and Gannon walk away, but hadn’t stopped them, because they hadn’t realised the attempt on Morley’s had already been made.

  Roberts was exasperated. But he saw another chance. Gannon was still carrying the suitcase full of fascist literature, with maps marking bomb targets. That was incriminating evidence enough. He was due at the Red Lion later for the handover. Officers were sent there to arrest him. Meanwhile Roberts took Hordern to look at the real scene of the crime.

  The good news when they got there was that Leeds’s fascists were apparently as bad at starting fires as the city’s police were at setting traps. There was no obvious sign of an arson attempt. Roberts showed his colleagues the padlock that Gannon had tried to saw. But though the Security Service colleagues could see marks on it, Inspector Buchanan of the Leeds police was of the view that he had been sent on a fool’s errand. He denied he could see any sign of tampering with the lock, and announced he was not going to waste any more time searching the premises.

  His officers had meanwhile failed to arrest Gannon. Realising that Leeds had no Red Lion hotel, they had guessed that he must have meant either the Black Lion or the Golden Lion. With a fifty-fifty chance of being correct, they went to the former while Gannon waited at the latter, before losing his nerve, leaving and getting rid of the contents of his suitcase.

  His trap failed, his evidence destroyed, Roberts returned to London. But if he was downhearted, his superiors weren’t. He had established that Windsor’s group were determined, even if they lacked competence. That determination was enough to make them dangerous. It was surely only a matter of time before they managed to set fire to something, and Leeds was home to many of Britain’s most important factories. The risk of leaving them at large was too great.

  Even if they couldn’t be prosecuted, there was another option open to MI5. Under emergency wartime laws, the government had the power to lock people up, indefinitely and without trial, if they were suspected of being Nazi sympathisers. At the start of December 1940, Windsor, Gannon, Longfellow and Jeffery were arrested. They swiftly confessed their support for fascism and their attempts to sabotage the British war effort, blaming the mysterious man from London, Mr Roberts, for leading them astray.

  MI5 had considered arresting Charnley and Angela Crewe as well, but rejected the idea. There was a mix of reasons for this. Partly, it was that neither had moved from talk into action. Crewe ‘was not likely to do any serious harm by her communication’. Charnley ‘did not appear to have taken any part in the attempts at sabotage’. But there was raw calculation behind the decision, as well. MI5 was trying to find active fascists, and so was Charnley. Why not let him carry on, and see who he turned up? ‘It was decided that he might be of more use to the authorities if left at large, at least for the time being.’

  One risk was that the arrest of his four fellow fascists might sow suspicion in Charnley’s mind about Roberts, and that was why it made sense to leave Crewe at large. Given the things she’d said to Roberts, leaving her alone would suggest that he couldn’t be the person who’d betrayed them. It seemed to work: Roberts and Charnley stayed in occasional contact for at least another year, though without much apparent result.

  It seemed that Roberts’s first official case for MI5 had been a success. But unknown to him, there were moves at the highest level of the government that threatened to end his MI5 career just as it was beginning to take off.

  * Atkinson hadn’t expected to become DPP: when in 1930 he was summoned to the Home Office to discuss ‘a certain matter’, he assumed that he’d made a mistake in his work as a recorder – the most junior sort of judge – and prepared for a reprimand. When he was told the real reason he was there, he refused to believe it and walked out of the room.

  4

  ‘Every person within the fortress’

  Sir Alexander Maxwell, the permanent under-secretary of state at the Home Office – its chief civil servant – had been at the department for thirty-six years, his entire career. The son of a Congregational minister, he was passionate about juvenile delinquency and reform, and had deeply held views about the need to balance public security with the liberty of the subject. He had a powerful intellect, but was gentle, humorous and modest. Those around him relied on him for advice and guidance, and held him in deep affection. He was the rock upon which the Home Office stood. MI5 found him a nightmare.

  Shortly before Christmas 1940, just as the Leeds case seemed settled, the Home Office began to take an interest in it. Over at MI5, the director of counter-espionage, Guy Liddell, sensed danger, and prepared for battle. Liddell was a veteran of the Great War, during which he’d won the Military Cross. After leaving the Army, he’d joined Special Branch, where he’d displayed a gift for counter-intelligence. In 1931, he’d moved over to MI5, as part of a reorganisation of intelligence across government. He was shy and gently humorous, but like Maxwell concerned for his subordinates, who sought him out for advice. After meeting him in 1940, the novelist Somerset Maugham included in a memoir a description of an unnamed Security Service officer: ‘a plump man with grey hair and a grey moon face, in rather shabby grey clothes. He had an ingratiating way with him, a pleasant laugh and a soft voice. I do not know what you would have taken him for if you had found him standing in a doorway where you had sought refuge from a sudden shower – a motor salesman perhaps, or a retired tea planter.’ At least one of Liddell’s friends recognised him, though another colleague would have disputed the suggestion of shabbiness: ‘always beautifully dressed, with handmade shoes’.

  Sir Alexander Maxwell

  Guy Liddell

  Liddell had been at loggerheads with Maxwell since the very start of the war. In July 1939, the Security Service had just thirty-six officers with which to thwart German intelligence and keep the country safe from home-grown threats. As it prepared for the coming war, its most pressing problem was what to do about the 70,000 Germans and Austrians living in the country. Many of them resented Hitler as much as any Briton, but might some not feel the pulls of patriotism? Might some, indeed, be agents sent over in advance? Even if one assumed that most of the Germans in Britain presented no threat, how was MI5 supposed to identify the dangerous ones?

  To Liddell, the problem was so difficult that it wasn’t even worth attempting. He calculated it would take at least eight months to interview every German and assess their case. ‘In the meantime the Germans will have an opportunity of working on enemy aliens in this country and organising them into some kind of intelligence agency,’ he wrote. Instead, he and his colleagues assumed that the government would repeat the policy adopted in the First World War: lock up every German man until they could prove they should be released. This would free MI5 to deal with more urgent matters.

  But Maxwell had other ideas. The view of the Home Office was that the Great War policy of internment, as it had been known, had been a cruel mistake. Applied far too widely as a result of public panic, it had resulted in thousands of innocent men being held in overcrowded conditions for years.

  On top of that, if it was difficult for MI5 to screen tens of t
housands of people in a few months, locking them all up was hardly straightforward, either. Where? For how long? Even if the government restricted itself to men of military age, there were 28,500 of them. The Home Office had managed to identify space to intern only 18,000.

  There were also compassionate considerations. Many of the Germans in Britain were refugees, mainly Jewish. Had they fled barbed wire at home only to find it in their place of sanctuary?

  Two days before war broke out, Maxwell wrote to the Security Service, telling them that there would be no mass internment. Tribunals would review the case of every male enemy alien over the age of sixteen. If MI5 thought someone should be locked up, they would have to make the case for it. Liddell’s judgement on this decision was blunt: ‘Farce.’

  Three months later, he felt his assessment had been proved right. ‘Large numbers of enemy aliens are at large and they have freedom of movement,’ he complained. He estimated that simply processing their cases was taking up four-fifths of MI5’s time. The general view within MI5 was that the Home Office neither understood nor cared about the problems the Security Service faced.

  Those problems weren’t limited to foreigners. MI5 was also concerned about Britons with questionable loyalties. Oswald Mosley was an admirer of Hitler. Could he and his followers be trusted? The Home Office responded that it couldn’t lock people up on the basis of what they might do, only for what they had done.

  The Security Service position was summed up by its director, Jasper Harker: Britain was a castle under siege. ‘It is essential,’ he said, ‘that every person within the fortress must either be harnessed to the national effort or put under proper control.’