Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  In the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler’s advance across Europe began to shift the argument in MI5’s favour. In April, Germany overran Denmark and invaded Norway, starting a two-month campaign that would end in defeat for the Norwegians and humiliation for the British forces sent to push the invaders back.

  But two months was longer than other European countries held out. On 10 May, Hitler invaded France and Holland and rolled forward with astonishing speed. The British Expeditionary Force, which had been deployed the previous year to hold the line in Belgium, found that the French line to the east had collapsed. The British were ordered to abandon their weapons and flee from Dunkirk. Six weeks after the offensive began, Germany’s territory stretched from the border of the Soviet Union to the Atlantic.

  With German forces suddenly just across the Channel, British high command tried to understand how they had moved so far and so fast. The concept of Fifth Columnists had originated in 1936, in the Spanish Civil War, when General Franco’s fascist forces claimed to have four columns of soldiers ready to march on Madrid, and a fifth column of sympathisers inside the city ready to rise up in their support. As it took another two years to take the city, this claim seems doubtful, but at the time the reports led to the arrest and assassination of suspected fifth columnists within the besieged city.

  The idea gripped imaginations across Europe, already impressionable thanks to the boom in spy novels and films. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps had entertained Tommies in the trenches of the First World War. Brought to the silver screen by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935, it thrilled another generation, with a plot which now emphasised that even the most respectable citizen could be a secret traitor.

  Behind Hitler’s victories lay good fortune, new military tactics and strategy, superior military forces, and opponents who were poorly equipped and led. But none of these explanations was as beguiling as the idea that the Germans had won in an underhand way. News reports suggested Norway had been betrayed from the inside. After Holland’s collapse, an apparently even more authoritative report came from no less a person than Sir Nevile Bland, the British ambassador.

  He had fled the country the day before it surrendered, and returned home to describe how it had been overrun in less than a week. His thousand-word report, entitled ‘Fifth Column Menace’, claimed that is was parachutists, assisted by foreign domestic servants, who had delivered victory to Germany. ‘The paltriest kitchen maid . . . not only can be but generally is a menace to the safety of the country,’ he wrote.

  MI5 had its own word for such an organisation: ‘Kriegsnetz’ – war network.

  And that was just the threat posed by Germans and Austrians. Evidence of the apparent duplicity of those from countries where Britain hoped for support came days after the fall of Holland, with the arrest of an American diplomat, Tyler Kent. Kent was a cipher clerk at the US embassy in London. His job meant he had seen private cables between Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. These messages showed Roosevelt was secretly moving away from America’s isolationist policy – something Kent strongly opposed. In the hope of exposing this, he began collecting documents at his flat.

  Kent had formed links with the pro-German Right Club, set up by Captain Archibald Ramsay, a Conservative Member of Parliament determined to root out the ‘Jewish influence’ he saw in his party. There he befriended Anna Wolkoff, one of its keenest members. He passed her some of the papers, which she in turn passed to the Italian embassy. British codebreakers reading Italian cables to Berlin reported that Rome was sending on most of the contents of Ambassador Joe Kennedy’s messages from London to Roosevelt.

  But MI5 was watching Kent. Maxwell Knight had at least five agents inside the Right Club: three women and two men. One of those men was Eric Roberts, who had added it to the portfolio of right-wing groups he’d joined in the service of MI5, although he hadn’t filed a report of any significance on Ramsay in a year. The day after Churchill became prime minister, Wolkoff boasted to one of Knight’s women that she had seen some of Churchill’s private papers. Nine days later, Knight, along with three policemen, arrived at Kent’s flat. They were accompanied by a US embassy official, who informed Kent that he had that day been dismissed from the diplomatic service, and so lost his immunity from prosecution. The searched yielded 1,500 secret papers.

  Following Kent’s arrest, MI5 renewed its case against the BUF. Knight briefed the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, arguing that Mosley and Ramsay were in close touch with each other, and that there was overlap between the memberships of their groups.

  ‘Anderson began by saying that he found it difficult to believe that members of the BUF would assist the enemy,’ Liddell, who was also present, recorded. ‘He seemed to have a great aversion to locking up a British subject unless he had a very cast-iron case against him.’

  The Home Secretary explained he was worried about the longterm impact on British democracy of locking Mosley and his supporters up. Liddell seethed inwardly. ‘I longed to say that if somebody did not get a move on there would be no democracy, no England and no Empire, and that this was almost a matter of days.’

  The following day, Churchill persuaded the Cabinet to extend regulation 18B of the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, which currently allowed the internment of those with ‘hostile origin or associations’, to cover anyone who had been a member of a proscribed group. Mosley and his fellow BUF leaders were swiftly rounded up.

  Sir Alexander Maxwell and the Home Office were losing the argument on internment. The final blow came on 10 June, as German troops prepared to take Paris. Benito Mussolini, hoping to share some of the spoils of victory, announced that Italy was entering the war on the side of its fascist allies.

  Officials had worked out a plan for the limited internment of Italians in Britain once war was declared, but Churchill had no time for such niceties, and gave a brief instruction: ‘Collar the lot.’ By July, 753 BUF members, 22,000 Germans and Austrians and 4,000 Italians had been interned.

  This led to grave injustices. Refugees from Germany found themselves being dragged out of their new homes by the very government to which they had come for protection. Even advocates of internment knew that most of those arrested were harmless. ‘We do not necessarily believe that there is a high percentage of fifth columnists among these people,’ Liddell mused. ‘There may be a few. Our main point is that as a category these aliens will be an embarrassment if hostilities commenced in this country.’ Already his department was deluged with tip-offs about suspicious foreigners. It only needed one of them to be revealed as a spy to trigger a public outcry.

  But those internees kept in camps were at least relatively safe. The low point of the internment policy came at the start of July. Churchill didn’t just want ‘enemy aliens’ locked up, he wanted them out of the country altogether. Canada was persuaded to take thousands of them, and the internees were loaded onto ships. On 2 July, the SS Arandora Star, carrying over 1,200 internees, was torpedoed by a German U-boat. More than 800 of those on board were killed.

  The sinking caused outrage in Britain. Many of those killed were Italians who had made their lives in Britain, and, as Liddell noted, ‘everybody is reluctant to believe that there could be any harm in their pet waiters and restaurateurs’. Even Liddell, the longstanding advocate of the wholesale arrest and deportation of ‘enemy aliens’, now seemed to disown the policy.

  Having spent close to a year arguing for such action, and detailing how it would work, he expressed puzzlement that the Italians had been on a ship to Canada in the first place: the plan had been to send them back to Italy ‘to create focal points for discontent’ against Mussolini. ‘Why this policy was never carried out I cannot think.’

  This was disingenuous at best. Liddell had been aware of the plan, and had supported it only weeks earlier. He was beginning to realise something that Maxwell, his opponent at the Home Office, had long known: national policy decisions could have a tragic impact on
individuals.

  Germany was happy to stoke the atmosphere of terror in Britain that summer. In the middle of August, Churchill’s War Cabinet was informed that forty-five Nazi parachutists had landed in Britain. Near one of the parachutes, some maps had been found. The next day ministers were told this had been a hoax by the Germans, who had dropped parachutes – but not parachutists – across the country, hoping to sow confusion. Nazi propaganda radio meanwhile broadcast English-language instructions to Fifth Columnists in Britain.

  MI5 was overwhelmed by reports of suspicious activity pouring in from across the country. The vast bulk of them were groundless, but each report required at least momentary consideration, and many took more than that. People spotted suspicious markings on walls and telegraph poles: these turned out to be the work of ‘children, boy scouts, lovers, tramps and lewd fellows’. Some Royal Air Force pilots reported seeing markings on the ground just north of the port of Newquay in Cornwall that might be a signal to enemy aircraft: they were in fact heaps of lime that a farmer was preparing to spread on his fields. A similar investigation close to nearby Truro found that some fencing had indeed been placed in a cross shape on a field: it had been installed by a different branch of the RAF, to deny German planes a landing ground.

  Another RAF photo showed an arrow on the ground, pointing towards a nearby ordnance factory. Examination of a map showed it coming from a church belonging to the sinister and slightly Germanic-sounding ‘Unden Order’. An investigation on the ground revealed that the church was ‘Undenominational’, and that the head of the arrow was a car park, built at the insistence of the local council, which then had a drive leading to the church itself.

  Sometimes the military didn’t wait to consult MI5. A retired soldier and his wife were arrested for a week because his surname sounded German. Liddell was told that some local units ‘appear to have prepared a kind of Black List of their own. When the balloon goes up they intend to round up or shoot all these individuals. The position is so serious that something of a very drastic kind will have to be done.’

  A new MI5 recruit named Anthony Blunt reported on his first day’s work, and Liddell was sufficiently amused by the summary to record it in full in his diary:

  1. Dealt with letter from lady pointing out danger of sentries being poisoned by icecreams sold by aliens.

  2. Report from a man who heard a colonel (name not given) making indiscreet statements (no details) at places and time not stated.

  3. Report about a mark (lover’s sign) on a telegraph post.

  4. Report about a Christadelphian* conscientious objector giving training in engineering to prospective members of HM Forces.

  5. Report on a hotel keeper in Scotland thought to have German blood in him . . .

  The inquiries didn’t just come from the public. A Home Office minister, Osbert Peake, passed on information from a constituent about a German woman in Yorkshire who owned several caravans. ‘Ostensibly these are said to be let out to holidaymakers but they obviously provide possibilities of espionage, wireless etc.’ Someone in MI5 took this one seriously. ‘One of the centres of fifth column activities may be a caravan circus,’ an officer noted. ‘This was proved to be the case in Holland, where it was found that large holes had been dug beneath caravans to conceal radio transmitters and arms.’

  The police investigated, but found nothing suspicious. Another MI5 officer closed the file, expressing doubts about the idea of Dutch clowns and strongmen having been secret Nazis: ‘The very fact that a circus is always on the move makes the digging of holes under caravans seem absurd.’

  A thriller writer, Dennis Wheatley, produced a paper on possible German invasion tactics which was largely dismissed by General Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s chief military adviser, as ‘too far-fetched even for Hitler’, but a few points caught his eye. One idea was, he thought, ‘just the sort of fiendish trick that the Nazi mentality would conceive’. And he asked an aide, Duncan Sandys – Churchill’s son-in-law – to look into it. A month later, Sandys sent back a dry reply. ‘You asked me to enquire about measures to prevent the unleashing of prisoners, lunatics and wild beasts,’ he noted, before explaining that the first two issues had been considered and that the third, given the current ratio of soldiers to zoos, wasn’t a concern.

  All this activity was watched keenly from abroad. In an encrypted message sent back to Moscow at the start of September, Semyon Kremer, an intelligence officer at the Russian embassy in London, reported that ‘the police have found pieces of metal polished to a mirror finish round important objectives. An expert thinks they were scattered by the Fifth Column to help the Sausage-Dealers’** aircraft to get their bearings when they dropped light signals.’ MI5 had investigated these aluminium discs, which were found in a circle on the ground near an aircraft factory, and concluded they had been dropped by accident.

  But among the many false trails there were enough real cases – like Reginald Windsor’s group – to feed the Security Service’s strong belief that there were dangerous people in Britain who needed to be monitored.

  When it came to the Leeds group, MI5 considered the case settled: they had their men behind bars, and that was an end to the matter. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that Roberts had done too good a job: the Leeds group were over-qualified for regulation 18B. When the new Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, was asked to sign the detention orders, he had a question. Internment was intended for those who were judged dangerous, but against whom criminal charges couldn’t be brought. Given what these men had done, he observed, surely they should be put on trial? Could he see a full report of the case?

  The request, which arrived just before Christmas 1940, set off alarm bells at MI5. A prosecution would mean Roberts having to give evidence. Even if he did so in private, his identity would be obvious to the men on trial, and it would be impossible to stop them communicating that back to Charnley. ‘We shall inevitably lose Roberts as an agent,’ director Jasper Harker was warned.

  Harker consulted Liddell. ‘We must make up our minds at once as to whether we are prepared to sacrifice Mr Roberts’s future usefulness,’ he wrote.

  Liddell was firm. ‘I do not think that there is a case without Roberts,’ he replied, and it would be impossible to retain his anonymity in a trial. ‘His identity would be bound to leak out,’ he said, citing the case of ‘Miss X’, another Knight agent, who had helped catch three communist spies in 1938. After their trial, Miss X – real name Olga Gray – had been paid off. But while Gray had found the undercover life a strain – at Knight’s request she had worked as a secretary inside the Communist Party for much of the 1930s – Roberts showed no signs of wanting to be pensioned off.

  MI5 began preparing its lines of defence against the Home Office. The first was delay. It was the end of January before Harker sent the report on the Leeds case to Morrison – a month after the Home Secretary requested details ‘at the earliest possible moment’.

  As 1941 began, the war seemed to move to a new phase. There was no longer the prospect of imminent invasion, though that threat might return again in the spring. Britain was taking the battle to the enemy in Africa, advancing through Libya from Egypt, but it was beginning to sink in that the fight was going to be a long one.

  At home, MI5 had found itself drawn into an internal row within Charles de Gaulle’s Free French government in London. The British were shown letters which apparently revealed that Émile Muselier, the commander of the Free French naval forces, had been passing information to the Nazis’ puppet Vichy government. Although MI5 had doubts about the veracity of the documents, Churchill ordered Muselier’s arrest. To Liddell’s evident amusement, this was delayed as the French admiral had been ‘down at Windsor spending the night with a lady friend’.

  De Gaulle was furious, convinced that the letters had been forged by British intelligence in an effort to discredit Muselier. He was half-right: they had in fact been forged by a French intelligence officer, who confessed after h
e was arrested a week later.

  As Liddell shuttled between Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office, trying to disentangle the threads of this plot – for which de Gaulle remained determined to blame the British – he discussed the Leeds case with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Atkinson confirmed his view that there was ‘no hope whatsoever’ of a prosecution without Roberts giving evidence.

  When it was eventually sent, Harker’s note to Sir Alexander Maxwell, enclosing a report on the case, was brief. ‘I appreciate it may be thought desirable that publicity should be given to this case,’ he wrote. ‘A public trial would, however, inevitably destroy our agent’s usefulness. He is a much valued agent, and I should be most reluctant that this should happen.’

  Maxwell’s reply ran to three pages of typically elegant prose. The aim of such a trial, he said, would not be to expose the activities of ‘the more disreputable riff-raff which has been attracted to the British Union’ but to punish the guilty and to deter other ‘little pockets of scoundrels’. And he had a final point: just because under emergency war regulations the government had the power to lock people up without trial, it was ‘very important’ that MI5 shouldn’t ‘drift into the view’ that this was an alternative to ‘criminal prosecution against persons who engage in criminal activities’.

  Harker’s reply went through several drafts, each stronger than the last, before it got to Maxwell. He insisted he needed Roberts in order to monitor the remnants of the British Union. ‘It is owing to the fact that he has been working for us for over seven years in the party that he is able to do this,’ he wrote. ‘There is no other agent who is in such a unique position, and if we are deprived of his services we shall be working under serious disadvantages.’ And he raised a further point: ‘The disclosure of the agent’s identity might have undesirable consequences, so far as he personally is concerned, and an undesirable effect upon other agents.’