Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  By September 1940, Rothschild was running his own section of MI5, tasked with counter-sabotage. He was told he could have a small staff, and asked that they should include an engineer. He also brought in two women, to act as secretaries. Neither was inclined to let that be the limit of her ambitions.

  As it happened, they were both Tesses: Teresa Mayor and Theresa Clay. Mayor hadn’t been Rothschild’s first choice. He’d wanted her flatmate Patricia Rawdon-Smith, but she suggested Mayor instead. For the unhappily married Rothschild, there was an appeal to her suggestion: one of the few women who had studied at Cambridge, Mayor had been known as an ‘unearthly beauty’. Her friends called her Tess, or sometimes ‘Red Tess’ – as a student, she’d flirted with communism.

  Tess Mayor in 1933

  Theresa Clay in 1938

  Clay was a friend of Rothschild’s sister Miriam, and like her a biologist specialising in parasites – in Clay’s case, lice. Another biologist wasn’t particularly what the team needed, but Clay, like Rothschild, would be able to speak science unto scientists. She also had another advantage as far as Rothschild was concerned: impeccable intelligence connections. She was in an intense relationship with Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, then Britain’s most famous spy.

  The 62-year-old Meinertzhagen had made a name for himself two decades earlier, during the Great War, fighting against German-Turkish forces in Palestine. Every schoolboy knew the tale of how, as an intelligence officer in 1917, he’d conceived and executed one of the great deception operations of the war. On his horse, he’d set out towards the Turkish lines carrying a haversack containing papers suggesting the British would make a feint on the enemy’s eastern flank before attacking in force in the west.

  Meinertzhagen rode within sight of an enemy patrol, and then pretended to flee. When they fired, he pretended to be hit, slumping in the saddle and dropping the haversack and his rifle, before spurring his horse away.

  The Turks found the plans, were fooled, and the British attack, sooner than expected and from an unexpected direction, was a total success. Jerusalem was captured within two months, and Meinertzhagen was a hero.

  The only problem with this story was that it was a lie. There had been a satchel full of documents and Meinertzhagen had been involved in the production of its contents, but the operation hadn’t been his idea, and he hadn’t been the man on horseback. The Turks also disputed that they had believed the ruse.

  Few knew the truth: the man who had been the brains behind the operation had been killed in action the following year, and the one who’d dropped the bag had stayed in intelligence, and so was not going to make a public fuss. Meinertzhagen exploited this to claim credit, and vigorously propagate the myth of the haversack.

  Meinertzhagen’s word was questionable in other areas, too. His main preoccupation was ornithology: he was an enthusiastic explorer and collector of birds, a crack shot who brought back specimens from his expeditions across the globe. But he’d been banned from the British Museum for stealing specimens.

  Meinertzhagen was an expert at deception, but not in the way people believed. He was a fantasist who told stories about his own acts of daring that lay somewhere between exaggeration and fraud.

  The precise nature of his relationship with Clay was also a mystery. In 1940, she was 29, less than half his age, and had known him most of her life. After his wife, and the mother of his children, died in a mysterious shooting, Clay became his travelling companion, nanny, and assistant. She didn’t share his house, but hers was linked to his by an interior door. She was undoubtedly devoted to him, and may have assisted him in his ornithological frauds. The only person recorded as having had the nerve to ask whether she was sharing his bed was Victor Rothschild. Meinertzhagen told him to mind his own business.**

  *

  Counter-sabotage turned out to mean bombs. Not the ones dropped from the air, but ones smuggled on to ships bound to Britain from supposedly neutral ports. Rothschild complained of the ‘benevolent’ attitude taken by Spain towards the German secret service, which allowed the enemy to bribe Spanish dockers to facilitate their work. Germany was trying to starve Britain into submission, and to that end, destroying a ship’s cargo could be as effective as sinking the vessel with a torpedo. So their engineers devised ingenious ways to secrete the explosives: flexible explosives disguised as raincoats, with the detonators concealed in their hangers. Or inside thermos flasks, hidden under an inch and a half of hot tea.

  If one of these hidden German bombs was discovered, either as a result of good security or because it had failed to go off, it was Rothschild’s job to study it. But first, it had to be made safe, and this too was a job Rothschild took upon himself. His years dissecting the eggs of frogs and fish had given him a steady hand, and he found the work more exciting than terrifying. ‘When one takes a bomb or a fuse to pieces, one really is so busy that one doesn’t have time to be frightened,’ he said. ‘One’s also very, very interested. Some of them are beautifully made.’

  The first bomb Rothschild tackled did, he conceded, make him ‘rather nervous’. The only other person to have attempted that type of fuse had lost an eye and an arm when it exploded. In the absence of more sophisticated protection, Rothschild defused the bomb while kneeling behind an armchair, hoping that if it went off he would at least be able to save his eyes.

  Even bomb disposal he did as only a Rothschild could. One day, shopping at the Cartier store on Bond Street, he was asked about his work by a staff member. Was it difficult? Was it frightening? Rothschild gave his usual self-effacing reply, and then added that there was one problem: his tools weren’t really up to the job. ‘It was difficult to get hold of the first-class screwdrivers that were necessary to undo the extremely small screws in the delay mechanisms.’ It was important, he remarked, ‘that the screwdrivers should not slip’. A month later, to his delighted surprise, the company sent him a ‘superb’ set of seven screwdrivers, ‘including some marvellously small ones’.

  Rothschild’s job wasn’t simply to defuse the bombs but to understand them, so as to guide others in dealing with them. He was, typically, impatient with the draughtsmen who were supposed to be producing diagrams of the devices: the images they produced were too technical for a layman to understand. When he vented his frustration to Inspector Donald Fish, a detective who had been seconded to MI5, the policeman suggested that his son Laurence, a self-taught graphic designer, might be able to do the job. Laurence had joined the RAF in the hope of becoming a pilot, but having failed the eye test, he was peeling potatoes when Rothschild tracked him down. Presented with a bomb fuse, he was enthusiastic: ‘If you can explain to me how it works, I think I can draw it.’ The result, Rothschild said ‘was beyond my most optimistic expectations’ – a picture both practical and beautiful.

  Laurence Fish’s diagram of a German 21-day fuse

  For the rest of the war, Fish Junior was regularly called in to illustrate MI5 reports on German technology: a fake bar of chocolate designed to blow up seven seconds after it was opened, or a mess tin concealing a bomb under sausages, mash and peas. If Rothschild appreciated him, he was occasionally careless with his safety: one device that Fish took home to study, a bomb disguised as a cigarette box, spent the night under his bed before he discovered that it was still live.

  Fish’s sketch of a bomb disguised as a chocolate bar

  Then there was the problem of the prime minister. Churchill was regularly sent gifts, mainly cigars, by well-wishers. Rothschild was asked to take a view of the dangers. He concluded that it would be ‘too easy’ to coat one end of a cigar with ‘cyanide or better (in one sense) botulinus toxin’ or to hide a small high-explosive charge inside, to be detonated when the cigar was lit. The safest thing would have been to destroy them all, but Churchill was very much inclined to consume them, taking, Rothschild noted, ‘obvious pleasure’ from personal danger. Rothschild calculated statistically what proportion of the cigars he needed to test to be confident they weren’t
dangerous. After each box was X-rayed, he would take his sample, grind it up in saline and inject the result into mice. Churchill was ‘amused by the experiments but displeased by the delay’.

  A more difficult problem was presented by a French general who accosted Churchill as he walked across Parliament Square and presented him with a Virginia ham. Churchill was delighted, and announced he would have it for breakfast the next morning. This caused panic among those tasked with his protection: how could they test the gift in time, and without the prime minister realising? In an ‘intricate surgical operation’, a very thin slice was removed without disturbing the ham’s surface. But there was no time for the usual tests. After a ‘high pressure conference’, some of London’s best scientific minds came up with a solution: they fed the slice to the Medical Research Council’s cat, and then watched it closely. When it survived, Churchill was allowed his breakfast.

  But there was the occasional compensation for the prime minister’s testiness: when Churchill was given a case of 1798 Armagnac, Rothschild insisted on a thirteenth bottle, which he and his colleagues took it upon themselves to test.

  Amid such glamour, the original purpose of Rothschild’s hiring wasn’t forgotten. He and his team set about understanding Britain’s defence manufacturers, looking at how they related, and their weaknesses. They assessed vulnerabilities, and identified people who shouldn’t be allowed near sensitive installations. The work quickly led them to develop deep suspicions about one company in particular, a household name that MI5 had long believed was a cover for sinister activities.

  * The exact timing is unclear. Kenneth Rose, Elusive Rothschild (2001), says ‘a year or so’. Hannah Rothschild, The Baroness (2012), relying on Miriam’s vivid recollection, says Victor was fifteen.

  ** In a coincidence that reflected the tight circles in which Britain’s leading families moved, and from which the intelligence agencies were recruited, the two Tesses were second cousins: Meinertzhagen was Mayor’s uncle. There were more family intelligence connections: Rothschild’s sister Miriam worked among the Bletchley Park codebreakers, along with Mayor’s brother Andreas.

  6

  ‘Agents in every country in the world’

  For nearly a century, the Siemens company had been at the cutting edge of technology. In 1848, it began building the first long-distance telegraph line in Europe, from Frankfurt to Berlin. Its founder, Werner Siemens, had a combination of business acumen and an eye for how an invention could be improved. His engineers built a telegraph line from London to Calcutta, and laid another from Ireland to America. Werner developed a dynamo, allowing the generation of electricity with enough power for industrial applications. That in turn allowed the company to build an electric tram service in Berlin, and an underground electric railway in Budapest. And he made innovations as an employer, too. He offered profit-sharing for staff, a nine-hour working day and a generous pension fund. His brother Wilhelm, meanwhile, settled in Britain, and built the firm up there. The business flourished: by the time of Werner’s death in 1892, his company was on its way to employing 5,000 staff.

  That growth continued after his death. Despite losing most of its overseas assets after the First World War, by the mid-1920s the firm was one of the top five electrical businesses in the world, with Werner’s son Carl at the helm. By the start of hostilities in 1939, it made everything from household appliances to railways, a success story in its founder’s image.

  None of that impressed MI5 very much. At the start of the war Jack Curry, the officer who had taken Roberts under his wing, began looking at Siemens. It was a large German company that was operating in Britain, and operating in some highly sensitive fields, particularly supplying machine tools to other manufacturers. Could its staff be trusted? Curry quickly realised that to check it would be a large job, and he was already too busy. He was in his fifties, and had had a serious eye operation the year before, so he seized his moment when Rothschild complained of having too little to do. The scientist was handed MI5’s thick file on Siemens.

  It dated back to 1914, when a Member of Parliament had received an anonymous letter from Chile. Signed ‘Britannicus’, the letter claimed that the local Siemens branch, ‘although professedly an English firm, is the rendezvous of all the Germans in the place, and is said on good authority to possess a clandestine wireless installation which has been used to communicate with their cruisers on this coast’.

  The reports continued to trickle in throughout the war. In 1916, MI5 was told that the company’s technical manager in Madrid was, along with his wife, suspected of spying. By 1917, Siemens was classed as an ‘enemy firm’, and having worked there was sufficient grounds to refuse a visa to a Norwegian consulate clerk.

  As the Great War ended, reports came in of Siemens staff behaving in suspicious ways all over the world. The company was receiving letters from the Dutch East Indies written to a cover address in The Hague. An employee in Stockholm was in touch with German agents there. Two of its employees in Japan were said to have been ordered to Moscow by the German admiralty. They arrived in July, but left the same month, and were suspected of travelling under false names, with the goal of committing ‘sabotage outrages in China or Japan’.

  By this point, the firm was associated within MI5 with all kinds of wickedness. It was noted that it had managed to regain control of its factories in communist Russia, and in 1921 it was suspected of channelling weapons from the Bolsheviks to Irish republicans.

  During the 1920s, when a slimmed-down MI5 was preoccupied with turf wars and the threat of communism, it had little time for Siemens, but as war with Germany approached again in the 1930s, intelligence agencies around the world began looking into the firm.

  This wasn’t irrational. If a country wanted to spy on industrial targets, an electronics company would be a good place from which to do it. Engineers working for German companies including Siemens had ‘obtained direct or indirect access in the normal course of their work to Navy, Army and Air Force establishments and re-armament factories’, an MI5 memo on the subject noted in April 1940. ‘Even if his visit to a factory is not directly concerned with the production side of the work, any trained engineer would obviously acquire important information about its exact location, the physical structure of the buildings and the general type of the work carried on there.’

  Rothschild and his team were particularly impressed by a recently published book, Inside the Gestapo, written under the pseudonym Hansjürgen Koehler by a man claiming to be a former Nazi agent. It asserted that ‘all German subjects travelling abroad are forced and obliged to carry on industrial espionage on Germany’s behalf’ and claimed that the Nazis had ‘a huge filing system of most of the factories of the world’, which told them ‘the points which were most vulnerable and could be used for putting the factory out of working order’. The book explained that ‘a handful of sand suffices to make a sensitive dynamo or turbine useless for a long time. In other places a small detonator is enough to start a terrible fire.’

  But Rothschild didn’t need to turn to sensationalist publications such as Koehler’s to find proof that German citizens were willing to spy for the Fatherland. He only needed to look across the Atlantic, to a case that showed both the reality of the threat, and the specific focus on factories.

  In 1938, MI5 had received a tip-off from Dundee. Mary Curran, a cleaning woman, had found suspicious maps in the hairdressers where she worked. One was hidden behind the till, and another was concealed under the linoleum on the shop’s floor. Encouraged by her husband, Curran went to the police, who were sceptical. Curran, however, persisted, and contacted the Security Service. The owner of the shop, 51-year-old Jessie Jordan, had recently moved back to Scotland, the country of her birth, from Germany, where she’d lived for the past three decades. MI5 had known about her, but not her shop. They began intercepting her post, and quickly realised that she was acting as a clearing house for letters from spies in the United States to their masters in Berlin.
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  Liddell passed this information to his American counterparts, who identified Jordan’s correspondent as a 26-year-old US Army deserter, Guenther Rumrich. When he was arrested, he led the FBI to his fellow spies, including Ignatz Griebl, a New York gynaecologist. Griebl in turn identified Nazi agents working on the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter and at the Curtiss-Wright aircraft factory in Buffalo. ‘In every armament factory in America, we have a spy,’ Griebl boasted under interrogation. ‘In every shipyard we have an agent. Your country cannot plan a warship, design a fighting plane, develop a new instrument or device that we do not know of it at once!’

  This was a huge exaggeration, but it served to alert the American authorities to the dangers they faced. The FBI agent leading the case, Leon Turrou, wrote a bestselling book on the back of it, Nazi Spies in America, which inspired a 1939 film, Confessions of a Nazi Spy – the first American movie in which the words ‘Adolf Hitler’ were uttered. Neither dwelt on the fact that the FBI had bungled the case, allowing several of the spies, including Griebl, to escape the country – a failure for which Turrou had been dismissed from the Bureau.

  For MI5, the case had a clear lesson: ‘The accused showed it was quite natural for them to work for the Fatherland against the country in which they had made their homes.’

  All Germans were suspect, and Germany was using engineers to do its spying. And the German engineering company Siemens had an international network that any intelligence organisation would have envied. In 1939, it had 26,000 employees abroad, working for around 200 subsidiaries.

  Rothschild leafed through report after report of dubious activity associated with the company. Koehler’s book claimed, in passing, that the Siemens Madrid office had been used by Germany to process aerial photo-reconnaissance pictures during the Spanish Civil War. France’s Deuxième Bureau listed Siemens employees in Cairo as Nazi agents. The same was reported of its staff in Panama, Athens and Singapore. There was suspicious behaviour from the company’s agents in Tehran, Argentina and India. In 1939, a decrypted telegram had led Liddell to write to the Commissioner of the South African police warning that the company’s workshop in Johannesburg ‘may be earmarked for some ulterior purposes’. To protect the secret of Britain’s ability to read the German Alpha code, Liddell had attributed this information to ‘a source whom we consider very reliable, but who wishes to remain unnamed’.