Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  Irma Stapleton had been born in Saxony in 1904. She’d moved to England in 1931 with her second husband, an Irish sailor. It was an unhappy union. Irma drifted from job to job, working as a typist, and took to petty crime, picking up three theft convictions. When war came, she claimed to be Swiss, rather than German. But this didn’t mean she was any less loyal to the Fatherland.

  ‘Look at the Queen, flaunting her necklace round and shaking hands with bombed-out people,’ she had told John at an earlier meeting. ‘With a pearl necklace, mind you! Look at all those poor saps in the underground shelters, all these people huddled there. The big people going to America, letting the poor fish fight for themselves. It is not the same in Germany. We will break their necks.’

  She hated the British. ‘I am so disgusted with everything they do. Everything they do is so low. You see people enjoying themselves in night clubs. Whereas in Germany the whole nation is organised.’

  In September 1941, Irma started her third job in two years, with the munitions company C G Wade’s, which was busy supplying ammunition casings for the war. One of her colleagues there was a fellow German, a refugee named Helmut Husgen. In conversation with him one day she poured out her true feelings, saying repeatedly that she would do ‘anything’ for her country. In reply, Husgen hinted that he was in touch with the Abwehr. Stapleton was enthusiastic, and asked what information they wanted. Troop movements? Shipping movements? She was sure she could find them out.

  Husgen said he would pass on her offer of help, and he was as good as his word. But unfortunately for Stapleton, the only spies he was in contact with were British ones. Husgen wrote to a man he knew in MI5.

  At the start of November, Husgen took Stapleton to the Café Royal on Regent Street, to meet a man he introduced as John Brunner. This man described himself as a freelance journalist, but Irma was left in no doubt that he was a German agent.

  They met again four days later, in the Cumberland Hotel. Irma told John that her marriage had been ‘an absolute failure’. Her husband had ‘no backbone at all’. She was unimpressed with the romancing capabilities of the average Englishman: ‘He goes to pubs and takes a girl for a drink and tries to be fresh.’

  She knew that people working for the German Secret Service took ‘mighty risks’, but thinking of the dangers faced by German soldiers, ‘it is the least we can do’. She explained how she had persuaded the chaps in the drawing office to show her technical diagrams: ‘I gave them the glad eye – and the rest of it.’

  She suggested she could sabotage the place where she worked, slowing production a little, or even burning the whole place down.

  She said it was just as well she didn’t have a gun, or she would go out and shoot Jews ‘wholesale’. They were ‘dirty’, ‘slimy beasts’ who were ‘always fermenting trouble by trying to make money’.

  As for Churchill, ‘I would be willing to sacrifice my life to kill him,’ she told John.

  The second case came a fortnight later, when Eric Roberts took a break from fighting off Dorothy Wegener’s advances to meet a soldier in Birmingham. Late on a winter evening in a dingy hotel room, he was talking to Gunner Philip Jackson of the 163rd Battery, Royal Artillery.

  Jackson was committing treason. He was sick of the war, sick of the corruption, sick of ‘Churchill and his rotten gang’. And the gunner had a plan he hoped would boot them out and result in a swift peace.

  Jackson had first come to MI5’s notice in 1936, when he applied to work for them. He was thirty years old at the time, doing casual work as a railway porter in Nottingham, when he volunteered to be an undercover agent exposing saboteurs. ‘A chap like me accustomed to working men and their ways,’ he wrote, ‘would be much more likely to obtain facts than your agents.’ He didn’t get a reply, and MI5 thought no more about him until 1941, when he applied for another job. This time, it was with the Germans.

  He was now a gunner in an anti-aircraft battery in the Midlands, and he hated it. So he visited the Spanish embassy in London, and then, when they refused to see him, he wrote, asking to be put in touch with Germany. ‘Civilians and military personal [sic] of all services are on the verge of mutiny,’ he wrote. ‘It doesn’t need bombing or invasion to win the war. If I could get to Germany via Eire I could tell the people the Truth over the radio and the government would soon fall.’

  How exactly this letter came into MI5’s possession was something the Security Service didn’t wish to discuss. The official internal explanation was that a British employee of the embassy was so horrified by its contents that he had taken a copy of the letter and passed it via an intermediary to MI5. Even this was a violation of protocol, but the truth was probably far more explosive.

  Diplomats and their paperwork were supposed to be off-limits for spying. But in practice the vital rule was not to get caught. MI5 had a Home Office Warrant on the Spanish embassy, enabling it to read its post before it even arrived. Meanwhile Roberts’s friend Jimmy Dickson was one of those responsible for getting secrets out of embassies. One of his embassy contacts was in charge of burning sensitive paperwork. Instead, this source would put some newspaper into the furnace, and then meet Dickson in a pub and hand over the documents. At various points during the war, both diplomatic staff and servants at the Spanish embassy were listed as MI5 sources. Even the diplomatic bags were opened, with couriers being delayed and distracted while their pouches were covertly opened and the contents photographed. The sensitivity of the operation was reflected in its codename – XXX, or ‘Triplex’.*

  The problem was that although Jackson’s letter was enough to court-martial him, MI5 couldn’t use it as evidence without revealing how they’d got it, an act that risked both blowing a vital source and destroying the basis on which diplomacy was conducted around the world.

  There was a further issue: the letter had been copied, but not intercepted: the embassy employee had passed it to his superiors, and it was entirely possible that it had actually made its way to Germany. In that case, German intelligence might attempt to contact Jackson. Jock Whyte, the MI5 officer handling the case, proposed arresting Jackson quickly while he was away from his troop, and then seeing if anyone came looking for him.

  Whyte was a punctilious man, who minuted every conversation, and was careful always to send thank-you notes. He had a poor relationship with his boss, Liddell. Whyte thought Liddell didn’t make enough use of him, and Liddell thought Whyte wasn’t much use. Describing Whyte’s interrogation technique, Liddell wrote: ‘Jock had a habit of putting all his cards on the table face up.’

  Fortunately for MI5, Roberts was a rather more subtle interrogator. Under the name ‘Browne’, he had been corresponding with Jackson for several weeks, but this was the first time they had met. Having told Jackson to sit, Roberts got to the point: he was, he said, ‘extremely suspicious’ of the soldier. ‘I cannot afford to take any risks,’ he said.

  Jackson replied that he had his own doubts about the meeting: ‘I am thinking this may be a police trap.’

  ‘There is always that risk,’ Roberts replied, smiling, then jokingly opened the wardrobe to show there wasn’t anyone hiding in there. He invited Jackson to look under the bed. The tension between the two men was broken.

  ‘I don’t want to be suspicious,’ said Jackson apologetically, ‘but I’m taking a big risk.’

  ‘My risk is greater than yours,’ Roberts told him gently.

  Jackson took the plunge. ‘Is it possible through your organisation for me to get across to Germany?’ he asked. ‘It sounds bloody silly, but I hope to get to Germany and do a broadcast instead of the fellow who is doing it at the moment.’

  Roberts was silent. Jackson continued. ‘There is a hell of a lot of disaffection in the army,’ he said. Germany should drop its current propaganda radio star William Joyce – the fascist Roberts had reported on years before who was now known universally as Lord Haw-Haw – and ‘get a fellow who has been in the army and who has seen the army in its rotten forms. It would
do more good than all the bombing.’

  Roberts’s reply wasn’t encouraging: ‘Could you give us any information that would be of use to us?’

  ‘I believe I could give you details of gun-sites,’ Jackson replied reluctantly.

  ‘That is the sort of information.’

  ‘So that your planes could fly over and bomb them?’

  ‘I think you had better leave that to us.’

  For an hour and a half, the two men danced around the issue. Jackson wanted to be a star defector, and didn’t see the point in helping the Germans bomb Britain. Roberts, in character as Browne, wanted him to be a source of intelligence.

  He got his way. By the time Jackson left, he had promised to fly in a German bomber raid over England and take part in any invasion. In the shorter term, he’d agreed to locate fuel dumps and anti-aircraft gun emplacements, and to tell Germany about the ground-locating radar systems they used.

  ‘Very, very satisfactory,’ Roberts observed, and offered to walk Jackson to New Street station.

  As with the Irma Stapleton case, detectives had been listening in the next room. Jackson was arrested and sentenced to death at a court martial the following year. However, he was saved from execution by a neat twist – killing him would have publicised the case, and with MI5 still uncertain whether his letter had been passed to Germany, potentially revealing Triplex, this was very much not in their interests. In 1943, he was moved to Broadmoor mental hospital.

  These cases explained why Liddell continued to worry about his fellow citizens. While it was true that MI5 hadn’t found any evidence of the feared Fifth Column, it did keep finding people who wanted to be Fifth Columnists. How many more such men and women were there out there that they didn’t know about?

  As Liddell considered this problem, a solution was emerging in the minds of Rothschild, Clay and Roberts: if the Fifth Column didn’t exist, perhaps they should set it up.

  * More than seven decades later, this operation remains unacknowledged by MI5. The parts of Liddell’s diary that probably refer to it are censored.

  9

  ‘A masterful and somewhat masculine woman’

  Guy Liddell spent Christmas 1941 at Rothschild’s estate at Tring. The day was marred by the news that Hong Kong had fallen, the latest in a series of advances the Japanese had made across the Pacific in less than three weeks. Still, there were causes for hope: a year earlier, Britain had stood almost alone. Now it had powerful new allies in the USA and the USSR. Germany’s advance on Moscow, which had seemed close to triumph at the start of the month, appeared to have stalled.

  In January 1942, Rothschild, Clay and Roberts went to see Liddell. They felt they had taken the relationship with Dorothy Wegener far enough, but they believed that ‘Jack King’ still had potential. Now they were feeling their way towards a new phase of their operation, one which would allow Roberts to work on a much larger canvas.

  Also present was Thomas Robertson, known to everyone in MI5 as ‘Tar’, for his initials. A cheerful Scot who had found his niche in MI5 after unimpressive stints in the Army and in banking, he was in charge of the Double Cross operation.

  The previous November, Rothschild had helped him out of a tight spot. Double Cross was developing into an MI5 industry, with a team of German double agents transmitting information back to their masters under the watchful eyes of MI5 officers. Their activities were coordinated by the XX Committee, which was tasked with creating the correct mixture of truth and lies to convince the Abwehr of their reliability while misleading them in key areas.

  Although much of this work was about choosing intelligence to send back to Germany, some of the double agents had been sent to Britain to act as saboteurs. Their credibility relied on them carrying out some sabotage. This had been the reasoning behind Operation Guy Fawkes. In an effort to convince Germany that a half-Norwegian saboteur they’d sent was doing his job, MI5 had set about blowing up a food store in Wealdstone, north-west London.

  It turned out that fake sabotage was quite hard work. The blaze had to be sufficiently impressive to get reported in newspapers, but not so big as to be dangerous. The nightwatchmen, who were sleeping on duty, had to be woken and lured away. A passing policeman on his bicycle threatened to upset the whole plan by arresting the MI5 officers, and had to be warned off by a superior officer. And that was before Scotland Yard began investigating.

  The bicycling policeman had managed to put the blaze out before quite the planned level of damage was caused. That meant that part of the bomb used to start the fire survived. The police recognised it as a type used by the Special Operations Executive, Churchill’s behind-the-lines sabotage organisation. Inspector Ted Greeno, the scourge of London’s criminals, went to see the commandos, to ask why a device built for blowing up Nazi targets in France had been set off in a food dump in north-west London.

  The Double Cross secret – that Germany’s spies had all been turned by the British – was too precious to risk divulging to an ordinary detective, even one as famous as Greeno. Instead, MI5 offered him their assistance. They had a counter-sabotage section, headed by the man who was now the country’s foremost expert on the subject: did the inspector want to speak to Lord Rothschild? The inspector did indeed, and may have had suspicions that something was up – according to Liddell, he asked ‘some searching questions’. Rothschild, in turn, suggested that the best person to look into this act of arson was himself. The bomb the Security Service had set off would be investigated by the Security Service.

  Now it was Rothschild who needed a favour from Robertson. The operation he was proposing for Roberts wasn’t just a shift of focus. It was a jump in scale. The people he would be dealing with would be far more dangerous than Dorothy Wegener and her friends. And it would not be for a single meeting, as with Gunner Jackson, but for numerous meetings over months or even years. In making his pitch, Rothschild wanted allies in the room. Tar Robertson, who was running MI5’s largest long-term operation, had a valuable perspective to offer.

  As Rothschild explained to the meeting, the idea for Roberts’s new role was driven by a new contact he’d made, someone in whom his department sensed an exciting opportunity.

  Marita Perigoe was born Mary Brahe in London in July 1914, just before the outbreak of the Great War. Rothschild described her as ‘of mixed Swedish and German origin’, probably because she had allowed her fascist friends to believe this, alluding vaguely to family members in Germany. In fact her mother was the Australian composer May Brahe, then famous for writing popular songs including ‘Bless This House’ and ‘I Passed By Your Window’. The first was reported to be a favourite of President Franklin Roosevelt, and the second was sufficiently lodged in the public mind to have been adapted at the start of the war by satirists mocking the blackout.

  The identity of Marita’s father was a more interesting question. May married Carl Brahe in Melbourne in November 1903, a month before the birth of their first son, Alec. Another son, Douglas, was born in 1905. In 1912, May, on the advice of her publishers, travelled to London to build her career as a composer, leaving her husband and sons behind. At the start of 1914, she returned to Sydney, pregnant. Frederick was apparently reconciled to her condition, because the family travelled together to London, and when Marita was born, Carl was named on the birth certificate as her father.

  The Brahe name was well known in Australia. Carl’s father had been a survivor of the 1860 Burke and Wills expedition, which travelled 2,000 miles north from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Of the nineteen men who set out, seven died, including both leaders. But Marita got little chance to know the man registered as her father. After war broke out, he joined up and in 1919, shortly after his return, he was killed in a motor accident.

  May stayed in London and remarried in 1922, to George Morgan, an actor she’d first met years earlier, in Australia. Three years later they had a son. Marita meanwhile was developing as an artist, and at the age of seventeen she enrolled at the Slade Scho
ol of Art, where she studied for two years, earning indifferent results. Perhaps realising that she wasn’t going to make it as an artist in her own right, she studied picture restoration. Her mother was now earning enough in royalties to support her as she took courses at a series of London art schools.

  Photograph believed to be of Marita Brahe, 1933

  When the war came, May back headed to Australia with her youngest boy – her two older sons had already returned. She left her husband and daughter behind.

  None of that was known to MI5. What they did know was that Marita was now a convinced fascist. In 1939, she was living with her friend Eileen Gleave, who was sufficiently closely involved in the British Union of Fascists that MI5 already had a file on her at the start of 1940. When war broke out, Marita and Eileen had debated leaving the country, but, Marita said later, ‘We didn’t think the British public could be so gullible.’ Risking British lives to protect Poland? ‘They won’t fall for it,’ Marita told herself. When it became clear that she’d misjudged her fellow citizens, she tried to get to Ireland, but it took too long for her to get her money together, and by then transit controls had been imposed.

  Instead, in early 1940, she had married Bernard Perigoe, four years her junior, and another enthusiastic fascist. They rented a room from Gleave in Jesmond Avenue, Wembley, north-west London.

  Gleave had just turned thirty, though she told people she was in her early twenties. She was a little over five feet tall, with dark, wavy hair and, according to one report, ‘attractive appearance’. Estranged from her husband, she’d begun a relationship with a fellow fascist, Ron Stokes. The two couples set themselves up to oppose the war, by democratic means or otherwise.