Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  That morning, she said, she’d had no idea that Gleave was going to suggest anything like this, still less that she might find herself a signed-up German spy before dinnertime.

  ‘I must say, you’ve taken it very calmly,’ Roberts told her.

  ‘I think when I come to get in the train tonight and think it over, I shall probably be a bit alarmed for a bit,’ Brown replied. ‘But you can depend on me.’

  Gleave offered her the advice of someone who had now been a conscious Nazi agent for several months. ‘You’ll feel much better when you find that you survive, that the weeks go on, and you’re still alive.’

  It was time for Brown to head back to Brighton. They discussed which bus she should get to Victoria for the train home, and whether there was anywhere else in Brighton that the Luftwaffe ought to be bombing. She thought mainly the guns at the grammar school. ‘I wouldn’t mind if they got hit at all,’ she said. ‘Because just opposite to them is the National Fire Service. I wouldn’t mind if they got bombed at all. They’re awful people.’

  ‘Well,’ said Roberts. ‘We’ll do our best to oblige.’

  Afterwards, he recorded his disbelief at the afternoon’s events. ‘So far as I could tell here was a citizen of responsible character, capable of forming a sane and balanced judgement on her country’s affairs and of no ill will towards those who are doing their best to carry out their duty,’ he wrote. ‘However within the space of an hour, without the offer of any financial or other inducement, nor pressure of any description, Nancy Brown was doing her best to tell a man she supposed to be a German agent what little she knew of the disposition of armed forces, war factories, etc in the Brighton area. The fact that the items of information volunteered might have resulted in the deaths of many people counted for nothing.’

  Brown was as good as her word. At the start of that November, she handed Roberts four hand-drawn maps showing the location of targets in Brighton that she’d picked out for the Luftwaffe. They included the fire station, ammunition dumps, places where tanks were concealed, and the Army Records Office – where 600 women worked, according to Brown.

  Nancy Brown’s sketches of targets for the Luftwaffe in Brighton

  Had Roberts genuinely been a German agent, he could have looked with satisfaction on the fruits of his first six months as a Gestapo man: he had some strange recruits, it was true, but he also had some who were enthusiastic and able and who could be directed into positions where they could be truly effective. From the perspective of an MI5 man, the results were more worrying, but the operation was still proving effective, and identifying people who were prepared to take serious risks for Germany – any of them could have been arrested for saying the things they’d said to him.

  But not everyone was so pleased with the Fifth Column.

  * One of the poem’s other themes, that the English preferred the pub to revolution – ‘a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale’ – could also have been written for Roberts, whose years undercover had left him with a contempt for political extremism on both wings; communists, he said, were ‘deadly boring’, and ‘even bloodier than the fascists’.

  ** There was also a Nancy Brown among the names of members of Captain Ramsay’s Right Club. That list didn’t specify which of the fascist Nancy Browns this was.

  11

  ‘Such methods were necessary’

  ‘The whole of the Rothschild family is engaged in collecting something or other,’ Victor once observed. ‘They seem to have got a collecting gene. Some of them collect fans, some of them collect Limoges enamel. They collect everything.’

  Victor had the bug, too. Before the war he had collected books, acquiring thousands of eighteenth-century editions. It was an elite passion, the kind that only people with an abundance of time and money could pursue.

  Now he was beginning the ultimate collection, one that no one else in the world was in the position to build up, one that enjoyed a Top Secret classification. Victor Rothschild was collecting fascists.

  He pursued his new hobby with the same rigour that his father and uncle had devoted to their butterflies. His small department, B1C, had its own card index of targets, with its own coding system, separate to MI5’s. Roberts’s reports were split up into paragraphs on each member of the Fifth Column, and these were then rewritten to remove clues to their origin and put into each person’s file in the official MI5 registry, referring simply to ‘Source SR’ – the codename Roberts was using now that his days as Maxwell Knight’s man inside the BUF were behind him.

  The people in Rothschild’s files fell broadly into two categories. First, there was the small group of conscious agents, who knew – or thought they knew – Jack King’s true allegiance. They not only gathered information themselves but passed on information from and about the second, much larger group – a network of unconscious agents judged by the Fifth Column to be likely to be useful to Germany.

  Right from the start of Roberts’s formal employment with MI5 in 1940, he had faced the question of whether his undercover work amounted to provocation. With the Leeds fascists, the matter had been simplified when Windsor confessed to the arson attempt on Dawson’s shop, which took place before he had ever met Roberts. With Gunner Philip Jackson, his letter to the Spanish embassy, even if it couldn’t be used directly, showed that he had made the first move. But as ‘Jack King’, Roberts was swimming in murkier waters.

  Had there been a Siemens spy ring to pick up his trailed coat and recruit him, his actions with Dorothy Wegener and the tank blueprint would have been entirely justifiable as a way to identify it. But instead, Roberts had found himself setting up his own spy ring.

  Summarising the case in July 1942, Rothschild referred obliquely to ‘certain unfortunate events in another case’ which had had ‘bad psychological effects’ on MI5 agents. This may have been a reference to the Ben Greene case, whose ripples were still being felt across the service.

  Ben Greene, cousin of the novelist Graham Greene, was an ardent pacifist who had found himself drawn into fascist circles by his opposition to the war. In 1940, Maxwell Knight had been asked to investigate him, and had sent one of his agents, Harold Kurtz, to speak to him.

  Kurtz was the man who would trap Molly Hiscox and Norah Briscoe the next year, but his actions in Greene’s case were less clear-cut. He reported that the pacifist had made a series of treasonous remarks, and, this being the height of the invasion scare, Greene was arrested and interned.

  Unlike many of those who were locked up, Greene had friends and resources to fight his corner, and a plausible argument that he had been framed. His case became a cause célèbre for those who viewed internment as a step too far for a democratic state, even one fighting a war such as this. In 1941, his brother Edward tricked Kurtz into going to a meeting with his lawyer, who proceeded to grill him on his previous statements. The answers he gave were evasive, and serious doubts were cast on the case against Greene. At the start of 1942, Greene was released, amid criticism of Kurtz’s evidence. MI5 stood by their man and their argument that Greene had been a danger, but the case threw a shadow over Knight.

  Eric Roberts was a much more circumspect and reliable agent than Harold Kurtz, but he was also doing a much more difficult job. Though Rothschild blithely asserted in July 1942 that the way the Fifth Column operation was being run would ‘obviate any possibility’ of Roberts being accused of being a provocateur, other officers inside MI5 had severe doubts.

  The leading initial critic was Edward Blanshard Stamp, Roberts’s adversary from their days together at Blenheim. F3, the section of MI5 that Stamp was in, was supposed to be in charge of monitoring fascists, so when Rothschild wrote up the progress of the Fifth Column operation in July 1942, he was copied in. His response was to try to tear the operation to pieces. He was deeply sceptical of Rothschild’s plan, and knowing that it relied on Roberts’s good judgement did nothing to ease his doubts. He suggested it should be shut down at once.

  Worried
that their masters would agree with Stamp, Rothschild and Clay went to Liddell to plead their case. Liddell had been back in Britain for just under three weeks, having spent June in the USA and Canada. Most of the trip had been work, liaising with his counterpart agencies. He had also taken a week’s holiday: his four children now lived in California with Calypso, his ex-wife, and her stepbrother.

  But Liddell kept his turmoil private. His job was to harness the competing egos of the Security Service to create an effective force. Much of that involved listening to complaints from his officers and then offering them guidance. After hearing Rothschild out, he agreed that the Fifth Column operation should continue, but asked Curry to look over the case history and provide a formal briefing.

  It wasn’t simply the ethics of the operation that bothered people in MI5. The ‘spectacular’ nature of Roberts’s reports was also troubling. Could they really be true? Could it be this easy to find people who actively wanted to help Germany win? That didn’t have to mean Roberts was fabricating or embellishing – though that was always a risk in intelligence – but what if he were being taken in, if the people reporting to him were, either maliciously or out of a desire to please or simply because they were deluded, misreading the level of support they had among friends and neighbours?

  Stamp wasn’t the only doubter in F3, and its officers set about checking out Roberts’s reports. Their motives may not have been wholly noble: these were the people who were supposed to be the experts on underground groups, and Roberts was revealing increasing numbers of people of whom they were unaware.

  But if they had hoped to humiliate Roberts and to push Rothschild back to his counter-sabotage work, they did the opposite. Time and again, the parts of Roberts’s reports that could be checked were found to be accurate.

  Rothschild was able to point to positive benefits from the operation. When he’d passed Edgar Bray’s intelligence about the amphibious vehicle trials to the War Office, the Director of Armoured Fighting Vehicles, Major General A. W. C. Richardson, had confirmed that the information was accurate and that he was shocked it had leaked out. ‘We certainly do not want it in the wrong hands,’ he told Rothschild.

  But that was nothing to what Hilda Leech – Perigoe’s ‘fat woman of 45’ – had delivered. Roberts’s initial impression of her wasn’t promising. ‘I have rarely heard such a lot of tripe talked within an hour and a half,’ he reported after their first meeting. ‘I do not, however, think that she is harmless, as she seems to believe in what she is saying and gives you the impression that she is willing to be made a martyr of. How she combines her expressed love for her country with her present espionage is beyond me, except that I do not think it has actually dawned on her that what she is doing is called by such an ugly name.’

  On this basis, MI5 paid little attention to Leech at first, but in July 1942 that changed. She told Roberts a story she’d heard from a friend of hers who worked at the aircraft-maker Handley Page: ‘experiments were going on on a new type of tail-less aeroplane which ran on low-grade fuel’. This meant nothing to her or to Roberts, but Rothschild, with his classified scientific contacts, realised she was talking about the top secret project to develop a jet engine. ‘This is a good example of the need for paying attention even to a woman of this type, as there is no doubt that the enemy would be extremely interested to hear of these experiments, which are in the “most secret” category,’ he wrote.

  Curry’s memo, when it arrived in August, certainly satisfied Liddell. He said it put ‘the whole question in its proper perspective’.

  In Liddell’s view, much of the counter-fascist work within MI5 was ‘moribund’ and in need of stimulation. It was true that the immediate threat of German invasion had receded after the summer of 1940. Operation Sealion, Hitler’s plan for an amphibious assault, had been abandoned after it became clear that the Luftwaffe wasn’t able to achieve command of Britain’s skies. Hitler’s decision to invade Russia in 1941 meant that he simply didn’t have the necessary forces to attack Britain at the moment. But Liddell feared this situation could suddenly change. Stalin might be beaten, or driven to surrender, and Spain might enter the war on Germany’s side.

  ‘We must I think regard the whole situation in the light of a collapse on the Russian front, ourselves driven out of the Mediterranean and 200 German divisions brought back to the West,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘In such an eventuality, how should we be feeling about the 60,000 enemy aliens at large in this country and other subversive bodies?’

  Curry proposed that the Fifth Columnists being unearthed by Roberts should be added to the Invasion List, the set of names of people to be arrested in the event of a German attack on Britain. He also suggested that the ethical questions around the operation could be addressed by taking it to the Home Secretary for approval. On this, Liddell disagreed. He suspected he knew what the Home Office would think if they learned about the Fifth Column operation.

  After the turmoil of 1940, MI5 had undergone a reorganisation in 1941. Jasper Harker was judged not to be up to the job of running the service, and had been replaced by Sir David Petrie, a veteran of the Indian Police, who had taken the title of director-general. Harker stayed on as his deputy, an arrangement that, surprisingly, seemed to work.

  Petrie wanted some sort of oversight of the Fifth Column. He passed Curry’s note to Duff Cooper, a Member of Parliament and former information minister who had recently been appointed by Churchill to oversee the Security Service. Cooper, a close friend of Rothschild’s, was unlikely to be too critical of the operation.

  Others were very far from happy. Roger Fulford, the head of F4, which looked at pacifist groups and ‘new politico-social and revolutionary movements’, now waded in.

  A vicar’s son, Fulford was a journalist and historian who had trained as a lawyer but never practised. He was another of the clever types corralled into MI5 during the great recruiting drive of 1940. One of his passions was Liberal politics: he had tried to get elected for the party in East Suffolk in 1929, and still harboured political ambitions. Another was English history. Neither of these led him to feel comfortable in an outfit that specialised in locking people up without trial, on the basis of secret evidence.

  By 1942, he was miserable with MI5 all round. He felt it had neglected fascism before the war, and was now going too far in the other direction. A man who was quite happy picking fights with colleagues, he was furious about the Fifth Column operation, which he felt trespassed on his turf and offended his Liberal values. He wrote Rothschild a memo telling him as much.

  ‘Fulford profoundly disagrees with everything’ about the operation, Liddell sighed into his diary. He also objected to Curry’s case summary being sent to Cooper without his agreement. He suspected Rothschild of trying to bounce the operation past him, and responded by saying he wanted to go over the details of the way Dorothy Wegener had been handled.

  Rothschild wasn’t used to being criticised, and he didn’t enjoy it. He was inclined to fire straight back at those who were doing it.

  It fell to Liddell to calm matters. He sat Fulford down, and joked that he’d half-expected to see him advancing up St James’s ‘on a white charger, brandishing a sword’.

  Liddell couldn’t quite tell whether the younger man wanted the operation closed down or simply transferred to his control. But after Fulford said he thought the evidence on which the investigation was based was ‘flimsy’, Liddell had had enough. He thought Fulford was ‘rather complacent’. It wasn’t Rothschild’s evidence that was ‘flimsy’, he replied, but the evidence that had been gathered by the people in MI5 who were supposed to be tracking Fifth Columnists.

  In Liddell’s view, MI5 was ‘only scratching the surface’ of pro-Nazi sentiment in Britain, and simply didn’t know the feelings of many of the people who lived there and might reasonably be expected to have mixed loyalties. He set out his scenario for a renewed invasion threat, accompanied by wireless broadcasts from Germany designed to unsettle people, and
a fresh wave of spies being parachuted in. This, he said, combined with a few small acts of sabotage, ‘would be quite sufficient to start a spy psychosis’.

  In those circumstances, it would be easy to imagine the sort of people that Roberts was uncovering becoming more active. This was why it was so important to know who they were.

  Fulford replied that he simply didn’t like provocation, but Liddell wasn’t finished. ‘I replied that it was no good tackling a job like this with Liberal kid gloves,’ he reported afterwards. ‘We might not like anything that savoured of agents provocateurs but such methods were necessary in times of crisis. Information was obtained which could not be used for purposes of prosecutions but we should at least learn where we stood.’

  Liddell said he didn’t agree with everything Curry had written – in particular he didn’t think they needed to get the Home Office involved. But, he told Fulford, he could forget any ideas of taking over the operation himself. ‘Rothschild had handled the case very successfully . . . and it would be folly at this stage to move such a complex matter from his direction.’

  The discussion, as far as Liddell was concerned, was at an end. He concluded that Fulford had been ‘rather shaken’ by it. He left MI5 soon afterwards.

  Liddell, too, had been shaken by the Fifth Column operation, but in a different way. If one agent, simply by announcing he represented Germany and was ready to listen, had been able to find a significant number of people who were willing to risk their necks to help Hitler win, how many more such people were out there? Were Perigoe’s contacts exceptional, or were they the visible signs of a much broader mass of people?

  He set out his thoughts on the question of provocation in a more measured way later in the year. Addressing MI5 officers from around the country, he talked in general terms about the problem of identifying Fifth Columnists. His concern, he said, was that after three years of war, they still didn’t know much about what many British people were thinking. Even those identified as potentially seditious at the start of the war had been subject to only a cursory and ‘haphazard’ investigation.