He repeated the argument he had made to Fulford, that in the event of a Russian collapse and renewed German interest in Britain, they would suddenly be very concerned about all these people. ‘Would not certain people at this stage perhaps come out of their holes and did we know exactly who they would be?’ he wrote afterwards, in a summary of his talk.
He alluded to Roberts’s work, saying that an existing investigation indicated that ‘certain people whose cases had never been investigated were of a highly dangerous kind’. Without giving details, he said the case involved unusual investigation techniques, in particular the use of agents. He asked his audience to consider whether this should be more widespread.
‘Ought we perhaps to change our method of investigation? We knew the man who waved a swastika flag in the street, the man who waved it in his back garden and was seen by his neighbours, but did we know one who waved it inside his own house?’
Four centuries earlier, facing external invaders and internal sedition, Elizabeth I had declared that she nevertheless didn’t want to open ‘windows into men’s souls’. So long as her people obeyed the law, she would not enquire into their private beliefs. This was one of the principles that set democracies apart from totalitarian states. It had already been suspended in the case of those who had been locked up for their nationality or their fascist sympathies. But Liddell was making the case for a further shift: to defeat Nazism, should Britain be prepared to use the kind of secret police tactics more commonly associated with the Nazis?
12
‘You bomb them, and blow the lot’
In June 1942, Perigoe mentioned an unusual possible recruit to Roberts. With the exception of the Russian-born Sophia Bray, the Fifth Column was so far a British group. Now Perigoe suggested they approach a German. She’d known the man in question, Hans Kohout, before the war, when she said he’d been a committed Nazi, but she wasn’t sure about his attitude now. Roberts suggested she cautiously sound him out.
She reported back a fortnight later: Kohout ‘would be willing to do anything to damage England’. If Roberts wondered how much damage someone that Perigoe had described as ‘a highly paid tinfoil expert’ was capable of doing, he would find out when they met.
Kohout was, it turned out, Austrian by birth. As a teenager, he had been an early member of the Nazi Party, joining it in his home town of Hofstetten-Grünau in 1924. As a young man, he’d moved first to Belgium and then in 1929 to Britain, becoming an expert in aluminium foil manufacture. Five years later, that skill had won him a job at a mill in Britain, and he’d settled in Wembley. He had escaped internment at the start of the war partly because he was no longer Austrian. Six years before Roberts met him, Hans Kohout had taken British citizenship.
After Perigoe mentioned his name to Roberts, Theresa Clay began researching him. With Rothschild occupied by protecting British targets from sabotage, not just in Britain but in Gibraltar and the Middle East as well, she was to take an increasing role in running the case. She was amply paid for it, apparently. Her companion Richard Meinertzhagen wrote to a friend that she was ‘very high up and drawing a huge salary’. And internally, she did have some status, increasingly signing memos under her own name. But not always. Notes further afield, including to the police, were in the name of ‘Lord Rothschild’, without his signature.
A young Hans Kohout
Clay was an unusual woman, a member of the upper classes who even before the war was used to being taken seriously as a scientist, and was content to be the subject of gossip around her unconventional private life.
She was respected by Liddell, and they discussed the running of the Fifth Column operation in Rothschild’s absence. She was not the only woman in MI5 to be doing a job traditionally reserved for men, but whatever Maxwell Knight’s views about the value of women as agents, the Security Service was very far from a bastion of equality. For a start, it didn’t have any women officers. There had been one, Jane Archer, but Harker had sacked her in 1940 after she denounced him as incompetent. Clay was one of more than fifty women who were designated ‘assistant officers’ – doing officers’ jobs without officer rank.
As she looked into Kohout’s background, she found that in June 1940, MI5 had received a letter warning them that he should be investigated. It was one of the thousands of such letters pouring in to MI5 from people newly suspicious of their neighbours, especially if, like Kohout, they had heavy Austrian accents. A month earlier, another neighbour had told the police they should look at him.
A local police sergeant had been sent to make ‘discreet inquiries’. His employer spoke well of him, and aside from the two who had made the reports, no one else had a bad word to say about him. He was given a clean bill of health, and no more thought was given to him for the next two years.
Whether or not Kohout was aware of these investigations, he knew that the British authorities needed little more than suspicion to lock him up, and was appropriately wary. He worried about the Germans, too. When Perigoe told him that she was in touch with a Gestapo man who was checking the loyalty of people in Britain, he was keen to explain that he had only changed his citizenship as ‘a matter of expediency’.
In 1938, he explained, he had wanted to rejoin the Nazi Party – ‘in order to avoid unpleasantness when that body took over control in England’, according to Roberts – but had been forbidden because he was no longer a citizen of the Reich. Instead, he said, he’d been instructed to join ‘the English equivalent’, Mosley’s British Union.
That hadn’t been his only attempt to serve the Nazi cause. The same year, he had approached the German government and offered to be a spy in Britain. After an interview in Vienna, he had been turned down.
But now he had a chance to prove his worth. Aluminium foil, and the related materials Kohout’s factory produced, had military applications that few people appreciated. In one of their first meetings in July 1942, Kohout told Roberts that his company had just supplied one of the Admiralty’s laboratories with ten thousand yards of paper coated with magnesia dioxide. This was cut into small squares that were then compressed into tubes to make batteries.
Rothschild sent a note to his friend Alan Lang-Brown, the Admiralty’s senior scientific officer, asking if that meant anything to him. The reply was immediate: ‘There has been a serious leakage,’ Lang-Brown wrote back. ‘This report would be of very great value to the enemy.’
The one comfort, he noted, was that Kohout had misunderstood the paper’s purpose. He had told Roberts the batteries were for submarines. In fact they were Zamboni Piles, a high-voltage, low-current cell designed to power a top secret project: a night vision system.
The units that Kohout’s batteries would power were known as ‘Tabby’ receivers – because tabby cats can see in the dark. Weighing around three pounds, and designed to look like a British Army water bottle in the hope they might escape German notice, they were most useful when used with an infra-red torch, either for illumination or for signalling.
Theresa Clay, continuing to act as Rothschild’s deputy, visited the Admiralty to reassure the anxious Lang-Brown that the information hadn’t been sent to Germany, and then set about investigating their new recruit’s finances.
Kohout, she learned, was an entrepreneur in his spare time, always on the lookout for ways to make a bit of extra cash. He was investing his earnings in houses that he rented out. According to Perigoe, he had also been involved in an enterprise to sell black market meat. Kohout approached espionage in a similarly industrious spirit.
At the start of August, Group Captain Joe Archer, the husband of the sacked Jane Archer, and the man responsible for liaison between the RAF and MI5, briefed Guy Liddell on the Air Force’s latest weapon, the De Havilland Mosquito fighter-bomber. Made entirely of wood, it was far faster than any other bomber the RAF had – ‘probably the fastest thing in the air,’ Liddell recorded afterwards – and could fly higher. It was a machine that would enable more accurate and effective bombing of Germ
any, and give a decisive advantage to the RAF over the Luftwaffe. Four weeks after Liddell was briefed, Roberts received the same information in the Park West apartment – from Kohout.
Nancy Brown, thrilled at her new secret life, had just left Perigoe and Roberts in the flat. Minutes later, Kohout came up to fill them both in on his latest intelligence-gathering activities.
Roberts handed round cigarettes, and then he began. ‘How did you get on?’
‘Quite good,’ replied Kohout. He had met a man from Smiths, the engineering firm. ‘They make instruments for the instrument board, clocks and that kind of thing, for aeroplanes.’
After a couple of drinks, the Smiths employee had a loose tongue. ‘I heard about a dive-bomber, it is still on the secret list, named a Mosquito.’
Roberts began to take notes, and Kohout went through his information. ‘Two engines, 15 to 16 hundred horsepower. It can be used for four different purposes, first of all dive-bombing, fighter-bomber and bomber and another one.’
‘Reconnaissance?’ Roberts suggested.
‘No, not reconnaissance. Something with fighting or bombing.’
‘Fighter? Purely and simply?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was its fighting speed, do you know?’
Kohout didn’t know that. But he did know that you only heard it nine seconds after it had passed. And he knew other things.
‘What would you call them things that would go under the wings?’ he asked, in his heavily accented English.
‘They’re elevators, aren’t they?’ Perigoe offered. ‘They’re the things that press up and down.’
‘If you open them,’ Kohout tried to explain, ‘the aeroplanes can roll continuously, like that. Now the aeroplane is very small, amazingly small. A hundred have been built for experimental purposes.’
He apologised for not being able to tell them about its armaments, but offered other information instead: the location of an aircraft factory. He had more, too. ‘Have you heard about a rocket plane?’ he asked. ‘It goes about 600 miles per hour.’
‘Six hundred miles per hour?’ Roberts repeated.
‘But she is useless, she is useless for anything, because they can’t steer her.’
Roberts was incredulous. Kohout was pleased with the response. ‘I know things, yes? I find out things, yes?’
‘You do, yes,’ Roberts assured him. ‘Who’s making this aeroplane then, or experimenting with it?’
‘I only know Smiths of Cricklewood is making the instruments.’
Perigoe tried to get some more detail: ‘Do you know anything about that plane at all?’
‘All I know is that it goes up to 600 miles per hour and it’s useless for war, fighting and bombing, because they can’t steer the blooming thing.’
‘Do you know what makes it go?’
‘Some kind of explosions. The idea comes from Germany,’ he said. ‘It goes in a tube.’
Roberts and Perigoe made appreciative noises, and Kohout revealed one of the problems with his method of espionage. ‘I would tell you more, but I was half tight, you see.’
Perigoe disapproved: ‘You shouldn’t get tight.’
‘I can’t help it, I can’t take all these whiskies half the night long!’
Roberts, who liked a drink himself, was more understanding: ‘No, no, no,’ he reassured Kohout as he tried to recall more about the aircraft design.
‘In the middle of the plane, somewhere near the cockpit, there is a tube,’ he explained. ‘A big opening where the wind flows through.’
Roberts decided it would be best to give the impression of having many sources of information, of whom Kohout was just one, if a valued one. ‘That’s quite enough to go on,’ he said. ‘This 600 miles per hour, that’s damned good. The speed of that plane was of great interest to us, it was a complete mystery. Now we know.’
Much of Kohout’s information was wrong: the Gloster E.28/39, the prototype British jet that had flown a year earlier, could be steered, and it didn’t go close to 600 miles per hour – he or his source may have misunderstood a kilometres per hour speed. But enough of what he said was correct. It would have been plenty for a real spy ring to go on.
If that had been all that Kohout had brought with him, it would have been an impressive haul. But he had more. He had a potential recruit, Mr Crump, a mechanic who, though married, was in love with an Austrian woman who had been interned. He might, Kohout said, be prepared to work for them if he was promised German citizenship. ‘He’s definitely a Nazi,’ Kohout assured Roberts.
‘He’s Aryan, is he?’ Roberts replied, as if considering the citizenship question.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure of that?’ Roberts checked, before giving his answer. ‘If he’s prepared to help us, of course we should be prepared to help him.’
He suggested a way in which Crump, a man who travelled, might be able to assist. ‘We should very much like to learn something about the defences in Sussex, if he can help us in that way.’
Kohout had news on that front, as well, if not actually in Sussex. He produced a map of Hertfordshire, on which he’d marked both defences and targets. He explained the key: ‘Number one – what do you call it – strassesperren?’
‘Street? Blocks?’ Roberts searched for a translation.
‘Street blocks. Number two is pill boxes. Number three, minefields.’ Roberts repeated each one after him. ‘Number four, searchlights, number five anti-aircraft guns. Number six, camouflaged factories. Number seven, explosive factories . . .’
‘Gosh, you’ve been busy.’ Roberts could barely keep up. ‘Explosive factories!’
‘Number eight is the places where the Army and Air Force is stationed. Number nine, aircraft factories, and nought – just a plain nought – is tank traps. And a cross if wireless stations.’
Perigoe and Roberts tried to process it all, but Kohout had more. ‘And a triangle . . .’
‘A triangle?’
‘Airfield.’
Perigoe examined the map. ‘Oh, you’ve only got one of those. Oh no – two – no, one.’
‘Only one,’ Kohout said. ‘I haven’t been everywhere.’ He was defensive. ‘It’s hard work, you know.’
He had a final mark: ‘Gas cylinders. You bomb them, and blow the lot up!’
He complained that the scale of the map was too small for precise marking of locations. Roberts promised to get him a large scale one, but said he was worried about Kohout’s safety. ‘If anyone finds it on you, it’s too dangerous.’
Kohout had already worked out a plan: he would lay a piece of paper on top of the map and mark that. He would hide the paper in his tie, and if anyone found it, ‘it gives nothing away – he doesn’t know what’s what’.
Kohout had finally run out of things to tell Roberts. He looked at his handler. ‘What do you think?’
Roberts had to balance the expectations of his recruits with his instructions from MI5 to discourage spying. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the department does not do much in the way of espionage proper, do you see? That’s the job for the Abwehr, but our job is to . . . we’re the forerunners, you see. We have to find out our friends and our enemies.’
Kohout was clearly frustrated that his heroic efforts for the Fatherland weren’t being met with more enthusiasm. Roberts tried to mollify him. ‘All this is passed on,’ he assured him. ‘I shall pass it on tonight myself.’
‘I get the credit?’
‘You’ll get the credit for this, it’s very good work. I’m very pleased with you, and I’ll get you a bigger map. You’ve got plenty of brains. The idea of pinning it in your tie is perhaps the best bit of work I’ve seen for a long while. My chief will be very amused at that.’
Had Roberts’s chief really existed – or at least, had he existed and worked for German, rather than British intelligence – he would have been more than amused. An untrained agent, who had only been working for them for two months, had provided intelligence on three di
fferent technologies, two of which related to aircraft, an area of particular interest for the Germans, as MI5 knew from the requests that were sent to the double agents it controlled. Hans Kohout was the best spy that Germany had in Britain in August 1942. The only problem was that his reports went no further than MI5 headquarters in St James’s.
Marita Perigoe was less than delighted to find that she had introduced someone to the group whose ability to deliver intelligence might exceed her own. She set about trying to diminish her rival in Roberts’s eyes. The Friday after Kohout’s star turn, Roberts, Gleave and Perigoe assembled at 499 Park West. Gleave was wet from the rain, and flushed with exertion.
Roberts offered to go out to buy sandwiches, and asked the women to see to the blackout curtains in his absence. It was eight in the evening, at the start of September, and despite the country operating on ‘Double Summertime’ – putting the clocks forward onto European time so as to save energy at the end of the day – the nights were starting to draw in.
In his absence, Perigoe decided to have a proper hunt for microphones. She explained to Gleave that it was possible to detect whether something had an electric current by touching it, which she demonstrated using an ironing board. Just as the pair of them were trying to lift the carpet, Roberts returned.
He took in the scene, guessed what they had been doing, and also that they had been unsuccessful. These moments required nerve from him. What if one day they did work out where the listening device was? After all, it was right in front of them.
While Perigoe hunted on the floor, she was ignoring a clearly visible wire that came into the flat next to the front door, ran around the wall, across the floor, up onto the table, and then connected to a microphone. All Perigoe saw was a telephone, and she never gave it a second thought. But telephones were the electronic devices that the GPO understood best of all. Which explained why, when Roberts had a phone line installed in the hall of his home in Epsom, he forbade his children from talking about him near it.
Agent Jack Page 20