But even if Perigoe didn’t suspect the phone, Roberts knew that she suspected him. The best way for him to win her trust was to show he trusted her. Nothing would have been more suspicious than refusing to leave her alone in the flat. He decided to stick to his strategy of making a joke of it.
‘How far did you get?’ he asked.
‘We decided to give it up,’ Gleave answered, laughing.
As they ate, Gleave showed him how she’d spent her afternoon. She’d been cycling round Watford, attempting to verify the details identified by Kohout on his map the previous week. He’d told Roberts that one location was a military base, but Gleave was doubtful.
‘Going along here, and there’s the entrance, and there’s a civilian at the entrance, not a soldier,’ she said, pointing.
‘And no soldiers dotted round the place at all?’ Perigoe asked, leading her witness.
‘I didn’t see any soldiers at all.’
‘But there must be some there,’ Perigoe said.
‘Kohout said there’d be about forty there,’ Roberts added, taking Perigoe’s point.
‘Well, there weren’t,’ Gleave replied. She gave more details of what she’d seen. It didn’t, Roberts observed, fit with Kohout’s account at all. ‘I’ll wring Kohout’s neck for him, if he’s not more accurate than that.’
This was the effect Perigoe was aiming for, and Gleave had more. She disputed that Kohout could have seen some of the things he claimed. ‘There’s heaps of places where you can’t see at all, there’s only three or four spots where you can get a good view of it,’ she said of one of the Austrian’s supposed observations. ‘I went round and round, you know.’
‘Well, it looks to me as if Kohout’s led us up the garden over that place,’ Roberts mused. ‘I wonder why.’
‘It might not be deliberate,’ said Gleave.
‘Well, of course you have to bear in mind that the chap has great difficulty in making himself understood,’ Roberts said. He congratulated Gleave on her work. ‘Well, thank you very much indeed, it’s excellent.’
‘Beautiful,’ said Perigoe, with feeling. ‘It’s lovely.’
‘And do you feel better for that ride?’ Roberts asked.
‘No.’ Gleave’s main feeling was exhaustion. Perigoe, sympathising, said she must have covered twenty miles. Gleave put the figure above thirty.
Roberts, on behalf of the German government, offered her some comfort. ‘When you hear of that place being wiped out later on,’ he said, ‘you’ll be able to pat yourself on the back and say, “Well, I had a hand in that.”’
The pleasing thought of having helped direct the Luftwaffe’s bombs led the group into a discussion of how their fellow spy might have gone wrong.
‘I don’t think it will be wise to let Kohout know that you’ve checked up on him,’ Roberts cautioned.
‘Oh no, of course,’ said Gleave. ‘He’s very funny.’
‘You’re telling me,’ offered Perigoe. She wished she could be there when Roberts confronted him. ‘Shall I bring my microphone along and put it in the bathroom and listen?’ she joked.
Kohout had told Roberts that an airfield he’d looked at could be captured by one hundred men. After handing round some plums, Roberts put that suggestion to Gleave. She thought the idea unlikely. ‘One hundred men would lose their lives,’ Roberts mused.
‘A very un-German attitude, I must say,’ Perigoe observed. ‘I mean, the German method is to be prepared and to see that you jolly well don’t miss it.’
Roberts replied that Kohout was a ‘silly ass’. The conversation turned briefly to films and Perigoe gave a scathing series of reviews of recent anti-Nazi propaganda films she’d sat through – ‘Marita is worth two of James Agate,’ the person transcribing the conversation observed, comparing her to a leading critic of the day. The party broke up shortly afterwards, with Perigoe confident that her work was done: Kohout was going to have a strip torn off him at his next meeting.
But when Kohout arrived at 499 Park West two weeks later, Roberts was all concern. He poured him a drink, and offered him some dinner. ‘Are you finding life pretty lonely nowadays?’ he asked the Austrian.
‘Sometimes,’ Kohout replied.
‘You are very happily married, are you?’ Roberts asked.
‘Oh yes, very,’ Kohout assured him. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well, we always take a kindly interest in the domestic affairs of our agents,’ Roberts, an agent-runner in the image of Maxwell Knight, replied.
As Roberts knew, Kohout hadn’t seen his wife and son in three years. They had been separated by an accident of war. In 1934, he had fallen in love with Auguste Frenzel, a 16-year-old Austrian who was visiting Britain. The following year they had married. A son, Ernest, followed in 1937. With her husband busy at work, Auguste opted to spend the summer months at home with her parents in Austria. At the start of July 1939 she and Ernest had travelled there as usual. Kohout had joined them for a fortnight and then travelled back to England to work. If either of them had worried about the possibility of war breaking out, they didn’t act on these fears, and in September Auguste found herself trapped in Austria, and unable to travel back to her adopted home. Her only means of communication with her husband was through letters passed by the Red Cross.
Since then, Kohout told Roberts, he had written to his wife and son ‘dozens of times,’ and had tried to send photographs, but these were always returned by the postal censors.
Turning back to business, Kohout said he’d brought some more information. He had discovered his error over the Zamboni Piles: they weren’t batteries for submarines. ‘You remember when I spoke to you about that black paper?’ he asked. ‘For the Admiralty?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Admiralty intends to extend the use of that particular material also for the signals,’ Kohout said, in his stumbling English. ‘That means the little flash lamps, you know, they start moving about?’
The piles were electrical accumulators, ‘that run a long, long, time – some say it’s indefinite, but I don’t believe that,’ Kohout said.
In fact his sources on this, as on so much else, were quite correct. The top secret ‘Tabby’ receiver used so little power that its batteries were indeed intended to last the lifetime of the unit.
Kohout offered to get some samples of the paper. If it was urgent, he could pass them to Perigoe? Roberts thought that would be a bad idea. ‘You needn’t bother Mrs Perigoe,’ he said. From now on, he was going to need to keep them apart, especially if Kohout was bringing in more triumphs.
One of the tricks Roberts had learned in his years undercover was to be a mirror. With Kohout, he was another chap, a concerned husband and father, trying to do his best in a difficult situation. With Perigoe and Gleave he was playful and snide, as much one of the girls as a married father of three in his thirties could be.
Perigoe disliked Kohout, was jealous of his successes, so in his meetings with her Roberts reflected that back at her and encouraged it. He pondered aloud whether it was suspicious that Kohout could remember insignificant details, but not important ones. ‘I thought he looked a singularly evil little man on that Saturday night when that lightning was flashing across his face, didn’t you?’ he commented. ‘Something spidery about him. Little eyes sort of flickering back from you to me, me to you.’
‘He has nothing to him at all, except a kind of nasty cunning,’ Perigoe replied. ‘I don’t like people with just cunning. It’s a Jewish trait.’
‘Yes,’ Roberts said. ‘You must make it your special duty to keep your eye on him, and keep it on him well.’
‘Crumbs. I can imagine a pleasanter object to keep one’s eye on.’
‘If you allow people like that enough rope,’ Roberts explained, ‘they inevitably come to the point where they put the rope around their own neck.’
‘Vermin,’ Perigoe said. ‘He ought to be exterminated. Such people shouldn’t live.’
‘We’ll exterminate him
in due course,’ Roberts promised her. ‘I shall take great personal pleasure in seeing him put out of action.’
If Perigoe was hostile to Kohout, Roberts decided, it wouldn’t hurt to encourage some reciprocal hostility, the better to play them off against one another. He was pushing at an open door: Kohout had disliked Perigoe since he first met her in their British Union days. He’d found the local group ‘a washout’, led by a man who ‘had no personality – he could not speak or dress.’ Perigoe and Gleave, meanwhile, had stoked the internal rivalries in the branch, leading Kohout to leave it.
So when the men met at the start of October, Roberts poured Kohout a drink, lit him a cigarette and took him into his confidence.
‘Mrs Perigoe has been rather curious about you lately, wants to know how you are getting on,’ he told Kohout, conspiratorially. ‘I said that you had been very unsatisfactory.’
Then he had a further thought for Kohout. ‘She’s never been friendly with any police officials, I suppose?’
‘I don’t know.’ Kohout was silent for a moment. ‘I remember one incident,’ he began, recalling how Marita had threated to ‘get the police on’ someone she was arguing with.
‘Well,’ Roberts said, moving the conversation on. ‘She is very useful to us because of the knowledge she’s got of the BU movement.’ He had sown his seed of doubt in Kohout’s mind about Perigoe’s loyalty to their cause. He gave the man another cigarette, and the conversation moved on.
Kohout’s discovery of secrets around the Tabby receiver had been worrying to the Admiralty, but his next scoop related to one of the greatest secrets of the war in the air, a development that it was hoped would save the lives of air crews flying the highly dangerous bombing missions over Germany.
The development of radar before the start of the war had been vital in winning the Battle of Britain, enabling the RAF to locate and intercept German bombers efficiently. But by 1943, the same technology was being used by the Luftwaffe to attack Bomber Command’s planes. As raids over Germany increased, so did the numbers of Air Force casualties – close to 10,000 in 1942.
Air crews would be much safer if the Germans could be deceived about the location of incoming attacks, so that fighters were mis-deployed and the wrong gun crews alerted. And British scientists had known for years about a way that, in theory, radar could be deceived. The problem was that they couldn’t agree on whether to use it.
This row had been raging since the start of the war. If they deployed it, would the Germans use it against them in return? The argument wasn’t simply about judging the wisest course. On opposing sides were two members of the military scientific community who had been arguing with each other for years. Sir Robert Watson-Watt had been behind the development of Britain’s radar. He was nearly fifty, a small, chubby Scot, whose verbosity was among a number of qualities that made him tricky to deal with. He was very protective of his brainchild, to the point of resenting any proposal that might threaten the reputation of radar.
Arguing against him was the 31-year-old Reginald Jones, who as a boy in south London had become fascinated by the emerging technology of the era, wireless. He had won a scholarship to Oxford to study physics, and began to research infrared radiation. The son of a Grenadier Guards sergeant, Jones was a patriot who in the 1930s abandoned his promising academic career to join the Air Ministry staff, applying his research to the question of whether infrared detectors could be used to locate aircraft. There he had been on the losing end of an argument with the more senior Watson-Watt, which had resulted in him being moved from his post. At the start of the war he was appointed MI6’s tame scientist, with access to top secret intelligence material that he used to understand the military technology Germany was developing.
While Watson-Watt’s contribution to the defence of Britain was well known, Jones’s was still highly classified. In early 1940, he had concluded that the Germans were using radio to guide bombers to their targets at night, and set about defeating them. An inveterate practical joker, he decided that better than simply jamming the German signals would be spoofing them.
Over the coming months, the ‘Battle of the Beams’ saw German scientists improving their systems only for Jones to develop his own countermeasures. In the end, he won out, disrupting the German signals sufficiently for the Luftwaffe to conclude that radio navigation was inaccurate, but he wasn’t always fast enough: at the start of November 1940, Coventry was heavily and accurately bombed while he was still trying to understand the new German system.
The battle had won Jones the ear of Churchill, who referred to him as ‘the man who broke the bloody beam’. The young scientist, already unburdened by any false modesty, was impatient with those he saw as letting their own pride or intellectual weakness get in the way of decision-making.
Jones had seen the way that radar could be fooled almost as soon as Watson-Watt’s system was explained to him in 1937. One of the scientists involved boasted that their radio waves could detect a wire hanging from a balloon at forty miles. ‘All one might therefore need to do to render the system useless would be to attach wires to balloons or parachutes at intervals of half a mile or a mile, and the whole radar screen would be so full of echoes that it would be impossible to see the extra echo arising from an aircraft,’ he wrote later.
By 1942, research had shown that a few hundred strips of foil just under a foot long and an inch wide would give the same reflection to the German radar as a Lancaster bomber. These were light enough that they wouldn’t need a balloon to hold them up: thrown from a plane, they would simply float to the ground slowly. The system was given a codename: Window. But the row about whether to use it went on for all of that year.
Kohout knew none of this, but he got one of the first signs that Jones was winning his argument when, in March 1943, his company was approached by the Air Ministry. Could they make foil strips to precise specifications? Naturally they turned to their aluminium foil expert, Hans Kohout, the man who was secretly trying to bring about Britain’s defeat.
He wasn’t told what the strips were for, but he could tell that they were important to the Air Ministry. His first proposal to Roberts, in a meeting at his home, was that he could sabotage the work, holding it up for weeks. He would be able to get away with it without it being traced back to him, he assured his handler. The proposal was exactly the kind of thing that those within MI5 who opposed the Fifth Column operation had warned of: that far from being controlled, potential saboteurs would end up being emboldened.
Roberts didn’t know what the foil was for either, but if it was important to the war effort, then he wanted Kohout to use his skill to make sure it was done as well and as quickly as possible. He was firm with him on the idea of creating a delay. ‘I told Kohout that he was not to consider any such thing and that when we wanted him to commit sabotage, we would ask him.’
Kohout said that in that case, he would at least give Germany access to the same weapon. He wrote out for Roberts the Air Ministry’s specifications, adding for good measure a list of German companies that he believed would be up to the job of making the strips.
Roberts passed the information back to Rothschild, but Window was so secret that Rothschild couldn’t work out what Kohout was talking about. An investigation revealed no evidence of any Air Ministry contracts with Kohout’s company. What on earth could the strips of aluminium foil be for?
At the start of April 1943, the committee to discuss the use of Window met again, with the chief of the air staff, Sir Charles Portal, in the chair. Jones had calculated that 12 tonnes of foil would be needed to deceive German radar. Other Air Ministry scientists offered estimates of 48 tonnes or 84 tonnes. Watson-Watt declared that all of these were too low, and that around 240 tonnes would be necessary. In his desire to protect the reputation of radar, Watson-Watt had overreached himself, and Portal realised this. He announced he’d ask Churchill to approve Window’s deployment as soon as possible.
Days after that meeting, MI5 got a f
urther clue as to what was going on. ‘There’s a thing going out, a thing like a search light,’ Kohout explained to Roberts. ‘That works if the beam touches metal.’ Roberts had no idea what he was talking about. Despite thirteen years living in Britain, Kohout still struggled to make himself understood.
What he did know about, though, was aluminium foil. He explained that the aircrews were supposed to throw bundles of these bits of metallic paper out of the plane as they flew and let them float to the ground. But if the metal strips were cut in the wrong way, they would stick together and fall to the ground in a single bundle.
‘Here, take this book!’ he told Roberts, full of enthusiasm at his demonstration. He showed how, because of the way the paper was cut, the pages stayed together and the book stayed closed as it dropped to the ground. This wasn’t what the Air Ministry wanted. Their specification was for strips of foil that would scatter when released into the air, not fall in lumps. ‘It has to be this idea you see of cutting it against the grain. Just let it go and the whole thing separates. And if you take it in the other way, the whole parcel may separate into big wads.’
Even with these clues – the paper had to be thrown from an aircraft, it had to separate and flutter downwards, and, while doing this, it had some effect on search beams – it was more than a month before Rothschild found out what Kohout had got his hands on. Finally, at the start of May, a contact who was working on radar explained it to him.
Rothschild, keen to show the value of the Fifth Column operation, didn’t hesitate to talk the discovery up.
‘Kohout has hit upon something which is considered to be of the most secret and hush-hush devices so far developed in the UK,’ he recorded in a note stamped ‘MOST SECRET’. His contact considered it ‘far more secret than H2S’ – the ground-directed radar system that Bomber Command had recently started using. Unlike most radar systems, ‘this one could be copied by the enemy almost overnight. Something like H2S might take over a year to introduce into aircraft. It is obvious that the slightest leakage of it to the Germans would put them in a very strong position.’
Agent Jack Page 21