Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  What no one in Britain knew was the Germans had in fact developed their own version of Window in 1942, and had opted not to use it for exactly the same reasons as the Allies – fear that it would be immediately copied and turned back against them. Hermann Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe, had been so horrified by its effect on German radar during trials that he had ordered the destruction of the reports, in case the Allies learned of the technology.

  Kohout meanwhile may not have understood the precise purpose of the pieces of foil that he’d handed to Roberts, but judging from the behaviour of the Air Ministry staff he’d dealt with at the factory, he knew that the secret he’d hit on was a big one. It was also one in which he had a personal stake. The planes that were carrying Window were dropping bombs not just on Germany but on Austria, too, where his wife and son lived. By passing his information to Roberts, he hoped to tilt the balance a little in favour of their defenders.

  The information stopped, of course, with Rothschild and his colleagues at MI5. At the end of June, Churchill chaired the final meeting on whether to use the new technology. Told that the benefit to Britain’s bombers outweighed the potential benefit to Germany’s, the prime minister was enthusiastic. ‘Let us open the Window!’ he declared.

  The secret weapon was finally used on 24 July 1943, in a raid on Hamburg. Out of 791 aircraft sent in the attack, only twelve didn’t come back, a quarter of the usual losses on that run. The following evening, during a raid on Essen, Jones listened as German fighter controllers tried to direct pilots to intercept bombers that weren’t there, fooled by a trick that owed a small part of its success to the manufacturing expertise of a man who believed himself to be a Nazi agent.

  In April 1943, Roberts and Kohout had a heart-to-heart. After a year of working for the Gestapo, Kohout was a star and he knew it. ‘He surmised that some agents might pass their lives without getting the “scoops” that he had been fortunate enough to get,’ Roberts reported afterwards. The Austrian recalled with delight how an Air Ministry official visiting the factory had urgently warned paper manufacturers of the dangers of any information leaking out. He’d had no idea as he talked about spies, Kohout mused, ‘that one was within ten feet of him’.

  As he looked at the man who was both his agent and his enemy, whom he was betraying even as he congratulated him, Roberts found himself in an interesting position. ‘I felt a certain sympathy,’ he wrote. ‘I knew that if positions had been reversed, and I had been in Germany, I would have been every bit as thrilled.’

  It wasn’t such a fanciful transposition. Roberts and Kohout had a lot in common. They were a similar age, both with young families. Both came from inauspicious backgrounds, and had achieved success in their fields through skill and hard work. Both had been attracted to fascism as young men, and both wanted to serve their countries. More than that, while many men dreamed of being secret agents, Roberts and Kohout had crossed the threshold from dreams to action, and found that they enjoyed the thrill.

  If Roberts was struck by his fellow feeling for Kohout, the other man’s thoughts about their relationship were ones of pure relief. ‘Kohout said that he sometimes shuddered to think of what might have happened if he had not contacted me,’ Roberts said. ‘I asked him what he meant, and he replied that he could not have kept quiet with information in his possession of the type given during the last month or so.’

  Kohout said that he would probably have made a ‘last effort’ to get the information to Germany through a neutral embassy – Spain was of course the obvious one. ‘He knew that he would in all probability have been caught in the attempt but he said that he was certain that he would have made the effort.’

  As it happened, he wasn’t the only man trying to get the Window secret out of the country. A secretary at the Air Ministry, Olive Sheehan, had given the details to Douglas Springhall, the national organiser of Britain’s Communist Party, who had attempted to pass it to the Russians. Sheehan’s flatmate had realised what was happening and reported her, and Springhall was sentenced to seven years in prison.

  Springhall could at least argue that he had only been trying to help an ally. Kohout believed he was passing intelligence to Britain’s enemy. He had been recorded discussing how to help Germany, and MI5 had evidence of him repeatedly acting to do so. Roberts might have felt he had a lot in common with Kohout, but he also knew that he was putting a noose around his neck.

  13

  ‘A twinge of uneasiness’

  If Roberts had reached a point of total trust with Kohout, he was nowhere near that stage with Perigoe, as he learned in November 1942. In the wider war, the British had finally had some good news. British forces in the Western Desert had won the second battle of El Alamein, and Axis forces were in retreat. Meanwhile a second Allied army had landed in North Africa, and was advancing eastward.

  In London, Perigoe was eating a meal with the man she knew as ‘Jack King’ when she suddenly asked a question: was his name really Roberts?

  There was no clue as to what was behind the question, but it was easy to guess. For the vast bulk of his career as an agent, Roberts had been working under his own name. He had used it to penetrate the Leeds British Union cell two years earlier. Reg Windsor and Michael Gannon had known it when they were arrested and interned, though Windsor at least at first didn’t believe Roberts had been the man who had turned them in. But the pair had now spent close to two years on the Isle of Man, comparing notes with other fascists, many of whom had known Roberts before the war.

  There was, for instance, Bernard Porter, the district leader for Epsom, where Roberts lived. Porter had been interned, and must surely have found it odd that Roberts, who outranked him in the organisation, hadn’t. It was hardly as if Roberts was a peripheral figure: he had been an enthusiastic fascist, joining every group he could. If the internees were trying to work out who had put them behind barbed wire, Eric Roberts was bound to be near the top of the list of suspects.

  And once they had reached that conclusion, it wouldn’t have been difficult to get word back to London. Roberts had first met Perigoe, after all, because she knew how to smuggle messages to and from the Isle of Man. Perhaps his past was beginning to catch up with him.

  Or there was another possibility, even closer to home. Roberts had never discussed his work in front of his children, he thought. But Max was a sharp lad, and had begun to suspect that his father had a secret. Finally, goaded by other boys, he yelled that his dad wasn’t, as he’d previously claimed, a conscientious objector. He was a spy. Eric and Audrey had been horrified when they heard this, and Max was sent back to the boys to say that he had lied. Probably his friends hadn’t believed him in the first place – it was exactly the kind of lie a child would make up. But what if they had nevertheless repeated it to their parents? Not every fascist in Epsom had been locked up.

  Roberts thought fast. He knew that Perigoe saw herself as a German agent, deep behind enemy lines. She didn’t speak with the melodrama of some of the other recruits, but she was all the more dangerous for her cooler take on the world. It was only a few months since she’d joked about stabbing him with a penknife. He was certain that she was capable of violence, even murder, if she believed she had been betrayed. And if she did believe that, killing him might be her best chance. Like Kohout, she had said and done quite enough to earn a death sentence, but her capture and trial might depend on Roberts being alive to identify her. For all her talk of microphones, she couldn’t know that her voice was in Rothschild’s archives.

  All this he weighed in a moment as Perigoe watched him for a flinch, a twitch, a sign that he knew he’d been found out. And then, without looking up from his food, Roberts gave his reply: ‘Yes.’

  Perigoe was wrong-footed. She had almost certainly expected a denial, and was poised to judge its plausibility. Roberts’s response wasn’t the one expected from a guilty man. Its insouciance left open a range of possibilities. Was this another of Jack’s jokes, like his remarks about micropho
nes in the Park West flat? Or was Roberts actually his name? And if it was, what did that mean? It was a fairly common name, after all. Could there be two men named Roberts inside British fascism, one working for the Gestapo and the other working for MI5? Her moment of challenge passed, and she was uncertain what she had achieved.

  *

  Thinking about the episode later, Roberts took the view that Perigoe didn’t really believe he was an MI5 man. Even if word had come back from the Isle of Man that Eric Roberts was not to be trusted, it was unlikely to have come with a photograph. What would a description say? Tall man in his late thirties, starting to lose his hair? That was a fairly wide field. There was the scar on his face, of course. Those were rather less common, even in this time of war. But if Perigoe genuinely thought he was this Roberts person, would she have come to meet him?

  The more troubling possibility was that the information about his name had come not from the Isle of Man but from within MI5. Roberts had long had his doubts about whether the organisation was as secure as it ought to be.

  Not long after he began working for Rothschild, he had been walking past Charing Cross station, next to Trafalgar Square, when he ran into an MI5 colleague, Dick Brooman-White, who dealt with Spanish espionage. He was five years younger than Roberts, and had joined MI5 after Eton, Cambridge and a career in journalism. Despite those disadvantages, he had an abundance of charm which had won Roberts over easily. He had delighted in teasing Roberts and Dickson in the early days of the war, and his default tone was that of exaggerated conspiracy.

  Brooman-White greeted Roberts and begged him to keep silent about their encounter: he had skipped out of the office to meet a ‘personal friend’ who had not shown up. As they were both there, would Roberts like to go for a coffee?

  Roberts would have preferred a beer, but he agreed to go to the Lyons Corner House across the road from the station. A vast multi-storey restaurant, staffed by waitresses too busy to pry into anyone’s business, it was a suitably anonymous location for two intelligence men to talk shop without being overheard. On typical form, Brooman-White asked Roberts if he had brought the Watchers – MI5’s network of surveillance experts – along with him. As they sipped their drinks, Brooman-White asked a tricky question.

  ‘Robbie, you have the art of never wearing your heart on your sleeve,’ he started. ‘Your pal Jimmy regards me as through the eyes of a civil servant, slightly eccentric or mildly crazy. What is your opinion?’

  Roberts was usually too careful to give a frank answer to a question like that, but this time he was flattered. If Dickson had given him the civil servant’s view, he would give him the secret agent’s.

  ‘I said that in my own private mind I often attached tags to the people with whom I was dealing and in his case, it was “Agent Plus”,’ Roberts recorded later. ‘I thought him wasted as an officer, he should have been an agent.’

  To Roberts, the field man who hated the office, there was no higher praise to offer, but as soon as he had said it, he worried he’d given offence. Instead, Brooman-White laughed. But what he said next was troubling. He alluded to a line from a report that Roberts had sent to Rothschild a couple of days earlier. How did he know that? Those reports were copied to Maxwell Knight, under an agreement he’d reached with Rothschild, and Roberts guessed that either Knight himself or someone on his staff must have mentioned it to Brooman-White.

  Despite the light mood of their conversation, Roberts felt ‘a twinge of uneasiness’. How many people were reading these reports, he wondered. ‘Being in the limelight could be disastrous. I avoided it as far as possible.’

  Brooman-White changed the subject a little, asking about Rothschild, and whether he ever discussed his friends. Wondering what lay behind the question, Roberts replied that they didn’t have those kinds of conversations. His unease continued. He knew Brooman-White to be very right-wing. Could he also be a little anti-Semitic?

  But there was something about Brooman-White that invited confidences. Perhaps it was this quality – the same one that Roberts himself had in abundance – that had earned him the label ‘Agent Plus’. He had another question: did Roberts think it was possible that the Office had been penetrated?

  If the question was a surprise, the fact that Roberts answered it was even more of one, even to himself. Yes, he said, he believed it was. And as he unburdened himself of the thought that had been troubling him for months, he went further. He identified two men he suspected might be working for the Abwehr. One was in Knight’s department, and the other was a man with access to some of MI5’s greatest secrets. But as soon as the words were out of Roberts’s mouth, he knew he’d made a mistake in speaking. Brooman-White didn’t believe the Office could have a traitor inside it – certainly not the second chap Roberts had named, who’d been to a good school and university. He had been pulling Roberts’s leg, and had got a better result than he could have hoped for.

  ‘Robbie,’ Brooman-White laughed. ‘You will be suspecting Vic Rothschild next!’

  Roberts had made a fool of himself. Humiliated, he resolved to keep his thoughts to himself from then on. But he also did something else: he went to Rothschild and Clay and asked them to take Knight off the circulation list for his reports. He might feel stupid making his accusations, but he would feel even more foolish if the Fifth Column found out who he was. The fewer people who knew what he was up to, the fewer people could spill the secret.

  It would be a quarter of a century before the truth emerged.

  Turning back to Perigoe’s accusation, though Roberts was confident he had seen off her suspicions at least for the moment, he took her question about his name seriously, and reported it back to Clay. She, in turn, thought it was sufficiently important to refer up the tree to Liddell. He asked her to prepare a short briefing note on the case as it stood.

  Liddell was one of the few supporters of the operation at the higher levels of the Security Service. Petrie, the director-general, had asked Harker, his deputy, to look into it again. Harker sat down with Liddell, his deputy Dick White, and Jack Curry. Liddell and Curry argued that the case showed the need for further investigation into Germans and their sympathisers living in Britain. After all, a single agent, simply by identifying himself as a Gestapo agent, had managed to unearth dozens of people who were apparently willing to help Germany. How many more might be out there?

  Petrie, Harker told them, did not think it was ‘necessary or desirable’ to find out. He also opposed using Roberts’s intelligence to widen the Invasion List. ‘He thought that the Fifth Column aspect was rather out of date,’ Liddell recorded in his diary. ‘Both Curry and I were in disagreement with this view.’ It was a stalemate. ‘Obviously nothing is going to be done,’ wrote a frustrated Liddell.

  Perigoe soon had a number of problems to distract her from the question of Jack King’s true identity. Her husband was proving a difficulty, too. Internment, with little end in sight, had apparently left Bernard bitter towards all sides in the war. Now that he knew of Marita’s connection to the Gestapo, he saw an opportunity.

  He proposed blackmailing the organisation. His wife was already being paid, but Bernard was the one who had to suffer imprisonment. Why shouldn’t he get some compensation, too? And if the Gestapo wasn’t willing to come up with the goods, well, the British authorities would be grateful to learn of a German operation under their noses. And perhaps he would be released as a result.

  As blackmail ideas go, it was an unconvincing one: Bernard would have been threatening to expose his own wife as a spy, and potentially send her to the gallows. But if the possibility of exposure worried Marita for one reason, it worried Roberts for another. When she told him her husband’s thinking, he realised he had to be stopped before things went any further. If Bernard reported the Fifth Column to the police, then MI5 would have to decide whether to order the arrest of its members. If they arrested them, the operation would be over, his role would be revealed, and the Home Office was likely to demand an ex
planation. But if there was no investigation, then Marita would surely smell a rat. Either way, if Bernard opened his mouth, the operation was in danger.

  To try to persuade Bernard to stay silent, Marita enlisted his parents. Charles and Emma Perigoe had moved away from Wembley at the start of the war, to Hastings in east Sussex. On one of the stretches of England’s south coast closest to France, the name of this fishing port was synonymous with invasion – William the Conqueror landed a little way down the coast in 1066. In 1940, when it had seemed Hitler might come at any moment, the town had been transformed, with gun emplacements, tank traps, and barbed wire along the beach. Pipes were installed to pump oil out into the sea – if the Germans tried to land, the British hoped to set fire to the water as they arrived.

  Marita didn’t enjoy the company of her in-laws, but she knew they were loyal to fascism and angry about their son’s continued imprisonment. The hostility they’d suffered from neighbours over these things had only turned them further against Britain.

  When Marita first told Roberts she had persuaded them to join the Fifth Column, his private response was sympathy. ‘I feel sorry indeed for these parents,’ he wrote. ‘But it is a good example of how fascist propaganda over a long period can undermine the loyalty of ordinary decent citizens. The Perigoe seniors are not dangerous in the same sense as the younger BU members, but I maintain that their sense of duty to their country has been seriously affected.’

  This was putting it mildly. Marita had handed him statements signed by each of them, pledging their loyalty to the Nazi ‘cause’. Charles had asked if he could become a full-time agent. Emma went further still. Marita returned from a visit to Hastings in May 1943 with a map her mother-in-law had drawn, with the aim of helping attackers. Emma had come up with a cover for their reconnaissance trip: a visit to the cemetery, carrying flowers to lay on relatives’ graves, provided a fine chance to scout defences. She ‘showed an excellent capacity for memorising gun positions and other items of military interest’, Roberts reported. ‘Marita remarked that Mrs Emma Perigoe felt very happy to think that she had done something of a concrete nature to help the German Secret Service.’