Perigoe could only approach people that she knew and trusted. That inevitably gave the Fifth Column a local feel, with many of its members living within walking distance of each other, in Wembley. This suburb of north-west London had been transformed over the previous decades, as developers built street upon street of reasonably priced homes for those who worked in the capital but wanted to escape its slums. Much of the building took place along the route of the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground. In the 1920s, the line’s owners had given the places that were now within commuting distance of the city the collective label ‘Metro-Land’, and built tens of thousands of family homes there.
Although these housing estates were the summit of modern suburban living, their mock-Tudor style tried to evoke the rural houses of a bygone era, with black beams and dormer windows that suggested these semi-detached three-bedroom homes were places with which Elizabeth I or Sir Francis Drake might have felt familiar. At a time when Britons suspected their nation’s place in the world might be declining, their architecture dwelt on an earlier century when its star had been on the rise.
Metro-Land was for the newly middle class, for those who were making their way in the world, and the Metro-Land spies that Perigoe recruited were drawn from these circles: people who had to work for a living, but who were clear that they weren’t working class. Perigoe herself was a picture-restorer. Edgar Bray was an accountant. Hilda Leech was a bank clerk, as Roberts had been. They shared a resentment that many of their ‘betters’ owed their stations in life to accidents of birth, rather than merit.
And while Perigoe looked down her nose at him, Kohout was the ultimate Metro-Land aspirational spy. Not only was he an expert in the modern material of tin foil, he had set himself up as a landlord, with a portfolio of five houses in the area.
The Fifth Column weren’t the only spies in Metro-Land. A few minutes’ drive away, in Hendon, on the other side of the Brent Reservoir, where Edgar Bray had watched the amphibious tank trials, lived the Abwehr’s apparently most prolific agent. Juan Pujol Garcia was a Spaniard who had volunteered his services to German intelligence in 1941. He was given the codename ‘Agent Arabel’, and told that if he could get himself to London, Berlin would take him seriously.
By the end of that year, Pujol was sending to Berlin not only his own reports of Britain’s situation, but those of three other agents he had recruited. If his progress delighted the Germans, it was causing some concern to MI5. Just as they had concluded that there were no German spies in Britain, intercepted transmissions, decoded at Bletchley Park, showed that there was an entire network. But on closer examination, a lot of the information seemed either ridiculous or wrong. The reports were understandably confused by Britain’s pre-decimal currency system of pounds, shillings and pence, but they also suggested that in Glasgow there were men ‘who would do anything for a litre of wine’. And there were descriptions of a tank that didn’t exist. The MI5 investigation concluded that whoever these spies were, they were either mad or fraudulent.
What neither MI5 nor the Abwehr considered was that Agent Arabel might not even be in Britain, and his network might be entirely inside his head. At this point, Pujol was living in Lisbon, filing imaginary dispatches based on what he could learn from tourist guides to Britain. Meanwhile, he was repeatedly failing in the next stage of his plan: to get recruited by British intelligence as well. He had realised that having a German agent working for them might be a good thing for the British. To his frustration, he couldn’t find anyone from Britain who agreed: the MI6 officers at the embassy in Lisbon showed no interest.
Even when Pujol’s wife Araceli went to the American embassy, and persuaded them to reach out to their British counterparts, progress was slow. It was only a chance conversation in early 1942 between Tar Robertson and one of MI6’s men in Lisbon that led to the realisation that Pujol was running his own fake agent operation, and had the Germans fooled. MI5 rapidly decided it would be best if he worked for them, so they brought him to Britain and set him up with his young family in Hendon.
There, he was given a British codename, ‘Garbo’, after the screen goddess Greta Garbo, in tribute to his skill at inhabiting different roles. By 1943, his ‘network’ consisted of seven imaginary agents, including a Portuguese salesman who lived in South Wales, and a Gibraltarian waiter in London. They were spread from North Africa to Canada, supplying information to Germany selected by the XX Committee and turned into messages by Pujol and his case officer, Tommy Harris.
The case was going swimmingly. Pujol and Harris created personalities and life stories for each of their spies, sending them on missions and even killing off one who was notionally based in Liverpool when they realised it would be impossible for him to explain how he’d failed to warn of the sailing of large numbers of troopships towards North Africa in November 1942.
The problem was at home. Fearing that his wife would accidentally reveal what he was doing, Pujol had forbidden Araceli much contact with fellow Spaniards. As she spoke little English, this left her with few people to talk to. A couple of years earlier, she had been a partner in his spying adventure. Now she was stuck caring for two small children in a suburban home in a foreign country, with little adult companionship. She begged to be allowed to go back to Spain, but was refused – there would be no way of monitoring her activities or protecting her from unwanted attention from Germany.
In June 1943, she had had enough. Araceli told her husband that she was going to go to the Spanish embassy in London and reveal what he had been doing. She then telephoned Harris and repeated the threat. MI5 went into a flap. Mrs Pujol was a Spanish citizen, and they had no power to stop her from asking to see her consul. If she revealed the extent of her husband’s fraud upon the Abwehr, it was bound to lead to an investigation into their other British agents, whose reports synchronised with his. Araceli could destroy the entire Double Cross operation, and MI5 had no power to stop her.
Liddell, Robertson, Harris and MI5’s legal adviser, Major Edward Cussen, held a crisis meeting. ‘She ought really to be locked up and kept incommunicado, but in the state of the law here nothing of the kind is possible,’ Liddell complained afterwards. They considered other options: warning the Spanish embassy that a mad woman fitting Araceli’s description planned to kill the ambassador. ‘This would, we hope, ensure her being flung out,’ Liddell considered. ‘It would, however, result in the police being called in, which would be a bore.’
The coincidence of geography that made the three miles around Wembley Park station the base of so many of the spies that MI5 was controlling suggested another possibility. If Araceli wanted something to do, perhaps they should give her an agent to run. Obviously they wouldn’t trust her with a real spy, or even one of her husband’s imaginary ones, but they already had a fake agent working in Metro-Land.
‘It has also been suggested, to give her an interest in life, that she would be shown a bogus message indicating that a Gestapo agent here has some instructions to make contact with Garbo,’ Liddell recorded. ‘We would then put in Jack and let her run his case.’
Araceli would be told that she must meet this Gestapo man and, at all costs, keep him away from the truth about her husband’s work. Roberts would play the inquisitive agent of Germany, scaling his activities to keep Araceli busy. It would be a deception wrapped in another deception to protect a third deception. ‘This will of course be an added complication to the already complicated Garbo case,’ Liddell observed.
It would be an added complication to the already complicated Fifth Column operation, too. Roberts would not only have to be a fake agent-runner, he would have to be a fake agent as well. It was a measure of Liddell’s confidence in Roberts’s powers of deception that he was considering it.
In the end, the plan was rejected in favour of Pujol’s own proposal – a cold-blooded deception of the mother of his children. Araceli was told her husband had been arrested, and that Harris was himself being disciplined for his handling
of the case. Mrs Pujol was initially distraught, and then sceptical. She called another MI5 man, Charles Haines, and asked him to come round. When he arrived, he found Araceli sitting in her kitchen, with all the gas taps turned on. Haines was unconvinced that this was a real suicide attempt, but with the Pujol children in the house, feared an accident. He consulted Harris, who sent his wife round to sit with Araceli.
It was Mrs Harris who persuaded Araceli of Pujol’s ruse. She so convincingly played the worried wife of a man who was in disgrace that by the morning, the other woman was convinced the situation was serious. Then came the coup de grâce: Araceli was driven, blindfolded, to Camp 020, MI5’s detention centre in Richmond, south-west London. There her husband was brought out to her, dressed in prison clothes and unshaven. Mrs Pujol was broken. ‘She promised him that if only he were released from prison, she would help him in every way to continue his work with even greater zeal than before,’ Harris reported. ‘She would never again ask to go to Spain.’
Pujol was back in business, and Roberts was free to get on with running his own branch of Metro-Land’s intelligence community.
15
‘A National Socialist atmosphere’
If the residents of Metro-Land dreamed of a more rural existence than their urban occupations allowed, Ronald and Rita Creasy lived one.
Their farm was 75 miles north-east of London, in what they advertised to potential paying guests as ‘the quiet of the real Suffolk country’. It was a world away from Metro-Land, with its rows of suburban houses a brisk walk from the station. The closest railway stop to the Creasys was seven miles away.
Ronald Creasy also occupied a quite different position in Britain’s social strata from the Metro-Land Fifth Columnists. The son of a substantial landowner, he was no petit-bourgeois – he had been educated by a private tutor. The Creasys, he said, could trace their line back to Norman times, when they’d held a lordship situated between Dieppe and Rouen. They’d owned land in the neighbouring county of Norfolk since the thirteenth century. By 1930, they had stakes in over eighty farms in the two counties. When he turned 21 that year, he was given the management of one of them.
But Ronald wasn’t content to follow the path of his ancestors and take his place at the top of the local social order. On visits to London and Paris, he was troubled by the plight of destitute people he saw. Closer to home, he was acutely aware of the difficulties facing agriculture. Both his father and their tenants had been hit by cheaper imports that had pushed down grain prices. Men had been forced out of work, and good land lay dormant, because it was uneconomic to plant it.
And if suburban dwellers harked back to a mythical bygone age, the farmers of Suffolk had begun the 1930s with a protest against one particular ancient tradition. Under the ‘tithe’ system, which dated from a time when people were expected to support their local priest, many farmers were legally required to pay money to the Church of England, or in some cases the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities, which had once been religious houses. The law that required this was obscure, and the deeds of the land often made no mention that it carried this obligation. The tax had once been supposed to be calculated based on the value of the crop, but as wheat prices fell, the amount demanded didn’t.
The young Ronald Creasy
Ronald was furious with the church. He saw farmers driven to despair and even suicide by their plight. Meanwhile, in church on Sunday he noted that his family, as the leading one in the area, had a reserved pew at the front, while lesser families were expected to sit behind them. ‘I could see our privileges and their lack of privileges,’ he later recalled. Orthodox religion, he concluded, ‘was always for those who have against those who have not’. He rejected the faith of his family in favour of pantheism.
A young man angry with the government and with the injustice of the social order might easily have pursued either communism or fascism in the early 1930s. But communism held no appeal for Ronald. For one thing, he saw himself as a patriot, and for another, his desire to overturn the social order didn’t extend all the way to giving up his own place in it. Rather, he saw himself as a Mosley-like figure, a member of the upper classes who would use his position to help the ordinary people.
‘The fascist idea suited me remarkably well,’ he said later, ‘because fascism means leadership and I was prepared to be a leader. I was born to leadership. That also encouraged me to leave the old behind and, for the sake of the people, to go into the BUF, but as a leader.’
He met Mosley and said that he would join the BUF – but only in a position commensurate with his status. Mosley, quite comfortable with snobbery, agreed, and Creasy was duly appointed the District Leader for his new local branch. Rita, his wife, was named Women’s District Leader.
Ronald saw the tithe as a means of engaging his fellow farmers. For several years now, they had been protesting about it. Some were nonconformists, and didn’t see why they should help fund a church to which they didn’t even belong. Others were newcomers who had bought their farms without understanding the tax. Meanwhile the church commissioners insisted upon their dues, and sent in bailiffs to collect the money.
Creasy persuaded Mosley to deploy Blackshirts to Suffolk to defend those who were refusing to pay. The ‘Tithe Wars’, as they became known, were an ideal cause for the British Union of Fascists, which combined nostalgia for a mythical past with attacks on those who had traditionally held power. This was a battle between downtrodden, honest British yeomen and the forces of the government, the police and the Church of England, a body that many identified with the Conservative Party. The farmers had been made poor by free trade and financial manipulation. Their fortunes would be restored by a government that would act in their interests. Beyond that, it was a straightforwardly popular local cause, the ideal thing for any insurgent party to attach itself to.
Mosley’s campaign against tithes was popular with farmers
The Blackshirt intervention made a difference. One stand-off with bailiffs and police in Ringshall, near Stowmarket in Suffolk, ended with the tithe receiver, in this case King’s College, Cambridge, giving way. At another farm near Wortham, twenty miles away, the Blackshirts fortified the entrance with trenches, and prepared to do battle with the bailiffs. They remained there for more than two weeks, until fifty policemen arrived from London and arrested nineteen of them. BUF membership across the region swelled, approaching 2,000 in 1934. Even though it fell away quickly after that, it remained popular enough for Ronald to be elected to the local council in 1938 as the British Union candidate.
But when war came, his association with fascism was less popular locally. He was attacked in the local pub when he tried to distribute leaflets advocating peace with Germany. A local journalist wrote confidentially to MI5 saying he suspected Ronald would be willing to help the enemy if he could. And in June 1940, he was rounded up and interned along with other BU leaders.
Ronald found prison hard. He was used to spending his days roaming across fields, accorded respect by those around him. Now he was stuck in a cell in Liverpool. The train there had stopped at every station to pick up more men like him. His particular fury was provoked by the one thing left for him in his cell: a Bible. This was Christian mercy, to lock a man up for his political beliefs?
Back in Suffolk, Rita was trying to manage the farm, as well as look after their five-year-old son. It wasn’t easy. The time was approaching when seeds needed to be sown. Ronald understood that – what should be planted where, and when.
Rita Creasy
By the time Ronald’s case was reviewed in September, he was in a sorry state. When the Advisory Committee questioned him about his views, he kept talking about his desire to return to the soil. As he rambled on about his love for his country, the committee chairman became increasingly frustrated. As Ronald began another speech, he interrupted: ‘Oh for God’s sake don’t quote Shakespeare to me.’
The committee struggled to decide whether Ronald was deliberately tr
ying to lie to them, or whether he was simply in the midst of a breakdown. In the end, they decided it was the latter. ‘This man is clearly interested in agriculture and nothing else in the world,’ they concluded, ignoring that, a year earlier, Ronald had described himself in the census as a politician and writer. ‘His attachment to the British Union arose from what may be described as his agricultural obsession; he is an agricultural fanatic and has no fanaticism for or interest in anything else.’ In the face of the protests of both MI5 and his local police force, they urged his immediate release.
In Ronald’s absence, Rita had moved back in with her mother, where she was rumoured to be hosting parties late into the night for local troops. Afterwards, she was reported to be spending hours scribbling furious notes. But these reports weren’t taken terribly seriously by the Security Service, who noted there had also been rumours that Rita’s mother had a wireless transmitter, and these had proved to be groundless.
Neighbours also claimed that the couple’s son, Karl, had been heard to say that Hitler was ‘a good man’. Whether this was true or not, it was certainly his father’s view. Ronald had visited Germany a couple of years earlier and been deeply impressed. ‘The happiness, the contentment, the wealth, the prosperity,’ he recalled. As for the Führer himself, ‘What a man! From poverty, from nothing, he built up a great nation.’ He received the ‘worship’ of the people, and Ronald thought he deserved it.
Even after war had broken out, he and Rita were advertising their farm in the BUF paper as a place where people could come and stay in a ‘National Socialist atmosphere’. The Advisory Committee, it seemed, had underestimated Ronald’s enthusiasm for non-agricultural activity.
Agent Jack Page 24