But after he returned from internment in November 1940, he and Rita opted to lie low. Whatever his private views, Ronald had no desire to go back to prison.
In September 1942, Perigoe mentioned the Creasys to Roberts. Their son had been staying with the Herzigs during the harvest. Rita felt unable to leave Ronald with crops still in the field, so the seven-year-old was due to travel back from north London to Suffolk by train on his own. ‘Please tell him what a big man he is to travel alone,’ Rita wrote sadly to Luise. ‘It will help to give him confidence.’
The Creasys had been having a hard time of it since Ronald’s release. The local shops refused them service, and occasionally villagers were sufficiently emboldened – or inebriated – to hurl abuse or even clods of earth at Ronald. But Perigoe reported that despite or perhaps because of this hostility, the Creasys remained loyal to Germany. They could, she said, be relied upon to do all they could to help an invasion.
Roberts was initially wary of allowing their recruitment to the Fifth Column. They broke his rule of keeping former BUF members at a distance. But Kohout weighed in on their behalf. They were close to the coast, he said, ideally placed to assist invaders. From Roberts’s perspective, they were sufficiently distant from London that he had never met them during his own time in the British Union. Also Ronald’s internment had been brief, and hadn’t overlapped with Reg Windsor’s. Perhaps it would be safe to allow the Creasys into the group.
In early 1943, Kohout visited the Creasys to sound them out. He came back with excellent news. First, Ronald and Rita had lost none of their zeal for the cause. ‘They knew if Hitler lost then Mosley would also lose,’ Roberts noted, after Kohout had reported back. ‘They were not proposing to become Nazis but they were British Union members and would do anything likely to bring Mosley into power. By helping Germany, they thought this could be effected.’
The couple had Italian prisoners of war working on the farm – Churchill’s government, having in 1940 decided that British-Italians were too dangerous to be allowed to stay in the country, had in 1941 realised it needed workers, and begun importing captured Italian soldiers as a labour force – and were in the habit of exchanging fascist salutes with them: ‘Viva Mosley, Viva Il Duce!’
The Creasys claimed local soldiers had told them about the previous year’s attack on Dieppe three days in advance. Ronald promised Kohout that if they got more such information, he would send Rita with it to London at once.
And Rita was more than a helper in her husband’s cause: Kohout said he thought Rita easily the more pro-Nazi of the two, ‘and by far the more dangerous to the British’. This was a view that the police and MI5 seemed to share. She was tall, with dark hair and eyes – there was a report she was half-Spanish – and wore lipstick and colourful clothes. According to one MI5 case summary, she was clearly ‘pretty immoral’, though the evidence for this seemed to be the gossip about the parties she’d held while Ronald had been interned.
The Creasys’ devotion to the fascist cause was serious, but it didn’t completely blunt their self-interest. They told Kohout that they would be willing to shelter German agents, but not for free: they proposed taking them in as ‘paying guests’.
Kohout wasn’t completely positive. He told Roberts that Ronald had the air of a ‘political lunatic’. But he felt the advantages of recruiting the couple outweighed the dangers. The Creasys were put onto the Fifth Column’s books.
It didn’t take Rita Creasy long to put the operation into jeopardy. Within a month of Kohout’s visit, she had told a friend that she was collecting intelligence for Germany. That friend told another friend, who in turn told someone else, who reported the conversation to the local police sergeant. He told his chief constable.
As with Roberts’s earlier manoeuvres with Dorothy Wegener, any activity that provoked a police investigation was a threat to the Fifth Column. If they questioned Rita, and she named Kohout or the Herzigs, it would be hard to explain why they weren’t immediately rounded up.
Fortunately, the chief constable of East Suffolk followed his chain of command, and informed MI5 of the tip-off. He was, in any case, doubtful about Rita’s story. Whether out of a belated sense of concern for security, or to give her tale a more romantic edge, she had told her friend that she made her reports to a Czech woman who lived in a rectory close to an airfield outside Ipswich. In a final, improbable, touch, she claimed that this agent of Nazi Germany, who was sending weekly reports back to Berlin, was Jewish.
If the police thought this tale ‘too fantastic’ to be believed, MI5’s local man, Major Hughes, didn’t. He began a fruitless search for the ‘Czech Jewess’, something that, given the numerous clues, should not have taken long: there were only eleven Czech women registered in all of East Suffolk, and initial research revealed half of them had since moved away.
A fortnight later, the police reported that Rita had been talking again. On a trip to the cinema, she’d told her companion more about the supposed German spy. The woman was now reported to be working as a maid at a rectory.
The immediate question was whether the German spy that Rita was talking about was a clumsily disguised ‘Jack King’, or someone else. The possibility, even a remote one, of an unknown agent operating in Britain was enough to justify a check not just on the Creasys’ post but also on their phone. In the following months, MI5’s listeners were introduced to aspects of agricultural management that had previously passed them by, such as the complexities of wire netting and the sexing of hens’ eggs, conversations that were probably innocent, but might have been an elaborate code.
Meanwhile the police were tasked with finding out about Rita’s contacts. In some cases, their reports revealed more about them than their subjects. Dennis Rudd, a clergyman, ‘acted in a most peculiar manner for a curate’, they reported. ‘He walked about in daylight with his arms around his wife’s waist, and would kiss her.’
Other reports were little more than village gossip. Rita had been seen in a pub with an American sergeant who was stationed nearby. But of the Czech maid, there was no sign. ‘I fear that this report does not carry us any further,’ sighed Hughes.
He had now been searching for his spy for two months, and was coming to the conclusion that she was probably fictitious. The listeners were told they could stop their check on the Creasys’ telephone.
In June 1943, Kohout visited the Creasys again. Ronald and Rita, he reported afterwards, were more determined than ever to help the Fifth Column. During his stay, Ronald had brought out from its hiding place a record of the Nazi anthem, the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, and listened with tears in his eyes. The cause of the British Union and National Socialism were one, he told Kohout afterwards. He had a suggestion, too. He’d heard that the nearby American airfields used radio signals to guide their bombers. Couldn’t the Fifth Column sabotage a local power station, to disrupt these signals ‘at a critical moment’?
Rita, meanwhile, busied herself distributing a leaflet to Polish soldiers stationed nearby. It began in an arresting style:
HIS MAJESTY WLADYSLAW THE FIFTH, BY THE GRACE OF GOD KING OF POLAND, HUNGARY AND BOHEMIA, GRAND DUKE OF LITHUANIA, SILESIA AND THE UKRAINE, HOSPODAR OF MOLDAVIA, ETC. ETC. ETC. HIGH PRIEST OF THE SUN.
Proclamation to the English, the Poles, the Germans and the jews.
The author, a New Zealand poet named Geoffrey Potocki who now laid claim to Poland’s throne, took an expansionist view of what his country’s rightful territory should be, proposing a realm stretching from the Gulf of Riga in the north to the Black Sea and the Adriatic in the south. At the bottom of the pamphlet, his address gave a clue as to the distance of his dreams from reality: ‘Half Moon Cottage, Little Bookham, Surrey’.
The leaflet was anti-Semitic in tone, and naive about Germany. But the reason for Rita’s interest was its astonishing claim that one of Britain’s allies, the Soviet Union, had carried out a war crime against another, Poland, killing thousands of prisoners in cold blood.
&n
bsp; The pamphlet’s opening lines made it clear that it was written by someone who was, at the very least, highly eccentric. (Potocki’s other claim to fame was his jailing, a decade earlier, over an attempt to publish an obscene poem titled ‘Lament for Sir John Penis’.) Which made it all the more remarkable that the leaflet’s central allegation was completely accurate.
In April 1943, Germany had announced to the world that its army in Russia had found mass graves in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. There were 4,400 corpses, their hands wired behind their backs, each killed by a shot to the back of the head. Their uniforms revealed them to be some of more than 20,000 missing Polish officers who had been captured by the Soviet Union in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin had been dividing up Poland between them. The Germans claimed their discovery was evidence of a Soviet massacre. The Polish government in exile demanded answers. The Russians blamed the Germans. The Germans suggested the Red Cross should come and investigate.
For Britain, it was a difficult moment. Poland had been one of the reasons Britain went to war in the first place, and then a vital ally, supplying pilots to fight in the Battle of Britain, and cryptographic intelligence to help break the German Enigma code. But the war was no longer about Poland, and the USSR was now a more important ally, laying down millions of lives on the Eastern Front as it pushed the German army back. On the Western Front, it was to the USA that Churchill now looked for troops and supplies. The Poles had become a side issue. It wasn’t worth antagonising Stalin to get justice for them. The British and American governments pretended to believe the Russians. Their newspapers largely followed this line.
But the Nazis and their supporters saw a wedge they could drive between the Allies. Potocki was passed the information by Poles who had serious doubts about whether their allies could be trusted any more. He in turn argued that they were fighting the wrong enemy. ‘It is high time for a negotiated peace,’ he wrote, ‘in which we hope the Germans will be persuaded to display a proper regard for the rights of Poland.’ Given the events of 1939, this was hardly a realistic proposal, but it was in line with his call for the return of the Tsars to Russia and the monarchy to France. Potocki anyway had a high regard for Hitler. Reports of mass killings by Germany were, he said, ‘mythical’.
Rita’s view of Potocki’s claims was nuanced. She told Kohout she thought she’d been ‘rather silly’ to distribute the leaflet, but she was bored, ‘and she wanted to do something to help fascism whether the people concerned were British fascists or not’. Besides, she argued, the leaflets wouldn’t have been published if they were illegal.
This point was in fact at the centre of some debate within MI5 and the British government. At the end of June, MI5 was looking into prosecuting Potocki, with Rita standing trial as an accessory. When she heard about it, Clay moved swiftly. Up to then, she had been letting Major Hughes worry about the Creasys, in collaboration with Miss Burke, a Blenheim-based woman who like her was designated an ‘assistant officer’. Now she was worried the pair were throwing the whole operation into jeopardy.
A police investigation into the Creasys would be likely to scare the rest of the Fifth Column into hiding, she feared. Worse, a police search of the Creasy house might turn up something that pointed to Ronald and Rita’s contacts with Kohout or Herzig or even Roberts himself. Even if it didn’t, the Creasys were aware of a Gestapo man named Jack King operating in London. What if they tried to denounce him to the police in exchange for better treatment? ‘It should be considered whether it is worthwhile losing a useful source of intelligence regarding subversive people in this country for the doubtful success in prosecuting Mrs Creasy for an offence for which she may merely receive a caution or a small fine,’ Clay wrote.
This was the paradox of the Fifth Column operation: because the Creasys were working, albeit unconsciously, for MI5, MI5 had an incentive to protect them.
MI5’s legal adviser, Edward Cussen, meanwhile, advised against prosecuting Potocki. Someone styling himself ‘High Priest of the Sun’ was unlikely to be taken seriously, and a court case would only have drawn attention to him. Although he wasn’t completely safe. In October, he was sentenced to two months’ hard labour for breaking the blackout. His response to the court was defiant: ‘I call upon God to punish you. Heil Hitler!’
In July, Roberts finally got to meet the Creasys for himself, accompanied by Kohout and Luise Herzig. The farmer set out to ingratiate himself to the Gestapo man, telling him that he was himself a vegetarian, like Hitler. Keen for some affirmation in return, he asked if the Führer was, like him, a pantheist. Roberts knew a thing or two about pleasing his audience as well. He was, he said meaningfully, not allowed to give an ‘official’ answer to this question, because the Reich was anxious not to offend those with other religious sensibilities. Ronald heard what he wanted, and replied that he had always suspected he shared his beliefs with the leader, and was glad to know this was true.
Ronald wasn’t a physically impressive man: average height, slim, a ginger moustache across his thin face. He told Roberts at some length about his experience appealing against his internment to the Advisory Committee, which he embellished somewhat, claiming among other things that they had warned him he would be lucky not to be shot if they saw him again.
‘I listened in patience, examining Creasy closely,’ Roberts reported. ‘I knew that the man was telling lies, but after a time I came to the conclusion that he really did believe in what he told me. Creasy had a way of putting over his story that was extraordinarily convincing.’
As Ronald continued to speak, Roberts saw why Mosley had been sufficiently impressed to appoint him a BUF District Leader. ‘The man has a wonderful grasp of the English language and despite his political fanaticism, he can hold the attention by his ability to make use of the beauty of words,’ read his report. ‘His theme was the nobility of the fascist creed. The man is a semilunatic, but after a while I noticed that Kohout and Mrs Herzig were listening with rapt attention, not grasping much of what was being said, but visibly moved by the sounds of the cascade. He eventually turned to the Jews. Creasy certainly knew his subject. His style might not appeal to farmers, but it would make a wonderful appeal to hooligan elements of the BU type.’
Ronald’s feelings about working with Roberts were mixed. He clearly found the prospect attractive – he’d gone to the meeting, after all – but he was also nervous about the risk he ran of being sent back to internment. ‘He had not now the courage for propaganda work,’ Roberts wrote. ‘Creasy hoped to save himself for activities after the war. The returning soldiers would be fed up with the Yids and more wide awake than the local farmers. He could see that fascism stood a good chance. I advised Creasy to save himself for his leader, who would be in want of idealists like himself.’
In the coming months, Ronald continued to try to have it both ways. He told the Herzigs his observations of the operations of the nearby US airfield, but tried to make light of them. ‘Creasy intimated that the information was to be regarded as gossip from himself and not a deliberate attempt to help the enemy, although he knew the destination of the information,’ Roberts wrote. ‘Typical BU man.’
The farmer had long been frustrated by his inability to convince the farmers of Suffolk of the wickedness of the Jews. But he now had a fresh plan for stirring up local anger. In 1941, the US Army Air Force had begun taking over large parts of East Anglia to build airfields. It was currently on course to build an average of one every eight miles – 100,000 acres in Norfolk. And each of these bases had hundreds or even thousands of airmen and ground staff on them. These troops were brash, and tended to thrown their money around. Some of them were also quite different from anyone the people of Suffolk had ever seen before.
‘The presence of coloured troops in the neighbourhood of Eye had led to a certain amount of friction with the villagers,’ Roberts reported. ‘Creasy was keeping an eye on this development and would seize any opportunity of stirring up trouble. The villagers and farmers were not
Jew conscious, but they were rapidly becoming colour conscious.’
The Creasys’ hatred of Jews didn’t, however, override their desire to make money. As Christmas 1943 approached, Ronald was conscious that the 200 turkeys he’d reared were in high demand – the Ministry of Food estimated only one family in ten would get a bird that year. He offered them to Kohout at four pounds ten shillings apiece, arguing he’d be able to sell them on in London, but Kohout turned him down. It was with some pleasure that Ronald later reported he’d got twice that from a Jewish black marketeer who supplied London’s hotels. ‘Ronald had never made any secret out of the fact that it was quite fair to make money out of the Jews and that this would not affect one’s attitude towards them when the time arrived for a general “beating-up”,’ Roberts wrote. The farmer took a similarly flexible attitude to paying off public officials: ‘Creasy said it was against his high principles to give bribes, but it worked wonders.’
Clay was becoming concerned that too much information was being shared about the Fifth Column operation. She attributed this to Burke’s habit of sharing excerpts from reports with MI5’s regional officers, who then passed them on to the local police. At the bottom of all Roberts’s reports, typed in red and underlined, were the words: ‘NO ACTION WITHOUT REFERENCE TO B1C LORD ROTHSCHILD’. In practice, that often turned out to mean Clay, working on the correct assumption that her boss’s name and title were more likely to impress strangers. But this warning was getting lost as the reports were passed on. Even though Burke was careful always to describe the information as coming from a ‘delicate source’, the police were inclined to act on it.
And in a rural area like Suffolk, it was hard to keep secrets. In August 1943, Rita was taken aside by an American officer with whom she had become friendly. His commanding officer had told him to stop seeing her. She and Ronald were viewed as ‘dangerous people’, he said. More than that, they were under observation by the authorities, and had been for the past decade (this wasn’t true, at least as far as MI5 were concerned: its file only went back as far as 1939). Rita was doubtful about this – given some of the things she’d said and done that year, she should surely already be under arrest – but the American was insistent. He explained that the authorities were content to let subversives roam freely, so long as they knew who they were.
Agent Jack Page 25