Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  In his meeting with Liddell to discuss the Fifth Column, Rothschild set out a third course between prosecution and continuity: humiliation. Kohout and the Herzigs could have their British citizenships revoked, and other key figures such as Marita would be called in and told the truth: that far from being cunning Nazi spies, they had been dupes of MI5. But he didn’t favour this option. It would, he argued, only push the fascists further underground.

  Rothschild was far more wedded to continuation. He pointed out the possibilities. Some of the Fifth Column had said they planned to go to Germany or Spain after the war, and Rothschild proposed helping them to do that: they could provide information about fascist groups there.

  Liddell, more cautious, wasn’t about to approve MI5 running an international fascist-hunting operation once the war was over. He simply agreed that it should continue ‘for the present’.

  In the meantime, Rothschild was so pleased with the Fifth Column that he wanted to take Marita on full-time, and increase her pay to five pounds a week. Not a vast sum, but it was paid in cash and it was tax-free.*

  As far as Roberts was concerned, she was already working quite hard enough. At the end of February 1944, she spent six hours briefing him on a visit to internees on the Isle of Man. At the end of his twelve-page write-up of the meeting, he closed, drily: ‘I left Marita at six pm. She said that she had more to report. I asked for mercy.’

  The pair had met Marita that Friday lunchtime in a pub in St James’s, round the corner from MI5’s headquarters, and Roberts had been surprised to find her ‘not only cold but almost hostile’. The reason for her irritation with him, she revealed, was that she had been certain he had been killed in an air raid two days earlier, and was annoyed to find her intuition had been wrong.

  She had been caught in a raid on the Wednesday night and the following morning had gone to see the damage. ‘When looking at the devastation, Marita’s mind was troubled by a vivid memory of the panelled room of which she had once had a dream, in which she had seen Gestapo members poring over index cards taken from a box,’ Roberts explained. ‘The conviction gripped her that this room was in one of the flats in King Street which had been destroyed and although she fought hard against this idea, it had filled her mind by the afternoon and her fears had become a certainty. She knew that the room had gone and that several of the Gestapo had been killed, including myself.’

  Apparently disappointed in herself more than she was relieved that Roberts was alive, Marita vowed never to trust her intuition again. That wasn’t a response which Roberts wanted to encourage – he felt intuition could be a useful sense in an agent. In an effort to encourage her, he told her that their headquarters had indeed been damaged, and his chief slightly injured.

  As it happened, there was a grain of truth in this: that month, Roberts’s boss had been bombed out of his flat in St James’s. It was the closest Roberts had come to telling one of Britain’s most industrious fascists that she was working for the country’s leading Jew, Victor Rothschild.

  * In this respect, Marita, an unconscious MI5 employee, was in the same situation as other, conscious MI5 staff, who were paid, untaxed, in cash until after the end of the war.

  17

  ‘Carrying on the struggle’

  The early months of 1944 saw two armies in southern England preparing to invade France: a real one and a fake one. While US forces built up along the western end of the coast, and British and Canadian forces in the centre, in Kent, at the point where the Channel was narrowest, the First US Army Group amassed. FUSAG faced a problem unique in the history of mechanised warfare: unless they were tied down, its tank-carrying landing craft tended to blow away in high winds.

  As part of Operation Fortitude, the plan to deceive Germany about Allied intentions for D-Day, a vast imaginary force was created that appeared poised to invade Calais. General George S. Patton was announced to be in command of FUSAG. Mobile wireless vans drove around broadcasting to each other, to create the impression of the kind of traffic a real force would create. Tar Robertson’s Double Cross agents reported on the activities of this army. At the start of May, one of Pujol’s fictional agents reported sighting the US 6th Armored Division in Ipswich. Meanwhile the real spies near Ipswich, Ronald and Rita Creasy, were told that, as known fascists, they had to stay away from coastal areas. Robertson was ‘98 per cent confident’ that he controlled all the German spies in Britain, but the planners were taking no chances.

  With most of the Fifth Column, it would be impossible to impose similar bans without revealing that they were suspects. The hope was that the only person they were passing information to was Roberts.

  In a country completely mobilised for war, even people in unimportant occupations had access to useful information. Eileen Gleave’s work in a laundry had meant she dealt with large amounts of troop kit, and had to send it after them when they were redeployed across the country. Bernard Perigoe’s parents in Hastings were well placed to assess the number of troops in their area, as was Nancy Brown in Brighton.

  Hilda Leech meanwhile was becoming increasingly anxious. In April, she called Roberts and asked him to meet her that evening. She was sure that she was being watched. The previous November, she had found herself talking to a smart man who was courting a young friend of hers. She had detected fascist leanings in him, and had begun to reveal her own sympathies when her friend mentioned that he was a police detective. Struggling not to collapse, Leech had asked which bit of London he covered. ‘The Edgware Road area,’ she had been told – that meant the Park West flat was right on his patch. Leech had refused to believe it was a coincidence and – unsuccessfully – urged Perigoe to stop going to the apartment.

  Now she had intelligence that she said was so urgent that she had to risk the phone. Roberts met her at Marylebone station and took her to a nearby pub. She’d learned from her son that the Home Guard were to have special duties when the regular army invaded Europe, and had now been on standby for some time. Meanwhile Home Guards on the east and north coasts had been warned the Germans might try to stage a counter-invasion.

  ‘Mrs Leech thought the news of sufficient importance to warrant the use of the telephone,’ Roberts reported. ‘She was certain that her mail was being opened and her telephone tapped. I asked her why she was so certain but she could not give me a satisfactory reason apart from a conviction which to use her own words suddenly swept over her.’

  It was, Roberts said, ‘useless arguing about it’ and so he asked instead what precautions she was taking. Leech replied she was ‘telephoning everybody she could think of and talking at great length’ in the hope that ‘the listeners would become so bored that they would report that her conversations were not worth checking’.

  Suddenly Leech spotted a tall man standing by the bar. ‘Special Branch!’ she hissed to Roberts. He replied that she was ‘talking nonsense’. Leech explained she was occasionally overcome with guilt at working with him, and asked him if it would be possible for her to become a German citizen after the war, so as to ease her conscience. ‘I suggested that if she felt qualms over what she was doing that she ought to offer her resignation. Mrs Leech said that it was not so much the awareness of doing wrong as the fear of being found out and exposed that worried her. She was certain that the information she had given us warranted the death penalty.’

  The man at the bar wasn’t one of MI5’s Watchers, but Leech was quite right that her post was being opened and her calls listened to. This meant Rothschild and Clay knew a huge amount about her personal life, including that she had gone to see a solicitor a few months earlier, complaining that her husband was withholding his affections. ‘I am writing to your husband informing him that your instructions show that his conduct appears to amount to cruelty,’ the lawyer replied, before going on to explain that ‘there can be no proceedings for restitution of conjugal rights for, strange as it may seem, there is no machinery for enforcing marital rights by the court’.

  But whatev
er precautions Leech had taken in contacting Roberts, MI5 would have been bound to hear the call she’d made to him that day. The previous month, when Roberts decided he needed to give a phone number to the Fifth Column, the solution had been straightforward: they were given the number of B1C, Rothschild’s department. After all, it wasn’t as if anyone who picked up the phone announced to the caller that they had reached MI5. The Fifth Column were told to follow a special procedure when calling, both allowing the B1C switchboard to know how to handle them, and at the same time reinforcing the group’s belief that ‘Jack King’ was merely one part of a much larger machine.

  The Fifth Column continued to provide information that would have been unavailable elsewhere. An exchange of interned citizens had been proposed with Germany. One of those listed to go home from a British internment camp saw an opportunity to do a little espionage in the process. ‘Some Austrian woman in one of the camps is collecting information from visitors which she intends to take out,’ Liddell noted. This fact had been passed to Marita, possibly on the grounds that she and Jack King might be grateful for a way to get secrets out of the country.

  Not all the information the Fifth Column provided was reliable. Sometimes people lied to its members, not because they suspected them of working for MI5, but simply to impress them. One of the women that Perigoe was keeping tabs on when she visited the Isle of Man was an Austrian woman in her early thirties called Mirjam Gallagher. Gallagher had spent the years before the war living in London in what might best be described as an open marriage to a half-German actor, with both of them supported by an allowance she received from a former lover in Holland. It was hardly surprising that, at the outbreak of the war, an Austrian living off hard-to-explain sums from a foreigner was suspected of being a spy, and she was swiftly interned.

  Her husband Tommy had managed to avoid detention on the grounds that though he was probably a rogue and a swindler, he didn’t seem to be working for Germany. But his efforts to secure his wife’s release were undermined by her habit of telling people, including one of Marita Perigoe’s informants, that she was a German agent. MI5 were never able to completely rule this out, but concluded that she probably just enjoyed telling ‘fantastic stories about herself’.

  But much of the information was solid, especially about internees’ attitudes. One, Ann Sokl, knew about Perigoe’s ‘Gestapo’ connection, and saw in it an opportunity for vengeance. She named an Austrian whom she believed had supplied information to British intelligence and asked for him to be placed on the Gestapo ‘Black List’.

  ‘Sokl said that whatever the outcome of the war, the renegades and spies who had helped Britain must be dealt with and taught that betrayal of their own countrymen was not a paying game,’ Roberts reported. ‘It was odd to think that the preliminary steps to ensure his death were being taken under the noses of the British internment camp authorities.’

  In February 1944, Rothschild was summoned to Northampton to examine a crate of onions brought off a ship from Spain, in which something suspicious had been spotted. Before he got there, he had a pretty good idea what the crate would contain.

  Decrypted German messages had told MI5 that five bombs had been planted inside shipments of food sent from Spain to Britain. Useful though that information was, it didn’t help them locate the devices among the vast amount of cargo travelling this route. The only way to do that was to wait. Sure enough, the steamship Stanhope, which was carrying oranges, had reported three explosions in its hold. Another ship, the Haywood, reported one. That left one bomb unaccounted for.

  The crate had been placed in an open area for Rothschild to examine it. He had a field telephone, and at the other end of the long wire, one of his assistants, Cynthia Shaw, who sat waiting to record how he disarmed the bomb. Or, if things went badly, how the third Baron Rothschild had met his end.

  This wasn’t vanity. If Rothschild was killed, it would be important for his successor to understand what he’d got wrong. So he described everything he could see, and everything he did.

  ‘It is a crate in three compartments,’ he began. ‘The right-hand compartment has onions in it. The middle compartment also appears to have onions in it. The left-hand compartment has already had most of the onions taken out but I can see right at the bottom in the left-hand corner of the left-hand compartment one characteristic block of German TNT.’

  German sabotage operations focused on destroying ships and their cargoes while they were in transit. So Rothschild knew this bomb was supposed to have gone off by now. Probably its clockwork timer had malfunctioned, but that didn’t mean he was safe. It could well be ticking down as he stood next to it, and all he really knew was that this crate was already overdue to explode.

  ‘I am now going to stop talking and start taking the onions out.’

  It was a wooden crate, less than waist high, and someone had started to crowbar it open to get the onions out. They’d stopped when they’d seen the explosive, but Rothschild didn’t know how much they’d disturbed the bomb.

  ‘I can now see one block of TNT in the middle compartment, top left-hand side. I can now see another block of TNT in the middle compartment, top right-hand side.’

  The onions had swelled and started to sprout during their journey, making it difficult to get them out.

  ‘I am now going to go to the right-hand compartment because I am looking for the delay mechanism or initiating device. There does not seem to be room for it in the middle compartment.’

  The TNT was shaped into bricks, three inches wide and five inches long. It was ideal for the purpose of naval sabotage, because it wasn’t damaged by water, and it wouldn’t accidentally detonate if the crate was dropped or knocked. To set it off, it needed another explosive, and that was what Rothschild was looking for.

  ‘I have come to a block of TNT in the right-hand compartment, furthest away from me to the left of the right-hand compartment. There is a sort of putty-like thing next to it. I am not sure what that is. I am going back to the extreme left-hand compartment because I want to try and get as much TNT out as I can.’

  The work was dangerous, but it was mentally absorbing, and Rothschild hated boredom.

  ‘I am now going very gently to take out the cast brick of high explosive.’

  There was a block of putty in this compartment as well, and some of it came away when he lifted out the TNT. It was about the same size and shape as the high-explosive brick. He lifted it out and put it on one side.

  ‘I am now going to start doing the same in the centre compartment.’

  There were two blocks in there. Rothschild reached out and probed them with great care. ‘I shall start with the left-hand one. It seems to be a little loose.’

  Both blocks came out. Rothschild assessed his situation. ‘I am now going back to the right-hand compartment. The delay mechanism and the starter must be in that compartment, and I am going to start slowly taking the onions away again.’

  He could see another block of TNT, and the block of putty he’d noticed earlier, similar to the one he’d just removed. He was increasingly sure that it was plastic explosive.

  ‘I cannot see any delay. I am having difficulty because the onions are jammed right in and I do not want to pull hard.’

  The German fuses were beautiful bits of engineering, which allowed their operators to set how many days they wanted to delay detonation. They were wound up, and then ticked down until the moment came to complete an electrical circuit that would start a small detonation. Small, but enough to set off a much larger one if they were connected to the right explosive.

  A German 21-day timer

  ‘This is the last block of TNT that I can see and I am going to try very gently to move it away from the plastic with which it is in contact. I do not see the delay or time clock. It must be inside the plastic or possibly buried underneath it.’

  Rothschild peeled back a little of the plastic block, to see if he could see a detonator sticking into the TNT. Nothing. />
  ‘I have taken out the last block of TNT and I am now going to start looking at the plastic explosive.’

  He lifted the putty block out. ‘It feels rather heavy.’

  One thing at a time. Rothschild carried the blocks of TNT away from the crate. Without a detonator, they were harmless. He returned to the two pieces of putty.

  ‘I am now going to start trying to take this plastic explosive to pieces.’

  The first thing he saw was a small cylinder, about the size of a cotton reel. This he recognised as high explosive, designed to set off the TNT when it was itself set off by a smaller detonator.

  ‘I see a primer inside one of them. I am going to try to take that out.’

  He was nearly there now, but a slip while handling the detonator would still be fatal.

  ‘I have taken the primer out and I can now see the detonator buried in the middle of the plastic.’

  At last, something familiar.

  ‘It is a twenty-one-day Mark II German time clock. I have unscrewed the electric detonator from the Mark II delay, so that one is safe.’

  He was confident now, but he mustn’t rush. There was a strong chance that the Germans had included a second detonator in the bomb. And there it was.

  ‘I can just see the other Mark II delay inside the other piece of plastic.

  ‘I have taken the other primer off.

  ‘The other detonator is off.

  ‘All over, all safe now.’

  When he checked the timers, he found that one had stopped. The other, presumably due to a bump in its unloading and transit, had restarted, and had been due to go off in seven days.

  If Rothschild exuded calm at moments such as this, he wasn’t always so controlled. Two weeks later, at a drunken MI5 dinner in Liddell’s honour at the Hyde Park Hotel, he found himself on the receiving end of pointed remarks from Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens, the monocled commander of MI5’s interrogation centre. Stephens had served for many years with the elite Gurkha regiment, and objected to Rothschild wearing a military uniform without ever having heard a shot fired in battle.