Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  Rothschild, on the other hand, felt that taking live German bombs apart by hand was rather more dangerous than running a prison camp for German spies – or a ‘nursing home’ for ‘miserable seamen’, as Rothschild disparagingly called it.

  ‘At one moment it looked as if there might be a stand-up fight,’ Liddell recorded. The pair had to be eased apart by David Petrie, the director-general.

  Stephens wasn’t the only MI5 officer to take against the young aristocrat. While Liddell liked Rothschild, others suspected his advancement was down to his connections, particularly with the prime minister. Although the pair weren’t close, few if any other MI5 staff had hosted the Churchills to dinner.

  There was also Rothschild’s often haughty manner, a product both of his background and his intellect. He knew this was a problem, and proposed a new family motto: ‘Quick to give – and to take – offence’.

  These things combined when Churchill got word of the exploit with the onion crate. He demanded to know whether the officer concerned was getting any kind of award. Rothschild was offered Membership of the Order of the British Empire, a junior honour that he sneered ‘is almost always interpreted as meaning that you have loyally served Paddington Station in a subordinate capacity for over thirty years’.289 The prime minister, meanwhile, had demanded more information about the operation, and insisted that Rothschild got the far superior George Medal. While gratifying for him, it only fuelled the belief among some colleagues that he was getting special treatment.

  Despite the efforts of Robertson and his double agents to suggest to Germany that D-Day might not even come in 1944, it was clear the direction in which the war was currently going. But that didn’t stop the Fifth Column from gaining new recruits. In January of that year, Roberts had dinner with a woman who had been recruited by Kohout, Serafina Donko, and her friend Alwina Thies.

  Thies was German, but had moved to Britain a decade earlier, when she was in her twenties. She’d come as a clerk, but was now working as a housekeeper for an elderly gentleman in Richmond. She knew that Serafina – Fini to her friends – had a contact who could get information to Germany, and she’d heard something that she wanted to be passed on.

  ‘She had heard from a friend who worked at an important secret factory at Waltham Cross,’ Roberts recorded. ‘The friend had to work all through the Christmas period, and although Alwina was not enlightened as to what was being made at the factory, she was advised that there were two factories and that their production was essential to the smooth operation of the Second Front.’ Thies told Roberts that ‘a concentrated bombing of the Waltham Cross area might have excellent results’.

  As the conversation continued, Roberts found he was impressed by ‘Thies’s method of conveying information in an apparently artless sentence. She would mention place X, say something in its praise or to its detriment and then add details of every factory and aerodrome in the vicinity. To me there was no mistaking her intentions but to any listener the conversation would have appeared completely harmless. She permitted herself to express strongly anti-Semitic sentiments but did not refer to or praise the German National Socialist regime.’

  As they talked further, he concluded that Thies ‘was not Nazi but she wished to help her country’. She hadn’t really taken much interest in German politics as a young woman, and had lived in Britain since 1935, but now she was wishing she’d paid more attention.

  The outbreak of war had meant she was suddenly subject to considerable suspicion and hostility. In those early days, several people told her that she should be locked up. (Though she didn’t know it, she had in fact been considered for internment by MI5 at the start of 1940, but exempted as they had no grounds to suspect her.)

  Thies had decided that she must win the trust of her neighbours. The Blitz had presented her with a chance. She helped out the people dealing with incendiary bombs, and cooked and made hot drinks for defence workers. This, it turned out, was enough to prove that she was, in the words of one neighbour, ‘a decent German’. Thies treated this condescension with contempt. She explained to Roberts that the British were ‘detestable people owing to their insularity and conceit, yet they were soft-hearted and often soft-headed’.

  But Thies also told Roberts that all the time she’d been helping her neighbours, she’d been hoping she would one day have the opportunity of doing something for the Fatherland. What the English couldn’t understand, she said, was that ‘whatever political opinions were held by a German, there was only one loyalty and that was to Germany.’

  Her opinions of her neighbours weren’t uniformly hostile. At times, she said she liked the British, and when Roberts challenged her on the contradiction, she conceded that, in any event, she preferred the British to the Dutch, ‘who were much too hard and exacting’. She was fond of her employer, Mr Martin. ‘She laughed and asked me if any German aged 73 would get up early enough to lay the fires and make the morning tea when there was a woman in the house,’ Roberts wrote. ‘If he knew that she had passed on his Civil Defence secrets to the German SS, it would break his heart.’

  But she refused to feel guilty about this. ‘Thies told me that Mr Martin was a typical Englishman. He had visited Germany countless times, knew German and German customs but he didn’t know the Germans. If he had taken the trouble to get to know them, Thies thought that he would never have left anything of a confidential nature about the house.’

  Thies said she had a number of English friends, and they hadn’t shown her hostility. ‘The trusting nature of the British was a matter of constant amazement to her. She had to admit that she had received many kindnesses.’

  Roberts thought highly of his latest recruit. ‘I formed the opinion that Alwina Thies is a person who could be a grave danger to this country if in contact with the enemy. Her intelligence is above average.’

  Rothschild drew Thies to the attention of his colleague J. G. Denniston, who was in charge of monitoring Germans and Austrians living in the UK. Seeking supporters for the Fifth Column, the peer asked Denniston to send him a note back if he thought the case was a useful one. Denniston obliged.

  ‘This, like many of your cases, is interesting and also disturbing to any feelings of complacency which we may be tempted to harbour,’ he wrote. ‘Here is a woman who has lived in England since 1935, and has been shown by you to be a strongly patriotic German, ready to do anything for her country without thought of personal gain. Yet for nearly nine years, not a breath of suspicion has touched her.’

  Denniston offered a considered assessment of the value of the Fifth Column. ‘Your investigations are highly alarming, in that they reveal the presence of violently and actively patriotic Germans in our midst, for the most part unsuspected hitherto; but consoling in that they support the . . . thesis that the Germans are not making use of their resident nationals over here.’

  And had he known about Thies, Nevile Bland, the British ambassador whose melodramatic report in 1940 on the fall of Holland had done so much to fuel the Fifth Column panic, might well have been delighted to learn that his suspicions of German servants had, at least in one case, been proved right.

  As D-Day approached, the Fifth Column considered drastic action: could they kill General Eisenhower? They knew that the commander of Allied ground forces, Britain’s General Montgomery, had set up his headquarters at his old school, St Paul’s in Hammersmith, west London. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the invasion, would be going there for meetings. They knew how to get weapons, as Kohout’s purchase of the gun the previous year showed. Surely it was worth an attempt?

  Though Roberts turned the plan down flat, this was a particularly anxious time for him. Perigoe and Gleave were quite capable of attempting something on their own initiative, and if they did, it would be his fault for failing to stop them. But on the other hand, his refusal to let them act risked raising their already-present suspicions about him. Roberts was increasingly anxious about exposure. He had been playing this role for more than
two years now, a long time to avoid a mistake. What if Kohout or Perigoe took it into their heads to follow him one evening? He knew how to spot a tail, but it wasn’t easy in the blackout. ‘I was close as damn it to exposure and hung on by a hair,’ he recalled later.

  Meanwhile Rothschild’s anti-sabotage duties had increased. ‘We spend most of our time preparing people for the Second Front – an endless series of lectures to baboon-like Field Security non-commissioned officers,’ he wrote to Duff Cooper at the end of March. ‘I have done it for six weeks now, and I’m bored to distraction.’

  On 6 June 1944, Allied forces landed at Normandy, successfully establishing a toehold in France. Within MI5, there was pride that Tar Robertson and his Double Cross team, along with the First US Army Group and its occasionally airborne tank landing craft, had successfully convinced Germany that this was merely a diversion from the real attack.

  For Rothschild, it was a chance for a change of scene and some fresh excitement. As the Germans retreated, they left surprises behind them for the advancing allies, including booby traps disguised as horse dung on the roads. Rothschild was seconded to the US Army to teach its officers the art of sabotage and counter-sabotage.

  After a trip to Rome to view the tricks of the retreating German army, Rothschild arrived in Paris soon after its liberation in August 1944. He took Tess Mayor with him. Officially, she was his assistant, but she like Clay was taking on duties far beyond the secretarial. She was awarded an MBE – the honour Rothschild had rejected – for ‘dangerous work in hazardous circumstances’ clearing booby-traps around Rocquemont, near Rouen. She filled another role as well. Barbara was still Rothschild’s wife, but their marriage had been over for years: Tess and Victor dined out as a couple in Paris.

  Victor Rothschild and Tess Mayor, centre, on bomb-disposal duties in France

  Alwina Thies’s patriotism didn’t blind her to the predicament her country was in. As D-Day approached, she had asked Roberts what he thought would happen if Germany lost the war. She was pessimistic. ‘The English will not allow us to prepare for the third war as we did for this one,’ she observed. ‘They will therefore be forced to be harsh, because they know as we know that this result will not be final.’

  She told Roberts that she wanted to carry on working for him after the war. ‘If she was not allowed to do so, she intended to visit Germany in order to see if she could contact anybody carrying on the struggle. She was certain she could be of help.’

  Roberts thought her response ‘appalling’ for its assessment that force was the only way questions could be resolved. But the question of the future was a live one. When Perigoe and Roberts had begun recruiting, the idea of a German invasion of Britain had still been a possibility that its members could cling to. By the summer of 1944, the question was how long it would take the Allies to reach Berlin.

  Within MI5, the success of D-Day saw the return of the argument that the Fifth Column operation should be wound up. Not only had the danger of a German invasion disappeared, there was no longer any risk that one of the members would leak something about the invasion of France.

  Liddell requested a ‘comprehensive’ summary of the operation, and just after D-Day, Rothschild sent it to him. It was largely Clay’s work. As well as a brief memorandum, Rothschild and Clay included a series of charts to explain the breadth of the Fifth Column network and its interrelated nature.

  Rothschild was now sufficiently concerned about the safety of the operation that he included an extraordinary comment in his covering note to Liddell and his deputy, Dick White: ‘You will I think both appreciate that this memorandum and the charts are not entirely suitable for reading on normal office days.’ Instead, he proposed that they study them ‘at leisure’ when no one else was around – at the weekend, or in the evenings.

  What kind of document might have been so sensitive that the director of MI5’s espionage division couldn’t read it at his desk on a normal working day? This must have been a reference to the charts. Rothschild had taken a further precaution with those. They were, he explained, incomprehensible without the unique card index that his department maintained of Roberts’s network. When they wanted to look at the charts, Liddell and White would need to ask Clay if they could see the index.

  Clay’s memorandum was partly a defence of the operation to date, and partly a case for continuing it.

  To demonstrate the reliability of Roberts’s reporting, his four-page summary of his April 1943 conversation with Brown in which she celebrated the bombing of Brighton was included. Down the margin, sections were marked and numbered in red. Next were thirteen pages of transcript, taken from the recording of the meeting, with more marks in the margin, showing what Roberts had been referring to.

  Clay mentioned in passing that Roberts had dissuaded his operatives from sabotage, but the main justification she offered for the operation was intelligence-gathering. ‘Its function is to provide the Security Service with records of disloyal and subversive persons and to prevent such persons from carrying out disloyal acts in times of emergency,’ she wrote. ‘The case is operating so well at the moment that numbers of disloyal persons are coming to light every week.’ She cited ten ‘subversive or potentially subversive organisations’ on which the Fifth Column was supplying information.

  Liddell continued his role as the operation’s main internal supporter. ‘This case is serving a very useful purpose,’ he wrote to White and Hollis. ‘I would strongly recommend that for the time being it should continue.’

  In July, Clay went to see Liddell. With Rothschild’s attention focused on Normandy and sabotage, the Fifth Column case was now hers to run alone, and she had a problem on which she hoped for Liddell’s advice. ‘Jack is rather beginning to get into difficulties,’ Liddell recorded afterwards. ‘A stage of the war has been reached where he has got to express some rather definite views about the future.’

  This was, of course, a live subject within MI5 as well, and one on which there was little agreement. As they came to terms with the idea that things were going badly for Hitler, the natural inclination of the Fifth Column’s members was to blame the generals for letting the Führer down. In this, Clay and Liddell decided to encourage them, pointing to the recent replacement of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who had been commanding German forces in France. ‘We decided that he should quote the instance of Rundstedt’s departure, explain that of course the generals are not party men and that although loyal to their country they have not got the same fanaticism as party members,’ Liddell wrote.

  As Jack King was supposed to be a Gestapo man, he would advocate a Gestapo solution, explaining that his ultimate boss, Heinrich Himmler, was extending his control in an effort to recover the situation.

  And Roberts was to continue to urge the Fifth Column against any kind of sabotage. ‘He is further to say that defeat, although not yet a fait accompli, must be regarded as a possibility, and that it is therefore important that his followers should take no overt action which would spoil their chances of reforming and playing their part in the preparation for the next war.’

  Elsewhere within MI5, Clay had been calling in support. In September 1944, Thomas Shelford, now running F3, the MI5 section that monitored fascist groups, sent a three-page memo setting out his section’s view of the operation. He asked his officers to suggest their own examples of where it had helped them. A department that had initially been sceptical about the Fifth Column operation’s value was now offering full-throated support.

  ‘I need hardly say that I fully agree with Lord Rothschild’s opinion about the importance of being fully informed about these people,’ Shelford wrote. ‘With the example of Hitler before us, I think that it is dangerous to disregard extremists merely because they can be dubbed neurotics.’

  Which was just as well, because two months earlier Kohout had stumbled across a clue to Britain’s greatest intelligence secret. One of his recruits was Maria Lanzl, a 32-year-old servant working in Hendon. She ha
d a friend who worked in the household of Superintendent George Hatherill, one of the star detectives of Scotland Yard. This woman reported, correctly, that the headquarters of the Special Operations Executive, Churchill’s army of commandos, was in Baker Street. She also offered another nugget: apparently, there was some kind of allied intelligence operation being run out of a country house north-west of London. Kohout passed the information up: surely this was worth investigating? The name of the place was Bletchley Park.

  Liddell was horrified. Bletchley was Britain’s code-breaking headquarters, the place where some of the world’s greatest minds had been assembled in an astonishingly successful effort to read the messages that German and Japanese forces were sending. It was thanks to this work that the Security Service had been confident that its Double Cross operation was believed, and that the Fifth Column wasn’t in contact with Berlin. The idea of the resourceful Austrian pottering out to Buckinghamshire on his motorbike to nose around was appalling. It was unlikely that the staff of Bletchley Park were strolling into the local pubs and announcing their success in cracking Germany’s supposedly uncrackable Enigma code, but Kohout had already demonstrated his knack for uncovering secrets. It was best to keep him well away. Liddell ordered Roberts to tell Kohout that ‘headquarters which are in the country are of no real interest’ to the Gestapo.

  Kohout’s focus, in any case, was elsewhere. ‘The group are now concentrating very much on establishing connection with the underground movement in Germany with a view to preparation for the third world war,’ Liddell wrote in his diary. Even after fifteen years in MI5, and five years of war, Liddell retained his capacity to be surprised by his fellow man: ‘The sentiments of these people are really astonishing.’