Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  But not everyone on the Fifth Column operation went unrecognised. For much of 1945, Cynthia Shaw, Rothschild’s stenographer on his bomb-defusing runs, was engaged with a particularly tricky task: obtaining German medals for their star recruits. Examples were sourced from the still-raging battlefront. Rothschild’s staff at the Royal Mint Refinery were asked if they could make copies. And in January 1946, Marita Perigoe and Hans Kohout were each presented with a bronze Kriegsverdienstkreuz 2. Klass – War Merit Cross, Second Class – the German medal for non-combat gallantry. They were, Liddell recorded, ‘extremely gratified’. Perigoe announced she would hide hers in the stuffing of her armchair.

  Although some German medals were issued after the surrender, it seems probable that the last Nazi medals of the Second World War were awarded, in secret, by the British Security Service, to two people the German government had never heard of. It is also possible that they were manufactured by a subsidiary of the world’s most famous Jewish bank.

  The files don’t record exactly what Roberts told his recruits about who, with the Third Reich in ruins and Hitler dead, had issued these decorations. They don’t record the explanation he gave for why in these circumstances they were still needed to collect intelligence for the Gestapo. They don’t record who Perigoe thought was still paying her four pounds a week, or her response when whoever it was cut that to two pounds a week.

  They do record the meeting that made that decision, on a Monday at the end of November 1946. The subject, once again, was the future of the Fifth Column. Unlike similar meetings that took place during the war, Roberts – now a permanent fixture at MI5 – was present. There were seven names under discussion apart from Perigoe’s. Eileen Gleave was still on the list, providing information on resurgent fascist groups. So was Joe Bates, the enthusiastic recruit from October 1944 – ‘in touch with a wide circle of pro-Nazi Germans and dual-nationals in the East End’. For most of the list, including Hans Kohout, the assessment given to Nancy Brown was typical: ‘Of little interest at the moment but contact should be maintained.’

  The meeting closed with instructions to Roberts to make ‘every effort’ to find new recruits. He was to tell these that ‘the remnants of the German Secret Service have amalgamated with the Soviet Secret Service’. The files don’t record whether this unlikely story yielded results. In truth, MI5’s focus was shifting back to its more traditional enemy. Communism, not fascism, became their primary focus.

  Still, if anyone could have convinced someone that he was an English Gestapo recruiter now working with the Russians, it was Eric Roberts. Rothschild and Clay were hardly unbiased, but their description of his work on the Fifth Column as a ‘staggering tour de force’ seems fair.

  Among the many subjects upon which Maxwell Knight had firm views was the capacity of an individual intelligence officer. ‘It must be clearly understood that there is a very definite limitation to the number of agents who can be successfully operated by one officer,’ he wrote. ‘It is my personal opinion that no officer can efficiently look after more than eight agents, and six is probably a better number.’

  By the end of the war, Jack Curry estimated Roberts was ‘directly or indirectly in contact with some five hundred fascistminded people’. It was a network some six times the size of the Double Cross operation. Of course, many of these were barely active – the vast bulk of Roberts’s time was occupied by a small number of his agents. But it still represented a huge feat.

  And not just by Roberts: Rothschild’s counter-sabotage department, B1C, was collating the intelligence Roberts brought back, transcribing the recordings, maintaining the private card index, chasing up leads and distributing reports on the Fifth Column members. Much of this essentially administrative work was viewed as women’s work, which may be why the woman who ran the operation in Rothschild’s absence, Theresa Clay, got little acknowledgement.

  But the Fifth Column operation was, in the end, one that MI5 was happy to keep quiet about. It hadn’t obviously changed the course of the war. The lives most clearly saved were those of traitors who, had they not found their way to Roberts, might have attempted a treachery that would have risked the noose.

  Worse, it had revealed something about Britain that few wanted to acknowledge. The country told itself that, while other nations might be willing to goose-step or bend to the will of a dictator, such things were not in the British nature. But Roberts had found ordinary British men and women who didn’t just privately wish Hitler well, but were prepared to risk their lives to help him. Behind them were surely many more who would cheerfully have gone along with fascism if it had seemed the safest course.

  It’s axiomatic that intelligence agencies are secretive. Often, the secrecy is used to protect people who have risked their lives to pass on information. Sometimes, as with Bletchley Park, the secrecy is aimed at preventing enemies from realising the extent of your capabilities. Both of these were partly true of the Fifth Column case. But there was another reason for MI5’s secrecy: embarrassment, both at what they had discovered, and the methods they’d used to do it.

  So sensitive was the operation that, when Rothschild submitted his internal history of B1C’s war, it didn’t contain a single mention of the Fifth Column.

  In 1947, Clay, still at MI5 and now signing her own name, sent a note to a colleague, explaining that she was trying to ‘destroy or replace by scrambled extracts’ all references to original Fifth Column reports. A decade after that, when the Security Service was cleaning out its files, many of Roberts’s reports were destroyed. With most of its defenders out of MI5, the Fifth Column operation was being wiped from the institutional memory.

  And Roberts? He was already on his way to his next adventure. In 1947 he would travel to Vienna, on loan to MI6, with a mission to get himself recruited as a Soviet agent. The boy from Cornwall had come to London to prove that he was as good as anyone. It had taken longer than he’d hoped, and only those closest to him would ever know, but he had made his way to the very heart of the secret establishment.

  Epilogue

  ‘A Great Source of Trouble’

  At the end of the war, MI5 had plenty of cause for self-congratulation. It had faced two challenges: attempts by Germany to send agents into Britain, and attempts by people already in the country to get information out. Both had been economically dealt with through the artful use of deception.

  The Double Cross operation had gone beyond simply capturing spies, and had succeeded in turning them against their masters, saving lives by deceiving the German high command about the location of the D-Day landings.

  Meanwhile the Fifth Column operation had absorbed the energies of those, such as Perigoe and Kohout, who were capable of inflicting serious harm on the British war effort. Had Roberts not posed as their Gestapo spymaster, they might have approached Germany directly themselves, perhaps through the Spanish embassy. Had Berlin had access to genuine intelligence about, for instance, the disposition of troops along England’s south coast, it would have jeopardised Double Cross. Worse, had Hitler known the Allies were trying to deceive him about the location of the D-Day landings, he might have guessed their real location, and pushed them back.

  And there was an elegance to the decision not to reveal the operation. Like Double Cross, like the cracking of the Enigma Code, it was another secret victory. The Fifth Columnists went to their graves thinking they had kept a great secret: that they had spent the war working for Hitler. They would never know the greater one: that they had spent the war working for MI5.

  But there was another twist, one which would hang over MI5 and many of its wartime heroes, including Liddell, Rothschild and Roberts: MI5 had itself been, unwittingly, working for someone else.

  Roberts returned from Vienna after just over a year, dispirited. His mission had been a dangerous failure. He had trailed his coat without success. So far as he could tell, the closest he’d come to Soviet intelligence was a moment when he was fairly sure they had tried to kill him. Th
ere seemed to have been little interest in recruiting him.* He had a theory as to why.

  Before he’d left, Liddell had hinted that he suspected MI6 might have been penetrated by the Soviets. On his return, the pair had a longer conversation. Roberts feared being put behind a desk, and wanted Liddell’s help staying in the field. In the past, the two men had got on together. Liddell had been the main senior backer of the Fifth Column operation. Roberts had gone to him when he was having problems with Maxwell Knight. But this time, he got little support. ‘He told me that in an agent context, no man could go on indefinitely,’ Roberts recalled. ‘Sooner or later, he became tired and jaded, if not blown.’

  Liddell changed the subject, and asked Roberts if he suspected MI5 had a traitor. Roberts’s mind went back to the suspicions he had long held about some of his colleagues. During the war, he’d assumed that such a person would be working for German intelligence. Perhaps that had been his mistake.

  Looking at Liddell, he replied that the Soviets seemed so uninterested in learning about the part of Allied operations that he’d been working in that the only explanation could be that they already had better sources of information. And if the communists had placed agents there, they would have tried to place them in MI5, too, as that was the main threat to their espionage operations.

  ‘He asked me how I would penetrate the Office if I were a Soviet spymaster,’ Roberts recalled. ‘The question both titillated and flattered me. I said the Soviet agent would have to be a man who by ability and social acceptability could reach a command position. He must have attended the same schools and universities as the rest of the people in the Office.’ Despite his years in MI5, Roberts still felt his own social inferiority keenly. ‘It would be useless for a chap like myself to attempt the assignment. I said that if the Soviet agent became a member of one or two of the most exclusive clubs, I doubted if anybody would be willing to entertain doubts of his loyalty.’

  ‘At which stage would our man be recruited?’ Liddell asked. Roberts had no reply. Somehow, a change in the other man’s manner made him wonder if he’d gone too far. ‘Guy seemed lost in thought.’ Abruptly, Liddell brought the conversation to a close, and Roberts was sure he’d overreached. ‘We never exchanged another word.’

  Roberts thought he’d upset Liddell. But it is possible that their conversation prompted him to take another step along the road to pulling together some thoughts that had been nagging him for years.

  In 1942, Liddell confided a worry to his diary: ‘There is no doubt that the Russians are far better in the matter of espionage than any other country in the world.’ He continued, ‘I am perfectly certain that they are well bedded down here and that we should be making more active investigations. They will be a great source of trouble to us when the war is over.’

  By 1949, when he spoke to Roberts, he knew that cables between the US and the UK had been sent to the Soviets during the war, probably from the British embassy in Washington. At that stage the inquiry was focused on junior members of staff, but it would gradually shift upwards, and identify a much more senior diplomat, Donald Maclean. With his exposure came that of Guy Burgess – Victor Rothschild’s former tenant and Tess Mayor’s former flatmate – and, in time, Kim Philby.

  As well as being a huge professional blow to the reputation of British intelligence, their exposure was a personal blow to Liddell. Burgess and Philby were men he had trusted, that he’d shared confidences with. And he, the master spy-catcher, had never realised they were traitors. At different times in the years that followed both Liddell and Rothschild would also come under suspicion of being Soviet agents. It would blight their careers. Liddell left the Security Service having failed to achieve his ambition of becoming director-general, and died in 1958. ‘I find that I miss him a great deal,’ Theresa Clay wrote to Roberts a few months later, ‘because although I did not see him very often he was one of those people one liked to think were around.’

  *

  Rothschild married Tess Mayor. She proved a much better match for him than Barbara, sharing his tastes and managing his eccentricities, and they went on to have three children. Perhaps the marriage succeeded because they had worked closely in moments of real danger, or perhaps the war had changed some of Victor’s expectations of a woman’s role. He continued his driven existence, working in research at Cambridge University and for Shell, consulting for the government, and trying, not entirely successfully, to keep his distance from the family bank. If his children sometimes found him difficult or distant, his friends found him relentlessly generous. Dogged by rumours that he too was a traitor, he finally wrote a letter to newspapers in 1986: ‘I am not, and never have been, a Soviet agent.’ He died in 1990. His memorial was attended by three prime ministers, and featured a recording of jazz piano as well as the more usual sacred music. Tess died in 1996.

  After the failure of his Vienna secondment, Roberts was brought back to work in the Office. He was given a desk job, handling other people’s reports. When he noticed he was being tailed by MI5’s Watchers, he became convinced that he too was under suspicion. In 1956, deeply unhappy, diabetic – ‘a product of years of anxiety’, his doctor judged – and drinking more than he knew was healthy, he was pushed out of MI5.

  He seized the opportunity and left the country. He had already helped his eldest son, Max, to take a sponsored job on a farm in Canada, and Peter had followed. Aged nineteen and twenty, they were now living in Toronto. Eric, Audrey and Crista joined them. After poring over atlases in the library, he decided to head on west. When they ran out of continent at Vancouver, they carried on to Vancouver Island, where Roberts was shocked to run into a former MI5 colleague in a restaurant – a chance encounter, he acknowledged, as she seemed as horrified as he was. Sensing he needed to go still further, he took his family to Salt Spring, an island off Vancouver Island.

  Eric Roberts on Salt Spring Island

  Here, at last, the man who had grown up next to one ocean found peace next to another. It was probably not a coincidence that he settled in a place where any strangers would be noticed, nor that his house overlooked the bay, allowing him to watch the ferries and sea planes arriving – ‘an ideal refuge’, he called it. His diabetes prevented him from working and so it was Audrey’s turn to lie about her age, pretending to be younger to get a job in a bank and support them both. They gardened and, like so many other British spies, Eric took to writing. He researched and published a history of the island, but it was his short stories based on his time in Vienna that came closest to the work that had dominated his life. Each was vivid, darkly humorous and ended with a grisly death.

  The Roberts house was a welcoming one, often crowded with their children and their friends, and in time their grandchildren, who adored their grandfather’s obsession with playing pranks on them.

  But Eric Roberts had one more secret to share. In 1968, a car pulled up outside his house. Inside was an MI5 officer, Barry Russell Jones, accompanied by a Canadian police officer. The Security Service was trawling through its history, searching for clues to traitors that it might have missed. The journey to Canada to interview Roberts was part of that. In the days that followed, Roberts would suffer a physical collapse, as long-suppressed memories flooded to the surface. But on the day itself, he was expecting his visitors. When Jones arrived, he handed him an envelope.

  Inside was the name of one of the men Roberts had told Dick Brooman-White that he suspected of being a German agent in 1941. The response had embarrassed Roberts into silence, but his doubts had never left him. He now believed he had got the country for whom the man was spying wrong, but not the identity of the agent.

  When Jones opened the envelope, he was able to give the retired spy a final classified briefing. The man whom Roberts had named had confessed to being a Soviet spy four years earlier, in return for a guarantee of anonymity and immunity from prosecution.

  The name in the envelope was that of Guy Liddell’s assistant, the young recruit who had so enterta
ined his masters on his first day at work with his sardonic assessments of the warnings from anxious citizens about poisoned ice creams and people with German ancestry: Anthony Blunt.

  Blunt’s confession that he had been working for the Soviet Union throughout the war had been ‘devastating’ to Rothschild: ‘I lost confidence in my ability to judge people.’ The pair had been close since their university days, and Blunt had been another of Rothschild’s wartime tenants, which of course meant he had also been Tess’s flatmate. Worse, Rothschild had introduced Blunt to Liddell, so that he could be assessed for recruitment to MI5.

  In his interrogation, Blunt had already revealed some of the missed moments when MI5 might have caught the Cambridge Spies. One of the earliest turned out to have been provided by Roberts, with his 1935 report of an ‘excited and urgent’ woman wiring money to a Hungarian in Zurich. The Security Service was, as Knight observed at the time, already interested in the woman in question, Edith Tudor-Hart, but it had not been interested enough. The previous year, Tudor-Hart had taken a young Kim Philby to a bench in Regent’s Park, where he met a man named ‘Otto’, who was there to recruit him for Soviet intelligence. Tudor-Hart was, Blunt observed decades later, ‘the grandmother of us all’. Roberts’s nine-line report on her activities told of one of the few incriminating things MI5 ever caught her doing. When they did eventually put a tail on her in the 1950s, the most they managed to catch her doing was dodging a bus fare.

  Eric Roberts died in 1972, aged 65. The Salt Spring Driftwood newspaper noted his work as a local historian, his three children, and three grandchildren, and that he was a freeman of the City of London. It didn’t mention his membership of seventeen subversive organisations, the countless aliases and codenames, his fifteen years as an agent of Maxwell Knight, his sixteen years as an officer of MI5, and his five years masquerading as the Gestapo man Jack King.