Agent Jack

by Robert Hutton

  But then he’d never wanted recognition, as he explained in 1969, in a letter to an MI5 colleague: ‘I regarded my role to be that of success in the cold.’

  Audrey survived Eric by sixteen years, living to the age of 88. She had been central to her husband’s success as an agent, not simply because of the way she ran the family during his long absences, but because of the support she gave him, enabling him to keep his secret and public lives in balance. Through it all, she had remained cheerful, optimistic and devoted to Eric.

  Theresa Clay stayed on at MI5 until 1948. As a woman, she was still only ranked as an ‘assistant officer’. But there are signs that her role running the Fifth Column operation was formally acknowledged: by 1946, there was a new note at the bottom of Roberts’s reports, still typed in red and underlined: ‘NO ACTION TO BE TAKEN WITHOUT REFERENCE TO MISS CLAY.’

  In 1949, Theresa joined the staff of the Natural History Museum, returning to her study of bird lice, on which she became a world expert, and rising to the rank of deputy keeper in 1970. She was the author of a number of authoritative works, and often cooperated with Miriam Rothschild, Victor’s sister. She seems to have been as silent about her wartime work as she was about her private life, but she stayed in touch with her wartime colleagues, attending Victor and Tess’s annual New Year party in Cambridge and corresponding with Roberts in Canada, encouraging him to write fiction. ‘I always thought you would be able to do this well,’ she told him. ‘You were always good at expressing yourself.’

  Theresa Clay

  Richard Meinertzhagen, her . . . well, whatever he was . . . died in 1967, and she defended his reputation for the rest of her life. After her death in 1995, the extent of his ornithological frauds became clear, and it is hard to see how she could have been unaware of them. But not all the birds Meinertzhagen discovered were fakes. The Afghan Snowfinch, which he found in the Shibar Pass in 1937, was genuine. He named it for Clay: Montifringilla theresae.

  John Bingham, the Maxwell Knight agent who caught Irma Stapleton, among others, stayed on in MI5, working in the counter-subversion section. On the side, he became a crime writer. In 1958, he began mentoring a young recruit, David Cornwell, and encouraging him as an author. Cornwell was a less successful spy, but, under the pen name John le Carré, a much more successful novelist. His greatest character, George Smiley, was based in part on the diffident Bingham. In 2014, Bingham was initially identified as the man behind Jack King, before MI5, in a highly unusual move, revealed the real identity of one of their agents, to ensure that Eric Roberts got the credit he deserved.

  *

  Cornwell also worked with Maxwell Knight, but was unimpressed. He recalled him as ‘part charlatan, part fantasist, but above all, a very cunning control freak. He possessed power of a sort over men and women, especially those he had groomed and manipulated, and that was his kick.’ Knight’s great days as a spymaster ended with the war, but he stayed on in MI5 until 1961. By then he had developed a second career as a TV naturalist, and would encourage children to get outdoors and be a ‘nature detective’. In 1944 he had got married, for the third time, to Susi Barnes, a woman who had worked in the MI5 registry, and shared his distaste for sex. They and his menagerie lived in relative contentment in Camberley, Surrey, for the rest of their lives. In 1965, he was invited to fill a vacancy on the council of the Zoological Society of London, where he found himself working alongside Ivor Montagu, the Soviet agent whom he had set Roberts to tail around London four decades earlier. When Knight died in 1968, his funeral was attended by the great and the good of the world of natural history, and ‘lots of men in brown felt hats who didn’t really identify themselves’.

  Roger Fulford, who had wanted the Fifth Column closed down in its infancy, clung to his dream of a seat in Parliament, but the Liberal Party’s fortunes weren’t strong enough to deliver it. He stood for election and was defeated twice more. But he found literary success after the war with a series of histories, including several on the Royal Family. To the end of his life, he continued to be argumentative, as fellow members of the committee of the London Library attested.

  Laurence Fish went on to become one of the most versatile illustrators of the following decades, known for his magazine covers and his ‘Go By Train’ posters, which advertised the glamour of towns such as Ayr and Whitley Bay. Away from his commercial work, he was an accomplished fine artist. He died in 2009.

  Roberts often wondered what became of Edward Blanshard Stamp after the war. ‘My guess is that either he was loaded with honours or was subsequently sentenced to a lengthy stretch in Dartmoor. I hope it was the latter,’ he wrote in 1969. It was in fact the former. He had returned to the law and became a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1971.

  Sir William Strang, who had spoken so foolishly to a member of the Fifth Column, was protected from the consequences of his mistakes for the same reasons they were. He helped to negotiate the partition of post-war Germany, securing the industrial north-west zone for British occupation, and advising on its reconstruction. In 1949, he was appointed permanent under-secretary in the Foreign Office, the most senior non-political role. His time in the job was to be dominated by the discovery of the Soviet penetration of MI6, something he struggled to comprehend. He was in charge until 1953, and in 1954 took a seat in the House of Lords as Baron Strang of Stonesfield.

  Rothschild never caught him, but there had been a spy inside Siemens all along, and an important one. In 1939, just after the start of the war, the British legation in Oslo received a parcel, containing a few pages of typescript and a cardboard box. The box held a trigger tube, for German anti-aircraft shells. The pages covered a huge range of German scientific research, from radar to torpedoes. Because some of its anonymous claims were demonstrably wrong, most in MI6 were inclined to discount the whole. But not the Secret Service’s scientific adviser, Reginald Jones. He was to use it as a crib sheet through the war, finding it proved right again and again.

  But it would be another decade before he discovered the source. Hans Ferdinand Mayer was a 45-year-old scientist working for Siemens in Germany. In the inter-war years he developed a close friendship with an Englishman, Cobden Turner, who helped him get a Jewish schoolgirl out of Germany. Feeling that Turner’s behaviour was representative of English decency, he decided to help Britain. His offer of further information was never taken up, and in 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo for listening to the BBC, and sent to Dachau, where he was lucky to survive the war. In 1953, a chance meeting between Jones and Turner led the MI6 scientist to realise that Mayer must have been his secret helper. The two men met in 1955, but agreed to keep Mayer’s secret. He died in 1980. Jones was clear on the value of his work: ‘As the war progressed and one development after another actually appeared, it was obvious that the report was largely correct; and in the few dull moments of the war I used to look up the Oslo report to see what should be coming along next.’

  Schmidt’s Restaurant, frequented by Walter Wegener in the 1920s as he sought to connect with his late father’s German side, stayed in business for several more decades, despite a reputation for some of the grumpiest waiting staff in London. It gained brief notoriety in 1951 when the diplomat Donald Maclean celebrated his 38th birthday with lunch there, before fleeing the country that evening after a tip-off that he was about to be unmasked as a Russian spy.

  Dorothy and Walter Wegener lived out the rest of their lives in Whitstable. By late 1944, when Walter was released from internment, Theresa Clay noted that Dorothy’s case file had reached ten volumes. But she did find a man, marrying William Ashmore, a lorry driver, in 1946. She died in 1980, two years after Walter.

  Bernard and Marita Perigoe divorced after the war – he’d been in prison most of their married life in any case. He remarried in 1949, and had two daughters. He remained active in politics, getting elected as a councillor in Harrow, but his time behind the wire had at least cured him of his enthusiasm for fascism: he became a communist. He told his friends th
at he’d been behind enemy lines during the war. Which, in a sense, was true.

  Marita carried on reporting to MI5 until at least 1947. In 1949, having apparently accepted that Britain wasn’t on the brink of a fascist revolution, she boarded RMS Strathaird, bound for Sydney to join her mother, May. A year after arriving there, and still only 36, she married John Gordon McKenzie, a 63-year-old civil servant who was in charge of schools in New South Wales. In November 1952, McKenzie went into his office on a Saturday. When he hadn’t returned home in the afternoon, an anxious Marita called the building’s caretaker, who went to McKenzie’s office and found him dead on the floor from a heart attack. Flags were flown at half mast in schools throughout the state.

  There was little call for picture restoring in Australia, so Marita became a costume designer for the theatre, something she turned out to be rather good at. Like Adolf Hitler, she preferred traditional styles of painting, and though pleased that her niece – and namesake – Marita Brahe had decided to become an artist, she was unimpressed that she followed the modern style, and tried, unsuccessfully, to correct her.

  She married for the third time in 1958 to Edward Jackson, who was also in the costume business. He died nine years later. Her fourth and final marriage was to David Burney, an actor. Marita sold her business, and the couple returned to England in the late sixties, where they lived in a thatched cottage in the countryside once painted by John Constable, an artist of whom Marita approved. She died in 1984, in a residential park for the elderly outside Ipswich, not far from Ronald Creasy’s farm.

  Marita Perigoe

  Hitler’s forces may never have made it to west London, but Eileen Gleave did, at least briefly, hook herself a nice blond SS man. In December 1946 she visited a prisoner-of-war camp near Shepherds Bush, west London, where some Germans were still being held, to ask whether any would be allowed to join her for a Christmas celebration – the camp allowed its inmates out on a day-release basis. The prisoner who showed her into the guard room, and who gladly accepted her invitation, was Joachim Kirmse, a German paratrooper who had been captured in 1943 in North Africa. After a spell in a prisoner-of-war camp in the US, he had been transferred to England after the peace. There the authorities tried to establish his real story – he had boasted to somebody that he’d been a Gestapo lieutenant before blotting his copy book and transferring to the regular army.

  Kirmse’s Christmas in Gleave’s flat had a profound effect on him. There were eight people at the party, including Marita Perigoe, who was living in the flat opposite at the time, but Kirmse said later that he and Gleave ‘felt drawn to each other’. Ignoring the others, they talked intently about their lives. ‘In Eileen, I found the woman with the perfect heart,’ he said. ‘She is without blemish.’

  If Gleave was delighted with Kirmse, the man she was then living with, a fascist named Oliver Gilbert, was less pleased. There was a ‘mutual misunderstanding’ between them, Kirmse judged. Or perhaps Gilbert understood too well. In any case, he moved swiftly out.

  Driven by love, and a desire to avoid returning to Germany, Kirmse absconded from the camp in April 1947 and moved in with Gleave. For three months he hid out in her flat, staying quiet while she was at work and, by his account, avoiding contact even with Marita.

  MI5 knew, or suspected, that Gleave was hiding Kirmse for most of this time. But there seemed no great urgency in retrieving him. Theresa Clay, still running the Fifth Column operation, may have hoped he would lead them to a more interesting subversive group. By July, it was decided it was time to round him up. Just after 7 a.m. on a Monday morning, Detective Inspector George Smith of Special Branch knocked on Gleave’s door.

  She let the policeman into her kitchen, but denied having seen Kirmse since April. Smith noticed there were two dirty cups on the table and asked if he could have a look around. Eileen hesitated, and then agreed. ‘I went to a bedroom situated at the front of the premises and noticed that the large divan bed there had apparently been slept in by two persons,’ Smith reported. ‘I endeavoured to open the wardrobe door and, after exerting considerable pressure, was successful. I found a man standing inside, naked.’

  ‘Oh you bloody fool,’ Gleave said to Kirmse. ‘Why didn’t you clear out when you had the chance?’

  Gleave was prosecuted for harbouring an escaped prisoner, but the magistrate took pity, partly because it was only after Kirmse’s capture that she learned another of the reasons for his reluctance to return to Germany: he had a wife and five children there. She was bound over to keep the peace for twelve months.

  In March 1950, Gleave followed Perigoe to Australia, and there the records for her end, though Marita’s niece recalls a woman named Eileen helping her with the sewing for Marita’s costume company.

  Hilda Leech and her husband retired to a smallholding in Devon, and then to a small village outside Launceston, Cornwall. After the 1956 Suez Crisis, she wrote to Parliament suggesting that the prime minister, Anthony Eden, should be hanged. The following year, the local police reported to MI5 that ‘she has, on occasions, acted in a peculiar manner’.

  MI5’s director-general wrote back: ‘Mrs Leech is known to us and in the past had a number of fascist connections. At present we tend to the view that the balance of her mind is disturbed.’

  Ronald Creasy never gave up on fascism. He and Rita had another child, a daughter, and lived out their days in the small town of Eye in Suffolk, with a weathervane over their house in the shape of the British Union’s lightning bolt logo. He was unashamed of his beliefs, giving regular interviews about them. He died in 2004. His gravestone describes him as ‘1939 BU Councillor, District Leader and Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, Eye Division’. It goes on: ‘Individual thinker, pantheist and man of spirit’. Rita died in 2008.

  The Soviet Union never acknowledged responsibility for the Katyn massacre. After its collapse, the Russian government began to release the papers around both the killings and the subsequent cover-up. There are memorials to the dead around the world.

  After a journey in which it looked briefly as though their British papers might not be enough to get them out of Austria’s Russian sector, Auguste and Ernest Kohout made it home to England in August 1945, six years after they’d left. The reunion wasn’t easy: Ernest didn’t know his father, and Hans was unused to having a child in the house. But he was keen to show his wife that he’d been trying to help the German cause. His medal may have helped, and in March 1946, he took her to meet Roberts. Kohout handed over a bundle of reports, apologising for their poor quality but saying that he ‘would be proud to do anything in his power to help the German Secret Service’. They discussed Kohout’s theories about the future of global politics. ‘Mrs Kohout looked impressed by her husband’s mental gymnastics,’ Roberts reported. ‘Both Kohout and Mrs Kohout invited me to spend a weekend with them.’

  Hans and Auguste had another son, Martin, in 1947. Putting his days as a fascist behind him, Hans went into business with a Jewish friend, Harry Green. With Green handling the sales while Hans managed the production side, the aluminium foil company they set up together was a great success. In due course Ernest went to work there, stopping in the pub with his father on the way home most days. Perhaps fearing that his wartime activities would catch up with him, Hans would warn his sons that, as an immigrant family, they must take care never to get on the wrong side of the authorities. But he nevertheless stayed in touch with some of his friends from the war, visiting the Creasys in Suffolk with his family. He died in 1979.

  Auguste survived her husband by seventeen years, dying in 1996. When Ernest went through his father’s things, he found a red box containing a Nazi medal. Auguste assured him it had been given to her father as a mark of his long service on the Austrian railway. Amused, Ernest hung his father’s War Merit Cross on the wall of his toilet.

  Hans Kohout’s Kriegsverdienstkreuz

  * Because this operation was carried out at the behest of MI6, it remains classified.

&n
bsp; Note on Sources

  It has been possible to tell this story thanks to the decision to open a selection of MI5’s historic files. This process, which has been going on for more than a decade, turns out to be like slowly tipping thousands of jigsaw pieces onto the floor. Some pieces belong to a well-known part of the picture, filling in holes with fascinating new details. Some only add mysteries, apparently fitting nowhere at all. And sometimes, a piece lands that suddenly reveals how a previously empty space in the puzzle fits together.

  The Marita Perigoe file, opened in February 2014, was such a piece. Before MI5 files are released to the public, they are carefully read, in case they reveal operational details, such as the names of informants: more than seventy years after the last note was made on Perigoe, parts of her file are still classified. The MI5 staff checking this file realised that they were looking at the description of an operation they knew nothing about.

  Even at that point, its scale was still unclear. A few months later, several more jigsaw pieces landed, revealing Eric Roberts as the agent at the heart of this discovery. And as with a jigsaw, the sudden understanding of one part of the puzzle led to the re-examination of previously mysterious pieces, many of which it was now possible to fit together. Files that had been open for years were no longer mildly interesting individual events, but part of a greater story.

  This book is the result of putting together those pieces. It hasn’t been straightforward. I have been able to find no living witnesses to this operation, and most of those involved in it were unaware of its true nature. Except for one extraordinary letter that Eric Roberts wrote to a former colleague at MI5 following Barry Russell Jones’s 1968 visit, I can find no evidence that any of those who did understand what was happening ever spoke about it. (Though sometimes this makes things easier. Where I have been able to compare tales told later by MI5 officers with the contemporary records, I have found, perhaps unsurprisingly, some evidence of embellishment and even on one occasion the wholesale borrowing of someone else’s adventure. Spies do lie.)