Agent Jack Read online

  A supporter of the Imperial Fascist League in London in the 1930s

  AGENT

  JACK

  The True Story of MI5’s

  Secret Nazi Hunter

  ROBERT HUTTON

  Contents

  Title Page

  List of Illustrations

  Note to the Reader

  Dramatis Personae

  1 ‘A great deal about sabotage and arson’

  2 ‘Thoroughly familiar’

  3 ‘A beacon for the enemy’

  4 ‘Every person within the fortress’

  5 ‘He is quite ruthless where Germans are concerned’

  6 ‘Agents in every country in the world’

  7 ‘So stupid and so obvious’

  8 ‘No organised body’

  9 ‘A masterful and somewhat masculine woman’

  10 ‘Somewhat melodramatic ideas’

  11 ‘Such methods were necessary’

  12 ‘You bomb them, and blow the lot’

  13 ‘A twinge of uneasiness’

  14 ‘Oozing with gratitude’

  15 ‘A National Socialist atmosphere’

  16 ‘The more violent it was, the better’

  17 ‘Carrying on the struggle’

  18 ‘The Gestapo department’

  Epilogue: ‘A Great Source of Trouble’

  Note on Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Also by Robert Hutton

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  Imperial Fascist League supporter, 1930s (Marx Memorial Library / Mary Evans)

  Eric Roberts at the start of the war (Crista McDonald)

  Eric Roberts in the early 1930s (Roger Kennard)

  Audrey Sprague in the early 1930s (Crista McDonald)

  Rotha Lintorn-Orman photographed by Bassano Ltd, 1916 (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Maxwell Knight photographed by Howard Coster, 1934 (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Eric and Audrey Roberts on their honeymoon (Crista McDonald)

  The Roberts family at play (Max Roberts)

  Sir Alexander Maxwell photographed by Walter Stoneman, 1941 (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Guy Liddell (Bettmann / Getty)

  An internment camp on the Isle of Man photographed by Major H. O. Daniels (The estate of Hubert Daniel / Tate, London)

  Victor Rothschild, c. 1930 (Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London)

  Tess Mayor photographed by Ramsey & Muspratt, 1933 (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Theresa Clay, 1938 (The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; MSS. Meintertzhagen, vol. 42, p. 69)

  Laurence Fish’s diagram of a German 21-day fuse (Courtesy of Jean Bray / National Archives, Kew)

  Laurence Fish’s sketch of a bomb disguised as a chocolate bar (Courtesy of Jean Bray / Trustees of the Rothschild Archive)

  Photograph believed to be of Marita Brahe, 1933 (Slade School of Fine Art, University College London)

  Jack King’s faked Gestapo pass (National Archives, Kew)

  Kenneth Denton outside his antiques shop (Private collection)

  Eileen Gleave, 1947 (Daily Mail / Solo Syndication)

  Post Office twin-turntable portable disc recorder (Courtesy of BT Heritage & Archives)

  Peter and Max Roberts (Crista McDonald)

  Nancy Brown’s sketches of Brighton (National Archives, Kew)

  Hans Kohout (Ernest Kohout)

  Ronald Creasy (Peter Stephens)

  Mosley’s campaign against tithes (SZ Photo / Scherl / Bridgeman)

  Rita Creasy (National Archives, Kew)

  German 21-day timer (National Archives, Kew)

  Victor Rothschild and Tess Mayor in France (Private collection)

  Eric Roberts on Salt Spring Island (Crista McDonald)

  Theresa Clay (Private collection)

  Marita Perigoe (Sara Morren)

  Hans Kohout’s Kriegsverdienstkreuz (Author’s photograph)

  Note to the Reader

  This is a true story. It has never before been told in full. The handful of people who knew it were sworn to secrecy. Such oaths are occasionally broken, but unlike some of British intelligence’s other Second World War operations, this was one no one wanted to boast about.

  Since 1945, Britain has told itself a story about the war. In this narrative, not only did the country stand alone against the military forces of fascism, but it was also uniquely resistant to the ideology itself. While other nations succumbed to such ideas or collaborated with invaders, Britain stood firm. That strength of character saved not just the UK, but all of Europe.

  But MI5 knew a different story. By the end of the war, it had identified hundreds of apparently loyal British men and women who longed for a Nazi conquest. A few had gone further, risking their lives to help Hitler.

  Even more worryingly, most of these traitors lived in a single ordinary London suburb, and had been identified by a single agent. Underneath the spirit of the Blitz, he had uncovered another set of loyalties.

  Much of what that agent found has been destroyed in the decades since. But among the records that have survived are more than 600 pages of transcripts of conversations, made between 1942 and 1944, in which British citizens discuss how best to betray their country to Germany. The tale of what they said, and how they came to be saying it, is one that caused deep unease among the few who knew it. But it is time for those voices to be heard.

  Dramatis Personae

  MI5*

  Jasper Harker – Director 1940–41, Deputy Director-General 1941–46

  David Petrie – Director-General from 1941

  Guy Liddell – Director, B Division (Espionage)

  Dick White – Deputy Director, B Division

  Maxwell Knight – Head of M Section (Agents)

  Victor Rothschild – Head of B1C (Sabotage)

  Theresa Clay – Assistant officer B1C

  Tess Mayor – Assistant officer B1C

  Cynthia Shaw – Assistant B1C

  Tar Robertson – Head of Double Cross

  Jack Curry – Head of F Division (Subversive Activities) then Research

  Roger Hollis – succeeded Curry as head of F Division

  Edward Blanshard Stamp – Officer

  Jimmy Dickson – Officer

  John Bingham – Officer

  Dick Brooman-White – Officer

  The Government

  Edward Tindal Atkinson – Director of Public Prosecutions

  Alexander Maxwell – Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Home Office

  John Anderson – Home Secretary 1939–40

  Herbert Morrison – Home Secretary 1940–45

  Norman Birkett – Head of the Advisory Committee on internment cases

  Duff Cooper – Member of Parliament, Head of the Security Executive, overseeing MI5

  William Strang – diplomat

  The Roberts Family

  Eric – codenames ‘102’, ‘M/F’, ‘SR’. Alias ‘Jack King’.

  Audrey (née Sprague)

  Max

  Peter

  Crista

  The Leeds Fascists

  Reg Windsor

  Michael Gannon

  Walter Longfellow

  Angela Crewe

  Private Robert Jeffery

  Sydney Charnley

  A. D. Lewis, alias ‘Mr Wells’ – the informer

  The Kent Sympathisers

  Walter Wegener – Siemens employee

  Dorothy Wegener – his sister

  Bobby Engert – Dorothy’s friend

  Edward Engert – Bobby’s brother

  Friedel Engert – Edward’s wife

  Martin Engert – father of Bobby and Edward
>
  Other Fascist Sympathisers

  Irma Stapleton

  Gunner Philip Jackson

  The Fifth Column

  Marita Perigoe

  Bernard Perigoe

  Charles Perigoe

  Emma Perigoe

  Eileen Gleave

  Hilda Leech

  Edgar Bray

  Sophia Bray

  Nancy Brown

  Hans Kohout

  Adolf Herzig

  Luise Herzig

  Ronald Creasy

  Rita Creasy

  Serafina Donko

  Maria Lanzl

  Alwina Thies

  * Over the course of the war, officers at MI5 arrived, were promoted and left. The organisation itself was restructured twice. Some job titles and departmental names here are simplified, and deal with the roles people were in when they encountered the Fifth Column case.

  1

  ‘A great deal about sabotage and arson’

  Mr Jones, assistant controller at the Westminster Bank, put down the phone in a puzzled mood. There was much to trouble any Englishman that day, even one sitting, as Jones did, in the headquarters of one of the City of London’s most important banks. The previous day, 10 June 1940, Italy had entered the war on Germany’s side. And while Adolf Hitler was gaining allies, Britain was running out of them: across the Channel, the French were on the point of surrender in the face of an unstoppable German advance. Britain was Europe’s final bastion of freedom and Hitler’s next target. The country was drawing up plans to face the most serious invasion threat to its shores in almost a thousand years.

  But at the front of Jones’s mind was the conversation he’d just finished, with a mysterious man from the military who wanted the Westminster Bank’s help.

  What was most puzzling was the nature of the request. It had come the previous day in a letter – marked ‘Secret, Personal’ – from the man he’d just spoken to, Lt Col Allen Harker. Harker’s question was in itself simple enough: could the bank release one of its staff immediately for special war work? Harker had been vague in his letter about both the work and what he called simply ‘my organisation’, but when Jones consulted his superiors, the answer was clear: there was no question of refusing. In the country’s hour of need, the Westminster Bank would not be found wanting.

  In Jones’s view, the man the government wanted was no great loss to the Westminster Bank. Eric Roberts had been a clerk there for fifteen years, during which time he had failed to distinguish himself. Indeed, he was best known for playing tiresome pranks on his superiors and even on customers. It was typical of Roberts that at the very moment the future of the nation hung in the balance, and when apparently he alone of the Westminster Bank’s staff could make a difference, he had gone on holiday.

  Eric Roberts at the start of the war

  It wasn’t just Roberts’s career that was unremarkable. He had married a fellow bank clerk and they now lived with their two young sons in an unexceptional semi-detached house in the unexceptional London suburb of Epsom. Roberts was ordinary in every way.

  But Harker had been clear that it was Roberts they wanted. Jones began to dictate a letter, confirming what he’d said in the phone call, that Roberts would be made available immediately. Even Harker’s address was mysterious: Box 500, Parliament Street.

  To a better-informed man, this would have been the clue. Box 500 was the postal address of the secret state. The day before Jones spoke to him, Harker – Jasper to his friends – had himself received a summons. He had been called to see the prime minister, Winston Churchill, who had appointed him director of the Security Service, MI5.

  Jones knew none of this. And although he did know that in wartime one was not supposed to ask questions, he could not help adding a line to his letter: ‘What we would like to know here is, what are the particular and especial qualifications of Mr Roberts – which we have not been able to perceive – for some particular work of national importance?’

  *

  Two months after that phone call, as the sun faded at the end of a fine summer’s day, a pair of young men in Leeds set out to burn down a shop.

  That night, as every night since the start of the war, the blackout was strictly in force. In an effort to stop lights from the ground helping enemy bombers to find their targets, the country plunged itself into darkness. On top of rationing and the other hardships of wartime, people had the nightly chore of covering every window and doorway with thick black cloth to prevent any possible leak of light. Air-raid wardens patrolled towns whose street lamps were unlit, looking for signs of light and warning transgressors. As pedestrians groped their way through the darkness, forbidden even from lighting a cigarette, cars navigated by the faint glow of masked headlights. Accident rates – and crime rates – soared.

  There was no moon as Reginald Windsor and Michael Gannon walked through the pitch-dark streets. Neither man looked like an aspiring arsonist. Windsor, at twenty-seven, was the older of the pair by a year. An unexceptional-looking young man with a tendency to talk too much, he worked long hours in the newsagent and tobacconist he owned, while Gannon worked as a driver. They could have passed for any two young men on a night out. But theirs wasn’t a friendship forged over sport or a drink in the pub. Their bond was fascism.

  Windsor wasn’t very good at making friends. Indeed, Gannon was one of the very few he had. He wasn’t a big drinker, he didn’t like billiards or card games, and though he’d played a bit of football, he hadn’t really got on with the other players. The first person he’d found that he felt he could open up to was his wife, Margaret. They’d married in 1937 and she was now two months pregnant.

  It was a hard world to be bringing a child into. Over the previous decade, Windsor had seen the effects of the Great Depression on his city. ‘I remember seeing the same persons on the street corners with no prospects at all in life,’ he said of the 1930s. He would go home and tell his mother about the indignity of ‘men having to wash the clothes while their wives went to work’. The politicians, he said, had ‘not nursed the people – from my point of view I honestly believe they have neglected many things in this country’.

  Local politicians, as well as those in London, were the target of Windsor’s anger. He was pretty sure that Leeds’ city councillors were lining their own pockets at the expense of honest taxpayers like himself. And it was these thoughts that had led Windsor, like 40,000 others, to join the fascists of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union. Mosley argued that the political system was failing the people and destroying Britain and her empire. The age of democracy was over. What was needed was a strong leader with the power to bring about change, unfettered by Parliament. These ideas had enjoyed some wider popularity in the early 1930s, but as people had seen how they worked in practice in Germany, support had ebbed – one reason that in 1937 Mosley had dropped the final two words from the name of the British Union of Fascists. Mosley became increasingly associated with the violence of his Blackshirts, the uniformed young men who were supposed to keep order at his events. He also began to talk more and more about ‘the Jewish Question’.

  Windsor had joined the British Union around the time of the Munich crisis of 1938, when it enjoyed a small resurgence. The prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was wrestling with Hitler’s demand that he be allowed to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. To Windsor and many others, it had seemed the country might be dragged into war by the same politicians who couldn’t even help ordinary people put food on their tables. Two of Windsor’s older brothers had fought in the Great War, and one of them had been seriously wounded. So, like a lot of Britons, he had been relieved that Chamberlain had been able to broker ‘peace for our time’ with Hitler that September. As Mosley said, war with Germany would mean sending Britons to die in a ‘Jews’ quarrel’.

  Like Mosley, Windsor didn’t see himself as anti-Semitic. He didn’t, he said, hate Jews. But he did blame them for many of the problems he faced. One of the reasons Mosley argued that democracy was
a sham was that governments were powerless in the face of ‘money power’, the bankers of Wall Street and the City of London who manipulated prices so as to profit at the expense of ordinary people. And who were these bankers? ‘Throughout the ages Jews have taken a leading part in international usury and all forms of finance and money lending,’ Mosley explained in his 1938 book, Tomorrow We Live.

  To Windsor, it seemed that the Jews had all the advantages. When Mosley railed against ‘international finance’ and the harm it did the ordinary man, Windsor knew exactly what he was talking about. When he read that Mosley promised to close down ‘the great chain and multiple stores, largely created by alien finance’, Windsor nodded in agreement.

  In the BU, Windsor had found his cause. He’d also found some friends. He became the treasurer of the BU’s North Leeds branch. As war loomed in 1939, he, along with other members of the party, campaigned for peace. As Mosley argued, war with Germany would be a ‘world disaster’. And the people pushing for it were the usual suspects: the Jews, angry that Hitler had ‘broken the control of international finance’.

  Once war broke out, a lot of BU members disappeared. Some had been called up to the military, and some simply stopped coming to meetings. But Windsor kept the faith. In March 1940, he signed up to help campaign for the BU candidate in the local parliamentary by-election. In a sign of the shift in public mood, the party won just 722 votes. The only other candidate, a Conservative, swept to victory with 97 per cent of the vote.*

  At the start of May, Chamberlain was forced to resign as prime minister after the Allies were routed by the advancing German forces in Norway, and was replaced by Winston Churchill. At the end of the month, France collapsed in the face of a swift German advance. This military disaster seemed, to Mosley’s supporters, to vindicate his stance. Why were British soldiers being sent to die to defend France when French soldiers had so little interest in fighting themselves? Hitler had shown himself to be the greatest military commander of the age, but he wanted to come to terms with Britain, so why not do just that?

  This view wasn’t confined to fascists. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, put out diplomatic feelers to Benito Mussolini’s government in Italy to see if it could help broker peace talks with Germany. Churchill, weeks into his job as prime minister, had to outmanoeuvre his own colleague to win support for continuing the war.