The banker who hunted Nazis

In early 1943, an Austrian expert in aluminium foil manufacture approached Jack King, the man he knew as a senior Gestapo liaison in the UK, with some vital intelligence to pass on to the Fuhrer’s Third Reich. The Wembley-based company for which he worked, he told King, had been approached by the air ministry to manufacture foil strips to a particular specification.

Hans Kohout, a naturalised British citizen but a committed Nazi, did not know what the strips were for, but he understood that they were vital to Britain’s war effort. So he made two proposals. He could sabotage the work and hold up manufacture for weeks. When King suggested this wouldn’t be a good idea, Kohout wrote out the specs and added for good measure a list of German companies that could make these strips so that the Fatherland had access to the same weapon.

This detailed report King accepted with gratitude, though he, too, had no clue to the significance of this technology. These aluminium strips were part of the famous “Windows” anti-radar technology that British technicians had determined would deceive German radar during the Royal Air Force’s bombing runs. To ensure that the bundles of foil did not stick together but fluttered out individually when released from aircraft, the strips had to be cut to specific dimensions, and Kohout’s factory was contracted to make them.

Had the Germans gotten hold of this information early, the course of the bombing war may have been different. But King did not pass this information on to the Gestapo. Instead, he reported the details to Baron Victor Rothschild, the polymath scion of the great eponymous banking house, then MI5’s expert on sabotage.

This act was not Jack King’s personal moment of ideological truth. It was Kohout, the rabid anti-Semite, who never discovered that the results of his conscientious spying for the Third Reich — and he was a productive spy — were being faithfully reported to a Jewish banker and that the information carefully filed in the MI5 vaults.

Kohout also never knew that Jack King, the man with whom he developed a deeply trusting relationship during the war, was the cover name for Eric Roberts, the protagonist of this extraordinary story, written with much flair and meticulous research by Robert Hutton, a Bloomberg journalist.

Roberts was an unlikely a candidate for the world of spies. He was by profession an unremarkable mid-level clerk at the Euston Road Branch of Westminster Bank, given to playing pranks on his superiors. By the end of the war, Agent Jack was one of MI5’s star undercover agents, with a network of 500-odd fifth columnists, from lonely young women and store clerks to picture restorers, office workers and farm estate owners. Some of the mildest of them harboured the most virulent anti-Semitic sentiments and/or a slavish devotion to Adolf Hitler and commitment to a German victory. They confided to this handsome mild-mannered six-foot tall man from Cornwall all manner of secrets that they gleaned from friends, associates and through some old-fashioned spying.

Blueprints of the latest tanks, specifications of Britain’s developing fighterbombers, nascent research on jet engines, the location of Bletchley Park (the Allied code-breaking headquarters), troop dispositions ahead of the Allied invasion of Europe, fifth columnists from Liverpool to Sussex diligently gathered information for “Jack King” to relay to the masters of the Third Reich.

Roberts had honed his art of deception when he became a member of a proto-fascist network in London, initially seeking company as a lonely immigrant to the city. He soon grew disenchanted with the ideology and as the war approached, was recruited by a fellow traveller to spy on these networks for the security services, a job that appealed to his impish nature. In 1940, his startled bosses were approached by a “military” representative to release this littlenoticed clerk for “some particular work of national importance”.

That nationally important work was to penetrate the remnants of fascist leagues after Oswald Mosley and the leading lights of the British Union of Fascists had been interned on the Isle of Man. Expanded to the fifth columnist operation, it was a programme so covert that MI5’s leaders took care to shield it from Whitehall for fear it would be blocked on grounds of violating personal rights.

As Hitler military machine swarmed over Europe, the notion that he was being helped by fifth columnists in conquered territory gained currency (few thought to attribute his victories to superior military tactics). In Britain, Mr Hutton describes wryly how MI5 thought nothing of adopting Gestapo-type tactics by interning known fascists and launching covert operations to flush out others.

It was perilous work, and Roberts was in constant danger of being unmasked. If his story, so compellingly related here by Mr Hutton, was not as publicised as those heroes of Operation Double Cross, it is because it was revealed an uncomfortable truth that contradicted the authorised narrative of Britain’s united, iron-jawed resistance to fascism. Indeed, the astonishing revelation in this book is the extent of popular support for Hitler and the depths of anti-Semitism among ordinary Britons, not just German or Austrian citizens hiding in plain sight. Mr Hutton’s book underlines a reality we are discovering today: that even in advanced democracies fascism retains a perilous allure.

AGENT JACK

The True Story of MI5’s Secret Nazi Hunter Robert Hutton

Weidenfeld & Nicolson,

336 pages; ~1,503