Officer Passion Pants, the unlikely Scottish spy who tapped Royals’ phones
On the face of it Tommy Argyll Robertson was the last person anyone would trust with a state secret. He enjoyed nothing more than gossip, louche nightclubs and the best that money could buy – when he had it.
Women, and men, adored him. His good looks, charm and infectious chuckle could melt icebergs.
As a Highland regiment officer his slimline tartan trews were to earn him the nickname Passion Pants. Yet Robertson was to become one of Britain’s key spymasters, the brains behind the country’s wartime Double Cross spy system and, bizarrely, the first person known to have tapped a royal telephone.
As a young recruit to MI5 he was sent under discreet orders from Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister of the day, to eavesdrop on conversations between King Edward VIII and his brother the Duke of York on the eve of the tortured young king’s abdication in December 1936.
Hidden in park bushes opposite the future king’s home in London’s Piccadilly, Robertson had tapped into a green GPO junction box to confirm the Government’s worst fears, that Edward VIII planned to step down. Years later he was to confide in his family: ‘I was the first person to know he was going to abdicate.’
His exploits, confirmed in recently released state papers, have blown a hole in Government protestations over the years that it does not tap Royal Family communications. It is an intriguing and mysterious world explored by a new Channel 4 documentary Spying on the Royals, which starts tomorrow and examines in detail the dark doings of Robertson and his MI5 cohorts.
How this son of a Scottish banker in the Far East came to be plucked from obscurity by MI5 is a peculiarly British tale, a mixture of ‘knowing the right people’, luck and Robertson’s own particular talents to amuse, put people at their ease and listen.
But critically, as Lady Dundas, widow of Battle of Britain hero Cocky Dundas, and wartime driver for Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower remarks: ‘He had a certain sort of special brain that could see round corners.’
Yet nothing in his early life suggested he would be anything but a well-connected wastrel.
Born in Sumatra, the eldest son of a Scottish banker and English mother, he was sent to Charterhouse public school in Surrey where he excelled at cricket and tennis. Significantly, it was to turn out, his great friend at school was John Kell, son of Sir Vernon Kell, founder of MI5.
But with no particular aim in life after school except to have a good time, he joined the Seaforth Highlanders in 1928 as a young officer after Sandhurst. Why he chose the Seaforths remains a family mystery other than it seemed a good idea at the time.
Among Robertson’s friends at Sandhurst was David niven, who later became an actor and author of bestselling autobiography The Moon’s A Balloon, which chronicled the free-wheeling life of under-employed young officers during the inter-war years, driving almost nightly from their posting in Dover to London for parties and returning at daybreak for a spot of undemanding soldiering.
Leave from Sandhurst had included a cricket tour of David niven’s home territory on the Isle of Wight. As much time was spent ineffectively shooting at seagulls with revolvers and drinking beer as playing cricket.
But life as a fast-living young officer about town was expensive, according to his younger brother, the late General Ian Robertson CB MBE, who was to command the Seaforths.
‘Tommy’s suits had to be the best from Savile Row and his shoes made by Lobb and hats by Lock & Co. My father, who had worked his way up from nothing, didn’t like spending money on other people’s debts. It upset him. Then Tommy bought a sports car and life started getting rather expensive, particularly on a young officer’s pay. I remember him almost killing me. The car’s brake appeared to be for decoration only. I have never been so frightened in all my life.’
These were the days when a young subaltern did a bit of soldiering in the morning. And that was about it. Older officers had two pink gins before lunch and a sleep in the afternoon. The younger ones played golf or games before driving to London for parties.
It was a lifestyle epitomised by the Poet Laureate John Betjeman’s famous pre-war poem: A Subaltern’s Love Song – drinks parties, balmy summer evenings in the Home Counties, open-topped sports cars and dancing until dawn.
But it could not last on a young officer’s pay.
‘In the end my father was writing to the commanding officer and asking why didn’t he give him more to do. I think the Scots can be quite parochial and he didn’t really understand how life worked in those days,’ said his brother.
ROBERTSOn’S army career might have been even shorter had it not been for secret handouts from his mother ‘Mim’, a member of the Gloucestershire Healing family who owned flour mills in Tewkesbury.
In the end his father simply stopped paying. Unable to support himself in the style to which he had become accustomed, the wayward charmer resigned his commission and was found a steady but boring job with a firm of City discount brokers in 1930.
It was a job he loathed and was ill-suited for, says his daughter Belinda McEvoy. ‘Daddy hated anything to do with money, he was useless with it and just spent it if he had it. He always loved parties and gossip, which is intriguing considering what he did with MI5.’
But his friendship with the Kell family was about to pay off. What Sir Vernon spotted in his son’s dashing young friend remains uncertain. Robertson did not officially join MI5 until 1933 but he appears to have been taken on by Sir Vernon as an ‘Unofficial Assistant’ and sent to the naval base at Invergordon in 1931 to ‘take the temperature’ in local bars among naval ratings who had mutinied over Government pay cuts. Hanging about in bars, making casual conversation with strangers, was a particular and fortuitous talent.
He may also have been involved, as a trusted fellow officer, in the informal interrogation of norman Baillie-Stewart, a pre-war nazi traitor.
Soon, the by now married Robertson – his wife Joan Grice-Hutchison was a minor English aristocrat – was on the MI5 payroll at the useful but, even then, meagre salary of £600 a year, taxfree, paid in cash.
His instruction included a spell with City of Birmingham Police Training School where trade craft – shadowing suspects – and interrogation techniques were on the syllabus. So, it now seems, was telephone tapping.
Back in London he was quickly credited with breaking a Russian spy in a pub in the capital with merely charm and alcohol.
On the outbreak of war he was back in uniform and known universally in intelligence circles by his initials, TAR, with which he signed memos. By now a major, he was to cut a memorable dash in his trews around the early wartime MI5 offices in Wormwood Scrubs prison. The girls in MI5, invariably recruited for their breeding and legs, dubbed him Passion Pants.
He was, like many of his team,
barely 30 years old. ‘He was very, very good-looking and great fun. All the girls in “The Office” adored him, although I don’t think he ever noticed particularly,” says his sister-in-law Cecily Robertson, who worked in wartime MI5 and later married his youngest brother.
The nerve centre of B1 (a), the MI5 department he ran, was for most of the war at 58 St James’s Street, in the heart of London’s clubland and within happy walking distance of the best pre-war watering holes, the Savoy and the Ritz.
Yet beneath the convivial atmosphere a deadly game was played out with secret ink, parachutes, small boats and safe houses.
Early in the war MI5’s focus had been on penetrating the German military defence system. But executing or locking up captured spies was clearly wasteful. Robertson’s early success in turning the Welsh Nationalist spy Arthur Owens showed there was another way – using a captured spy’s radio transmissions to elicit further information from the enemy.
Robertson’s work with Owens encouraged the Germans to send more agents, and in 1941 helped crack the enemy’s top secret Enigma radio transmissions. It was to be the birth of Double Cross, feeding them a mixture of real but low-grade information together with the outright bogus.
So successful were these tactics that several of Robertson’s agents were awarded the Iron Cross by a grateful enemy who believed ‘their’ agents were running networks of spies in Britain – all fictitious.
To run the agents Robertson recruited a diverse collection of talent that included a co-owner of Bertram Mills Circus, a member of the newspaper-owning Astor family, academics, a racing driver, soldiers and lawyers. Biologist Victor Rothschild of the banking family was MI5’s explosives expert.
By feeding the enemy false reports about the effectiveness of V1 and V2 rockets, the Germans re-targeted their weapons so they landed in open countryside.
BUT their greatest coup, through the Spaniard Joan Pujol Garcia, codenamed Garbo, was to convince Hitler at the 11th hour that the invasion of Europe was planned for the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy.
It is only in recent years Robertson’s name has become known to a wider public, notably through Ben Macintyre’s bestselling Double Cross and Agent Zig Zag, the account of double agent Eddie Chapman’s wartime exploits masterminded by Robertson’s team. In the 1967 film Triple Cross, based on Zig Zag’s memoirs, Robertson was played by Trevor Howard.
Yet the nature of his job, as the master puppeteer working in the shadows, ensured that much of the post-war glory from memoirs and films fell to the men and women he had recruited or worked with – the Serbian double agent and playboy Dusko Popov, codenamed Tricycle for his three-in-a-bed sex romps and who passed off disinformation to the Germans while working for MI6; Eddie Chapman, the criminal safebreaker who volunteered to assassinate Hitler; and Nathalie Sergueiew, a Russian female double agent and femme fatale codenamed Treasure.
Beneath the jovial exterior, however, was a streak of ruthlessness. In the case of Treasure, he threatened her with jail. Or worse.
Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was to describe Robertson as ‘the original architect’ of the Double Cross system and its guiding genius. His official reward was an OBE, today considered the automatic preserve of film stars, footballers and pop stars.
Unhappy with post-war MI5 reorganisation he resigned to become a farmer, something he knew nothing about, but like his entry into the Seaforths, seemed a good idea at the time.
He may have flirted briefly with intelligence work during the Cold War. But he effectively turned his back on spies and spying for the life of a gentleman farmer, family, stamp collecting, golf and friends. He died, laughing and partying to the last, in 1994, perhaps, as his obituary noted, ‘one of the most unsung heroes of his country’s wartime servants’. Certainly one of the most unlikely.
Spying on the Royals, Channel 4, Sunday 8pm.