AGENT JACK
THE TRUE STORY OF MI5’S SECRET NAZI HUNTER
ROBERT HUTTON Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 313pp, £20, Oldie price £13.99 inc p&p
This ‘deeply researched, often astounding book describes how a loose network of homegrown fascists plotted to undermine wartime Britain, and explains the ingenious way MI5 attempted to neutralise them’, wrote Anthony Quinn in the
Guardian. ‘It places centre-stage an unlikely hero, a balding ex-bank clerk from Cornwall named Eric Roberts,
first recruited by the spymaster Maxwell Knight to infiltrate a British Union of Fascists cell in 1930s Leeds.’ During World War II, Roberts came to the attention of banking heir Victor Rothschild, head of MI5’S antisabotage unit, who decided to place him in charge of a bogus Nazi fifth column organisation under the false identity of Jack King. ‘You marvel at’ the fifth columnists ‘being taken in by “Jack King”, but also at Roberts’s cunning and bravery in sustaining the imposture for three years; one false move might have given the game away, and there would have been plenty among his duped legions ready to take revenge.’
Hutton’s book shows that ‘the homegrown sympathy for Hitler was more widespread and a great deal nastier than previously believed’, wrote espionage expert Ben Macintyre in the Times. ‘Whatever we may like to imagine about our wartime spirit, there were plenty of would-be quislings in British factories, offices and homes.’ Agent Jack is ‘a well-researched, highly readable account of Roberts’s strange undercover life. He was a man so innocuous and inconspicuous that his bosses at the Westminster Bank could not quite believe that anyone would want him released from banking to perform top-secret wartime duties.’