History's Secret Heroes: Series 1: Jack King and the Fifth Column

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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A wartime spy who infiltrated a group of British Nazi sympathisers has been identified as a bank worker from Surrey.

It was October 2014.

Thousands of miles from Surrey on Vancouver Island, Krista MacDonald's phone rang.

The cousin called from England to say that there's a lot of news about your father.

It's just been released into the papers and on the radio.

And then

all the newspapers started phoning.

First, it was Britain, and then when it hit Canada, all the newspapers, TV stations, etc., were calling.

It was hard, really, to take it all in.

I had somebody come to the door.

I belonged to the genealogy club, somebody went through the genealogy club, somebody went to our local bookstore and tried to get hold of me that way.

Christopher MacDonald's father was called Eric Roberts.

He had died 42 years earlier.

MI5 had just released Eric Roberts file.

MacDonald knew her father had been some sort of secret agent.

He told her when she was 10 years old, but they had never talked about the details.

I knew just instinctively from an early childhood to be quiet and if anybody asked what our father did for a living to ask of her parents and definitely knew not to sort of seek out attention for ourselves.

The news brought back memories of her childhood in wartime Britain.

For the first time, some of the quirks of her family life began to make sense.

We were told to stay away from the phone for various reasons, which is probably obvious our phone was bugged.

If the phone rang, then to pass it over to my father or mother.

Her father had always been careful about household security, locking the doors, closing the windows, and drawing the curtains every evening when the sun went down.

I remember one time,

I was probably about eight at the time,

and he was walking home from the railway station to our house, which was a three-mile walk.

This car came zooming at a very fast speed.

He thought it was obviously aiming at him.

He was just walking by a brick wall and there happened to be just an opening in this wall and he jumped into it

and he said that he did tell my mother and his kids were around at the time that he thought

somebody was aiming for him to kill him.

Now in 2014 MacDonald was about to learn much more about the mysteries of our father's life.

The MI5 files revealed a wartime conspiracy.

A network of British fascists gathered secret information that might help the Nazi cause and hasten Britain's defeat.

This network was often referred to as a fifth column.

The fascists believed they were passing secrets to a Gestapo officer who'd been planted in England.

But they had been fooled.

The person they were really passing secrets to was Eric Roberts.

He went through life as an ordinary bank clerk, but in reality, he was a top-secret MI5 agent.

He was known by the code name Jack King.

I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance and courage from World War II.

Jack King and the fifth column

Eric Roberts had been born into an ordinary middle-class family.

In 1907, he went to a grammar school.

He is a reasonably successful student.

This is Robert Hutton, journalist and author of the book Agent Jack, the true story of MI5's secret Nazi hunter.

He goes to the mining college as a teenager, doesn't like it, doesn't get on with the machines.

And at 17, he moves to London to really seek his fortune.

He goes to work for the Westminster Bank as a clerk doing boring, administrative, ordinary, old-fashioned banking, sitting behind a glass window and talking to customers and so on.

Very ordinary, dull work.

But even at 17, he has a bit of a secret life because one of the things he does very shortly after moving to London is start going to political meetings.

The political climate of early 1920s London was febrile.

Until 1918, only men who owned property were allowed to vote in elections.

This meant 40% of British men and 100% of British women could not vote.

Large numbers of veterans would have come back from war and still have had no say in the running of their country.

To avoid this obvious injustice, the Representation of the People Act was passed in 1918.

All men over 21 were given the vote, as as were women over 30 who met a property qualification.

This changed the British political landscape, bringing in millions of new voices.

Many of those who had lived through the First World War were frustrated by the failures that had brought the world to such a crisis.

All sorts of stuff swirling around, people looking for people to blame, people looking for an explanation,

why is my life the way it is?

Whose fault is this?

The world changed dramatically during and after the First First World War.

Across Europe, monarchies fell and new regimes arose.

In particular, the Russian Revolution in 1917 was a shock to much of the rest of the world.

The last Tsar was murdered and the Soviet Union became a communist state.

In Britain, communism's promise of equality and justice appealed to some young people who were disillusioned with their own political system.

Many in the British establishment, though, saw communism as a deadly threat.

They're looking for something that can fight it and the thing that they find is the thing that's worked in Italy, which is fascism, which sort of seems to offer

some of what people find appealing about communism.

There's talk of equality and strong government, but is combined with patriotism and a respect for hierarchies and so on.

Some mainstream British politicians who were opposed to communism and socialism openly admired Mussolini and fascism as an alternative.

At the time, many young people like Eric Roberts were joining political groups.

And he joined an outfit called the British Fascisti.

The British Fascisti Party was founded by a wealthy radical anti-communist and alcoholic called Rotha Linton Orman.

Her party was the first in Britain to claim the name fascist.

As her party's Italianate name suggests, she was inspired by Benito Mussolini.

And Eric, I guess, probably

he's obviously attracted to the patriotic side of the British fascisti more than he's attracted to the sort of the equality side of communism.

In the British Fascisti party, Roberts met a man by the name of Maxwell Knight.

In the 1920s, political groups and industrialists often sent spies into each other's organisations.

Knight was undercover.

He was spying on the British Fascisti.

Knight believed Eric Roberts was young and curious enough to be moulded into an agent.

He asked Roberts if he would also join the Communist Party.

His assignment would be to attend communist meetings and report back to him.

Roberts agreed.

And Eric Roberts, recruited as a spy, which is, to a teenage boy, far more exciting than politics, finds himself trying to penetrate the communists.

As Roberts began his spying career, British fascism was just getting started.

The young MP, Sir Oswald Moseley, had ridiculed fascists while serving as a Conservative, then an Independent, then a Labour MP.

Yet after his ideas were rejected by the Labour Party in 1930, he left that too.

Moseley created his own political party, the New Party, which quickly took a turn into fascism.

Moseley made the front page of Time magazine, which described him as Britain's Hitler.

In 1932, he incorporated the new party into a more ambitious organisation, the British Union of Fascists.

Mosley believes in the strongman theory of politics, that the problem that governments have got is there is too much democracy.

And he looks across Europe and which are the successful political parties in Europe in the early 1930s.

And you've got Mussolini in Italy, who is seen as turning the country around and rising up in Germany you've got this guy Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party and

Mosley sees in the Nazis a model for political success.

In 1933 Mosley's aristocratic wife died.

Three years later he married one of his mistresses.

another aristocrat, Diana Mitford.

When Mosley marries Diana Mitford, he gets married in Joseph Goebbels' house and Hitler is the guest of honour.

And you look at the way that Mosley dresses.

Hitler had his brown shirts, Mosley has his black shirts.

He creates a paramilitary organization that would have looked awfully familiar to anyone who had recently been in Germany or indeed anyone who had fled Germany.

Moseley moved the British Union of Fascists headquarters to a former teacher training college on the King's Road in Chelsea.

The building was renamed the Black House.

Mosley's fascist defence force, nicknamed the Black Shirts, became notorious for violence, especially against Jewish people and communist groups.

This great meeting,

the largest ever gathered under one roof in Great Britain,

is the climax of a national campaign

in which comparable audiences have assembled in every great city in this land to listen to the case for fascism.

Though some in the British establishment had first hoped popular fascism might counterbalance communism, MI5 now began to recognise that fascism itself was a real threat.

The word comes down from government to MI5.

Time to start looking at the British Union of Fascists.

By this point, Eric Roberts had put spying behind him and had settled down.

He's just got married to Audrey, a fellow clerk at the bank.

But Roberts was bored.

He applied repeatedly for jobs in South America, only to be rejected each time.

He began to suspect that he was being passed over for men with public school educations, so he attempted to better himself, studying five nights a week and sitting 19 exams in banking, commerce, commercial law and economics.

He even took elocution lessons to lose his Cornish accent.

When he wasn't studying, he learned martial arts and read spy thrillers.

In 1934, around the time of his marriage, Roberts wrote to his old spy handler, Maxwell Knight.

And his controller comes back to him and says, I have a job for you.

By this point, Knight had joined MI5.

And the job is we would like you to join the British Union of Fascists.

Go along, get involved, see what you can find out.

This was not an easy decision for Roberts, who would soon have a family to think about.

But he still had some connections from his years in the Black House, so he accepted and joined the British Union of Fascists.

Between 1934 and the start of the war, Eric Roberts is essentially a passive spy.

Eric is rising, leaving the bank, going to a gent's toilets and changing into his black shirt uniform before before heading off to headquarters in Chelsea.

He's going along, playing the part of a keen member of the British Union and just reporting back.

Who's saying who to what, who's involved, who has he seen, passing on whatever information he can.

This is London.

You will now hear a statement by the Prime Minister.

This morning...

The British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note

stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received

and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

War breaks out and the British Union is quite rapidly prescribed.

It becomes a forbidden organisation and its leaders are rounded up.

Through the late 1930s, Roberts had risen through the ranks of the British Union of Fascists to the level of inspector.

MI5 knew that Roberts could be useful to them.

First, though, he had to be freed up from his day job at the bank.

MI5 wrote to Roberts' boss, asking for his immediate release for special work.

And in reply, the sort of controller of Westminster Bank says, Well, I mean, obviously, you can have this man if you want him, but we'd really like to know why on earth you want him, because we don't think there's anything very special about him.

If only they knew.

Roberts' new role would remain secret for decades.

Eric at this point is invited to formally join MI5 and be sort of a a fascist expert and B an undercover man because he's good at it.

And he spends the next year or so essentially whenever MI5 think they have a dubious fascist and they'd like someone to go and get alongside them and suss them out and take a view as to whether or not they're dangerous, Eric is very often the man they send.

In 1941, Roberts was assigned a new handler at MI5,

Victor, 3rd Baron Rothschild.

The Rothschilds were one of the most most prominent Jewish families in Europe and were explicitly targeted and demonised by Nazi propaganda.

One Austrian member of the family was held prisoner by the Nazis and ransomed for an enormous sum of money.

In Britain, Lord Rothschild felt this threat keenly.

When war broke out, he joined the British Intelligence Service.

Part of his remit at MI5 was to look for Nazi sympathisers within the United Kingdom who might be planning sabotage attacks.

He quite quickly establishes that the big worry is factories and production and technology.

And he becomes worried about a big German company that's based in Britain that he thinks would have been an ideal starting point for any network of German spies and that's called Siemens.

British intelligence had been keeping watch on the industrial manufacturing company Siemens since the First World War.

When the war began, Siemens was forcibly taken over by the custodian of enemy property.

This put the company under British management and cut its ties with Germany.

As war approached in the 1930s, MI5 began to look at Siemens again.

In 1940, Lord Rothschild submitted a report on the company.

While its German head, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, was deemed far from pro-Nazi, there were suspicions around some of the British staff at the West London factories.

Lord Rothschild was convinced that Siemens was a nest of spies.

At this point in the war, the conviction of the British government and to some extent MI5 is that the reason that the Nazis were so successful in moving across Europe is because they had help and this idea of what's called a fifth column.

A fifth column is a secret group of enemy sympathisers who try to undermine a country from within.

The term was used to describe Nazi sympathizers outside Germany.

It's absolutely believed, it's believed that that's how the Germans were able to

overrun Europe, how they were overrun the Netherlands and France so quickly, and it's MI5's job to find the fifth column.

Lord Rothschild's starting point was Siemens.

He needed someone to infiltrate the spy ring he believed was operating there and sniff out any potential collaborators.

Eric Roberts was the obvious man for this job.

In order to maintain his cover, he was given a new identity as Jack King, a metals expert.

MI5 was monitoring an employee in the Siemens factory with German heritage and links to the British Union of Fascists.

His name was Walter Wegener.

Eric Roberts' mission as Jack King was to get close to Wegener's sister, Dorothy.

MI5 hoped that she could lead him to the Nazi sympathisers or agents within Siemens.

And And

he does this for about a year and they're not really getting anywhere.

They even try a little bit of entrapment.

Eric, in his guise as an expert on a particular kind of metal casting, presents this woman with a British tank plan that he's got hold of and says, you know, if only we could get this to

the Germans.

And she doesn't know.

She has no idea what to do with it.

She hides it in a jar of marmalade and the operation is a bust.

After a year of spying on Dorothy Wegener, Eric Roberts and Lord Rothschild came to a conclusion there was no semen spyring.

And

by the end of 1941, MI5 has pretty much concluded that there is no British fifth column.

But the intelligence operation did reveal something of interest.

A substantial number of British people wanted to be in a fifth column.

At the start of 1942,

Rothschild has a thought which is, well, if there is no fifth column, but there are lots of people who'd like to be in the fifth column, why don't we run the fifth column?

In other words, MI5 could fool these people into believing they were part of a Nazi spy ring.

And that way, we can find all of these potential traitors and we know where they are, so we can round them up if we need to, and we can keep an eye on what they're doing, and perhaps they will lead us to other potential traitors, perhaps they will lead us to real traitors.

Roberts had previously played Jack King as a hapless Nazi sympathiser.

Now King was promoted to the role of Gestapo agent, running his own network of informers.

He set up headquarters in the basement of an antique shop on London's Marylebone High Street.

MI5 ensured it was thoroughly bugged.

And so they begin what is known in MI5 as the Fifth Column Operation.

MI5 would draw up an invasion list of sympathizers who could be rounded up in the event of a German attack.

There was one person at the top of that list, a secretary named Marita Perigo.

Roberts had met Perigo during his research into alleged spies at Siemens.

Marita is a convinced fascist and she, unlike the others who are just sort of sitting around complaining about things, she's not for sitting around and complaining.

She wants to do.

Her husband, Bernard, has already been interned, is being held in prison for his fascist activities.

And Marita wants to take revenge.

Perigo was exactly the kind of Nazi sympathiser that MI5 was concerned about.

Lord Rothschild described her as crafty and dangerous.

He said, a woman of this type, with so much misdirected ingenuity, might do great harm to the security and war effort of this country.

To convince Perriga that he was a Gestapo agent, Jack King would need proof.

MI5 created a fake Gestapo pass for him, complete with a swastika stamp.

Marita is galvanized by Jack King's revelation.

And immediately she sees that she has got her way to help the war effort in this case against Britain.

And first of all, because she was a keen fascist, she has a lot of friends and she busily begins sort of sounding them out and recruiting them.

From the basement of the antique shop, Jack King would use Perigo to build a network of Nazi sympathisers in Britain.

She helped him recruit dozens of people.

And she wants to do more.

And the first thing, obviously, that she suggests is that she should get involved in sabotage.

Now MI5, the last thing MI5 want these people to be doing is actual sabotage.

The whole point is to stop them from doing sabotage.

So they're looking for

something

that

people could harmlessly do and they settle on espionage.

Perigot told Roberts that she had copied down details of military operations and equipment from her employer's papers.

She had also made sketches of the security arrangements at factories she had visited.

She handed all of these documents over to Roberts, confident that they would reach Germany.

By the end of the Second World War, Roberts had identified around 500 Nazi sympathisers in Britain.

He had still not been exposed as the real identity of Jack King.

And the problem MI5 has got is...

What do you do with all of these people?

Any lawyer would say, look, my client only did these things because this man came to him pretending to be a Gestapo agent.

So you can't prosecute them.

They consider telling them that they've been rumbled just to sort of humiliate them.

And then they have this further thought.

After the war, no one knew how the political situation in Europe would develop.

Roberts was told to keep his contacts, including Perigot, close at hand.

By this stage, British fascism is pretty much a wholly owned concern of MI5 and indeed of Eric Roberts.

There is very little happening inside British fascism that does not get reported back to Eric.

And so they think, well, why don't we just keep it going?

And so Eric says to his network, look, obviously things haven't worked out the way that the Gestapo hoped they would, but do stay in touch.

You know, if you hear anything, here's how you can reach me.

And, you know, who knows what the future will bring.

After the war, Roberts was sent to Vienna, this time under orders from MI6, who were hoping to have him recruited as a Soviet agent.

The mission was a failure.

He returned a year later, disillusioned with espionage.

In 1956, Roberts left MI5 and accepted a pension.

Still fearing for his family's safety if he were ever exposed, he emigrated to Canada.

Roberts settled in Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.

He wrote a book on local history and tended his garden.

I think he felt safer.

He wanted to lead a different life.

Just get away from it all.

Since his identity was finally revealed in 2014, Roberts has been acknowledged as a significant British agent in the Second World War.

His work helped the British government understand, contain and control any threat posed by fascism and Nazi sympathisers within the United Kingdom.

His daughter, Krista, remembers him simply as her father.

When we went to bed, he always told us bedtime stories.

So, for my brothers, it was Teddy's gang, and for me, it was about a girl called Heidi who got up to all kinds of daring things.

Even with the release of her father's file, Krista still wonders how he managed his double life.

I don't know how he kept his sense of humour because, you know,

he was under such stress all the time.

He's so good at telling stories.

Like, he always had people mesmerized and just totally caught up in the story.

After MI5 released the files in 2014, Robert Hutton spent three years researching the true story of the man known as Agent Jack King.

One detail still astonishes him.

At a special ceremony in January 1946, Eric Roberts presents Marita Perigot with medals on behalf of the Gestapo.

Along with another member of the fifth column, Perigot was awarded a Nazi bronze medal for non-combat gallantry.

She vowed to hide it in the stuffing of her armchair.

And I believe that these were the last German medals awarded from World War II, and they were awarded to two British citizens by MI5.

Perigo and her fellow British fascists of the Fifth Column lived the rest of their lives believing they had been secret Nazi heroes.

Thanks to Eric Roberts, the truth was that all along they had been spying for MI5.

Next time on history's secret heroes, the untold story of the Albanians who risked their lives to save hundreds of Jewish refugees.

Families took Jews into their families, fed them, took care of them, hid them, and whenever things became more dangerous, they would find ways to move them to other locations.

Arslan Ruznici and the Besser Code.

My name is Jonathan Meyerson, and two years ago we produced Nuremberg, a dramatized reconstruction of the trial of the major Nazi war criminals.

Their crimes were indisputable, but one mystery remained.

How did this group of unremarkable men come to rule all of Germany?

Our new podcast, Nazis, The Road to Power, unravels this improbable story in 16 episodes, starring Tom Mothersdale, Derek Jacobi, Alexander Vlahos, Toby Stevens and Laura Donnelly.

It remains a lesson for us all.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We the man to be seen!

Winner best book!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com