Agent Jack by Robert Hutton

Author:Robert Hutton [Hutton, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474605144
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A Post Office twin-turntable portable disc recorder

What they heard in the early days of the operation was an atmosphere of constant distrust.

‘All disloyal persons are extremely suspicious of so-called members of the German Secret Service or Gestapo as they are well aware that this technique is used by all security services to find out who is loyal and who is not,’ a July 1942 case summary read. ‘It would not be an exaggeration to say that during thirty per cent of Jack’s time with the fifth column, members firmly believe that he is in MI5.’

Roberts tried to assuage Perigoe’s doubts by turning them into a joke. ‘Look at Marita, she looks at you with half-closed eyes,’ he laughed to Gleave, after Perigoe had questioned who he was really working for. She was, he said, ‘so terribly suspicious’.

Perigoe was defensive: ‘Well, I haven’t asked you if you were working for anything for some time, so I thought I’d better.’

‘You asked me about MI5 on Saturday,’ Roberts pointed out.

‘Did I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I have to do that fairly regularly, don’t I?’

Roberts even made a joke out of the idea that they were being bugged, when that was precisely what was happening. The first time he invited Perigoe and Gleave to the Park West flat, he stepped out of the room, calling casually back: ‘Oh, Marita, whilst I’m out of the room, you can amuse yourself with the microphone.’

She replied in the same spirit: ‘I’ve looked for them already.’

But this was only partly a joke. In the months to come, when she was left alone, Perigoe would launch genuine searches for a bug. Was it under the carpet? Behind the photograph of Churchill? In the vents, high up on the wall, that let in air from outside?

For Roberts, humour was a way to ease tension, making difficult situations into the subject of shared jokes. He teased Perigoe about her ‘threats to bump me off’, suggesting that she would stab him with a penknife, or poison him. And like the microphones in the flat, this was a joke with an edge: by August 1942, Perigoe had talked about killing him at least once. Afterwards, she denied it had happened, and then tried to laugh it off. But Roberts had seen the ‘virulent’ look on her face. He knew that if she concluded he was deceiving her, his life would be at risk. This operation was a far more serious business than hiding blueprints in marmalade with Dorothy Wegener.

As Roberts tried to assess how much Perigoe really suspected him, he was also worrying about other threats to his safety. He continued to be concerned that his colleagues at MI5 were too complacent about the possibility of German penetration. MI5’s confidence in this area was based on the success of the Double Cross operation. German communications, decrypted by Britain’s codebreakers at Bletchley Park, suggested their reports were being believed.

But if MI5 was capable of hoaxing the Abwehr, it was possible that the Abwehr was capable of playing an even larger hoax back to Britain.

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