Agent Jack: The True Story of MI5's Secret Nazi Hunter
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
'Highly readable' Ben Macintyre
'Pacy, original and frequently chilling' Henry Hemming
June 1940. Britain is Europe's final bastion of freedom - and Hitler's next target. But not everyone fears a Nazi invasion. In factories, offices and suburban homes are men and women determined to do all they can to hasten it.
Throughout the Second World War, Britain's defence against the enemy within was Eric Roberts, a former bank clerk from Epsom. Equipped with an extraordinary ability to make people trust him, he was recruited into the shadowy world of espionage by the great spymaster Maxwell Knight. Roberts penetrated first the Communist Party and then the British Union of Fascists, before playing his greatest role for MI5 - as Hitler's man in London.
Codenamed Jack King, he single-handedly built a network of hundreds of British Nazi sympathisers, with many passing secrets to him in the mistaken belief that he was a Gestapo officer. Operation Fifth Column, run by a brilliant woman scientist and a Jewish aristocrat with a sideline in bomb disposal, was kept so secret it was omitted from the reports MI5 sent to Winston Churchill.
In a narrative that grips like a thriller, Robert Hutton tells the fascinating story of an operation whose existence has only recently come to light. Drawing on newly declassified documents and private family archives, Agent Jack shatters the comfortable notion that Britain could never have succumbed to fascism, and celebrates - at last - the courage of individuals who protected the country they loved at great personal risk.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this meticulous WWII espionage history, Bloomberg UK correspondent Hutton (Romps, Tots and Boffins) relates the story of British spy Eric Roberts and the Fifth Column, a secret MI5 operation to identify Nazi sympathizers in the U.K. Posing as Gestapo agent "Jack King," Roberts recruited more than 500 British fascists to help prepare for the German invasion of England. In reality, the would-be saboteurs were under close watch by MI5's countersabotage division. Drawing on documents declassified in 2014, Hutton describes Roberts's recruitment efforts and the balancing act he managed between cultivating his network and not allowing its members to commit any serious mischief. In one case, he arranged for local police to stake out a warehouse in Leeds that had been targeted for firebombing. The police failed to respond to the agreed upon signal, however, and only the incompetence of the arsonists prevented the warehouse's destruction. Hutton argues that MI5 kept Roberts's reports, which exposed ordinary citizens as well as the daughter of a popular composer, classified for 70 years because they undermined "the story Britain told itself about the war." This entertaining, detailed narrative presents a chilling portrait of England under siege.
