Agent Jack, The True Story of MI5’s Secret Nazi Hunter

Title: Agent Jack, The True Story of MI5’s Secret Nazi Hunter

Author: Robert Hutton

Publisher: Orion Publishing (www.orionbooks.co.uk)

Pps: 313 including notes and index

Price: £20

ISBN: 978-1-4746-0511-3

Fans of Ben Macintyre will love this book, is the quote featured on the front cover of Agent Jack, and as soon as you start reading it, if you are a fan of Ben Macintyre, you see exactly what he means. It is well written and tells you things, interesting things, that you just didn’t know.

I have read a lot of books on the subject of WWII and spies and PoWs and escapes in my lifetime and I had never even heard of Agent Jack until I spotted this title being reviewed in the recent weekend papers. I just had to read it for myself.

It has not disappointed, delivering a mix of James Bond and Dad’s Army, with a touch of John Betjeman thrown in through the evocation of Metro-Land. Horror writer Dennis Wheatley puts in an appearance, too, producing a paper on possible German invasion tactics which was largely dismissed by prime minister Winston Churchill’s chief military adviser as too far-fetched even for Hitler. Hands up among the readership who even knew of that.

The opening two pages are pure Walmington-on-Sea as it introduces Agent Jack in his real identity of Eric Roberts, a clerk with the Westminster Bank for 15 years ‘during which time he had failed to distinguish himself’, the author notes. ‘Indeed, he was best known for playing tiresome pranks on his superiors and even on customers’.

Readera familiar with Dad’s Army will almost certainly imagine Captain Mainwaring uttering his most famous catch phrase, ‘Stupid boy’. But the occasional prankster is not even in the office, being away on holiday at the time that the UK’s secret intelligence services asked his employer about his availability as ‘the country was drawing up plans to face the most serious invasion threat to its shores in almost a thousand years’.

The book’s publicity explains that the author, the UK political correspondent for Bloomberg News, draws on newly declassified documents and private family archives to tell the story of a man who was recruited into the shadowy world of espionage by spymaster Maxwell Knight and code-named Jack King. He signle-handedly bulit 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 was so secret, we learn, that it was omitted from the reports that MI5 sent to Churchill.

Just when you might have felt it was safe to assume there was nothing left to learn about the period from 1939-45 that the Republic of Ireland refers to as The Emergency but that many of us know as World War II, Robert Hutton joins the slew of writers quietly but firmly proving us wrong.  A very welcome addition to the literature and another great idea for a Christmas present.