How MI5 spied on Britain's wartime fifth column

British intelligence officers mounted a covert operation to infiltrate and control hundreds of Nazi sympathisers in the UK during the second world war, according to newly declassified MI5 files.

In the most significant indication so far of a "fifth column" of Hitler sympathisers in Britain, an MI5 mole known by his code name "Jack King" posed as a Gestapo agent to penetrate groups of fascists. They passed him information, believing that it was being channelled to Germany, and were rewarded with fake Nazi war medals distributed by their British masters.

MI5 has not disclosed King's real identity.

The discovery of a thriving extreme rightwing movement in Britain undermines the idea that wartime fears of a fifth column were myth. In fact, the agent King cultivated a group of six key contacts who gave him information about admirers of the fascist leader Oswald Mosley and a clique of Nazi Roman Catholic priests, as well as other Britons inspired by Hitler.

The epic double-cross - overseen by the MI5 spymaster Maxwell Knight, the model for "M" in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels - began with a probe for potential traitors at Siemens Schuckert, the British arm of a German company suspected of carrying out Nazi espionage.

This became a more ambitious project when the Siemens surveillance drew MI5's attention to Marita Perigoe, a Swedish-German woman whose husband had been interned during the war for membership of the British Union of Fascists.

Perigoe was assessed to be "so violently anti-British and so anxious to do anything in her power to help the enemy" that she was deemed worthy of "special attention". After making her acquaintance in the early 1940s, King told Perigoe he was a Gestapo agent seeking information about Britons who were "100 per cent loyal to the Fatherland'' in order to shore up local support in the event of a Nazi invasion.

During the operation, MI5 received intelligence on "scores and probab­ly . . . hundreds" of fascists, mostly based in London but also in the provinces. King actively discouraged the group from carrying out espionage, but was deluged with unsolicited intelligence material including details of British research into jet propulsion and sensitive radar screening techniques, all of which the sympathisers thought was sent to the Nazis.

Alongside this zeal for subterfuge, the group also displayed what MI5 described as "somewhat melodramatic ideas about secret service work". Officers indulged this by furnishing the core contact group with a suitable meeting place in the basement of an antique shop. According to the case files, King's recruits also delighted in discussions about invisible ink and an operation to hide defence plans in "a large jar of marmalade".

Not all the exchanges were so light-hearted. Spymasters were appalled at the bloodlust displayed by pro-Nazi Britons. At a meeting in April 1943, one of the recruits, Nancy Browne, is described as being "thrilled" by German raids on her home town of Brighton, including the bombing of a school clinic in which two children and a pregnant woman died.

"I looked in vain in the faces of these three women for any signs of contrition," King reports. "Nancy Browne looked a fine, healthy specimen of an English woman but it was obvious that the deaths of these people meant absolutely nothing to her."

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The agency later described Jack King as "the most valuable single source of information" on Nazi sentiment in Britain. The wartime spymaster, Lord Rothschild, praised the agent's efforts as a "staggering tour de force", recommending that he be rewarded with a job in a bank, a year's salary and a war medal. MI5 has still not released his real name.

Christopher Andrew, the historian and author of the authorised history of MI5, told the Financial Times that the fifth column operation had been "a very fine way of preventing a small but determined group of pro-Nazis from getting secrets to Germany".

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