Eric Roberts

Eric Arthur Roberts (18 June 1907 – 17 or 18 December 1972) was an MI5 agent during the Second World War under the alias Jack King. By posing as a Gestapo agent and infiltrating fascist groups in the UK, Roberts was able to prevent secret information from finding its way to Germany. Roberts continued to work for the British security services after the war, particularly in Vienna, but it was a time of great anxiety in the services because of the suspicions surrounding double agents such as the Cambridge spy ring.

Roberts never felt completely accepted by MI5 because of his social background, and a desk role did not suit him as well as his wartime role had. He is the subject of the biography Agent Jack (2018) by Robert Hutton, and for a major character in the novel Transcription by Kate Atkinson.

Background Roberts was born in Wivelsfield, East Sussex, in June 1907, the son of Percival Arthur Garfield Roberts and his wife Maud (née Green). At the time of the 1911 Census the family was living in Penzance, Cornwall, where his father worked for the Western Union Cable Company. He attended a grammar school, in spring 1934. The couple set up home in Epsom, Surrey.

Career

MI5 work before and during the Second World War Roberts was recruited in the 1920s as an MI5 field agent to infiltrate first communist and then fascist groups by the spymaster Maxwell Knight. In the 1930s he was tasked to infiltrate the British Union of Fascists. After the bank was asked to release him for war service one of his bosses wrote back expressing surprise at the choice of someone so unremarkable for important work: "what are the particular and especial qualifications of Mr Roberts – which we have not been able to perceive – for some particular work of national military importance which would take him away from his normal military call-up in October?"

By 1942, Roberts was posing as a German Gestapo agent named "Jack King", a member of the Einsatzgruppe London, to obtain information about Nazi sympathisers in the UK. Originally his mission was to infiltrate Siemens-Schuckert (GB) Ltd, the suspect British arm of the German company, until he met a "crafty and dangerous woman" named Marita Perigoe.

According to Roberts, writing in his reports back to MI5, some of the fifth column fascists he dealt with had such hatred for Britain, driven by anti-semitism and the propaganda of Mosley’s group, that they "applauded" women and children being killed by German bombs.

Postwar espionage (MI6) In 1947, Roberts was seconded to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to work in Vienna, posing as a British civil servant and passing information to a Soviet agent, Jellinek. This low-grade, accurate but harmless information passed to enemy spies he described as "chicken feed", a term also used by the spy writer John le Carré. At the time Vienna was a very dangerous place full of spies from all sides. Roberts wrote about some of the dangers he faced every day in his work in Austria. In one incident he waited for an arranged meeting at a cemetery in the city and narrowly avoided being picked up by a Soviet ZiL car.

He died on 17 or 18 December 1972, leaving a widow Audrey, two sons (Maxwell, born 17 January 1936, and Peter), a daughter (Crista McDonald), three grandchildren and two sisters.