Agent Jack - Robert Hutton

This story is absolutely fascinating! Most of the events and history of this whole story were redacted or classified for decades (until 2014), and the amount of research that must have gone into writing this story from beginning to end is incredible! For that alone I recommend reading this book.

Agent Jack is the story of Eric Roberts, a bank clerk with the ability to make people like and trust him, who becomes an MI5 agent. Before WW2 he infiltrates groups of Communists and then Fascists, but after WW2 breaks out he becomes Jack King, the agent who manages to bring down a huge network of Nazi sympathizers and spies in Britain (sometimes named the 5th Column during the Nazi invasion of Europe). He poses as a secret Gestapo agent, and builds his “network” of people who are pushing for Hitler to win the war. This is the way MI5 were able to bring the 5th Column down from the inside without the general public having any knowledge of it.

Despite the fact that this book is very well written and researched, and that the whole story really is fascinating (and true), I found myself often getting bogged down in the details, and after putting the book down I often had to prod myself to go back to it and finish it. Every time a new person enters the scene we are given their entire background which tends to bring the flow of the narrative to a halt. Sometimes it wasn’t too much of an issue, at other times I felt like I had forgotten where we were in the timeline and had to go back and check. I do appreciate a good explanation and detail when it matters (Rothschild’s background is very important for example), but sometimes it was a bit overkill, especially with people who weren’t really that involved.

All in all though this is a very interesting piece of history that I think should be read - that there were so many Nazi sympathizers in Britain during WW2 is something that is generally overlooked, and Agent Jack provides some great information on how something could have gone differently along the way and changed the entire outcome of the war.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.