Roy Hawkins is an agent with MI6.
In the fact section above, I list Hawkins as being British and that is half true; the other half is American. He chooses to live in England and to serve in that country's intelligence department. He also chooses to put his life on the line constantly in the still new War with Germany. The year we first meet him and start to follow his exploits is 1940, the beginning of Summer to be exact; Paris has just fallen into Nazi control with the arrival of German troops and the legitimate French government has fled the capital.
25 years of age and yet to many of the young men who will at times work with Hawkins, he is often considered "the old man" and at times he even feels it. His manner of speech is a matter of some interest. "His transatlantic accent - half American, half English-threw people off. Americans assumed he was British and the British took him for a Yank. ... The Canadians thought he was one of them". The Germans he encountered all had to wonder, though, because at the time we start following him, England, and by extentson, Canada, was at war with Germany while America was not. Hawkins knows to use this to his advantage in several way, one of which is that when he travels in Europe, he routinely uses his American passport.
Hawkins had already been an undercover operative for some time when we meet him. "As an undercover agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service, Roy Hawkins was an experienced practitioner of all the espionage black arts: deception, camouflage, insinuating yourself into the unwitting trust of others, frequent betrayal, theft, every form of sabotage from planting fake information to blowing things up, and finally, killing those who trusted you, if - and when - duty called for it, as it occasionally did".