M

by Henry Hemming

  By sharing this information with some of Gwladys’s friends, Max had hoped to go up in their estimation and earn their trust. The problem was that nobody believed him. Now he was seen as both an outsider and a fantasist.

  Some locals took this further, spreading the rumour that Max went out at night to fish from land that belonged to others. Others went further still, claiming that he was a werewolf.

  It was hardly surprising that Max spent so many hours fishing by himself. But neither his lack of friends nor his dislike of hunting accounted in full for the tension in his marriage. Gwladys was uncertain about her future with her husband because after two years together their relationship had not yet been consummated.

  How can we be sure? The sex life of a married couple rarely leaves a paper trail. The absence of a child confirms nothing. Yet the recollections of Gwladys’s friends, when interviewed many years later, were consistent on this one point. Max would later confirm, under oath, that around this time his wife became estranged from her mother, and according to Gwladys’s friends this was because Mrs Poole had found out about her daughter’s non-existent sex life. She had urged Gwladys to leave Max and to have the marriage dissolved, but her daughter had refused.

  In his letter to the British Lion, Max mentioned that he would be leaving London for ‘reasons of health’.2 It is possible that he had seen a doctor about his problem, whatever it may have been, and that he had been told a move to the country might help.

  Another possibility is that Max was secretly gay, as one ex-lover suggested in an angry memoir that came out after his death. That book was published in the 1980s, amid the climate of renewed homophobia that accompanied the AIDS epidemic. This take on Max’s sexuality would then be repeated so many times in the following years that it soon took on the hallowed status of fact. But the evidence to support it was almost non-existent. This claim about Max’s private life left his family and friends both bemused and baffled. Throughout his life there were references to him flirting with women, being attracted to women and to their being attracted to him. There are also suggestions that he had affairs with various women. One of his superiors at MI5 complained that Max, as a married man, was known ‘to have lived with one of his [female] secretaries and now to be living with another’.3 No man ever claimed to have been Max’s lover; equally the notion that he married Gwladys to hide his sexuality is tenuous. Both of Max’s parents had died by the time of his marriage and it is difficult to imagine either of his spymasters, one of whom was a confirmed bachelor, being remotely concerned about his marital status.

  For all this, after two years of marriage, Max and Gwladys had not consummated their relationship. There was a problem in bed, and this added to the strain on their relationship. It might have been a purely physical issue, or a more psychological one, but it seems that those long fishing trips, when Max often stayed out late into the night, were a series of escapes. He was running away from Gwladys, from his failure to consummate and in some ways he was running away from himself.

  By 1929, Max was stuck. The course of his life seemed to have run into an eddy. Having so recently been a young, high-flying spymaster with contacts throughout British intelligence, he was now a pub-running fisherman thought by the locals to be either a fantasist or a werewolf. Possibly both. When working for the Makgill Organisation, he had displayed a rare aptitude for recruiting and running agents; indeed, this was the only job in which he had ever flourished. Although Max loved his wife and there were times when he enjoyed living on Exmoor, after two years of this he was desperate to find a way out.

  9

  MORTON’S PLAN

  At last, Desmond Morton had found a solution. The MI6 officer with a machine-gun bullet lodged in his chest had been tussling with a familiar problem, namely, how to root out Soviet espionage in Britain. Technically, this was not his problem to solve. Morton continued to run the Production section in MI6, as well as Section VI, which gathered intelligence on economic preparations for war inside countries like Germany and Russia. His official area of interest was overseas, yet his attention was always being drawn back to the home front in the undeclared intelligence war between Britain and the USSR, one that Moscow was now winning.

  Two years earlier, in 1927, Morton had taken part in the notoriously shambolic raid on the London headquarters of the All-Russian Co-Operative Society (ARCOS), the Soviet body responsible for Anglo-Russian trade. The British suspected ARCOS of being a front for various illegal activities. A herd of policemen, accompanied by Morton and several MI5 officers, had piled into the ARCOS building on Moorgate in the hope of finding a photocopied Signals Training manual that they believed to have come from a British military base in Aldershot. But they did not find the manual, or anything else to fully justify the search.

  The ARCOS raid led to an immediate cessation of diplomatic relations between Britain and the USSR. It also ended the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement. Worse, when pressed in Parliament about this raid, the Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, and even the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, revealed that the government had access to encrypted diplomatic traffic between Moscow and the Soviet embassy in London. This was an epic blunder. The Soviets responded by changing their encryption, introducing a ‘One-Time Pad’ system that was theoretically unbreakable, and which ended the government’s unfettered access to Soviet diplomatic traffic.

  The year after this disastrous ARCOS raid, Desmond Morton helped to coordinate the arrest of two Soviet spies who were operating on British soil, Wilfred Macartney and Georg Hansen. Several months later, Morton’s colleagues interviewed the first major defector from the Soviet Union, whose information only confirmed the MI6 man’s fears about the extent of Soviet espionage in Britain. But the worst was still to come.

  In April 1929, after five years of intricate, clever investigation by Morton and others at MI6 and MI5, Inspector Van Ginhoven and Sergeant Jane of Special Branch, as well as Walter Dale, a former policeman, were all arrested and charged with being paid Soviet agents in a spy ring dominated by former and serving British policemen. Only now did Morton appreciate how bad the domestic situation had become. The existence of Soviet spies deep within Special Branch, of all places, marked a new low. As one MI5 officer explained, for ‘ten years, any information regarding subversive organisations and individuals supplied to Scotland Yard by MI6 or MI5, which had become the subject of Special Branch police enquiry, would have to be regarded as having been betrayed’.1

  Soon after these arrests, the Labour Party won the 1929 General Election. The new Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, restored diplomatic relations with Moscow and instructed Special Branch to scale back its operations against the Communist Party.

  Desmond Morton once said that he had just one enemy in life. It was not the German soldier who had fired a bullet into his chest, but ‘International Leninism’.2 Similar to the late Sir George Makgill, Morton wanted to protect his country from the Soviet Union and its ideology, which was why, in 1929, shortly after the Labour victory, he made the decision to bypass Special Branch and set up his own secret agent network on British soil. It would target Communism in Britain and Soviet espionage.

  This was risky. Morton knew that if the existence of his new operation became known beyond MI6 there would be major and lasting repercussions for him and his agency. So, the man he chose to run this network had to be unfailingly discreet.

  Morton had kept in touch with Max during his exile on Exmoor and had even asked him to carry out several low-key jobs using the handful of agents that he still had in play. Usually, the work involved verifying reports received by MI6. Morton referred to Max and his men as ‘Casuals’. Certainly, their work in the years after the General Strike had more in common with a casual amateur hobby than a full-time profession. Yet that was about to change.

  In late 1929, Morton asked Max to renew and enlarge his agent network and to start working for him as an MI6 agent. This well-tailored yet som
etimes charmless MI6 officer was essentially offering Max his previous life back, only with regular pay and more power. Max did not need to think long before saying yes.

  All Morton needed was clearance from his boss, Sir Hugh Sinclair, the head of MI6 known as ‘C’. Morton may have been a ‘typical old-fashioned bachelor’ who could come across as lacking any sensitivity, but he had the common sense to realise that his plan had one major flaw, and that was Max’s past.3

  So he covered it up.

  ‘I have just heard of a man, Mr Maxwell Knight, now Proprietor of the Royal Oak Hotel, Withypool,’ Morton explained to C.4 He had known Max for at least five years. ‘This man holds in his hand the threads of a small amateur detective or secret service in London, consisting of about a hundred individuals in all walks of life, many of whom speak foreign languages. I could see Maxwell Knight without disclosing my name or identity,’ he went on, ‘only saying that I am in some way connected with non-political circles.’ The implication that Max would have no idea that Morton was an MI6 officer was absurd, yet Morton’s desire to obscure their relationship was understandable. He did not want his chief to find out that over the last five years, as an MI6 officer, he had been informally running a senior British Fascist.

  Over lunch with Max at the United Services Club on 27 November, 1929, Morton explained that C had agreed to his being given a three-month trial. Of course, he must not breathe a word of this to anyone, least of all to those with the slightest connection to Special Branch. Max’s pay would be modest, just £35 a month, plus expenses (equivalent today to roughly £15,000 per year). As a signing-on bonus he would get £60. That initial payment was made in used pound notes that were out of series, a suitably cloak-and-dagger start to his official career as an MI6 agent.

  Max began his new job while many others in the world were losing theirs. In the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, unemployment soared and with it the threat of Communism. Max’s work felt relevant again. He was back in London doing a job that he believed in. The patriotism of his teenage years, the frustration he had once felt after seeing no active service and his experiences in K, had all coalesced into a zealous hostility towards Communism. Now he was being paid by the government to do work he might have done for free – if only he could afford to. The memory of his two years living on Exmoor, amid a bleak expanse of rugged moorland, and those long fishing trips alone, must have felt like an unhappy fugue.

  In his new guise as an MI6 agent running a network of subagents, Max reported directly to Desmond Morton. Usually they met for clandestine debriefs in St James’s Park Underground Station, which may not have been the cleverest place to convene, given its proximity to MI6 Headquarters.

  Morton was encouraged by Max’s early reports. ‘With every passing month,’ he wrote, Max ‘got his agents nearer to the target area’, which was the centre of the British Communist Party.5

  Most of these agents were individuals Max had taken on while he was working for Makgill. The shelf life of an average undercover agent is short. He or she might be exposed or find the stress of the work too much, or the quality of the agent’s intelligence may drop off. Agents might also fall out with their spymaster. Max was unusual in this sense. He managed to keep his agents going for many years. Indeed, one of his sources around this time – a gay, penniless poet who would go on to become Chairman of the Labour Party and sit in the House of Lords – was still reporting to Max, and only Max, more than thirty years after they had begun to work together.

  Once Max had breathed life into his old network, he began to look around for more ‘little ships’, as he liked to call them, to launch at the Communist Party.6 One of these was set to be an old comrade from K – William Joyce.

  Two years earlier, Joyce had graduated from Birkbeck with a First in English Literature, one of just two first-class honours degrees awarded that year. He had since applied to join the Foreign Office. Although he was ultimately turned down, the man who had married Max’s first love was now becoming a more respectable figure. He was a familiar face in his local branch of the Conservative Party, where there was talk of his one day standing for Parliament. Only the long, curving scar across his cheek hinted at a wilder and more violent past.

  Max had always preferred to take on friends of his as agents, a habit he had inherited from Makgill. He also believed that every recruit should share his political outlook. Joyce was certainly a committed enemy of Communism, but this did not make him trustworthy, as Max discovered.

  Very soon after approaching William Joyce about the possibility of his becoming an agent, it seems Max found out that Joyce was cheating on his wife, Hazel, then pregnant with Joyce’s child. You might think that Joyce’s ability to hide a relationship from his wife, or at least his willingness to do so, would make him ideal for intelligence fieldwork. Not for Max, who saw cheating on your wife as equivalent to betraying your spymaster or, indeed, your country. The fact that Joyce’s wife was someone Max had cared for himself, and probably still did, only reinforced the point.

  In MI6 today, trainee intelligence officers are taught to consider potential agents in terms of their suitability, their access and their motivation. Max could have persuaded Joyce to join the Communist Party, which would have given him the access. He was certainly motivated. Yet, by cheating on Hazel, he had shown himself to be unsuitable.

  Max decided not to take on Joyce. Already he had learned to be wary of any man or woman who seemed to enjoy deceit for its own sake, or who lied for their own pleasure. He needed those ‘whose personal honesty and motives were above reproach,’ he wrote, individuals who found the distortion of the truth to be a burden, but one that they would carry for the sake of their country.7 Max had misjudged Joyce, and not for the last time.

  10

  ‘I CAN MAKE THINGS BLOODY UNPLEASANT FOR YOU’

  Every agent has a blind spot, as Desmond Morton was about to be reminded. Max had assured his boss that in his new job for MI6 he would avoid Special Branch ‘like the plague’. By using Max, Morton was not only trespassing on his rival organisation’s territory but also flouting the government’s ban on undercover operations against the Communist Party. But if Morton’s agent was trying to avoid Special Branch ‘like the plague’, he had a very unusual way of going about it.

  Soon after being taken on by MI6, Maxwell Knight began to have regular lunches with an old friend. This was Lieutenant-Colonel John Carter, a man who was by that stage of his career Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and as such the nominal head of Special Branch. On 23 July, 1930, Max went to have another lunch with Colonel Carter of Special Branch. They met at their usual spot: Hatchett’s, on Piccadilly. Max settled down for what he presumed was going to be another convivial meal.

  It was not.

  ‘Was Major Morton going to close down the whole of this business,’ demanded Carter, ‘or was he not?’1

  The man from Special Branch had found out about Max’s network. He was apoplectic with rage, and understandably so. It seems that during one of Max and Carter’s earlier meals the young MI6 agent had made a remark that piqued Carter’s curiosity. It is unlikely that Max told the Special Branch man outright that he was working for Morton. More likely he was unable to resist the temptation to hint that he was up to something, that his exile on Exmoor was over and that he was back in the intelligence game.

  Carter’s response was to send a detective down to Exmoor to investigate. Other Special Branch detectives began to shadow Max around London. Although Max later claimed to have been aware of this, assuring Morton that he was more than capable of shaking off a Special Branch tail, it is hard to think why he would have allowed these detectives to see him meeting Morton. Most likely this observation happened at St James’s Park Tube station, just a stone’s throw from MI6 Headquarters.

  By modern standards the idea of an MI6 agent meeting his spymaster here, of all places, sounds hopelessly amateur. But this level of tradecraft was not unusual at that time.
There are many elements of MI5 and MI6 intelligence-gathering between the wars that come across as shockingly unprofessional when compared to what goes on today. Much of this was down to a lack of training, limited resources and tiny salaries. Men like Max and Morton were drawn to their profession out of a boyish love of intelligence and often found themselves making it up as they went along. But this does not fully explain Max’s decision to have a series of lunches with the head of Special Branch. Like a poacher who asks to meet the gamekeeper from whom he is stealing, this may have been about brinkmanship as well, and the bravado of being in on a secret which the other person is not.

  All that had now come to an end. A spluttering Colonel Carter told Max that Desmond Morton was ‘a worm’, and that before he was finished he wanted to see the MI6 man ‘go on his knees to him on the carpet at Scotland Yard’.2

  ‘I can make things bloody unpleasant for you,’ Carter told Max. ‘How would it be if I gave the whole thing away to the Communist Party?’

  By ‘the whole thing’ he meant Max’s agent network. Only months after it had been revived, Carter was threatening to snuff out Max’s espionage career.

  ‘This is going to be a fight,’ Carter went on.3 ‘I am going to fight until the last ditch.’ The head of Special Branch then delivered his ultimatum. If Max continued to work for MI6, Carter would ‘make his life and that of his agents a misery’.4