M

by Henry Hemming

  ‘One begins to wonder whether we are really at war at all,’ despaired Guy Liddell, Deputy Director of MI5’s B Division, who was not the only one in the Office to resent this hesitant, nebulous atmosphere.2 Liddell wanted all anti-war publications shut down and the immediate internment of the 70,000 Germans living in Britain. He felt that ‘enemy aliens’, as they were then known, must be locked up and then ‘called upon to show cause why they should be released’.3 Not the other way around. This was the policy stipulated in the War Book, and it was roughly what had happened during the last war.

  The Home Office refused. Inspired by what Liddell dismissed as ‘old-fashioned liberalism’, senior Home Office officials took a principled stand at the start of the war against the prosecution of anti-war publications and the mass internment of enemy aliens.4 ‘Our tradition is that while orders issued by the duly constituted authority must be obeyed,’ wrote Sir Alexander Maxwell, the donnish Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, ‘every civilian is at liberty to show, if he can, that such orders are silly or mischievous and the duly constituted authorities are composed of fools or rogues.’5 Although Maxwell accepted that this gentler approach might backfire, because it could encourage those ‘who desire revolution, or desire to impede the war effort’, he insisted that this ‘risk is the cardinal distinction between democracy and totalitarianism’. The Home Office would rather lose the war nobly than sanction an all-out attack on civil liberties.

  MI5 could only offer strongly worded protests as the Home Office pursued its alternative policy on enemy aliens, which was to set up one-man tribunals all over the country and review the case of each German national individually. This was both enormously fair and unbelievably time-consuming. After several months it would lead to the internment of 569 Germans. A further 6,800 were told to observe a curfew and stay away from certain parts of the country, while the remainder, some 64,000 people, were given no restrictions at all.

  MI5’s Guy Liddell called this ‘laughable’.6 ‘The liberty of the subject, freedom of speech etc. were all very well in peacetime,’ he wrote, ‘but were no use in fighting the Nazis.7 There seemed to be a complete failure to realise the power of the totalitarian state and the energy with which the Germans were fighting a total war.’ Already there was a fundamental rift in Whitehall, and it reflected a similar division throughout the country. The Home Office saw the war as a clash of principles, yet for MI5 this was a bloody fight for survival and it began at home, as the example of Poland and Czechoslovakia had shown.

  With the war less than a month old, reports had come in from Poland to suggest that the Nazi invasion had been assisted, in part, by ethnic Germans living inside Poland. Some of these stories were accurate. The Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, a series of paramilitary units made up of Germans resident in Poland, had indeed committed acts of sabotage during the invasion and had even taken on armed Polish units. The German occupation of the Sudetenland the year before had been assisted very slightly by the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps, a similar paramilitary organisation for ethnic Germans living beyond the borders of Nazi Germany. For MI5, this raised the spectre of there being inside Britain already a so-called Fifth Column.

  This term had been coined several years earlier by General Franco, during the Spanish Civil War, when he referred to his ‘Fifth Column’ of sympathisers in Madrid, living among the enemy. Now, in Britain, Fifth Column became shorthand for a supposed network of Germans living in Britain who were ready to rise up in the event of a Nazi invasion to carry out sabotage, espionage and perhaps launch attacks against British forces.

  This was a familiar fear. Although it had not been referred to back then as a Fifth Column, in the years before the First World War millions of Britons became convinced that there were hundreds of German spies living secretly among them. The hysteria followed the publication of various novels and speculative newspaper articles by the likes of William Le Queux, whose best-seller The Invasion of 1910 cemented this idea of expatriate Germans forming a readymade network of potential spies. Indeed, the spy fever had been so intense in 1909 that the government had felt compelled to respond. It had asked a young Vernon Kell and one other officer to set up the Secret Service Bureau, which later divided into MI6 and MI5. MI5 had been born out of spy fever, and it was easy for those in the Home Office, in September 1939, to imagine that its fear of a Fifth Column in Britain was inspired by little more than institutional prejudice.

  This was part of the reason why those in the Home Office refused to authorise the mass internment of enemy aliens that MI5 had called for. As a result, Kell, Liddell and the rest of MI5 were swamped with work relating to the new one-man tribunals, which, in turn, made it harder for them to concentrate on combating German espionage. MI5 also had growing pains to contend with. During the early stages of the war, Kell’s department doubled in size. At the same time its staff struggled to adapt to their new wartime headquarters in Wormwood Scrubs, a former prison block.

  M’s situation was rather different. He continued to run his section from a palatial housing development overlooking the River Thames, and his staff of three officers remained unchanged. Captain Knight, as he now was, would have to make do with just Jimmy Dickson and Bill Younger. Yet with the small injection of funds he had received several months earlier, M had been able to take on several new agents. These included ‘M/C’, a female typist in the mould of Mona Maund and Olga Gray. M/C had managed to get a job as a secretary at BUF National Headquarters and over the following months she would supply M with a valuable stream of material on Fascist activities. But he needed more.

  Following the outbreak of war, M Section found itself responsible for dealing with individual cases of suspected espionage as well as monitoring the Communist underground and penetrating all extremist political organisations on the Right. As usual, M would have to do a lot with very little. But the stakes were higher now. His choice of precisely where to deploy his agents, when and how to instruct them could be the difference between his uncovering a Fifth Column and there being a successful German invasion.

  M had to think very carefully before deciding where to direct one of his newest agents, Marjorie Mackie, codenamed ‘M/Y’, a middle-aged single mother from Essex who was short and broad and had remarkable sky-blue eyes. Mackie’s only son had recently joined the merchant navy. Before the war she had made a living doing public cooking demonstrations for a well-known flour company. Like a modern-day television chef, only without the cameras, she baked bread and pies while chatting to an audience of passing shoppers, a job that seemed to combine her two great skills in life: cooking and talking. Yet the legacy of this work, even if she did not recognise it in herself, was an exaggerated manner. Mrs Mackie would often come across in conversation as the kind of person who was willing to embellish a story if she felt her audience was losing interest. She could try too hard to be believed, a quality that did not bode well in her new job as a government agent.

  M wanted Mrs Mackie to infiltrate the Right Club, a secretive anti-Semitic group committed to undermining the war effort and spreading the idea that this conflict was part of a global Jewish-Communist-Masonic conspiracy. M had reason to believe that the Right Club was developing its own network of agents – just as a Fifth Column might do. This rumour almost certainly came to him from one of his two agents already inside the group, John Hirst and Eric Roberts. Yet neither man was at all close to the figure at the heart of the Right Club. This was where Mrs Mackie came in.

  The Hon. Captain Archibald Ramsay, MP, usually known as ‘Jock’, was a former officer in the Coldstream Guards and a Conservative backbencher whose outlook was essentially Fascist. He had set up the Right Club earlier that year in response to the looming possibility of Britain and Germany going to war, an event which he felt was a terrible mistake. Yet he was not anti-war on humanitarian grounds. Instead Ramsay thought that Britain and Germany should be allies in the struggle against Jews, Masons and Communists.

  This moustachioed, balding
politician had belonged in the early 1930s to various right-wing and anti-Communist groups, including the Christian Protest Movement, which campaigned against the persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union. Its Assistant Secretary back then had been Mrs Mackie. This was why M had taken her on. Mackie’s first job for MI5 was to get back in touch with Captain Ramsay and to find out what he was up to.

  ‘I telephoned to Mrs Ramsay,’ wrote Mrs Mackie, ‘and asked her if I could see her and Captain Ramsay and renew our acquaintance.8 She invited me to tea.’

  The conversation that followed was ‘violently anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic,’ explained Mackie. The former cookery demonstrator played along, nodding when necessary and otherwise trying to persuade Mrs Ramsay that her views were just as extreme as her husband’s.

  It worked. The following month Mackie was invited to join the Right Club, and in late September 1939 she finally got to speak to Captain Ramsay himself. What she heard was extraordinary.

  Ramsay told this MI5 informant that Right Club members, his agents effectively, had infiltrated not only every leading right-wing group but also Whitehall. ‘He told me that he had most of the Government Departments covered with the exception of the Foreign Office and the Censorship Department. He added, “If you could help us here it would be very useful.”’9

  ‘I made no promise,’ she told M, but Mackie led Ramsay to believe ‘that I had many friends in military circles who would use their influence on my behalf’.10

  Captain Ramsay was not only building up a network of agents inside the British government, but, according to Mrs Mackie, he was making tentative plans for a right-wing coup. M had also begun to receive disturbing intelligence from within the Communist movement, including one report suggesting ‘that instructions have now been received from Moscow to go right ahead with all plans for creating a revolution in this country when the time is ripe’.11

  There seemed to be danger from homegrown Fascists and homegrown Communists, as well as the growing threat of a Nazi invasion. At the same time, M had a more personal crisis to contend with. Just four days after Captain Ramsay had told Mrs Mackie to find a job in the Foreign Office or Censorship, a Special Branch report came into the Office to suggest that M, of all people, had tipped off William Joyce about his imminent arrest. By then Joyce’s broadcasts from Berlin were being discussed in the press.

  M responded immediately. While he conceded that he had spoken to Joyce on the phone shortly before his escape, ‘there was no question of Joyce having been warned or given any improper information’.12

  Yet M offered no plausible explanation as to why Joan Joyce would have made this up. She knew that M was trying to get one of her other brothers, Quentin, released from prison and she had no incentive to slander this MI5 officer. If this had been a lie, it was an elaborate one that served no purpose. It is hard to say which of his colleagues actually believed M’s denial. Yet, by that stage of the war, the Office was overwhelmed with more pressing work and this matter was left alone.

  The first month of the war had been a strange, discomforting time for M. He had received ominous intelligence about plans being made by Captain Ramsay and the Right Club, and had seen reports describing Communist and Fascist plots for a coup. In the background came the drone of his former comrade, Lord Haw-Haw, as he made broadcasts from Berlin. It was impossible for M to know what the fallout from his telephone call might be, but this did at least force him to confront his relationship with Joyce and perhaps with British Fascism more generally.

  Most of M’s identity as a young man had been bound up in his experiences with K and the BF. The reinvention of this movement as a pro-Nazi phenomenon must have been painful for him and confusing; it was a shift that ate into his understanding of himself and his past, as well as his amour propre. It also challenged his sense of what this war was about. Many people, including those who, like him, had once been involved in the Makgill Organisation, men whom M respected, admired and liked, saw this as part of an ongoing conflict between the Right and the Left in which Britain would be better advised to side with Germany. For others the war belonged to a struggle between dictatorship and democracy, and steps should be taken to limit the freedoms of those people in Britain who sympathised with Hitler and the forces of dictatorship. Maxwell Knight was not a man given to long expressive outpourings of his innermost feelings, either in conversation or on the page, so there is no direct account of his political position at this time. Indeed he was so accustomed to presenting different sides of himself to his many agents that keeping his interior world hidden came naturally. Instead, we are left with the record of what he did.

  Inasmuch as this tells us anything, it suggests that by the start of October 1939 this MI5 spymaster, like so many others with connections to the Right, was still undecided about how he saw the war, or indeed the threat of homegrown Fascism. Politically the BUF was by then something of a joke, and there was no prospect of a truly popular Fascist uprising in Britain, yet the danger was that radicalised British Fascists, for whom ideology was more important than nationality, may have already decided to work for Nazi Germany. M’s dilemma was centred on just how serious that threat really was.

  34

  THE FASHION DESIGNER

  On 4 October, 1939, the day before Hitler flew out to the newly occupied capital of Poland for a victory parade, Marjorie Mackie began her job in Military Censorship. Her contact at the Right Club who had encouraged her to apply for this position, Mrs Ramsay, was thrilled. Mackie now worked in the same complex as MI5, one of the few government departments in which the Right Club had no agents.

  Very soon after Mackie had started her new job, Mrs Ramsay asked her whether she had been able to meet any MI5 staff. For once, the MI5 agent was able to tell the truth. Yes, she replied, she had met several people who worked for the service.

  She then told Mrs Ramsay that this happened occasionally in the shared canteen.

  Mrs Ramsay was impressed.

  ‘Yes, I think when it comes to a showdown,’ she said, ‘you will have work to do.’1

  Showdown. This language must have been familiar to M. ‘The Showdown’ was similar to ‘The Day’, which had once been predicted by his friends in the British Fascists, when the Communists would try to seize power and the Fascists would nobly rise up to stop them. But there was a critical difference between the Showdown and The Day. The current crop of right-wing extremists, including Mosley and Ramsay, had little intention of handing back power once they had seen off the Communists. They wanted to run the country themselves.

  It was not long before Mrs Mackie was invited to join the Right Club’s ‘Inner Circle’. In one of the subsequent meetings, she was told about the group’s red leather-bound ledger that contained details of every Right Club member, a list including at least eleven MPs, almost as many peers, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Carnegie – husband of Edward VII’s granddaughter, Princess Maud – Lord Redesdale – father of the Mitford sisters – Harold Mitchell, MP – later a vice chairman of the Conservative Party – as well as one German princess, one Russian prince and at least one MI6 agent, Arthur Loveday, who had joined for ideological rather than operational reasons.2 The calibre of these members was a reminder of just how many well-connected and politically influential figures remained unsure, either privately or publicly, about the need to take on Hitler.

  Yet for now Mrs Mackie did not know who was on that list of Right Club members. It was only as she earned the trust of Captain Ramsay and others that she was introduced to more members of the group. One of these was a woman about whom her spymaster had already heard a great deal. This was Captain Ramsay’s unofficial secretary, an aristocratic Russian-born fashion designer called Anna Wolkoff.

  Earlier that year Wolkoff had been described in one MI5 report as ‘a staunch Nazi propagandist’.3 Since then four separate warnings about her had been received by the Office. One described her ‘displaying pro-Nazi, pro-Communist and anti-British tendencies to a degree which exc
eeds that of wrong-headed stupidity and may be dangerous’.4 All suggested that she might be working for the Nazis. But it was still possible that she was just an angry anti-Communist, which would make sense given what had happened to her family.

  Anna Wolkoff’s father, Admiral Wolkoff, previously an aide-de-camp to Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, had been posted to London as naval attaché in 1917, shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution. He and his wife were never able to return to the land of their birth. Instead, they took on a small café in South Kensington, the Russian Tea Rooms, and read impotently about the destruction of the society that they had known all their lives. The Wolkoffs’ daughter, Anna, became a fashion designer, and at one point in the 1930s was doing well. She opened a shop on Conduit Street, her clothes were being worn by the likes of Princess Marina of Kent and Wallis Simpson and one of her outfits was photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue. But her company’s finances were shambolic, and shortly before the war began her business had collapsed.

  By the time she was introduced to Mrs Mackie, in December 1939, Anna Wolkoff had been forced to move back in with her parents. Wolkoff was still furious about the demise of her company, and had concocted a bizarre Jewish conspiracy theory to explain what had happened. She had also taken to calling herself Anna ‘de’ Wolkoff. This small adjustment is telling. It reflected her growing sense that nobody was taking her seriously. Wolkoff felt entitled to a job just as she felt entitled to have her views heard. This was one of the reasons why she and several friends from the Right Club had begun to put up ‘sticky-back’ posters at night during the blackout, so-called because one side was covered in adhesive gum. These contained sarcastic, usually anti-Semitic messages designed to undermine the war effort. Sometimes Anna Wolkoff and her sticky-back gang went to cinemas to boo at newsreel footage of Churchill or any other pro-war MP. She was angry about the war and sympathetic to Hitler, but beneath it all was an opinionated individual who wanted to feel important again.