M

by Henry Hemming

  M knew that Mosley had recently been heard to say in private that ‘our time is approaching’ and ‘reward and victory were in sight’.2 Senior Fascists had been instructed to be near their telephones when the ‘showdown’ began. M had been told as well about an extremist Fascist cell within the Fellowship of the Services, a group for active servicemen, which was centred on Charles Geary, a former member of the British Fascists and one of M’s old comrades from K.3 Another ex-BF man, John Hirst, reported ‘that Geary was trying to recruit from among the members of the Fellowship of the Services extremists who would be prepared under certain circumstances to resort to violence in the event of a political upheaval in this country’.4

  In a purely democratic sense the homegrown Fascist movement was irrelevant, as it had been for several years, yet it was increasingly clear that some members of this radical fringe were either willing to help the enemy or had begun to do so already. Anna Wolkoff and her clique in the Right Club, meanwhile, were trying to carry out espionage. But M did not have enough evidence for a prosecution. If he could show that they all belonged to the same undercover network, however, that would change.

  M was also aware that Wolkoff was spending time with a ‘young man employed in the United States Embassy’.5 Mrs Mackie had told her spymaster that this was not a romantic relationship, and ‘that this man is definitely pro-German’.6 This was curious. M needed to find out the name of Anna Wolkoff’s new American friend and the nature of their non-romantic relationship. Of course, the easiest way to do this was to ask Wolkoff herself.

  On the afternoon of 19 March, 1940, M sat down in a room in the War Office with Vernon Kell and Anna Wolkoff. Her brother, Alexander, had been told by a friend – presumably one with an MI5 connection – that Anna should tone down her anti-war activities. At around the same time, Alexander Wolkoff’s application for British citizenship had been denied. Anna thought that he was being punished for her activities. She had written a furious note to Kell demanding an explanation. His response was to call her in for an interview, where she met both the Director of MI5 and a ‘Captain King’, one of M’s favourite aliases.

  ‘It was a real pleasure to cross swords with someone of Miss Wolkoff’s calibre,’ wrote M afterwards.7 ‘She is an extremely clever woman with a considerable amount of superficial charm. She is also a first-class liar.’

  Wolkoff began by trying to overwhelm Kell and M ‘with thanks for having granted her an interview’, before following up with a customary blast of name dropping.8 She told the two MI5 officers about the drinks party she had attended the night before with Prince Schubatow and advice she had received from Admiral Hall. She then admitted to being a ‘stickyback performer’, meaning she put up anti-war posters at night. But this was not a contrite confession, as far as M could tell, merely ‘a smoke screen’. Her real purpose, he surmised, was ‘to obtain information as to the intention of the authorities’ regarding her and her associates.

  The MI5 men gave away nothing. Wolkoff went on the offensive, trying to pressure them into revealing what they knew about her. ‘I hope I am right in saying she did not get any change out of the interview,’ wrote M, ‘and I trust in due course that I shall receive some reports as to exactly what version she puts round among her friends.’9

  Before that could happen, Wolkoff wrote to M directly.

  ‘Dear Captain King,’ she began, ‘thinking over my interview this afternoon on my way back, I remembered that I said to my brother: “If this sort of nonsense goes on, I shall simply write to … … (you know whom I mean).”10 I mention this for your information as it may be of use to you.’

  This information was of no use to M. The letter was a threat. She wanted him and MI5 to back off. The person she planned to contact if MI5 continued its investigation into her was probably Admiral Hall, a man with powerful connections within British intelligence, but this is not clear. Like many others on the Right, Wolkoff believed that MI5 should be on her side. The fact that she was friendly with the likes of Vernon Kell, Reginald Hall and Mark Pepys, all of whom were either working for or connected to MI5, only emboldened her. Wolkoff believed that she was above investigation by them because she belonged to their social milieu. Later that year a different Fascist appealed against her detention by producing an account of her genealogy, or, as she put it, her ‘pedigree’.11 Nobody from ‘good respectable stock’, she insisted, could pose a threat to national security. ‘There are rogues in every class of society,’ she was told, and her appeal was turned down.

  Barely twenty-four hours after M had received Wolkoff’s menacing note, he read Hélène de Munck’s account of a long conversation with the same woman. ‘She had some idea that I could teach her to see the future,’ began de Munck.12 ‘The early part of the interview was devoted by Anna to staring at a piece of silver in a glass of water with this in view.’ Once they had finished trying to predict the future, Wolkoff told de Munck that there were Right Club agents hidden throughout Whitehall, all of whom were ready ‘to work against the Jews’. She also mentioned a document she wanted to smuggle into the country from Belgium.

  At this point Anna Wolkoff asked the Belgian nanny if she would bring this item into the country during her next trip to Brussels. Just as Olga Gray had played coy when asked to be a Comintern courier, de Munck was admirably vague in her reply. She told Wolkoff that she would think about it.

  This was promising. It took M one step closer to being able to put together a case against Wolkoff and the Right Club. He had also begun to learn more about the American embassy official who was spending time with Wolkoff. Mrs Mackie had reported that this man was now in a position to provide details of the inner workings of MI5, and towards the end of March 1940 she reported that he was called ‘John Kent’.13

  This was not his real name, but it was close enough. M would soon have a sense of what Kent had in his possession that made him of such interest to Anna Wolkoff and the Right Club.

  37

  A LETTER TO AN OLD FRIEND

  Collectors tend to fall into one of two categories. There are completists, who want a full set of whatever it is they are interested in, and hoarders, who like to gather as many examples as they can of a particular type of object. Tyler Kent displayed elements of both ends of the collecting spectrum. The range of his illegal collection mattered to him, but so did the incredible size of it.

  The son of a senior American diplomat, Tyler Kent was something of a dandy. He came from a prominent Southern family and had arrived in London, in October 1939, to start a new job as a cipher clerk at the US Embassy. Yet deep down he felt this position was beneath him. Kent had been educated at Princeton, the Sorbonne, Madrid University and George Washington University; he spoke Russian, French, Spanish and Italian; he had grown up in China, Germany, Ireland, England, Bermuda and Switzerland. Though a citizen of the world, he presented himself as a fastidiously patriotic American. Malcolm Muggeridge later described him as ‘one of those intensely gentlemanly Americans who wear well-cut tailor-made suits, with waistcoat and watch-chain, drink wine instead of high-balls, and easily become furiously indignant.1 They always strike me as being somehow a little mad.’ Kent was not mad, yet by the time he had arrived in London he was on a secret crusade.

  After joining the US State Department in 1934, he had pushed for a lowly job in Moscow – an unusual choice given his impressive qualifications. His boss out there, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, William C. Bullitt, did not take to him. ‘The sooner you shoot him the better,’ Bullitt would later say of Kent.2 ‘I hope you will shoot him, and shoot him soon. I mean it.’

  Kent may not have seen eye to eye with Bullitt, but the main reason for the disillusionment he began to feel in Moscow concerned the confidential messages going into and out of the US Embassy. After several years in the Soviet Union, Kent had become certain that the United States was manoeuvring itself into a diplomatic cul-de-sac that made its involvement in the next European war all but certain. Senior American di
plomats were, he said, ‘actively taking part in the formation of hostile coalitions in Europe, and all sorts of things of that nature, which they, of course, had no mandate to do’.3 He was so angry about this that he began to do something that he himself had no mandate to do: collect classified diplomatic correspondence.

  Soon after the outbreak of war in 1939, Kent was told that he would be transferred to London. Rather than risk smuggling his collection of stolen documents out of the Soviet Union, he had them burned. On his arrival in Britain he began to build up a fresh collection of material pilfered from the Code Room of the US Embassy.

  The communications that Kent was now gathering in London were not only more sensitive than what he was used to seeing in Moscow, but easier to steal. The US Ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, father of the future US President John F. Kennedy, and a man whose sympathies were closer to Berlin than London, liked to have copies of important documents made for his own private collection.

  ‘Part of my function was to make these copies,’ explained Kent.4 ‘It was quite simple to slip in an extra carbon.’ He made each facsimile on embassy notepaper so that nobody could doubt its provenance when, or if, he came to share this collection with the world.

  After just six months in London, Tyler Kent had stolen or copied more than a thousand confidential documents. He kept these items in his flat in neat labelled folders with titles like ‘Germany’, ‘Turkey’ or his favourite: ‘Churchill’. By the start of April 1940, he even had in his collection copies of four of the eleven messages that had passed between Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  This exchange between Churchill and Roosevelt would amount to just fifteen telegrams in total, yet it contained enough to suggest that the American president was colluding with Churchill to help Britain win the war, despite America’s neutrality. These messages show Churchill offering to share secret military technology with the US Navy to help it police American territorial waters, all to Britain’s military advantage. Roosevelt, meanwhile, comes across as having decided long ago to bring America into the war. The political ramifications of these telegrams being made public were seismic.

  M was unaware of Tyler Kent’s stash of documents. But he knew that this man had been seen in the company of a suspected Nazi agent soon after his arrival in Britain. In October 1939, a team of MI5 watchers had been following Ludwig Matthias, a businessman from Stockholm, following a tip-off from the Swedish police. Kent was one of the first men seen to meet Matthias. This alleged German spy then took an envelope from Kent. It was roughly ten inches by six inches and was described as ‘bulky’.5

  Ordinarily, a suspicious meeting like this between a suspected Nazi agent and a US diplomat would be reported immediately to the US Embassy. MI5 had gone out of its way until then to maintain good relations with American officials. But on this occasion they held back. MI5 wanted to see where the Tyler Kent trail might lead.

  The dilemma now facing Kent, in early 1940, was what to do with his enormous collection of stolen material. The publication of the telegrams between Churchill and Roosevelt would strengthen the American isolationist movement immeasurably and ‘do incalculable harm to the Allies’, as M later wrote, but only if this correspondence was conveyed to an individual or organisation that was willing to use it against British interests.6 Kent understood this. He knew that if he played his cards in a certain way he could change the direction of the war.

  One danger was that Kent would share his material with the Germans. Towards the end of February 1940, he had asked for a transfer to Berlin. Perhaps he had been ordered to do this by Ludwig Matthias, the suspected Gestapo agent. Yet his transfer request was turned down.

  Another possibility was that Kent would use these stolen papers to launch a new career in journalism. In March 1939, he had contacted an old friend, Barry Dennis, Editor in Chief of the International News Service, one of the world’s largest telegraphic agencies. Dennis had informally offered him a job as a foreign correspondent. Publishing these papers would be a sensational way to start his journalistic career.

  Kent would later claim that he had only ever planned to be a patriotic whistleblower, and that he worried the American people ‘were not being adequately informed, or if they were informed, they were informed in the sense of being told half-truths instead of the strict truth’.7 He wanted the facts ‘brought to the attention of say, the American Senators’. Some of the statements he made are reminiscent today of American whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg or Edward Snowden. The difference is that these two had always known roughly what they planned to do with their material. By April 1940, Tyler Kent appeared to be dangerously undecided, or was he waiting for instructions from his spymaster?

  One of the few people that Kent had spoken to in London about his collection was Anna Wolkoff. She had been introduced to him by a mutual acquaintance at the Russian Tea Rooms. Kent described Wolkoff as ‘a smart woman, fun to talk to, but plain as hell’.8 Even if he had found her attractive, he had just begun an intense affair with Mrs Irene Danischewsky (the aunt of the actress Dame Helen Mirren). Instead, Kent and Wolkoff clicked on the subject of politics. Both were anti-war and anti-Semitic. They began to meet more frequently. Kent showed her some of the documents in his collection. Wolkoff excitedly passed on details of what she had seen to her friends in the Right Club, including Mrs Mackie, and from here the information went back to MI5.

  M knew that Anna Wolkoff was receiving valuable intelligence from somewhere, but he was not yet aware of Kent’s archive. Nor had he got any further in his attempt to prove that the Right Club was communicating with Berlin. Nothing had come of the test letter. By the start of April 1940, M had two agents at the heart of an extremist group that had access to secret intelligence and might, or might not, be trying to establish a Fifth Column in Britain.

  That was all.

  He needed a break. Anything, really, that would allow him to prove in court that the Right Club had a means of communicating with the enemy.

  Just when he needed it most, a member of the Right Club was asked to commit an act of espionage.

  J. McGuirk Hughes was an ex-Makgill agent who had spent most of the last decade working as the BUF Director of Intelligence. He also had close ties to Special Branch and may have been taken on by M as his agent codenamed ‘M/J’. His precise relationship with M is ambiguous, and no doubt it went through several permutations. Much clearer is that on 9 April, 1940, J. McGuirk Hughes approached Lord Ronald Graham, ‘Ronnie’ to his chums, the younger son of the Duke of Montrose, an officer in the Right Club and a man described by M as ‘pleasant, politically stupid, but quite honest’.9 Hughes began by asking Lord Ronald to send a letter to William Joyce in Berlin.

  If he agreed to do this, the young aristocrat would be guilty of communicating with the enemy and under a strict interpretation of the law he could then be classed as an enemy agent. It is unlikely that he was aware of this. Nor did he have any idea that copies of the letter Hughes was so keen for him to send would soon be, or already were, in the possession of MI5 and Special Branch.

  Lord Ronald agreed to the plan. He told Hughes that he would ask a friend of his at the Spanish embassy, the Duke of Alba, to send the letter to Berlin via the diplomatic pouch. But then he had second thoughts.

  At the time, he was trying to get a commission in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Wisely, he concluded that sending letters to the enemy might not improve his chances of getting it. Instead, Lord Ronald took Hughes to the Russian Tea Rooms, where he introduced him to someone with less to lose: Anna Wolkoff. Hughes asked Wolkoff ‘if she would like to do something against the Jews’.10 He had never met this woman before, yet he seemed to know exactly which of her buttons to press.

  Wolkoff replied at once that she would very much like to do something ‘against the Jews’.

  Hughes produced an envelope addressed to ‘Herr W. B. Joyce, Rundfunkhaus, Berlin’ and asked he
r to send it.11 Without finding it too much of a coincidence that Hughes should have on his person a letter addressed to the one man in Berlin that she had already tried to contact, Wolkoff agreed.

  Very soon after, right on cue, Hélène de Munck came in for dinner. She mentioned to Admiral Wolkoff that she had a friend at the Romanian Legation who would soon be leaving for mainland Europe. The admiral passed this on to his daughter, who came over at once to ask de Munck whether it was true.

  It was, she replied.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’12

  Good question. De Munck replied that she had not thought it important.

  Wolkoff asked whether her Romanian friend might be able to get a letter out to Germany.

  ‘I replied that I thought he might be able to,’ recalled de Munck, ‘as he had sometimes been good enough to take letters for me to an uncle who lives in Romania.’13

  Wolkoff reached into her bag, pulled out the sealed envelope addressed to Joyce, and handed it over to the former nanny. She told de Munck to pass it on to her friend so that he could send it to Berlin. Wolkoff then asked whether she could meet this mysterious Romanian.

  ‘I explained that I could not very well ask him to compromise himself by meeting strangers, and I thought he would be much more likely to take the letter as a personal favour to me.’14

  Wolkoff accepted this.

  That night Hélène de Munck passed the letter to M, who had it and its contents photographed. The next day Wolkoff asked whether she could add a few lines to the message.

  ‘I replied that it might be difficult to contact my Legation friend, but that I would do my best and let her have it as soon as possible.’15

  That night de Munck got the letter back from M and arranged for Wolkoff to come round the following morning.

  Shortly before nine in the morning on 11 April, 1940, Anna Wolkoff arrived at Hélène de Munck’s flat where she opened the envelope. Eyeing its contents with interest, de Munck said that her Romanian friend would probably want to know what was in the letter before agreeing to take it.