M

by Henry Hemming

  ‘Well, look at it,’ replied Wolkoff, holding it out to her.

  De Munck reached forward and took ‘a single sheet of quarto paper covered with a code consisting of letters and figures.16 It was typewritten and there was a diagram at the bottom of the back page. The only portion of the document which was en clair was a short passage typed in German.’

  She complained that it meant nothing to her.

  ‘Neither does it mean anything to me,’ said Wolkoff. ‘But I know what the letter is about.’

  Wolkoff explained that it was an account of Jewish activities in Britain for Lord Haw-Haw to use in future broadcasts, adding, with a characteristic flourish, that in Berlin this would be ‘like a bombshell’.

  Rather than add a message to the original document, Wolkoff took a fresh sheet of paper and sat down at de Munck’s typewriter – the same machine that the MI5 agent had probably used to produce reports about her – and typed out a few inconsequential lines in German asking for a repeat of a particular broadcast about Freemasons, one of her pet obsessions. She signed off ‘P. J …!’ This was short for ‘Perish Judah’, so that Joyce would know this message had come from the Right Club. She also drew the group emblem of an eagle and snake.

  ‘She resealed the letter in an envelope which she had brought with her,’ wrote de Munck, ‘handed it back to me, and left the flat at about 9.15 a.m.’17 Later that day the MI5 agent handed the package to M, who had it photographed by Special Branch and arranged for the text to be passed on to the Government Code and Cypher School for decoding. ‘Certain arrangements were then made’ for the letter to be sent to Joyce in Berlin.18

  M needed it to reach the German capital so that he could show in court that Wolkoff had successfully communicated with the enemy. Fortunately for him, the coded letter contained a line asking Joyce to acknowledge that he had received the note by referring in a future broadcast to ‘Carlyle’. If Lord Haw-Haw used this word in the coming weeks, then it would be possible to frame a prosecution against Wolkoff. This would allow M to charge at least one Nazi sympathiser: but that might be all.

  38

  CARLYLE

  On 9 April, 1940, the same day that Anna Wolkoff was handed a letter addressed to William Joyce, German forces launched a surprise attack on Denmark and Norway.

  The Phoney War was over. In London more people began to be seen carrying around their gas masks. The streets in the capital were eerily empty that night as everyone gathered round their radios. All over the country the mood had changed. Bullish indifference started to be replaced by caution and, for some, a creeping, contagious anxiety. MI5 began to be bombarded with reports from wary members of the public. Some had seen pigeons flying in a suspicious manner that they took to be German courier pigeons; others, marks on telegraph posts that could be coded signals for German invaders.

  As spy fever rose, MI5 saw reports from Norway to suggest that Germans living in Norway, as well as pro-Nazi Norwegians and Danes, may have committed acts of sabotage, subversion, propaganda and espionage to assist the invading Nazis. How else to explain the crushing nature of the German advance? If there had been a Fifth Column in those countries, as some newspaper reports suggested, it would be naïve to think that Berlin had not tried to set up a similar network in Britain.

  As the Germans continued to punch north through Norway, Anna Wolkoff saw more of Tyler Kent. He showed her further documents from his collection, including an item from the Churchill–Roosevelt correspondence.

  ‘May I have this?’ asked Wolkoff, holding up the message.1

  Kent asked if she was going to show it to Captain Ramsay, the Conservative MP and leader of the Right Club.

  Wolkoff replied that she was. Kent offered no objection.

  Tyler Kent agreed to let Captain Ramsay see his documents on the understanding that the politician would use them to raise a question in Parliament about Churchill’s correspondence with Roosevelt. At last, the American cipher clerk had decided to play his hand. In doing so, he hoped to kill off any chance there was of America coming into the war unprovoked. But it may not have been Kent who had made this decision.

  Years later it emerged that Kent was not working for German intelligence, but nor was he a patriotic whistleblower. He appears to have been working for Moscow Centre. The NKVD agent Guy Burgess later attested to this. Other scraps of evidence all point in the same direction. The alleged Gestapo agent that Kent had been seen to meet, Ludwig Matthias, was Jewish and anti-Nazi and was far more likely to have been working for Moscow than Berlin. It is also striking that the material gathered by Kent from the US Embassy had very little value to the Germans, but was of considerable interest to the Soviets.

  Regardless of what his motivation may have been, Tyler Kent had just it the fuse on a series of events which could seriously damage the prospects of America joining the war. M still had no evidence of espionage. He gave instructions for Hélène de Munck to tell Wolkoff that she was going to Belgium and to ask the fashion designer whether she still needed a document smuggled in from Belgium. She did not. But she had another job for de Munck in Brussels. Wolkoff asked her to meet ‘our principal agent in Belgium’ and to use her spiritual powers to work out whether this man could be trusted.2

  Belgium was MI6 territory. For M to send one of his agents there was a risk, but one that by this stage of the war he was willing to take. On 16 April, 1940, the former nanny flew to Brussels where, as Wolkoff had instructed, she met Nieuwenhuys, the Second Secretary of the Belgian Embassy, who had agreed earlier to be part of the chain of people relaying uncensored messages from London to Berlin. Four days later Hélène de Munck was back in London, where she assured Wolkoff that in her spiritual opinion Nieuwenhuys could be trusted.

  Only two days after de Munck’s return from Belgium, Mrs Mackie reported that someone living at No. 47 Gloucester Place was supplying Wolkoff with ‘confidential information about members of the British Intelligence Service’, including Guy Liddell.3 One of the residents at this address was the American embassy official Tyler Kent.

  This was M’s clearest indication yet that Kent was sharing with Wolkoff, and presumably others, ‘information which [he] had no right to be conveying to any person outside the United States Government Service’.4

  Then M had another breakthrough. During one of his broadcasts, Joyce decided to turn against the French. ‘Where is their Shakespeare?’ he fumed. ‘Who is their Carlyle?’

  Carlyle.

  This was the agreed code word to show that Joyce had received the letter first presented to Wolkoff by J. McGuirk Hughes. Wolkoff could now be classed as an enemy agent.

  M did not waste any time. He compiled a comprehensive report linking Tyler Kent to Anna Wolkoff, Captain Ramsay and the Right Club. ‘It seems urgently necessary for something to be done about this man,’ he wrote on 4 May, 1940, meaning Kent.5 He then suggested that Liddell, who had good contacts at the US Embassy, should take this report to the Americans.

  But he did not.

  By now the Security Service was, in the words of its former official historian, ‘close to collapse’.6 Following the German invasions of Norway and Denmark, it received from government departments more than 8,000 vetting and security requests each week. Liddell was struggling to stay on top of this, just as he was failing to get anywhere in his attempt to persuade the Home Office to reconsider its stance on the mass internment of enemy aliens and homegrown political extremists. MI5 was no longer alone on this. The Joint Intelligence Committee, a relatively new body dominated by senior intelligence officials from across Whitehall and the armed forces, was ‘strongly of the opinion that something more should be done.’7

  The Home Office would not budge. If there was an MI5 investigation that could be used to strengthen the case for the internment of those who might belong to a Fifth Column, then it was in Liddell’s and MI5’s interests to make sure that it did. This was perhaps why Liddell sat on M’s report about Kent rather than pass it on to the American e
mbassy.

  Just days later, on 10 May, 1940, on a gloriously sunny morning in London, German forces poured into Belgium and Holland. The day began with news of the Blitzkrieg. It ended with the installation in No. 10 Downing Street of Winston Churchill.

  39

  VICTORY AT ALL COSTS

  The morning after Churchill became Prime Minister, the Director of MI5 wrote to the Home Office asking for the immediate internment of the BUF leadership and all members of extremist right-wing groups. This amounted to roughly five hundred people in total. ‘It will be interesting,’ wrote Liddell, ‘to see if the Home Office are prepared to swallow this pill.’1

  It was not. Liddell’s boss, Jasper Harker, was summoned to the Home Office that evening and told as much. As a sop to MI5, the Home Office agreed to the internment of male enemy aliens aged sixteen to sixty-five years living in a county adjacent to the south and east coasts of Britain, and to placing tighter restrictions on non-enemy aliens. Yet even these mild measures elicited a flurry of complaints from the British public. ‘An elephant keeper in Bertram Hills Circus at Southampton is a German,’ noted Liddell, wearily.2 ‘They do not know what to do with the elephants.’

  By this stage, Guy Liddell did not have ‘the slightest doubt’ that the BUF would be willing to help the Germans in the event of an invasion.3 ‘There were after all some quite intelligent people in this office who had given careful study to the matter and that was their considered view,’ he wrote, referring here mainly to M.

  Liddell, M and a growing number of MI5 officers were ‘very concerned’ about the Home Office position.4 Relations between the two departments had become, according to one MI5 historian, ‘severely strained’.5 The following day Jimmy Dickson and Francis Aikin-Sneath, a former schoolteacher who had been taken on by MI5 to help investigate British Fascism, were asked to put together a report showing precisely why the BUF was a hostile association. The plan was for M, Kell and the heads of both the Metropolitan Police and Special Branch to present this document once it was finished to the Home Secretary. Just hours after Dickson and Aikin-Sneath had been put to work, Churchill stood up in Parliament to deliver one of the great speeches of the twentieth century, one that seemed to sum up the mood inside MI5 better than that of the Home Office:

  I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

  That night, in west London, Anna Wolkoff made omelettes with Mrs Mackie and Joan Miller, the society girl working at MI5 who had recently been brought into M’s investigation of the Right Club. If they did discuss Churchill’s speech, Mackie did not mention it in her report. Instead she focused on what Wolkoff told her, once Miller had left, about the dinner she had attended several nights earlier at the glamorous L’Escargot Restaurant in Soho. It was not the food or the setting that had excited her so much as the company.

  Wolkoff explained that there had been four people at that dinner: Tyler Kent, herself, another Right Club member called Enid Riddell and an Italian referred to by Wolkoff as ‘Mr Macaroni’. Apparently, she gave most people nicknames like this. ‘It was a joke,’ explained Kent much later.6 Mrs Mackie tried to find out who Mr Macaroni was, but all she could get out of Wolkoff was that he had a ‘name like a tin of fruit’.7

  Three days later, Wolkoff obtained another secret message from the Churchill–Roosevelt correspondence. This telegram had come into the US Embassy that very morning and was the US President’s reply to Churchill’s request, on 15 May, for some fifty ‘of your older destroyers,’ ‘several hundred of the latest types of aircraft’ and ‘anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition’.8 Churchill had also asked Roosevelt to send a naval squadron to Ireland, for fear of a possible German invasion. In return he had offered the use of the British port of Singapore to help the Americans ‘keep that Japanese dog quiet in the Pacific’.

  Roosevelt replied that ‘it would be possible to hand over 40 or 50 destroyers of the old type, but this is subject to the special approval of Congress, which would be difficult to obtain at present’. This was the genesis of the ‘Destroyers for Bases’ deal, also known as ‘Lend-Lease’, in which the United States would swap fifty ageing American warships for leases on various outlying British bases. Despite heavy opposition from both Congress and the US Navy, Roosevelt would force the deal through. The first destroyers were delivered (full of supplies) in September of that year. But on 16 May, 1940, when Wolkoff first read Roosevelt’s message, its meaning was less clear.

  Later that day, Wolkoff and Mackie stumbled through the blackout to a private residence in Chelsea where they posted an envelope through the door. Inside was a copy of Roosevelt’s message to Churchill, the one that had been received in London earlier that day. This house was the home of ‘Mr Macaroni’, who was in fact Francesco Marigliano, the Duca Del Monte – which explains the line about tinned fruit. Del Monte was an experienced Italian diplomat and close friend of Mussolini who had in the past couriered secret messages between Rome and London. He was connected to Italian intelligence. ‘It is understood,’ wrote Mackie shortly afterwards, ‘that the Italians were very pleased with this information.’9

  One week later, a message arrived in Berlin from the German Ambassador in Rome. It gave an accurate precis of Roosevelt’s message about destroyers. The German Ambassador explained that his information came from an ‘unimpeachable source’.10 By passing this classified document to an Italian diplomat, at a time when Italy was a military ally of Nazi Germany, Anna Wolkoff had committed a flagrant act of espionage.

  The following day, Canning, the head of Special Branch, and M went to see a Home Office Assistant Secretary, Sir Ernest Holderness. They were accompanied by an MI5 lawyer, Toby Pilcher (whose father would have been known to M because he, too, had belonged to the British Fascists in the 1920s). The meeting went well. Holderness asked how many homegrown Fascists MI5 would like to see interned.

  ‘We said that as a maximum about 500, though if absolutely necessary we would be prepared to modify this.’11 Holderness then went to present the MI5 case to the Home Secretary.

  A message came back from the Home Office later that day. They were absolutely opposed to MI5’s plans for mass internment, arguing that there was no evidence of any Fifth Column activity in Britain.

  Churchill’s position was pointedly different. Less than twenty-four hours later, on Saturday, 18 May, the War Cabinet met to discuss the question of British political extremists. ‘Action should also be taken against Communists and Fascists,’ urged Churchill, ‘and very considerable numbers should be put in protective or preventive internment, including their leaders.’12 His views seemed to be perfectly aligned with M’s. The Cabinet agreed with him. But again, the Home Office demurred.

  ‘During wartime,’ wrote M, ‘there will always come a point in an investigation where an agent must be sacrificed in order to achieve satisfactory results; and the Intelligence Officer in charge of the case must face the responsibility of deciding the exact point at which such sacrifice must be made.’13 M decided that this moment had come. Just hours after that Cabinet meeting, M went to meet Herschel Johnson, a senior official at the US Embassy.

  M told him that an American embassy official had been stealing documents and passing them on to an extremist right-wing organisation that was suspected of espionage. He then took Johnson through the association between Wolkoff and Kent, adding that Kent had been seen the year before in the company of Ludwig Matthias, a suspected Gestapo agent.
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  Johnson was ‘profoundly shocked’, wrote M.14 He was also furious that MI5 had waited until now to tell them about Tyler Kent. He demanded to know why they had been kept in the dark for so long. M replied that nothing had been found to confirm that Matthias was actually a spy.

  Perhaps wanting to change the subject, M handed over his written summary of MI5’s case against Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff. Johnson would have been justified in telling the MI5 officer at this point that he could handle the situation from here, before showing him politely to the door. Instead, he agreed to M’s request. The MI5 spymaster wanted to do more than staunch the flow of secrets from the US Embassy. Rather than have the Americans deal with Kent internally, as they might have done, M wanted a synchronised double arrest of Kent and Wolkoff.

  This was partly a practical measure, but mainly it was to increase the impact of these arrests and to draw out the connection between Wolkoff and Kent. If the Americans agreed to waive Kent’s diplomatic immunity, M could arrange for his arrest to take place at the same time as Wolkoff’s on Monday morning.

  M saw Johnson again the next day, Sunday. By then, the US Ambassador, Joe Kennedy, who had been out of town for the weekend, had been briefed. He, too, was livid about being kept out of the loop for so long. But he agreed to M’s request.

  All that remained was for the State Department in Washington, DC, to confirm the removal of Kent’s diplomatic immunity. The problem was that Kent himself was due to work in the Code Room that night, just as the message waiving his immunity would come in. Johnson ‘will act with great care,’ reported M, ‘in order to see that there is no leakage which might get back to Tyler Kent’.15 It was agreed that the arrests of Kent and Wolkoff would go ahead the next day.