M

by Henry Hemming

  Even if M had not been feeding information to Morton, his decision to synchronise the arrests of Kent and Wolkoff, his presentation of the case against them and his pressing of the Home Secretary for the mass internment of senior Fascists contributed decisively to the implementation of 18b(1a).

  Beyond any doubt is the effect of this particular legislation on Fascism in Britain. Most of the senior Fascists who were interned during the war would be tarred for the rest of their lives by this detention. Although they were never tried, and their sentences were custodial rather than punitive, in postwar Britain the idea that they had done something that might have been treacherous or disloyal proved to be toxic.

  When Neil Francis-Hawkins, a senior BUF figure, tried to return to his job at the Medical Supply Association shortly after the war, more than a hundred employees walked out in protest. He was forced to find work elsewhere. Many other Fascists had similar experiences. The Daily Worker and the Communist Party kept an eye on who was being released from detention, frequently calling for strikes if a Fascist was set to resume his or her pre-war job. Mosley was unable to successfully relaunch his political career after the war. Fascism was never again a legitimate voice in British politics. The wartime detention of so many senior figures after the introduction of 18b(1a) ensured the death of organised Fascism in Britain.

  The origin of this legislation is easy to pin down: it was the moment in 1937 when MI5, using intelligence from M’s agents, pushed for an amendment to the War Book. This new clause proposed the internment of any British citizen thought to pose a threat to public safety or national security. The implementation of 18b(1a) three years later was realistic partly because of this earlier clause, also because the government already had details of who belonged to these extremist groups. Much of that intelligence had been patiently accumulated by MI5 and, in particular, by M Section. The end of British Fascism had been made possible by the diligent, selfless work of M’s agents, including Eric Roberts, E. G. Mandeville-Roe, Claud Sykes, John Hirst, Kathleen Tesch, Friedl Gaertner, Harold Kurtz, Vivian Hancock-Nunn, Jimmy Dickson, Hélène de Munck and Marjorie Mackie. Without their intelligence, gathered during thousands of hours of painstaking and often boring undercover work, it would have been extremely hard, perhaps impossible, to execute the order in May 1940 to detain all senior British Fascists.

  Much of the credit should go to M. By running these agents, by presenting the Wolkoff-Kent case in the way that he did and, presumably, by lobbying Morton, he had played a key role in the introduction of the legislation that killed off British Fascism. The man who had helped to nurture this movement so soon after its birth in the 1920s had been instrumental in its demise. M had chosen his country over his friends, patriotism over personal loyalty and, by doing so, he had overcome his past.

  In August 1940, M told a senior Fascist during a long interrogation that he had spent fifteen years getting to know the Communist and Fascist movements in Britain. ‘I’d like to impress on you one thing,’ said M.8 ‘I have no very particular biases one way or another.’ This was perhaps the first time in his life that Maxwell Knight had been able to say such a thing and to mean it, and for it to be true.

  42

  THE TRIAL

  The trials of Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff began in an almost empty court room at the Old Bailey just days before the US presidential election of 1940. Even the police were barred. Members of the press were allowed in only for the sentencing, which took place more than five months after the defendants had been arrested and two days after President Roosevelt had secured his third term in office.

  Breckinridge Long, then the US Assistant Secretary of State, described the trial as ‘almost a major catastrophe’ for the president, and would refuse permission for one of Roosevelt’s telegrams to Churchill to be read out in court.1 Long worried that this message ‘might implicate the chief’.2 It is not hard to see why. The Churchill–Roosevelt correspondence to which Tyler Kent had had access showed the president acting without congressional approval and apparently engaging in an undeclared war against Germany. The timing of this trial, and the decision to hold it in camera, was partly procedural but mainly political. Roosevelt was not the only one who would come out of this badly. Even today there are papers relating to the consecutive trials of Kent and Wolkoff that have either been lost or have not been released because of their sensitive nature.

  We do know, however, that Tyler Kent arrived at the Old Bailey looking ‘dapper’,3 as a reporter from the Daily Sketch put it, a ‘typical American former University man’, also that the trial was interrupted by air raid sirens. By this point in the war, the Blitz was under way. The Crown prosecution, led by Solicitor General Sir William Jowitt and assisted by George McClure, who had handled the prosecution of the Soviet agent Percy Glading two years earlier in the same court, depended on detailed testimony from both Hélène de Munck and Marjorie Mackie. Although these trials were held behind closed doors, this would mark the beginning of the end for both MI5 agents. For one of them, at least, it was a fitting send-off.

  Marjorie Mackie had often struggled in life to be taken seriously and believed. Now she had been asked to testify before the highest court in the land as a key witness in what was arguably Britain’s major wartime spy scandal. It was the ultimate test of her credibility, and one that she passed.

  M sounded as proud as a parent when he recorded that the police officers who took statements from Mackie and de Munck ‘complimented each of the two women on their detached attitude, and their extremely accurate memories’,4 and that the Crown prosecution ‘congratulated all the agents concerned – not only on their work as agents, but on the manner in which they gave their evidence in Court – little of which was even questioned, let alone discredited’.5

  This was not for want of trying. Wolkoff instructed her defence to argue that Hélène de Munck was a ‘drug fiend’. Joan Miller also suggested that the Belgian nanny had a problem with drugs. It is impossible to know whether this was true, but these allegations in court did not undermine her testimony. Evidence was also provided by the US Embassy’s Second Secretary Franklin Gowen as well as Guy Liddell, M and other MI5 officers. Wolkoff called as character witnesses Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, Captain Ramsay and Sir Oswald Mosley, who arrived from Brixton prison looking dishevelled and angry. Their evidence had little or no effect on the jury.

  By passing on Roosevelt’s message to an Italian diplomat, Anna Wolkoff had committed an act of espionage. Yet this was not brought up in court. Instead, her decision to add several lines to a message intended for William Joyce was used to frame her as a ‘foreign agent’, loosely defined as ‘any person who is or has been or is reasonably suspected of being or having been employed by a foreign power either directly or indirectly for the purpose of committing any act either within or without the United Kingdom prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State’. There was no suggestion that Wolkoff was actually in the pay of a foreign power, but in the eyes of the law this one act was enough for her to be classed as a spy.

  This changed the case against Kent. Although he had not been shown to be in direct contact with either Berlin or Rome, or indeed Moscow, he had passed on information to a ‘foreign agent’, that is, Wolkoff. Despite detailed attempts by Kent’s lawyer, Maurice Healy, KC, to argue that his client’s offences had taken place within the precincts of the US Embassy and were therefore extraterritorial and beyond the jurisdiction of that court, or that his diplomatic immunity applied when he was arrested and his flat was searched, the jury took less than half an hour to find Kent guilty on five counts under the Official Secrets Act and one count of larceny. A separate jury found Wolkoff guilty on two counts under the Official Secrets Act and one under the Defence (General) Regulations. The press was then called in to watch Mr Justice Tucker sentence Kent to seven years of penal servitude. Wolkoff received ten.

  That is a wrinkle-free account of the two trials, and it is striking that neither jury took very long to reac
h their verdicts. They might have taken longer, and possibly reached different conclusions, had the full facts of the case been put before them.

  When the hearings began, two people intimately connected to these trials were hundreds of miles away from London. One was the US Ambassador, Joe Kennedy, who left the country only hours before the trial began. Another was J. McGuirk Hughes, who had presented Wolkoff with the encoded letter to Joyce.

  The reason for Kennedy’s hasty departure may have concerned the question of Kent’s diplomatic immunity. There are different accounts of when this was formally waived by the State Department. Most likely this did not happen until shortly after the raid on Kent’s flat, which would make his arrest and the subsequent search of his property unlawful.

  It was vital to the prosecution that Kennedy could not be called, and the same was true of Hughes. The last man to be summoned by Wolkoff’s defence was the unfortunate process server who had been given the job of serving Hughes with a subpoena. For many years Hughes’s actual whereabouts during that trial were a mystery, until the historian Bryan Clough tracked down his granddaughter. She explained that her grandfather had been told that his life was in danger and he must fly to Scotland. This had happened just before the start of the trial. Hughes was one of the only people named in court who could have explained the origins of the coded letter that was sent to Joyce. The other was M.

  So where did this letter come from – and why should it matter?

  ‘The lawyer told me that Hughes sent this message as a plan to test Miss Wolkoff,’ explained one of Wolkoff’s character witnesses.6 In her account, the letter had originated with Hughes.

  M gave a different explanation. He revealed in an internal MI5 note that this coded letter had been written by Joyce’s close friend and fellow extremist Angus MacNab.

  So why did M fail to mention MacNab in court or have him charged with espionage? This same question was asked by the Home Office Advisory Committee several years later.

  ‘The real reason why MacNab was not prosecuted,’ came the reply from MI5, ‘was that an agent had to be protected.’7

  That is all we have. Either MacNab was an MI5 agent, or the agent referred to here was J. McGuirk Hughes. In any event, the idea for this letter does not appear to have originated with MacNab. More likely, M was involved from the start. There is no question that Wolkoff was guilty of espionage, but it is also clear that M had carefully arranged a situation in which she was given the opportunity to carry out this act and that she was encouraged to do so.

  ‘The agent provocateur is a most loathsome figure,’ said one Colonel Labouchere, head of a government intelligence agency during the First World War, ‘whose employment can never be justified under any circumstances whatever.’8 Despite this, Labouchere employed several. Almost nobody in MI5, Special Branch or any other government agency relished the use of agents provocateurs, yet they were employed repeatedly against British civilians during both world wars.

  In the years immediately after the Wolkoff-Kent trial, there were many other occasions in which an MI5 officer decided that, on the basis of reliable evidence, an individual was likely to commit a treacherous or disloyal act. Rather than wait for that person to commit the crime, a government agent would be dispatched to provide the suspect with the opportunity to incriminate themselves.

  Perhaps the finest wartime agent provocateur employed by MI5 was Eric Roberts, who was first taken on by M as a seventeen-year-old. Roberts left M Section early in the war to join a separate MI5 unit and would spend the next few years posing as an undercover Gestapo officer on the lookout for new recruits. At least one MI5 officer had scruples about Roberts’s work, calling it a ‘serious form of provocation’.

  ‘In a very mild sense it is,’ replied Guy Liddell, ‘but in the absence of any other methods I do think it is desirable to ascertain something about evilly-intentioned persons.’9

  This sentiment was shared exactly by M. In his desire to neutralise British Fascism he had taken shortcuts. Asking Hughes to present Wolkoff with a letter to Joyce was a provocation. Making sure that during the trial Hughes was many miles away in Scotland, if this is what he did, allowed him to obscure the nature of the trap that he had laid. By sending Hélène de Munck to Belgium, M had been operating in MI6 territory, as they would soon find out – which led to another inter-agency row. By slipping into Kent’s flat before the raid, as he appears to have done, M had also committed an act of trespass, and it is possible that he had Kent unlawfully arrested. Yet perhaps the most serious departure from his role as an MI5 officer was his decision to lobby Churchill’s trusted adviser Desmond Morton, as he appears to have done in May 1940. ‘The duties of a Security Service end with the supply of accurate information,’ wrote Kell.10 ‘It should have no executive function.’ By pushing for the detention of so many senior British Fascists, M had not broken any laws, but he had ignored one of MI5’s guiding principles.

  He would argue that the end justified his means, and the wartime threat of Nazi invasion changed everything. His underlying desire to stop the flow of intelligence from the US Embassy to Berlin is understandable and legitimate, but was it reasonable to argue in May 1940, as he did, that there could be a Fifth Column in Britain?

  By that point in the war, a smattering of intelligence suggested that the German advance in not only Poland but Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France might have been assisted by German nationals and those sympathetic to the Nazi regime. Soon after the invasion of Holland, the Nazi Party publicly thanked the leader of the Dutch Fascist party for his assistance. On balance, it probably was reasonable to conclude in May 1940 that the German advance in some of these territories could have been accelerated by so-called Fifth Columnists. M’s agents had encountered people in Britain who wanted Germany to win the war, as well as those gathering arms or making plans to seize power in the event of an emergency. M did not have evidence of a Fifth Column of saboteurs and agents in the pay of the Nazis – because this did not exist – but he was unable to rule it out. Indeed, given the reports he had received, it would have been irresponsible if he had done.

  While it was reasonable to think, in May 1940, that there might have been a Fifth Column in Britain, it does not follow that the government was right to order the mass internment of enemy aliens and homegrown Fascists. Yet given what was known by MI5 at the time, and the threat of German invasion, the temporary internment of political extremists probably was justified. Locking up so many enemy aliens was not. The difficulty was that these two very different groups – the enemy aliens and the homegrown Fascists – were frequently lumped together during discussions of a potential Fifth Column.

  The government’s understanding of homegrown Fascism was informed by a detailed intelligence picture that had been built up over many years by MI5, Special Branch and various police constabularies. The decision to intern so many enemy aliens, however, was based on not much more than a handful of reports from mainland Europe, and was influenced by the historic fear of Germans living in Britain. Indeed, throughout history whenever an entire ethnic group is cordoned off like this it inevitably stems from a failure of intelligence. MI5 pushed for the internment of homegrown Fascists because they knew so much about them; it called for the internment of Germans and Italians for the opposite reason: they knew so little.

  Accurate, verifiable information is the seawall against historical prejudice. In the case of enemy aliens in Britain during the summer of 1940, that wall was breached, leading to the wholesale internment of thousands of innocent people, including many German Jewish refugees who were eager to help the British war effort. The most tragic unintended consequence of this mass internment of enemy aliens concerned the men and women on board the transport vessel Arandora Star, then bound for Canada. On 2 July, 1940, this ship was torpedoed, resulting in the deaths of many British seamen and military guards, a small number of German prisoners of war and more than seven hundred German and Italian civilians who had been living in Br
itain at the outbreak of war.

  As the panic of these months subsided and the threat of Hitler’s invasion fell away, thousands of these enemy aliens were released. After the first year of detention, more than 12,000 had been set free.

  The rate of release for the right-wing extremists held under 18b was slower. All had the right of appeal before the Home Office Advisory Committee. Although MI5 was able to supply evidence to this committee from anonymous agents, which could not be verified, the process was largely fair. Detailed records were kept of each hearing and by the end of 1944 just sixty-five extremists were still interned under 18b. For all its deficiencies, and there were many, the mass detention of these homegrown Fascists, which had been triggered by the Kent-Wolkoff affair, helped to remove the possibility of a Fifth Column in Britain. It also reinforced the resolve to fight. Above all it killed off British Fascism.

  43

  KNIGHT’S BLACK AGENTS

  Very little in M’s experience of the rest of the war would come close to that first year of the conflict, either in its intensity or its historical impact. After Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Communist Party put its weight behind the war effort. British Fascism by then had been all but extinguished. German espionage was contained. Indeed, by 1941, thanks to the Double Cross deception, in which captured German agents were used to relay false information back to Berlin, MI5 ‘actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country [Britain]’.1 Just one German spy evaded detection. After less than five months in the country he ran out of money and committed suicide.