M

by Henry Hemming

  In the years after his retirement from MI5, if he was not performing on television or writing another book, Max was usually to be found outside watching cricket or roaming the fields and woods around his home, a landscape which reminded him of where he had grown up. It was on these expeditions that he was at his happiest. ‘Those of us who had the privilege of going on field trips with him,’ wrote one of his companions on some of these outings, Leo Harrison Matthews, Director of the London Zoo, ‘are left with memories of many happy days full of interest, good talk, and deep enjoyment.’25 He described him as ‘the perfect friend, loyal, kind and gentle, full of fun and good companionship’.

  Max cut a distinctive figure on these outings, not least because of the amount of gear he took with him. ‘I must issue a word of warning about the very real danger of overloading yourself with bits and pieces that you probably won’t use very much.26 I say this with real feeling,’ he confessed, ‘for I myself am a great sinner in this respect. In fact, my friends tease me unmercifully on this point and tell me that I look like the White Knight in Alice Through the Looking-Glass.’

  During the 1960s, the ‘White Knight’ was a regular sight out in the environs of Camberley, in his old fishing coat with its capacious pockets, searching for wildlife. In some ways this is a familiar image to us, for this was how he had spent so much of his time as a boy. In old age, Maxwell Knight had returned to his childhood. His love of wildlife and the English landscape was the great constant throughout his life, from the time he was given his naturalist badge as a twelve-year-old Boy Scout through to his arrival as a popular broadcaster in his mid-fifties. Coming to the end of his life, Max was revisiting his youth and that golden age before the outbreak of the First World War, the years before the deaths of his father and brother or the advent of Communism and Fascism. It was during those days that Max had learned the most important lesson of his life: that if you watch an animal carefully, and if you study its behaviour, you might learn enough of its character to be able to tame it, and that if you can do that, you may be able to look after it. This was what he went on to do, in one way or another, for the rest of his life.

  EPILOGUE

  Maxwell Knight died of a heart attack on 24 January, 1968, at the age of sixty-seven, only seven years after retiring from MI5. His memorial service was held at St James’s Church, in Piccadilly, west London, and brought together Max’s many friends from the world of natural history as well as ‘lots of men in brown felt hats who didn’t really identify themselves,’ his nephew recalled.1 In death, it seemed, the two parts of his life had come together. Yet the only references in the memorial address to his MI5 career were heavily veiled and meant little to those beyond the secret world.

  A letter soon appeared in Countryside magazine from a list of British natural history luminaries, including James Fisher, Peter Scott, Johnny Morris and David Attenborough, calling for contributions to the Maxwell Knight Memorial Fund. This led to the creation of the Maxwell Knight Young Naturalists’ Library, a collection of books housed initially at the Linnean Society and later the Natural History Museum, where it remains to this day. Royalties from the sales of his books continue to go to this library.

  The actual details of his MI5 work, and the extent of his agent-running operation, would remain obscure for many years. With so little accurate information about his espionage career, the story of this part of his life came to be dominated by rumours, snippets of information and a fantastical memoir written by Joan Miller, one of Max’s former secretaries. Miller argued that Max was secretly gay, and in the years that followed the publication of her book he was routinely described as both homosexual and homophobic, as well as neurotic, manipulative, anti-Semitic and obsessed by the Occult.

  Only recently has it become possible to put together a fuller and more accurate account of Max’s life and MI5 career. The Security Service Act of 1989 placed MI5 on a statutory footing, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 attitudes within Thames House towards the service’s history underwent a dramatic change. The following year came the ‘Waldegrave Initiative’, which led to the periodic declassification and release of material from the MI5 archive to the National Archives, a major turning point in the field of British intelligence history.

  Ask MI5 today about Maxwell Knight and you will learn that he ‘had a hugely significant impact in the success of our operations’, even if he ‘was clearly an unusual and talented character’.2 One retired senior MI5 officer has been more specific about Max’s legacy, highlighting the way ‘he demonstrated the importance in security intelligence work of agent-running’.3

  Another of Max’s key contributions was that he changed the perception within MI5 of female agents. Olga Gray, Mona Maund, Hélène de Munck, Marjorie Mackie, Kathleen Tesch and Friedl Gaertner were just some of the women he turned into successful government spies. Max described ‘a woman’s intuition’ as ‘sometimes amazingly helpful and amazingly correct’ and that, ‘given the right guiding hand, this ability can at times save an Intelligence Officer an enormous amount of trouble’.4 Deep down he felt that women were more discreet than men and often made for better agents. There may have been MI5 officers before him who employed female agents, but none used so many for so long and to such good effect.

  A full obituary of Max, including his intelligence work, might have mentioned all this. Also, it would have touched on his anticipation of Soviet moles in Whitehall and how he had correctly suspected Anthony Blunt of working for Moscow. His fundamental conviction that the main threat to British security came from Russia was accurate, indeed it seems prescient in today’s political climate.

  Max also played the key role in the great MI5 success story of the 1930s, the breakup of the Woolwich Arsenal spy ring, and the wartime infiltration of the Right Club. This led to the prosecution of Anna Wolkoff and Tyler Kent and prevented the public disclosure of highly sensitive material from the Churchill–Roosevelt correspondence. Yet beyond the headlines, and what made him such a respected figure within British intelligence, a spymaster’s spymaster, was his unusual ability to recruit and run a large stable of agents and to keep them going for many years. Throughout the latter stages of his career, he was called upon to give lectures about his experiences or to get them down on paper, and in this way his methodology and outlook were passed on within MI5 and beyond.

  Yet Max’s greatest achievement was his contribution to the demise of British Fascism, made all the more poignant by the part he had played in the rise of this movement during the 1920s. Max ran agents deep inside the British Union of Fascists, he compiled reports on British Fascism, and pushed to have its leaders detained during the Second World War. Indeed, it is hard to think of anyone who did more to bring about the death of organised Fascism in Britain.

  After seven years learning his craft, first at the Makgill Organisation and later with MI6, Max spent no fewer than thirty years as an MI5 spymaster. From 1931 until his retirement in 1961, he practised and ultimately perfected the art of identifying, recruiting and running undercover agents. Recently, he has been described as one of the twentieth century’s ‘most intuitive intelligence officers’ and ‘one of the great spymasters in British intelligence history’.5 Perhaps we can be more precise: it is unlikely that any other MI5 officer, either before his time or since, has run so many agents during his or her career, or displayed such a sensitive understanding of their craft. For this reason, it is fair to think of Maxwell Knight as the greatest spymaster in MI5’s history.

  What of his agents? Hélène de Munck became a naturalised British citizen, as Max had promised when he first took her on, and later ran a guesthouse with her sister in Devon. Mrs Mackie carried on her MI5 work for some years before taking the position of manciple at the Charterhouse almshouse in London, where she became famous for throwing lively soirées that ended with a séance. Little is known about the postwar lives of Kathleen Tesch, who returned to her life in a Home Counties village, or indeed Mona Maund, only that
her brother became Bishop of Lesotho and she left all her money to a spiritualist charity. E. G. Mandeville-Roe joined the army, where he remained until retirement. Claud Sykes was briefly part of MI6 before returning to his first love – writing. Graham Pollard became a legendary bibliographer and towards the end of his life was known for his eccentric outfits and his love of pipes and long walks in the country, much like his former spymaster. Tom Driberg wound up as a life peer, Chairman of the Labour Party and an enthusiastic campaigner in the House of Lords for the legalisation of cannabis. Friedl Gaertner, the beautiful divorcée, married the Second Secretary at the US Embassy in London and became a diplomat’s wife. Yet like many of Max’s agents, she was never able to leave behind her MI5 work entirely. In the years after leaving Britain, she would be interviewed occasionally by MI5 molehunters as they tried to piece together the extent of Soviet penetration during her time in the service. As her son later recalled, she found these visits deeply unsettling.

  Having been an agent for most of the 1930s, Vivian Hancock-Nunn became an MI5 officer during the war. As such, he was probably one of the first to be told, in 1944, that his brother-in-law, Gerald Hewitt, had been arrested for making Nazi broadcasts from France. It may well have been Hancock-Nunn who arranged for his fellow MI5 officer John Maude, KC, to defend Hewitt in court. Hewitt avoided execution and was sentenced to twelve years in jail. Hancock-Nunn left MI5 and spent the rest of his life trying to reclaim and then restore his family’s estate in Sussex. Increasingly, he seemed to be a man out of step, depressed and unhappy in the world. ‘I see no object in life whatever,’ declares the hero in one of Hancock-Nunn’s novels.6 ‘If I had a child I would be compelled to say to it – “is your journey necessary?” It would certainly be a most unenjoyable journey.’

  Harold Kurtz did valuable work for MI5 during the war before going on to be a translator at the Nuremberg trials, where he was given the unenviable task of taking down the final words of Nazi war criminals. Max helped to secure his British naturalisation, and Kurtz would spend the rest of his life in Oxford, mainly writing historical biographies. He was often seen playing draughts with college porters, ‘a familiar, vast and unforgettable figure’, but one who was also described as ‘a lonely man who thrived in company’ and who had been driven to drink by his wartime experiences.7

  Jimmy Dickson was another of Max’s former charges who turned to drink after leaving MI5. Although he was kept on after the war, Dickson was frozen out of the Office in the early 1950s and took early retirement. He tried to get back to his writing, but the spark had gone. As his son recalled, he became reclusive after the death of his wife and depended increasingly on cigarettes and alcohol.

  Dickson’s closest ally in the Office had been Eric Roberts, another of Max’s comrades from the British Fascists to make the transition from MI5 agent to MI5 officer. Having always wanted to get behind the curtain and become part of the cosmopolitan urban elite, he began to miss his days as an agent almost as soon as he got his feet under the table at MI5. ‘I looked on myself as a field operator who had the ability to get the news,’ he later wrote.8 Roberts left MI5 in the mid-1950s to emigrate with his wife and children, including his son, Maxwell, named after his former spymaster, to Canada, where he chose to live as far away from the Office as possible on a small island on the west coast.

  Canada had a particular hold on Max and those who worked for him. His two most talented operatives moved there – Eric and Olga – while Vivian Hancock-Nunn finished one of his novels with the hero emigrating to Canada. Max’s protégé in MI5, John Bingham, also completed an unpublished book in which the protagonist escapes to Canada to be at one with nature. For those in M Section, it seems that Canada was an Edenic emblem of empire, a larger, younger and less threatening version of the country in which they had grown up, a promised land they could escape to once they had finished with their life in the shadows.

  There were times when Olga Gray felt otherwise. After the war, she moved with her young family to Lindsay, outside Ontario, a small town with small-town values. Rather than let her considerable talents go to waste, she became a reporter for the local newspaper, but had to write under a pseudonym because the assumption in Lindsay at that time was that if a woman had a job it meant that her husband was unable to provide for her. After dinner the former MI5 agent was known to leave the women’s conversation to join the men, who were usually talking about hunting or fishing, and tell them to start talking about something that mattered, like politics.

  Olga’s daughter remembers how her mother would often pick her up from school and take a detour on the way home to a dirt track on the outskirts of town. It ran parallel to a railroad. They would wait in the car with the engine running until a freight train came into view. Olga would honk at the driver. He would blow his whistle. Olga would rev the engine until the train came alongside, then they began to race.

  Her daughter still recalls the look on her mother’s face as she slammed down the accelerator, screamed with joy and began to race against the train. That was when she came alive, the adrenaline coursing through her as it had done during her days working for M. Then the road ran out, the train hived off and Olga returned to her new life as a housewife in a small town in Canada.

  Olga was tracked down in the 1980s by Anthony Masters, who wrote up their interview as a feature in the Mail on Sunday. He was so pleased with the double-page spread that he sent a copy to Olga as a way of saying thank you. Yet after seeing the piece, she had a nervous breakdown and would spend the next month in a psychiatric ward. Olga convinced herself that the children of the men she had helped to put away would find her or one of her children. The panic attacks she had experienced intermittently over the last few decades came back.

  Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is usually associated with soldiers who have experienced warfare, or victims of traumatic accidents or disasters. Although it is often linked to a single event, it can also follow a period of acute and sustained tension, as it appears to have done for some of M’s agents.

  ‘Six years of work under conditions of constant anxiety and fear had made me suspicious of my own shadow and even of myself,’ wrote Eric Roberts, after he was visited unexpectedly by an MI5 officer towards the end of his life.9 Years after retirement he confided in a friend, ‘I still get nightmares.’10 Going back over his work as an agent, after ‘deliberately suppressing the past’ for so long, ‘hurt like hell,’ he wrote. ‘I repeat, hurt like hell.’

  Two days later ‘fear returned in full force. Yes, fear,’ he went on. ‘I was ill. Very ill.’

  Whereas some of Max’s agents were relatively unaffected by their work, others experienced panic attacks or flashbacks and in other ways they paid a price for their service. By talking to the relatives of these agents and examining their death certificates, it is possible to put together a rough picture of what happened to at least ten of these agents after they retired. Two died of complications related to excessive consumption of alcohol. One became morbidly obese. Many of the others began to suffer from type 2 diabetes. During the 1960s, when most of Max’s agents died, although less than one in fifty Britons had type 2 diabetes, its prevalence among Max’s agents was more than twenty times worse and it was described as a cause of death for four of these ten agents. Without full medical histories it is impossible to make any precise causal link between their work and their subsequent health, but it does seem that the transition from high-pressure intelligence work to a life outside MI5 took a considerable toll on most of Max’s agents.

  We know a lot about the burden that soldiers bear in the years after their active service ends, and we celebrate their bravery and their sacrifice. Rightly so. But it is rare to hear the contribution of government agents described in similar terms. For some of Max’s agents, that was part of the problem. Not only had they grown up in a society that emphasised self-discipline and personal restraint, making it unusual for them to seek professional help, but they understood that for some of their c
ountrymen or -women the work they had done was not something to celebrate.

  ‘In Great Britain, for some peculiar psychological reason, there has always been a stigma attached not only to the calling of secret agents, but also to the actual word,’ wrote Max, in 1945.11 ‘Even officials in Government Departments, on whose shoulders lies the burden of responsibility in connection with National Defence, have been – and in some cases, still are – prone to regard an “agent” as an unscrupulous and dishonest person actuated by unworthy motives.’ And yet, he stressed, ‘an honest and loyal agent, whether he is working for his country in foreign lands, or at home, has often to exhibit some of the highest human qualities. It would be a satisfactory reward to any person engaged in the operation of agents, if he could feel that his efforts had done something, by example, to raise the status of an agent.’

  One of the ways to change how we think about these government agents and to celebrate their work is by knowing their names, the lives they led and therefore the nature of what they gave. This has been one of the aims of this book, to celebrate M and his agents. During his long career at MI5, Maxwell Knight wanted to elevate the standing of his operatives: individuals who lived, like him, in an age when extreme ideology was in the ascendant, yet who decided to worship at a different altar. They were brave men and women who chose to let go of a part of themselves – who gave over their lives, really, anonymously and for very little reward – to a spymaster they trusted, and for a country they believed in.