BRITAIN’S FIRST SPY CATCHER
early 1914, one of the most important German spies to be uncovered, Frederick Schroeder, was arrested and convicted. Schroeder was friends with the Kaiser’s spymaster Gustav Steinhauer and reported directly to him. His letters out of the country had been intercepted for some time and when Kell decided to act, his wife was found with army drill books and detailed naval maps.
Some operations were more bizarre – and imagination was always key to spotting spies. A woman at Dover carrying a bunch of artificial flowers in summer raised suspicion with one agent who could not understand why she did not have fresh flowers. He found cunningly hidden inside the plastic stems a message destined for an enemy agent.
One foreigner staying at a hotel in Folkestone who had seemed evasive when questioned by MI5 officers was spotted sending chocolates abroad. When they were intercepted, agents found hidden in a chocolate cream a hidden message, neatly folded up.
A sign of the success of the bureau was that at the outbreak of CALL ME K: Sir Vernon Kell, founding father of MI5; inset, biographer wife Lady Constance World War One in August 1914 it took Germany more than two weeks to discover that British troops had already landed in France. Action was also quickly taken to arrest key spies. A coded telegram was issued to police forces across the country, and the hidden enemies were under lock and key within 12 hours.
According to Kell’s figures, 31 suspected foreign agents were apprehended before the outbreak of war and 33 more were arrested between 1914 and 1917. Of those, 11 were executed by firing squad.
In the 1920s, the focus of the bureau changed. Countering Communist subversion following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia became a concern while in the 1930s the growth of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists attracted their attention.
Despite becoming Director General of MI5, Kell remained on active duty, particularly if a case was hard to crack. One suspect in Edinburgh had defeated MI5’s agents and appeared to be innocent but Kell, still harbouring suspicions, travelled to Scotland himself. As he rifled through the man’s belongings, he held a notebook to the window and saw what seemed to be a thicker page than the others.
In fact it was two pages sealed together, with a coded message written in invisible ink between them. One close colleague would later put it: “He could smell a spy like a terrier smells a rat.”
By now Kell – known as K, which he used as his signature on secret documents – was heading up a significantly bolstered organisation. In the late 1930s the bureau had hundreds of agents but the Government’s demands were also huge as Hitler’s warmongering grew.
By 1939 the hordes of refugees coming into Britain were impossible to oversee. MI5 were also swamped with false rumours as spy mania gripped the country. One woman even reported her neighbour for passing on messages to the Germans by hanging out her washing in a Morse code pattern.
Kell remained committed to fighting the new espionage threat and coming up with new ways of tackling it. But by 1940 senior ministers felt new blood was needed. MI5 had been given extra resources but had not deployed
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them well enough. Kell was held responsible for a lack of intelligence which might have prevented the sinking of the British battleship HMS Royal Oak by a U-boat while anchored at Scapa Flow in October 1939.
Churchill, now Prime Minister, acted decisively and demanded his resignation after 31 years. It was a sad and probably undeserved end to a distinguished MI5 career.
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