SECRET LIFE OF MI5’S MASTER SPOOK
Millions knew him as a popular wildlife TV presenter but according to a new book Maxwell Knight spent decades as a high-ranking spymaster
MAXWELL KNIGHT made for an unlikely spymaster. His qualifications were meagre, his military record unexceptional and his love of attention surely made him a liability.
Nevertheless he was to go on to become one of Britain’s greatest intelligence operatives, playing a leading role in the development of MI5 and inserting his agents into vital posts within the British Communist and Fascist parties. He is even thought to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s character M, the boss of James Bond, and for Jack Brotherhood in John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy.
A new book by the historian Henry Hemming, which draws on recently declassified MI5 files, conversations with former MI5 operatives and members of Maxwell Knight’s family, has revealed for the first time the extraordinary story of his life and career as well as the previously hidden identities of some of his top agents.
Born in 1900 into a Home Counties family Knight joined the navy as a cadet at the age of 14. After the First World War came a spell as a jazz band leader but by the time his career in espionage began he was scratching a living as a teacher.
In 1923 he was approached by Sir George Makgill who ran his own private intelligence agency investigating the activities of British Communists. Knight’s first assignment was to infiltrate the British Fascisti organisation. His mission was not to disrupt it but to look for people who might want to join Makgill’s outfit which shared many of the same aims.
It was there that Knight met William Joyce, who would later become better known as Lord Haw-Haw. The two knew each other well and Joyce even married one of Knight’s ex-girlfriends. During the Second World War, when Nazi sympathisers were being detained, it was Knight who told Joyce about his impending arrest, allowing him to flee to Berlin and record his famous propaganda broadcasts.
FOLLOWING a spell spent managing a pub in Exmoor (a desperate bid to save the first of his three marriages) Knight was offered a job with MI6. Shortly after – it is thought this had something to do with an undisclosed favour for the King – he was given his own new department at MI5. Thus was “M Section” born with Maxwell Knight, who gave himself the codename “M”, at its head.
He ran the section from his flat in Sloane Street, which carried its own problems. Knight was a dedicated naturalist who, since boyhood, had always cared for an eclectic range of pets. At various times these included a baboon, monkeys, a bear called Bessie that he used to take for walks, parrots, exotic fish, ferrets and all manner of other creatures. Later, during his second marriage it became too crowded and he was forced to rent a flat in Dolphin Square, the notorious apartment complex in London’s Pimlico, from which to run his espionage activities.
Knight had an unusual relationship with women. None of his three marriages were ever consummated. The first ended when his wife Gwladys died after taking an overdose of barbiturates. It is unknown whether this was suicide or an accident, and the second was annulled. His third was a success, largely because his wife seemed to demand nothing of him physically. Whether he was a closeted homosexual or simply had no such feelings is unclear.
As Hemming notes, sex did seem to “scramble his brain”. He was, for example, a pioneer of using female agents which others in the spy community thought unseemly. Despite this he never had any time for those who deployed what he called “Mata Hari methods”.
One of his most successful spies was Olga Gray, a young typist from Manchester. She infiltrated the Communist Party of Great Britain and was asked to smuggle documents to India for them. Her sex, far from being the hindrance Knight’s forebears regarded it to be, was immensely useful – the Communists picked her for the task because customs officers were less likely to search a young lady. After that she was given a job as secretary to the head of the party giving her access to all manner of valuable information.
Among Knight’s other agents was Tom Driberg, a Daily Express columnist, member of the Communist Party and later a Labour MP.
As Adolf Hitler began systematically breaking the terms of the Treaty of Versailles MI5’s focus shifted from Communism to Fascism. Knight was able to recruit some of his old comrades from the British Fascisti, especially useful as groups such as Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists grew both more powerful and more extreme.
Amazingly – and completely by accident – one of Knight’s agents came face to face with Hitler just days before the outbreak of war. Kathleen Tesch was another of Knight’s female operatives. She had inveigled her way on to a coach tour to Germany being run by The Link, a British Fascist group. When the coach party stopped to admire Hitler’s getaway in the Bavarian Alps two uniformed men boarded the vehicle and took her off. She was taken into a room where an awkward meeting with Hitler followed. She was presented with a signed copy of Mein Kampf and wrote later that she had felt “uncomfortable” in the Führer’s presence. With no idea that she was a spy, they had invited her in solely on account of her Teutonic surname, which was an honoured one in Germany.
M Section spent the war investigating, infiltrating and disrupting Right-wing groups that officials feared would support a Nazi invasion if it occurred.
The section’s biggest war-time victory was the unmasking of Tyler Kent. Kent, who worked for the US embassy, had been observed meeting known Nazi agents as well as a woman called Anna Wolkoff, a Russian emigré who, MI5 discovered, had been trying to send letters to Berlin. After the American ambassador Joe Kennedy (father of JFK) had agreed to waive Kent’s diplomatic immunity he was arrested. He was found in possession of about 2,000 official documents including correspondence between Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, and President Roosevelt and sentenced to seven years in prison. Wolkoff, whose arrest was witnessed by an 11-year-old Len Deighton, was sentenced to 10 years.
AFTER peace was declared Knight again turned his attention towards the Communist threat, an obsession that was not widely shared with his bosses in MI5 but was vindicated when the Cambridge spy ring was exposed. Among his employees at the time were David Cornwell – better known as John Le Carré – who idolised Knight and used his time in MI5 as inspiration for his writing.
Knight was finally forced to retire from spy work in 1961 on health grounds as he suffered from acute angina. By then though he was already one of the BBC’s most prolific broadcasters. During the 1950s he had appeared in 306 radio broadcasts, had 20 books published, appeared on television 40 times and was even a guest on Desert Island Discs.