By GUY WALTERS

Revealed after decades in the shadows, the motley misfits recruited by the real M whose courage helped to win the war

IT HAD been a long nightshift for the young Americandiplomat and, backat his London flat, at atime when most peoplewereontheirwaytowork,29-year-old Tyler Kentcollapsedgratefullyintobed. Inthecominghours,sleepwouldbein short supply. First came asuccessionof demanding knocksonhisdoor,whichKentdeclinedtoopen – an obstinacy that onlydelayedthe inevitable as it wasknockedoffitshingesbyaheftypoliceinspector.

Fivemen rushed into the room,andfound the startled diplomatinhispyjamabottoms,whileinthebathroom,hisdistressedgirlfriendwasfoundinonlyapyjamatop.

Andsobeganasequenceofeventsthatwould eventually put Kent,acipher clerk at the AmericanEmbassy,in jail. After allowingthecoupletogetdressed,oneofthefive men started firing offquestions.Was there anything intheflat that belonged to theembassy?Did he know one AnnaWolkoff?WassheaSovietspy?

Kentmust have known his denialswouldbe hope less .His inquisitorsswiftlyfound some 1,500 duplicatedsecret documentsstolen fromthe US Embassy ; Kent was arrested and leda way.

Asthey walked down to the waitingpolice car , the tall , broad shoulderedman leading the raid mighthave allowed himself the flickerof as mile . After all , he h adjustbroken up a spy ring thatthreatened to prevent the UnitedStates from joining the war against Germany . Ithad been a good morning’ s work for them an known by a singleletter –M . Put simply , this was MI5’ s greatest spy master ,whose pioneeringskill in recruiting and handlinga motley range of highlyeffective agents–who bravelypenetrated anddestroyedscoresof fascistandcommunistcell sand spyrings – helped tochange the course of history.

It is no surprise , then ,that eventoday ,the name of MaxwellKnightisstill spoken with reverence inthecorridors of Thames House ,headquartersof the home securityservice , MI 5.

Knightwasnotonlyaspymaster.Afterhe left MI5 in the early1960s,heforgedahighlysuccessfulcareeras a television naturalistandbecametheDavidAttenboroughofhisday.

Heeven appeared on DesertIslandDiscs,wherehemayhaverevealedhis penchant for jazz,butnever breathed a word abouthismanyyearsintheshadows.Thereasonforhimremainingthereissimpleenough: MI5 has kept itsrecordsabouttheactivitiesofMandhisagentsfirmlyunderlockandkey–untilnow.

Finally,thefilesarebeingdripfedto the National Archives inKew,and it is now possible for afullpicture to emerge of thisenigmaticman with a beaky noseandearsalittletoolarge.

ThelifeofKnighthasbeencapturedin a major new biographycalledM,byHenryHemming.

Throughanexhaustivepiecingtogetherofpreviouslysecretfiles,Hemminghasnotonlyassembledafull account of Knight’s activitiesbutalsorevealsforthefirsttimetheidentitiesofmanyofKnight’sagents.Itisanexemplarypieceof

A stout mother, the antithesis of a Bond girl

historicalsleuthing,notleastbecauseMI5zealouslyguardstheidentitiesofitsagentslongaftertheyhavedied.

Whatis even more revelatoryisthe nature of Knight’ s spies .For while Ian Fleming’ s fictional M employedagents inthemould of James Bond ,thereal Mused people whowere decidedly unglamorous .

Theywere housewives andsecretaries , bank clerk sandlawyers , historian sandcooks – people more athomein the suburbs thanglobe trotting with suit casesfullof gadgets.

TakethecaseofMarjorieMackie,a short, stout, middle-agedsinglemotherfromEssex,perhapstheantithesisofaBondgirl.

Bytrade,MissMackiewasademonstrationchef,paidbyfoodcompaniestoprepareandpromotetheirproducts in front of shoppers.Onthesurface,theebullientMissMackie seemed the mostunlikelycandidatetoinfiltrateashadowycabal of British Nazisympathiserscalled The RightClub,runbyaristocraticToryMPArchibaldRamsay.

Shortlyafter the outbreak ofwar , M suspected this highly anti Semi ticsecretsociety might be hatchingplans to act as a fifth column in the even to f a Germaninvasion , and was anxious to gather whatintelligence he could . The reasonhe selected Miss Mackie wassimple : she had once worked asthe secretary in a previous movement run by Ram say.

In September 1939, MackieapproachedRamsay’ s wife , andasked –in the formal parlanceofthe 1930 s–ift hey could ‘ renewtheiracquaintance ’. Seeminglyunsuspecting , MrsRamsay metMissMackie over tea , and theMP’ swifethen proceededto vent violently about the Freemasons andthe Jews . Naturally , them other from Essex nodded along as though she was in completeagreement.

Afew weeks later, Miss Mackiewasasked to join The Right Clubandwhatshewouldsoonlearnwassensational.NotonlywasRamsayhatchingtentativeplansforsomesortof coup, but the club hadmanagedto infiltrate its ownagentsintonearlyeverygovernmentdepartment.

Overthe next few weeks, MissMackieinveigledherselfintotheinnercircle of the club, whosemembersevenincludedtheDukeofWellingtonandLordRedesdale,fatherof the famous Mitfordgirls.Crucially, Miss Mackie alsometaWhiteRussianemigreecalledAnnaWolkoff. Anna was in touchwithan American cipher clerkcalledTylerKent,whohadadmittedto her that he was copyinghighlysensitive documents thathadcomeacrosshisdesk.

Thiswasanastonishinglyimportantpieceofintelligence,anditwouldeventuallyleadtothearrestandimprisonment of both KentandWolkoff.

Amongthe cables that Kenthadcopied were correspondencebetweenChurchilland Rooseveltshowingthat the US President waswillingto enter into a war againstNaziGermany long before theattackon Pearl Harbor .Had KentandWolk offbeen able to publicisethis information , the mood in Americawouldhaveturnedincreasinglyisolationist,anditisquitepossibletheUnitedStateswouldneverhave joined forces with BritainagainsttheNazis.

Forgood measure, Kent’s flat hadalsoyieldedalistdetailingscoresofBritishcitizenswhosympathisedwiththeNazis.

Inher own way, Miss Mackiechangedthecourseofthewar,andwithit,thewholetideofhistory.

ButitwasnotjustmembersofthefarRight upon whom M’s motleybandofagentsspied.Throughoutmuchof the 1930s, Knight and MI5wereextremelyconcernedwiththethreatposedbycommunism,seenasfar more dangerous to the securityof the United Kingdom thanmeninbrownshirtsgoose-steppingaroundBavaria.

The most successful of Knight’ spenetrationagentswas a typistcalledOlga Gray ,whose fatherhad been the Northern NightEditorof the Daily Mail .A fan of thenewlypopular genre of spy novels ,

The recruits relished living double lives MI5 chief took his own secrets to the grave

Gray had been flattered and excited when approached by a work colleague at a party in Birmingham and asked baldly if she wanted to work for the ‘Secret Service’.

Gray quickly agreed to meet a Captain King, who was of course Knight. She found him charismatic and was soon working for him by penetrating the Friends of the Soviet Union and, later, the Communist Party of Great Britain, where she even became secretary to its head, Harry Pollitt.

Although she was attractive, Knight later observed that Gray had ‘attained that very enviable position where an agent becomes a piece of furniture’.

But despite the enormous amounts of intelligence she provided to MI5, Gray found being an agent highly stressful, and she resigned from her double life in 1935.

However, as Gray would have known from the plotlines of so many espionage novels, a spy can never fully shake off their past. Two years later, Gray was contacted by a former communist colleague, Percy Glading, who told her that he needed her to run a safe house for a highly secret operation. Gray could have declined the offer, but instead she accepted it, covertly acting as a double agent, and immediately telling Knight about the approach.

By doing so, she was able to unmask and apprehend the members of a Soviet-backed spy ring in the Woolwich Arsenal, who were stealing military secrets and sending them to Moscow.

Although Gray’s mission had been a resounding coup for MI5, her work had taken its toll. She had liked and grown close to Glading and she saw her actions – even though for the good of her country – as being acts of betrayal on a more emotional level.

After testifying in court as Miss X against Glading during his trial, she parted company from M and moved to Canada.

Other agents controlled by M appeared to relish living double lives, perhaps because their real lives were so seemingly humdrum. Among them was Eric Roberts, who came from Cornwall and worked as a clerk for Westminster Bank.

As with so many of M’s menagerie of spies, the balding and portly Roberts was no James Bond, but it was the bank clerk’s sheer ordinariness that enabled him to infiltrate not only Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, but also The Right Club and the British Communist Party.

Roberts supplied Knight with vast amounts of intelligence but it was his work for MI5 during the war that proved to be exceptionally valuable.

Throughout much of the conflict, Roberts posed as a Gestapo officer called Jack King working undercover in Britain, and in this guise he approached numerous people whom MI5 suspected as being potentially treacherous.

Thanks to his efforts, which required a huge amount of deception and guile, Roberts was able to stop the Germans gaining an enormous amount of secrets concerning British technology.

But even the seemingly unflappable Roberts found living a secret life traumatic.

‘Six years of work under conditions of constant anxiety and fear had made me suspicious of my own shadow and even of myself,’ he wrote later.

Another of M’s agents also had a seemingly dull life. His name was Jimmy Dickson, a civil servant at the Ministry of Labour. A chainsmoker with a weak heart, Dickson was a womanising former fascist who wrote pot-boiling thrillers in his spare time.

He seemed utterly unsuited to secret work, yet Dickson was trusted by Knight. And it was Dickson who spent years infiltrating British fascist movements with such success over a period of years that, eventually, he was able to produce an authoritative report showing why the British Union of Fascists was a hostile organisation – and why its members should be interned.

Sadly, as with so many of M’s agents, the stress of subterfuge proved too much, and after the war, Dickson turned to drink and was forced into early retirement. His later attempts at writing thrillers amounted to nothing.

And as for M himself, was his eventual fate any better than that of Dickson or his other agents? In some ways yes, as his career as a broadcaster was to make him a household name. But his personal life was tarnished by the death of his first wife in 1934. The cause was an overdose of prescribed barbiturates, more likely to have been accidental than deliberate.

As Knight consummated neither his first nor his subsequent two marriages, many have supposed him to have been gay. Although this is possible, there is simply no evidence to support it.

If he had such a secret, then like all good spymasters, he took it to his grave. His funeral in Piccadilly in 1968 drew many friends and colleagues from the natural history world. But his nephew would recall how there were also ‘lots of men in brown felt hats who didn’t really identify themselves’.

It is only now that we can finally make them known to the world and take off our own hats in acknowledgment of the bravery of these very suburban spies.

M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster, by Henry Hemming is published by Preface on May 4, priced £25. Offer price £17.50 (30 per cent discount) including free p&p, until April 30. Pre-order at mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640.