BRITAIN’S FASCIST SPYMASTER
M by Henry Hemming Preface 400pp £20 The Week Bookshop £17
The subtitle of this “fascinating biography” proclaims Maxwell Knight to be “MI5’S Greatest Spymaster”, said Ben Macintyre in The Times. While this “may or may not” be the case, Knight – a leading light at MI5 between the 1930s and the 1950s, was “incontrovertibly the strangest”. Charismatic, funny and possessed of an “instinctive talent for the arcane act of running spies”, Knight was also an animal obsessive who, in his 50s, became a well-known BBC natural history presenter. He shared his home – a “reeking menagerie” – with various exotic pets, including a Himalayan monkey and a “bear named Bessie”. He had three marriages, but consummated none of them – probably because he was “terrified of sex”. And despite helping to break up Nazi spy rings during the War, he was himself an “enthusiastic fascist” who maintained such sympathies until at least the late 1930s. Henry Hemming has done a “superb job of peeling back the layers covering this most veiled of spies”, even if he doesn’t quite solve the “conundrum” posed by his subject.
Knight’s espionage career had “unlikely” origins, said Lara Feigel in the FT. After a stint as a “dissolute” jazz musician, he was recruited in his early 20s by a private intelligence agency, who set him the task of “infiltrating the British Fascisti”, the UK’S first self-proclaimed fascist party. Knight rose quickly, becoming the party’s director of intelligence and helping to recruit a young William Joyce (later the Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-haw). The fact that he “sympathised with the views of those on whom he reported” must have made his rise easier, said Alan Judd in Literary Review. In 1931, aged 31, he was recruited by MI5, and “negotiated permission to run his section – M section – from his flat, with his monkeys in attendance”. Hemming’s “thoughtful” biography brings to life an “endearing” figure whose “fame within MI5 lasted well into the Cold War”.
Actually, despite his reputation as a “master spook”, Knight’s record was “patchy”, said Robert Mccrum in The Observer. He was easily distracted by his hobbies (which also included writing pulp fiction and “dabbling in the occult”), and as section head at MI5 he failed, for instance, to expose the Cambridge spies recruited by the Soviets. While Hemming’s biography is “rich in sub-plot and cameo characters”, its main character remains “shadowy”. Ironically, it is only in fiction that Knight today “stands in plain sight”: as one of the models for Ian Fleming’s “M”, and for Jack Brotherhood in John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy.