TWITCHER TAILOR, SOLDIER SPY
In 1961, London Zoo promised children who signed up as junior members that they could ‘meet famous animal experts such as David Attenborough, Maxwell Knight and Peter Scott’. We all know Attenborough, and Scott is still remembered for his work in bird conservation. But who was Maxwell Knight?
Author of more than two dozen books Knight was also one of Britain’s most prolific broadcasters in the Fifties.
Unknown to his fans, however, Knight was an MI5 spymaster – its bestever, Henry Hemming argues in this jaw-dropping biography of the man who styled himself ‘M’ long before Ian Fleming thought of it.
From 1931 to 1961, presiding over his own ‘M Section’, Knight perfected the art of ‘identifying, recruiting and running undercover agents’. Naturalism and espionage turn out to be surprisingly complementary. When M infiltrates his spies into fascist and communist groups, Hemming likens him to a cuckoo hen depositing eggs in various nests.
Although Knight kept his two careers separate, there were a few overlaps. The illustrations in two of his books were drawn by his young M Section colleague David Cornwell, now better known as the novelist John le Carré.
The flat from which he ran M Section was said by an agent to resemble ‘the den of some amiable scientist rather than a spy’, with top-secret meetings often interrupted by his menagerie of parrots, dogs, mice and snakes.
‘I made it a rule to spend some period every day just sitting still and looking at them,’ he said of his animals. Equally applicable to spooks, says Hemming: ‘Strip away the mythology, the tradecraft, the gadgets and the romance, and spying is watching.’ No surprise, then, that many spies, including Ian Fleming, have also been serious birdwatchers. James Bond himself was named by Fleming after a US ornithologist.
On Knight’s intuitive understanding of how to handle animals, Hemming writes: ‘They trusted him, especially female creatures.’ Here, too, the parallel is inescapable: he pioneered the use of female agents, in defiance of MI5’s rule that women were too emotional and indiscreet for such work.
One of M Section’s greatest triumphs – breaking up a Soviet spy ring – was achieved by his agent Olga Gray. The grateful M gave Olga his highest tribute: he named a pet otter after her.