SPIES OF THE SUBURBS
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 night shift for the young American diplomat and, back at his London flat, at a time when most people were on their way to work, 29- year-old Tyler Kent collapsed gratefully into bed. In the coming hours, sleep would be in short supply. First came a succession of demanding knocks on his door, which Kent declined to open – an obstinacy that only delayed the inevitable as it was knocked off its hinges by a hefty police inspector.
Five men rushed into the room, and found the startled diplomat in his pyjama bottoms, while in the bathroom, his distressed girlfriend was found in only a pyjama top.
And so began a sequence of events that would eventually put Kent, a cipher clerk at the American Embassy, in jail. After allowing the couple to get dressed, one of the five men started firing off questions. Was there anything in the flat that belonged to the embassy? Did he know one Anna Wolkoff? Was she a Soviet spy?
Kent must have known his denials would be hopeless. His inquisitors swiftly found some 1,500 duplicated secret documents stolen from the US Embassy; Kent was arrested and led away.
As they walked down to the waiting police car, the tall, broadshouldered man leading the raid might have allowed himself the flicker of a smile. After all, he had just broken up a spy ring that threatened to prevent the United States from joining the war against Germany.
It had been a good morning’s work for the man known by a single letter – M. Put simply, this was MI5’s greatest spy master, whose pioneering skill in recruiting and handling a motley range of highly effective agents – who bravely penetrated and destroyed scores of fascist and communist cells and spy rings – helped to change the course of history.
It is no surprise, then, that even today, the name of Maxwell Knight is still spoken with reverence in the corridors of Thames House, headquarters of the home security service, MI5.
Knight was not only a spymaster. After he left MI5 in the early 1960s, he forged a highly successful career as a television naturalist and became the David Attenborough of his day.
He even appeared on Desert Island Discs, where he may have revealed his penchant for jazz, but never breathed a word about his many years in the shadows. The reason for him remaining there is simple enough: MI5 has kept its records about the activities of M and his agents firmly under lock and key – until now.
Finally, the files are being dripfed to the National Archives in Kew, and it is now possible for a full picture to emerge of this enigmatic man with a beaky nose and ears a little too large.
The life of Knight has been captured in a major new biography called M, by Henry Hemming.
Through an exhaustive piecingtogether of previously secret files, Hemming has not only assembled a full account of Knight’s activities but also reveals for the first time the identities of many of Knight’s agents. It is an exemplary piece of historical sleuthing, not least t because MI5 zealously guards the identities of its agents long after they have died.
What is even more revelatory y is the nature of Knight’s spies. For while Ian Fleming’s fic- tional M employed agents in the mould of James Bond, the real M used people who were decidedly unglamorous.
They were housewives and secretaries, bank clerks and lawyers, historians and cooks–people more at home in the suburbs than globetrotting with suitcases full of gadgets.
Take the case of Marjorie Mackie, a short, stout, middle-aged single mother from Essex, perhaps the antithesis of a Bond girl.
By trade, Miss Mackie was a demonstration chef, paid by food companies to prepare and promote their products in front of shoppers. On the surface, the ebullient Miss Mackie seemed the most unlikely candidate to infiltrate a shadowy cabal of British Nazi sympathisers called The Right Club, run by aristocratic Tory MP Archibald Ramsay.
Shortly after the outbreak of war, M suspected this highly antiSemitic secret society might be hatching plans to act as a fifth column in the event of a German invasion, and was anxious to gather what intelligence he could. The reason he selected Miss Mackie was simple: she had once worked as the secretary in a previous movement run by Ramsay.
In September 1939, Mackie approached Ramsay’s wife, and asked – in the formal parlance of the 1930s – if they could ‘renew their acquaintance’. Seemingly unsuspecting, Mrs Ramsay met Miss Mackie over tea, and the MP’s wife then proceeded to vent violently about the Freemasons and t he Jews. Naturally, t he mother from Essex nodded along as though she was in complete agreement.
A few weeks later, Miss Mackie was asked to join The Right Club and what she would soon learn was sensational. Not only was Ramsay hatching tentative plans for some sort of coup, but the club had managed to infiltrate its own agents into nearly every government department.
Over the next few weeks, Miss Mackie inveigled herself into the inner circle of the club, whose members even included the Duke of Wellington and Lord Redesdale, father of the famous Mitford girls. Crucially, Miss Mackie also met a White Russian emigree called Anna Wolkoff. Anna was in touch with an American cipher clerk called Tyler Kent, who had admitted to her that he was copying highly sensitive documents that had come across his desk.
This was an astonishingly important piece of intelligence, and it would eventually lead to the arrest and imprisonment of both Kent and Wolkoff.
Among the cables that Kent had copied were correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt showing that the US President was willing to enter into a war against Nazi Germany long before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Had Kent and Wolkoff been able to publicise this information, the mood in America would have turned increasingly isolationist, and it is quite possible the United States would never have joined forces with Britain against the Nazis.
For good measure, Kent’s flat had also yielded a list detailing scores of British citizens who sympathised with the Nazis.
In her own way, Miss Mackie changed the course of the war, and with it, the whole tide of history.
But it was not just members of the far Right upon whom M’s motley band of agents spied. Throughout much of the 1930s, Knight and MI5 were extremely concerned with the threat posed by communism, seen as far more dangerous to the security of the United Kingdom than men in brown shirts goose-stepping around Bavaria.
The most successful of Knight’s penetration agents was a typist called Olga Gray, whose father had been the Northern Night Editor of the Daily Mail. A fan of the newly popular genre of spy novels,
A stout mother, the antithesis of a Bond girl
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
The recruits relished living double lives MI5 chief took his own secrets to the grave
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.
© Henry Hemming, 2017