This book is based on recently declassified MI5 files, conversations with former officers from MI5 and MI6, and the relatives of Maxwell Knight and the agents he ran, as well as diaries, memoirs, newspaper reports and contemporary accounts. References for most quotations can be found at the back of the book.
Maxwell Knight may have been the greatest spymaster ever employed by MI5, Britain’s counterespionage agency, yet technically he never worked for it. The organisation that we all know today as MI5 was quietly renamed ‘the Security Service’ several weeks before Knight began to work there, but the new title took years to catch on in Whitehall. For most people today the Security Service is better known as MI5, the name I have used in this book. Maxwell Knight also worked at one point for MI5’s foreign counterpart, originally known as MI1(c) or C’s Organisation, later MI6 and today SIS, which I have referred to throughout as MI6. (Just to help tell them apart: the TV series Spooks is set in MI5, whereas James Bond works for MI6.)
The most complex relationship in espionage, as well as the most fraught and dramatically compelling, is usually between the operative out in the field who gathers information and the man or woman to whom that operative reports. There are all sorts of terms to describe the two roles. The individual collecting intelligence might be a contact, source, informant, spy or agent (and if this agent takes on his or her own informants, they are subagents), while the person they report to could be the agent runner, agent handler, officer, case officer, operations officer or spymaster. A further source of confusion is that an American intelligence officer can sometimes be referred to as an agent. In this book I have generally referred to the people who gather intelligence as agents, and those who look after them as either officers or spymasters. For clarification on this, or any other question, feel free to get in touch. My email address can be found at henryhemming.com
Henry Hemming
January 2017