Wherever he went, Desmond Morton carried around the bullet that had almost killed him. During the war, a German machine-gun round had ripped into Morton’s left lung, stopping just short of his aorta, and was so deeply embedded that any attempt to remove it might have been fatal. For the rest of his life, Desmond Morton had this metallic memento mori buried deep inside him. He was an Old Etonian and lifelong bachelor whose experiences in the trenches had turned him into a more distant and inscrutable figure, a persona that seemed to be perfectly suited to the intelligence work he began to do after the war.
In the early 1920s, Morton worked for what is today called MI6, the foreign counterpart to MI5. He ran MI6’s Production section, which was responsible for gathering intelligence on overseas Soviet activities directed against Britain. Though most of this work involved running agents and informants abroad, it helped for him to have sources at home. This was why Desmond Morton had developed a professional relationship with Sir George Makgill.
The two spymasters had been introduced to each other after the war by Sir Vernon Kell, the monocled and moustachioed head of MI5, and an old friend of Makgill’s. It was Kell, of MI5, who had first encouraged the opinionated Scottish industrialist to set up his own private intelligence agency and had even supplied Makgill with advice and contacts. This was partly out of friendship but also because he wanted access to the intelligence that this agency might gather.
As the British government struggled to reduce the titanic national debt incurred during five years of all-out war, MI5 was savaged by spending cuts. By 1925, it had no full-time agents and a staff of just thirty-five (today that number is closer to 4,000). MI5’s scope was limited to countering espionage and subversion within the British armed forces. Kell’s counterpart in MI6 had even suggested that MI5’s staff be further reduced, and would later push for its outright abolition. Yet, as MI5 continued to shrink, the threat of Communism seemed to grow.
Kell was ‘a shrewd old bugger’, as one colleague put it.1 He recognised that Makgill’s private agency could provide him with cheap, reliable intelligence that he could gain access to without exceeding his department’s official purview. Desmond Morton, at MI6, saw the situation a little differently. Like Kell, he understood the potential of the Makgill Organisation. Yet unlike the head of MI5, Morton was not willing to receive information second-hand from Makgill or from ‘Don’, his ‘intensely keen’ son. Morton wanted direct access to Makgill’s operatives for himself.
This was unusual. A basic rule of agent running is that agents should report to one spymaster. Morton wanted some of Makgill’s men to work for two. Perhaps overawed by Desmond Morton’s position in MI6 or wanting to help out a brother Mason – Morton appears to have been a Freemason like Makgill – the industrialist accepted. By the time of the 1924 General Election, Sir George Makgill was sharing some of his star agents with Morton over at MI6, including Jim Finney, whose report on the Zinoviev Letter was used to authenticate this forgery. Another shared source was Maxwell Knight.
The problem here was that Desmond Morton worked for MI6, and as such he was not supposed to be running agents among the British civilian population. That was the responsibility of the London Metropolitan Police Special Branch – usually known as Special Branch. This was one of the reasons Morton went to great lengths to hide his relationship with Max.
Unknown to all but a handful of people, for at least a year Max had been reporting both to Don at the Makgill Organisation and to Desmond Morton at MI6. By the end of 1924, Max was also in touch with Special Branch and had a freelance arrangement whereby if he supplied them with intelligence that led to an arrest he would get paid. Summaries of Max’s reports even made their way to MI5 where they were seen by Sir Vernon Kell, who might forward them to the Director of Military Operations and Intelligence.
This would explain why MI5 was so relaxed about the paramilitary activities of K. Max, one of the men at the heart of this group, the other being Joyce, was now well known among highly placed individuals in what was for him the holy trinity of British Intelligence: MI5, MI6 and Special Branch. Max’s high standing among them was partly a reflection of the size and reach of his agent network, and the quality of its product. It was also testament to the way he presented himself. Max produced his reports quickly, and they were thorough and detailed. As far as anyone could tell, he did not brag about his work, invent information, disobey instructions or get carried away by the excitement of being involved in espionage. He ‘makes an excellent impression,’ wrote Desmond Morton, being ‘very discreet, and at need prepared to do anything, but is at the same time not wild.’2
This last point was crucial. Max seemed to be learning to rein himself in when it mattered. He was also described by his new MI6 spymaster as ‘clearly perfectly honest’.3 But this was not honesty as most people recognised it. Max was truthful in his dealings with Morton, yet when out in the field he could lie, as they say in the navy, like a hairy egg.
By the time Max returned from Glasgow in the summer of 1925, after those three wild raids on the local Communist Party headquarters, his career as a spymaster was flourishing. In the shadowy world of private investigation, he was becoming well known and for the first time in his life he had tasted success.
Max’s standing within the British Fascisti was no less impressive, even if he had just been knocked off his perch within the BF Intelligence Department. Towards the end of 1924, Brigadier Sir Ormonde Winter, a formidable figure who had recently stepped down as the British government’s Director of Intelligence in Ireland, had succeeded in taking Max’s job as the BF Director of Intelligence. Yet before this retired army officer could take up his position, he was outmanoeuvred by another elderly Fascist, one Lieutenant-Colonel Bramley, who began to run the BF Intelligence Department instead.
Rather than remove Max entirely, Bramley agreed to take him on as his deputy. Max was given the title Chief Intelligence Officer for the BF. Technically, this was a demotion, but he had survived. He was also starting to be paid for the first time by the British Fascisti, and this meant that he could give up his job as a prep-school games teacher, which he did almost at once.
Aged twenty-five, Max was now making a decent living from his intelligence work. He was also finding time to look after his growing miscellany of beloved pets. There was at least one dog in his collection, various reptiles and rodents, and a parrot. Following the loss of Bessie the bear, his collection had a new star turn. This was Rikkitikki, his Indian mongoose, ‘one of the most affectionate, playful and amusing pets I have ever had’.4 He was also very fond of his bush baby, Pookie, who looked like a misshapen teddy bear and was famous among his friends for the occasion when it knocked over a glass of sherry, got drunk and bounced around the flat like a kangaroo before curling up in a ball and falling fast asleep.
Although Max was doing well, there was always a chance that the demand for his intelligence work might suddenly evaporate, casting him adrift. Most of the young men like him who had thrown themselves into the world of private investigation hankered after a secure and permanent job at MI5, MI6 or Special Branch. The prospect of being an intelligence officer for the government, with greater powers, more funding, better pay and a pension, was obviously attractive. MI6 was Max’s most likely destination, given his close relationship with Morton. So he may have been surprised when he received an invitation, at around this time, from the head of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell, to a gathering of his exclusive ‘Intelligent People’ dining club.
Several years earlier another of Makgill’s agents, Con Boddington, had made the move from private to public sector when he left the Makgill Organisation and joined MI5. Now Max looked set to do the same. This would mark an almost unbelievable turnaround. Four years earlier he had been a jazz-obsessed family outcast with dreams of not much more than writing cheap novels. Now he looked set to embark on a career in a glamorously secretive government department. Even his curmudgeonly Uncle Robert would have approved.
Little is known about the dinner itself, only that it took place at the Hyde Park Hotel, there were no women present and the food was ‘the best to be had in London’.5 Kell made a short speech, as was his custom, and at one point he spoke to Max, whereupon he made him an offer.
It was not the one that Max wanted.
Kell merely asked his guest whether he was interested in joining a reserve of intelligence officers who could be called upon during a national emergency. Kell did not offer Max a job in MI5, nor did he plan to. Maxwell Knight remained on the periphery of British intelligence.