On 9 April, 1940, the same day that Anna Wolkoff was handed a letter addressed to William Joyce, German forces launched a surprise attack on Denmark and Norway.
The Phoney War was over. In London more people began to be seen carrying around their gas masks. The streets in the capital were eerily empty that night as everyone gathered round their radios. All over the country the mood had changed. Bullish indifference started to be replaced by caution and, for some, a creeping, contagious anxiety. MI5 began to be bombarded with reports from wary members of the public. Some had seen pigeons flying in a suspicious manner that they took to be German courier pigeons; others, marks on telegraph posts that could be coded signals for German invaders.
As spy fever rose, MI5 saw reports from Norway to suggest that Germans living in Norway, as well as pro-Nazi Norwegians and Danes, may have committed acts of sabotage, subversion, propaganda and espionage to assist the invading Nazis. How else to explain the crushing nature of the German advance? If there had been a Fifth Column in those countries, as some newspaper reports suggested, it would be naïve to think that Berlin had not tried to set up a similar network in Britain.
As the Germans continued to punch north through Norway, Anna Wolkoff saw more of Tyler Kent. He showed her further documents from his collection, including an item from the Churchill–Roosevelt correspondence.
‘May I have this?’ asked Wolkoff, holding up the message.1
Kent asked if she was going to show it to Captain Ramsay, the Conservative MP and leader of the Right Club.
Wolkoff replied that she was. Kent offered no objection.
Tyler Kent agreed to let Captain Ramsay see his documents on the understanding that the politician would use them to raise a question in Parliament about Churchill’s correspondence with Roosevelt. At last, the American cipher clerk had decided to play his hand. In doing so, he hoped to kill off any chance there was of America coming into the war unprovoked. But it may not have been Kent who had made this decision.
Years later it emerged that Kent was not working for German intelligence, but nor was he a patriotic whistleblower. He appears to have been working for Moscow Centre. The NKVD agent Guy Burgess later attested to this. Other scraps of evidence all point in the same direction. The alleged Gestapo agent that Kent had been seen to meet, Ludwig Matthias, was Jewish and anti-Nazi and was far more likely to have been working for Moscow than Berlin. It is also striking that the material gathered by Kent from the US Embassy had very little value to the Germans, but was of considerable interest to the Soviets.
Regardless of what his motivation may have been, Tyler Kent had just it the fuse on a series of events which could seriously damage the prospects of America joining the war. M still had no evidence of espionage. He gave instructions for Hélène de Munck to tell Wolkoff that she was going to Belgium and to ask the fashion designer whether she still needed a document smuggled in from Belgium. She did not. But she had another job for de Munck in Brussels. Wolkoff asked her to meet ‘our principal agent in Belgium’ and to use her spiritual powers to work out whether this man could be trusted.2
Belgium was MI6 territory. For M to send one of his agents there was a risk, but one that by this stage of the war he was willing to take. On 16 April, 1940, the former nanny flew to Brussels where, as Wolkoff had instructed, she met Nieuwenhuys, the Second Secretary of the Belgian Embassy, who had agreed earlier to be part of the chain of people relaying uncensored messages from London to Berlin. Four days later Hélène de Munck was back in London, where she assured Wolkoff that in her spiritual opinion Nieuwenhuys could be trusted.
Only two days after de Munck’s return from Belgium, Mrs Mackie reported that someone living at No. 47 Gloucester Place was supplying Wolkoff with ‘confidential information about members of the British Intelligence Service’, including Guy Liddell.3 One of the residents at this address was the American embassy official Tyler Kent.
This was M’s clearest indication yet that Kent was sharing with Wolkoff, and presumably others, ‘information which [he] had no right to be conveying to any person outside the United States Government Service’.4
Then M had another breakthrough. During one of his broadcasts, Joyce decided to turn against the French. ‘Where is their Shakespeare?’ he fumed. ‘Who is their Carlyle?’
Carlyle.
This was the agreed code word to show that Joyce had received the letter first presented to Wolkoff by J. McGuirk Hughes. Wolkoff could now be classed as an enemy agent.
M did not waste any time. He compiled a comprehensive report linking Tyler Kent to Anna Wolkoff, Captain Ramsay and the Right Club. ‘It seems urgently necessary for something to be done about this man,’ he wrote on 4 May, 1940, meaning Kent.5 He then suggested that Liddell, who had good contacts at the US Embassy, should take this report to the Americans.
But he did not.
By now the Security Service was, in the words of its former official historian, ‘close to collapse’.6 Following the German invasions of Norway and Denmark, it received from government departments more than 8,000 vetting and security requests each week. Liddell was struggling to stay on top of this, just as he was failing to get anywhere in his attempt to persuade the Home Office to reconsider its stance on the mass internment of enemy aliens and homegrown political extremists. MI5 was no longer alone on this. The Joint Intelligence Committee, a relatively new body dominated by senior intelligence officials from across Whitehall and the armed forces, was ‘strongly of the opinion that something more should be done.’7
The Home Office would not budge. If there was an MI5 investigation that could be used to strengthen the case for the internment of those who might belong to a Fifth Column, then it was in Liddell’s and MI5’s interests to make sure that it did. This was perhaps why Liddell sat on M’s report about Kent rather than pass it on to the American embassy.
Just days later, on 10 May, 1940, on a gloriously sunny morning in London, German forces poured into Belgium and Holland. The day began with news of the Blitzkrieg. It ended with the installation in No. 10 Downing Street of Winston Churchill.