ON AUGUST 23, 1939, THE NAZI DIPLOMAT JOACHIM VON RIBBENTROP, a man known to the British press as “Von Brickendrop,” on account of his gaffes at diplomatic events, dropped a different kind of brick. Just days after negotiations had broken down about a possible military alliance among Britain, France, and the USSR, the man who had once hosted MI5’s Guy Liddell in Berlin flew out to Moscow to sign what became known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement between Hitler and Stalin to the effect that neither Germany nor the Soviet Union would attack each other and, secretly, that Poland would be divided between them. This was less than a year after the Munich Agreement. Communism was now allied to Fascism. In the political tug-of-war between the Right and the Left, the axiomatic conflict of the age, the two opposing teams had just agreed to pull in the same direction. It was absurd and terrifying in equal measure. The greatest obstacle to German territorial expansion had been removed, suddenly, and now it seemed to be just a matter of time before war broke out.
As they had done during the Munich Crisis, less than a year earlier, piles of sand started to appear at street corners in London to fill up sandbags or put out fires once the bombing began. More men were seen walking around in uniform. There were more gas masks, more helmets, and more bayonets. Searchlights began to sweep the capital’s horizon at night. Museum staff packed away their beloved treasures and many Londoners made plans to leave. These were twilight days, and as Virginia Woolf wrote, it felt “like waiting a doctor’s verdict.”
An equally busy scene was being played out in the offices of M Section in Dolphin Square. Earlier that summer M had at last been able to add two officers to his unit. One was Jimmy Dickson, the civil servant who had spent the last fifteen years as M’s most trusted agent. Now he would be running agents himself. The other addition was the stepson of M’s friend Dennis Wheatley, the renowned novelist. This was Bill Younger, recently an undergraduate at Oxford where he had carried out several jobs for M. Like most of M’s agents, Younger had been held back in childhood, having suffered from polio that stunted his growth and left him with a withered arm; he also continued M’s tradition of working with authors. Dickson had produced five thrillers by the time he joined M Section, while Younger, aged just twenty-two, had already had two collections of poetry published.
In the hours after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was announced, M, Dickson, and Younger, the three officers of M Section, were being inundated with intelligence. The best of it came from Friedl Gaertner, the beautiful divorcée, who had reported on the day before the pact was signed that Hitler and Stalin had secretly agreed to carve up Poland and that London would not be flattened by the Luftwaffe at the start of war.
She was right. As well as carrying out what M described as “excellent work in connection with German organisations in this country,” Gaertner had secured the trust of the Nazi Party in London, to the extent that she was asked around this time to become a spy for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence department. This was exactly what M had hoped for when he had taken her on only a year ago. It marked the genesis of Friedl Gaertner’s career as a British double agent codenamed “GELATINE.”
As Gelatine, Gaertner would become one of the many cogs in MI5’s intricate and hugely successful Double Cross deception, in which German agents were turned by MI5 and used to feed misleading information back to Berlin. Dusko Popov, a Serbian playboy turned MI5 double agent codenamed “TRICYCLE,” apparently on account of his preference for three in a bed, was besotted with Gaertner and described her as “highly regarded by the Germans.” Later on in the war, her credibility as a German agent allowed MI5 to feed inaccurate information to Berlin about where V-1 and V-2 rockets were landing, which helped to save many British civilian lives.
In those dying days of August 1939, M Section was also receiving a glut of intelligence about the reaction to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact from British Communists. One of M’s best sources on this was M/8, an agent who had been reporting to him on and off for the last fifteen years but who was coming into his own only now. M/8 was Tom Driberg, the flamboyant Express columnist and future Labour politician and peer. Although Driberg was the unlikeliest of M’s agents, being promiscuously gay, indiscreet, and famous, he was now one of his most valuable sources.
Another important agent was M/4, M’s long-serving Liverpudlian, one of the few comrades in his local branch who seemed capable of understanding what had happened. “I have been able to explain to confused members the apparent change in Soviet policy,” this MI5 agent reported, later adding that he was “in demand as a speaker at branch meetings specially called to clarify the programme of the CPGB and its attitude to the war.” The district organizer for Merseyside would soon take M/4 aside to tell him that he was “very pleased” with his work and that he had “shown a deep political understanding of Marxism as applied to the present situation.” It should come as no surprise that M/4 could give such a coherent account of Moscow’s volte face, given that he had spent most of his adult life pretending to be someone other than himself.
There was also confusion on the Right, unless, that was, you spoke to William Joyce. In the wake of Stalin and Hitler’s extraordinary pact, Joyce pronounced himself “very clear” that “the greatest struggle in history was now doomed to take place” and that “I wanted to play a clear and definite part.” Unfortunately for him, that was unlikely to happen. For many months he had been on a Home Office list of pro-Nazi extremists who were to be arrested as soon as war broke out. Before that took place, however, something very unusual happened.
At around midnight on August 24, 1939, Joyce received a telephone call. According to his sister, who was in the room at the time, the man on the other end of the line told him that the “Defence Regulations would become effective in two more days and that his detention order had already been signed.” It was a short conversation, she remembered, lasting less than a minute. Little more than a day later, on August 26, William Joyce and his wife, Meg, fled to Berlin.
William Joyce would spend the rest of the war broadcasting splenetic Nazi propaganda back into Britain and became known as “Lord Haw-Haw,” infamous for his broadcasts that started with him saying “Jairminny calling, Jairminny calling.…”
Joyce, or Lord Haw-Haw, as he had become, may not have been the only Briton doing propaganda work for the Nazis, but he was the most effective. By the end of 1939, according to a Mass Observation survey, M’s former comrade, the man who had married the girl that he had once loved, had as many as six million regular listeners in Britain while a staggering eighteen million people tuned in occasionally to hear him. Goebbels referred to Joyce as the best horse in his stable, and at one point during the war he was branded by a prominent Daily Mirror columnist as “the biggest danger to the nation.”
Yet perhaps the most remarkable part of William Joyce’s transformation into Lord Haw-Haw was how he had escaped to Berlin in the first place, given that he was on a list of twenty-three individuals to be arrested by the British police. The official who renewed his passport shortly before his departure must take some of the blame, as should those who waved him through customs and immigration. However, most of the responsibility for Joyce’s escape lies with the man who tipped him off on the phone.
So who was he?
The answer was revealed to MI5 less than a month after Joyce had made it to Berlin. Joyce’s sister, Joan, who had helped her brother pack, explained what had happened to a member of the Nordic League, an extreme right-wing organization. Except this man was no ordinary fanatic. The individual she confided in turned out to be an undercover policeman.
Joan Joyce told him that a “secret service” officer “had advised William to leave England to avoid being arrested.” She then let slip a vital detail. This “secret service” officer had also visited one of her other brothers, Quentin, then in prison. She provided a date and a time for the prison visit. It was the morning of September 19.
Records show that on the morning in question, Quentin Joyce was visited by just one officer from MI5.
His name was Maxwell Knight.
Ever since M had joined MI5, in 1931, there had been a danger that his past was not yet history and that his connection to British Fascism might one day come to haunt him. By making that call, M had been mainly responsible for Joyce’s escape. This was not a forgivable oversight on his part; he had gone out of his way to warn his former comrade.
The years that M had spent with the British Fascists had finally become his nemesis, but not for political or ideological reasons. Although M had joined the BF at a formative point in his life and had poured himself into this fledgling movement, because he believed in its mission to save the country from international Communism, the version of Fascism that he had signed up to was significantly different from its more extreme incarnation under Mosley. M’s membership in the BF had certainly edged him further to the right, and he remained throughout his life a man who “did not rate democracy very highly,” according to a former official MI5 historian. Yet by 1939 he was not a Fascist, in the contemporary understanding of the term. The most troubling legacy of M’s time in this extremist group was not political but social. He had been caught up in the web of friendships that he had made long ago. While he may have felt a lingering guilt about what had happened to Joyce fifteen years earlier outside Lambeth Baths, M was driven mainly by a sense of friendship. He made that call out of personal loyalty.
Only the year before, in 1938, E. M. Forster had suggested provocatively, and to great effect, that “if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” M and Joyce lived in an age when for many people the friends one chose in life mattered more than any inherited attachment to one’s country. M was bound to his comrades in the BF and K both by the choices they had made in life and what they had experienced in each other’s company. These men had fought together, burgled together, marched together, drunk together, even kidnapped together. In the case of M and Joyce, they had loved the same woman. Some of M’s previous associates had become agents of his at MI5; others had formed the nucleus of the new Fascist movement. If he could help it, M would prefer not to betray any of them.
Yet the prime minister’s declaration of war on September 3, 1939, changed the complexion of these relationships. War presented M with the most profound challenge of his life. For years he had believed that the men and women he had gotten to know among the British Fascists were, for the most part, on the side of the angels. Now he had to decide whether he was willing to destroy this understanding of them and the movement that they belonged to. It was like being asked to kill off a part of himself. What made this so difficult was not just the bond he felt toward some of these people but the premium he had always placed on loyalty. The man that he had long aspired to be—that blurry composite of his father and his brother, of Richard Hannay and Bulldog Drummond, the zookeepers he had looked up to as a boy, the poachers, the naturalists, the sea captains, the spies—that man did not betray his friends. Not under any circumstances. But neither did he turn against his country. Never before had M imagined that he might have to decide between the two.
Now the particular course of his life, the nature of his profession, and the outbreak of war had combined to produce a punishing test of character. Maxwell Knight would have to choose between his friends and his country.