ON OCTOBER 4, 1939, THE DAY BEFORE HITLER FLEW OUT TO THE newly occupied capital of Poland for a victory parade, Marjorie Mackie began her job in Military Censorship. Her contact at the Right Club who had encouraged her to apply for this position, Mrs. Ramsay, was thrilled. Mackie now worked in the same complex as MI5, one of the few government departments in which the Right Club had no agents.
Very soon after Mackie had started her new job, Mrs. Ramsay asked her whether she had been able to meet any MI5 staff. For once, the MI5 agent was able to tell the truth. Yes, she replied, she had met several people who worked for the service.
She then told Mrs. Ramsay that this happened occasionally in the shared canteen.
Mrs. Ramsay was impressed.
“Yes, I think when it comes to a showdown,” she said, “you will have work to do.”
Showdown. This language must have been familiar to M. “The Showdown” was similar to “The Day,” which had once been predicted by his friends in the British Fascists, when the Communists would try to seize power and the Fascists would nobly rise up to stop them. But there was a critical difference between The Showdown and The Day. The current crop of right-wing extremists, including Mosley and Ramsay, had little intention of handing back power once they had seen off the Communists. They wanted to run the country themselves.
It was not long before Mrs. Mackie was invited to join the Right Club’s “Inner Circle.” In one of the subsequent meetings, she was told about the group’s red leather-bound ledger that contained details of every Right Club member, a list including at least eleven MPs, almost as many peers, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Carnegie—husband of Edward VII’s granddaughter, Princess Maud—Lord Redesdale—father of the Mitford sisters—Harold Mitchell, MP—later a vice chairman of the Conservative Party—as well as one German princess, one Russian prince, and at least one MI6 agent, Arthur Loveday, who had joined for ideological rather than operational reasons. The caliber of these members was a reminder of just how many well-connected and politically influential figures remained unsure, either privately or publicly, about the need to take on Hitler.
Yet for now Mrs. Mackie did not know who was on that list of Right Club members. It was only as she earned the trust of Captain Ramsay and others that she was introduced to more members of the group. One of these was a woman about whom her spymaster had already heard a great deal. This was Captain Ramsay’s unofficial secretary, an aristocratic Russian-born fashion designer named Anna Wolkoff.
Earlier that year Wolkoff had been described in one MI5 report as “a staunch Nazi propagandist.” Since then four separate warnings about her had been received by the Office. One described her “displaying pro-Nazi, pro-Communist and anti-British tendencies to a degree which exceeds that of wrong-headed stupidity and may be dangerous.” All suggested that she might be working for the Nazis. But it was also possible that she was still an angry anti-Communist, which would make sense given what had happened to her family.
Anna Wolkoff’s father, Admiral Wolkoff, previously an aide-de-camp to Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, had been posted to London as naval attaché in 1917, shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution. He and his wife were never able to return to the land of their birth. Instead, they took on a small café in South Kensington, the Russian Tea Rooms, and read impotently about the destruction of the society that they had known all their lives. The Wolkoffs’ daughter, Anna, became a fashion designer, and at one point in the 1930s was doing well. She opened a shop on Conduit Street, her clothes were being worn by the likes of Princess Marina of Kent and Wallis Simpson, and one of her outfits was photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue. But her company’s finances were shambolic, and shortly before the war began her business had collapsed.
By the time she was introduced to Mrs. Mackie, in December 1939, Anna Wolkoff had been forced to move back in with her parents. Wolkoff was still furious about the demise of her company, and had concocted a bizarre Jewish conspiracy theory to explain what had happened. She had also taken to calling herself Anna “de” Wolkoff. This small adjustment is telling. It reflected her growing sense that nobody was taking her seriously. Wolkoff felt entitled to a job just as she felt entitled to have her views heard. This was one of the reasons why she and several friends from the Right Club had begun to put up “stickyback” posters at night during the blackout, so-called because one side was covered in adhesive gum. These contained sarcastic, usually anti-Semitic messages designed to undermine the war effort. Sometimes Anna Wolkoff and her stickyback gang went to cinemas to boo at newsreel footage of Churchill or any other pro-war MP. She was angry about the war and sympathetic to Hitler, but beneath it all was an opinionated individual who wanted to feel important again.
When Mrs. Mackie told Anna Wolkoff that she had taken a job in Military Censorship, the fashion designer’s response was characteristically spiky. She told Mackie that she could easily get uncensored messages out of the country using her many diplomatic contacts. Wolkoff added that she was planning to get a job in the Ministry of Information’s Censorship Department and that an old family friend might pull a few strings for her.
That friend was Admiral Sir Reginald “Blinker” Hall, the ex-Conservative politician who had set up the Economic League—the organization that had employed K during the 1924 general election. Admiral Hall was a prominent figure from M’s past and a man he would ordinarily trust. Hall had gotten to know Anna’s father when he had been the Russian naval attaché. Since then he had supported her application for British naturalization, describing the Wolkoff clan as “a fine example to others.” M was about to reach a rather different conclusion.
By the time M’s agent had been introduced to Anna Wolkoff, M appears to have undergone a profound change. His wife, Lois, had moved away from the capital and for the first time in his adult life he appears to have been without his collection of animals. In anticipation of London being flattened by the Luftwaffe, an estimated four hundred thousand animals had been put down during the first few weeks of the war, most of them cats. Outside veterinary hospitals one would see piles of animal corpses covered by tarpaulins. Although M never wrote about the fate of his pets during the early stages of the war, by the end of September 1939 he and Lois were no longer living in the apartment on Sloane Street. Some of his pets would have been taken in by his long-serving daily, Mrs. Leather, while others were no doubt passed on to friends, but the rest were probably put down.
This left M in a cold and unfamiliar world, and he must have felt strangely cut off from his past. At about the same time, he experienced a political and moral shift in his outlook. Perhaps the change came over him suddenly. One secretary described him wandering around with one of his black cigarettes in his mouth, being “suddenly immobilized by a plan of action which came into his head” and “standing with a pair of drumsticks in his hand while he worked out the details.” Or else it crept up on him in the wake of Joyce’s departure and the outbreak of war. Either way, in October 1939, he told a British Fascist that “there was little difference between Communism and present day National Socialism.”
This may not sound like much, but to a man who had long seen international Communism as the great existential threat to his country, and whose former comrades now identified themselves with National Socialism, this was a huge departure. M had come to see the war as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship. In principle, this MI5 spymaster had resolved to turn against his Fascist past. Now he had to decide how far he was willing to go.