THE MORNING AFTER CHURCHILL BECAME PRIME MINISTER, THE director of MI5 wrote to the Home Office asking for the immediate internment of the BUF leadership and all members of extremist right-wing groups. This amounted to roughly five hundred people in total. “It will be interesting,” wrote Liddell, “to see if the Home Office are prepared to swallow this pill.”
It was not. Liddell’s boss, Jasper Harker, was summoned to the Home Office that evening and told as much. As a sop to MI5, the Home Office agreed to the internment of male enemy aliens aged 16 to 65 years living in a county adjacent to the south and east coasts of Britain and to placing tighter restrictions on nonenemy aliens. Yet even these mild measures elicited a flurry of complaints from the British public. “An elephant keeper in Bertram Hills Circus at Southampton is a German,” noted Liddell, wearily. “They do not know what to do with the elephants.”
By this stage, Guy Liddell did not have “the slightest doubt” that the BUF would be willing to help the Germans in the event of an invasion. “There were after all some quite intelligent people in this office who had given careful study to the matter and that was their considered view,” he wrote, referring here mainly to M.
Liddell, M, and a growing number of MI5 officers were “very concerned” about the Home Office position. Relations between the two departments had become, according to one MI5 historian, “severely strained.” The following day Jimmy Dickson and Francis Aikin-Sneath, a former schoolteacher who had been taken on by MI5 to help investigate British Fascism, were asked to put together a report showing precisely why the BUF was a hostile association. The plan was for M, Kell, and the heads of both the Metropolitan Police and Special Branch to present this document once it was finished to the home secretary. Just hours after Dickson and Aikin-Sneath had been put to work, Churchill stood up in Parliament to deliver one of the great speeches of the twentieth century, one that seemed to sum up the mood inside MI5 better than that of the Home Office: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”
That night, in west London, Anna Wolkoff made omelets with Mrs. Mackie and Joan Miller, a society girl working at MI5 who had recently been brought into M’s investigation of the Right Club. If they did discuss Churchill’s speech, Mackie did not mention it in her report. Instead, she focused on what Wolkoff had told her, once Miller had left, about the dinner she had attended several nights earlier at the glamorous L’Escargot Restaurant in Soho. It was not the food or the setting that had excited her so much as the company.
Wolkoff explained that there had been four people at that dinner: Tyler Kent, herself, another Right Club member named Enid Riddell, and an Italian referred to by Wolkoff as “Mr. Macaroni.” Apparently, she gave most people nicknames like this. “It was a joke,” explained Kent much later. Mrs. Mackie tried to find out who Mr. Macaroni was, but all she could get out of Wolkoff was that he had a “name like a tin of fruit.”
Three days later, Wolkoff obtained another secret message from the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence. This telegram had come into the US Embassy that very morning and was the US president’s reply to Churchill’s request, on May 15, for some fifty “of your older destroyers,” “several hundred of the latest types of aircraft,” and “anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition.” Churchill had also asked Roosevelt to send a naval squadron to Ireland, for fear of a possible German invasion. In return he had offered the use of the British port of Singapore to help the Americans “keep that Japanese dog quiet in the Pacific.”
Roosevelt replied that “it would be possible to hand over 40 or 50 destroyers of the old type, but this is subject to the special approval of Congress, which would be difficult to obtain at present.” This was the genesis of the “Destroyers for Bases” deal, also known as “Lend-Lease,” in which the United States would swap fifty aging American warships for leases on various outlying British bases. Despite heavy opposition from both Congress and the US Navy, Roosevelt would force the deal through. The first destroyers were delivered (full of supplies) in September of that year. But on May 16, 1940, when Wolkoff first read Roosevelt’s message, its meaning was less clear.
Later that day, Wolkoff and Mackie stumbled through the blackout to a private residence in Chelsea where they posted an envelope through the door. Inside was a copy of Roosevelt’s message to Churchill, the one that had been received in London earlier that day. This house was the home of “Mr. Macaroni,” who was in fact Francesco Marigliano, Duca del Monte—which explains the line about tinned fruit. Del Monte was an experienced Italian diplomat and close friend of Mussolini who had in the past couriered secret messages between Rome and London. He was connected to Italian intelligence. “It is understood,” wrote Mackie shortly afterward, “that the Italians were very pleased with this information.”
One week later, a message arrived in Berlin from the German ambassador in Rome. It gave an accurate precis of Roosevelt’s message about destroyers. The German ambassador explained that his information came from an “unimpeachable source.” By passing this classified document to an Italian diplomat, at a time when Italy was a military ally of Nazi Germany, Anna Wolkoff had committed a flagrant act of espionage.
The following day, Albert Canning, the head of Special Branch, and M went to see a Home Office assistant secretary, Sir Ernest Holderness. They were accompanied by an MI5 lawyer, Toby Pilcher (whose father would have been known to M because he, too, had belonged to the British Fascists in the 1920s). The meeting went well. Holderness asked how many homegrown Fascists MI5 would like to see interned.
“We said that as a maximum about 500, though if absolutely necessary we would be prepared to modify this.” Holderness then went to present the MI5 case to the home secretary.
A message came back from the Home Office later that day. They were absolutely opposed to MI5’s plans for mass internment, arguing that there was no evidence of any Fifth Column activity in Britain.
Churchill’s position was pointedly different. Less than twenty-four hours later, on Saturday, May 18, the War Cabinet met to discuss the question of British political extremists. “Action should also be taken against Communists and Fascists,” urged Churchill, “and very considerable numbers should be put in protective or preventive internment, including their leaders.” His views seemed to be perfectly aligned with M’s. The cabinet agreed with him. But again, the Home Office demurred.
“During wartime,” wrote M, “there will always come a point in an investigation where an agent must be sacrificed in order to achieve satisfactory results; and the Intelligence Officer in charge of the case must face the responsibility of deciding the exact point at which such sacrifice must be made.” M decided that this moment had come. Just hours after that cabinet meeting, M went to meet Herschel Johnson, a senior official at the US Embassy.
M told him that an American embassy official had been stealing documents and passing them on to an extremist right-wing organization that was suspected of espionage. He then took Johnson through the association between Wolkoff and Kent, adding that Kent had been seen the year before in the company of Ludwig Matthias, a suspected Gestapo agent.
Johnson was “profoundly shocked,” wrote M. He was also furious that MI5 had waited until now to tell them about Tyler Kent. He demanded to know why they had been kept in the dark for so long. M replied that nothing had been found to confirm that Matthias was actually a spy.
Perhaps wanting to change the subject, M handed over his written summary of MI5’s case against Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff. Johnson would have been justified in telling the MI5 officer at this point that he could handle the situation from here, before showing him politely to the door. Instead, he agreed to M’s request. The MI5 spymaster wanted to do more than stanch the flow of secrets from the US Embassy. Rather than have the Americans deal with Kent internally, as they might have done, M wanted a synchronized double arrest of Kent and Wolkoff.
This was partly a practical measure, but mainly it was to increase the impact of these arrests and to draw out the connection between Wolkoff and Kent. If the Americans agreed to waive Kent’s diplomatic immunity, M could arrange for his arrest to take place at the same time as Wolkoff’s on Monday morning.
M saw Johnson again the next day, Sunday. By then, the US ambassador, Joe Kennedy, who had been out of town for the weekend, had been briefed. He, too, was livid about being kept out of the loop for so long. But he agreed to M’s request.
All that remained was for the State Department in Washington, DC, to confirm the removal of Kent’s diplomatic immunity. The problem was that Kent himself was due to work in the Code Room that night, just as the message waiving his immunity would come in. Johnson “will act with great care,” reported M, “in order to see that there is no leakage which might get back to Tyler Kent.” It was agreed that the arrests of Kent and Wolkoff would go ahead the next day.