M Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Henry Hemming

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  PART I: BECOMING M

   1: A Man Adrift

   2: The Makgill Organisation

   3: Bloody Fools

   4: The Razor’s Edge

   5: Revenge

   6: The Freelance Spymaster

   7: The Day

   8: Exile

   9: Morton’s Plan

  10: ‘I Can Make Things Bloody Unpleasant for You’

  PART II: THE RED MENACE

  11: Olga

  12: The M Organisation

  13: Watchers

  14: Cuckoo Eggs

  15: Trailing One’s Coat

  16: An Author with Unpredictable Hours

  17: Heart and Soul

  18: Blackshirts

  19: Courier

  20: The Honeymooning Spy

  21: Olga Pulloffski

  22: Mussolini’s Man

  23: A Mysterious Affair

  24: Percy’s Proposal

  25: Mr Peters

  26: Moscow Moves

  27: Old Friends, New Agents

  28: Reprieve

  29: Miss X

  30: Mona

  31: ‘What a Very Beautiful View’

  32: Crisis

  PART III: THE ENEMY WITHIN

  33: Mrs Mackie Investigates

  34: The Fashion Designer

  35: The Mystic

  36: A Smokescreen

  37: A Letter to an Old Friend

  38: Carlyle

  39: Victory at All Costs

  40: The Raid

  41: The Meeting

  42: The Trial

  43: Knight’s Black Agents

  44: The Comintern Is Not Dead

  45: Rebirth

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Despite an almost total lack of qualifications, Maxwell Knight rose to the top of MI5 to run pivotal operations for national security during WWII. He ran an intricate network of agents amongst the Communist organisations of London and did more than anyone else to break up British fascism, in spite of his own history inside the movement.

  But whilst his career achievements are outstanding, the eccentricities of his personal life are astonishing. Whilst sharing his residences with a bear and a bush baby, he was running a series of undercover spies in the Fascist movement. When living in a pub on a Devon moor he was recruited to run an illegal spy ring in London. Thrice-married, he was the first in MI5 to fully grasp the potential of running female agents. A revered broadcaster, he inspired ordinary citizens to lead double lives in order to serve their country.

  In telling Knight’s remarkable story, M also reveals for the first time in print the names and stories of some of the men and women recruited by Knight, who were then asked to infiltrate the most dangerous political organizations in Britain. Drawing on declassified documents, private family archives and original interviews, M reveals not just the shadowy world of espionage but a brilliant, enigmatic man at its centre.

  About the Author

  Henry Hemming is the author of five previous works of Non Fiction, including most recently Churchill’s Iceman, published in the US as The Ingenious Mr. Pyke, where it became a New York Times bestseller. Earlier works include Misadventure in the Middle East and In Search of the English Eccentric. He has written for the Economist, The Sunday Times, FT Magazine and the Washington Post, among many others. He lives in London with his two children.

  Also by Henry Hemming

  Misadventure in the Middle East

  In Search of the English Eccentric

  Together

  Churchill’s Iceman

  M

  Maxwell Knight,

  MI5’s Greatest Spymaster

  Henry Hemming

  For Matilda,

  My M

  If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

  – E. M. Forster, ‘What I Believe’, in Two Cheers for Democracy

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is based on recently declassified MI5 files, conversations with former officers from MI5 and MI6, and the relatives of Maxwell Knight and the agents he ran, as well as diaries, memoirs, newspaper reports and contemporary accounts. References for most quotations can be found at the back of the book.

  Maxwell Knight may have been the greatest spymaster ever employed by MI5, Britain’s counterespionage agency, yet technically he never worked for it. The organisation that we all know today as MI5 was quietly renamed ‘the Security Service’ several weeks before Knight began to work there, but the new title took years to catch on in Whitehall. For most people today the Security Service is better known as MI5, the name I have used in this book. Maxwell Knight also worked at one point for MI5’s foreign counterpart, originally known as MI1(c) or C’s Organisation, later MI6 and today SIS, which I have referred to throughout as MI6. (Just to help tell them apart: the TV series Spooks is set in MI5, whereas James Bond works for MI6.)

  The most complex relationship in espionage, as well as the most fraught and dramatically compelling, is usually between the operative out in the field who gathers information and the man or woman to whom that operative reports. There are all sorts of terms to describe the two roles. The individual collecting intelligence might be a contact, source, informant, spy or agent (and if this agent takes on his or her own informants, they are subagents), while the person they report to could be the agent runner, agent handler, officer, case officer, operations officer or spymaster. A further source of confusion is that an American intelligence officer can sometimes be referred to as an agent. In this book I have generally referred to the people who gather intelligence as agents, and those who look after them as either officers or spymasters. For clarification on this, or any other question, feel free to get in touch. My email address can be found at henryhemming.com

  Henry Hemming

  January 2017

  PROLOGUE

  Early on Monday, 20 May, 1940, at a point in the Second World War when the threat of a Nazi invasion of Britain feels unmistakably real, a police car pulls up outside a boarding house in central London. Five men pile out of the vehicle and make for the building. The door is opened by a maid. One of the men explains that they are looking for an American. His name is Tyler Kent. She asks them to wait and goes to fetch her employer. There follows a pause, probably no more than a few seconds, before the five men rush into the building.

  One goes after the maid, while the others make a dash for the stairs. Two of the four men now haring up the staircase of No. 47 Gloucester Place are seasoned, solid-looking police detectives from Special Branch. The third is an official from the United States Embassy. The last is a broad-shouldered thirty-nine-year-old with a beaky nose and a gait that speaks of long country walks. His name is Maxwell Knight. To his friends, he is Max. To most of his colleagues in MI5, Britain’s counterespionage agency, and to his sprawling family of undercover agents, he is better known as ‘M’.

  This is M’s raid. It is based on his analysis of intelligence from his operatives, a web of men and women that he personally recruited to his maverick wing of MI5 known as ‘M Section’. His speciality is getting agents inside extremist political groups. One of M’s undercover operatives, a middle-aged single mother who made a living before the war doing cooking demonstrations, recently provided her spymaster with the intelligence that led to this raid.

&nbs
p; After the first flight of stairs, the four men are confronted by the landlady. One of the detectives produces his search warrant and asks for the whereabouts of Kent. She gestures at the door behind them.

  Tyler Kent is an American embassy official that M believes to be a Nazi spy. If the man from MI5 is wrong about this, there will be a diplomatic incident. If he is right, but has left it too late, classified communications may have already been dispatched to Rome and from there to Berlin. In the spy films this spymaster loves to watch the plot usually centres on an enemy agent trying to steal secret papers – the ‘MacGuffin’, as Alfred Hitchcock calls them. It rarely matters what is on those papers. This is different. The documents that M hopes to find, and that the alleged Nazi spy has stolen, contain secret correspondence between Winston Churchill, the new British Prime Minister, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US President, which, in the wrong hands, could change the course of the war.

  One of the detectives tries the door. It is bolted shut from the inside, so he knocks.

  ‘Don’t come in,’ a man calls out.

  The detective knocks again.

  ‘Don’t come in!’ The voice is more indignant this time. M can hear traces of a whispered conversation and the irregular clunk-clunk-clunk of people moving about suddenly and at speed.

  One of the detectives walks away from the door, turns and prepares to charge. His name is Inspector Pearson and he is built like the side of a barn. The rest of the men clear a path to give him a clear run at the door and for a moment in that corridor, while elsewhere in London people are making their way to work, and across the English Channel German forces continue to bomb, shell and shoot their way towards Paris, all is still.

  It is hard to say precisely what is running through M’s mind at this point in the operation, only that very recently in his life he reached a crossroads. The outbreak of war nine months earlier forced him to confront a ghost from his past. Now as he stands in the corridor, waiting for the policeman to break down the door, he is facing a decision that will change the way he is seen for years to come. This MI5 spymaster knows that he must choose between his friends and his country, punishing one in order to protect the other, and if he does not make this decision soon, very soon, it might be made for him. M is a man who has always valued loyalty above any other human quality, yet at this point in his life, to his dismay, he must contemplate a betrayal.

  Inspector Pearson jogs down the corridor. Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. Crack. M watches his body slam into the door. The wood gives way with an easy splintering sound, and the passage is filled with light. The men race in.

  PART I

  BECOMING M

  1

  A MAN ADRIFT

  It began in 1923, when Maxwell Knight agreed to meet a man called Makgill.

  Knight, or just Max, as everybody knew him, was an energetic twenty-three-year-old unhappily employed as a school games teacher. He was good-looking in an unconventional way, ears a little too big, nose more prominent than he might have liked. He wore his hair scraped back under a film of pomade. He had an easy, sporty air and the enviable ability to put people at ease. Yet on that particular day, the day that he went to meet Makgill, it is unlikely that he was feeling his usual relaxed self.

  Although there is no record of where this interview took place, it was probably at the Guards Club, in central London, where Makgill had conducted meetings like this in the past. Entering the club, Max would have noticed the sudden change in atmosphere as the doors to the street cracked shut behind him. It was worlds away from the sweaty, swaying clubs of nearby Soho where he spent most of his evenings. The air tasted cleaner in here. The lighting was sharper, more refined. It was quieter, too, the silence broken only by the hushed drum of his footsteps and the distant flutters of conversation. Indeed, most features of this venerable gentlemen’s club, from its polished neo-Georgian furnishings and Palladian proportions to the enormous elevated portraits of gimlet-eyed army officers, had been chosen to impress upon visitors the calibre and standing of the men who belonged to this military tribe. Usually, it had the effect of putting newcomers on edge. Making matters worse, Max had almost no idea what he was doing there.

  He had agreed to the meeting after a chance encounter at an event staged by the British Empire Union, a right-wing political group that campaigned against the spread of Communism. Max had got into conversation with John Baker White, the son of a Kentish landowner. Baker White had asked the young games teacher whether he might be interested in doing some part-time work of a patriotic nature. For reasons that will soon become clear, Max agreed immediately.

  The man that Max was now set to meet was Sir George Makgill, eleventh Baronet and de jure eleventh Viscount of Oxfuird, a square-jawed industrialist who was also a Freemason, a novelist and a terrifying interviewer. Another young man who went to meet Makgill in similar circumstances would confess that ‘except for an uncomfortable twenty-four hours I spent with the Troisième Bureau [part of the French Security Service] some time later, I have never experienced such searching cross-questioning’.1 Max had just walked into the job interview from hell, for a position that had not yet been described to him.

  Makgill’s aim in the cross-examination that followed was simple. This no-nonsense, gruff industrialist wanted to get the measure of Maxwell Knight, to find out what this twenty-three-year-old stood for, the type of man he was and, most importantly, whether he could be trusted.

  All of us are guilty in job interviews of projecting a version of ourselves, or at least trying to do so. Max would have gone out of his way to present himself to Makgill as an upright ex-naval officer from a good family, a young man who was patriotic, tough and utterly trustworthy. In some ways, he was all these things. During the last two years of the First World War, Max had been an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve, having volunteered for active service at the age of seventeen. He had served on destroyers and converted trawlers, and although he did not see enemy action, he was thought to have done well and was promoted to Hydrophone Officer, first class, finishing the war with the rank of Midshipman. Even though Max was forced to take shore leave on one occasion as a result of seasickness, he was judged to be ‘a promising young officer’.2

  Before that Max had spent several years as a cadet on HMS Worcester, a doggedly strict naval training vessel. So, no one could quibble with his describing himself as tough. As for his family background, Max could draw faithfully on childhood memories of exploring the grounds of the Knight family pile in Wales, Tythegston Court, a manor house set amid glorious rolling parkland. His ancestors had been clerics, antiquarians and landowners. One of his cousins was R. D. Blackmore, author of Lorna Doone, the classic Victorian romance. Although they were not quite landed gentry, the Knights had been men and women of private means and admirable reputation. When asked about his politics, Max could point to his having been talent-spotted at a meeting of the British Empire Union as evidence of his hatred of Communism and his unwavering patriotism.

  So far, so good. This was the version of himself that Max had arrogated and wanted the world to see. But there was another side to him, a shadow self that he would not have presented to Makgill during that interview. Max did not volunteer that he had recently been declared the black sheep of his family, cut off financially by the family patriarch and banned from future Knight family gatherings, or that he spent his evenings drinking champagne and dancing in grungy Soho cellar clubs. He probably kept to himself that he had been kicked out of the civil service after less than a year, and that the most likely reason for his decision to join the British Empire Union was neither patriotic nor political. It was to impress his girlfriend.

  We all contain contradictions. Max Knight, by the age of twenty-three, cleaved to more than most. He had shown himself in the last few years to be patriotic and tough as well as rash, directionless and a source of intense frustration to his family. The job Makgill had in mind was an unforgiving test of character. It was demanding and dangerous and could
last for years. To satisfy himself that Max was suitable, this middle-aged industrialist needed to get beneath the young man’s veneer of clubbable charm in order to understand the person he was at his core. One way to do that was by examining his past.

  Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July, 1900, and spent most of his childhood in the village of Mitcham, which was not yet part of London but no longer part of the surrounding countryside either. His father was a solicitor, as well as a philanderer and a spendthrift. Max’s mother, Ada, who was by then on her second marriage, was large and loud and loved to sing. She was the livewire of the Knight household. When her cheating husband ran out of money, as he frequently did, it was Ada who packed up their modest belongings and took their youngest, Max, and his two siblings, Eric and Enid, to stay with their rich uncle in Wales. The reason Max had such vivid memories of life at Tythegston Court, with its servants, its manicured formal gardens and its rambling grounds, was that his father was so often broke.

  Yet the defining characteristic of Max’s early years was not this financial insecurity, and the peripatetic life which followed; it concerned his relationship with wild creatures. As a child, Max was obsessed with animals. By the age of nine, he had kept lizards, mice, rats, hedgehogs, slow worms, many different species of bird, ‘and, of course,’ he wrote, ‘the inevitable tortoises’.3 Rescuing animals and taking care of them was a fixation for him, and it helped to bring this otherwise shy boy out of himself. ‘I was brought up never to be afraid of any animal without good reason,’ he once wrote.4 This hobby burnished him with a lifelong love of the outdoors. It may have also given him an underlying fearlessness.

  His most treasured boyhood memories were of going onto Mitcham Common to hear the churring of the nightjars and the harsh, rasping call of the corncrake, or those moments in his life when he had found an injured creature in the wild, captured it, tamed it and nursed it back to health. When asked about his favourite boyhood pet – Agatha, a white Agouti rat – he described her as ‘more intelligent than any other rat I ever owned – and I had many’.5 More than other boys his age, Max seemed to relish the slow, sleuthing discovery of character. He treated each animal as an individual and liked to spend hours alone with his pets, studiously working out their separate personalities.