M

Maxwell Knight,
MI5’s Greatest Spymaster

Henry Hemming

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Epub ISBN: 9781409052524

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Published by Preface Publishing 2017

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Copyright © Henry Hemming, 2017
Cover: Figure © Arcangel, London © Getty

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First published by Preface Publishing in 2017

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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.

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.

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.

His family tolerated all this – often it amused them – yet none of them could really understand why these creatures responded to him as they did. This sometimes withdrawn boy appeared to have what naturalists call ‘the gift’. Within a month of finding a female toad, for example, which, for reasons known only to Max, he had christened Ted, he had tamed her. ‘I got her to feed out of my hand, and she would even take hold of an earth-worm suspended from my fingers and try to pull it out of my grasp.’⁶ Few wild-born toads will feed from a human hand. Fewer still are happy to do this after so little time in captivity.

‘He handled them brilliantly,’ a cousin later recalled. ‘They seemed to come to him easily, trustingly.’⁷ In the way that some gardeners are green-fingered, Max had an apparently intuitive understanding of how to handle animals, a personal magnetism. They trusted him, especially female creatures, it seemed, and throughout his childhood he continued to display this rare gift.

At the age of twelve, he was paid seven shillings and sixpence for an article of his on animal welfare. In the same year he proudly sewed onto his shirt the naturalist badge that he had been awarded as a Boy Scout. His ambitions at the time were to be either a zookeeper, a vet or a taxidermist. It was clear to anyone who knew Max, or those who saw him handle pets, that his career would involve animals.

Then came 1914. In May of that year, Max’s father died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-three after a short illness. Hugh Knight’s death seemed to confirm an absence in his son’s life rather than create one. His father had been a peripheral presence, one whose place in the family hierarchy was rapidly assumed by Hugh’s brother, Robert, who was parsimonious, prudish and much less forgiving of Max. He saw his nephew as wayward. Others might have been charmed by Max’s love of animals, or his growing interest in music. Not Uncle Robert. Soon after Hugh’s death, Robert Knight had his nephew dispatched to HMS Worcester, a training vessel for those going into the merchant navy. Max’s mother was by then financially dependent on her brother-in-law Robert and was either unable to intervene or unwilling to do so.

To describe the regime on board this naval training vessel as Spartan would be unkind to that ancient Greek city-state. HMS Worcester had it all: barbaric initiation ceremonies, arcane traditions, a rigid pecking order, rampant bullying and a rule against boys having more than one bath a week. The food was ‘unfit for human consumption’.⁸ Cadets were deprived of sleep, and during the winter it was knee-shakingly cold. Yet life on board HMS Worcester certainly had the desired effect of hardening up its teenage cadets.

By the end of 1914, Max was living in a country that had gone to war, his elder brother was fighting in the trenches, his father had recently died, while he himself had started a harsh new life as a naval cadet. Aged fourteen, he had been fast-tracked into adulthood.

After several years on HMS Worcester, Max volunteered for the Royal Naval Reserve. Although he emerged from the conflict unscathed, in the last year of the war his brother, Eric, was killed on the Western Front. This left Max, by the end of the war, bereft of the two most important men in his life. He finished his naval career in 1919 and went to live with his mother and sister in London, where he took a lowly job as a clerk at the Ministry of Shipping. With no father or brother to rein him in, he was soon sucked into a subversive new movement. While other men his age worried about the protean political shape of the world, eagerly signing up to trade unions and political parties, Max joined a different kind of party. He got into jazz.

The jazz scene in postwar London was irreverent and wild, an uncharted, exotic land where it seemed that anything went. ‘You can call off imaginary figures, yell “hot dog” in the midst of some perfectly decorous dance, and make a donkey of yourself generally.⁹ That is jazz,’ said Paul Whiteman, the so-called King of Jazz, adding: ‘anybody can jazz’. Jazz was a musical movement as much as a youthful provocation. It was rebellious, out of control and for many people in Britain its sudden popularity signalled a breakdown in morality. The nineteen-year-old Maxwell Knight could not get enough of it.

On leaving the navy, right after the end of the war, Max set up a jazz band composed of ex-servicemen. It was, he claimed, ‘London’s first small, hot combination’.¹⁰ If they really were ‘hot’, then some credit for their playing should go to the man then giving Max clarinet lessons: Sidney Bechet, the legendary jazz saxophonist who was then based in London, a musician whose playing fell upon the listener, wrote Philip Larkin, ‘as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes’.¹¹ Max later recalled a ‘sort of jam session’ with Bechet in which the maestro played on a soprano saxophone ‘Softly Awakes My Heart’, from the opera Samson and Delilah, while the young civil servant ‘did my best to be with him on the clarinet’ – possibly the same instrument he had just bought from Bechet.¹² Max also became friends with members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, including its leader, Nick LaRocca, who gave him the first pressing of their hit record Rag Tiger. It did not survive. ‘Some ass of a friend of mine a few years later went and put his foot on it.’¹³

In these loud and out-of-control months after leaving the Royal Naval Reserve, jazz became a governing passion in Max’s life, but it did not replace the other one. Even as he threw himself into the demi-monde of London’s new jazz scene, making new friends everywhere he went, alive to its possibilities, Max continued to collect animals. Like a young man who refuses to pack away his boyhood train set, and expands it instead, he now had more animals than ever before. As well as mice and a bush baby – a small furry primate with worried-looking eyes and the pointed ears of a bat – there was a parrot living in his flat and several grass snakes. On at least one occasion, his two hobbies collided when he tried to impersonate a snake charmer by playing his clarinet ‘fairly close’ to his pet snakes.¹⁴ To his lasting disappointment, the snakes did not respond.

Just as it seemed that there was no room in his life for another animal, Max acquired a new pet that he called Bessie. Yet few people remembered this animal’s name. They found it hard to see past the fact that Bessie was a bear.

This particular bear, Max recalled, was ‘the most attractive bundle of cunning and mischief that you could possibly imagine’.¹⁵ Bessie the bear caused mayhem wherever she went, knocking over furniture in Max’s flat, rootling around in the kitchen and on one occasion getting her snout stuck in the flour jar. Max would put her in a harness and take her out for walks in the street. Passers-by mistook her for an exuberant and rather large Chow puppy.

Otherwise, Bessie spent her days inside Max’s flat, in a mansion block in Putney, southwest London, where she seemed to get on well with the other pets, including a bulldog and a young baboon. This list of animals is revealing. Nobody else in London had a bear, a bulldog and a baboon. Max made sure to mention this to a gossip columnist that he had befriended, who made him and his exotic menagerie the subject of a short article. As a boy, Max had had no interest in looking after common-or-garden pets such as rabbits or guinea pigs, partly because he thought they were ‘stupid’ but also because nobody paid them much attention. Max was a watcher at heart, yet it seemed that he also liked to be seen.

There may have been another reason why he clung on with such tenacity to his childhood hobby. Looking after these animals must have reminded him of that more innocent age he had enjoyed before his life had been upended by war, adolescence, HMS Worcester and the deaths of his brother and father. Max’s childhood was unfinished business. Caring for these pets was perhaps a way of getting back to it.

Given the jazz, the animals, the drinking and the dancing, his day job at the Ministry of Shipping was for him a distraction as much as anything else, and after no more than a year, he was out. It is unclear whether he resigned or was sacked. A respectable career as a civil servant had stretched out before him, and with it stability, status and security, but it had come too soon.

Having left the civil service, Max found a job selling paint. Not long after this unusual career move, his uncle decided to cut him off. Robert Knight was no longer prepared to endure the spectacle of his nephew’s life unravelling like this. He announced that forthwith Max was banned from all family gatherings and would no longer receive his modest allowance.

This was a heavy, lasting blow. Max had never seen himself as a rebel. He wanted to lead a more unbuttoned life than most of his contemporaries and he enjoyed being the odd man out. ‘In a world where we are all tending to get more and more alike,’ he later wrote, ‘a few unusual people give a little colour to life!’¹⁶ Until then, he had imagined that everyone was laughing along with him – but not his uncle, it seemed, who had come to think of him as a pleasure-seeking Peter Pan more interested in jazz and pets than settling down to become a conscientious civil servant.

Max was still living in Putney with his sister and mother. Although the two women in his life did not turn on him in the wake of his family excommunication, they could hardly ignore what had happened. When Ada made a codicil to her will shortly after, to reflect the death of Max’s brother, Eric, who was one of the executors, she chose to substitute Eric with a former colleague of her late husband. Clearly Max could not be trusted with this level of responsibility.

Max’s new career as a paint salesman lasted only a few months, after which he found a job teaching games at the well-to-do Willington Prep School in Putney. Sometimes he filled in for a colleague by taking an English class, hoping, perhaps, that this might lead to more time spent teaching more challenging subjects. But it did not.

By 1923, Max was stuck. He even tried to become a novelist to escape his predicament, writing short stories in the style of John Buchan, his favourite author, whose amateur spy and all-action hero Richard Hannay from books such as The Thirty-Nine Steps he idolised, and sending these off to boys’ magazines. But if any of them were published, there is no record of it. All the doors in Maxwell Knight’s life appeared to have closed. He had a lot to prove and dangerously little to lose. He was also very short of money.

The only bright spot in Max’s life was his girlfriend, Hazel Barr, a quiet eighteen-year-old schoolgirl he had met one morning on the upper deck of a bus. He had been going to work, she to school. There was a spark between them. They began to take the same bus each day. Max was soon invited to meet Hazel’s parents, and made a winning impression on her mother. Indeed Mrs Barr began to wonder whether this nice young games teacher was going to propose marriage to her daughter. Although Hazel and Max did not have sex, which was normal for an unmarried couple at the time, they saw a lot of each other. Hazel later described herself as ‘completely enamoured’ of Max, adding, ‘I think the feeling was mutual.’¹⁷ Hazel also appears to have taken her beau along to an event staged by the British Empire Union, which was probably how Max came to meet John Baker White.

Given the dead-end Max had reached in his career, when asked by Baker White in 1923 whether he was interested in part-time, paid work of a patriotic nature, his response would have been emphatic and fast.

Not long after, he went to see Sir George Makgill.

What did Makgill make of Max? He was certainly different from the other men Baker White sent to him. Usually, these were bluff ex-officers in the mould of Bulldog Drummond, the fictional soldier famous for his Hun-bashing, Bolshie-baiting approach to life. Max Knight kept mice. He was not terribly interested in politics, and he adored jazz – which for a reactionary like Makgill was a tuneless abomination. Here was a twenty-three-year-old drop-out whose great gift in life, his ability to look after animals, seemed to qualify him to do little more than work in a zoo. Yet Makgill saw qualities in this apparently feckless young man that might be useful to him.

It was a gamble – every agent recruitment is – but Makgill concluded that Maxwell Knight might be suitable for the task he had in mind. It was probably at this point in their conversation that Makgill began to explain a little more about himself and his organisation.

2

THE MAKGILL ORGANISATION

Sir George Makgill had been on the other side of the world when he heard that his father had died. The elder son of a Scottish baronet, he had taken himself off to New Zealand several years earlier, and had expected to be there for a long time, when he learned of his father’s death and that he had inherited a title, land, property, money and a vast portfolio of shares and industrial holdings. Makgill’s understanding of the world began to change. He returned to Britain, where his boyish patriotism hardened into a more prickly nationalism. During the First World War, he campaigned for a boycott of all German goods. He funded the Anti-German Union and lobbied hard for the expulsion from the Privy Council, which advised the monarch, of two of the country’s leading Jewish politicians, Sir Ernest Cassel and Sir Edgar Speyer, arguing that they were not sufficiently British. But it was only towards the end of the war that Sir George Makgill found what he believed to be his calling in life.

‘The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution,’ warned the Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1919.¹ By then, Russia had fallen to Communism. Germany looked set to follow. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed. The Ottoman Empire was on the brink, and Bavaria and Hungary had just become Soviet Republics. The Communist threat to Britain in the immediate aftermath of the First World War was real and it was different. In 1920, the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon complained that the Soviet Union ‘makes no secret of its intention to overthrow our institutions everywhere and to destroy our prestige and authority’.² In the past, Britain’s enemies had endangered particular trade routes or far-flung colonial territories. Yet Communism and the Soviet Union imperilled the British ruling class, capitalism as an economic system and the entire British Empire. Although the British government tried to suffocate the Bolshevik experiment at birth, supplying arms and assistance to White Russian rebels in the years after the establishment of the new Communist regime in Russia, it failed. The Soviet Union emerged triumphant and was now stronger than ever. Moscow had both the resources and the will to succeed, as well as a recruiting tool of explosive potency. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 demonstrated beyond any argument that a speedy socialist revolution in an ageing autocracy, like Britain, was not just fantasy. It was realistic, and surprisingly easy to carry out.

Most worrying for a man like Makgill, and so many others within Britain’s social, industrial and political elite, was the growing sympathy for the Soviet Union among large chunks of the newly enfranchised working class. Between 1914 and 1918, the size of the British electorate had more than doubled. For many of these new voters, the Bolsheviks had the noble appeal of the underdog. Trade union membership in Britain had rocketed. Unemployment would soon be on the rise, leaving the country hamstrung by industrial action. In 1920 alone, twenty-six million working days were lost to strikes. Even the police had gone on strike. The promise of Communism, or the threat of it, depending on your perspective, was without precedent. Sir George Makgill was one of those who became convinced that the British government had not recognised this danger for what it was. So, the baronet decided to take matters into his own hands.

With the help of fellow industrialists, landowners and politicians who belonged to the British Empire Union, of which he was Honorary Secretary, Makgill set up a private intelligence agency. It was run, according to MI5, ‘somewhat on Masonic lines’, and would be known by various names, including the Industrial Intelligence Bureau and Section D (possibly after ‘Don’, its chief agent-runner).³ Yet the ‘Makgill Organisation’ is most apt, for, like so many intelligence agencies, its activities came to reflect the fears and private obsessions of those in charge, which in this case meant Makgill himself.

Some of the principal customers for its intelligence product were factory owners and right-wing industrialists from the Coal Owners’ and Ship-Owners’ Associations or the Federation of British Industries. They wanted timely information on forthcoming strikes and the names of prominent Communists and trade unionists. But these were not the only people interested in its intelligence. Makgill planted agents inside the Communist Party and the more militant trade unions as well as pretty much any other group he did not like the sound of or was intrigued by: Anarchists, Irish Home Rulers, women traffickers, Occultists; everything from the Rudolf Steiner Anthroposophical Society to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Yet there was never any hesitation or doubt in Makgill’s mind that the principal threat came from the Soviet Union.

With so many groups to investigate, Makgill was almost constantly on the lookout for new agents. He used talent-spotters like Baker White to send him potential recruits, which was how he had come to be interviewing Max.

Makgill sought two qualities in his agents. The first was an almost Masonic emphasis on secrecy. ‘If you talk,’ Makgill had told Baker White, ‘you’re out.’⁴ The second was more idiosyncratic. He would only take on agents who shared his political outlook. This was the ‘unique feature’ of the Makgill Organisation that ensured that ‘every man and woman working in it could be trusted’.⁵

It is hard to say whether Makgill felt that Max lacked one of these qualities, but the first job he gave him was certainly unusual. Max was not asked to join a trade union or become a Communist. Instead, his instructions were to penetrate a political group that posed no apparent threat to the country, to Sir George Makgill or to any of his cronies. Max’s target was an organisation that was conservative, patriotic and staunchly anti-Communist, the kind of group Makgill himself might have set up.

Max did not mind. The work sounded exciting, demanding and important, in stark contrast to his life as an impoverished games teacher. He said yes.

3

BLOODY FOOLS

Soon after being taken on by Sir George Makgill in 1923, Maxwell Knight walked into a severe-looking building off the King’s Road in Chelsea, west London, the headquarters of a group called the British Fascisti, where he offered his services as a volunteer. Max had just stepped into the political fringe of postwar London. This was a land with its own rules, and he would have to learn them all, and fast, for Makgill provided no training. Instead, this first-time agent had to make it up as he went along.

Max’s task was to secure a lowly position inside the Intelligence Department of the British Fascisti, or BF, as it was known, before quietly working his way up in the years that followed. He was a ‘penetration agent’, but with a difference. Usually, Makgill ordered his men to join a target organisation, gain acceptance as an ordinary member, and then, like a young cuckoo in another bird’s nest, wreak havoc from within. Yet Max’s instructions were to let the British Fascisti carry on with its work uninterrupted. His job was simply to keep an eye out for potential recruits to the Makgill Organisation and otherwise to steal intelligence from the BF. Quite why Makgill did not openly collaborate with this group, given their shared interests and aims, is unclear. We can only assume that the wealthy industrialist had tried to do this but had been rebuffed, and in response he decided to send in an undercover agent.

In the headquarters of the British Fascisti, Max encountered a ‘superfluity of voluntary workers’, most of whom seemed to ‘come and go as they wish and can never be depended upon’.¹ He became one of them, taking the part-time and unpaid position of ‘Research Officer’. His career as an undercover agent had begun. Now he could learn more about the organisation he had infiltrated.

The British Fascisti was the brainchild of Rotha Lintorn-Orman, a twenty-eight-year-old lesbian who had served as an ambulance driver during the war. She had been decorated for bravery but had returned to a country she frequently found hard to recognise. Many of those who came back from active duty overseas experienced a similar sense of unease and bewilderment. It was as if they spoke a different language from the civilians at home, and had acquired an alternative set of values. Lintorn-Orman was also amazed to find the country paralysed by industrial unrest. Like so many others, she blamed international Communism.

It is hard to exaggerate the impact on British society of not only five years of bloody, total war but also the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires and the birth of the Soviet Union, all in the space of just a few years. The effect was cataclysmic. It was as if the foundations of the established world order had been blown out, leaving an apparently endless vista of new political possibilities. Whereas some people in Britain found this inspiring, others were more fearful. Rotha Lintorn-Orman wanted to do whatever she could to prevent Britain from succumbing to Socialism, which meant protecting the country from the Soviet Union and its ideology, and in this she was not alone. One of her closest allies at this point in her political career, a woman who shared her resolve and determination, was her mother. In May 1923, Blanche Lintorn-Orman gave her daughter Rotha the colossal sum of £50,000 (equivalent to just over £1 million today) to defend the country from the so-called Red Menace.

At the time, Benito Mussolini was the only European leader to have successfully expunged Communism from his country’s political fabric. Without really looking into the minutiae of what Mussolini stood for, or what Fascism was, Rotha Lintorn-Orman set up a group inspired by the Italian leader’s example. It was run initially from the London offices of the Partito Nazionale Fascista Italiano, Mussolini’s party, and was called ‘The British Fascisti’.

At the time, expressing admiration for Mussolini was a lot less radical than it sounds today. The Times, the Morning Post and the Observer were frequently complimentary towards the Italian leader. Winston Churchill referred to him as ‘the Roman genius’.² Mussolini had even been employed by MI5 in 1917, when he was paid £100 a week to ‘persuade’ left-wing Italian protesters to stay at home.³ Yet the strangest feature of Rotha Lintorn-Orman’s new group was not so much its name or the overt connection it had to Mussolini, but that the original programme of the British Fascisti did not contain anything that could be described as clearly fascist. Instead of being patriarchal, anti-Semitic and revolutionary, the British Fascisti seemed to be more interested in dressing up in uniform, organising marches and professing its love of the monarchy or its desire to defeat Communism. Rather than being entirely male, this group had been set up by a woman and its original Grand Council contained more women than men.

Lintorn-Orman’s first move as leader of the BF was to set up an informal nationwide militia with branches all over the country. In the event of a socialist uprising, the idea was that these units would rise up to fight ‘for King and Country’ – a popular BF slogan that had also been used to recruit British soldiers during the war.

The reaction of most British people to the launch of Lintorn-Orman’s patriotic new group was one of bemusement. The group’s acronym did not help. ‘BF’ also stood for ‘Bloody Fool’. One eager member of the BF recalled those who ‘decried my youthful enthusiasm and dismissed us as having Bolsheviks under our beds’.⁴ Yet there were those who took this group very seriously. Within a year of the BF’s formation, tens of thousands of Britons had paid to join up, including minor aristocrats, disgruntled ex-army officers and Conservative members of Parliament such as Patrick Hannon and Colonel Sir Charles Burn, a former aide-de-camp to the King. The BF even recruited the captain of the England cricket team, Arthur Gilligan, who may have introduced Fascism to Australia during the 1924–25 Ashes tour. He probably saw this as his only accomplishment during what turned out to be a whitewash 5–0 defeat.

Apart from these headline-grabbing recruits, the rump of the BF’s membership was made up of disillusioned Tories, many of whom had fought during the war and were now gravely concerned about a Communist uprising. They shared a belief that the government was not doing enough and that it was time for decent British patriots like themselves to do the job themselves. Almost everything about this new group harked back to the war. Its central message was that the country was now locked in an epoch-defining struggle against a foreign enemy. It had a hierarchy and language that appealed intrinsically to ex-servicemen, some of whom had come to miss the camaraderie and sense of purpose they had felt during the war.

Also familiar to these new recruits was a feeling that the people in charge were not doing their job as well as they might, and that applied to the country as well as the BF itself. ‘The opinion of Headquarters is rather low throughout the whole organisation,’ wrote Max, once he had established himself within the British Fascisti, ‘and it appears not without reason.’⁵

This was part of an early report Max delivered to his spymaster in the Makgill Organisation, a man codenamed ‘Don’. His identity has never been revealed. Yet the little evidence that there is suggests that Don was Sir George Makgill’s son, Donald, a Mason, like his father, and the future Viscount of Oxfuird, whose confidential account of this period in his life was ‘experience of intelligence work with father’.⁶

Sir George Makgill’s son Donald was described as ‘self-confident, possibly to excess, intelligent, reliable, intensely keen’.⁷ Like Max, he was learning on the job and had no training in intelligence work. Unlike him, this rookie spymaster was working for his father and could afford to make a few mistakes. What made Max’s task so much harder was the toxic atmosphere he began to experience inside BF Headquarters.

The Communist Party frequently tried to infiltrate the ranks of this group, and Max’s new colleagues often speculated about who in their midst might be a spy. If becoming a BF volunteer had been easy, lasting for anything more than a few months was going to take considerable skill and perhaps a little luck.

There were various ways for Max to handle himself in this suffocatingly tense, watchful environment. He could look to win over key figures or take aim at anyone who seemed suspicious of him. Instead, he did everything possible to become invisible. ‘Information will come to you, it is a mistake to go out and try to find it,’ Max later told an agent.⁸ ‘It is so easy to feel that one would like to find out a certain point, but one often forgets that the whole of our work may be destroyed by trying to hasten.’ When a new job came up in BF Headquarters, Max did not put himself forward. Instead he hung purposefully back. When a task was actually given to him, he accomplished it efficiently, in contrast to most of the other volunteers in the office.

During those first few months in the BF, Max learned the art of doing both a lot and very little, until his efforts came to the attention of Rotha Lintorn-Orman. Makgill had instructed his agent to join the British Fascisti and slowly work his way up. In one sense Max failed. His rise was meteoric. After just a few months inside this right-wing group, Sir George Makgill’s operative was promoted by Lintorn-Orman to be Director of Intelligence for the entire organisation and Deputy Chief of Staff.

This was an extraordinary coup, even if it left Max with a colossal workload. When he was not teaching games to pre-pubescent boys just over the river in Putney, he now had to look after the British Fascisti’s registry of ‘personal files’, containing information on known left-wing agitators and suspected spies, root out Communist agents inside the organisation, run Fascist cells inside the trade union movement, gather intelligence on Communist activities, supply this to local Fascist units, attend meetings as the BF deputy chief of staff and report on all this to his spymaster, Don.

Only a year before, Max had been a loser-ish jazz enthusiast who spent most of his spare time looking after pets and writing pulp fiction. That had all begun to change. Now he was a less frequent habitué of Soho, having tired of what he called the ‘look of unutterable boredom which characterises the British upper classes when dancing’.⁹ Even his much-loved bear, Bessie, that emblem of his earlier life, had been removed from his flat and now lived in a zoo. This may have had more to do with Bessie’s desire to mate than Max’s growing maturity, but as a younger man his solution might have been to find a male bear to satisfy her needs. As he later wrote, sounding like a man who had given the idea serious thought, ‘breeding bears in a private establishment is something which is not very practical’.¹⁰

Instead, Max devoted himself to his two part-time careers: working for the British Fascisti and for the Makgill Organisation. The success of the latter job depended on the continuation of the former. If for any reason he was thrown out of the BF, his value to Makgill would evaporate. That was one risk. The other was more insidious: it was that he might lose sight of himself.

Leading two lives like this was both nerve-racking and psychologically precarious. Max’s undercover work required him to play the part of an enthusiastic young Fascist, and to do this he dutifully read BF publications, attended Fascist rallies and took abuse from Communists, Socialists and trade unionists, and he made many Fascist friends. Although he rarely spent more than a few hours in character, an evening here, a morning there, the longer he played this part, the harder it might become to maintain his inner division between the fictional personality he had constructed and his real self.

By the summer of 1924, however, he appeared to be managing it. Max’s reports to Don, his ‘intensely keen’ spymaster, had not lost their edge.¹¹ He continued to find the setup in the British Fascisti Headquarters chaotic and to describe many of his colleagues as vain or lazy. In spite of his position in the upper branches of the BF tree, Max had not become a Fascist. But, when he needed to, he could do a very good impersonation of one.

Indeed, there were times when Maxwell Knight seemed willing to go further than anyone else in BF Headquarters in the fight against international Communism. This was one of the reasons why he had come to the attention of a teenager who had recently joined the movement. This newcomer was unhappy, funny and impetuous. Max had never met – nor would he ever meet – anyone quite like him.

4

THE RAZOR’S EDGE

William Joyce was an opinionated fitness fanatic who had grown up much too fast. He was stocky, spoke with a light Irish brogue and often found it hard to say anything other than what he was thinking. There was a mischievous, Puck-like quality to him. Though born in the United States, in New York, Joyce had spent most of his life in Ireland until he and his family fled after they were threatened with execution by the IRA. This had been almost entirely Joyce’s fault.

During the Anglo-Irish War, which began soon after the end of the First World War, Joyce had been a teenage informant for the Black and Tans, the British auxiliary police units dominated by soldiers who had recently served on the Western Front. They were notorious for their heavy-handed response to IRA attacks. Word of Joyce’s collaboration with these government forces had spread far, and by the time the Black and Tans left he was a marked man. Joyce and his family were given just days to leave the country.

In some ways, William Joyce never really left behind that moment in his life. ‘He saw battle, murder and sudden death at a very tender age,’ wrote Max, and was clearly brutalised by the experience.¹