By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Coming accoss a trove of recently de-classified documets detailing three 1939-40 coups to overthrow the British Government and place a Nazi puppet regime instead.

What made these documents remarkable is because of their complete absence from the official histories of pro-Nazi fascists in Britain. Although some of the purpetraters would challenge their detentions in the courts, their detailed plans for a Nazi puppet regime were never revealed.

So we decided to work this story backwards where thus in parts one, two, and three (which also included an anlyses of the Rudolf Hess flight) and four, we could see how Hitler pursued an influential and largely overlooked backdoor foreign policy towards the British ruling class and, in particular, King Edward VIII's subsequent Duke of Windsor, who according to a recent BBC documentary, helped the Nazis invade France by revealing defense weak spots to known collaborators and ‘encouraged the Nazis to bomb the UK into submission including a plot to put him on the throne.

In a third conspiracy case we analised in part five of the 39 putative puppet government ministers listed – at least half of whom were peers or knights of the realm – 32 were the subject of Security Service attention and have PF-series76 file numbers handwritten beside the names on MI5’s copy of the leaders’s list. Yet to date, only four of those files have been released to the UK National Archives. 

 

The trial of Ramsay’s ‘Chief of Staff Anna Wolkoff

While Ambassador Kennedy arguably harbored some sympathy for Germany, other forces were at work in the American embassy to undermine Churchill’s pleas for American intervention. However Tyler Kent, a clerk at the US Embassy was to steal secret correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill requesting American military aid. The courtcase of Anna Wolkoff and Tyler Kent heralded by front-page headlines in the British press as “the biggest trial of the war,” took place in a sealed courtroom at the Old Bailey in October 1940. Tried separately, Wolkoff and Kent were accused of stealing top-secret cables exposing both Britain’s strategic military weaknesses and Roosevelt’s willingness to support England, thereby violating American neutrality. The contents of these documents were so inflammatory, especially to the incumbent American president, that Churchill tried unsuccessfully to have the trial postponed until after the US presidential election in early November 1940. Kent was also refused extradition and tried as a war criminal in England. 

Despite Churchill’s repeated efforts, the Wolkoff trial commenced on October 23, 1940. In early November, Roosevelt won the presidency in a landslide, protected by the cloak of secrecy about the issues at stake and assuring that none of the evidence fell into the hands of the press. Describing security at the Central Criminal Court, the Daily Express reported that “thick brown paper was pasted over the glass panels of the doors, the doors themselves were locked, and police stood guard at them to ensure that nobody outside the courtroom would see a certain witness.” The British press speculated correctly that the star witness at the trial was likely to be high-ranking MI5 agent Maxwell Knight.

Maxwell Knight (known as ‘M’), head of section B.5b, in charge of monitoring fascists and communists in Britain.1 

Maxwell Knight Friedl Gaertner, codenamed GELATINE who had been introduced to MI5 by a Stuart Menzies (later head of MI6) whose brother was married to her sister. Knight later became Sir Maxwell Knight and the model for the James Bond character.

Knight assessed Friedl Gaertner an ‘extremely level-headed and intelligent person’.2 Gaertner is significant because her perceptive reports give us first-hand, and probably objective accounts of the frictions as the Anglo-German Fellowship faced the drama of Munich and the atrocities of Kristallnacht. She is of wider interest to historians of British intelligence for her later roles in the Wolkoff/Kent spying case and the Double XX deceptions. Infiltrating the Fellowship was her first assignment and proved her mettle as an intelligence agent, just as it was and did for Kim Philby working for Russian intelligence.

The accused Anna Wolkoff was a dressmaker and sole proprietor of Anna de Wolkoff Haute Couture Modes. Her atelier was located on an especially upscale stretch of Conduit Street in Mayfair, home of London’s high-end retail boutiques. Despite clientele like the Duchess of Windsor, Wolkoff’s business barely broke even and eventually closed when the principal backer withdrew, leaving Wolkoff with £4,500 in debt. A naturalized British citizen, Wolkoff was also an active member of British right-wing movements during the 1930s. Her Fascist leanings were influenced by her Russian past. She was rumored to be terrified of the plight of General Kutepov, a white Russian war hero who was kidnapped in Paris and sent to a Russian prison where he was tortured to reveal the names of White Russian agents living abroad who had turned against Stalin. He was never heard from again, and Wolkoff feared a similar fate. 

As part of a pro-Nazi European network, Anna Wolkoff was protected by European aristocrats and members of government. The information in one of Wolkoff’s personal intelligence files was considered so damaging that it was initially classified for one hundred years, until 2044, and only recently published under the Freedom of Information Act. 

Wolkoff’s co-conspirator, Tyler Kent, the twenty-nine-year-old cypher clerk at the American embassy in London, where he mostly worked the 4:00 P.M.-to-midnight shift in the embassy code room. A prep school and Princeton graduate, Kent’s first diplomatic posting was to the American embassy in Moscow where he had a reputation as more of a ladies’ man than a diplomat, forming a romantic liaison with an agent in the Russian Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), forerunner of the KGB. Once in London, Kent’s political views attracted the attention of the local police who initiated surveillance, quickly concluding that he was both anti-British and pro-German. Despite his limited salary, Kent maintained bank accounts in London, Cork, and Dublin and used a few different addresses in Chelsea and Knightsbridge. He also traveled frequently outside the UK, which further raised the suspicions of British intelligence. Wolkoff met Tyler Kent at the Right Club where both were outspoken members. Wolkoff recognized a fellow sympathizer in Kent, to whom she spoke in Russian under the pretext that “it is very convenient to be able to talk in rapid Russian, because if the lines are tapped they will not be able to understand.” An informer who worked in the British government helped Wolkoff disseminate the top secret correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill to both the Nazi Party and Nazi sympathizers across Europe.

Maxwell Knight, an ambitious MI5 officer reported directly to Guy Liddell. Knight had established a secret office in Dolphin Square in Pimlico and recruited Guy Burgess. The latter, along with Liddell’s other later recruits, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby and Donald Maclean, became known as the Cambridge Five spy ring that passed sensitive British government intelligence to the Soviet Union during the war and well into the 1950s.

From an unremarkable flat in Dolphin Square, a location chosen because it was also home to Sir Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford, Knight and Burgess infiltrated the Right Club and quickly focused on Anna Wolkoff. Among an increasingly persuasive and vocal group of German sympathizers, Wolkoff was an early and forceful convert to the Nazi cause. She visited the Sudetenland just before its annexation by Germany and boasted of her close ties to the Nazi leadership and their open invitation to visit whenever and whatever she wished.

Wolkoff’s subversive activities outside of the club quickly gained Knight’s attention. He recruited informants within the Right Club, which led him to file an affidavit against Archibald Ramsay and his wife, the widow of Lord Ninian Crichton-Stuart. When the Ramsays were not living at the medieval Kellie Castle in Scotland, they maintained an apartment in Ovington Square in London where they recruited new Right Club members like Anna Wolkoff. Testimony by a member of the Christian Protest movement detailed how a “political and religious” movement worked to establish close ties between Christian conservatives and the Far Right. That witness recounts that Mrs. Ramsay, or Ismay as she was known to club members, liked to boast that she had met Hitler personally as part of a British delegation and that “Hitler was undoubtedly a genius.”

Another informant activated by Maxwell Knight was Anne Van Lennep. A British citizen of Dutch background, she maintained a close friendship with Baroness Fuchs von Norhorf who left England on the eve of the war in 1939 suspected of being a Nazi spy and was “very closely associated with Anna Wolkoff.” Lennep told Knight that Wolkoff had “made herself very useful” and that “when the crisis comes,” the Far Right had contacts in both MI5 and the police. Another of Knight’s informants, “Mrs. X,” whose name is redacted to this day, told Knight that “many of the names of the Right Club did not appear in any written record. The ones that did were kept in a special locked book, so that if I joined I need not fear that my connection with the movement would become known. This left me with the impression that membership of the Right Club was a secret matter.” While Wolkoff was an active member of the Right Club, she operated her other subterfuge activities out of the Russian Tea Rooms on Harrington Road in South Kensington. Knight focused his surveillance on activities of this White Russian émigré gathering spot in order to understand and infiltrate an insurgent cell of Nazi support.

The café was composed of two shabby dining rooms, one hung with an imposing portrait of the last tsar. The Russian Tea Rooms had been established by Wolkoff’s parents in 1923 and was a frequent gathering spot for members of the club where they could be assured that their tea was served with appropriately subversive pro-Hitler sentiments. One tearoom patron, a naturalized Belgian, recalled that “there was a group of people who met there very often. They generally sat together at the same table and talked in low voices. The group consisted mainly of women, but occasionally there was a man or two. The principal topic of their conversation was anti-Semitism and praise of Germany for the way it had rid itself of Jews.”

Admiral Nikolai Wolkoff, Anna Wolkoff’s father and owner of the Russian Tea Rooms, also attracted the attention of MI5. Wolkoff was a former military officer who spoke frequently about his interest in the Balkans and Russia. His intelligence file described him as forty-five to fifty years old, about five feet, seven inches tall, clean-shaven with “dull blond hair; grey blue eyes; reddish complexion; hunched walk, wears a gold-rimmed monocle.” On the same day that Mrs. Hall, a Knight informant, lunched at the Russian Tea Rooms, Admiral Wolkoff was overheard describing the German invasion of England and how he “hoped nothing would happen to him because he wanted to see the day when he would spit in the faces of the English.” 

Knight also interviewed Lieutenant Nicholas Ignatieff, a member of the First Canadian Division of Engineers and eldest son of Count Pavel (“Paul”) Ignatieff, minister of education in the Imperial Russian War Cabinet of 1914. The Ignatieff family had escaped to Canada three years after the Revolution where Ignatieff’s father maintained close connections to the émigré community as the president of the White Russian Red Cross Society. The younger Ignatieff, who lived in London, explained that its White Russian community was “quite fanatical in its anti-Semitism and really have come to regard Hitler as a savior, not only of Germany, but of the whole of Europe including Russia. They will do literally anything to help his cause, so ardent is their belief in the new order which they think he is to bring to Europe and possibly the world.” Lieutenant Ignatieff went on to say that “the Nazi movement was beginning to make a good deal of headway in Canada until the outbreak of the war.”

Sir Archibald Ramsay and his wife lived down the street from the Russian Tea Rooms and closely monitored Wolkoff’s contributions in furthering the Nazi cause. Tyler Kent, whose dalliances with the White Russian émigré clientele presented an opportunity for him to both practice his Russian and further his pro-German ties, was also a tearoom regular. Other members of the Right Club who spent time at the tearoom and became subjects of interest to MI5 included Lady Beatrice Kerr-Clark, who lived nearby and described Anna Wolkoff as “a very personable type of woman with many man friends.” She added that the Russian Tea Rooms was “frequented by persons of a violently anti-Semitic type. A conversation in the tea shop has been overheard by a friend of Lady Beatrice to the effect that ‘it would be a good thing if Hitler won.’” 

Knight’s surveillance also focused on various other patrons. From the MI5 files: “Alan Wilfred Devon George, of 18 Queens Gate Place, S.W., a pro-Nazi, is very friendly with Admiral Wolkoff and his two daughters and until about a fortnight ago, dined at the Russian Tea Rooms in Harrington Gardens almost every night.” Mrs. Austin Hall who had lunch at the café on June 28, 1940, was observed to live in South Kensington with her young son and a German nurse. “Mrs. Hall was pro-German in her attitude, though perhaps not definitely pro-Nazi.” She was overheard to be speaking about a friend, Mrs. Arthur Watson, who had been interned for seven weeks at the Royal Holloway Prison. She also boasted that she corresponded frequently with Graf (Count) Montgelas and sent him one pound weekly to his internment camp, in addition to other pro-Nazi Austrians living in Central London with whom she was in frequent contact.

A statement by Joan Priscilla Miller, a secretary at the Military Intelligence Department, met Wolkoff at the Russian Tea Rooms. She described “Anna Wolkoff’s conversation (as) strongly anti-Semitic. She said she had had to close down her dressmaking business because of the unscrupulous tactics of her Jewish competitors and that the Jews were ruining the country.” Wolkoff recognized that Miller’s job in the British government might present an opportunity down the line and sent her a dress of Wolkoff’s own design, left “lying on her doormat,” that Miller had admired. At another meeting, MI5 notes that the two women made omelets together. Miller recounted that Wolkoff talked a lot during that dinner and “said she had been listening in to the news on the German radio and expressed the opinion that the German military and air strength was far superior to ours and that England would not be able to stand up to Germany.” 

Anna Wolkoff capitalized on a budding friendship with Tyler Kent to persuade him to bring home sensitive documents with information about US and British strategy that would benefit the Nazi regime. Wolkoff would stop by Kent’s flat and “borrow” the documents, after which she would have them photographed by family friend and amateur photographer Nicholas Smirnoff. Like Wolkoff, Smirnoff was a White Russian by birth and a naturalized British citizen. He worked as an examiner in the British Censorship Bureau until he was eventually detained. Wolkoff told Smirnoff that “the telegrams were very confidential and the information in them was wanted for her society.” In a sworn statement, Smirnoff said that Wolkoff “told me that these documents were lent to her by a foreign diplomat, but did not say who he was or from what Embassy he came. She said it was a stroke of luck that she had managed to get these documents and that in these documents preference had been given to the United States—I cannot say what for. . . . I thought it was rather strange that she had these telegrams in her possession. I could not read what was on the pictures I had made, but Anna Wolkoff said it would not matter because it could be read with a magnifying glass.” 

According to the prosecution at his trial, a raid on Kent’s flat “found masses of highly confidential cables, codes and copies of such documents, many of them extremely confidential and of the greatest importance to the diplomatic and strategic position of the Allies.” At least a cursory concern on the part of the American embassy that Kent had not acted alone in supplying Wolkoff with the cables. Tevis Wilson, also employed in the cipher and code department, was a close personal friend of Kent’s and was quickly moved to the embassy visa section following Kent’s arrest, with no further action taken.

The telegrams stolen by Kent and passed to Wolkoff contained information about the decrepit state of the British fleet and urgent requests by Churchill for military support from America. The trove included two top secret messages from Churchill to Roosevelt. Disclosures included instructions to the British Fleet on how they should handle American merchant vessels and proof that Churchill, then serving as First Lord of the Admiralty, was eschewing official protocol and bypassing the prime minister to go directly to Roosevelt for military aid aimed to lure the United States into the war, which Churchill believed was a foregone conclusion. In cables marked STRICTLY PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, FOR THE PRESIDENT, MOST SECRET AND PERSONAL, Churchill pleaded for help from Roosevelt: “Immediate needs are: first of all, the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers to bridge the gap between what we have now and the large new construction we put in hand at the beginning of the war. This time next year we shall have plenty . . . anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition, of which again, there will be plenty next year if we are alive to see it. . . . We shall go on paying dollars as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more you will give us the stuff all the same.”

Wolkoff passed the documents she “borrowed” from Kent to a fellow Nazi sympathizer, a staff member at the Romanian embassy, who expedited the Kent telegrams by diplomatic post to another Right Club member, William Joyce. Joyce, referred to in a popular song as “Lord Haw-Haw the humbug of Hamburg,” had left England to establish a pro-Nazi English-speaking radio show in Berlin which he started in early 1940. According to British intelligence, Joyce’s show “broadcasts the most virulent fifth column propaganda and at times gives instructions to secret groups or cells in the country to carry out subversive operations in Great Britain.” Joyce’s program appeared on frequencies across Europe, not just in Britain. The documents Wolkoff received from Kent, often written in code, described, among other things, Jewish activities in England. Wolkoff thought Joyce could make use of these in his propaganda broadcasts from Germany and that the information would “be like a bombshell.” On this particular occasion, a trap was set and the contact unknowingly handed the document to Maxwell Knight of MI5 instead of Joyce.

In addition to contacts in Nazi Germany, Wolkoff had a network of fellow Nazi sympathizers all over Europe who were eager recipients of the photos of the purloined cables, which were bundled with copies of Hitler’s speech dated April 28, 1939, and pro-Nazi flyers for distribution. Wolkoff liked to claim that she had agents stationed not only in England but all over Europe and the United States, mostly female recruits she had met at Right Club meetings. Wolkoff also recruited foreign government officials such as the Count and Countess de Laudespins. The count, who worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels, allowed Wolkoff to use the Belgian diplomatic post to send documents including anti-Jewish and anti-Freemason propaganda materials to be distributed to other contacts in Belgium. She ignored a warning by another Belgian contact to “give up this so-called anti-Jewish work . . . as it was dangerous.” Despite the warnings, Wolkoff forged ahead, disseminating whatever information she had received to as widespread a network as she could garner, praising one go-between for doing admirable work, with “pluck and initiative.”

Wolkoff also established contacts with the Italian Fascist government who had their own plan to infiltrate Britain. At his trial, Tyler Kent described how Wolkoff and a Miss Enid Riddell, another Right Club member, invited him “to a restaurant in Soho called l’Escargot, where I met a man who was introduced to me as Mr. Macaroni by Anna. It occurred to me at the time that this was probably a pseudonym. Following is a description of the man: Age about 45, shortish, thick set, dark hair and complexion.”

Mr. Macaroni was really the Duca del Monte, the military attaché at the Italian embassy and a cousin of Howard Kerr, the Duke of Gloucester’s equerry. Lady Howard of Effingham reported that he “looked like a cheap gangster.” An early intelligence report notes that his work as attaché did not appear to be taxing and that he spent most of his time at the International Sportsmen’s Club: “In spite of his ostensibly pro-British attitude, he was believed to be overstepping the legitimate duties of a military attaché in obtaining ‘intelligence’ in this country.” There was also speculation that del Monte was not acting alone. One MI5 informant attending a cocktail party at the duke’s Chelsea home at 67 Cadogan Square was suspicious that another guest, Aldo Terzolo, the head of the Italian Commercial Bank on Regent Street who was “tremendously anti-British and pro-German,” might be an accomplice. 

Over a convivial French meal, Wolkoff passed documents to del Monte that she had obtained from Kent and had copied at a local Woolworth’s. These documents referred to “a trade agreement which benefited the United States at the expense of other neutrals” and Churchill’s role in that agreement. Wolkoff “thought the Italians would be glad to have the information” and later learned through Kent that Italy was pleased to have received copies of the documents. After dinner, “Mr. Macaroni” invited the group to the Embassy Club where they stayed until just after midnight.

Miss Enid Riddell, the fourth guest at the l’Escargot dinner, described trying to contact the Duca del Monte after Wolkoff’s arrest. “I told the Duca about Anna’s arrest. He was very concerned and said he couldn’t understand why she had been detained, nor could he understand why Kent had failed to put in an appearance. I made no further attempt to get in touch with Kent.” 

Eventually, MI5 trapped Kent by sending a fake cable purportedly from Roosevelt to Churchill, which, when it was passed on by the Wolkoff/Kent duo, was intended to mislead the Nazis. The ruse was actually quite simple. Kent did not notice that despite the sensitivity of the correspondence, the communiqué was sent in standard “Gray code” rather than strip cipher, an unusual format for such a high-level communication and a code that had already been cracked by the Nazis. In the fake cable, Roosevelt assured Churchill of both military and economic aid.

In addition to the cables stolen and disseminated across Europe by Wolkoff and Kent, another curious incident occurred. As MI5 began to close in on the Right Club, Sir Archibald Ramsay passed the Red Book, the secret list of the Right Club membership, to Tyler Kent for safekeeping. Kent had a history of making liberal use of US embassy safes. After the discovery of his misdeeds, US officials examined the safe at the US embassy in Moscow, where Kent had worked previously. They found a briefcase belonging to Kent that contained a revolver, a book about European languages, and pornographic pictures of his Russian girlfriend. At the trial, Kent testified that around May 1, 1940, Ramsay brought a locked “Ledger” to the embassy: “I did not know what this contained and Captain Ramsay merely asked me to keep it for him.” In fact, the Red Book was purposefully left at the American embassy. A high-security Bramah lock guarded the ledger’s secrets. Kent had stored it in a cupboard safe opposite the door of the cipher room discovered when the police raided his office in the American embassy. At the time, the ledger was not considered worth taking into custody along with its protector.

The value of the membership list was understood by Ramsay to be the Right Club’s most carefully guarded asset. He was the only one who knew the names and identities of all the members. When Ramsay was arrested on May 23, 1940, three days after Wolkoff and Kent, he said that “he had given the Right Club membership book to Kent one night when the latter came to dinner, because he had promised certain prominent and influential members that the book would not be left in any place where any unauthorized person might have access to it.” This was a promise that was kept until 1990 when the Red Book entered the collection of the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, one of the largest and most prestigious libraries in Europe dedicated to the study of the Holocaust and genocide.

Ramsey would boast that as a member of Parliament, “on 73 occasions . . . he had risen in his place in the House of Commons to speak on the subject of Jews and Communism. He said he was the only member who dared attack the Government on their policy and he was being removed to prison as a menace to that policy.”

Wolkoff and Kent were charged under the Official Secrets Act with “offences which in substance amount either to espionage on behalf of Germany or something very closely akin to it.” The OSA, as it was known, was revised in 1939 to provide official legal protection in the UK against espionage and the disclosure of unauthorized information. After Wolkoff’s arrest, which was witnessed by eleven-year-old Len Deighton, who later became an acclaimed British author of spy novels, Wolkoff was taken to the Rochester Row police station, around the corner from the Russian Orthodox church where she would occasionally attend services. It was noted that a wallet with a swastika engraved on it was found among her possessions when the police raided her apartment, listed in the police report to be further evidence of her political leanings. 

Kent was arrested at his flat at 47 Gloucester Place in South Kensington by Sir Maxwell Knight, who was refused entry and had to force the door open. A briefcase full of photographed secret embassy documents was found as well as a large amount of currency. When questioned by Knight at his arrest, Kent said that he took the documents because “they show a dishonest discrepancy between the news which was given to the public and the actual trend of political affairs as was known in diplomatic circles. I considered it was my duty to make these facts known.” He added that he was trying out a new camera that he was thinking of purchasing from an embassy colleague who was leaving the UK, a story he later retracted when Knight visited him at Brixton Prison with proof that Smirnoff had confessed to taking the photos. In response to Kent’s arrest, Ramsay commented that “T.K., poor young man, is finished; they will send him back to America because, of course, the telegrams were very secret.”

Anna Wolkoff claimed in her defense that “Tyler Kent was an agent of the OGPU (the Soviet Secret Police) and that he had beguiled Anna into doing things that she should not have done only because she was in love with him.” Her defense strategy was to call witnesses, notably a Russian priest who claimed to know Kent well, to both prove that Kent was a spy—and suggest a love affair. Wolkoff’s defense also noted that their client had tea the previous week with the Duchess of Kent and that “Her Royal Highness would help Anna Wolkoff to the full extent of her power.”

In a sworn statement, Kent said that he had met Anna Wolkoff at a meeting of the Right Club where he was a steward, a title that he did not know the significance of. He said that he came to England to work in the coding office of the US embassy, explaining, “[M]y object in taking these was preserving for my own records which I considered of importance, without any specific object in mind.” He recounted that he had struck up a friendship with Anna Wolkoff, who visited his apartment and took an interest in the documents when she saw them out, asking to borrow them. He also described an instance when he was late for a meeting with Wolkoff in his flat, and she spent an hour there alone. As further evidence of Wolkoff’s knowledge of criminal intent, he claimed that when she called him from her parents’ apartment on Roland Gardens, around the corner from Kent’s apartment, she spoke to Kent in Russian in order to avoid potential phone taps.

Anna Wolkoff was tried separately from Kent in a sealed courtroom at the Old Bailey. Due to the sensitive political nature of the stolen documents presented as evidence, the courtroom was cleared when each count was presented. On November 7, 1940, Wolkoff was sentenced to ten years in prison for “attempting to assist the enemy,” violating the Official Secrets Act of 1911 and the Defence Regulations Act of 1939. Her naturalized British citizenship was also revoked while she was in prison. The incriminating nature of Wolkoff’s crimes, to both the United States and Britain, did not end with her imprisonment. In 1941, nearly a year after her trial, one of the prosecutors on the case, Bennett, filed a brief stating that he “is extremely anxious to find the third photostat in the Wolkoff case in order if possible to use it for the Prime Minister’s downfall . . . if it was only a political arrangement between Rooseveldt [sic] and Churchill, it would be no use, but if it showed up malpractice it could be used as a means of dissolving Parliament.” Both Wolkoff and Kent were convicted after twenty-five minutes of deliberations. Kent was found guilty under the same Official Secrets Act as Wolkoff as well as the Larceny Act of 1916. Although they were tried separately, they were sentenced together. Wolkoff was sentenced to ten years in Royal Holloway Prison and then moved to Aylesbury Prison in Buckinghamshire. Today this prison is used for young offenders and has one of the worst ratings in the British prison system. Wolkoff’s prison sentence and designation as Prisoner 352 was personally signed by the home secretary, Sir John Anderson.

With the US Justice Department declining to prosecute him, Tyler Kent was sentenced to seven years in Brixton Prison, which he appealed. By then, his defense had evolved with Kent claiming to have taken the documents that Wolkoff had passed to her network of Nazi sympathizers because he was planning to write a book about the war: “Kent protested that he had not had a fair trial. He said he had no felonious intent, therefore he could not have feloniously obtained or communicated the documents.” Unlike the trials that were conducted behind closed doors, the sentencing of both Wolkoff and Kent was open to the public.

The infamous Russian Tea Rooms, the location for so many of Wolkoff and Kent’s seditious dealings, was closed soon after their sentencing. Admiral Wolkoff had arranged through his solicitors to file for bankruptcy so that whatever funds remained could be kept for his daughter when she left prison. Admiral Wolkoff’s wife found work as the manager of a British government canteen and the former cook found employment in the household of “a very prominent person,” whose identity was not disclosed. It was also noted that although the cook was Russian by birth, she spent her childhood in Germany and considers herself to be German.

There was still media interest in Anna Wolkoff, even in prison. Her sister, Kyra Wolkoff, was interviewed for an article in the Daily Herald titled “Spy Gives Dress Tips.” Wolkoff’s sister commented that Wolkoff had not appealed her sentence: “Anna has settled down and made up her mind to serve her sentence with a good grace. She is not moping because she is allowed to sew.” When she was released from prison in June 1947, Wolkoff was assessed as “still likely to be a danger to the community.” Having been stripped of her British citizenship, she lived mostly abroad until her death in a car accident in Spain in August 1973, aged seventy-one.

Kent was released from prison and immediately deported back to America, with a departure delay of two months due to a dock strike. His arrival on the SS Silveroak, which docked in Hoboken, New Jersey, in December 1945, was attended by fifty journalists. However, interest in Kent died down fairly quickly. He married and went on a yearlong cruise with his new wife. When he returned, he received word that the FBI wanted to question him in connection to a Nazi spy ring led by Kurt Jahnke. Intelligence from that investigation suggested that Kent was spying for the Russians and not for the Nazis. This line of inquiry was soon abandoned and Kent led a prosperous life on the East Coast as the owner of car dealerships, until the business went bankrupt in the mid-1960s.

 

Conclusion

Unlike the United States, where both the FBI and CIA (the close equivalents of MI5 and MI6) are subject to Freedom of Information Act obligations, in Britain, the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service are excluded explicitly from scrutiny under FOI legislation. It is therefore not possible to ascertain whether the missing files remain locked in the intelligence services’ registries or whether they have been destroyed. When – occasionally - MI5 does respond to requests for clarification, it asserts the right to pick and choose what information to release.

Although it is Government policy to neither confirm nor deny whether any individual or group has been subject to investigation by MI5, an exception to this policy allows us to release to The National Archives files that are still in existence and at least 50 years old, if to do so would not damage national security.

A similar modus operandi we saw in the case when Ramsay had inscribed members' names in a large leather ledger called ‘The Red Book’. MI5 discovered this in Tyler Kent’s apartment on the morning of his arrest – Ramsay had given it to the American for safekeeping - and provided copies of its entries to the Home Office. In the wake of the Kent and Wolkoff convictions, Liberal MP Geoffrey Mander asked the Home Secretary to “publish the list of members of the Right Club in possession of the Home Office.” Home Secretary Herbert Morrison refused because to do so was “not in the public interest [and] I do not propose to give any indication of what names there are, or are not, on this list.”3

The Red Book would remain under wraps for more than 50 years 4. When its entries were finally opened for public examination, they showed that of the 242 Right Club members listed, 13 were titled aristocrats (of both sexes), and 12 were sitting MPs; there were also three members of European Royal Families and at least five senior officers, serving in the British army. Since MI5’s publicly released files disclose no evidence of any subsequent investigations into The Right Club, much less its involvement in the coup plot, the aim of keeping its membership secret appears to have been to protect the reputations of those who belonged to it.

Despite the continuing suppression of a substantial number of files, those papers which have been de-classified and released to the National Archives plainly show that throughout World War Two, senior and influential figures in the British establishment not only supported Nazi Germany but took active – and illegal – steps to hasten a German victory; and, further, that there is compelling evidence that they were protected from the consequences of their actions because of their privileged status in society.

 

1. For more on Knight see Alex Masters, The man who was M: the life of Maxwell Knight, (1984) and Hemming, M.

2. MI5 report, 30 May 1938, KV2/1280 C503281, The National Archive (TNA).

3. Hansard, 31 July 1941 Vol. 373 cc1509-10.

4. The leather-bound ledger was finally released to the Wiener Library in London.

 

 

For updates click hompage here