The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw

Author:David Nasaw [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: United States, Biography & Autobiography, History, Historical, General
ISBN: 1594203768
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-three

THE FALL OF FRANCE

It was Saturday, May 18, 1940. The ambassador was spending his weekend at St. Leonard’s. Late in the evening, Herschel Johnson, his number two man at the embassy, called to say that he had been visited that afternoon by Maxwell Knight of MI5, British Military Intelligence. “Johnson’s language,” Kennedy recalled in his unpublished Diplomatic Memoir, “was guarded but I gathered enough from what he said to learn that one of our clerks was suspected of having given out confidential information to sources allied to the Nazis.”

Johnson met with Kennedy at St. Leonard’s the next morning and told Kennedy a most “extraordinary story” of espionage at the American embassy. Tyler Kent, a twenty-nine-year-old code specialist from an old Virginia family who had joined the U.S. Foreign Service after college, served in Moscow, and been transferred to London in October 1939, had been consorting with Anna Wolkoff, the daughter of a former admiral in the czar’s navy. Wolkoff was connected to the Right Club, a secret society of English Fascists led by Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, a Conservative member of Parliament. Through the use of undercover agents, MI5 had learned that Wolkoff had bragged about receiving information from Kent that could only have come from the embassy. Scotland Yard was preparing to arrest Wolkoff the next morning, Monday, “and would search Kent’s rooms at the same time provided that we would waive any diplomatic immunity that might prevent such a search.” Kennedy agreed to waive immunity.1

The ambassador arrived at the embassy early on Monday morning, May 20. That same morning, Maxwell Knight of MI5, Franklin Gowen of the embassy, and three men from Scotland Yard made their way to Tyler Kent’s flat. They arrived at 11:15. On being refused entrance, they broke down the door, took Kent into custody, let the woman he was with go home, and searched his rooms, where according to Knight they discovered “a most amazing collection of documents [including] copies of secret and confidential code telegrams between various United States Embassies and Washington.” An hour or so later, they returned to the embassy, where Kennedy and Johnson took a quick look at the stolen materials: almost two thousand documents, two sets of duplicate keys to the code and file rooms, a tin box, and a locked, leather-bound book. Kent was brought into the office, where he insisted that he was not a spy but had taken the documents “only for my own information.”2

Tyler Kent had not been the highest-ranking or most efficient of the decoders, but it had fallen to him to code and decode the clandestine Churchill-Roosevelt cables. Had it become public knowledge in the spring of 1940 that the president of the United States, whose actions in the international arena were bound by strict neutrality laws, had been in secret communication with the bellicose first lord of the British Admiralty, Roosevelt and the Democrats would have been severely embarrassed six months before the presidential elections.3

The ambassador in London was frightened to the core at the possible repercussions.

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