Tyler Gatewood Kent (March 24, 1911 – November 20, 1988) was an American
diplomat
A diplomat (from grc, δίπλωμα; romanized ''diploma'') is a person appointed by a state or an intergovernmental institution such as the United Nations or the European Union to conduct diplomacy with one or more other states or internati ...
who stole thousands of secret documents while working as a cipher clerk at the US Embassy in
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
during
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
.
Early life and career
Kent was born in
Newchwang
Yingkou () is a coastal prefecture-level city of central southern Liaoning province, People's Republic of China, on the northeastern shore of Liaodong Bay. It is the third-smallest city in Liaoning with a total area of , and the ninth most populo ...
,
Manchuria
Manchuria is an exonym (derived from the endo demonym " Manchu") for a historical and geographic region in Northeast Asia encompassing the entirety of present-day Northeast China (Inner Manchuria) and parts of the Russian Far East (Outer Manc ...
, where his father was the US
Consul
Consul (abbrev. ''cos.''; Latin plural ''consules'') was the title of one of the two chief magistrates of the Roman Republic, and subsequently also an important title under the Roman Empire. The title was used in other European city-states throug ...
. He was educated at
St. Albans School in
Washington, D.C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
, followed by
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
where he studied history,
George Washington University
, mottoeng = "God is Our Trust"
, established =
, type = Private federally chartered research university
, academic_affiliations =
, endowment = $2.8 billion (2022)
, preside ...
, the
Sorbonne
Sorbonne may refer to:
* Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities.
*the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970)
*one of its components or linked institution, ...
(where he studied
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
) and the
University of Madrid. Through his father's connections, he joined the
State Department
The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an United States federal executive departments, executive department of the Federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government responsible for the country's fore ...
and was posted to
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
under
William C. Bullitt
William Christian Bullitt Jr. (January 25, 1891 – February 15, 1967) was an American diplomat, journalist, and novelist. He is known for his special mission to negotiate with Lenin on behalf of the Paris Peace Conference, often recalled as a mi ...
, the first American
ambassador
An ambassador is an official envoy, especially a high-ranking diplomat who represents a state and is usually accredited to another sovereign state or to an international organization as the resident representative of their own government or sov ...
to the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
. There he was promoted to cipher clerk.
By 1939 he was suspected of engaging in
espionage
Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangibl ...
for the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
, but lacking any solid evidence, the Diplomatic Service decided to transfer him to the embassy in London, where he began working on October 5, 1939. With a position that required him to encode and decode sensitive telegrams, Kent had access to a wide range of secret documents.
In London
As soon as Kent arrived in London, he was seen in the company of Ludwig Matthias, a suspected German agent who was being tailed by detectives of
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard (officially New Scotland Yard) is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing Greater London's 32 boroughs, but not the City of London, the square mile that forms London's ...
's
Special Branch
Special Branch is a label customarily used to identify units responsible for matters of national security and Intelligence (information gathering), intelligence in Policing in the United Kingdom, British, Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth, ...
. He was observed being a frequent guest of the Russian Tea Room in
South Kensington
South Kensington, nicknamed Little Paris, is a district just west of Central London in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Historically it settled on part of the scattered Middlesex village of Brompton. Its name was supplanted with ...
, a resort of
White Russians led by Admiral Nikolai Wolkoff, the former naval attaché for
Imperial Russia
The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the List of Russian monarchs, Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended th ...
in London, and his wife, a former maid of honor to the
Tsarina
Tsarina or tsaritsa (also spelled ''csarina'' or ''csaricsa'', ''tzarina'' or ''tzaritza'', or ''czarina'' or ''czaricza''; bg, царица, tsaritsa; sr, / ; russian: царица, tsaritsa) is the title of a female autocratic ruler (mona ...
. Through one of their daughters,
Anna Wolkoff
Anna Nikolayevna Wolkova (1902 – 2 August 1973), sometimes known as Anna de Wolkoff, was a White Russian émigrée, and secretary of The Right Club, which was opposed to Britain's involvement in World War II.
Early life
She was the elde ...
, Kent met Irene Danishewsky, wife of a British merchant who was a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union. She became Kent's mistress.
Because of their background, Irene and her husband were placed under
surveillance
Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as c ...
by
MI5
The Security Service, also known as MI5 ( Military Intelligence, Section 5), is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), G ...
as possible Soviet spies.
Kent was also becoming active in politics. His views are uncertain, but many have assumed that he took an
isolationist
Isolationism is a political philosophy advocating a national foreign policy that opposes involvement in the political affairs, and especially the wars, of other countries. Thus, isolationism fundamentally advocates neutrality and opposes entangl ...
line and that he was prepared to help
British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
anti-war campaigns. Early in 1940, through Anna Wolkoff, he met
Archibald Maule Ramsay
Archibald is a masculine given name, composed of the Germanic elements '' erchan'' (with an original meaning of "genuine" or "precious") and ''bald'' meaning "bold".
Medieval forms include Old High German and Anglo-Saxon .
Erkanbald, bishop o ...
, an
anti-semitic
Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism.
Antis ...
Conservative
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization i ...
Member of Parliament
A member of parliament (MP) is the representative in parliament of the people who live in their electoral district. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, this term refers only to members of the lower house since upper house members of ...
, and joined Ramsay's group
The Right Club. Ramsay gave Kent, who had diplomatic immunity, the Right Club's membership list for safekeeping.
Kent later invited Wolkoff and Ramsay to his flat and showed them the stolen documents. He would later claim that he showed them to Ramsay in the hope that the latter would pass them to politicians hostile to Roosevelt. Anna Wolkoff made copies of some of these documents on April 13 and sent them to
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
through an intermediary from the
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
Embassy. It was subsequently found, through interception of wireless messages by
MI8
MI8, or ''Military Intelligence, Section 8'' was a British Military Intelligence group responsible for signals intelligence and was created in 1914. It originally consisted of four sections: MI8(a), which dealt with wireless policy; MI8(b), b ...
, that they then came into the possession of Vice Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris
Wilhelm Franz Canaris (1 January 1887 – 9 April 1945) was a German admiral and the chief of the '' Abwehr'' (the German military-intelligence service) from 1935 to 1944. Canaris was initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and the Nazi r ...
, head of the
Abwehr
The ''Abwehr'' (German for ''resistance'' or ''defence'', but the word usually means ''counterintelligence'' in a military context; ) was the German military-intelligence service for the ''Reichswehr'' and the ''Wehrmacht'' from 1920 to 1944. A ...
.
Wolkoff approached fellow Right Club member Joan Miller and asked her if she could pass a coded letter to
William Joyce
William Brooke Joyce (24 April 1906 – 3 January 1946), nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, was an American-born fascist and Nazi propaganda broadcaster during the Second World War. After moving from New York to Ireland and subsequently to England, J ...
(later 'Lord Haw-Haw'), through her contacts at the Italian embassy, not knowing that Miller was an undercover agent for MI5 and directly under the supervision of its head of counter-subversion,
Maxwell Knight
Charles Henry Maxwell Knight OBE, known as Maxwell Knight, (9 July 1900 – 27 January 1968) was a British spymaster, naturalist and broadcaster, reputedly a model for the James Bond character "M". He played major roles in surveillance of an e ...
. Miller agreed to take the letter, but instead of taking it to the Italian embassy showed it to Knight.
Arrest, trial and conviction
On May 18, 1940, the US ambassador
Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.
Joseph Patrick Kennedy (September 6, 1888 – November 18, 1969) was an American businessman, investor, and politician. He is known for his own political prominence as well as that of his children and was the patriarch of the Irish-American Ke ...
was informed of this development and agreed to waive Kent's
diplomatic immunity
Diplomatic immunity is a principle of international law by which certain foreign government officials are recognized as having legal immunity from the jurisdiction of another country. . On May 20, Kent was arrested under the
Official Secrets Act
An Official Secrets Act (OSA) is legislation that provides for the protection of state secrets and official information, mainly related to national security but in unrevised form (based on the UK Official Secrets Act 1911) can include all infor ...
in a dawn raid at his flat. Officers of MI5 found 1,929 official documents there, and besides Churchill's cables was a book containing the names of people under surveillance by Special Branch and MI5. Searchers also found keys to the US embassy code room. Anna Wolkoff was arrested on the same day and charged with violating the same Act.
On May 31, after 11 days of secret detention, the US State Department announced that Kent had been fired and "detained by order of the
Home Secretary
The secretary of state for the Home Department, otherwise known as the home secretary, is a senior minister of the Crown in the Government of the United Kingdom. The home secretary leads the Home Office, and is responsible for all national ...
" but not that he had been arrested under the Official Secrets Act.
On October 23, Kent was tried ''
in camera
''In camera'' (; Latin: "in a chamber"). is a legal term that means ''in private''. The same meaning is sometimes expressed in the English equivalent: ''in chambers''. Generally, ''in-camera'' describes court cases, parts of it, or process wh ...
'' at the
Old Bailey
The Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, commonly referred to as the Old Bailey after the street on which it stands, is a criminal court building in central London, one of several that house the Crown Court of England and Wales. The s ...
. Brown paper was pasted on the windows and glass door panels. He was specifically charged with obtaining documents that "might be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy" and letting Wolkoff have them in her possession. He was also accused of stealing documents that were the property of Ambassador Kennedy. The only spectators allowed at the trial were official observers, including
Malcolm Muggeridge
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge (24 March 1903 – 14 November 1990) was an English journalist and satirist. His father, H. T. Muggeridge, was a socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party (UK), Labour Party Members of Parliament (for Romfo ...
, representing
MI6
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...
. Two of the witnesses against Kent were Maxwell Knight and Archibald Ramsay, who was interned on the
Isle of Man
)
, anthem = "O Land of Our Birth"
, image = Isle of Man by Sentinel-2.jpg
, image_map = Europe-Isle_of_Man.svg
, mapsize =
, map_alt = Location of the Isle of Man in Europe
, map_caption = Location of the Isle of Man (green)
in Europe ...
under
Defence Regulation 18B
Defence Regulation 18B, often referred to as simply 18B, was one of the Defence Regulations used by the British Government during and before the Second World War. The complete name for the rule was Regulation 18B of the Defence (General) Regula ...
because he had seen the documents. British officials who had knowledge of the documents believed that if they had come to light at that time, Anglo-American relations would have been seriously damaged, for they showed that Roosevelt was looking at ways to evade the
Neutrality Acts to help Britain survive a German onslaught.
[ This would also have damaged Roosevelt's re-election bid for the presidency that year.
At his trial Kent also admitted that he had taken documents from the US Embassy in Moscow, with the vague notion of someday showing them to US senators who shared his isolationist, anti-semitic views. He said that he burned the Moscow documents before being assigned to London. It was learned later that he had fallen in love with an interpreter who worked for the ]NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
...
, thus fueling speculations that he had Soviet contacts.
On November 7, 1940, he was convicted and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment. Isolationist groups in the United States claimed that he had been framed and that the trial was an attempted cover-up of an attempt to get the US to join the war. The documents, finally released in 1972, did not support this claim. The papers that Kent had purloined indicated British-American naval co-operation, but they also showed that Roosevelt was not prepared to go further without support from the US Congress
The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washingto ...
or the public.
Later years
At the end of the war, Kent was released and deported to the United States. He never changed his beliefs: he insisted that he had always been a staunch anti-communist
Anti-communism is Political movement, political and Ideology, ideological opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, w ...
. After marrying a wealthy woman, he became a publisher of a pro-segregation Florida
Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...
newspaper with links to the Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and ...
.[ He condemned President ]John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK and the nickname Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination ...
as a communist, and charged that Kennedy was killed by communists because he was abandoning his communist leanings.
According to Ray Bearse and Anthony Read, despite Kent's anti-communist beliefs, officials in the FBI
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and its principal Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement age ...
believed him to be a secret Soviet sympathizer. He was the subject of six FBI investigations from 1952 to 1963, all ending inconclusively.
He died in Kerrville
Kerrville is a city in, and the county seat of, Kerr County, Texas, United States. The population of Kerrville was 24,278 at the 2020 census. Kerrville is named after James Kerr, a major in the Texas Revolution, and friend of settler- ...
, Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...
in 1988.[Kerrville Mountain Sun, 26 Nov. 1988 (p. 13)]
References
Bibliography
*Ray Bearse and Anthony Read, ''Conspirator: The Untold Story of Tyler Kent'' (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
* Clough, Bryan. ''State Secrets: The Kent-Wolkoff Affair''. East Sussex: Hideaway Publications Ltd., 2005.
*Warren Kimball and Bruce Bartlett, "Roosevelt and Prewar Commitments to Churchill: The Tyler Kent Affair", Diplomatic History, vol. 5, no. 4 (Fall 1981), pp. 291–311.
*Peter Nicholson (director)
''Churchill and the Fascist Plot''
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned enterprise, state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a four ...
(UK), 16 March 2013 television documentary.
Further reading
Intelligence: U.S. Spy for Nazi Germany
William F. Floyd, Jr., Warfare History Network, 12 July 2021
External links
*
*Excerpt from a BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
(dated December 17, 2010, accessed December 25, 2010)
*Tyler Gatewood Kent papers (MS 310). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library