Tyler Kent Affair
The Tyler-Kent Affair , also Kent-Wolkoff Affair or Kent Case , was a secret espionage operation in Great Britain during the seat of the war in 1939/40, around two years before the United States entered World War II .
The affair was triggered by the employee of the US embassy in London, Tyler Kent , who had to encrypt the telegrams from the then British naval minister Winston Churchill to the US president Franklin D. Roosevelt from October 1939. As a result, and after looking at other papers, he came to believe that Roosevelt had encouraged the fact that Paris and Warsaw would be given unconstitutional assurances regarding American support in the event of war.
The papers that Kent acquired forbidden, including a secret insurance policy to France in the event that the German Wehrmacht would attack, proved that Roosevelt was prepared to bypass the neutrality laws to supply the allied warring parties in Europe with weapons. Kent also feared that the US government would go to war against Nazi Germany .
procedure
The US citizen Tyler Kent had worked in the Foreign Service since 1934 and had been employed at the embassy in London since October 1939, where he worked as a cipher and thus had access to secret correspondence. He began to secretly make copies of the documents and kept them in a suitcase in his apartment. In early 1940 he met Anna Wolkoff , a Russian exileist , whose family ran a Russian Tea Room in South Kensington , where the members of the Right Club , a highly anti-Semitic association of British war opponents, met regularly. Wolkoff's father was a tsarist naval attaché in London, her mother a chambermaid of the last Russian Empress Alix von Hessen-Darmstadt .
Around March 1940, Kent was introduced by Wolkoff to the Right Club's founder , Archibald Maule Ramsay (a member of Parliament for the Scottish Unionist Party ). On April 13, 1940, he passed the copies of the correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill (at that time still First Lord of the Admiralty in Chamberlain's wartime government ) on to Ramsay. All three shared the view that the war was a Jewish conspiracy . (Kent had previously worked for the embassy in Moscow as an employee for a long time and was an admirer of " old Russia "). Ramsay intended to inform the still incumbent Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Churchill's correspondence with Roosevelt, which he regarded as detrimental to his country, but this did not happen before Churchill took office on May 10, 1940.
Access of the MI5
Wolkoff, who trusted the Right Club member Joan Miller (1918-1984), asked them to forward an encrypted letter via Romanian diplomatic mail to the fascist William Joyce (better known as Lord Haw-Haw ) who was in Berlin . Miller had been used as an agent by the head of B5b (Political Subversion Monitoring) of MI5 , Maxwell Knight . She showed this letter to Knight, who was briefing the US Ambassador to London Joseph P. Kennedy through Deputy Head of Division B5b Guy Liddell (later appointed Director of Division B of MI5 by Churchill) . Kennedy then lifted Kent's diplomatic immunity.
On May 20, 1940, MI5 personnel searched Kent's house and in 1929 confiscated documents classified as secret, including duplicates of the embassy's encryption keys. In the process, they also came across the list of members and friends of the Right Club, later known as Ramsay's Red Book , which Ramsay, who was then interned under Defense Regulation 18B until September 1944, for safety (trusting the diplomatic status of Kent ) had deposited there.
Trial and verdict
Wolkoff and Kent were arrested for violating the British Official Secrets Act of 1920 and sentenced to ten and seven years' imprisonment respectively on November 7, 1940 in an in-camera trial before the London Crown Court . Of the proceedings, only the judgments became known to the public. In 1941, Kent sought an appeal.
According to the 6th Amendment to the United States Constitution , secret trials are not permitted, which is why the Kent case caused unrest in the US Congress and the US State Department was forced to comment. On September 2, 1944, Kent portrayed it as a German spy who had passed Wolkoff the papers in order to deliver them to Germany. However, the Ministry had a copy of the British judgment, which stated that Kent had no knowledge of Wolkoff's intentions with regard to Germany.
Consequences and meaning
The affair ushered in a series of measures in Britain to increase surveillance and, if necessary, apprehend political opponents. This also enabled action against parliamentarians such as the leader of the British Union of Fascists , Oswald Mosley , and Archibald Ramsay. Approximately 1,000 people were detained in Great Britain under Defense Regulation 18B 1 (a) by the end of 1940 .
Kent was handed over to the US authorities in 1945. The State Department decided not to charge him as a German spy. Anna Wolkoff died in a car accident in Spain in 1969 (or 1973).
Joseph Kennedy was recalled as ambassador from London one day before the start of the Tyler-Kent Trial and three weeks before the 1940 presidential election . For Roosevelt, he ran the risk of running as a "peace saver" himself and exposing his illegal agreements with a warring party. On the day of his return, Roosevelt, who had banned him from the press, coerced him to silence at dinner with James F. Byrnes, and Kennedy gave a radio address the following day in which he endorsed Roosevelt's candidacy.
The openness practiced in 1972 as a result of the Watergate affair led to the publication of documents in the Kent case as well. They confirmed a collaboration between Roosevelt and the British on naval issues, among other things. In “Telegram 2727” of December 25, 1939, Churchill then informed the President that Great Britain would bring up German ships in the 3-mile zone of the USA, but inconspicuously and outside the coast line of sight. On February 28, 1940, he indicated that US mail would also be censored on American and neutral ships. The discovery of these encroachments on sovereignty would have sparked a scandal at a time when isolationism was at its height in the US.
Lifting of secrecy
The US and UK documents on the case were finally released in August 1989, the year after Kent's death. Previously, the public had been reminded of the affair again in 1981 by excerpts from Joan Miller's later posthumously published autobiographical book One Girl's War , which had led to a renewed ban in the meantime.
literature
- Bryan Clough: State Secrets. The Kent-Wolkoff Affair. Hideaway Publications, Hove 2005, ISBN 0-9525477-3-2 .
- Alison R. Holmes, J. Simon Rofe (Eds.): The Embassy in Grosvenor Square: American Ambassadors to the United Kingdom, 1938-2008. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
- Joan Miller: One Girl's War. Personal exploits in MI5's Most Secret Station. St. Martin's Press, 1989, ISBN 0-312-03410-5 .
- Joseph E. Persico: Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage. Random House, 2001.
- Peter Rand: Conspiracy of One: Tyler Kent's Secret Plot against FDR, Churchill, and the Allied War Effort. Lyons Press, Guilford 2013.
- AW Brian Simpson: In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain. University of California Press, 1992.
- Nigel West (= Rupert Allason ): MI5: British Security Service Operations, 1909–1945. Stein & Day Publications, New York 1982, ISBN 0-8128-2859-3 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Clough: State Secrets , p. 23.
- ↑ Article about Joan Miller on spartacus-educational.com , accessed May 10, 2018.
- ↑ Martin Folly, Niall Palmer: The A to Z of US Diplomacy from World War I through World War II. Scarecrow Press, 2010, p. 194.
- ↑ Clough: State Secrets , pp. 26 f.