Tyler Kent

Tyler Gatewood Kent (born March 24, 1911 in Nowchwang, Yingkou , Manchuria , † November 20, 1988 in Texas ) was an American cipherer of his embassy in Moscow and London during World War II . He stole documents from the secret mail traffic between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Minister of the Navy Winston Churchill in order to pass them on to isolationists or the German Reich .

Youth and career

Kent was born in China where his father, William P. Kent, was the US consul. The family was from Virginia and was related to John Tyler . He attended the private St. Albans School in Washington, DC and then to study history at Princeton University , George Washington University , the Sorbonne (where he studied the Russian language) and the University of Madrid . Through his father's activities, he also joined the State Department and was sent to Moscow in 1933 to the first US Ambassador to the Soviet Union , William C. Bullitt , where he worked as a cipher. Although he had no communist beliefs, he was recruited by the Soviet secret services during his Moscow service.

In 1939 he came under suspicion of espionage for the Soviet Union. In the absence of evidence, the diplomatic service decided to transfer him to London, where he started on October 5, 1939. Churchill, who had recently become First Lord of the Admiralty (Secretary of the Navy), communicated with Roosevelt at the time, and both men expected that he would soon become Prime Minister of Britain.

Affair over the secret Churchill – Roosevelt correspondence

→ Main article : Tyler-Kent affair

As the companion of a Ludwig Matthias suspected of being a German agent, Kent came into the spotlight of detectives from Scotland Yard 's Special Branch soon after his arrival . He was observed as a guest in the Russian Tea Room in South Kensington . The club was a meeting place for Russian exileistocrats, led by the former naval attaché of the Russian Empire in London, Admiral Nikolai Wolkoff, and his wife, a former lady-in-waiting of Tsarina Alice von Hessen-Darmstadt .

Through their daughter Anna Wolkoff , Kent met Irene Danischewski , the wife of a British trader who occasionally traveled to the Soviet Union. The couple was observed as suspected of spying by the MI5 domestic intelligence agency. Irene Danischewski became Kent's lover.

Through his embassy work, Kent had access to many classified documents, including Churchill's correspondence with Roosevelt. He began to take home the more interesting documents and become politically active. His views are not very well known, but moved - like those of his ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy - on the line of the isolationists , so that he was ready to support British opponents of the war.

At the beginning of 1940 he met the MP Archibald Maule Ramsay through Anna Wolkoff and joined his anti-Semitic The Right Club . Ramsay gave Kent, who enjoyed diplomatic immunity, the Right Club membership roster for safekeeping. Kent invited Wolkoff and Ramsay to his apartment and showed them the stolen documents. He later stated that he had hoped Ramsay would pass them on to US politicians who opposed Roosevelt. On April 13, Anna Wolkoff made copies of some documents and sent them to Berlin through an intermediary in the Italian embassy. Monitoring of the radio traffic by MI8 revealed that the material reached Admiral Canaris , the chief of the German defense .

Wolkoff asked Right Club member Joan Miller , whom she trusted, to forward an encrypted letter to William Joyce through her Italian embassy contact. Miller, who was an agent in Division B5b of MI5 , agreed, but took the letter to her manager and future lover, Maxwell Knight .

Arrest, Trial, and Judgment

On May 18, 1940, US Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy was informed of the events and agreed to waive Kent's immunity. He was arrested during a search of Kent's house on May 20. Among the more than 1,900 documents, MI5 found Churchill's telegrams to Roosevelt as well as the encryption codes of the embassy and the membership book of the Right Club founder Archibald Ramsay. Some of the people on this list were under surveillance by MI5 and Special Branch. On the day of the arrest, the Battle of Dunkirk began after German troops had reached the Channel coast. Later Kent saw himself, Ramsay and the other prisoners as pawn sacrifices, which the Fifth Column thought to hold responsible for the defeat of Dunkirk before the public.

The US State Department announced on May 31, eleven days after Kent's secret arrest, that he had been released and "arrested on the instructions of the (British) Home Secretary ( John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley )". No mention was made that he was arrested under the Official Secrets Act . Anna Wolkoff was also arrested on the same day for violating this law.

On October 23, Kent was indicted in private in a room in the Old Bailey , the glass doors and windows of which had been taped with brown paper. He was accused of having obtained documents that "can be of direct or indirect use to the enemy" and of having given them to Wolkoff. He was also charged with stealing documents from Ambassador Kennedy's property. The only legal observer of the trial was Malcolm Muggeridge for MI6 . Two of the witnesses against Kent were Maxwell Knight and Archibald Ramsay; the latter was imprisoned on the Isle of Man under Defense Regulation 18B because he had seen the documents.

Under British censorship little information penetrated the US, so that during the war there was speculation in the US press about the mysterious arrest of a US diplomat in another country. British officials who knew the secret documents believed that if they had become known at the time, Anglo-American relations would have been massively disrupted, as they showed that Roosevelt was unconstitutionally violating neutrality laws in order to save Britain from German conquest. It would also have prevented Roosevelt's re-election that same year. Churchill, on the other hand, who was only minister until May 11, 1940, bypassed his Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the cabinet.

At the trial, Kent said he had also secured secret documents from the US embassy in Moscow with the vague idea that one day they would be shown to US senators who shared his isolationist, anti-Semitic views. He burned these before leaving Moscow. It later became known that he had fallen in love with a translator who worked for the NKVD , which is why Soviet contacts were suspected.

On November 7, 1940, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. Kent's trial and imprisonment, as well as cooperation with US authorities, led isolationist groups in the US to express that he had been silenced and that the trial served to hide the country's attempt to enter the war.

Condemned as a traitor in Britain, Kent could also be viewed from another perspective as an American patriot who was silenced by his administration to prevent disclosure of illegal collusion between Roosevelt and Churchill during the Seated War in Europe. This was summed up in 1946 by John H. Snow:

“As we know, our nation is strictly divided into two camps in terms of responsibility for war. All thoughts and questions are reduced to one question. To put it bluntly, it goes, 'Were Roosevelt and his schemers responsible for America's entry into the war or not?' Both camps cannot be right at the same time. As we believe, the answer cannot lie in between. That would be an old trick and we are tired of it. He never prevented war. The Kent case itself raises many questions, but the main question is - and remains - 'What was the content of these telegrams?' ... "

post war period

At the end of the war, Kent was deported to the USA. After marrying a wealthy woman, he published a newspaper with ties to the Ku Klux Klan . Between 1952 and 1963, Kent was the subject of six inconclusive FBI investigations. Because of the anti-Semitism he has been the target of the Anti-Defamation League for a long time .

The documents published in 1972 as a result of the Watergate affair also in the Kent case confirmed a collaboration with the British and others. a. in naval matters. In Telegram 2727 of December 25, 1939, Churchill informed the President that he would pursue German ships in the 3-mile zone of the United States, but secretly and out of sight of the coast. On February 28, 1940, he indicated that US mail would be censored on American and neutral ships. The news would have caused a scandal at the time.

Kent died impoverished in a trailer park in Texas in 1988.

literature

• Ray Bearse, Anthony Read: Conspirator: The Untold Story of Tyler Kent . New York. Doubleday. 1991
• Bryan Clough : State Secrets: The Kent-Wolkoff Affair. East Sussex: Hideaway Publications Ltd., 2005. ISBN 0-9525477-3-2
• Paul Willetts: Rendezvous at the Russian tea rooms . London: Constable, 2015 ISBN 978-1-4721-1985-8

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Anthony Masters: The Man Who Was M. The Life of Maxwell Knight. Oxford, New York: Bais Blackwell 1984. pp. 82f.
2. ^ John H. Snow: The Case of Tyler Kent . The Long House Inc., New Canaan, CT, 1946, p. 58.