Book speculates on the spy in Churchill’s Admiralty in early days of WWII

“Churchill’s Mole Hunt”, a recently-published book of historical fiction, explores the murky world of espionage in London at the beginning of the Second World War that surrounded the Russian émigré Anna Wolkoff and US embassy cipher clerk spy Tyler Kent.

The book, by author and journalist John Tilston, goes behind the scenes of historic events when Winston Churchill returned to the British government as First Lord of the Admiralty.

Just after midnight on October 13^th 1939, Captain Gunther Prien surfed German U-Boat 47 on the incoming tide through tricky defences and into the British Royal Navy’s main base at Scapa Flow in northern Scotland.

There were few chinks in the defences, and Churchill had ordered the Royal Navy to move quickly to plug the remaining gaps with two more sunken ships to add to those already in place and to the submarine nets.

The gap in the southern entrance to Scapa Flow was just metres wide.

Yet 31-year-old Prien, in a display of skilful navigation, guided his boat through to the very heart of the Royal Navy’s base and sank the battleship Royal Oak, condemning 832 men to a watery grave. Prien was hailed as a hero of the Third Reich and personally decorated by Hitler.

But questions remain about how Prien and his commander Rear Admiral Karl Doenitz got such pinpoint information.

The “Official History of the Second World War: The War at Sea Volume One”, published by the British government (Her Majesty's Stationary Office) in 1954 concluded that “There has been a good deal of criticism of the [Royal Navy] intelligence provided from London … It must be admitted that, during the early months of the war, the procurement by the enemy of intelligence regarding our warship dispositions and movements was superior to our own”.

Did the Germans have a well-placed spy in London? We’ll now never know for sure because immediately after the War a senior officer in the Royal Navy ordered that sensitive papers be burned. But Churchill is known to have suspected there was an enemy spy within the Admiralty.

“Churchill’s Mole Hunt” is a fictional account based on detailed historical research of the key characters involved: from Roosevelt and Churchill, through US Ambassador Joe Kennedy, renegade Scottish MP Jock Ramsay and MI5’s Maxwell Knight and Joan Miller, to real life spies Wolkoff and Kent. It extends from the early London blackouts, through the sinking of Royal Oak, the Battle of River Plate and the theft of secret correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill.

It follows a joint Scotland Yard/MI5 investigation around Westminster, Whitehall, Kensington, Pimlico, the smart embassies and pubs of central London and the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall. It delves into the dealings of The Right Club to identify and trap the spy at the heart of Churchill’s Admiralty, and reveals why this has never subsequently came to light.

The book is available on Amazon.

The characters - Anna Wolkoff

Anna Wolkoff was the daughter of Admiral Nikolai Wolkoff who was an aide to Tsar Nicholas II based in London. Anna was born in Russia in 1902 but remained in London with her father after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 rendered his services superfluous. In 1940 she was arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act. She was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. At her trial she threatened to kill Joan Miller, who gave evidence at the trial. She didn’t. She was released in 1947 and went back to the Tea Room but that closed soon afterwards. She eked a meagre living out of dressmaking. She died in 1969.

The characters - Tyler Kent

Tyler Kent was born in China in 1911. His father was a serving U.S. diplomat at the time. Maxwell Knight interviewed him while in prison and said he was telling him the truth when he said he didn’t know the Roosevelt/Churchill documents would be passed on. He told Knight he thought Ramsay would use them for political purposes. After his release from prison in 1945, Kent returned to anonymity in the U.S. He died in a Texas trailer Park in 1988.

The characters - Joan Miller

Joan Miller was born in 1918. After the time described in this story, she lived for a short while with Maxwell Knight, but soon realised she was being used as a cover for his homosexuality, which, despite being widespread in London society, was illegal at that time. She married Tom Kinlock Jones in 1943. She continued working in MI5 but transferred to the Political Intelligence Department. She died in 1984. Despite MI5’s efforts to stop it, her daughter published Miller’s book about her experiences, entitled One Girl’s War: Personal Exploits in MI5’s Most Secret Station, in Dublin in 1986. Some critics have suggested she embellished her story.

The characters - Gunther Prien

KapitainLeutenant Gunther Prien was born in Germany in 1908. He won his papers in the German merchant marine at the age of 24, but could not find work. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and the Kriegsmarine the following year. He scored the first official U-Boat victory in the war and on his first patrol sunk three Allied ships. He was awarded the Iron Cross First Class when he stepped ashore from the Scapa Flow mission. He quickly capitalized on his fame by publishing his memoirs entitled ‘I Sank the Royal Oak’. After Scapa Flow, he was credited with destroying 28 merchant ships. While leading a U-Boat wolf pack attack on an Allied convoy in March 1941, he was killed when U-47 was sunk.

The characters - Archibald Ramsay

Archibald Ramsay was born in Scotland in 1894. In 1940, he was interned in Brixton Prison under special wartime regulations that allowed the Home Secretary to detain people who were deemed a threat. He was the only M.P. to be detained under this regulation. Some believed his profile and membership of the House of Commons saved him from being charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act for passing information to Nazi Germany. In fact, some Labour Party M.P.s suspected he’d done a deal to stay out of court by keeping the membership of the Right Club secret.

In 1941, while in detention, he sued the New York Times for libel for reporting he had been spying. He won his case by arguing that if he had been guilty of spying British authorities would have charged him, but the court awarded derisory damages of a farthing, effectively suggesting it regarded this as a technicality.

He was released from Brixton in September 1944. He lost his seat in parliament in the 1945 General Election that also turfed out Churchill. In 1955 he published a book in self-justification entitled The Nameless War, and he died in March of that year. He said in his book that he kept the names of Right Club members secret because of the “well-grounded fear of Jewish retaliation of a serious nature.” He did entrust the list of members to Tyler Kent for safekeeping and was discovered when his flat was raided.

The characters - Admiral Sir Barry Domvile

Admiral Sir Barry Edward Domvile was born in 1878 and began his career in the Royal Navy in 1892. He was interred by the British Government in 1940 and was released from Brixton Jail in July 1943. His fascist views were not dimmed by the enforced years of quiet reflection. He published his memoirs, entitled From Admiral to Cabin Boy, four years later and developed a conspiracy theory that he dubbed “Judmas” (‘the Judaeo-Masonic combination, which has wielded such a baneful influence in world history’). After being introduced to Hitler on a visit to Germany in 1936, he wrote: "This remarkable man was fully alive to the evil potentialities of Judmas, and was determined to remove its influence from Europe. He died in 1971.

The ships - The Graf Spee

The Graf Spee remains at the bottom of the entrance to Montevideo Harbor. There is frequent talk that it will be salvaged.

The ships - HMS Royal Oak

HMS Royal Oak now lies in 30 metres of water in Scapa Flow, almost upside down, with her upturned keel reaching to within just five metres of the surface. A wreck buoy marks her hazard to shipping.

She was built in the naval dockyards at Devonport, Plymouth during World War I and fitted with an awesome array of firepower, particularly her eight 15" guns - the largest guns ever fitted on a British Naval vessel. They each weighed 100 tonnes and were capable of firing 876-kilogram shells onto targets up to 29 kilometres away. Identical guns from her sister ships HMS Ramilles and HMS Resolution are on display outside the entrance to the Imperial War Museum in south London.

The characters - Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy was US Ambassador to the Court of St James from 1938 to 1940. He was opposed to the war and tried to influence the British government against declaring it, but once it started, he more or less supported the Allied war effort, despite the fact that he was no friend of President Roosevelt. He resigned in November 1940 in protest against what he saw as Roosevelt's determination to enter the war. His children, including the future President JFK, cut quite a dash on the London social scene.

The characters - Herbert von Dirksen

Herbert von Dirksen was born in Berlin in 1882. He worked as a barrister and an assistant judge before the First World War, in which he won the Iron Cross. After the war, he joined the diplomatic service and served in various European posts, finally replacing Joachim von Ribbentrop as Ambassador to Britain in 1838 when the latter was appointed Nazi Foreign Minister.

On the outbreak of war he returned to Germany where he retired. He was a member of the Nazi Party but in June 1947 was cleared of responsibility for Nazi atrocities committed. He died in 1955.

The characters - Karl Doenitz

Karl Doenitz promoted to Rear Admiral for the Scapa Flow attack and eventually ended up as Admiral of the Fleet, commanding the German Navy from early 1943. Hitler anointed him as his successor when he killed himself in his Berlin bunker in 1945. He was head of state for 20 days before he was captured. He was convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials – though most Allied sailors believed he fought hard but fairly - and spent eleven and a half years in prison. He died in 1980; he was 89 years old.

The characters - Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, was born in 1908 into a wealthy banking family. He was educated at Eton and went to Sandhurst, but didn't distinguish himself at either place. It was in the war that his star started to burn brightly. He began working in Naval Intelligence for Admiral Godfrey in May 1939. He remained in that capacity for the whole of the war and was central to much of the work done. After the war he worked for the news agency Reuters and eventually created Bond, partly it seems in his own image. He died in 1968.

The characters - Admiral Nickolas Wolkoff

Admiral Nickolas Wolkoff was born in 1870.

He and his family remained in London and, latterly, ran the Russian Tea Rooms. He was interned during the war and died in 1954.

Members of the Right Club

A list of members of The Right Club maintained by Sir Archibald Ramsay emerged after the War. It included: William Joyce (who as Lord Haw Haw broadcast Nazi propaganda and who was executed for treason after the war); journalists A.K. Chesterton and Francis Yeats-Brown; the aristocrats Lord Redesdale, the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Westminster, Lord Sempill (also a pilot in the Armed Forces), the Earl of Galloway and the Marquess of Graham (who later became a Minister in the Rhodesian Government and signed that country's illegal Declaration of Independence in 1965); Conservative Party Members of Parliament John Stourton, John Mackie, James Edmondson, Mavis Tate and Thomas Hunter; Commander E.H.Cole from the Royal Navy; colonial public servant Aubrey Lees; Samuel Chapman; Ernest Bennett; Charles Kerr; Margaret Bothamley; H.T. Mills; Richard Findlay and the delightfully named Scot Serrocold Skeels. There were three on the list - Joan Miller, Marjorie Amor and Helen de Munck – who, unknown to Ramsay, were from MI5.

The Right Club's Red Book

According to Professor Richard Griffiths, the police had the leather bound book containing the names of members of the Right Club found in Tyler Kent's flat until October 1944. But the best guess now is that it was returned to Ramsay after his release. Nothing was seen of it until the late 1980s, when it was discovered at the bottom of an old safe in a solicitor's office.

Luckily, the finder passed it onto Professor Griffiths, who used it as a primary source for his book, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, The Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939-40, then deposited the book at the Wiener Library. It is now publicly available for viewing.

The characters - Rear Admiral John Godfrey

Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence from 1939 to 1942, was highly regarded by many of his contemporaries but suffered from never gaining Churchill’s full confidence. Nor did he aid his own cause by once sending a memo to Churchill pointing out that the First Lord had been overstating enemy losses at sea. In 1941 he played a crucial role in establishing intelligence co-operation with the United States after a productive 90 minute meeting with President Roosevelt. Just days after being promoted to Vice Admiral in mid 1942 he was relieved of his duties, after falling out with the Joint Intelligence Committee (the British Government's top spy coordinating body), and sent to India as the Flag Officer Commanding the Royal Indian Navy. He retired in 1945 and died in 1971, aged 83. These days he's considered to be one of the unsung heroes of the war.

The characters - Maxwell Knight

Maxwell Knight, who was born in Surrey in 1900, was an eccentric. He was recruited into British Intelligence from the right wing British Fascisti, a group set up in the 1920s to counter the growing influence of the Labour Party and Trade Unions. He lived with Joan Miller for a while. After the War he remained in MI5 but also wrote several books on natural history. He later became a popular presenter on BBC of children’s’ programmes known as Uncle Max. He died of a heart attack in 1968.