Officers from the US Embassi;:, Scotland Yard, and MI5 broke into Tyler Kent s bedroom and found the suave young American code clerk standing beside his unmade bed wearing striped pajama bottoms. His mistress was wearing the matching top. Along with the Embassy code room keys, the agents found some 2,000 documents, including copies of top-secret cables that Kent had encoded and transmitted from Churchill to Roosevelt seeking America’s help in the war. Kent planned to give those cables to FDR’s isolationist enemies in Congress. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy waived Kent’s diplomatic immunity and turned him over to the British, who imprisoned him until his secret trial. It was a long way to fall. Kent had used his brilliant language skills and privileged position to get ahead. His haughtiness had irked all he met, but his father’s anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal, anti-Semitic friends helped maintain his career. His good looks didn’t hurt, either. A black sheep with diplomatic privilege, Tyler Kent stood at the crossroads of history: Stalin’s purges, Hitler’s rise, and the Phony War. With access to never-before-seen archive documents and a keen sense for thrilling drama, Peter Rand arrestingly weaves together Kent’s star-crossed love affair, imprisonment, and trial into a rich and compelling tapestry that conveys a fresh vision of that tumultuous time. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/conspiracyofonetOOOOrand Critical acclaim for Peter Rand s China Hands “A splendid job, history vividly evoked ... A fine book.” —Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “A well-drawn portrait of a generation ... Rand does a good job of tracing relationships among his colorful characters and brings in personal detail from unpublished letters and interviews.” —New York Times Book Review “Rand writes with an appreciative zest and an understanding sensitivity.” —Boston Globe “China emerges in the pages of this book with its dazzling complexity intact. . . . Worth reading not only for the welcome attention it brings to a largely unexamined chapter in American journalism but for its flashes of insight into the byzantine politics of the Kuomintang.” —The Nation “Rands work provides an introduction to such fascinating people . . . Insightful observation . . . excellent writing, characterization of the writers, and use of the journalists' letters make this work stand far above most popular histories.... Engrossing ... highly recommended.” —Library Journal “An absorbing account . . . Rand skillfully weaves context into these highly personal narratives and vividly recreates a fascinating, confounding, and ultimately tragic era.” —Kirkus Reviews “Rand vividly recreates the period, lucidly and penetratingly presenting the Chinese experiences of the journalists.” —Publishers Weekly “A sweeping narrative ... a vivid mural of a generation.” Booklist Also by Peter Rand Nonfiction: China Hands: The Adventures and Ordeals of the American Journalists Who Joined Forces with the Great Chinese Revolution Fiction: Firestorm The Time of the Emergency The Private Rich Goldfrom Heaven Conspiracy of One Tyler Kent's Secret Plot against FDR , Churchill and the Allied War Effort Peter Rand LYONS PRESS Guilford, Connecticut An imprint of Globe Pequot Press To buy books in quantity for corporate use or incentives, call (800) 962-0973 or e-mail premiums@GlobePequot.com. Copyright © 2013 by Peter Rand All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the pubbsher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford CT 06437. Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press. Photo on page viii courtesy of the Library of Congress. Author has made all reasonable attempts to establish proper credit for all photographs contained herein. Any failure to credit or mistaken credit is purely incidental and unintentional. Project editor: Meredith Dias Layout: Casey Shain Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rand, Peter, 1942- Conspiracy of one : Tyler Kent’s secret plot against FDR, Churchill, and the Allied war effort / Peter Rand, pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7627-8696-1 1. Kent, Tyler. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Secret service—Soviet Union. 3. World War, 1939-1945—Diplomatic history. 4. Spies—United States—Biography. 5. United States—Foreign relations—Great Britain. 6. Great Britain—Foreign relations—United States. I. Title. D810.S8K467 2013 940.54'8647092—dc23 [B] 2012051752 Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 For Bliss and James “What do you think spies are:priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play Cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives Do you think they sit like monks in London, bal¬ ancing rights and wrongs ?” —-John le Carre, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold Tyler Kent in 1940. Contents Introduction.xi One: Boy Misfit.1 Two: Bad Hat.17 Three: Anti-Semitism.35 Four: Code Clerk.57 Five: Secret Sharer.79 Six: The Onslaught.87 Seven: The Raid.105 Eight: Usual Suspects.129 Nine: The Blackout.135 Ten: The Dungeon.151 Eleven: The Trial.161 Twelve: Mothers Plea.179 Thirteen: Goodnight, Irene.187 Epilogue.215 Acknowledgments.227 Endnotes.231 Bibliography.245 Index.249 V Introduction The strange case of Tyler Kent, American spy, first came to my attention over lunch one day at Boston University with Dr. How¬ ard Gotlieb. Renowned as one of the great American collectors, Gotlieb founded and kept what became the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. From 1963 until his death in 2005, he assembled an archive of twentieth-century Americana second to none. The center commands a vast array of memorabilia, including literary manuscripts; the papers of painters, sculptors, espionage agents, show business figures like Bette Davis and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; and the rough drafts of important American journalists, among them Gloria Emerson, Martha Gellhorn, David Halberstam, and Dan Rather. It was Halberstam who declared Gotlieb a boulevardier among collec¬ tors, a man you might expect to encounter on the Champs-Elysees, in the lobby of the Adlon or Claridge’s, or on the esplanade in Nice in his blue blazer, moving with stately vigor, armed with his cane, a confidant to everyone in the world worth knowing. Gotlieb enthusiastically supported my work from the day my first novel hit bookstore shelves. He provided a haven at Boston University for my manuscripts and papers. He also invited me to use his valuable resources for my research. XI Introduction Over lunch, Gotlieb confided to me that some years earlier he had acquired the papers of Tyler Kent, who, he explained, as a young code clerk in the American embassy in London in 1939 and 1940, had cre¬ ated a small archive of his own of top-secret diplomatic documents that he had copied, secretly removed from the embassy in his briefcase over a nine-month period, and squirreled away in his bed-sit apart¬ ment at 47 Gloucester Place in the Marylebone area of London. Kent had spent a number of years during his twenties in the US embassy in Moscow, where he had developed his archival habits, and MI5, the British domestic counterintelligence branch, had been keeping an eye on him from the moment, in October 1939, that he first set foot on British soil as an embassy employee. In May 1940, officials arrested Kent on the suspicion that he was working as an espionage agent in London for the Nazis. I had never heard of Tyler Kent, and it’s probable that you never have either—until now. He is one of history s footnotes, a minor player in a vast game, who might have made a difference in the outcome if things had turned out differently. “Hes got a marvelous name,” Gotlieb said. “Sounds rather like Clark Kent, who also had a secret side to his character.” It was, as Gotlieb told it, a fascinating story, but a forgotten one that had taken place many years earlier. More than half a century had elapsed. Even at the time, government officials suppressed the story of Kents arrest, his secret trial, and subsequent imprisonment. Word filtered out eventually, during the course of the war, when members of Parliament discovered that among the documents found in Kents apartment were secret telegrams that Winston Churchill had sent to President Roosevelt during the early months of the war—telegrams that suggested the two men had been discussing ways in which the United States might help the British war effort at a time of enormous opposition to intervention in the States. XII Introduction From 1944 on, civil libertarians and former anti-interventionists took considerable interest in Kent’s case, wondering what Kent knew that Anglo-American interests felt they had to silence with a secret trial and a long imprisonment. The flurry of publicity around his release and subsequent deportation back to America lasted a short time, but Kent withdrew into silence after issuing a lengthy statement to Con¬ gress. History consigned Kent to that limbo where the might-have- beens slumber. It had been closed to researchers by agreement with Kent until his death in the mid-1980s. As it happened, Gotlieb told me, no one had yet seen the Kent archive, including at least one pair of subsequent biographers who had written about Kent after his death. How had Gotlieb come upon this trove of Kent’s papers? Kent, the eminent archivist told me, had returned to the States in 1945. He was then thirty-four years old. He had spent the war years in an internment camp on the Isle of Wight. When he stepped off a ship in Hoboken, New Jersey, on a cold, blustery November day, a battery of reporters and photographers alerted to his return met him. He appeared, as ever, calm and self-possessed in his Savile Row suit. Still youthful, he projects in the news photos of the time the aura of a modestly famous second-string Hollywood matinee idol fresh from a career-shattering scandal. He has the pallor and the weariness of someone who has had his brush with infamy. Kent disappeared from public view. Within months he met and married a rich, older divorcee named Clara Hyatt. He settled down on Claras Maryland farm to the life of a Southern gentleman farmer, an occupation for which his penal servitude as a farm laborer on the Isle of Wight had prepared him admirably. For many years, he lived not far from his ancestral Virginia roots. A man of leisure, he maintained a luxuriously appointed yacht in Florida, on which he could indulge his favorite pastimes of sailing and fishing. In the 1960s, he and Clara lived in Florida, where, for a time, XIII Introduction Kent operated a local newspaper, from which he propounded the same racist views that had won him friends among British and American antiwar activists. Kent also maintained correspondence with various groups, including military historians, unreconstructed isolationists who believed that the Anglo-American liberal elite had victimized Kent, and even Third Reich apologists. As the years went by, Kent put on weight and grew an unflatter¬ ing goatee. We see him, in the 1970s, on the shores of Lake Chapala, in Mexico, where he and Clara have moved. John Toland, the distin¬ guished World War II historian, visited the Kents on Lake Chapala in 1972. In photographs taken on this visit, the portly Kent wears a bolo tie and a wide-brimmed hat. He is, according to Toland, gracious, reserved—and bitter about his wartime ordeal. Soon after Toland visited them, the Kents’ fortunes nosedived. Kent had invested his wife’s wealth in the Mexican peso. It was a promising move in those years when oil was transforming the Mexi¬ can economy. The oil boom went bust, however; the peso crashed, and so did the principal from which Clara and Kent drew their income. The Kents returned to America and ended up in Kerrville, Texas, not far from San Antonio, in a mobile home. This is how Kent’s papers came to find a home at Boston Uni¬ versity. Lurking in the background of Kent’s past, furtively prepared to take up his cause, flickered certain loyalists from the doomed past. These occasional courtiers warmed the vanity of the man who had played a role of some importance in the ideological war waged by the anti-interventionists, men like Charles Lindbergh, who thought Hit¬ ler invincible. In the twilight of Tyler Kent’s life, when he played the genteel country squire in a trailer park and needed money, one of these courtiers stepped forward and brokered the sale of Kent’s papers to Boston University. XIV Introduction He kept the Savile Row suits, found neatly pressed and beautifully maintained in the closet of the mobile home he shared with Clara, who survived him and lived into her nineties. Howard Gotlieb offered me the opportunity to peruse the Kent archive. Among Kent’s papers are documents that historians have used from time to time to sketch the tale of Tyler Kent, and some that no others have seen as yet. Among them, I found more than fifty love letters that Kent preserved all those years, penned to him in prison by Irene Danischewsky, his inamorata. These letters, written in longhand, open the shutters onto a time long gone and provide a voice of courage and passion to this disquieting tale. The daughter of Russian emigres who settled in London in 1916, Irene inspired me to write this story. She is the muse of this account just as she was to Kent. Did he reread these letters in later years, or merely keep them as mute witness to the past? We’ll never know. The effort of reliving those years would have caused him too much pain, I suspect. Irene’s letters have the freshness of expression that never ages. They would have returned Kent too swiftly to his trial, a time of might-have-beens, when he was young and restless—a time when, on the threshold of life, he glimpsed immortality, and, for a brief moment, possessed the power to change the course of history. xv » ■ ( - m\ ■