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State Secrets: The Kent-Wolkoff Affair

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The Kent-Wolkoff affair that is the topic of Bryan Clough's detailed book is about the arrest of Tyler Kent, a code clerk in the American embassy in London, in May, 1940. In the U.S. it is often referred to as the Tyler Kent affair.

Kent was arrested for having hundreds of cables to and from the embassy in his unlocked London apartment. Also implicated was Anna Wolkoff, a Russian émigré who was supportive of pro-German political factions in London - factions supported by American isolationists, including Tyler Kent himself.

The arrests were made in late May, 1940, just as Dunkirk is about to fall after the German blitzkrieg swept France that month. It is before Hitler starts the planning for Operation Sea Lion but the invasion of England is considered an imminent threat within the U.K. At the same time, Hitler keeps sending secret peace feelers to the U.K. - and an element within the U.K. still thinks they are worth considering.

Notably, it is also before Franklin Roosevelt's run for an unprecedented third term as president, with the election six months away. It is a time when England's resources for war appear limited - and discussion of American support by supplying arms is starting, including what would become the "Lend Lease" contract.

The Kent-Wolkoff affair is historically minor, except when considered in the context of the period. Today it would appear that Tyler Kent's possession of hundreds of secret dispatches would be a serious security violation. But security of the period was lax and others - including the ambassador routinely took government documents for personal files.

The importance of the affair was in its early moves against British pro-German citizens; in what may have been political maneuvering to force the resignation of U.S. ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of John F. Kennedy); and British attempts to prevent the embarrassment of Franklin Roosevelt in the pre-election period.

The arrest of Tyler Kent is notable in that he was sentenced and interned in the U.K., rather than being sent back to the U.S. for trial in public, as might have been the case if not for the delicacy of the U.K. government trying to solicit American support for the war.

Clough's conclusions on the Kent-Wolkoff affair are dramatically different than when he started the book. It would spoil the story to reveal them - but, as an English reviewer noted on the amazon.co.uk site, "most books on espionage are rubbish" and this book highlights why.

As a result, the book should be required reading for journalists as a lesson in fact-checking and the reliability of witnesses.

Some aspects of the book may be slightly confusing to Americans not familiar with things like British social structures or MI5 and MI6 in the U.K. but an occasional Wikipedia search is helpful.

The one criticism of the book is that as Clough peels back the onion on "cover stories" from the U.S. and U.K., he might have done a better job of highlighting what changed in the public version of the Kent-Wolkoff affair from chapter to chapter.

This book is badly presented - it's only by reading these comments that I could work out what it's about! At the time (Second World War) the outline of the story must have been well-known, but the author seems to assume any reader would know that. It's therefore difficult to piece together the point of this book. It has no reproductions of e.g news items at the time; and the quotations from other books (typically, this 'affair' was one chapter in ten or so spy stories, published after WW2 to make money) aren't distinguished by typeface, or by facsimile reproduction. The chapter titles are silly and unhelpful ('Second Spin Cycle', 'Kent Speaks'). Moreover the author is an unreconstructed believer in all WW2 mythology and cliche, with for example no grasp of the 'Holocaust' and Pearl Harbor as frauds, or the truth about the treatment of Germans. Capt Ramsay MP gets some mentions; so does William Joyce, 'Lord Haw Haw'. And a rather large cast of judges, oficials, MI5 and MI6 men, spies, Ambassadors, military people, Joseph P. Kennedy etc. Needs reformatting, reediting, illustrating, and critical reshaping.