Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War

20. The Spy in the State Department: Tyler Kent

149 20 The Spy in the State Department Tyler Kent I believed myself to have been presented with a moral dilemma. Tyler Kent, a US diplomat and spy, September 1982 Tyler Kent was a State Department officer assigned to one of America’s most important embassies in one of its most sensitive jobs at a critical point before World War II. More than seventy years have passed since Kent was arrested for espionage. Although his case faded into obscurity after World War II, some historians still dispute whether he was even a spy. Others believe he spied for both the Soviets and the Germans, and still others claim he was an unwitting dupe in a British plot to lure the United States into war against the Axis powers. Kent came from a long line of Virginia’s landed gentry but was born in Manchuria in 1911 and was raised in various foreign countries where his father served as an American diplomat. Kent seemed to be an ideal candidate to follow family tradition in the diplomatic service. He studied at Princeton University, the University of Madrid, and the Sorbonne in Paris , and he mastered six languages on his world travels. However, he failed the oral examination for the Foreign Service, but his father’s connections enabled him to join it as a communications clerk in 1934.1 150 Espionage during the World Wars, 1914–45 Kent was first assigned to Moscow, where he later claimed that he developed an intense hatred of Soviet communism. At the same time, some observers, including KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky, claim that Kent had a Russian mistress and was recruited by the Soviet intelligence services to provide codebooks and classified documents.2 Kent certainly exhibited some of the traits fitting a spy’s profile. He was described by college classmates as a “brilliant linguist but a loner.”3 Given his aristocratic roots, Kent also deeply resented the inferior treatment he received at the embassy because he was a code clerk and not a full-fledged diplomat. Embassy officers like Kent were easy targets for the Soviet intelligence services. Security was notoriously slipshod, and Moscow was a stark posting that offered few diversions for foreigners. US diplomats spent their offduty hours drinking and partying, often with Russian women who were controlled by Soviet intelligence. Although he may have been a loner, Kent was an active partygoer and womanizer and also lived beyond his means. After his Moscow tour, Kent was dispatched to London in 1939. By the time he left the USSR, the idealistic Kent had fallen under the spell of Nazi propaganda and firmly believed that the Jews were the cause of the looming conflict in Europe. As an embassy code clerk, he was able to read all correspondence between London and Washington on the growing Nazi threat to the continent. Kent was appalled by some of the messages he read. He was privy to secret communications between President Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill relayed through the embassy, a highly unusual correspondence because Churchill was the lord of the Admiralty at the time and not yet the prime minister. Although the vast majority of the American people favored neutrality, Roosevelt and Churchill were conducting a dialogue regarding possible US assistance to the British in the future. Kent, who was both a virulent isolationist and a Nazi sympathizer, was outraged as he read the correspondence. Roosevelt, in his view, was secretly scheming with Churchill to drive the United States into a war that was opposed by the American public. The young communicator decided to copy all the correspondence and provide it to isolationist US legislators so Roosevelt ’s plotting could be exposed. But suddenly another opportunity arose. In 1940 Kent met Anna Volkova, a Russian émigré who was as passionately anti-Semitic as he was. Volkova consorted with a group of pro-Nazi The Spy in the State Department • Tyler Kent 151 Englishmen called the Right Club whose members frequented the Russian Tea Room, her father’s London restaurant. When the club was formed in 1939, its leader, Archibald Ramsay, claimed that “Hitler is a splendid fellow with whom we should be proud to be friends.”4 Kent met Ramsay through Volkova and showed his new fascist friends the proof of Roosevelt’s perfidy in his correspondence with Churchill.5 Kent later admitted that he showed the documents to his new friends and that Volkova...