In 1940, Tyler Kent was working as a cipher clerk at the US embassy in London, responsible for sending cables. He was a die-hard “isolationist,” against the US government entering World War II. Believing that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was betraying American neutrality, he decided to amass about 1,500 telegrams passing between the US president and Britain’s soon-to-be leader, Winston Churchill. He believed that exposing them would reveal a plot to bring the US into the war.
Kent was secretly passing information to a pro-Nazi group in Britain. MI5 detected Kent’s espionage through a spy inside that group. Following his previous posting in Moscow, Kent was also a Soviet agent. At that time, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were allies, jointly dismembering Europe—a chapter that today’s Kremlin would prefer airbrushed from history.
In May 1940, MI5 informed the US ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy Sr. (father of JFK), about Kent’s espionage. The US State Department stripped Kent of his diplomatic immunity and London’s Special Branch police arrested him. READ MORE from Calder Walton about Kent’s espionage.