Agent M
The Lives and Spies of MI5's Maxwell Knight
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The fascinating, improbable true story of Maxwell Knight -- the great MI5 spymaster and inspiration for the James Bond character M.
Maxwell Knight was perhaps the greatest spymaster in history. He did more than anyone in his era to combat the rising threat of fascism in Britain during World War II, in spite of his own history inside this movement. He was also truly eccentric -- a thrice-married jazz aficionado who kept a menagerie of exotic pets -- and almost totally unqualified for espionage.
Yet he had a gift for turning practically anyone into a fearless secret agent. Knight's work revolutionized British intelligence, pioneering the use of female agents, among other accomplishments. In telling Knight's remarkable story, Agent M also reveals for the first time in print the names and stories of some of the men and women recruited by Knight, on behalf of MI5, who were asked to infiltrate the country's most dangerous political organizations.
Drawing on a vast array of original sources, Agent M reveals not only the story of one of the world's greatest intelligence operators, but the sacrifices and courage required to confront fascism during a nation's darkest time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British popular historian and biographer Hemming (The Ingenious Mr. Pike) revisits the life of Maxwell Knight in the first biography of the 20th century s leading MI5 spymaster. Knight was an eccentric figure who possessed an unparalleled ability to turn unqualified men and women bankers, secretaries, lawyers, booksellers into reliable and consistently productive agents. During the 1920s and 30s, Knight used this ability to infiltrate and render innocuous the British Fascist movement, under the leadership of first William Joyce (later Lord Haw-Haw) and then Oswald Mosley. Knight had for some years been attracted to fascism himself and might have tipped off his old friend Joyce that he was about to be apprehended before Joyce fled to Germany in August 1939. Hemming writes far more briefly about Knight s less successful postwar effort, including his recruitment of John le Carr to identify communist infiltrations of British institutions. The book is clearly written and well researched, though Hemming occasionally stumbles, as when he gets distracted by the work of some of Knight s less effective agents in the early 1930s. Still, this in-depth introduction illuminates a largely forgotten man of antidemocratic tendencies who played a key role in keeping Britain secure and democratic for much of the interwar and early postwar periods.
