DRONKERS, JOHANNES• 159him from the party. When Driberg demanded to know the reason, he
was informed that he had been accused of betraying the CPGB’s se-
crets to MI5 and being an informant codenamed ‘‘M8.’’ When Drib-
erg reported this to Knight, ignorant that his reports had been
circulated within MI5 as having come from M8, the latter realized
that only someone inside the Security Service could have compro-
mised his agent. Knight died in February 1968 convinced of Soviet
penetration of MI5, but he never learned that it was his colleague
Anthony Bluntthat had been the person responsible. Instead, aReg-
istrysecretary, Celia Luke, confessed to leaking the information and
was sacked.
In later years Driberg was tempted back into espionage by the
Czechs, who paid him handsomely for his political gossip, apparently
never suspecting that he was routinely reporting every contact to
MI5. One significant mission undertaken by Driberg for MI5 was to
travel to Moscow in 1953 to interview his old friendGuy Burgess.
This journey resulted in a slim but affectionate biography of thede-
fector,Guy Burgess, which was released in 1954 and was followed
by his own autobiography,Ruling Passions. Driberg succumbed to a
heart attack in the back of a London taxi in August 1976.DRONKERS, JOHANNES.In May 1942 Johannes Dronkers, a 46-
year-old Post Office clerk, was one of several Dutch refugees towed
into Harwich by an armed Royal Navy trawler. At theRoyal Victoria
Patriotic School, he underwent routine screening and was inter-
viewed by Adrianus Vrinten, a private detective who before World
War II had worked for theSecret Intelligence Servicestation in The
Hague. Dronkers claimed to be a member of the anti-Nazi resistance
in the Netherlands, but Vrinten recognized him as a leading member
of Mussert’s National Socialist party. When challenged, Dronkers
admitted he had been sent to England by theAbwehrand revealed
his safe-arrival signal, a message to be broadcast on Radio Oranje.
Under interrogation atCamp 020, Dronkers confessed that he had
been in the pay of the Abwehr since 1938 and, although he had been
given a mission in England at that time, he had not fulfilled it. He
was allowed to see one of his other companions from the voyage
across the North Sea, a half-Javanese named John Mulder, about
whomMI5had some suspicions, but their conversation proved Mul-