KNIGHT, MAX• 291Communist activist, and three of his agents in the Arsenal. Knight’s
specialty was the cultivation of agents who could spend years maneu-
vering themselves into a position of access. In Gray’s case, it took
nine years for her to accumulate sufficient information to call in the
police. Similarly, Knight employedJoan Millerto ingratiate herself
with theLink, a group of suspected Nazi sympathizers; in 1940 this
led to the appearance ofAnna WolkoffandTyler Kentat the Old
Bailey in 1940 on a charge of having stolen hundreds of secret tele-
grams containing Prime MinisterWinston Churchill’s correspon-
dence to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from the U.S. embassy.
Another of his agents wasTom Driberg, who was eventually be-
trayed byAnthony Bluntand expelled from the CPGB, an incident
that convinced Knight that the Soviets had penetrated MI5.
Knight enjoyed a wide circle of friends in London and used them
as a useful pool from which to recruit informants and obtain assis-
tance. He approachedDennis Wheatleyfor permission to employ
his stepson,William Younger, as an agent while he was still at Ox-
ford. He also arranged for Wheatley to provide cover for another of
his agents, Friedle Gaertner, by hiring her as his secretary. Still other
agents included Marjorie Mackie andWilliam Allen, both used to
penetrate potentialFifth Columnists.
In 1934, while working for the Security Service, Knight published
a thriller,Crime Cargo, and after his retirement, when he was making
radio programs as the BBC’s expert on animals, he wrotePets Usual
and Unusualand coauthoredThe Senses of Animalswith L. Harrison
Matthews in 1963. Fluent in German, Knight also translatedA Con-
fidential Matter: The Letters of Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig,
1931–1935.
Although Knight enjoyed phenomenal success incounterintelli-
genceand trained a generation of case officers such asJohn Bing-
ham, his accomplishments were marred by the Benjamin Greene
episode in which one of his agents, an Austrian namedHarald
Kurtz, concocted evidence against an espionage suspect who proved
to be exceptionally well connected. Greene and his family pursued
Kurtz for years and eventually brought the case to the House of
Lords. Greene was released from custody and Kurtz was exposed
publicly as an unscrupulous Security Service stool pigeon who had
manufactured a spurious case against an innocent man for financial
reward.