Back in 2010, on his the Medium and the Message blog, and at a time when many people were talking about Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, the US soldier who smuggled classified material to WikiLeaks, film-maker Adam Curtis pondered aloud about an earlier American espionage artist. Tyler Kent was his name: privately educated, an alumnus of both Princeton and the Sorbonne, he was posted to the Soviet Union in the 1930s where he soon came under suspicion. Transferred to London, he had access to highly sensitive telegrams, including those between Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt, many of which he stashed in his flat, before being arrested and imprisoned in 1940. Kent is little known these days, but was he a righteous whistle-blower, an antiwar prophet abandoned to the historical wilderness?

For Paul Willetts, author of the heady Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms, the answer is emphatically no. His Tyler Kent is a sybarite and philanderer, an antisemite, a psychologically astute opportunist, an Ivy League one-percenter who exuded “an air of conceit, of brusque prerogative, nourished by an august Virginian pedigree, a doting mother and a fancy education”. He’s part of a blue-blooded underground – Jew-hating Conservative MPs, “white” Russians forced to flee their homeland after the 1917 Revolution – who, to a greater or lesser degree, aligned themselves with the values of the Third Reich. Pitched against them were the likes of Maxwell Knight – novelist, ornithologist, pet-lover and M15 agent runner.

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One can imagine satirist Chris Morris making a film about these would-be warriors of righteousness. They squirrel through and busy about London, setting up organisations such as the Brothers of the Russian Truth and a pirate radio station the New British Broadcasting Service; they sign-off letters “PJ” (Perish Judah) and, like teen delinquents, scratch anti-Jewish graffiti on street windows; they attend meetings organised by the Nordic League, an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan-inspired White Knights of Britain (also known as the Hooded Men), whose centre of operations is the Druid’s Memorial Hall on Lamb’s Conduit Street where a papier-mache model of Stonehenge occupies the stage.

Especially vivid is the portrayal of Anna Wolkoff, keen occultist, correspondent of the rightwing modernist novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and a fashion designer whose outfits were worn by the Duchess of Windsor. Another character – Kent’s lover (one of many), Irene Danischewsky – turns out to have been an aunt of the actor Helen Mirren.

Willetts, whose previous books include a biography of mid-century Fitzrovian dandy writer Julian MacLaren-Ross, has a rare talent for isolating details that capture the feel and tempo of London’s past. Early in the war, he observes, many children had left the capital: “sporadic chalk-marks on walls and pavements affording a heart-rending reminder of them”. He notices the long queues of men and women who, fearing the onset of German bombing, stood outside veterinary surgeons waiting to have their pets put down. Written in the present tense, with some chapters just half a page, it’s easy to imagine this story being turned into a superior historical thriller.

What did it all amount to? Were Kent and his crowd a bunch of fantasists? A rump faction of the kind that politically turbulent times often throw up? Willetts points out that one of the cables Kent stole discussed Roosevelt’s plan to circumvent the Neutrality Act that committed the US to an isolationist stance. Had that made been made public, the war could have gone very differently. Kent, however, even after being deported in 1945, mostly stayed the same: he married an older heiress, purchased a Florida newspaper that he used to promote segregation, maintained his innocence, and ended his days living in a trailer park in the Texas town of Mission.
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