Spy in the Code Room

Secret British information intended for Washington is usually handed to the U. S. Embassy in London for transmission in code. When various items began to turn up in Berlin last spring, often to be hurled tauntingly back at Great Britain by renegade Broadcaster William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), Scotland Yard agents suspected a leak and tapped the Embassy telephone wires. Within a short time they had heard enough. They arrested Tyler G. Kent, a weak-chinned, 29-year-old American code clerk, who went to London from the U. S. Moscow Embassy at the beginning of the war. In his apartment they found six suitcases full of stolen or copied Embassy documents, among them a letter from Prime Minister Churchill to President Roosevelt which had been handed to the Embassy that very morning.

With the collaboration of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, a trap was set in the Embassy with a Scotland Yard agent replacing Clerk Kent and taking all his telephone calls. Into it fell an attractive, 37-year-old White Russian emigree, Anna Wolkov. Weak Clerk Kent, in love with Anna Wolkov and fanatically antiSemitic, had been persuaded to pass on information and documents to his inamorata, who then was suspected of sending them across the Irish Sea to the German Legation in Dublin.

Last week, with utmost secrecy, behind windows covered with heavy brown paper, His Majesty's High Court of Justice concluded its trials in London's most famous criminal court, the Old Bailey. Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkov heard themselves sentenced as spies. Kent was sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. Anna Wolkov received ten years. Britons were surprised at the mildness of the sentences, even though one of the culprits was a citizen of a nation with which Britain wants to keep on the best of terms.

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