| Ted Kavanagh | British comedian, member of the ITMA cast. More... |
| Tyler Kent | Tyler Kent was born in China in
1911. His father was a member of the U.S. Diplomatic Corps. Kent was educated at Princeton, the Sorbone, the University of Madrid and George Washington University. Kent, who spoke French, Greek, German, Russian, Italian and Spanish, joined the State Department in 1934 as a clerk in the Foreign Service and was posted to Moscow. While in the Soviet Union Kent was accused of helping White Russians to smuggle into the United States various Imperial Russian treasures. It was later revealed that he was also passing on documents to Nazi intelligence while in Moscow. Kent was transferred to London to work as a cypher clerk at the American Embassy. His arrival in England in the company of Ludwig Matthias, a Gestapo agent, brought him to the attention of MI5. In February 1940, Tyler met Anna Wolkoff. Her father, Admiral Nikolai Wolkoff. After the Russian Revolution Wolkoff decided to remain in England. The Wolfoff family ran the Russian Tea Room in South Kensington, a place where members of the secret society, the Right Club, used to meet. Wolkoff introduced Tyler to Archibald Ramsay, the leader of the organization. Wolkoff, Kent and Ramsay talked about politics and agreed that they all shared the same political views. Kent was concerned that the American government wanted the United States to join the war against Germany. He said he had evidence of this as he had been making copies of the correspondence between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Kent invited Wolkoff and Ramsay back to his flat to look at these documents. This included secret assurances that the United States would support France if it was invaded by the German Army. Kent later argued that he had shown these documents to Ramsay in the hope that he would pass this information to American politicians hostile to Roosevelt. On 13th April 1940 Anna Wolkoff went to Kent's flat and made copies of some of these documents. Joan Miller and Marjorie Amor were later to testify that these documents were then passed on to Duco del Monte, Assistant Naval Attaché at the Italian Embassy. Soon afterwards, MI8, the wireless interception service, picked up messages between Rome and Berlin that indicated that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence (Abwehr), now had copies of the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence Soon afterwards Wolkoff asked Miller if she would use her contacts at the Italian Embassy to pass a coded letter to William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) in Germany. The letter contained information that he could use in his broadcasts on Radio Hamburg. Before passing the letter to her contacts, Miller showed it to Maxwell Knight. On 18th May, Knight told Guy Liddell about the Right Club spy ring. Liddell immediately had a meeting with Joseph Kennedy, the American Ambassador in London. Kennedy agreed to waive Kent's diplomatic immunity and on 20th May, 1940, the Special Branch raided his flat. Inside they found the copies of 1,929 classified documents including secret correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The Special Branch officers also found duplicate keys to the embassy code room. The officers were also shocked to find that in Kent had what became known as Ramsay's Red Book. This book had details of the supporters of the Right Club and had been given to Kent by Archibald Ramsay for safe keeping. Kent and Anna Wolkoff were arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act. The trial took place in secret and on 7th November 1940, Wolkoff was sentenced to ten years. Kent, because he was an American citizen, was treated less harshly and received only seven years. In December 1945 Tyler Kent was deported to the United States. Surprisingly, his former employer the Department of State decided not to prosecute him for working as a spy for Nazi Germany. Tyler Kent died in a Texas trailer park in 1988. (Marc James Small)
|
| Admiral Husband E KIMMEL: | Commander, US Pacific Fleet. More... |
| Patric Knowles | Hollywood movie actor. More... |
| Frank KNOX | US Secretary of the Navy. More... |
| Alexandra Kollontai | Soviet Ambassador to Sweden.
Madame Kollontai got around in more ways than one-- she was considered one of the
early advocates of what would be called the "free love" movement in the 60's... More surprising perhaps is Kollontai's continued survival and occupation of official positions-- ambassador to Sweden during WW2. As a close associate of most of the people who wound up on Stalin's "enemies list" and an "Old Bolshevik" par excellence she got through the great purges completely unscathed, another indication that perhaps the purges were motivated by something other than mere bile and paranoia on Stalin's part...(Mike Yaklich) |
| Fred T. Korematsu | Fred T. Korematsu, who lost a
Supreme Court challenge in 1944 to the wartime internment of
Japanese-Americans but gained vindication decades later when he was given
the Medal of Freedom, died on Wednesday 30 March, 2005, in Larkspur,
Calif. Mr. Korematsu, who lived in San Leandro, Calif., was 86. The cause
was a respiratory ailment, said Don Tamaki, a lawyer for Mr. Korematsu. When
he was arrested in 1942 for failing to report to an internment center, Mr.
Korematsu was working as a welder and simply hoping to be left alone so he
could pursue his marriage plans. He became a central figure in the
controversy over the wartime removal of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans
and Japanese immigrants from the West Coast to inland detention centers. He
emerged as a symbol of resistance to government authority. When President
Bill Clinton presented Mr. Korematsu with the Medal of Freedom, the nation's
highest civilian award, in January 1998, the president likened him to Linda
Brown and Rosa Parks in the civil rights struggles of the 1950's. In
February 1942, two months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the
designation of military areas from which anyone could be excluded "as
protection against espionage and sabotage."
In May 1942, the military command on the West Coast ordered that all people with Japanese ancestry be removed inland, considering them a security threat, and internment camps were built in harsh and isolated regions. Mr. Korematsu, a native of Oakland, Calif., and one of four sons of Japanese-born parents, was jailed on May 30, 1942, in San Leandro, having refused to join family members who had reported to a nearby racetrack that was being used as a temporary detention center. Mr. Korematsu had undergone plastic surgery in an effort to disguise his Asian features and had altered his draft registration card, listing his name as Clyde Sarah and his background as Spanish-Hawaiian. He hoped that with his altered appearance and identity he could avoid ostracism when he married his girlfriend, who had an Italian background. A few days after his arrest, Mr. Korematsu was visited in jail by a California official of the American Civil Liberties Union who was seeking a test case against internment. Mr. Korematsu agreed to sue. "I didn't feel guilty because I didn't do anything wrong," he told The New York Times four decades later. "Every day in school, we said the pledge to the flag, 'with liberty and justice for all,' and I believed all that. I was an American citizen, and I had as many rights as anyone else." Mr. Korematsu maintained that his constitutional rights were violated by internment and that he had suffered racial discrimination. In the summer of 1942, he was found guilty in federal court of ignoring the exclusion directive and was sentenced to five years' probation. He spent two years at an internment camp in Utah with his family. In 1944, the A.C.L.U. took his case before the Supreme Court. In December 1944 in Korematsu v. the United States, the Supreme Court upheld internment by a vote of 6 to 3. Justice Hugo L. Black, remembered today as a stout civil liberties advocate, wrote in the opinion that Mr. Korematsu was not excluded "because of hostility to him or his race" but because the United States was at war with Japan, and the military "feared an invasion of our West Coast." In dissenting, Justice Frank Murphy wrote that the exclusion order "goes over the very brink of constitutional power and falls into the ugly abyss of racism." The case was revisited long afterward when Peter Irons, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, discovered documents that indicated that when it went to the Supreme Court, the government had suppressed its own findings that Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were not, in fact, security threats. In light of that information, Judge Marilyn H. Patel of Federal District Court in San Francisco overturned Mr. Korematsu's conviction in November 1983. In 1988, federal law provided for payments and apologies to Japanese-Americans relocated in World War II. Mr. Korematsu returned to California after the war, worked as a draftsman and raised a family. For many years, he withheld information about his case from his children, seeking to forget about his humiliation. In recent years, Mr. Korematsu expressed concern about civil liberties in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Surviving are his wife, Kathryn; his son, Ken, of San Francisco; and his daughter, Karen Korematsu-Haigh, of Larkspur. In her decision overturning Mr. Korematsu's conviction, Judge Patel said, "Korematsu stands as a constant caution that in times of war or declared military necessity our institutions must be vigilant in protecting constitutional guarantees." RICHARD GOLDSTEIN |
| Kate Smith | American singer. More... |