Conspiracy of One: Tyler Kent’s Secret Plot against FDR, Churchill, and the Allied War Effort

Officers from the U.S. Embassy, Scotland Yard, and MI5 broke into Tyler Kent’s bedroom. They found the suave young American code clerk beside his unmade bed, wearing striped pajama bottoms. His mistress was wearing the matching top—and nothing else. Along with the Embassy code room keys, the men also found 2,000 smuggled documents, including top-secret cables that Kent had encoded and transmitted from Churchill to Roosevelt seeking American help. Kent planned to give those cables to FDR’s isolationist enemies in Congress.

American ambassador Joseph Kennedy waived Kent’s diplomatic immunity and turned him over to the British, who imprisoned him until his secret trial. It was a long way to fall. Kent had used his brilliant language skills and privileged position to get ahead. His haughtiness had irked all he met, but his father’s anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal, anti-Semitic friends helped maintain his career. His good looks didn’t hurt, either. A black sheep with diplomatic privilege, Tyler Kent stood at the crossroads of history: Stalin’s purges, the rise of Hitler, and the Phony War. Peter Rand arrestingly weaves together Kent’s star-crossed love affair, imprisonment, and trial into a rich tapestry that conveys a fresh vision of the tumultuous era.