Tyler Gatewood Kent (March 24, 1911 – November 20, 1988) was an American diplomat who stole thousands of secret documents while working as a cipher clerk at the US Embassy in London during World War II.
Through his father's connections, he joined the State Department and was posted to Moscow under William C. Bullitt, the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union.
By 1939, he was suspected of engaging in espionage for the Soviet Union, but lacking any solid evidence, the Diplomatic Service decided to transfer him to the embassy in London, where he began working on October 5, 1939.
With a position that required him to encode and decode sensitive telegrams, Kent had access to a wide range of secret documents.
As soon as Kent arrived in London, he was seen in the company of Ludwig Matthias, a suspected German agent who was being tailed by detectives of Scotland Yard's Special Branch.
Through one of their daughters, Anna Wolkoff, Kent met Irene Danishewsky, wife of a British merchant who was a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union.
Two of the witnesses against Kent were Maxwell Knight and Archibald Ramsay, who was interned on the Isle of Man under Defence Regulation 18B because he had seen the documents.
British officials who had knowledge of the documents believed that if they had come to light at that time, Anglo-American relations would have been seriously damaged, for they showed that Roosevelt was looking at ways to evade the Neutrality Acts to help Britain survive a German onslaught.
[3] At his trial, Kent also admitted he had taken documents from the US Embassy in Moscow, with the vague notion of someday showing them to US senators who shared his isolationist, antisemitic views.
The papers that Kent had purloined indicated British-American naval co-operation, but they also showed that Roosevelt was not prepared to go further without support from the US Congress or the public.
[5] According to Ray Bearse and Anthony Read, despite Kent's anti-communist beliefs, officials in the FBI believed him to be a secret Soviet sympathizer.