6 Personas Failed to Shield Man Contacting German Intelligence
By Constance Bell ·
For four years the state erased Edwin Fuller Heath from public record after he defied warnings to stop contacting German intelligence using six different identities.
Edwin Fuller Heath did not have a single identity; he had a wardrobe of them. According to the file's catalogue entry for record KV 2/2104, he operated as Edward Heath, Edwin Fuller, Major Edward Henderson, Percy Gordon Lennox, Carl Calder, and the aristocratic Sir James Charles Calder.
This was not the careful tradecraft of a state-sponsored sleeper agent. The catalogue description notes that Heath already had "several convictions for deception offences" before the war began. He was a man whose primary vocation was the lie, a professional fabricator who found himself in the crosshairs of the Security Service just as Europe began to burn.
Warned Off
The state usually tolerates a liar as long as the lie is small or serves a purpose. But when the lies intersect with foreign intelligence, the tolerance evaporates. The catalogue entry for KV 2/2104 records that in 1939, Heath was "warned off contact with the German intelligence service."
In the lexicon of the Security Service, a warning is not a suggestion; it is a marker. Once a subject is "warned off," every subsequent move is viewed through the lens of defiance. Heath, however, "persisted." He continued to reach out to the Germans, perhaps believing his collection of personas—the Major, the Sir, the Lennox—could shield him from the gaze of his own government. He mistook the state's surveillance for a game he could win, failing to realize that the Security Service does not play games with people it cannot control.
September 1939 to November 1943
When the game ended, it ended with the total removal of his liberty. The catalogue entry records that Heath was interned from September 1939 until November 1943.
Internment is the state's most blunt instrument. It is the solution for the individual who is too dangerous to be free but not necessarily useful enough to be prosecuted in a way that might reveal sources. For four years, Heath was erased from the public record, his six identities collapsed into a single prisoner number.
When he was finally released in November 1943, he did not return to a state of full citizenship. The file's catalogue entry specifies that he was released "with restrictions." The state never truly stops watching a man like Heath; it simply changes the method of his confinement from a camp to a set of rules. The nature of these restrictions remains unstated in the catalogue description, leaving a gap where the specifics of his monitored life should be.
The PF Series
The classification of Heath's file provides the most telling detail. He is listed under the Security Service: Personal (PF Series) Files, specifically in the category of "WORLD WAR II. German Intelligence Agents and Suspected Agents."
This puts Heath in the same archival ecosystem as some of the most successful deceptions of the war. A search of the same catalogue series shows files like KV 2/63, KV 2/64, and KV 2/65, which contain communications from Juan Pujol Garcia, codename GARBO. Garcia was a double agent who fed the Germans a torrent of British deception material, helping to shield the D-Day landings.
There is a stark irony in the juxtaposition of these files. The Security Service viewed Heath's "deception offences" as a liability requiring internment, yet in the GARBO files, deception was the primary weapon of the state. The state does not object to the lie itself; it objects to the lie it does not author. Garcia was a tool for the Security Service, a managed asset whose falsehoods were curated by the state. Heath was an unmanaged liar, a man whose persistence in contacting the Germans was an act of autonomy that the state found intolerable.
Heath was not a master spy, but a man whose appetite for persona made him a target. The Security Service's files do not record a man of great influence, but a man of great redundancy—six names for one person, all of them eventually known to the same set of watchers.
Beyond the Security Service's files, other records suggest that Heath's talent for deception extended to his finances. A separate catalogue entry, CRIM 1/2090, lists the defendant as Edwin Fuller Heath, charged with bankrupt obtaining credit contrary to the Bankruptcy Act 1914.