Peter Mason and his wife Prudence Mason served Britain’s MI-6 from the earliest days of the Cold War through the 1970s. Peter was a member of the Special Operations Executive and the Special Air Service during the war, and afterwards was assigned to a Baker team, which hunted down low-level Nazis who had escaped trial at Nuremberg but were complicit in war crimes. His team found and eliminated many of them in the first few years after the end of the war.
Prudence herself served as a transport pilot during World War 2 and later joined MI-6, partly due to her linguistic ability and partly due to her marriage to Peter. Prudence completed a solo mission to infiltrate the Haganah in British Palestine, before Israel declared its independence. The two later traveled throughout Europe as part of a Wild West show, where they performed as trick shooting cowboys and used this cover to carry out operations behind the Iron Curtain.
Peter was known to be a friend and consultant to Ian Fleming, the former British intelligence officer who wrote the James Bond novels. It was Mason who suggested to Fleming that Bond carry a Walther PPK in the books.
Very little verifiable information about Peter and Prudence’s exploits has been declassified by the British government, and Prudence is still subject to a “D Notice” barring British media from discussing her life or career. However, later in life Peter donated an incredible collection of his personal weapons and spy gear to several museums.
For episode #19 of the Spycraft 101 podcast, I spoke with Dr. Richard Wooldridge, founder and chief curator of the Combined Military Services Museum in Maldon, United Kingdom (@cmsm_museum). Hundreds of the Masons’ knives, firearms, and gadgets are part of the collection there, as well as a copy of Prudence’s unpublished memoirs. We discuss everything that is known about Peter’s and Prudence’s exploits, and do our best to separate fact from fiction. We even go over Peter’s “License to Kill”, issued by the British government.
