M

by Henry Hemming

  He had also managed to recruit at least one Communist student and – his greatest achievement by that point – he had taken six men from the ranks of the British Fascisti and played each of them into the Communist Party. One of these infiltrators may have been Joseph McCall, the ex-serviceman who had helped him in the most recent Glasgow raid, and who had been a Fascist before he joined the Communists. Losing the services of McCall after his arrest might have left Max blind to what was going on in Glasgow Communist circles, yet by then he seems to have had another man on the inside. This second agent was probably a BF member before Max convinced him to join the Communist Party on his behalf. Later codenamed M/5, this second Scottish agent became a keen collector of antique weaponry and would work as a factory gun examiner. He was still reporting to Max from deep inside the Communist movement at the start of the Second World War.

  Identifying, recruiting and running just one of these penetration agents required patience and finesse, as well as consistently sound judgement. To have six of them on the go suggested an unusual talent. Almost every element of Max’s early career as a spymaster was remarkable. It was unheard of for a twenty-five-year-old with no training and limited resources to build up and run such a large web of informants. Agent running seemed to come naturally to him, in the way that looking after wild creatures had done. But his confidence around animals and his ability as a spymaster were not just gifts he had inherited unwittingly. These two skills informed and complemented each other, and were rooted in Max’s capacity for hard work and his willingness to fail.

  Other spymasters might spend months building up to their first approach to a potential agent, yet within his first year Max had made as many as fifty approaches. He was honing his tradecraft through endless repetitions, giving himself the space to fail, learn and try again. The same could be said of the way he handled animals. As a child he had spent thousands of hours with an improbable array of different creatures, sometimes getting it wrong, but almost always learning from his mistakes. Endless practice does not guarantee success, but it helps.

  No less important was the way he grasped early on what would become the most important lesson of his career as a spymaster, one that emerges from the reminiscences many years later of an agent who was taken on by Max at around this time.

  In early 2014, MI5 released several files that would shed light for the first time on the story of a brilliant wartime British agent known as ‘Jack King’. Posing as a Gestapo officer, this man had infiltrated a number of extremist right-wing groups in Britain during the Second World War. When these MI5 files were first released, the identity of this ‘genius’ agent was a mystery. After much speculation, most of it wrong, it emerged that ‘Jack King’ was in fact Eric Roberts, a humble bank clerk who had been working at Westminster Bank when he was pulled out of his job by MI5. His manager at the time had been suitably perplexed.

  ‘What we would like to know here is – what are the particular and especial qualifications of Mr Roberts which we have not been able to perceive – for some particular work of national importance?’8

  This seemed to be one of those inspiring wartime stories in which a modest English amateur is plucked from obscurity and goes on to perform heroics for his country, after which he or she returns to an ordinary life after the war. But that is not what happened.

  By the outbreak of war in 1939, Eric Roberts, the self-effacing bank clerk, had in fact been an undercover agent for almost half of his adult life. It began, for him, when he was recruited to the Makgill Organisation in the early 1920s by Maxwell Knight.

  Max had met Eric Roberts for the first time either in late 1923 or early 1924. Roberts was a precocious seventeen-year-old from Cornwall who had come up to London to start a new job at the Westminster Bank. Wanting to make new friends, ‘Robbie’, as Roberts was known, decided to join the British Fascisti, which was how he had met Max. The young spymaster recognised in Roberts the qualities that already he had come to cherish in a prospective agent, that mercurial blend of intelligence, industry, modesty, humour, patriotism and unfulfilled ambition. Just weeks after Roberts had joined the BF, Max persuaded him to resign from this group and infiltrate the Communist Party instead.

  Max had unearthed a gem. Eric Roberts would go on to be one of the most successful penetration agents of his generation, infiltrating by his own account seventeen different extremist groups. He had a long and impressive career in the field, yet he never forgot his first assignment as one of Max’s agents.

  Roberts had been told by Max to gatecrash a Communist meeting that was due to be addressed by Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Union’s roving ambassador. Max’s teenage agent arrived at the venue, strode into the room and took a seat. His heart must have been pounding uncomfortably as he began to make mental notes of who was there, the positions they appeared to hold, who was speaking to whom and what Litvinov said, before scurrying off at the end to scribble it all down ‘with a leaky fountain pen’.9 He passed on his first report to Max. As Roberts recalled, ‘M. K. was delighted.’

  Why had this bright young Cornishman agreed to do this? His reasons were in some ways political. Eric Roberts had joined the BF because he saw Communism as a threat. Another lure was the familiar and intoxicating romance of being a spy, or at least the idea of being a spy. As a boy, Roberts had repeatedly read Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s classic espionage novel, and it was this book, he explained, that ‘set my mind working in the direction of intelligence’.10 Just as Max had been obsessed by the novels of John Buchan, Roberts had fallen in love at an early age with the labyrinthine possibilities of an undercover life, and this inoculated him against some of its initial hardships. The other reason he was prepared to risk being exposed as a Fascist spy and beaten up by a gang of Communists had to do with his spymaster.

  In most descriptions of the way Max ran his agents there are allusions to the strange hold he appeared to have on them, his ‘Pied Piper nature’, which ‘attracted many to become agents out of personal loyalty’.11 There is a hint of this in Eric Roberts’s recollection. The Cornishman explained, a little gnomically, that the best way to understand his relationship with Max was by reading Kim, a book in which the eponymous hero becomes the disciple of a charismatic Tibetan lama. Roberts mentioned Max’s ‘personal magnetism’.12 Another called him ‘an almost mystical figure’.13 It was as if Max could cast a spell over some of his operatives, and that just as he had ‘the gift’ when handling pets he inspired a preternatural loyalty from his agents.

  Yet there was no magic here. The key to Max’s appeal was to do with the way he treated his operatives. Throughout his career he went to unusual lengths to discern the individual character of each and to make him or her feel special. ‘Every good agent likes to think that his officer is almost exclusively concerned with him, and with him alone,’ as Max once explained, ‘even though the agent may know perfectly well that the officer has others with whom he deals.14 This is a definite and illogical kink in human nature, but it is a kink which must be fostered by any officer who is going to make a success of this work.’ Here was the artifice at the heart of his craft. Max had learned early on that to be a successful spymaster he must exploit this essential weakness in the nature of his agents and build up in each an almost exaggerated sense that he was interested in them, only them and nobody else.

  The need for anyone running agents to make their charges feel special, to flatter and pamper them with attention, might sound obvious today. In 1924, it was not. British spymasters did not routinely shower their informants with praise or go out of their way to make them feel unique. Government agents were more often seen as men and women of dubious morals. They were ‘police spies’, and for many Britons this was a contradiction. The police were there to help in a crisis and be visible, transparent and straightforward. Spies were not.

  The British military men who found themselves running spies in the 1920s may not have been in the habit of doting on their agents as if they were fascinating pets. Max wa
s different. He had what Graham Greene called ‘the human factor’. ‘He gave tremendous support to the agents,’ one colleague observed.15 ‘He really cared about them as people.’ Even at the age of twenty-five Max understood that a recruitment is a seduction, and that the onus must always be on the spymaster to make his agent feel singular and special, not the other way around.

  By the summer of 1925, Maxwell Knight was in a powerful position. He had in play a small army of devoted agents, and he had learned a lot about how to keep them productive and safe. Their intelligence was also starting to make a difference politically. Increasingly, K, the paramilitary group Max belonged to, was taking the fight to the Communists. It seemed to be getting away with it, too.

  Although members of K were occasionally arrested, the punishments they received were surprisingly mild. The four men prosecuted for Pollitt’s kidnap were defended brilliantly in court and found ‘Not Guilty’. Max’s accomplice in Glasgow, Joseph McCall, was sentenced to just seven days in prison or a £3 fine. As well as getting off lightly, some members of K had the strange belief that the authorities approved of what they were doing. McCall even told the court that the police had known about his undercover activities before his arrest. ‘In the strictest confidence,’ wrote one of Pollitt’s kidnappers, unaware that his letter would later be published, ‘I can inform you that the Police and Government and all concerned are on our side.’16

  These men appeared to be suffering from baroque delusions of grandeur, except that they were not. The four men behind the kidnapping of Harry Pollitt were represented in court by Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, KC, a former MI5 officer whose military commission in the last war had been arranged by Admiral Hall, Chairman of the Economic League. One of Max’s colleagues in Glasgow, a man called J. McGuirk Hughes, who also worked for the Makgill Organisation, had in the past been given money by Special Branch and the temporary command of several policemen.

  K was a dangerous, right-wing paramilitary group responsible for burglary, kidnapping and violence. It was rumoured to have ‘a store of arms’ hidden somewhere in London.17 But MI5 did not class this outfit as a threat. Instead, K, by then ‘one of London’s most influential secret societies’,18 was described blandly in one MI5 report as a ‘well organised and efficient’ organisation responsible for ‘some quite good work from an intelligence point of view’.19

  This sounds like a chronically inept assessment. Stranger still, MI5 was more suspicious of K’s parent organisation, the British Fascisti, insisting that no ‘members of H. M. Forces should have any connection with the Fascisti’,20 a society that was not ‘desirable in this country’,21 whose members ‘bring discredit by their methods on all who really wish to maintain law and order’.22 It was as if MI5 had confused the tearaway K with the much more benign BF. But there was an explanation for all this. Right at the heart of K was a man whom they could trust.

  6

  THE FREELANCE SPYMASTER

  Wherever he went, Desmond Morton carried around the bullet that had almost killed him. During the war, a German machine-gun round had ripped into Morton’s left lung, stopping just short of his aorta, and was so deeply embedded that any attempt to remove it might have been fatal. For the rest of his life, Desmond Morton had this metallic memento mori buried deep inside him. He was an Old Etonian and lifelong bachelor whose experiences in the trenches had turned him into a more distant and inscrutable figure, a persona that seemed to be perfectly suited to the intelligence work he began to do after the war.

  In the early 1920s, Morton worked for what is today called MI6, the foreign counterpart to MI5. He ran MI6’s Production section, which was responsible for gathering intelligence on overseas Soviet activities directed against Britain. Though most of this work involved running agents and informants abroad, it helped for him to have sources at home. This was why Desmond Morton had developed a professional relationship with Sir George Makgill.

  The two spymasters had been introduced to each other after the war by Sir Vernon Kell, the monocled and moustachioed head of MI5, and an old friend of Makgill’s. It was Kell, of MI5, who had first encouraged the opinionated Scottish industrialist to set up his own private intelligence agency and had even supplied Makgill with advice and contacts. This was partly out of friendship but also because he wanted access to the intelligence that this agency might gather.

  As the British government struggled to reduce the titanic national debt incurred during five years of all-out war, MI5 was savaged by spending cuts. By 1925, it had no full-time agents and a staff of just thirty-five (today that number is closer to 4,000). MI5’s scope was limited to countering espionage and subversion within the British armed forces. Kell’s counterpart in MI6 had even suggested that MI5’s staff be further reduced, and would later push for its outright abolition. Yet, as MI5 continued to shrink, the threat of Communism seemed to grow.

  Kell was ‘a shrewd old bugger’, as one colleague put it.1 He recognised that Makgill’s private agency could provide him with cheap, reliable intelligence that he could gain access to without exceeding his department’s official purview. Desmond Morton, at MI6, saw the situation a little differently. Like Kell, he understood the potential of the Makgill Organisation. Yet unlike the head of MI5, Morton was not willing to receive information second-hand from Makgill or from ‘Don’, his ‘intensely keen’ son. Morton wanted direct access to Makgill’s operatives for himself.

  This was unusual. A basic rule of agent running is that agents should report to one spymaster. Morton wanted some of Makgill’s men to work for two. Perhaps overawed by Desmond Morton’s position in MI6 or wanting to help out a brother Mason – Morton appears to have been a Freemason like Makgill – the industrialist accepted. By the time of the 1924 General Election, Sir George Makgill was sharing some of his star agents with Morton over at MI6, including Jim Finney, whose report on the Zinoviev Letter was used to authenticate this forgery. Another shared source was Maxwell Knight.

  The problem here was that Desmond Morton worked for MI6, and as such he was not supposed to be running agents among the British civilian population. That was the responsibility of the London Metropolitan Police Special Branch – usually known as Special Branch. This was one of the reasons Morton went to great lengths to hide his relationship with Max.

  Unknown to all but a handful of people, for at least a year Max had been reporting both to Don at the Makgill Organisation and to Desmond Morton at MI6. By the end of 1924, Max was also in touch with Special Branch and had a freelance arrangement whereby if he supplied them with intelligence that led to an arrest he would get paid. Summaries of Max’s reports even made their way to MI5 where they were seen by Sir Vernon Kell, who might forward them to the Director of Military Operations and Intelligence.

  This would explain why MI5 was so relaxed about the paramilitary activities of K. Max, one of the men at the heart of this group, the other being Joyce, was now well known among highly placed individuals in what was for him the holy trinity of British Intelligence: MI5, MI6 and Special Branch. Max’s high standing among them was partly a reflection of the size and reach of his agent network, and the quality of its product. It was also testament to the way he presented himself. Max produced his reports quickly, and they were thorough and detailed. As far as anyone could tell, he did not brag about his work, invent information, disobey instructions or get carried away by the excitement of being involved in espionage. He ‘makes an excellent impression,’ wrote Desmond Morton, being ‘very discreet, and at need prepared to do anything, but is at the same time not wild.’2

  This last point was crucial. Max seemed to be learning to rein himself in when it mattered. He was also described by his new MI6 spymaster as ‘clearly perfectly honest’.3 But this was not honesty as most people recognised it. Max was truthful in his dealings with Morton, yet when out in the field he could lie, as they say in the navy, like a hairy egg.

  By the time Max returned from Glasgow in the summer of 1925, after those three wild rai
ds on the local Communist Party headquarters, his career as a spymaster was flourishing. In the shadowy world of private investigation, he was becoming well known and for the first time in his life he had tasted success.

  Max’s standing within the British Fascisti was no less impressive, even if he had just been knocked off his perch within the BF Intelligence Department. Towards the end of 1924, Brigadier Sir Ormonde Winter, a formidable figure who had recently stepped down as the British government’s Director of Intelligence in Ireland, had succeeded in taking Max’s job as the BF Director of Intelligence. Yet before this retired army officer could take up his position, he was outmanoeuvred by another elderly Fascist, one Lieutenant-Colonel Bramley, who began to run the BF Intelligence Department instead.

  Rather than remove Max entirely, Bramley agreed to take him on as his deputy. Max was given the title Chief Intelligence Officer for the BF. Technically, this was a demotion, but he had survived. He was also starting to be paid for the first time by the British Fascisti, and this meant that he could give up his job as a prep-school games teacher, which he did almost at once.

  Aged twenty-five, Max was now making a decent living from his intelligence work. He was also finding time to look after his growing miscellany of beloved pets. There was at least one dog in his collection, various reptiles and rodents, and a parrot. Following the loss of Bessie the bear, his collection had a new star turn. This was Rikkitikki, his Indian mongoose, ‘one of the most affectionate, playful and amusing pets I have ever had’.4 He was also very fond of his bush baby, Pookie, who looked like a misshapen teddy bear and was famous among his friends for the occasion when it knocked over a glass of sherry, got drunk and bounced around the flat like a kangaroo before curling up in a ball and falling fast asleep.