M

by Henry Hemming

  To meet this new challenge, MI5 had been given more resources and greater powers. For the first time it would have a specialised agent-running section. Yet the man chosen to run this new wing of MI5, on which so much depended, was not one of the service’s established senior officers. Instead, he was a thirty-one-year-old outsider whose indiscretions at MI6 had triggered the Treaty of Westminster. He had also asked, rather unusually, that his new colleagues refer to him as ‘M.’

  Maxwell Knight’s first visit as a member of staff to MI5 Headquarters, or ‘the Office’, as it was known, came towards the end of 1931. MI5 was then based just south of Hyde Park on Cromwell Road, a short walk from one of M’s favourite buildings in London, the Natural History Museum, famous then, as it is today, for its collection of fossils. The scene inside MI5 was not so very different. M was introduced to a galère of ageing former soldiers, ex-Indian policemen, washed-up colonial administrators and civil servants, most of whom had reached the twilight of their career. They were older than average, poorly paid and, with the exception of just one officer, none had gone to university. There were also surprisingly few of them, as had been the case for most of the last decade. Two years earlier, MI5 had had just thirteen officers distributed between A Division, which dealt with administration, and B Division, responsible for counterespionage and countersubversion. All were sworn to secrecy. M was told that MI5 ‘should never be referred to in conversation with civilians’.1

  Most of his new colleagues had been drawn into the world of intelligence by their romantic sense of patriotism, or this had rubbed off on them over the years. They were bound together by a shared affinity for intrigue, a dwindling sense of ambition and the feeling that working for MI5 was less a job than a vocation. Although many of those in the Office were hard-working and competent, for years they had been held back by MI5’s limited resources and its relatively low standing within Whitehall.

  The atmosphere inside the Office was said to resemble that of a school staff room or a small family business, while the canteen looked like a café for debutantes on account of all the glamorous women from ‘good’ families who carried out MI5’s clerical duties. One officer who joined the Office soon after the Second World War described that canteen as ‘a showpiece for some of the best-looking women you ever saw, and they were all the prettier because we men were so dowdy by comparison’.2

  M was told that a relationship between an officer like him and one of these dazzling women was forbidden, unless, it seemed, the man in question was Eric Holt-Wilson, Deputy Director of MI5, and the female member of staff was the beautiful Aubrey Stirling, thirty-five years his junior, who joined the Office at the same time as M. Two months later she married the man fondly known in MI5 as ‘Holy Willy’, who got away with this largely because of his close friendship with the only officer who outranked him in MI5, the central point within this miniature merry-go-round, Sir Vernon Kell.

  Kell was the person M most needed to win over, and on the face of it this should have been easy. Both M and Kell were dedicated fishermen who kept parrots at home and were known for their occasional eccentricities. M often had a lizard or mouse in his jacket pocket. Kell insisted on being chauffeured to work each day in a car with a flag on the bonnet depicting a tortoise, an unusual mode of transport for anyone, but truly peculiar for a spy chief whose job was so secret that it did not officially exist. Kell and M were both polite and principled. Their values were Edwardian, their politics were diehard Conservative. Yet Kell lacked M’s charisma. Although he had natural authority and a manner that was both reassuring and equable, Kell was often slow to come round to new ideas, including the radical one that M proposed for infiltrating the Communist Party.

  By the time M had joined MI5, ‘the amount of information in the possession of the Department regarding secret and illegal activities’ of the Communist Party was, he wrote, ‘strictly limited’.3 This was something of an understatement. Most of the intelligence that came into MI5 fell into one of two categories. There was ‘human intelligence’, or HUMINT as it is sometimes known today, that mostly came from agents, informants and defectors; and there was ‘signals intelligence’, SIGINT, that was generated mainly by telephone checks or ‘Home Office warrants’ (HOWs), which allowed MI5 to intercept letters sent to a named individual at a given address. The difficulty was that each HOW had to be individually authorised by the Home Office, making these cumbersome and slow to operate. Telephone checks were easier to set up, yet with no reliable recording equipment the listening was done in real time by telephone switchboard operators who might not always understand the nuances of the conversation that they were listening in to, or indeed the language.

  Meanwhile, the human intelligence trickling in to MI5 when M arrived generally came from the police, ex-Communists, Soviet defectors or from John Baker White, the former member of the British Fascisti who had once brought Max to Makgill’s attention. Baker White was now a senior figure at the right-wing Economic League, where he ran his own intelligence network and supplied information to the police and MI5. Codenamed ‘B. W.’ or ‘B/W,’ he liked to provide his material over a pint in the pub to his old friend Con Boddington, another ex-Makgill man who had gone on to join MI5. After ‘a little leg-pulling’ between the two, Baker White passed on scraps of gossip from his sources inside or close to ‘the Party’, as Communists called their organisation.4 The quality of human intelligence coming in to MI5 was fine, but there was rarely enough and it was not always reliable, especially if Boddington and Baker White had spent too long in the pub.

  Already M had several agents inside the Party. One was a young bookseller who had married a Communist; another was a Glaswegian gun examiner. M also had a well-known gossip columnist at the Daily Express on his books, and a young writer whose comedy sketches were being performed on the BBC. The intelligence they supplied was good, sometimes excellent, yet none of these agents had tapped the fountainhead. No matter how hard they tried, and they could never appear to be trying too hard, M’s agents had been unable so far to break into the senior ranks of the Communist movement. Rather than wait years for one of these men to secure a top position, M’s new idea was to find a female secretary and engineer a situation in which she might be given a job working for an important Party figure.

  An efficient and reliable secretary is a valuable asset in any organisation, yet by 1931 good secretaries in the Communist movement were in particularly short supply. If M could find a suitable candidate, ‘she might stand a very good chance of obtaining a secretarial position in a Party organisation’.5 It sounded like an excellent, low-risk plan. But M’s new boss did not agree.

  ‘Women do not make good secret service agents,’ wrote Kell, unambiguously.6

  He was not the only MI5 officer to be against the use of female agents on principle. Some of M’s new colleagues believed that women lacked the staying power of men. Others worried that they were more prone to falling in love with their targets than men.

  M felt otherwise. ‘It is frequently alleged that women are less discreet than men,’ he wrote, ‘that they are ruled by their emotions, and not by their brains: that they rely on intuition rather than on reason; and that Sex will play an unsettling and dangerous role in their work.’7 And yet, ‘it is curious that in the history of espionage and counterespionage a very high percentage of the greatest coups have been brought off by women’. He went on, ‘this – if it proves anything – proves that the spymasters of the world’ – in other words, Kell – ‘are inclined to lay down hard and fast rules, which they subsequently find it impossible to keep to, and it is in their interests to break’.

  Recruiting a female agent at the start of his career as an MI5 officer was a risk, and it would put him up against his new chief. So it was vital to M, or ‘Captain King’, as he had introduced himself, that Olga Gray was up to the task.

  13

  WATCHERS

  There were various qualities that M hoped to find in Olga Gray. First, he had to be
sure that her outlook was unimpeachably anti-Communist. Olga had been spotted at a Conservative garden party and came from a family with a diligently patriotic and right-wing outlook, so there seemed to be no problem there. It was also important that Olga was an experienced secretary. As she explained during their interview, she had spent more than five years as a commercial typist.

  Next came the question of trust. Could M trust Olga, and might she trust him back? ‘The agent must trust the officer as much as – if not more than – the officer trusts the agent,’ he wrote.1 Much like a meeting between a potential bride and groom before an arranged marriage, he had to decide right away whether they were compatible. During their first interview, he asked about her ‘home surroundings’ as well as her ‘family, hobbies, personal likes and dislikes’.

  They seemed to be a good match. She could also see a joke, which helped. ‘A vivid imagination and a schoolboyish sense of humour’ were, wrote Eric Roberts, vital attributes in any undercover agent.2 Another question in M’s mind as he got to know Olga Gray was whether this young woman was, at heart, a watcher.

  David Cornwell, better known as the author John Le Carré, worked for several years under M and would use him as the model for Jack Brotherhood in A Perfect Spy. Le Carré also drew a series of cartoons to illustrate two of M’s books (Talking Birds and Animals and Ourselves), which is to say that he knew M pretty well. In Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there is a memorable exchange between the spy-turned-schoolmaster Jim Prideaux and his podgy, picked-upon pupil Bill Roach, in which Prideaux calls Roach the ‘best watcher in the unit’.3

  Le Carré’s erstwhile spymaster was always on the lookout for the best watcher in the unit. Indeed, Prideaux and M were both officer-ish prep-school games teachers at one point in their careers, and it is possible that this remark belonged originally to the MI5 man. Either way, M was good at spotting a watcher – the diffident outsider who had never really excelled at games and who was used to sitting it out on the sidelines, waiting and watching, because this is what espionage boils down to: patient observation. The word itself comes from the French espionner, meaning to watch or observe, and before that specere, to look out for. Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond books, James Schlesinger, at one time the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Andrew Parker, who became MI5 Director General in 2013, all described themselves as keen bird-watchers. Indeed, Fleming named his most famous literary creation after a little-known American ornithologist called James Bond. The real Bond, the circumspect birder, was undoubtedly closer to M’s ideal of an agent than his fictional namesake. Strip away the mythology, the tradecraft, the gadgets and the romance, and spying is watching.

  During the course of their interview, M decided that Olga might well be a watcher. She may have had another quality that drew him in. M prided himself on being able to chart the contours of anyone’s personality during a long conversation like this one, and although it is unlikely that Olga opened up at this early stage about her childhood abuse at the hands of her father, M would have noticed that when she spoke about her family, and in particular her father, something was not right. For a different type of spymaster this might have set alarm bells ringing; for M it probably had the opposite effect.

  This MI5 officer would later write twenty-nine books about natural history and looking after animals, and though a lot of this material is dry and factual, there are occasional glimpses of his past, or material which sheds light on the way he recruited and ran his agents, his ‘tradecraft’, to use Le Carré’s well-judged term. From the hundreds of thousands of words written by M about pets it becomes clear that he had a preference for taking on a particular type of animal.

  ‘There are few more pleasant experiences,’ he once wrote, ‘than the successful rearing of some young wild creature – particularly if it has come into one’s possession through being orphaned, or through being the victim of an accident.’4 ‘I have hand-reared many British birds,’ he explained elsewhere, ‘but all of these were birds which had been found exhausted, wounded or deserted, or have been birds that I rescued from some predator.’5 Other places he described an interest in rearing ‘deserted or stray young birds’,6 ‘fledglings fallen from their homes, or found slightly injured’.7 In another book, he wrote, ‘I have reared many injured and deserted birds by hand.’8 In an identical sense, when recruiting new agents M was always drawn to people like Olga who were in some way injured by their past. Perhaps he thought they would attract less suspicion, or that they were more biddable. It is also possible that deep down, in ways that he may not have understood about himself, he wanted to fix them.

  What did Olga make of M? She found this MI5 spymaster ‘charming’ and endearingly unconventional. One secretary remembered him ‘crawling on hands and knees in pursuit of some unlikely insect or animal’,9 or grabbing a pair of drumsticks mid-conversation, with a jazz record playing in the background, and ‘beating out a tune on the marble mantelpiece’.10 He was attractively tall and athletic-looking. There was nothing slight about him. He was big without being large – long nose, flappy ears and chunky shoulders – and although he was not classically good-looking, M had presence. Olga called him ‘avuncular’, a word which jars, given he was only six years older than her, yet already there was a powerful certainty to this man, one that was set off nicely by a hint of lawlessness. There was also his voice.

  Much of M’s charisma, and the impact he had on people, can be traced back to the way he spoke. As a boy, he had been fascinated by the effect of his voice on animals. He learned that a gentle, firm and reassuring tone could put almost any creature at ease. He encouraged pet owners to utter ‘soothing words’ to their animals while feeding them,11 and that ‘the tone of the human voice influences animals to a considerable extent’.12 One woman described M’s delivery as ‘hypnotic’.13 M claimed to be able to make a parrot ‘dance, whistle and shout just by stimulating it with my voice; I can also quieten it and make it responsive in an affectionate manner by speaking to it softly.’14 His speech had an irresistibly rich and mellifluous timbre, and he knew it. But if Olga had fallen for M and the way he spoke, she did not admit to this.

  ‘I didn’t have any sexual feeling for him,’15 she protested, ‘largely because I didn’t see how he could possibly be attracted to me. It just seemed impossible because at the time I felt totally unfeminine.’

  Of course that might change as they got to know each other, as they now would. M decided either during or after that first interview that he wanted to recruit Olga as an MI5 agent.

  He made her an offer, which she accepted. Olga Gray was then told to make her way to London for training.

  14

  CUCKOO EGGS

  It is hard to say precisely what Olga expected to find as she walked into M’s flat in Knightsbridge, west London, only that it was entirely different from what she saw. In most of the spy films she had watched, the fittings and furnishings of a spymaster’s quarters had the male gravitas of a presiding judge. The walls tended to be clad in panelled wood, brass-tacked leather chairs were dotted around like icebergs and in the middle of it all was a monolithic desk, larger than it needed to be, behind which you would see the spymaster himself. What Olga observed as she ventured into M’s flat was, she later said, ‘like the den of some amiable scientist rather than a spy’.1

  Fish tanks bubbled away against one wall, there were cages for M’s animals as well as boxes for his insects, Petri dishes for larvae, bags containing different feeds for his animals and bowls of food littering the floor. Among the various pets running or flying around the flat as Olga walked in there was a small dog and a magnificent blue-fronted Amazon parrot, also a talented mimic. ‘It would make the squeak of the corkscrew, the pop when the cork comes out and the gurgling noise of the contents being poured.’2 There were harvest mice in there, at least one tortoise and probably a snake and a bush baby. Elsewhere Olga would have seen M’s vast collection of jazz records as well as his roommate, an ortho
paedic surgeon known as Val, who may have been wandering about in the background as she entered. Olga could have been forgiven for wondering to herself whether ‘Captain King’ was really the MI5 spymaster he claimed to be.

  M had only recently moved into this maisonette flat at No. 38 Sloane Street, which had previously been rented by his sister, Enid. She appears to have moved out just after her brother was given his job at MI5. He might have preferred a larger setup, yet that was impossible given his tiny salary. Unlike most of his new colleagues, M was unable to fall back on a private income. But even if he had been paid more, or his allowance had not been cut off by his uncle ten years earlier, he probably would have spent most of it on records and pets. Throughout M’s life, whenever he had more money than he needed, his instinct was to spend it, just like his father before him.

  Olga may have imagined that a car would come to take them from M’s chaotic home to the calm of MI5 Headquarters or to an imposing country house where she and the other trainee spies could begin their lessons. Instead, her instruction, such as it was, lasted little more than a weekend and it took place at M Section Headquarters, that is, her spymaster’s flat.

  M refused to run his section from the Office, where the rest of MI5 was based. Although his new agent-running unit was formally under the aegis of MI5, it remained, as far as he was concerned, the child of the Makgill Organisation, a more maverick and independent outfit than MI5 would ever be. It was under Makgill that M had learned his craft and had recruited most of his agents, a number of whom had come over with him to MI5. Even ‘M Organisation’, the name he liked to use to refer to his wing of MI5, was a reference to the Makgill Organisation. Dick Thistlethwaite, a senior MI5 officer, later referred to the Makgill Organisation as ‘the real “M” organisation’, adding that in 1931 it ‘technically joined up with us’, meaning MI5, ‘but was careful to keep its separate identity’.3 Not only did M see his new section as a continuation of the Makgill Organisation. It is also likely that the moniker he chose for himself – ‘M’ – was a reference to his own Christian name as much as to Makgill, the man who had first brought him into the world of intelligence.