M

by Henry Hemming

  Perhaps M explained some of this to Olga. ‘I state unhesitatingly that I think it is not only desirable, but essential that an agent should know exactly what his position is,’ he later wrote.4 ‘I am against any complicated system of cut-outs; and equally against employing an agent who thinks he is working for, let us say, a news-agency. If this sort of subterfuge is practised, there inevitably comes a day when the agent has to be told what his real position is, and I think this has a very bad effect on the agent himself: he feels that he has been led up the garden, and made a fool of; and worst of all, that he has not been trusted.’ He told Olga that she was working for M Section, part of ‘the British Intelligence Department’, and that her task was to penetrate the Communist movement.

  It was hard to guess how far she might get, but for M the holy grail was finding proof of a link between Moscow and the Communist Party of Great Britain. Along the way she should look for evidence of illegal activities, the names of ‘closed’ Party members, communications between undercover comrades and any other details about left-wing underground networks. She might also need to answer specific questions from M’s new colleagues. In M’s reports, Olga would be referred to as ‘M/12’. Her pay was to be £2.50 a week, approximately £150 in today’s money. So she was not doing this to get rich. Yet it was vital that she received a regular salary. From his own experience, M understood the effect of being paid by results and how this could militate towards exaggeration and unnecessary risks. It would also undermine the basic lesson he preached to Olga repeatedly during that weekend, until she was probably sick of hearing it: be patient.

  ‘The great thing is not be in too much of a hurry,’ he told another agent.5 ‘We shall not mind if you do not show any very tremendous results for a month or two. You have to be very patient in this game.’

  This applied to Olga as much as to M. It was vital that he did not rush her.

  M then gave her a crash course in what to report, the paramount importance of accuracy and objectivity and the need to keep her mind supple with memory exercises.

  That was it, more or less.

  ‘The very best training,’ M always argued, ‘is for an agent to be put into contact at the earliest possible moment with the organisation to be investigated.’6 This young spymaster had learned not to overload his agents with instructions and warnings. Like a film director obsessed with realism, he wanted his recruits to give untutored and naturalistic performances.

  Olga was now ready to begin her mission to reach the heart of the Communist movement, which would be further than any of M’s existing agents had got. Yet by the time her training had finished, in 1931, there was one other M operative who might arrive there at about the same time.

  M had given this other agent the codename ‘M/1,’ possibly because this person had been one of the first people to be taken on by him. Having worked for M over the last few years, M/1 had recently secured a job at the new Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, and was now providing M with a stream of valuable intelligence about who was employed at the paper, the stories its editors planned to publish, editorial policy, authorship of anonymous articles and other valuable scraps picked up inside this Communist propaganda machine. M/1 seemed to be just one or two promotions away from the upper reaches of the Party. M’s operative was talented, courageous and resourceful, and until now this agent’s identity has remained a carefully guarded secret.

  MI5 does not publicly name its agents. The basic contract of trust between spymaster and informant is rooted in the understanding that the former will never give away the latter, even after death. Yet sometimes MI5 releases enough material about a particular agent to make an identification possible, but only if you are prepared to do a bit of digging.

  In the National Archives in Kew, in southwest London, there are thousands of declassified MI5 files. Some include fragments of reports written by M/1. By trawling through enough of these documents it is possible to build up a rough picture of who M/1 was, where this agent worked and the names of the Communists that this agent reported on. Most of these people were employed at the Daily Worker. Four were not.

  M usually asked that intelligence relating to any one of these four ‘should be disseminated with very great care’, a clear sign that this information came from personal conversations between one of these targets and M/1.7 If that intelligence was acted on by the police, it would be easy for the person arrested to guess who had tipped off the authorities. These four people were Elsie McMeakin, Edith Martin, Arthur Glyn Evans and his wife, Peggy Evans. They had various things in common, yet one stands out: they all lived in the same building.

  Indeed, M/1 was something of an expert on the comings and goings at No. 22 Adelaide Road, a large house in Camden, north London, where these four people lived at different times. In one report, M/1 described a letter arriving at this address late in the day before it was taken by hand to Communist Party Headquarters early the next morning. In itself this indicates that M/1 probably spent the night at that house. Yet reading between the lines of this and many other reports, it seems pretty clear that M/1 either was sleeping with someone who lived at No. 22 Adelaide Road or was living there, too.

  According to the annual electoral registers, during the years that M/1 was active, nine individuals were based in this property at one time or another. Five of the nine were reported as being in conversation with M/1 or were under suspicion by MI5, which means they cannot have been M/1 themselves. This leaves just four people registered as living there who might have been M/1.

  Here are some other details about this MI5 agent: he or she was employed by the Daily Worker; belonged to the St Pancras branch of the Communist Party in London; and frequently attended meetings of the Workers Press Commission. This allows us to cross off several names from the list, leaving just two people.

  The strangest thing about these last two is their relationship to each other: they were husband and wife. Their names are Kathleen Beauchamp and Graham Pollard. Both professed to be devout Communists. One of them appears to have been an MI5 agent.

  There is another clue about M/1’s identity, but it is confusing. In one report, M appears to refer to M/1 as ‘H. G.’8 Usually a detail like this is redacted before a file is released to the public, but this one slipped through the net. The initials ‘H. G.’ seem to rule out both Beauchamp and Pollard, who were, of course, K. B. and G. P.

  Perhaps M/1 did not live at No. 22 Adelaide Road after all? Or was ‘H. G.’ a codename?

  The ‘H. G.’ clue appears to blow us off course but for one thing. ‘Graham’ was not Pollard’s first name. It was his middle name. He was ‘H. G. Pollard’, and, just as H. G. Wells was sometimes known to friends as ‘H. G.’, so was H. G. Pollard.

  Not only did Graham Pollard live at No. 22 Adelaide Road during this period, he belonged to the St Pancras Local at the same time as M/1, he attended meetings of the Workers Press Commission when M/1 did and, crucially, he was on the staff at the Daily Worker at the same time as M/1. So, too, was his wife, Kathleen, a director of the newspaper’s controlling press. As a result of her position, she was found in contempt of court when her newspaper printed an article protesting against the conviction of a leading Communist, and in January 1933 she was arrested and jailed. Shortly after her imprisonment M received a report from M/1, which appears to rule out Kathleen Beauchamp as an MI5 agent.

  Graham Pollard was hailed after his death in 1976 as one of the most distinguished bibliographers of his generation. He was a learned, twinkly-eyed civil servant whose birthday, towards the end of his life, was noted each year in The Times. Pollard had an extraordinarily catholic range of interests including bookbinding, type design, the history of medieval Oxford and the newspapers, nineteenth-century literary forgeries and the book trade. He was admired for his remarkable ‘facility in mastering a new subject and his convincing manner when talking on almost any topic’.9 Now it seems that we can add to his long and varied career a stint as an MI5 agent deep inside
the Communist Party.

  It is even possible to pinpoint the period when Pollard was recruited. In 1921, when M began to teach at the prep school in Putney, southwest London, a seventeen-year-old Graham Pollard happened to be living just a few hundred yards away, and he had good reason to visit the school: he had recently been a pupil there himself.

  The year after these two presumably met, Pollard won the top history scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, where his father, the great Tudor historian A. F. Pollard, had once been. Roughly a year later, M began to insert penetration agents into the Communist Party. One of the first appears to have been Graham Pollard, a teenager, who told his Oxford friends at exactly this time that he had suddenly become a Communist.

  ‘Pollard did not often proclaim his faith,’ noted Peter Quennell, critic and author, with evident suspicion.10 Indeed, the only time that Communism seemed to enter Graham Pollard’s life was ‘when a railway-strike happened to coincide with an important London book-sale; and he was much exercised as to whether he should miss the sale, or run the risk of travelling on a train behind a black-leg engine-driver’. Pollard was far better known at Oxford for his love of rare books, for being a member of the aesthetes’ den the Hypocrites Club, for having a room that looked ‘like a bookseller’s shop’, and for the occasion when he beat Evelyn Waugh in the ‘half-blue’ at spitting (at a distance of ten feet).11 Hardly the portrait of a devout Communist.

  Yet on leaving Oxford, Pollard married Kathleen Beauchamp, a young Communist and a former pupil of his father’s. M’s young agent became increasingly accepted in Party circles after coming down from Oxford and involved himself in the production of various Communist publications. He also began to run part of the famous Birrell and Garnett bookshop in Soho, central London, having bought a share of the business from the Bloomsbury luminary David ‘Bunny’ Garnett.

  Pollard’s life was now a heady mix of books, extreme politics and espionage. He started each day with lunch at Chez Victor, one of the most fashionable restaurants in town, before drifting into his bookshop for an afternoon of work. Then he might head off to a Party meeting, file a report for M and go home to his Communist wife. His life as a bohemian, a political activist, a bookseller and an undercover agent was exciting and exacting, and it required him to play many parts. By the end of 1931, as Olga was about to launch herself at the Communist movement, it seemed that Graham Pollard might just reach the heart of the Party before she did.

  All the same, M had so much riding on his experiment with female secretaries, and was so determined to see it succeed, that he recruited another one. ‘A cuckoo is not content to lay one egg only,’ he once wrote, ‘but only one egg is normally laid in one nest.’12 Rather than enlist just one undercover secretary, M took on two and launched them at different parts of the Communist movement. As well as Olga, codenamed M/12, he began to run another female typist referred to as ‘M/2’. Like Olga, she came from a respectable, middle-class family from outside London and she had strong connections to her local Conservative Party.

  There was no way of telling which of these two women would flourish as an intelligence agent, or whether he had given them enough training. Rather like a cuckoo hen in the hours after depositing her eggs, all that M could do now was wait.

  15

  TRAILING ONE’S COAT

  Every agent remembers the first job. M had instructed Olga Gray to attend a meeting of the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU). This was a bland, left-of-centre organisation with branches all over the world. It raised money for impoverished Russians or else campaigned against the negative media portrayal of the Soviet Union. The FSU attracted political progressives and milk-and-water liberals, all of whom sympathised with the plight of the Russian people and subscribed to some of the basic tenets of Marxism, but few of them went so far as to call themselves Communists.

  Unknown to most of these people, the FSU was a Communist ‘front’ organisation secretly under Soviet control. The many branches of the FSU, including the one Olga was about to visit, were referred to as ‘Innocents’ Clubs’ by Willi Munzenberg, a senior figure in the Soviet body quietly pulling the strings in the FSU, as well as many other front organisations. Munzenberg worked for the Communist International, better known as the Comintern. Based in Moscow, the Comintern had been set up by Lenin in 1919 to coordinate the overthrow of global capitalism. Since then its agents had been midwives at the birth of almost every national Communist Party, supplying instructions, expertise and money, before staying on as governesses while each national Party agitated for a worker-led revolution. By 1931, the Comintern was a vast centralised network unparalleled in scale and ambition. Each day a flood of messages, propaganda and money pulsed out of its nerve centre deep in the Soviet Union, while in the opposite direction came intelligence, fresh recruits and a growing sense that momentum was on their side and capitalism would soon crumble. One of the ways the Comintern broadcast its message was through the activities of front organisations such as the FSU. ‘These people have the belief they are actually doing this themselves,’ wrote Munzenberg, of those who joined the FSU, and ‘this belief must be preserved at any price’.1 Olga’s task was to become one of them.

  M had instructed her to play the wide-eyed innocent and to present herself at an FSU meeting as ‘an ordinary, interested and sympathetic enquirer’ who wanted to know more about the Soviet Union.2 She was going to ‘trail her coat’, in spy parlance, in the hope that a Party official might befriend her and take her on as his secretary.

  Playing the part of a willing ingénue might sound easy. For Olga it was not. She had been brought up to see Communism as a political aberration. Now she had to pretend the opposite, to twist her mind inside out and convince a part of herself that what she had once believed to be wrong was instead right.

  It worked, as far as Olga could tell. During the meeting, she got into conversation with various attendees. Nobody accused her of being anything other than what she claimed to be, and by the end of that session she had made several acquaintances. But that was it. She went home empty-handed.

  This was Olga’s first taste of life as an MI5 agent. She might have to endure hundreds of meetings like this, forever playing the political naïf, seizing upon ideas and phrases she found absurd as if they were full of genuine possibility, and even then there was no guarantee that she would be taken on.

  Yet at a subsequent FSU meeting, ‘very shortly after’ the first, Olga was approached by the Assistant Secretary of the FSU.3 ‘He may have had,’ reported M, an ‘interest’ in Olga, seeing her ‘as a personable young woman’. This was one way of saying he took a fancy to her. He listened carefully to her cover story about the job she had as a secretary for an author with unpredictable hours. This was wish fulfilment on M’s part, as he had always wanted to be a professional writer. It was also designed to be tempting bait. The supposedly ‘unpredictable’ nature of his hours implied gaps in Olga’s schedule that she needed to fill. The FSU man asked whether ‘she had any free time which she could devote to doing voluntary work for the FSU’.4 She replied that she did.

  Very soon after, Olga Gray began to work as a part-time and unpaid secretary at the FSU office. M’s first cuckoo egg looked set to hatch.

  Her new surroundings turned out to be shambolic, yet this allowed her to demonstrate her considerable abilities as a secretary. She ‘speedily reduced the existing chaos to some semblance of order’.5 Her new colleagues were impressed.

  ‘Form the habit of taking notes of what you see and hear as soon as possible after an incident or observation,’ wrote M.6 ‘We may have good memories, but they play us false every now and then.’ Olga soon got used to writing down or memorising key details about anything unusual that she observed. She would then produce a written report and post it to M, or else she held the information in her head and either gave him a call or passed it on in person. They might meet in the lobby of a shabby hotel, in the cinema or in one of their homes. M preferred his agents to get th
eir intelligence down on paper right away, but, as he soon discovered, Olga had a phenomenal memory and this was not always necessary for her.

  During those first few months of working for the FSU, Olga Gray supplied her spymaster with ‘a considerable amount of information’.7 The main problem, for M, was that none of it had any great intelligence value. The other issue was that Olga’s chances of being offered a more senior position inside the Communist Party had plummeted, for reasons that were out of her control.

  ‘Efforts are being made to send spies into the Party,’ revealed the Communist-run Daily Worker on 29 March, 1932, very soon after Olga had begun to work at the FSU.8 The wife of a Party member had been approached by a Special Branch detective who had tried to recruit her as an informant. Instead, she had reported him to her comrades.

  ‘Revolutionary vigilance against spies and provocateurs is an essential part of the working-class fight against war,’ thundered the newspaper where Graham Pollard worked. There had never been a good time to be a government agent inside the British Communist movement, but the weeks after this exposé were especially tough.