M

by Henry Hemming

  17

  HEART AND SOUL

  One of the senior figures in the office where Olga Gray had begun to work was called Percy Glading. He had full lips, lank hair and wore large round glasses that made him look like an overgrown schoolboy. Glading was quick-witted and likeable. He was also thought to be one of the most dangerous Communists in Britain.

  For years MI5, MI6 and Special Branch had been trying to uncover Glading’s connection to Moscow. Now M had an agent inside this man’s office. It was up to him to exploit the situation, and to do that he needed Olga to become one of Glading’s closest confidantes.

  It was no secret to those who knew Percy Glading well where and when his political radicalisation had taken place. Although he later described his childhood in the East End of London as full of ‘the usual joys experienced by hundreds of poor proletarian families’, it was not this in itself that had turned him into a dedicated Communist.1 The eldest of five children, Glading had left school at twelve to provide his family with another income. His first job was delivering milk, which he claimed to have done ‘from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. each morning including Sundays’, one way of saying he worked very hard, and at the age of fourteen he became a railway engineer, before taking a job as an engineer’s turner and universal grinder at the Woolwich Arsenal, a vast military-industrial complex that supplied weapons and munitions to the Army and Royal Navy.2 Aged seventeen, he became an active trade unionist and a member of the Social Democratic Party. During the First World War, he refused to fight on political grounds, and after being laid off towards the end of the conflict Glading decided to join the Communist Party.

  Yet the first great rupture in his political firmament took place several years later, in 1925, after the Party sent him out to India. His instructions were both simple and open-ended: he was to foment opposition to British rule. What he witnessed, many miles away from home, left an ache of injustice that would remain with him for the rest of his life. The Indian police that Glading saw were more violent than their British counterparts, and the workers were more clearly oppressed than those at home. Indeed, the conditions in India often resembled those in Britain during the mid-nineteenth century, when Marx had produced his revolutionary critique of capitalism. Glading came home full of zeal. But his political radicalisation was not yet complete.

  MI5 described Glading at this time as ‘a red-hot Communist’.3 In May 1928, Special Branch argued that he should ‘be dismissed at the first opportunity’.4 He was subsequently hauled in by his boss at the Woolwich Arsenal, which was run by the Admiralty, and told that unless he severed all ties to the Communist Party he would lose his job.

  Glading was outraged. ‘I refuse to renounce my beliefs or membership of the Communist Party.5 I did not adopt my present political views lightly or thoughtlessly, but after deep study and considerable experience of working-class life.’ More to the point, ‘I was not aware that the Admiralty employed Communists, Labourists, Liberals, and Tories, but engineers and craftsmen, and that the test was fitness for the job. Now it appears we are to have a test of technical fitness and a test of political fitness.’

  He appeared to be right. From a legal standpoint the Admiralty was unable to sack an employee based on his or her democratically held opinions. Yet the government did not see Communism as a legitimate political belief. It was classed instead as a revolutionary ideology, and as such Glading was sacked.

  The dismissal of Percy Glading became national news. Those on the Left fulminated against his employers at the Admiralty, yet the decision stood. Glading had joined the aristocracy of the dispossessed. Very soon after, he disappeared. The next time he popped up on MI5’s radar, several years later, he was a man reborn.

  Percy Glading, Mark II, was bolder, faster and more furtive. He had been radicalised, but nobody in MI5 knew quite how or by whom. Glading had a new wife, Rosa, whose parents were Russian and who had worked for various companies bankrolled by the Soviet Union. He had also been promoted to National Organiser of the Communist Party and was a paid official at a Soviet front organisation, where he was joined in late 1932 by one of MI5’s only female agents, Olga Gray.

  Olga’s new working day began with a journey from her flat in an elegant Regency-style crescent near Holland Park, in west London, to the office that she shared with Percy Glading and others on a noisy, traffic-jammed road in Clerkenwell. Here she got on with various jobs for the two Communist front organisations, while also carrying out her duties for MI5. She typed up or copied documents, processed bills, filed away papers and otherwise kept an eye out for anything that might interest M. At the end of each day she wrote down useful intelligence or went straight to M’s flat to pass it on to her spymaster, as well as the various animals, fish and insects also in attendance. M’s rooms continued to resemble a miniature zoo. There was no sign of this letting up; indeed, he was now becoming known among the keepers at London Zoo as a man who would take on almost any small animal in need of a temporary home.

  Olga’s reports rapidly provided M, and his colleagues in MI5, with a detailed portrait of the two front organisations operating out of No. 53 Gray’s Inn Road. Though both were controlled by the Comintern, they were very different in character, and represented two consecutive phases of Moscow’s engagement with the West.

  The older of the two was the League Against Imperialism (LAI), which had once been intended as the focal point for the global anti-imperialist movement, such as it was, and a counterpoint to the League of Nations – hence the ‘League’ in its title. Yet the LAI’s inability to do much more than echo Stalin’s thinking, including his wrong-headed ‘Class Against Class’ policy, which urged Communists to attack moderate left-wingers, meant that the LAI came across as little more than a clumsy Soviet tool. Which it was.

  The other organisation for which Olga now worked was the Anti-War Movement (AWM), which seemed comparatively young, friendly and open-minded, like the LAI after an intense course of media training. The AWM embodied the new Comintern policy, which happened to be a complete reversal of its previous one. In 1933, on April Fool’s Day, of all days, Moscow announced that Communists all over the world were now to embrace their former enemies on the Left and form a ‘United Front’ or ‘Popular Front’ against Fascism.

  ‘We no longer referred to ourselves as “Bolsheviks”,’ wrote one Communist, Arthur Koestler, ‘nor even as Communists – the public use of the word was now rather frowned at in the Party – we were just simple, honest, peace-loving anti-Fascists and defenders of democracy.’6 Olga was now a Conservative pretending to be a Communist, surrounded by Communists pretending to be Liberals.

  The new line from Moscow may have been a complete U-turn, but it seemed to work. The Party was attracting not only more recruits but also men and women from a wider range of backgrounds, a shift reflected in the type of people now being seen at No. 53 Gray’s Inn Road. One of those who seemed to have fallen for the new Comintern policy was a British civil servant and former Royal Air Force pilot called Dickson. Olga often saw him in conversation with Glading.

  Although Olga was now getting close to Percy Glading, M needed her closer. The main difficulty was that she only worked in the office part-time. Another problem was the presence there of so many disciplined Party members, all looking out for government agents like her. Olga could never appear to be gravitating towards Glading, the one man in that office who was clearly involved in underground work. Instead, she had to show herself succumbing slowly to the logic of Communism, until she became what she later called a ‘Moscow-sympathising trendy’.7

  The problem was, this guise bore increasingly little resemblance to her real life. In October 1932, only weeks after she started work for the two Communist front organisations, Olga decided to join the Ealing Ladies Hockey Club. She went straight into the First XI at left back, and was even selected for one of the Middlesex County teams. Most of her new friends were well-off, privately educated girls who lived in Kensington – the very opposite of Percy Gl
ading and everything he stood for.

  The life of all undercover agents is remote. It becomes more so if, like Olga, they end up operating in a city that they do not know. Although she saw a lot of M, Olga had begun to miss female company. Joining the hockey club was a risk, but she desperately needed to take the edge off her loneliness. Olga had even considered the idea of asking her mother to move in with her.

  Before that could happen, Olga Gray had a breakthrough at work. It was suggested to her ‘that she should rearrange her time, in order that her secretarial work for the author should become a secondary matter’, and she could start working full-time at No. 53 Gray’s Inn Road.8

  This changed everything. ‘The tempo of her work increased,’ wrote M, with some relief, ‘and the value of her information also.’9 Now his agent ‘was frequently brought into touch with other prominent Communists and revolutionary figures; and on more than one occasion, she was able to assist the Department in identifying important persons who were doing underground work in one or other section of the Communist movement’.

  The value of Olga’s reports improved, and so did their quality. By now she knew, without needing to be reminded, that a fragment of overheard conversation meant nothing to her MI5 spymaster without a description of who had said it, to whom, where, when and, ideally, with a sense of how the person had said it. As well as reporting the names of individuals, Olga frequently provided descriptions of their appearance, complexion, eye colour, height and any distinguishing features. If she really wanted to impress M, she would also supply the person’s address. When unsure about any detail, if she felt just a shiver of uncertainty, she knew to hold back.

  ‘Detective work,’ wrote M, ‘means that observations must be accurate; it means having a great deal of patience and, most important of all, avoiding hasty conclusions without being able to prove them.’10 Or as Le Carré’s Jack Brotherhood put it: ‘Never make it up if you think you don’t know and ought to.’11

  Olga was providing M with a landslide of valuable information about the two leading Comintern-controlled organisations in Britain. She was even being taken on trips to mainland Europe with delegations from the Anti-War Movement. Although no reports from these trips have been released by MI5, perhaps because M was wary of documenting agents’ activities in MI6 territory, these journeys not only improved Olga’s ‘position and prestige, but also produced for the Department a great deal of information regarding the ramifications of the work being done by this body’.12 She was gathering ‘a vast amount of information pertaining to Communist affairs,’ wrote M, and was rapidly cementing her position as one of his most valuable agents. Indeed, things were going so well with Olga that M felt that he could pull out the other agent he had working intermittently in the same office.

  In an interview Olga gave fifty years later, she referred to having seen in the office where she worked the thriller writer ‘John Dickson Carr’, adding that he ‘was also an MI5 agent’.13

  This is remarkable. Although this Pennsylvania-born novelist is less well known today, John Dickson Carr was, at the time, internationally renowned as the master of the ‘locked-room’ murder mystery. Writers sometimes become spies, spies often become writers and, in one sense, the thought of Dickson Carr as an MI5 agent sounds about right. Yet his biographer Douglas Greene was confused, as well he might have been.

  There is no hard evidence that John Dickson Carr was connected to the LAI or AWM, let alone MI5 and M. Nor did anyone else in the office remember a famous American novelist working there. Greene suggested that Olga might have been referring to a different man. He was right.

  Olga did spot an author called J. Dickson, but it was not John Dickson Carr. The man she saw, codenamed M/3, was Jimmy Dickson. He was a gregarious, fast-talking Londoner who wrote novels under the name Grierson Dickson and who, by the end of the decade, had become a famous thriller writer – hence the confusion with the other best-selling J. Dickson.

  Although Jimmy Dickson later became an MI5 officer, and has been identified as such, his long career beforehand as one of M’s agents has never been described in print, let alone the details of how he and his spymaster met and why M was so reluctant to describe Dickson’s past.

  M and Dickson got to know each other after they both joined the British Fascisti. This was in 1923 (around the same time that Joyce became a member). Several articles written by Dickson make it all but certain that he too belonged to the right-wing paramilitary group K. At some point after this, M asked Dickson to infiltrate the Communist Party on his behalf. By the time M was moved to MI5, Dickson, one of his old comrades from K, was a trusted agent and one of his closest friends.

  Jimmy Dickson was quick and restless. Like Olga he had a superb memory. He smoked up to a hundred cigarettes a day and could survive on very little sleep. As a boy, he had had problems with his heart and had been unable to play any sport. No doubt those hours spent on the sidelines had helped turn him into something of a watcher. After a few months as a teenager in the RAF, at the very end of the war, he had started to write in his spare time and would later claim that for many years every story he had ever submitted to a magazine ended up being published – in stark contrast to his spymaster’s record. He was a womaniser, and briefly tried his hand as an actor. In 1930, as one of M’s subagents inside the Communist Party, he had a comedy sketch of his performed on the BBC. Yet the strangest detail about Dickson was what he did for a living.

  Throughout his career as one of M’s agents, Jimmy Dickson was a civil servant at the Ministry of Labour. He had started to work there in the early 1920s, and was almost certainly the man referred to angrily by the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, in 1931, when he grilled the head of MI6 about M’s network.

  The idea of using a civil servant as an MI6 informant had been shocking at the time, and had helped precipitate the Treaty of Westminster. It was even more shocking now, several years later, given that M knew what the repercussions could be. A different spymaster might have accepted that he could no longer use Jimmy Dickson. But M refused to let his old comrade go. He rated him for his memory, his energy, his ambition and his ability to compose a lucid report. Above all, he trusted Jimmy Dickson. The feeling was evidently mutual. Dickson would soon ask M to become godfather to his son. Clearly, for M, the risk of being hauled in front of the Secret Service Committee was eclipsed by the value of having inside the Communist Party an old friend from his days inside K. This may also explain why M refused to run his section from the Office, for fear that Dickson’s identity might leak out to his colleagues in MI5. From the moment he joined MI5, it seems, M was trying to cover up elements of his Fascist past.

  Equally valuable to M was M/5, his Scottish gun examiner, who had just been ‘initiated’ into the ‘illegal section of the Party’ and who now belonged to an underground Communist cell in Glasgow.14 M/5’s reports were starting to sound like excerpts from a John Buchan novel. At one secret meeting he had been told about a ‘specially trained comrade from Russia’ who was coming over to England ‘to consult with “the big cheese”’.15 M/5 had won the trust of his fellow Communists. Very soon, it seemed, he would be uncovering details of actual espionage.

  Graham Pollard, the bookseller of Soho, was still married to a devout Communist who knew nothing of his MI5 work. Pollard continued to supply intelligence from the Daily Worker office, some of which overlapped with material sent in by the gentleman barrister masquerading as a diehard Communist, Vivian Hancock-Nunn, who was now producing the best intelligence of his career. This included juicy scraps about the legal standing of the Party or how the Communists were planning to defend themselves during a forthcoming trial, information that could easily have been passed on to the Crown prosecution.

  By 1933, M’s agents had blended seamlessly into the fabric of the British Communist movement. When a leading Party man called Jimmy Shields ran into the offices of the Daily Worker shouting that ‘all incriminating documents’ must ‘be immediately burnt’, beca
use the police were coming, one of the men he yelled at was Graham Pollard.16 Two months later, Shields attended a celebratory dinner for the Daily Worker at which he was handed Tom Wintringham’s menu card to sign as a memento of the evening. He made his scrawl just a few inches from a signature which read: ‘Vivian Hancock-Nunn’.17 When Glading, a close friend of Shields, worried that there might be an undercover agent working in his office, he shared his concerns with Jimmy Dickson.

  The so-called Cambridge Spies, including Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean, a group of British-born Soviet agents who successfully penetrated Whitehall during the 1930s and 1940s, are seen today as some of the most notorious traitors of the twentieth century. It is often assumed that they got away with their deception for so long because they belonged to the British ‘establishment’, and that this group had a peculiar inability to suspect its own. Yet the same charge can be levelled at just about any self-contained group, including the British Communist Party during the 1930s, as M’s agents demonstrated.

  By getting his operatives to speak in the right way, read the right books and make friends with the right people, M had assimilated his agents into the Communist movement with enormous skill. Under his direction, Olga Gray, Jimmy Dickson, Vivian Hancock-Nunn and Graham Pollard, among others, gained the trust of those that they were spying on. What made this so impressive was that, unlike the Cambridge Spies, M’s agents had ventured into an alien world. Philby and Blunt were surrounded by friends from school, from university and from the clubs they belonged to. M’s agents were not. One of them, Pollard, had even married into the movement he had been told to infiltrate. As well as learning a different way of speaking and being, these agents had managed to make themselves small and apparently insignificant. Pollard, Hancock-Nunn, Dickson and Gray were all lively and at times combative characters, yet to carry out their work for MI5 each one agreed to hide their personality behind a wall of incuriosity. They became, as M put it, ‘grey people’.18 Their job was to remember everything, in the hope that nobody remembered them.