M

by Henry Hemming

  The man controlling them had a different and often more demanding task. As well as safeguarding his agents, by seeing that they did not get too close to one another, or make mistakes that might jeopardise their cover, M had to manipulate his band of informants in such a way that they could keep up a continuous flow of intelligence and be able to answer specific questions from his colleagues in MI5. This was delicate, challenging work. M was running his agents in the way that he had once led his jazz band after the war, keeping an eye on individual performances while moderating the tempo, faster there, slower here, keeping the melody in mind as much as the overall direction of the piece, and, like all the best jazz band leaders, he was always ready to improvise.

  By 1933, the greatest threat to British domestic security continued to be Communism, be it the possibility of espionage, subversion or sabotage in the event of war. The intelligence produced by M’s agents over the last two years had transformed MI5’s understanding of the Party and was now beginning to affect government policy. For more than a decade, the Director of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell, had pressed for an Incitement to Disaffection Bill, which would make it easier to control subversion inside the Armed Forces. Only now, armed with so much intelligence on left-wing activities, much of it from M Section, was his case taken more seriously. By the end of 1934, to Kell’s huge satisfaction, this bill was passed into law.

  In late 1933, Kell gave M a Christmas bonus. The young spymaster was overjoyed. He wrote back to his chief, a man old enough to be his father, and one who was perhaps starting to replace Makgill as a father figure, telling him ‘how very happy I am working for the show, and also how very much I appreciate the marvellous way in which my small efforts are backed up by all concerned’.19 He might have finished there, but M went on. ‘I am heart and soul in the work (without I hope being a fanatic) and it is grand to be doing something which is really of use & which is so very pleasant at the same time.’

  This last sentence is revealing. While it underlines his hatred of Communism, which we know about anyway, it also introduces the idea that within the Office he was known – jokingly, perhaps – for having a deep-seated loathing of the Left, and being an individual whose politics were further to the Right than anyone else’s. It was no secret within MI5 that M had once belonged to the British Fascists, but he had always been able to say his membership had been purely operational. Yet as his colleagues got to know him better, some of them must have wondered whether his time among so many right-wing extremists had changed the way he saw the world, perhaps more than he realised.

  For all the good work that M and his agents had done, they had not found incontrovertible proof of Soviet espionage. No foreign spies had been arrested. MI5 still needed evidence of links between Moscow Centre and the Communist underground in Britain, presuming these connections even existed. Nor was it true that all of M’s agents were flourishing.

  M’s other female secretary, M/2, was struggling to produce useful intelligence. She had attended meetings of various left-leaning organisations in the hope of being picked up, ‘trailing her coat’ as Olga Gray had done, but nobody had taken the bait. M/2 had been active for more than a year, and it must have been tempting for M to let her go. But he chose to keep her on. Spying is watching, and spying is waiting. There might yet be time for this agent to prove her worth.

  Her counterpart, Olga Gray, continued to edge closer to Percy Glading. She reported that Glading and others ‘appear to be engaged on some matters of a confidential nature’.20 Glading had also been heard to mention Communists lying ‘doggo’ in the Woolwich Arsenal, waiting to carry out ‘jobs’, and a secret rendezvous with a man suspected by MI5 of being a Soviet agent.21 But that was it. There was never anything more detailed. Percy Glading had a knack for remaining just out of reach.

  In the offices where Olga worked there was an outer area, for general purposes, and an inner one, where Glading met his trusted comrades. Olga had not yet been allowed into this private sanctum. The same could be said of all M’s agents: they had penetrated the outer office of the Communist movement, and they had done this well, but they had not been given access to the safe room. M needed his agents to delve deeper, to take themselves further into this foreign land, but for Olga this was going to be hard.

  Just as she needed to come across as an increasingly devout Communist, Olga’s mother had moved in with her. Mrs Gray’s presence must have reminded her of her past, her childhood, her father and all the niggling insecurities that had once barnacled themselves onto the keel of her personality. Meanwhile, Mrs Gray wondered to herself, and no doubt out loud to Olga, when her twenty-eight-year-old daughter was going to find herself a husband. What surprised Mrs Gray most about Olga – for she did not know that her daughter was working for MI5 – was that she chose to spend so much time with Communists. If it was radical politics she was after, perhaps it would make more sense, given her right-wing background, to join the other new political movement that was starting to take shape.

  18

  BLACKSHIRTS

  The rise of William Joyce in the British Union of Fascists was fast, but for Joyce himself it was not fast enough. He was one of thousands of men and women who joined this new party soon after its launch. Most were drawn to the commanding presence of its leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, who painted himself as being cosmopolitan, dashing and decisive, a man of destiny who was also wealthy, aristocratic and something of a maverick. He was unusual. Indeed, there was no one else quite like him in British politics at that time. As one shrewd civil servant wrote: Mosley was ‘a “hero” in an “heroic” age’.1

  Unemployment was up. Public spending was down. There were frequent predictions of national bankruptcy. Hardly a week went by without news of another protest, strike or demonstration, including the ‘Hunger Marches’, in which thousands of unemployed workers tramped down to London to petition the government for jobs. Britain was in need of strong, dynamic leadership. Instead, it was saddled with Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald, two able and sensible politicians who came across at that point in their careers as tired and short of ideas.

  Mosley was different. For all his pomposity and his vaulting ambition, he was full of plans. Joyce described him as ‘the greatest Englishman I have ever known’.2 It is unlikely that Mosley returned the compliment, partly because the greatest Englishman he had ever known was the one who greeted him each morning in the mirror, yet the Leader, as he asked to be addressed, seemed to admire certain qualities in William Joyce, in particular his ability to fight.

  Mosley asked Joyce, once a hardened streetfighter for K, to lead the paramilitary wing of the British Union of Fascists, which was known as the ‘I Squad’, or just ‘I’. This made Joyce a busy man, as most BUF meetings ended in violence. Occasionally, it was started by Communist gangs; otherwise, it was staged or provoked by Joyce’s men.

  Mosley understood the political value of violence at his rallies. It lent his cause a sense of victimhood and this pulled in new recruits, many of them young men looking for danger and adventure. The toughest were dragooned into Joyce’s I Squad, where they received courses in self-defence before turning out at BUF rallies dressed up like European Fascists. The Nazis had only recently come to power, with Hitler installed as the German chancellor, and for many people in Britain it was still possible to feel a certain admiration for this strong new leader, the order he had imposed on his country and the way he had defeated Communism. Mosley was at pains to make the visual connection to Hitler, and made sure that new recruits to the BUF were given military-style haircuts, similar to Joyce’s, and wore jackboots, peaked caps, leather belts as wide as cummerbunds and black shirts modelled on Mosley’s old fencing tunic.

  Joyce was in his element. Just as he enjoyed the dressing up, the militarism and the ferocious anti-Communism, he relished the sense that he was part of a political movement with real momentum behind it, one that seemed to be part of a broader European shift to the Right. It was also the first time that he ha
d ever belonged to a party that was so well funded, even if it was not yet clear where the BUF’s money came from.

  Above all, the young American liked the feeling that he was being listened to. Soon after being put in charge of the I Squad, Joyce began to speak at BUF events. As an experienced teacher, he was comfortable on stage. He could quote at length from Dryden, Shakespeare and Virgil, and, when he needed to, he could be very funny. ‘You would not believe anybody with such mannerisms could be such a mimic,’ wrote M. But the key to Joyce’s stage appeal was his extraordinary anger, underscored by a hint of vulnerability, which made his performances strangely compelling.3

  By the summer of 1933, William Joyce was doing so well in the British Union of Fascists that he was asked by Mosley to accompany him as his right-hand man on a forthcoming trip to Berlin. Even though Joyce was a pronounced Germanophile who spoke German and had studied Germanic philology at university, he had never actually visited the country. So, he was understandably excited by the trip. There was one snag. He needed a passport to which he was not legally entitled.

  Although Joyce had been brought up to think of himself as British to his core, and he knew that his membership in the BUF depended on his British citizenship, he was in fact an American. On 4 July, 1933, American Independence Day, no less, Joyce lied to the British passport authorities about his place of birth by claiming to be a true-born Briton. With this he secured his passport. In so doing, as he would later find out, he had sentenced himself to death.

  Otherwise, his trip to Germany was a success. Mosley had pulled out of the visit shortly before their departure, leaving Joyce to lead the BUF delegation. He met various minor Nazi officials and, alongside Unity Mitford and Diana Guinness, he attended the epic ‘Day of Victory’ celebrations in Nuremberg, a Wagnerian spectacle involving just under a million participants which left both Mitford and Joyce mesmerised.

  On his return Joyce abandoned his plans to become an academic and gave up teaching. Instead, M’s old comrade took on the full-time role of Director of Propaganda at the BUF. In the space of no more than a year, William Joyce had become one of the most important figures in a resurgent British Fascist movement. M watched with interest.

  Several months later, on 20 November, 1933, after Mosley had been forced by illness to pull out of making a crucial speech, Joyce was asked to take his place on stage. That night he gave an electric, lacerating performance, one that marked him out for the first time as a potential leader of the BUF. John Beckett, a former Labour MP, described this twenty-seven-year-old as ‘one of the dozen finest orators in the country’.4 He seemed to say the unsayable, and do so with relish. Listening to him felt like a transgression. In his speeches he weaved together truisms, quotes, jokes, facts and half-formed prejudices into a coherent narrative, railing against the political establishment, Socialists, intellectuals and democracy itself, which he dismissed as ‘a psychopathic expression of inferiority’.5 He also attacked Jews, claiming that his assailant outside the Lambeth Baths had been not only a Communist man, but a Jew as well. He never let slip that it might have been an Irish woman who disfigured him, or that the right-wing politician he had agreed to protect that night, Jack Lazarus, was himself Jewish. Like so many British Fascists who had joined the movement in the 1920s, Joyce’s anti-Semitism was a recently acquired prop that was fast becoming a crutch.

  Another of Joyce’s new hobby horses was his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. Although Mosley had appeared earlier that year on a balcony in Rome with the Italian dictator, and BUF delegations had visited Nazi Germany on numerous occasions, the official relationship between the BUF and the Fascist regimes in Italy and Germany remained opaque. Mosley dismissed the rumours that the BUF was being bankrolled by Hitler, Mussolini or both. Yet these allegations did not go away.

  The question of Mosley’s connection to foreign Fascist regimes was one of the reasons why, three days after Joyce’s explosive speech, and shortly before M received a Christmas bonus for his infiltration of the Communist movement, the heads of MI5, Special Branch and the Metropolitan Police met to discuss the problem of Fascism in Britain. Sir Russell Scott, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, began the meeting by asking ‘whether the time had now come when Fascist activities in this country should be watched in the sort of way that Communist activities were watched’.6 The most recent conviction of a Briton under the Official Secrets Act had not involved a Communist passing intelligence to Moscow, but a Fascist, Norman Baillie-Stewart, conveying secrets to Berlin. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Trenchard, agreed with Scott wholeheartedly, and would soon be pushing for the BUF to be outlawed. Yet the Director of MI5 was curiously reserved. Sir Vernon Kell warned that his department was unable to look into Fascism until it had received the necessary funding.

  Nonetheless, it was decided that ‘MI5 should undertake to look after Fascism in this country in the same way as they look after Communism’.7 MI5 would deliver monthly summaries to the Home Office of intelligence from the police, Special Branch and its own agents. This appeared to mark a turning point in MI5’s approach to British Fascism, but really it was nothing of the sort.

  The Home Office would be forced to wait more than half a year before it received a report on Fascism from MI5. By that time there were no MI5 agents inside the BUF, just three casual sources, run by M, who were merely ‘quite reliable’.8 MI5 was even being outperformed at this stage by the Trades Union Congress, which had a spy inside Mosley’s party. Kell seemed to be holding back, and it is possible to see why.

  In March 1933, eight months before that meeting at the Home Office, the deputy head of MI5’s B Division, Guy Liddell, went to Nazi Germany. His aim was to gather intelligence about the German Communist Party and the Comintern-controlled League Against Imperialism, but this was not an undercover mission. Instead, Liddell spent ten days in Berlin as a guest of the German political police, or Abteilung 1A, later known as the Gestapo.

  Guy Liddell was once described by Somerset Maugham as resembling ‘a motor salesman, perhaps, or a retired tea planter’.9 Yet beneath his plump and unprepossessing exterior there lay a shrewd intellect. Liddell was a fine cellist, a skilful dancer and he was brave, too, having been awarded a Military Cross during the last war. But this Smiley-esque character had his blind spots. He frequently displayed a certain deference towards those he felt socially or intellectually inferior to, such as his wife, the Hon. Calypso Baring, who divorced him, and his future MI5 assistant Anthony Blunt, the art historian and Soviet agent, who would ruthlessly befriend and betray him. Liddell’s judgement could also go awry on the subjects of German Jews and Communism.

  On his return from Berlin, Guy Liddell concluded that although some of the Nazi claims about Jews were exaggerated, ‘there have undoubtedly been some very serious cases of corruption in government institutions where the Jews had a firm foothold.10 For the last ten years it has been extremely noticeable that access to the chief of any department was only possible through the intermediary of a Jew. It was the Jew who did most of the talking and in whose hands the working out of any scheme was ultimately left.’ Liddell also noted that ‘there is certainly a great deal of “third degree” work going on’, that is, torture, and ‘a number of Jews, Communists and even Social Democrats have undoubtedly been submitted to every kind of outrage and this was still going on at the time of my departure’. Yet if he did raise any objections to his hosts, as he might have done on his last night in Berlin, over dinner with the senior Nazi official Joachim ‘von’ Ribbentrop, there is no record of it.

  Guy Liddell was neither an anti-Semite nor an advocate of torture, yet he was willing to accept much of what he had been told by his Nazi hosts largely because he wanted to maintain the new working relationship between British and German intelligence. Rather than be critical of the Gestapo, Liddell preferred to focus on their shared enemy. ‘The Comintern remained a more serious problem,’ he concluded, ‘than the Nazi regime.’11

  We may never
know how long this intelligence-sharing relationship between MI5 and the Gestapo lasted, or whether it went both ways, so that material gathered by MI5 was passed to the Nazis, but this understanding helped to cement the belief within MI5 that Communism was the principal threat to British security, not Fascism. This helps to explain why Kell’s response to a more thorough investigation of British Fascism was so lacklustre.

  When MI5 did at last get to work on this, Kell’s tone was decidedly cool. He told local police chief constables that Fascism in Britain was simply a reaction against Communism, and a movement that ‘insists on the common interest of all classes in an intensified economic nationalism inspired by patriotic sentiment’.12 This was not quite an endorsement of BUF philosophy, but nor was it going to make any police chief sit up and take notice. Kell’s defensive account of the BUF was repeated in MI5’s first report on Fascism, along with a warning against hastily branding anyone opposed to Communism as a Fascist.

  For more than a decade, MI5 had seen the British Fascist movement as legal and essentially constitutional. Of course, it contained some troublesome and overenthusiastic patriots, but generally these were not the kind of people to get mixed up in foreign espionage or subversive activities. That was the view held by the Director of MI5 as well as its in-house expert on Fascism – M.

  By the time MI5 produced its first report on Fascism, the BUF’s membership had rocketed to 50,000. The proprietor of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere, one of the country’s richest men, had recently given his support to Mosley, and the BUF was now spending £3,000 a week on publicity. Sir Oswald Mosley’s new party was popular, rich and on the rise. At its helm was a man described by his biographer, Stephen Dorril, as ‘the last of the great platform speakers’, whose rhetoric pulled in recruits from across the social spectrum, ranging from unemployed Lancastrian cotton workers to the wife of T. S. Eliot.13 British Fascism had been revived and reinvented under Mosley, and at BUF Headquarters in Chelsea, the ‘Black House’, where sentries stood guard at the door, a rumour began to circulate about some thirty Conservative MPs who were set to join the BUF. The optimism was almost unbearable.