M

by Henry Hemming

  M had acknowledged some time ago that Mosley’s party was ‘in distinct opposition to the original organisation’, that is, the BF, and that some of the new party’s more active members were ‘not the type to behave particularly constitutionally should any opportunity for doing otherwise occur’, a slightly muddled statement that spoke to the uncertainty M was beginning to feel.14 Although the BUF was in ‘a very disorganised and loose state at the moment’, it was, he agreed, ‘well worth investigation’.

  Yet he refused to believe that Mosley was receiving any money from Hitler or Mussolini. Indeed, M was adamant that ‘no evidence whatsoever can be produced to support this contention’ and dismissed it as ‘quite untrue’.15

  M was certain of this mainly because none of his sources inside the movement had confirmed the rumour. These casual informants included his old friends William Joyce and E. G. Mandeville-Roe, who had recently met Hitler. Another of his sources was the BUF’s Contact Officer. Amazingly, this was M’s original spymaster, ‘Don,’ now Sir Donald Makgill.16 Ten years after they had been first introduced, their roles had swapped. Having once received reports on the BF from a young Maxwell Knight, ‘Don’ was now reporting to him from inside the BUF.

  For M to have so many trusted friends inside Mosley’s organisation was useful, and it kept him, and MI5, up to speed on most of the major developments inside this party. But it also weighed him down with a false sense of certainty. M was so close to the movement that he found it hard to accept any interpretation of its threat that contradicted his own analysis. Only in April 1934, after months of having dismissed the idea, did M finally admit that the BUF might be receiving money from overseas.

  One of his BUF contacts, ‘a far more reliable source’ than Sir Donald Makgill, who appears to have been better suited to life as a spymaster than an agent, reported that before Mosley’s visit to Rome the BUF coffers had been virtually empty.17 After his return, they became mysteriously full.

  ‘It is considered,’ conceded M, begrudgingly, ‘that this is an example of cause and effect.’18

  The idea that the BUF was now on Mussolini’s payroll was worrying, even if there was no hard proof, and it should have elicited a change to M’s approach. Yet in the weeks that followed he did not recruit a mass of new agents and direct them at the Fascist movement. Instead, he turned his attention elsewhere. For the first time since joining MI5, M’s political past appeared to be influencing his present.

  19

  COURIER

  In May 1934, as Olga and M walked out of a cinema in Leicester Square, a black cat crossed their path. Although neither one was hugely superstitious, both began to wonder about the kind of luck coming their way. The next day Olga had what she later took to be an answer. She was approached at work by the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, the man who had once been kidnapped by K, who asked her to undertake a ‘special mission’.1 It would involve ‘carrying messages from here to other countries’. Later that day, Percy Glading took her aside to elaborate on this: they wanted her to become a courier for the Comintern.

  It is easy to see why. Olga had no criminal record. She was intelligent and scrupulous and had a fantastic eye for detail. She was also a she, which made her far less likely to attract suspicion from either the police or customs officials. These were some of the same qualities that had brought her long ago to the attention of M. The characteristics that had made her an ideal recruit for MI5 looked set to get her a job working for Moscow.

  Another facet of Olga’s character that her spymaster had come to appreciate was her sense of when to hold back. Pollitt’s proposal was the big break she had been working towards for two years. The temptation to accept immediately must have been considerable, yet she resisted it. ‘With very becoming self-restraint, Miss “X”,’ as M later referred to Olga, ‘did not appear too keen: when Glading renewed his suggestions, Miss “X” asked him where she would have to go and what she would have to do.2 The reply was that she would have to go some distance for a short time, to take messages, etc.’

  Olga agreed to the mission, and only then did Pollitt reveal that she would be going to India. Their original idea was to send her to Mumbai (Bombay, as it then was), with no plausible cover story and during the monsoon season, ‘a time of the year when normal people do not choose to travel to India,’ complained M.3 ‘They proposed that she should stay there for a matter of only a few weeks, another unusual circumstance; and the Party showed themselves so out-of-touch with general social matters, that they did not realise that an unaccompanied young Englishwoman travelling to India without some very good reason stood a risk of being turned back when she arrived in India, as a suspected prostitute.’

  It was poor tradecraft, as far as M was concerned. He concluded that Glading and Pollitt had not shown ‘themselves as being very clever’.4 Yet it was essential to him that this Comintern operation was a success, both for what it might reveal and so that his agent would be entrusted with more secret work.

  To make sure that Olga was not arrested as a prostitute, M devised a more suitable cover story. She was to say that this trip had been her doctor’s idea, and that she was going to visit a relative in Mumbai. M conceded that the story was ‘rather thin’, yet in some ways it needed to be. Olga’s cover had to be good enough to get her to India, and back, but not so good that Pollitt and Glading might suspect that she had received help.

  Another question for M was whether to alert the Indian authorities to Olga’s presence. It would be easy for him to send a telegram to the relevant officials in Mumbai, but there was then a chance that Olga’s identity as an MI5 agent might leak out. M’s attitude had always been that ‘a secret agent should be a secret agent’.5 Olga would have no protection.

  Having accepted Harry Pollitt’s proposal, Olga was given a large sum of money and details of an address in Paris. Once there, she would learn more about her onward journey.

  As Olga packed her bags on the night before her departure, the scale of her mission must have dawned on her. Only recently she had been a humble typist from Birmingham. Now, Olga Gray was an MI5 agent who had been taken on by the Otdel Mezhdunarodnykh Svyazey (OMS), the branch of the Comintern, in Moscow, that supplied Communist Parties around the world with money and directives. Having mastered the art of allowing herself to ‘drift along with the tide’, as M put it, she would have to be more active, stronger and more assertive.6 After being an ‘extra’ over the last few years, it was as if Olga had been told to play the lead, knowing that if she fluffed her lines she could end up in jail or worse.

  On 11 June, 1934, Olga Gray set out for Paris. Her spymaster could only imagine what happened next and the scene on the passenger ship as she made her way to India. But this would not have been hard. Most of the action in M’s first novel, which was about to be published, was set on an ocean-going liner not dissimilar to the one his agent was about to board.

  ‘If your last cruise was dull try this one!’ was the headline on the publicity blurb for M’s first book, Crime Cargo, published by Philip Allan just three months after Olga left London. M’s hope was that his novel would do well enough to provide him with a little extra income. It was not his intention that the book’s publication might jeopardise his MI5 operation.

  In spite of this, several characters in M’s novel were clearly based on individuals who were then under investigation by MI5. ‘Kerrigan’, a foul-mouthed Scottish engineer in Crime Cargo, was obviously modelled on Peter Kerrigan, the leading Scottish Communist who belonged to the same illegal cell as M/5. ‘Baldy McGurk’, the ‘bald-headed pig-eyed Irishman’ in the book, was indistinguishable from J. McGuirk Hughes, a former colleague of M’s at the Makgill Organisation and now Director of Intelligence at the BUF.7 Unsurprisingly, the fictional McGurk meets a nasty end. In M’s follow-up book, there would be a barrister named ‘Vivian’ who was identical to his agent Vivian Hancock-Nunn. There is also a Bill Allen who is not dissimilar to the real Bill Allen, then one
of Mosley’s closest allies.

  None of this would have been a problem if M had chosen to write under a pseudonym, yet he did not. This MI5 spymaster even agreed to a series of hammy publicity shots to promote Crime Cargo, all taken by the celebrity photographer Howard Coster. Although M usually smoked ‘long hand-made cigarettes from a little tobacconist’s shop in Sloane Street’, he posed in these with a pipe, in an attempt to look like a latter-day Bulldog Drummond.8 You might expect this from any other debut novelist, but not from MI5’s only dedicated agent-runner whose ability to manage his agents depended to a large extent on his anonymity.

  M’s admission on Exmoor, some years ago, that he had worked occasionally for MI5 and Special Branch was perhaps forgivable, as his espionage career seemed by then to be essentially over. This was different. Choosing to write this book under his own name, given its content, was a huge risk and for little gain. So why did he do it? He appears to have been blinded for a moment by a desire to do more than sell lots of books. He also wanted to be a well-known author. This urge to be seen and known was not new in him. Indeed M’s niggling inability to dissemble himself when he needed to was one that recurred throughout his life, and it appears to have had its roots in his childhood.

  In M’s recollections of growing up, the figure of his father is prominent, until you begin to wonder whether his mother and siblings were there at all. Hugh Knight was ‘my ally’,9 he wrote, a kind and sensible man who ‘encouraged me in every possible way’10 and was ‘a keen naturalist’11 with ‘a good library’.12 If ever young Max misbehaved, his father was ‘more amused than angry’. When a problem arose, Hugh Knight could be counted on for ‘a sensible and rather cunning suggestion’.13 He was full of integrity, too, and ‘never threatened anything that he did not intend to carry out.14 I wish to goodness that there were more parents like him today.’

  It is a portrait that sounds much too good to be true, and almost certainly was. Others recalled Hugh Knight as a distant figure, who was too busy having affairs and spending money on his mistresses to dote on his youngest son. M’s depiction of his father reads like a sketch of the father he longed to have. Though it is a mistake to ascribe too much of M’s personality to the relationship he had with his father – Hugh Knight is not the master key that opens up M’s hinterland – the distance between father and son, and the way that he later obscured this, reveals something about the man he became. One of M’s cousins remembered him as a boy who ‘tried almost too hard to please adults’.15 It seems he desperately wanted to impress his father and to get his attention, which was perhaps why he began to collect unusual pets, in the hope that they might pique his father’s interest. The legacy of this was that thirty years later, as an MI5 spymaster, he seemed to have buried inside him a troubling desire to be known and recognised, even if it ran counter to the most basic requirements of his job.

  What can’t have made any of this easier for M, as he counted down the days to the publication of his novel, was that one of his agents had suddenly become a best-selling author himself. In July of that year, just two months before M’s book was published, Graham Pollard and John Carter released their book, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets. Despite its unpromising title, this was a thrilling account of their investigation into a series of literary forgeries. The quality of their investigative work, wrote The Times, was worthy ‘of Sherlock Holmes’.16 Ian Fleming later called this book ‘a superb piece of detective work’.17 Pollard and Carter’s work was hailed as ‘perhaps the most dramatic, and certainly the most dramatically presented, piece of literary detection ever published’.18 Its authors were ‘first notorious, then famous’.19

  Pollard was thrilled. M less so, mainly because of the impact on his agent’s work. M/1’s reports had become less frequent over the last year, and there were signs that Pollard was edging away from the Communist movement, having separated from his Communist wife. M’s response was to coax Vivian Hancock-Nunn into covering more of Pollard’s patch. Meanwhile, M/4 and M/5 kept up their drip-feed of information from Liverpool and Glasgow. With Olga away, Jimmy Dickson began to report from No. 53 Gray’s Inn Road once again. Although M/2 was still struggling to produce useful intelligence, M judged that she was able to keep going and around this time he urged her to join a trade union. M also had an agent in Birmingham, and others elsewhere in the country.

  For almost any other spymaster, this would be too many agents to run. Yet like an attentive mother hen, M was able somehow to keep abreast of his many agents and rarely seemed to lose sight of them. No doubt he was relieved, at around this time, when he heard that one of his charges had made it home.

  After forty-seven days away, Olga had made it back to London. There followed a long debrief with her spymaster.

  Her first challenge had been to smuggle Pollitt’s money into France. Her solution was ingenious, and was not one that any of M’s male agents would have come up with. She hid the cash in her sanitary towels.

  This worked perfectly, and she took the money to an address in Paris. Here she found Percy Glading waiting for her. Seeing him in the French capital must have felt illicit yet familiar, like an office romance. They had known each other as colleagues for several years, but this was the first time they had been together as part of an illegal Soviet operation. Glading converted the money into US dollars and returned it to Olga, along with instructions and questions for the leadership of the Indian Communist Party. Now all she had to do was take these to an address in Mumbai.

  From Paris, Olga almost certainly travelled to Marseille, where she boarded a ship bound for India, a ‘vile little boat’, as she called it, probably a P&O mail packet taking post and a handful of passengers to Australia.20 The journey was mostly uneventful, and Olga had little to do other than attempt to mark the banknotes with the invisible ink M had given her. She was also busy fending off the unwanted advances of a male admirer, who proposed marriage towards the end of the trip. Olga was not interested, and later said that the reason he had done this was that she ‘was the only single girl travelling’.21 Still, she found it hard to think that anyone would find her attractive.

  Olga negotiated the Mumbai port authorities with her customary cool and continued to the Taj Mahal Hotel, where M had told her to look up an old friend of his, a jazz band conductor. This was probably Crickett Smith, who had once played with M’s former teacher, the legendary Sidney Bechet. This jazz conductor helped Olga find a boarding house, where she prepared for the next phase of her mission.

  M’s agent had arrived in Mumbai at a tense moment in the history of Indian industrial relations. Over the past few months, there had been strikes and worker-led protests in Kurla, Shelapur, Nagpur, Delhi and Kanpur as well as Mumbai, the epicentre of the illegal Indian Communist movement, where the police had recently opened fire on a ‘riotous mob of over a thousand strikers’.22 The Delhi Intelligence Bureau, the Indian equivalent of MI5, understood that the Comintern wanted to ‘render all the aid within their power’ to the Indian Communists and that ‘the channel’ for this ‘lies through Great Britain’.23 They were expecting a Comintern courier to arrive from Britain at exactly this time bearing messages and money. But they had not been tipped off about M’s agent.

  Olga delivered the Comintern’s cash and messages without being arrested. The Indian Communists told her to return to the boarding house where she awaited further instructions.

  The days that followed were gruelling. It was monsoon season, and Olga spent most of her time indoors. Each morning she looked out onto a sky that was heavy with thick, blueish cloud. The heat was muggy and close. As the rain emptied down, her mind began to play tricks on her. Olga became convinced that one of the Indian Communists had been arrested, and that he had revealed her name. She was housebound, lonely and scared, and later described those days in the boarding house as ‘the first time I had been really afraid’, adding, ‘I realised I wasn’t playing spy games any longer.’24

  Most o
f M’s agents would experience at some point a similar moment of disillusion. The romantic depiction of espionage in novels and films could only take them so far, making the initial experience of life as an agent thrilling and fun. But there would almost always come a point when this wore off and either the danger of the work or just the quotidian drudgery of what they were doing finally kicked in. M’s challenge as a spymaster was not just choosing and recruiting his agents but helping them through that nadir. It was Olga’s bad luck that when she first experienced it M was thousands of miles away.

  She stayed in the boarding house for three weeks until at last she received a message. She was to go back to London empty-handed.

  On the way home, Olga had time to reflect on her situation. Over the last few years, she had carried out important work for MI5. Yet this had come at a price. There are only so many lies that any of us can tell. She was beginning to feel the nervous strain of her work, and although M may have noticed this on her return he desperately wanted her to keep going.

  Although Olga’s mission to India had taken its toll emotionally, in intelligence terms it had been a success. Olga had gathered valuable details about the Indian Communist Party and the inner workings of the Comintern courier system. She had also earned the trust of Harry Pollitt and Percy Glading. MI5 had been opening their post for years, it had been tapping Pollitt’s telephone, searching transcripts of his political speeches for seditious content and monitoring both men’s movements, but never before had it had an agent so close to either man. Her information allowed M’s investigation of Glading to move into a new phase. Usually, there are three stages in a counterespionage operation. First, identify the suspected agent. Next, find evidence of espionage. Finally, have the agent arrested. Thanks to Olga’s intelligence, M had completed the first stage of his investigation into Percy Glading: he was convinced that this man was working for the Comintern.