M

by Henry Hemming

  ‘Knight – lean, long-beaked, knowing-eyed – has had many jobs.25 In the Navy … Ran his own dance-band, proudly claims it was “London’s first small hot combination.” … Sold paint … Sportsmaster at a prep school … Ran pub on Exmoor at which part of “Lorna Doone” was written. Lived at one time in small Chelsea flat, where envious jungle-sounds produced by a parrot, a bulldog, a bear-cub and a monkey failed to drown his clarinet accompaniment to “Beale Street Blues” on the gramophone.’

  It must have been strange for M to read this. Here was a portrait of a younger version of himself, the one that Gwladys had fallen in love with almost a decade ago. Several months after the publication of Crime Cargo, Gwladys had sold the pub on Exmoor and moved to nearby Minehead, where she began to run Madame Miranda, a beauty salon that offered everything from hairdressing and manicures to lingerie. Gwladys was never one to dwell on her unhappiness, or any physical discomfort, yet she could no longer ignore the gloomy state of her marriage. It was not just their sexual incompatibility that she found upsetting, but the way they had drifted apart over the last decade. When she and Max had first met, they were two sporty rural types, both rising stars in the British Fascist movement, who no doubt talked about having a family. Most of this future they had imagined together had now fallen apart, but they could not bring themselves to formally end their marriage.

  Shortly after Gwladys sold the pub, M discovered the truth about the dissident Fascist who had approached Eric Roberts. It had been a trap. His agent’s lukewarm response had been reported to the BUF Intelligence Department approvingly. Roberts had passed his first real test.

  Over the months that followed, M’s agent settled into the routine of being a full-time bank clerk and a part-time MI5 operative. Instead of getting dressed up in the evening as a Special Constable and patrolling the streets of London – a position he had been forced to give up after joining the BUF – he pulled on his Fascist regalia.

  ‘I rather liked myself in my blackshirt, knee boots and breeches,’ wrote Roberts, many years later, ‘but found it awfully embarrassing after leaving the bank to change in some public toilet.26 There was a frightful occasion at Sloane Square where an ex-naval type saw me enter a lavatory cubicle in office garb and emerge minutes later in jackboots, blackshirt et al. His dignity as janitor was clearly grossly offended. “You Fascist B — —. Get out of here and never show your face again or I’ll do you.” I followed his advice. I had no wish to be “done.”’

  Nor did Roberts want to lose his job at the bank, which was why he hesitated when asked to carry out a new mission for the BUF. The senior Fascist J. McGuirk Hughes had asked that he join a secret Fascist cell of bank workers.

  ‘I am always glad to hear from you over the phone so long as it is safe, so don’t be afraid to ring up,’ wrote M after the conversation that followed.27 ‘Your problem is indeed a knotty one, and until I can take advice from my boss I do not want to give you a definite opinion. The real snag is that it is entirely against our principles to ask anyone to do something which might lead to trouble for them with their employers.’ M was concerned about Roberts losing his job at the bank, but not so worried that he ruled out his involvement. ‘On the other hand, if you feel you can assist them to some degree without running the risk of getting yourself known in banking circles, then I feel that it might lead to greater things as you rightly suggest. Can you not interest yourself in a mild way to begin with, thus giving me time to take further advice?’

  The following month MI5 sent another report on the Fascist movement to the Home Office. It included information on Fascist cells such as the one Roberts had been asked to join. Although the political threat of the BUF was in decline, some MI5 officers were now convinced that Mosley was being manipulated by a foreign power.

  M was not one of them, and this was partly because of his relationship with William Joyce. Although he described his old friend as ‘a rabid anti-Catholic, and a fanatical anti-Semite’, a man whose ‘mental balance is not equal to his intellectual capacity’ and who had ‘decided tendencies towards absolute monarchy, absolute government, dictatorship etc.’28 – a report later described by a Joyce biographer as ‘one of the most insightful profiles ever written about him’ – M was receiving intelligence from Joyce about the inner workings of the BUF.29

  ‘For your own private information,’ M revealed to Roberts, in January 1935, ‘I can tell you that Joyce has a well organised intelligence service of his own, and he is kept fully informed of what goes [on] among the various [BUF] factions.’30 There is little doubt that some of the fruits of Joyce’s ‘intelligence service’ were being passed on to M.

  M’s job was to gather timely intelligence about subversive organisations, including the British Union of Fascists, so by using Joyce as an informant you could say he was simply doing his job, and doing it well. Yet by taking so much intelligence from Mosley’s No. 2, and remaining close to him and his wife Hazel, he was in danger of being unable to see the BUF for what it really was.

  Slowly, however, M’s understanding of Fascism appeared to be changing. The catalyst was not so much the reports he was receiving from William Joyce but those about him. The best of these came from Eric Roberts.

  In January 1935, Roberts reported that Joyce was giving ‘the impression that he has an actual working agreement with the Nazis’.31 Several weeks later Joyce declared that ‘if Fascism is to succeed, it must have an international basis’ and that the BUF had much ‘in common with German and Italian Fascists’. Next to an account of this speech in Joyce’s MI5 file went the following comment: ‘M. thought this remark very significant.’32

  M’s sympathies were in flux. At last, it seemed, he had begun to accept that Mosley’s BUF might be closer to Mussolini and Hitler than he had been prepared to admit. But still he wanted proof.

  21

  OLGA PULLOFFSKI

  In July 1935, M was in the seaside town of Eastbourne, on the south coast, recuperating from a case of pneumonia, when he heard that Olga Gray had been rushed to hospital.

  On her return from Mumbai the year before, Olga had resigned from her job with the Anti-War Movement and the League Against Imperialism. Although she kept in touch with the two leading Communists Percy Glading and Harry Pollitt, and she continued to pass on gossip to M, Olga no longer worked inside the two front organisations. The strain of her work had become too much, and over the months that followed she had begun to build a new life for herself, even if the old one was not yet ready to let her go.

  ‘I was approached by Glading,’ she recalled, ‘and asked to take on a paid job as Secretary to Harry Pollitt at Communist Party Headquarters.’1 This was February 1935. M had never before had an agent working inside this office, known as the ‘Kremlin’, least of all one employed as secretary to the most powerful Communist in Britain. ‘No official or other single individual ever has the same opportunity for obtaining information covering a wide area as does a clerk or secretary,’ wrote M.2 ‘A woman so-placed will have a much wider grasp of the day-to-day doings in a movement, than any of the officials of the movement will ever dream of. I would state categorically that if it were possible for any business magnate or government official to be able to see into the mind of his secretary, he would be astounded at the amount of knowledge concerning the general affairs of the business or department in question which lay in the secretary’s brain.’

  M was desperate for Olga to accept this offer. He later suggested that the ‘temptation’ of taking the job ‘was too much both for the Department and Miss “X”’, yet the ‘temptation’ was undeniably greater for him than it could ever have been for Olga.3 Ultimately, she agreed to become Harry Pollitt’s secretary.

  ‘The work was very hard,’ she wrote.4 It was also varied. One afternoon in the so-called Kremlin, Olga was ‘stitching reports into the lining of Soviet sailors’ great coats to carry home’.5 Another, she was taking minutes at staff meetings of the Daily Worker, typing up Pollitt’s letters, g
oing through his correspondence or sitting in on meetings with key Communists.

  The quality of Olga’s new intelligence was exceptional. M must have been in a state of controlled, rolling euphoria as he went through her reports and passed on to his colleagues the ‘most valuable information’, including, at last, proof of ‘the existence of Harry Pollitt’s covert link with Moscow’.6 Olga also ‘explained how the cipher system was based on a book’.7 As the historian Nigel West has shown, this key piece of intelligence enabled British government codebreakers to begin their decryption of ‘MASK’ wireless communications between Moscow and London, a breakthrough that transformed MI5’s understanding of undercover Soviet operations inside Britain.

  Olga’s new job was different from her earlier work in terms of its intensity, its secrecy, the number of reports she had to write up for M. It was also unusual because her relationship to the people she was spying on had changed. Previously, she had been reporting to her spymaster on the activities of suspicious Communists. Now she was informing on people that she had occasionally come to like. What had once been espionage was starting to feel like betrayal.

  Harry Pollitt was, she insisted, ‘an honest Communist’, a likeable individual who clearly trusted her.8 Percy Glading ‘was a very nice man with a little daughter,’ she recalled.9 ‘I remember him being a very stimulating conversationalist and about the only person who could make an account of a film or play he’d seen absolutely riveting.’

  You can only betray the people you love. During her three years inside the Communist movement, Olga had naturally grown closer to some of her targets, and there was even a rumour that around this time she started to have an affair with Percy Glading.

  Joe Thomas, a Communist who claimed to have known both Glading and Olga at the time, later suggested that Olga ‘had been sleeping with Glading throughout the whole adventure’.10 We may never know whether this was true. If it was, however, M would not have approved.

  ‘It is important to stress that I am no believer in what may be described as Mata-Hari methods,’ he wrote.11 ‘I am convinced that more information has been obtained by women-agents, by keeping out of the arms of men, than ever was obtained by sinking too willingly into them.’ His reason was simple: the man ‘will very speedily lose his interest in her once his immediate object is attained’.

  Yet M did not want his female agents to be too austere either. ‘A clever woman who can use her personal attractions wisely has in her armoury a very formidable weapon,’ he wrote.12 ‘Closely allied to Sex in a woman, is the quality of sympathy; and nothing is easier than for a woman to gain a man’s confidence by the showing and expression of a little sympathy.’

  A little sympathy. It is hard to say whether, in Olga’s case, this extended to sleeping with Glading or merely being fond of him. Either way, the distance between them had shrunk dramatically and this was making her job harder.

  The other problem in Olga’s life concerned a song. ‘Olga Pulloffski, the Beautiful Spy’ was a catchy number that had come out just after she began to work at King Street. The song was so popular that when this MI5 agent walked into Communist Party Headquarters her colleagues used to sing it out to her in greeting:

  She’s Olga Pulloffski, the beautiful spy.13

  The gay continental rapscallion,

  Some say that she’s Russian,

  And some say she’s French,

  But her accent is gin and Italian.

  Shame on you, shame on you,

  Oh fie fie!

  Olga Pulloffski, you beautiful spy.

  You could make this kind of thing up, but nobody would believe you. An MI5 operative deep inside the Party was being serenaded by the people she was spying on with a song that made her out to be a spy. Olga became convinced that her colleagues knew her secret and were merely waiting for the right moment to punish her.

  M tried to see Olga as often as possible. If he did not meet any of his agents in person, he fired off letters to them, spoke to them on the phone, reassured them, even when there was no operational need to do so. It was the same with his pets. ‘Some “superior” people are inclined to sneer at the idea of fondling captive animals,’ he wrote, ‘but this attitude merely shows their ignorance of what a young – and often an adult animal – requires.14 Stroking, gentle scratching and, what for want of a better word we call fondling is not only much appreciated by many animals, it gives them security too.’

  In May 1935, however, M had come down with pneumonia and for the next two months he was mostly bedridden. His duties were carried out by the only other employee in M Section, Rita Retallick, who later became an officer for MI5 and then MI6. She did her best to look after his family of agents, yet she was only a surrogate for M. The umbilical connection between Olga and her spymaster had been broken.

  With M still recovering, Olga bumped into a man she had known from Birmingham, possibly a former boyfriend. Her instinct was to unburden herself about the last few years of her life, to tell him about Mumbai, Glading, Paris, M and the strange, debilitating pressure of leading two lives that had been set up, as if part of some cruel joke, in direct opposition to one another. But she did not. She could not. Instead, she held everything in.

  Olga had never felt either so trapped or so alone. We are used to thinking of spies as the heroes of their stories. Now Olga had become the victim of hers. In early July 1935 she had what was later described as a nervous breakdown. She was taken to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square. Soon her room was filled with flowers, presumably including those from her two sympathetic employers, MI5 and the Communist Party – a floral reminder of how she had ended up there in the first place.

  Later Olga described the pressure of those weeks leading up to her breakdown, of a life spent ‘looking over your shoulder, all the time.15 Even when sleeping, you’re not at ease.’ It was like being afraid of the dark as a child, she said, ‘but permanently so. It did a lot of damage.’

  The pressure of lying to people you know, not once or twice, but hundreds, possibly thousands of times, requires some form of release. For some people it is enough to talk it out; others may turn to drink, become depressed or experience panic attacks – perhaps the only constant is that the pressure of this work requires an outlet and that usually the spymaster is a vital part of this process. It was no coincidence that Olga’s breakdown took place during one of M’s few absences.

  We have become used to thinking of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a condition experienced by soldiers after an acute traumatic experience, or by victims of accidents and natural disasters. But it can also be rooted in the experience of spending years pretending to be someone you are not. In 2016, a former MI5 agent appealed against his murder conviction on the grounds that he was suffering at the time from PTSD, adding that ‘he was told that his flashbacks and nightmares were not uncommon for undercover agents’.16 Historical diagnoses are tricky, but it seems extremely likely that by 1935, as a result of her work for MI5, Olga had begun to experience a condition very similar to what we would today call PTSD.

  When she next spoke to M, presumably at the hospital, Olga was clear about her next step.

  ‘I informed the officer of the Intelligence Department for whom I worked, that I found the work too great a strain and would prefer to drop my connection with the Communist Party and return to ordinary life.’17 If M had pushed her before, he did not do so now. He accepted that Olga’s career as a government agent was effectively over.

  ‘As may be readily understood,’ M conceded, ‘she was tired, suffering from some nervous strain; and rather disposed to feel that she had done enough.’18 Guy Liddell would tell Eric Roberts that ‘in an agent context, no man could go on indefinitely.19 Sooner or later, he became tired and jaded, if not blown.’ For more than three years, Olga had reported with tenacity and skill on the Communist underground movement. The intelligence she had produced had changed the government’s understanding of Soviet activities in Brit
ain and Moscow’s relationship with the British Communist Party. Now her life as an MI5 agent was set to finish. Soon after being discharged from hospital, Olga was elected to be Secretary of the Ealing Ladies Hockey Club and before the end of the year she had found a job working for an advertising company.

  M also knew that Graham Pollard’s career was essentially over, now that he had been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to write a history of the book trade. But his link to M was not severed. If Pollard happened upon anything interesting, he would pass it on to his spymaster. And the same went for Olga; the bond between M and his agents was one that never fully broke.

  ‘On instructions,’ she wrote, of the months after her nervous breakdown, ‘I continued to maintain purely friendly contact with Pollitt and Glading.’20 There might still be another chapter in her MI5 career.

  22

  MUSSOLINI’S MAN

  Shortly after Olga had been elected Secretary of the Ealing Ladies Hockey Club, in 1935, Italian forces under the command of General Emilio De Bono marched into what is today Ethiopia, marking the start of the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. In the bloody engagements that followed, Italian troops armed with tanks, planes, machine guns and mustard gas attacked Ethiopian troops and civilians, many of them defending themselves with little more than antique rifles or spears. It was brutal and one-sided, at least this was how it seemed to most contemporary observers.

  Amazingly, you might think, some people in Britain urged the government to look the other way while Mussolini indulged his imperial ambitions. The loudest of these pro-Italian voices came from Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The BUF was soon spending more than £3,000 a month on its propaganda in support of Mussolini. It organised meetings in support of the Fascist aggression in Ethiopia and its members chalked slogans onto the streets, such as ‘Mind Britain’s Business’ or ‘Mosley Says Peace’.1 At first this seemed to be part of a BUF strategy to win more votes at the forthcoming General Election. But when it came, the BUF did not field any candidates.