M

by Henry Hemming

  By late 1935 Mosley appears to have accepted that his party was never going to achieve power democratically. As the image of European Fascism continued to sour, and more became known about the behaviour of paramilitary thugs in Germany, the extent of Fascist anti-Semitism or indeed its attitude towards all opposition, the British public turned against the BUF’s militarism as well as Mosley himself. Most voters saw him by late 1935 as conceited, pompous and lacking in self-awareness. P. G. Wodehouse would soon caricature him as Roderick Spode, leader of the Blackshorts, so dim that he was outwitted by Bertie Wooster.

  MI5 had a rather different take on this man. Kell’s department had recently established that Sir Oswald Mosley was secretly being paid by Mussolini a monthly subsidy of £3,000. The first of these payments had been made as early as 1933. Since then the Italian dictator had ploughed into the BUF roughly £70,000 a year (equivalent to more than £2.5 million today). The money was brought over by couriers in a variety of currencies, before being deposited in a secret bank account at the Charing Cross branch of Westminster Bank, or it was used as cash in hand to pay off existing debts. Although there were private donors to the BUF in Britain, such as the financier Alex Scrimgeour, who gave money directly to William Joyce, most BUF income came from Benito Mussolini.

  This marked a sea change in MI5’s attitude towards British Fascism. From that moment, wrote M, ‘the Fascist party in this country was regarded with very grave suspicion’.2 The political movement that M had once infiltrated, married into and helped to build up was now being talked about in the Office in the same terms used to describe the Communist Party.

  Indeed, the Fascists and Communists in Britain had a surprising amount in common. Both political parties now received roughly £3,000 a month from a foreign dictator and had the potential to become instruments of theirs in the event of a war. The one consolation for MI5 was that if there was an international conflict it would only have to deal with one or the other, because the idea of the Fascists and the Communists being on the same side was absurd.

  For years MI5 had seen the Soviet Union as the most likely adversary in a future war, which was why M had been told to investigate Communist underground networks. Yet by late 1935, MI5 was beginning to think about homegrown Fascists in similar terms. If the country ever went to war against Italy or Germany, it was possible that Mosley’s BUF might be repurposed to help the enemy. At the heart of this new analysis was the idea that some homegrown Fascists might feel a greater sense of loyalty towards international Fascism than to their own country.

  Mosley’s party had appealed to the British people for democratic support, but it had been rejected. Like a spurned lover, the BUF was now becoming angrier and more insular. At a march in London on 24 May, 1936, Empire Day, observers were struck by the similarities between the new uniforms worn by Mosley’s men and Hitler’s SS. Later that year, at the so-called Battle of Cable Street, in the East End of London, some 100,000 protesters gathered to prevent a BUF delegation from completing its march. One eye witness recalled the look of ‘grim determination’ on the faces of the anti-Fascists.3 All over Britain people were waking up to the threat posed by Fascism, both on the Continent and on their own doorstep.

  A Special Branch informant described one of Sir Oswald Mosley’s speeches at this time as ‘a genuine statement of intent to undermine the political stability of Britain’.4 William Joyce’s pronouncements were becoming wilder as well, as if such a thing was possible. In one speech he slammed Churchill, then a hawkish backbench MP, as ‘an imitation strategist, the Butcher in Chief to His Majesty the King’; Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, was ‘the steel merchant metamorphosed into a squire by casual experiments in pig breeding’; his predecessor Ramsay MacDonald was dismissed as the ‘Loon from Lossiemouth’; and Lord Willingdon, the Viceroy of India, was a ‘phenomenal freak whom it would be indecent to describe as Viceroy’.5 One man who heard Joyce speak wrote that ‘never before, in any country, had I met a personality so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic’.6

  The evolution of British Fascism into an embittered, radical force was echoed precisely in Joyce’s outlook. Having been part of this movement from the start, in 1923, when he was driven by an intense patriotism and a fear of Communism, Joyce had now embraced the angry, militant and more anti-Semitic message of contemporary European Fascism. Joyce had been radicalised by his encounter with Nazi Germany. He was an extremist with a grievance, one whose marriage was also falling apart. As M pointed out, ‘it is not thought that he has enough stability to make him accept defeat very gracefully’.7 In the face of ridicule or alienation, ‘anything might happen to him’.

  M was the author of several detailed reports on Joyce, and the question of whether to have this person more closely monitored would be referred to him. But before he could make a decision on this, M’s life was swallowed up first by personal tragedy and then by scandal.

  23

  A MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR

  In the summer of 1936, Gwladys Knight went to see her doctor with a complaint of ‘very acute sciatica’, a condition that causes sharp prickly pain around the lower back and upper legs.1 Being Gwladys, she was completely ‘unwilling to accept any treatment that necessitated resting in bed’, complained her doctor, or ‘undergo proper investigation as to the cause of her sciatica’.2 She was, he concluded, ‘a difficult patient’. He prescribed her aspirin. Later that summer a different doctor gave her a course of barbiturates, powerful sleep-inducing drugs that are used more sparingly today because of their addictive potential.

  Several months later, once she was feeling a little better, Gwladys went up to London to do her Christmas shopping. She arrived at Paddington Station late on Sunday, 26 November, 1936. On her shopping list for the following day were two evening dresses, flapjacks from Pugh, scarves from Femina, black bags from the Anglo-Persian Bag Company, cushion covers from Liberty and grey shirt studs for ‘L’.3 Rather than go to her husband’s flat for the night, Gwladys took a room several miles away at the Overseas Club, where M was a member and sometimes met his agents. Feeling tired, she decided to have an early night.

  What happened next became a subject of intense speculation. Initially, M suggested that he had gone to the Overseas Club at around midnight on Sunday and had found his wife unconscious, after which he had called a doctor. But that is not what happened.

  It was later established that Gwladys was discovered in bed the next morning by the maid who had come in to wake her up. Her husband was then called, followed by a doctor, who confirmed that Gwladys had gone into a coma. Stimulants were administered in the afternoon and a second doctor came by that evening. The next day, M arranged for Sir William Wollic, medical adviser to the Home Office, to see Gwladys. His prognosis was bad. Still in a comatose state, his wife was moved to a nearby nursing home, and two days later, after a momentary improvement, several days before what would have been her thirty-seventh birthday, she died of heart failure.

  In the Daily Mail her death was called a ‘riddle’.4 In the Dundee Courier it was a ‘mysterious affair’.5 While there was little doubt about the cause of her death – she had taken an overdose of the barbiturates that had been prescribed to her several months earlier – there was uncertainty over whether this had been a tragic accident or she had chosen to take her own life.

  Gwladys’s grieving mother and brother were in no doubt that this was a case of suicide, and that she had been driven to it by M. In their darker moments, they claimed that he might have somehow murdered her.

  At the coroner’s inquest, Gwladys’s family was represented by a well-known criminal lawyer, Reginald Seaton, who told the coroner that his aim was ‘to elucidate if this man’ – he had pointed at M – ‘was in any way responsible, not criminally, for his wife’s death’.6 Seaton explained that Gwladys was wealthy and had neither children nor a will. As such, her husband stood to benefit financially from her death.

  Although M’s lawyer objected to this
remark, the coroner ruled that it was admissible. Gwladys was indeed intestate and her estate, valued at £1,637, over £100,000 in today’s money, did go to M. Perhaps swayed by Seaton’s arguments, the coroner ruled that although it was impossible to show that Gwladys had intended to take her own life, he could not be certain that her death had been accidental. As a result he gave an open verdict.

  Though this had little impact on the settling of her estate, and it formally ended the investigation, this ruling allowed an element of mystery to surround Gwladys’s death indefinitely. Today, you can find wild allegations on the Internet to suggest that Gwladys died in a Satanic ritual gone wrong.

  On the face of it, the coroner’s open verdict was strange. Gwladys’s aspirin pills were the same shape and size as her barbiturates, and a side effect of taking the latter was temporary amnesia. Most likely, she took the barbiturates, woke up in pain and took more of these pills by accident, either in the mistaken belief that she had not yet taken any, or because she thought they were aspirin.

  There was also the note she had written to M shortly before falling into a coma:

  Sweetheart, – Just arrived for a few days shopping.7 Will you give me a ring in the morning & see what we can fix up? Not too early as I will be having breakfast in bed, & shan’t be leaving here until after 10 a.m.

  Love, G.

  This message should have been enough to convince the coroner that her death was an accident and she had had no intention to take her life. Yet the fact that M had given two different versions of her first night in London, and that he had failed to hand over this note from Gwladys for several days, was enough to create doubt in the coroner’s mind.

  M’s behaviour was hard to explain. Most likely he was acting on a misguided desire to keep up appearances. He did not want the world to know that his wife slept apart from him. Those who spoke to the MI5 man about Gwladys’s death described him as shaken by what had happened, and sad that he had not spent more time with her over the years. On top of the shock and the sadness, M now had to deal with intense public exposure. This was a man who liked to be in control. His secret ambition, he once said, ‘was to be a prison governor’.8 Now the nation was able to pick over details of his private life as they read accounts in the press of the coroner’s inquest. An enterprising journalist from the Western Morning News even tracked him down to his flat, the headquarters of M Section, and asked for an interview. M refused.

  There had always been a part of him that enjoyed attention, but this was different. His newfound fame, or notoriety, threatened to compromise his work. It had also begun to change the way he was seen in the Office. The controversy surrounding Gwladys’s death did not immediately turn M’s colleagues against him, but it may have clouded his reputation in some parts of MI5.

  M’s geographical separation from his colleagues, the trashy novels he wrote, the jazz, the pets – all this allowed him to come across as endearingly and entertainingly original, when the going was good. Yet when the weather turned, as it had done in the wake of his wife’s suspected suicide, M was vulnerable to being seen as something of an oddball, especially by new recruits to the Office such as Dick White, a future head of MI5, who took ‘an instant dislike’ to M on account of his ‘enigmatic’ personality, his unusual interests and the distance he kept from MI5 Headquarters.9 Perhaps M’s personal politics also played a part in this, and the rumours of his Fascist past.

  The line between loveably eccentric and dangerously weird will always be fine. In the wake of the coroner’s open verdict on his wife’s death, M had to re-establish in the minds of his colleagues which side of it he was really on. More so than at any other point in his MI5 career, he needed a victory.

  24

  PERCY’S PROPOSAL

  When Percy Glading met his Soviet handlers in London for the first time, around the time of Gwladys’s death, he was surprised to discover that neither man was actually Russian. They made a comic-looking pair. One was tall with long dark hair swept back from his forehead like Count Dracula. The other was short with mousy, curly hair and no visible neck. Their names were Theodor Maly and Arnold Deutsch, and they worked for the Inostrannyi Otdel (INO), the foreign intelligence department of the Soviet secret police, the notorious People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). Both were living in Britain as ‘illegals’: elite Soviet intelligence operatives deployed outside Russia without the protection of diplomatic cover. If discovered by MI5, Maly and Deutsch would not be rescued by Moscow, which was why they had no intention of getting caught.

  Maly and Deutsch would later be hailed as two of the finest ‘illegals’ ever to be employed by Moscow Centre. Deutsch was the shorter of the two. He was an Austrian academic once famous in Vienna for his crusading belief in the importance of better orgasms. Since then he had shown himself to be a superb spymaster. In just two years in London, Arnold Deutsch had personally recruited some twenty agents for the NKVD. Kim Philby had been the first, followed by Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and up to fifteen others, including several who have never been publicly identified.

  Deutsch’s boss in the London rezidentura, the local Soviet intelligence apparatus, was Theodor Maly, a tall, languid Hungarian with gold fillings in his front teeth and a past that had come to haunt him. An ex-seminarian, Maly had been captured during the First World War and taken to Siberia where he learned Russian, lost his faith and joined the Red Army. In the years that followed, he took part in some of the worst massacres of the Russian Civil War, the memory of which tormented him for the rest of his life and was part of the reason why he had asked to be posted abroad – anywhere, really, other than the Soviet Union. This was how Maly came to be running the NKVD rezidentura in London, in late 1936, at around the time that he and Deutsch recruited a former factory worker called Percy Glading.

  Deutsch described Glading, their bespectacled new agent, as ‘a devoted communist, courageous, daring, painstaking and industrious.1 He is also well-read and well-educated. He is a good organiser and writes well.’ Glading’s only weaknesses, believed Deutsch, were that he could be too trusting of his comrades and sometimes he lacked patience. It was a prescient judgement.

  Whereas Philby and the other wide-eyed Cambridge recruits had been won over at once by Deutsch’s mittel-European charm, his easy sophistication and his worldliness, Glading was more acerbic. He found Deutsch too cautious, at one point complaining that he was ‘bumptious’.2 There was also a part of Glading that resented being told what to do by a foreigner, an incipient sense that one day he should be doing Deutsch’s job himself.

  For all this, Glading was flattered to have been chosen by the NKVD from among so many other Comintern agents. His instructions from Maly and Deutsch were to recruit a team of subagents inside the Woolwich Arsenal, the industrial complex in which he had worked before being kicked out on account of his Communist beliefs, and to have these agents ready to remove secret plans from the factory, photograph them and then have the negatives couriered to Moscow.

  Finding British factory workers who were willing to betray their country was surprisingly – depressingly – easy. This says a lot about the political ferment of the time. Several months earlier, in July 1936, a group of Spanish officers had launched a rebellion against the democratically elected government of Spain, an uprising that sparked the Spanish Civil War. This appeared to be part of an ongoing conflict between the Right and the Left, and as such it would attract thousands of idealistic volunteers who were willing to give their lives in defence of one side or the other. The world had entered an age of political extremes in which antipathy towards Fascism could easily become sympathy for Communism, and vice versa, which was why Percy Glading did not have to look hard to find three Woolwich Arsenal workers who were willing to help Moscow in the belief that by doing so they might be fighting Fascism.

  The other part of Glading’s job was harder. He needed to find a place in which to have the stolen material photographed. He decided
to set up a safe house. But who to run it? Ideally, this person would be a trusted comrade with experience of illegal work and a clean record, yet one who did not formally belong to the Communist Party.

  Olga Gray was not entirely sure why Percy Glading had asked to see her, after he contacted her unexpectedly in February 1937, but she had a pretty good idea. Three days earlier she had told Harry Pollitt that she was finally leaving the Communist Party. She probably thought Glading wanted to talk her into changing her mind.

  Instead, he asked her to run a safe house. Olga was to find a flat that did not belong to a block with a porter, because Glading did not want anyone keeping tabs on his movements, and to move into this place and carry out certain tasks. He would have his own set of keys. Glading planned to visit the property several times each month, and in return she could live rent-free in a fully furnished flat.

  The easiest course of action for Olga, the most attractive, simplest and safest response, was to say no and to carry on with her life after MI5 as if this conversation had not happened. M would never find out. Instead, she told Glading that she would think about it. After that she made a call to her spymaster.

  M must have gone into shock. Having endured the worst few months of his life, bar none, an agent he had written off had now presented him with what might be the biggest break of his career. MI5 had been investigating Glading for more than a decade. M’s agents had repeatedly got themselves to within touching distance of this man, but no closer. M/5 thought that ‘Percy Glading is the comrade in charge of the whole Illegal Apparatus’ for the entire Communist Party and had even been told that Glading wanted to speak to him personally about weaponry he examined at work.3 This same agent heard that Glading was in charge of a series of illegal factory groups, including one in the Woolwich Arsenal. Jimmy Dickson, the civil servant and novelist, had been grilled by Glading about variable-pitch aircraft propellers and on how to get information from Communists inside the government. Graham Pollard’s career as an agent had recently spluttered back to life when he reported that Glading had rebuked a comrade for being so naïve as to accept at face value a statement made by the Comintern.