M

by Henry Hemming

  Yet Percy Glading was meticulous. On the telephone he gave away nothing. He had guessed correctly that MI5 was reading his post and was shadowing him intermittently around London. As the MI5 watchers reported wearily, Glading ‘seemed to be somewhat suspicious of being followed’.4

  Now the man who seemed incapable of slipping up had invited an MI5 agent to help him carry out an act of international espionage. All that remained was for M to convince Olga to accept.

  ‘To be quite frank,’ admitted M, she ‘was none too keen to be drawn again into the Party activities’.5 It had been less than two years since Olga’s nervous breakdown. This new mission would be the most challenging of her career. But it also provided a chance for her to bow out, and do so to a standing ovation. None of M’s agents had ever been given an opportunity like this to catch a Soviet agent. Although it would be a waste to say no, it required nerve to say yes.

  Olga Gray was later described by a Scotland Yard detective as ‘the bravest girl I ever knew’, one who ‘had forgotten more about courage than many soldiers ever learn on the battlefield’.6 No doubt her spymaster helped to build up her self-belief. Another agent marvelled at ‘M’s ability to instil confidence’ in his informants.7 Whatever it was that helped to persuade her, in the days after Glading made his proposal to Olga Gray she agreed to join his underground cell.

  25

  MR PETERS

  Over the next few weeks, Olga Gray and M looked for a flat that met Percy Glading’s requirements as well as MI5’s. For Soviet purposes it could not be part of a block with a porter. For the British, its entrance had to be observable from the other side of the street (where a team of MI5 watchers would be installed). Eventually, Olga found a property on Holland Road, in west London, that M was happy with; and so, too, was Glading.

  Having gone flat hunting with M, Olga went furniture shopping with Glading. Together they picked out chairs, chests of drawers and curtains on an instalment plan. He gave her £100 to cover the rent for the first year, and in early April 1937 Olga moved into her new home, the ground-floor flat in No. 82 Holland Road, a property that surely holds the distinction of being the only private residence anywhere in the world to have been chosen by MI5 and paid for by Soviet intelligence.

  While Olga made herself at home, a team of MI5 watchers did likewise across the road. Their presence was essential if M was going to mount a prosecution of Glading and his cell, but it was also a potential weakness. These watchers were not quite as stealthy as they liked to think. The future MI5 officer Anthony Blunt would describe their methods as ‘very unscientific’.1 For one of his colleagues in MI5, allowing these men and women to get involved ‘was to put the whole operation in the direst straits’.2 One slip from the watchers would be enough to scupper M’s operation.

  Late on 21 April, 1937, Glading arrived at the safe house with a male guest. He was introduced to Olga as Mr Peters. This was not his real name. There followed forty-five minutes of ‘polite conversation’ in which Olga and Mr Peters tried to get the measure of one another, a mutual cross-examination hidden beneath a veneer of prim banalities.3 It must have been excruciating. Olga made a mental sketch of her visitor while he sized her up, and after less than an hour Mr Peters left.

  ‘Aged about 45; very tall, about 6′4″; medium build, heavy enough not to look lanky,’ she told M, in a typically precise report, ‘very dark hair; thinning along left and right partings; rather small eyes, dark (possibly grey), rather heavy lids; straight nose but rather heavy; rather wide mouth, short upper lip, dark moustache; slightly cleft chin; typical shiny grey complexion of some Russians and Germans; teeth gold filled in front; hands with very long fingers, flat nails, strums with fingers on chair arm etc.; dressed in black suit, black shoes, dark tie.4 Spoke English very well, but slowly. Noticeable accent, but English correct. Has difficulty with “w”s, tries not to pronounce as “v” but not very successful.’

  It was a superb description, as good as any that M had ever received, and it introduced him to Theodor Maly. This was the first time that any of his agents had encountered such a senior member of the Soviet Union’s London rezidentura, even if Olga did not find out his real name. At the time, this rezidentura contained about twenty Soviet professionals, including spymasters like Maly as well as talent spotters such as Edith Tudor-Hart (who had been reported on earlier by Eric Roberts after she made an unusual bank deposit), and couriers, safe-house operators, photographers and mail drops. They passed themselves off in London as businessmen and journalists or, in one case, as an ice skater. Their job was to recruit and service a growing band of Soviet agents working undercover in Britain. M’s agents, and others run by MI5, were supposed to catch them. But this was not going to be easy.

  The politician Lord Robert Cecil famously likened this 1930s contest between Soviet intelligence and British counterespionage to a football match between Manchester United and the Corinthian Casuals. The elite Russian professionals of the NKVD had been drawn against the poorly equipped English amateurs, embodied by M Section, with its permanent staff of just two. It was a contest in which there seemed to be just one possible victor.

  M was certain from Olga’s report that ‘Mr Peters’, or Theodor Maly, had not visited Glading’s safe house to give orders or inspect stolen documents. ‘The purpose of the meeting,’ wrote M, ‘was for the flat and Miss “X” to be “looked at”.’5

  Maly was satisfied and sent a message to Moscow Centre to say that Glading’s network was ready to be activated. Glading had a team of men inside the Woolwich Arsenal. He had a safe house with photographic equipment and an apparently reliable woman running it. Theodor Maly, one of the most accomplished agents to work for Moscow, had judged that Olga was everything she claimed to be. A Corinthian Casual had dodged a two-footed lunge from a Manchester United professional.

  In response, Moscow Centre assigned a task to Glading and his men. Their mission reflected a major shift in Russian naval policy. For years, Stalin had adopted the ‘Youth School’ approach to naval development. This held that while the capitalist and Fascist nations could worry themselves about who had the heaviest battleship with the biggest guns, the Soviet Union would be different. The Red Navy had become a small, heterogeneous fleet dominated by lightweight destroyers and cutting-edge S-, K- and M-class submarines.

  In 1935, Stalin changed his mind. He decided that size did matter. Now he wanted a fleet of fifteen titanic battleships and battlecruisers, yet there had been no shipbuilding on this scale in Russia since the Bolshevik Revolution, so it was impossible to construct this new fleet without foreign help. A tentative agreement was reached with President Roosevelt for American contractors to supply designs, armour plating and materials for the construction of these warships. However, the deal was scuppered by the US Navy, where there was little appetite for sharing any technological secrets with the Soviet Union.

  In Moscow the question of how to obtain this expert naval knowledge was put before the country’s different intelligence-gathering agencies, including the NKVD, which was how Stalin’s quest for a larger, heavier and more impressive fleet came to involve an ex-factory worker from the East End of London named Percy and a typist from Birmingham named Olga. Moscow Centre needed Glading’s new cell to steal the blueprints of the secret fourteen-inch naval guns that were under construction at the Woolwich Arsenal. There were just five copies of these plans anywhere in the world and they were well guarded. But if Glading’s setup was as good as Maly thought it might be, his men could stand a chance of getting their hands on the secret documents.

  M was aware of only some of this. Based on the intelligence that he had received, a slender Eastern European with gold teeth was running a Soviet network in London that was centred on Percy Glading, and they were planning to steal and photograph something. That was it.

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  MOSCOW MOVES

  It was not long before Percy Glading was starting to feel the strain. Several months after Olga had moved into the safe
house, he came by drunk one night and began to pour out his worries to her. The MI5 agent made a good listener. Glading explained that he had just seen six of his people, that is, agents, and complained that he was doing very little work these days for the British Communist Party. Instead, he was at the beck and call of ‘other people’, meaning his Soviet controllers, Maly and Deutsch.

  Glading was starting to crack up, and so was the NKVD rezidentura. Shortly after this drunken encounter, one of Deutsch’s other agents lost a diary. It contained a complete list of the men and women in Britain who were secretly working for Moscow. There was enough in this document to warrant shutting down the entire NKVD operation in Britain, which is what now happened. Deutsch fled the country. Maly was already overseas, either organising or carrying out the murder of a Soviet defector. The entire NKVD network in Britain ground to a halt, leaving Percy Glading, Kim Philby and the rest in limbo.

  The incriminating diary had been misplaced by Edith Tudor-Hart, an Austrian photographer and NKVD agent who had once talent-spotted Philby. It is hard to say just how far Tudor-Hart might have gone in her attempts to recover this document, and what levels of coercion, bribery or violence had run through her mind. Yet three weeks after it had gone missing, the diary was found. It had fallen down the back of her sofa.

  Moscow’s response, however, was not to reactivate its British networks. At least, not right away. At that moment the Russian capital was in the grip of ‘Stalin’s Terror’, a period of murderous paranoia in which almost anyone in the Soviet Union who was accused of being an enemy of ‘the people’ was either shot or sent to a labour camp. Although this was unrelated to the missing diary, Theodor Maly came under suspicion at around this time of being a Nazi agent and was summoned back to Moscow.

  Maly was not working for the Germans. He was a loyal NKVD officer, and on being told to return to the Soviet Union to stand trial the man who had recently interviewed Olga might have tried to seek asylum in the West, or to go underground. Instead he returned to Moscow, knowing that he would probably face a firing squad. Soon after his return, Theodor Maly was executed. Some have argued that he was driven back by his crippling sense of guilt, and that this was suicide-by-show-trial. Either way, in the weeks and months that followed, the NKVD operation in Britain was leaderless and inactive.

  M was a man who understood how to wait. As a naturalist, he had spent hundreds of hours camped out near nests and burrows, anticipating the emergence of a particular animal. He knew within himself the power of patience, yet by July 1937, three months after Olga had moved into the safe house, he was getting fidgety. None of the espionage once hinted at by Glading had taken place. Or perhaps it had, and M was simply unaware of it. Was there another safe house, and another Olga? Did this Mr Peters have tens of Percy Gladings dotted around the capital? Or should M be pouring his limited resources into investigation of the Fascists rather than the Communists?

  Several weeks later, Glading arrived at Olga’s safe house with two people who were introduced to her as Mr and Mrs Stephens. As usual, these were not their real names.

  ‘They were clearly foreigners,’ wrote Olga.1 ‘They spoke to each other in French.’

  She described Mr Stephens as ‘very self-assured’, with ‘large hands’, ‘very thick short fingers’ and a ‘very slight but almost unnoticeable hesitation in speech’.2 Mr and Mrs Stephens were in fact Mikhail Borovoy and his wife, then travelling under the names Willy and Mary Brandes. They were NKVD illegals, like Maly and Deutsch, who had previously been in the United States. Moscow Centre had sent them to London to activate Glading’s spy ring and use it to steal the plans of the Royal Navy’s new fourteen-inch gun. The following month, the two illegals returned to Olga’s flat where they ran through the details of the planned operation. A date was set for the dress rehearsal. The actual operation would take place three days later.

  The practice run was a near disaster. This was mainly because the woman operating the camera had never taken a picture before. Borovoy had originally lined up an experienced female photographer from the Soviet rezidentura, but there had been a hitch: she was in love with Borovoy (or so Borovoy claimed). The feeling had not been mutual, he explained, and the photographer had apparently had a breakdown and been ordered back to Moscow.

  In her place had come Borovoy’s wife. Having no idea how to work a camera, she was, as you might imagine, in an age before autofocus and automatic exposures, ‘decidedly nervous regarding her ability to use the apparatus efficiently’.3 Glading was also ‘very jumpy’ during the rehearsal.4 Although ‘Mr Stephens’ tried to remain calm, he was under immense pressure. As Glading put it to Olga, illegals like him ‘live on a volcano the whole time they are over here’.5 It was a feeling Olga knew all too well.

  At last, they finished photographing a map of the London Underground – a stand-in for the blueprints they planned to photograph during the operation itself. The negatives were developed and left to dry overnight, and the next day Olga took them to Victoria Station and handed them to Glading.

  He told Olga that he was annoyed by the stand-in photographer’s performance the night before. As he had predicted, the first roll of film was a failure. But the second was legible. Everything was now in place for ‘the job’ to go ahead.

  The forthcoming operation ‘is obviously regarded as important’, Olga told M, and it would involve photographing blueprints.6 It was up to M to decide when and where the arrests should take place.

  At last the day of the actual operation arrived. At seven o’clock in the evening, the team of MI5 watchers observed Mrs Stephens enter the safe house carrying ‘a large oblong parcel’.7 Inside the flat, Olga watched her unfold this package. Inside was a series of plans. She laid them out on a broad refectory table, where a state-of-the-art Leica camera had been set up on a tripod. Olga tried to see what the plans were, but Mrs Stephens shooed her out of the room, telling her to make some tea. The MI5 agent reappeared a few minutes later and after handing round the mugs she tried to get a look at the plans, but was told to go to her bedroom.

  Olga sat in her room for the next three hours while Mrs Stephens finished her photography. Having wrapped up the original plans, she left the flat at about ten thirty. Olga emerged from her room and found forty-two negatives drying in the bathroom.

  Meanwhile, as Mrs Stephens left the building one of the MI5 watchers began to follow her. She hopped into a taxi, as did her tail, and the two cars drove to Hyde Park Corner, in west London, where Mrs Stephens got out. One of the MI5 watchers did the same. She was then observed meeting Mr Stephens as well as another man. This would turn out to be a middle-aged councillor from Bexley, in the East End of London, George Whomack, who had worked at the Woolwich Arsenal since the war and had once been described by MI5 as an ‘active and dangerous Communist’.8 Now he was part of Glading’s NKVD cell. Whomack took the blueprints from Mrs Stephens and left.

  Back in the safe house, Olga stood on tip-toes in the empty bath, squinting up at the drying negatives. Amazingly, given how small they were, she was able to make out the serial numbers of the plans. She called up M to report what she had seen. He made enquiries, and established that these plans were for the Royal Navy’s new fourteen-inch gun. Now he had grounds to order the arrest.

  Yet Mr and Mrs Stephens were not apprehended by the police. Instead, they were kept under observation the following day and were shadowed onto a train that took them to Dover. From there they left the country.

  The Soviet plan had worked to perfection. The two illegals made it safely out of Britain and copies of the secret blueprints were soon received in Moscow. Percy Glading’s first NKVD mission had been an unqualified success. Olga must have been completely baffled.

  Knowing precisely when to call in the police and make an arrest is often the hardest part of an intelligence operation. Just as there are risks attached to coming in too late, by striking too soon you might destroy the possibility of uncovering more valuable information. After the arrest
of the Soviet spies Wilfred Macartney and Georg Hansen almost a decade earlier, there had been a feeling among some MI5 officers that they may have jumped in too early, and that, in future, in a similar situation, it would be wise to delay the arrest in the hope of gathering more intelligence. Perhaps this was in the back of M’s mind when he chose not to order the prompt arrest of Mr and Mrs Stephens. Or had he developed a sentimental attachment to Olga? Calling in the police would have effectively ended her undercover career, and he may not have been ready for that. It is also possible that in the glare of the moment, when faced with a momentous, career-defining decision, the MI5 spymaster had frozen.

  By then M had mastered the art of running agents. His infiltration of the Communist Party on a shoestring budget had been an extraordinary feat. He possessed an unparalleled ability to turn unqualified men and women – bankers, secretaries, barristers, booksellers – into reliable and consistently productive agents, and to keep them going for many years. But knowing exactly when to call in the police in the course of an investigation was a very different skill, and one that M had not yet acquired.

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