M

by Henry Hemming

  OLD FRIENDS, NEW AGENTS

  As if to compensate for what had happened, in the weeks that followed M oversaw a surge of activity from his other agents. Two years earlier, he had had just one agent inside the Fascist movement: Eric Roberts. Now he had four, including one codenamed ‘M/R’, whose identity has never been revealed.

  M/R was evidently not a newcomer to the Fascist movement. Within a few months of being taken on by M in 1936, this new agent had access to senior BUF figures as well as high-ranking Italian Fascists. One of M/R’s first reports recounted a long meeting with Gino Gario, a prominent journalist on the official Italian newspaper in Britain, L’Italia Nostra, in which Gario comes across as desperate to impress M/R. He even gave the new MI5 agent a guided tour of Casa Littoria, the headquarters of the Italian Fasci in Britain. This allowed M/R to make a sketch of the floorplan. Although M’s new agent apologised to his spymaster ‘for his deficiencies as an architect’, this plan was good enough to be used by the police several years later in a raid on this building.1

  So, who was M/R? Other details in newly released MI5 files show that this agent was a male journalist with good connections to Italian Fascists. From this limited description there is one candidate who stands out: a journalist then employed at the London International Press who was also a respected figure in the Fascist movement. Even the initials of his surname – M.-R. – point to the codename M/R. But we need proof.

  When the journalist with the surname M.-R. wrote his will, he did so by hand. Equally, the agent M/R’s sketch of the Casa Littoria floorplan was hand-drawn and contains examples of its author’s handwriting. Although one document was written several decades after the other, it is possible to make a forensic comparison of M/R’s handwriting and that of the journalist M.-R.

  Ellen Radley of the Radley Forensic Document Laboratory, one of Britain’s longest-running private forensic laboratories, has concluded ‘there is strong evidence’ that the handwritten plan of the Casa Littoria was made by the same person who wrote the will.2 The circumstantial evidence only confirms the link. It seems that M/R was almost certainly one of M’s old associates from the British Fascists, E. G. Mandeville-Roe – known to his friends as Geoff.

  M appears to have recruited yet another old comrade from the BF, and one of some standing. Mandeville-Roe was a founding figure of the British Fascist movement. He had composed the ‘Fascist Song’, the Right’s answer to ‘The Red Flag’, and had been Editor of British Fascism and author of a book on the corporate state, which played a vital role in shaping early BUF policy. More recently, Mandeville-Roe had met Mussolini and Hitler and had even been announced as a possible BUF Parliamentary candidate. Now he was spying on the movement he had once helped to build up.

  For M to persuade this renowned Fascist to work for MI5 was a coup. It would have taken many years for a newcomer to achieve anything like the same level of seniority. M’s history inside the Fascist movement had made him initially reluctant to direct agents against it. But now that same intimacy provided him with a range of contacts that he could either blackmail or charm into working for him. M’s underlying weakness might yet become his strength.

  As well as Roberts and Mandeville-Roe, M asked another of his old friends from the BF to infiltrate the Right. This required a more substantial transformation. The role of every agent may change over time, moving from tactical to strategic and back again, but this was altogether different. Having spent most of his adult life as one of M’s key agents inside the Communist movement, in 1937 Jimmy Dickson was asked by his spymaster to reinvent himself as a Fascist.

  This was like telling an agent deep inside a violent animal-rights group to infiltrate a jihadi cell. Dickson, by then an established novelist, would have to learn a different way of speaking, a new manner and invent a fresh bodyguard of lies with which to protect his identity.

  M insisted. Ultimately, Dickson agreed.

  Although M may have hesitated at first, by 1937 he had clearly recognised the threat of Fascism both at home and abroad. Now he was in a rush to deploy new agents against right-wing targets. As well as Roberts, Mandeville-Roe and Dickson, M also took on at around this time ‘M/S’, an agent recently identified by the historian Richard Dove as Claud Sykes, the great-great-nephew of the Duke of Wellington. Sykes was an actor, author and translator whose main claim to fame was that he had once set up a theatre company with James Joyce. Like so many of M’s recruits, Sykes was a prolific writer with a romantic attachment to the idea of being a spy. In one of his many books, Sykes describes what he imagined to be the thrill of life as a ‘spy who goes alone into the enemy camp, where the mispronunciation of a word or ignorance of some trivial custom may betray him’, insisting that this agent ‘deserves as well of his country as the soldier who serves in the field’.3 His ambition was about to be realised.

  Claud Sykes’s main qualification was that he spoke excellent German. His first task as one of M’s new agents was to befriend Dr Gottfried Roesel, the London correspondent for National Zeitung, who was soon gulled into revealing that he was, in fact, the London Group leader of the Nazi Party.

  Intelligence provided by Sykes, Dickson, Roberts, Mandeville-Roe and others was starting to affect the way MI5 and the British government saw homegrown Fascism. This new 1930s version of British Fascism posed a different threat to its 1920s predecessor. As one MI5 report of 1937 explained, ‘a very reliable informant inside the movement [probably Eric Roberts] has formed the opinion that there are a certain number of young people – possibly only a few hundred – who have been so hypnotised by Fascist propaganda that in the event of war against either Italy or Germany their sympathies would lie with the enemy’.4

  This was a stunning assertion. It implied that a homegrown Fascist might present the same kind of danger as an enemy agent. What made this so worrying for M, and his colleagues in MI5, was just how many of these right-wing extremists there were in Britain, and how much harder it would be in wartime to have them taken off the streets, given that they were British. In light of this, MI5 pushed for a bold new amendment to the War Book, the compendium of regulations and measures to be introduced when the country went to war. In 1937, MI5 demanded the wartime power to order the internment without trial of any British citizen who seemed to pose a threat to public safety or national security. This amounted to a denial of habeas corpus and the possibility of hundreds, maybe thousands, of innocent Britons being locked up as a result of nothing more than their membership of a right-wing group such as the BUF. It seemed to be a rejection of a basic tenet of the British legal tradition. Yet the intelligence from M Section was persuasive, and in July 1937 this controversial amendment was quietly approved by the Committee of Imperial Defence and added to the War Book.

  Several weeks later, in an ancient tumbledown church in the New Forest, near the south coast, M got married for the second time. His bride was Lois Coplestone. They had met recently in a pub and, rather than go for a series of romantic meals, they had gone fishing together. Over the months that followed they fell in love.

  Lois was attractive, self-contained and was ten years younger than her new husband. Like Gwladys, she came from a respectably upper-middle-class, Conservative-voting family, she was reasonably well-off and had grown up outside London. ‘I was immediately attracted to him,’ she recalled, describing M as ‘a deeply charming person’.5 Another woman remembered ‘the charm this smiling man possessed – charm of a rare and formidable order’, adding that he was ‘enigmatic and debonair, qualities I found irresistible’.6

  Aged thirty-seven, Maxwell Knight had grown into himself. He was sturdier and broader than the man Gwladys had married, his face was that little bit craggier, his nose beakier. He still wore his hair brushed back over his head, yet it was thicker than before and there was less need for all that pomade. M had for many years had a commanding presence, yet by the time he met Lois he possessed a more imposing physicality. His speech was military with undertones of the country. He exu
ded an air of quiet certainty. ‘Be confident and unafraid in your approach,’7 he once wrote, one of several lines that could apply just as well to approaching an animal, recruiting an agent or meeting one’s future wife, ‘for your confidence, or lack of it, will communicate itself almost at once.’8

  M was assured and persuasive, but there was also a hint of vulnerability to him. Early on in their relationship, he told Lois about how he blamed himself for Gwladys’s loneliness towards the end of her life. Lois described him as ‘shattered’ by her death.9 M was determined not to make the same mistake in his new marriage, and after their wedding in Boldre, a village close to where Lois had grown up, he arranged for his wife to move in with him on Sloane Street.

  Before long it became clear that there was not enough room in the flat for Lois, M, M’s jazz collection, M’s pets and of course M Section. Something would have to give. This might have been the moment to move his agent-running operation into the Office, which was now just down the road from Parliament at Thames House (where it is again today), but M refused. There may have been practical reasons for this – he did not want his colleagues to know that he was still running the civil servant Jimmy Dickson – but deep down this was about identity. M was a spymaster forged in the Makgill smithy. The origins of his section lay beyond MI5, and his unit would always be more right-wing, more daring and more maverick than any other MI5 section. The man at its helm wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible.

  Rather than move his operation into the Office, M decided to start running it from a flat owned by Lois’s brother in Dolphin Square, an ultra-luxurious, new housing development that overlooked the River Thames. According to Dolphin Square promotional literature, this complex was for a new generation that ‘thinks differently and will live differently’.10 That was certainly true of M and his long-suffering secretary.

  Back on Sloane Street, Lois was learning to live with a man who was not yet accustomed to sharing his home with his wife. Part of the problem was his unusually large collection of pets, which was forever being added to as friends or acquaintances gave him injured or unwanted creatures. M found it hard to say no. He always relished the challenge of taking on a new animal, even if he found it hard to bear when an animal died in his care. ‘I have myself felt tears welling up when I once failed to bring a monkey through pneumonia and it died in my arms,’ wrote M, some years later.11 ‘I do not think that this was pure sentiment’ – he loathed the idea of being oversentimental – ‘it was a combination of real grief at the loss of a pet, and compassion for the monkey whose sufferings I was unable to do much to alleviate.’

  Keeping his pets alive and healthy was a major undertaking, and over the years M had developed certain rigid habits. He was a stickler for cleanliness and eliminating draughts, for instance. ‘Bottles, teats, tubes and mixing dishes must be washed after each meal,’ he warned. ‘Failure to do this will mean sickness and possibly death.’12 The temperature and lighting in the flat were to mirror the outside world as much as possible, so when night fell the lights were not always turned on, unless, that was, the newlyweds were entertaining.

  Although Lois got on well with her new sister-in-law Enid, who was a frequent visitor to the flat, she was not so keen on her husband’s colleagues from work, including Sir Vernon Kell, who would often come by for dinner. Another regular guest was the best-selling novelist Dennis Wheatley. M greatly admired Wheatley and had recently dedicated his last book to him. The writer was no less intrigued by this MI5 spymaster. The two men were also bound together by their experiences at a séance held by the notorious spiritualist Aleister Crowley, who liked to be known as ‘the Beast’. They had gone along out of curiosity, both professional and private, and were probably expecting it to be something of a joke.

  ‘It was extremely unnerving,’ M later told his nephew, adding that he and Wheatley had been ‘very, very shaken’.13 For M, this experience appears to have confirmed or, more likely, sparked his interest in spiritualism. Although this was a little eccentric at the time, it was certainly not unusual. The number of spiritualist societies active in Britain by the mid-1930s had trebled since 1914. Thousands of séance circles met in people’s homes across the country during the interwar years, usually in the hope of speaking to a father or son who had ‘crossed over’ during the last war. M did not hold regular séances himself, but for the rest of his life this MI5 spymaster remained open to the possibility of a non-religious life after death.

  Lois did not share her husband’s spiritualist bent. Like so many parts of his interior world, this one seemed to be cordoned off from her. Sadly, the same was already true of his sexuality. After several months of marriage, their relationship remained unconsummated, even if this time M may have tried to address the problem.

  Lois’s future sister-in-law, Rosamund Selsey, recalled bumping into M late one night in his flat, and in the surprisingly frank conversation that followed the MI5 officer described to her the pain of losing Gwladys and revealed that he was seeing a doctor about his problem in bed. It was rare for him to let anyone in like this. Perhaps the legacy of Gwladys’s death would be a growing self-awareness, and a different type of relationship with his past.

  What had not changed, however, was the distance M liked to keep from his colleagues in the Office. He still preferred to conceal the identity of his agents, including the latest addition to his stable, an informant he codenamed ‘M/J’.

  ‘Joyce, to my mind, is one of the most fascinating character studies in the movement,’ wrote Eric Roberts in early 1937, describing him as a man who ‘knows what he wants in life, and is out to get it.14 I feel somehow, despite the fact I dislike the man intensely, that in him there is someone who might one day make history. With all his faults he remains in my mind one of the most compelling personalities of the whole movement.’

  Roberts had also predicted that Joyce and Mosley would soon fall out, based on what he had seen of their relationship. Several months later, he was proved right. Having been forced out of the BUF by Mosley, Joyce retaliated by setting up a pro-Nazi splinter group, the British National Socialist League. M’s response might have been to ask for Joyce to be put under close observation. Instead, he appears to have taken him on as an agent.

  We know that less than a month after Joyce was removed from the BUF the American supplied M with at least one scrap of intelligence. Several months later M began to receive intelligence from a new agent codenamed ‘M/J’. This source was particularly well informed on conversations among the BUF leadership that had taken place several years earlier – the kind of high-level discussions to which Joyce had been privy at that time. Otherwise, M/J received new material ‘from an informant of his in the BUF’.15 Again, this points to Joyce. Several years earlier M had told Roberts 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’.16 Even the internal codename ‘M/J’ is suggestive. More than half of the agents to whom M gave alphabetical codenames were assigned letters that corresponded to their actual names. Joyce’s family also claimed some years later that he had become one of M’s agents at around this time.

  Perhaps the only other man who could have been M/J was J. McGuirk Hughes, the BUF Director of Intelligence and a former Makgill man. He too had his own network of informants, his name fits and he moved in similar circles to Joyce. Although it is not possible to make a definite identification of M/J, there is no doubt that in 1937, in his desperation to find out more about the Fascist movement, and as a result of being ‘seriously handicapped by lack of adequate finance’, M recruited another friend from his Fascist past as an MI5 agent.17 It was probably Joyce.

  Although Eric Roberts reported around this time that William Joyce ‘was growing morose, savage, unstable and more unreliable than ever’, M felt that he knew him better than that.18 ‘I should not think that anything could occur to shake his basic patriotism,’ M had once written.19 In so many ways, M’
s opinion of Joyce reflected his relationship with the homegrown Fascist movement in Britain more broadly. While a growing body of evidence suggested that radicalised British Fascists could pose a threat to national security in the event of a war, and increasingly M accepted this, he was not yet ready to write off everyone connected to the movement. He continued to see his old comrade ‘Joycey’ as a man who might say outrageous things when he was up on stage but who was, at the same time, at his core, incapable of betraying his country.

  28

  REPRIEVE

  On 12 January, 1938, M received a call from Olga Gray. Percy Glading had just told her that there was going to be another job, and it was taking place that weekend. Moscow Centre was getting greedy, he must have thought. It would have come as a surprise to M to learn that the NKVD knew even less about this operation than he did.

  Glading had always wanted to prove the world wrong. In the past he had taken orders from his Soviet superiors – Borovoy, Maly and Deutsch – yet his abiding ‘aim and ambition’, he once told Olga, was to take over the ‘executive side of the work’ being done by the NKVD in Britain.1 To prove that he was up to the job, Glading had decided to carry out an espionage operation without first informing Moscow Centre. As before, he wanted Olga to be part of it.

  M’s response was to step up surveillance on Glading’s home in Harrow, north London. Three days later this Soviet agent was seen leaving his house early in the afternoon, before he was lost by the MI5 watchers. He returned three hours later carrying a folded newspaper. It appeared to conceal a small book. The watchers could not be sure. The best way to find out was by making an arrest, yet this might be just another rehearsal using an ordinary book of no consequence, in which case an arrest would be a mistake. Glading was also alone, whereas Olga had said that a Moscow operative would be involved. It did not feel right. M decided to hold back.