M

by Henry Hemming

  Although it is still theoretical, this edges us closer to M/2’s identity. The point of a Communist fraction was to influence voting on a particular committee. So, by looking at the voting records of the AWCS executive committee on issues of interest to the Communists, it might be possible to build up a list of women who belonged to this Communist fraction, one of whom could be M/2.

  At the Working Class Movement Library in Manchester there is a collection of AWCS papers, including a little-known history of this trade union. Among many other details this gives the names of several prominent Communists who sat on the executive committee during the 1930s. One of these was a Mrs Williams – who could not have been M/2 because she was too old (and too prominent). Crucially, this archival collection also holds the voting records of the AWCS executive committee during the 1930s. During the period that M/2 was active on this committee, there were forty-eight different women who voted with the strident Communist Mrs Williams, for one reason or another. Some of those would have done so simply because they thought she was talking sense, others because they belonged to the same Communist fraction. One of these forty-eight women may have been M/2.

  Most of these names can be ruled out as M/2 on the basis of other details gleaned from her MI5 reports, such as her approximate age and when she joined and left this trade union. This leaves nine possible candidates.

  How to whittle these nine names down to one? This is the trickiest part of the puzzle (and one that took me some time to work out). But there is a way to do it.

  If you map the locations mentioned by M/2 in her reports to M and correlate these with the dates when these reports were made, an interesting pattern slowly emerges. It seems that in the years before 1938, M/2 was living south of the River Thames, perhaps near Stockwell or Brixton – as most of her reports before this date mention places close to or inside this area. After this date, however, she appears to have been based in Hammersmith.

  In London today most councils have a local history centre that holds a complete set of annual electoral registers for the surrounding boroughs. By visiting enough of these centres dotted around the capital, it is possible to work out roughly where these nine women who might have been M/2 lived, and when. It turns out that just one of the nine candidates for M/2 lived in Stockwell until 1938, after which she moved to Hammersmith. Her initials were M. M.

  When she was at school, M. M. was twice awarded ‘Honours’ in the Royal Drawing Society Certificates.3 We know that M/2 was a good sketcher; indeed, some of her drawings have survived in MI5 files.

  M. M. worked on the China Campaign Committee in 1939. So did M/2.

  M. M. attended the International Peace Campaign in 1938. As did M/2.

  We also know that after the start of the war M. M. was an air raid warden in Hammersmith. M/2 had the same job in the same place at the same time.

  The agent known as M/2 can now be revealed as an enterprising, brave and selfless woman called Mona Maund. Her name also explains M’s codename: M. M., with her two Ms, was M/2.

  Similar to Olga Gray and Vivian Hancock-Nunn, Mona Maund had almost certainly come to M’s attention through the good offices of the Conservative Party. Her father, Captain Maund, was a staunch Conservative and at one time High Sheriff of Worcester. Like so many of M’s agents, Mona Maund had had an interrupted childhood. Her mother died when Mona was just four years old. For the rest of her life, she was particularly close to her father, who referred to her touchingly in his will as ‘my darling daughter’ and ‘my best of all God-sent daughters’. Indeed, Maund’s career as one of M’s agents may have finished in 1940, not, it seems, because she was exposed as a spy, but as a result of her father moving into a nursing home in Worcester. She moved back there to look after him.

  Mona Maund’s great skill as an agent was her extraordinary perseverance, as well as her ability to persuade so many Communist Party members to see past her right-wing background – even if this had taken several years to achieve.

  It is striking that M chose to use agents like Maund, from resolutely right-wing families, to penetrate left-wing groups. Moscow Centre often asked successful upper-middle-class Englishmen to masquerade as, well, successful upper-middle-class Englishmen. Yet few of these agents were ever fully trusted by their controllers, even after they had defected to the Soviet Union. By contrast, M liked to recruit Tories or Fascists and turn them into Communists. The transformation was harder to achieve and it required superior tradecraft, yet the payoff was significant: he had no cause to question their loyalty.

  Mona Maund was a doting daughter and a resilient spy, yet the most valuable intelligence she passed on to MI5, and it was priceless, would go to waste. When the police searched Percy Glading’s house after his arrest in 1938, they found a diary that listed six names. As MI6’s Valentine Vivian pointed out, two of these names actually referred to the same person – a young Communist called Melita Norwood. Also, in Charles Munday’s flat, a slip of paper was found that had Norwood’s address on it. Clearly, Melita Norwood was important. She was also Honorary Secretary of the AWCS Cricklewood Branch. Mona Maund was Honorary Secretary of the AWCS Central Branch. The two women knew each other.

  ‘This girl is a rather mysterious character,’ wrote Maund about Melita Norwood.4 ‘She is quite an active person in her trade union but a certain amount of mystery seems to surround her actual Communist Party activities. She has a husband about whom nothing is known except that he looks rather like Charlie Chaplin.’ Maund then supplied M with the crucial detail: ‘it is also certain that she is doing some especially important Party work’.5 This ‘Party work’ was so important, she added, that Norwood had told her comrades ‘she will not be able to undertake any open Party work for some little time’.6

  This was not all that Mona Maund provided on Melita Norwood. ‘Suppose you can draw and paint,’ M later wrote.7 ‘What an advantage this will prove to be!’ Although he was a hopeless sketcher himself, M urged his agents to make drawings of their targets. Having provided excellent intelligence on Melita Norwood and a character sketch of this woman, Maund made an actual sketch of her. Her likeness was so striking that it was later reproduced in an official history of MI5 next to a photograph of Norwood. But Maund would have hoped for much more from her intelligence than that it would be used many years later to illustrate a book.

  M had passed Maund’s reports about Melita Norwood to the head of B Division, Jasper Harker, a handsome former Indian policeman who was rumoured among the MI5 secretaries to have either no toes or ‘very small feet’.8 He was also known to be not very bright. Harker examined the reports carefully. He then decided not to have Melita Norwood investigated.

  It later emerged that Norwood had been recruited as an NKVD agent by either Theodor Maly or Arnold Deutsch in 1937 – just a year before Mona Maund’s reports. Norwood went on to spend most of her career as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, which coordinated British nuclear projects, where she used her position to pass on to Moscow Centre an avalanche of atomic secrets. She became one of the most successful Soviet agents in Britain with the longest record of service. She was finally exposed at the age of eighty-nine, in 1999, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘I’ve been rather a naughty girl,’ she said, when her cover was finally blown, which endeared her to some.9 But there was nothing charming about what she had done. Melita Norwood is seen today as having had a greater impact on the Cold War than any other Soviet agent active in Britain.

  Although there may have been relatively few officers working for MI5 when Harker made his disastrous decision not to follow up on Mona Maund’s reports on Norwood, and, yes, it was not possible for MI5 to pursue every lead produced by the Glading case, this was the most important. MI5’s ability to prevent espionage depended on both the intelligence it received and the quality of its analysis. In this instance, the two were woefully mismatched. Jasper Harker’s failure to exploit this intelligence about Melita Norwood was a blunder of Homeric p
roportions. The greatest intelligence coup to come from M’s most persistent agent ultimately came to nothing.

  31

  ‘WHAT A VERY BEAUTIFUL VIEW’

  On 12 March, 1938, just two days before Percy Glading and his accomplices were sentenced, German troops marched into Austria in what was euphemistically called the Anschluss, meaning the ‘connection’ or ‘annexation’. Even if the troops were welcomed by many Austrians, this was an invasion in all but name. The territorial expansion Hitler had set out in his memoir Mein Kampf was now under way. Spain looked set to become another nation in which a democratically elected government was to be replaced by a dictator, now that the Spanish Civil War had swung decisively to the Fascists. By the summer of 1938, the greatest threat to world peace did not come from Moscow but from right-wing dictators. As the News Chronicle put it, ‘sooner or later the democracies will have to stand’.1

  Earlier that year an MI5 source inside the German embassy in London, the aristocratic diplomat Wolfgang zu Putlitz, reported that German espionage operations against Britain had begun. The days of cooperation between German and British intelligence were a distant memory. MI5 needed to infiltrate pro-Nazi organisations in the capital, and do so fast.

  M’s response was to take on two new agents, both of whom were unlike any others he had recruited: they were German. Their job was to penetrate the German expatriate community in London and try to win over Nazis and Nazi sympathisers. The trouble was, one of M’s new agents was gay and had refused to join the Hitler Youth. The other was a passionate opponent of Nazism who had recently married a Jew. But if M could teach British Fascists to pass themselves off as Communists, perhaps he could get these two to disguise themselves as devout Nazis.

  One was Harold Kurtz, codenamed M/H, a twenty-five-year-old German later given the nickname ‘The Porpoise’ on account of the way he liked to leave the bathroom soaked in water after his ablutions each morning. Kurtz would go on to write distinguished biographies of the Empress Eugenie and Marshal Ney. He was bad with money, smoked as if it was good for him and was fond of drink. He was also a pronounced Anglophile desperate for British citizenship, which is what M promised when taking him on.

  The same was broadly true of M’s other new agent, Friedl Gaertner, a stunning divorcée who had recently arrived in London after her sister’s marriage to Ian Menzies, brother of the senior MI6 officer and future ‘C’, Stewart Menzies. Friedl Gaertner’s sister had met Ian Menzies after he saw her perform at the London Casino. At the time she had been wearing nothing but a diaphanous pink body stocking. When Stewart Menzies met Friedl, he tried to recruit her as an MI6 agent, asking her to go back to Nazi Germany on his behalf, but she refused.

  ‘Though willing to work,’ explained Stewart Menzies, ‘her whole heart is set on living over here.’2 So he suggested that she work for MI5 instead and put her in touch with M.

  After their first meeting, M described Friedl Gaertner as ‘an extremely level-headed and intelligent person’ whose ‘one aim and object in life is to secure a permit to work in this country and to remain here’, adding that ‘there is no doubt whatever about her very considerable personal attractiveness’.3

  This gave M an idea. He suggested that she should pose, in every sense of the word, ‘as a sort of super high-class mannequin’, that is, model, who was new to London and who wanted to help the Nazi cause.4 After taking the weekend to think about it, Friedl Gaertner agreed to work for MI5. But she drew the line at pretending to be a model. Instead, M, or ‘Michael’, as she called him, found her a job as a secretary for Dennis Wheatley, his novelist friend. Once he was happy with her cover, a version of the one he had first given Olga, M the spymaster launched her and Kurtz at the German community in London.

  M wanted to take on many more agents, but he did not have the resources. He later bemoaned his ‘financial starvation’ at this time and the government’s failure to take ‘a more courageous attitude’.5 Because of a lack of funds, it seems, he also lost the exclusive services of E. G. Mandeville-Roe, or M/R, by then a trusted figure in several extremist right-wing groups with close ties to Nazi Germany. Instead, Mandeville-Roe began to combine his work for MI5 with espionage for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which was quite a turnaround for a man who had recently railed in print against ‘the Ghetto descendants of Throgmorton Street’.6

  M was stretching himself perilously thin and was now running far too many agents. He later warned that ‘no officer can efficiently look after more than eight agents’, adding that ‘six is probably a better number’.7 By the summer of 1938, M had over a dozen in play. This was hazardous, both from their point of view and from his.

  ‘I shall always endeavour to be available,’8 M wrote to one agent, adding elsewhere that an MI5 officer must ‘be at the beck-and-call of the agent – not the agent at the beck-and-call of the officer’.9 The danger attached to this, one rarely acknowledged, was that M might lose sight of himself.

  ‘The officer will have to be continually adapting himself to agents who vary very much in character and personality,’ M later warned, when describing his craft.10 ‘This is one of the most important items in regard to the handling of agents, for while the officer must always adapt himself to the agent, and not the agent to the officer, the latter must be constantly on his guard in order to see that he does not become that terrible creature, one who is “all things to all men”.’

  This is a curious line, one that stands out from M’s other writings on espionage. He had been running his stable of agents for most of the last fourteen years, almost without pause. The need to mould himself to so many different personalities during that period must have left him in danger of losing touch with himself, or knowing exactly what he believed in.

  On top of all this came the mounting threat of war, which had escalated suddenly over the summer. By early September 1938 the Munich Crisis, as it was later known, began to approach its nerve-racking crescendo. Hitler continued to call for the partition of Czechoslovakia and the transfer of the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, refusing all talk of compromise.

  M section was understaffed and overworked. The movement M had once belonged to had become the greatest threat to world peace. War seemed to be imminent. In London there were rushed marriages. Trenches were dug in parks to serve as makeshift air raid shelters. Children were evacuated from the capital, air raid wardens were recruited and millions of gas masks were distributed as the crisis intensified. Almost twenty years after the end of the last war, Britain appeared to be just days away from another bloody conflict against Germany.

  At the height of this crisis, M produced a stark reassessment of his old friend William Joyce. One of M’s informants, probably John Hirst, another comrade from his days in the British Fascists, no longer felt that ‘Joyce’s loyalty can be relied upon.11 He [Hirst] thinks that Joyce has been keeping in constant touch with the NSDAP [Nazi Party] over the last week or so.’ M’s agent had even heard Joyce declare that ‘if there is war with Germany I will be shot rather than take any part in it on behalf of Britain’. At this point, tears had run down Joyce’s cheeks, rolling over his scar, before he went on shakily, ‘but I am convinced that we shall one day see Germany the master of Europe’.12

  ‘Joyce’s personality, which is always highly emotional, has become more hysterical during recent weeks,’ added M, who had finally accepted, it seemed, that his erstwhile brother-in-arms could pose a threat to national security. The following day a warrant was taken out to intercept Joyce’s post. This bore fruit almost at once.

  The day after the Munich Agreement was signed and the Sudetenland was ceded to Germany, MI5 intercepted a suspicious letter addressed to Joyce. It came from Ernst Bauer, who was known to MI5 as a Nazi spy.

  The following month Joyce’s business partner, Angus MacNab, went to Belgium and got drunk with a stranger who was, unfortunately for him, an MI6 informant. MacNab revealed that he was on his way to Cologne to meet the same Ernst Bauer. The following mor
ning, displaying all the tradecraft of a goldfish, MacNab asked the MI6 informant if, by any chance, he had mentioned the name ‘Bauer’ last night, because if he had, this had been a mistake. The informant replied that indeed he had.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said MacNab, ‘forget that I ever mentioned such a man or such a name.’13 Understandably, this plea had the opposite effect. A report of this exchange made its way to MI5, and MacNab’s colleague, William Joyce, was added to a list of Britons to be rounded up in the event of a war.

  In the weeks after the Munich Crisis, as a necklace of barrage balloons, or ‘blimps’, was installed around London to force the German bombers higher when they attacked, M looked frantically for more agents to launch at Fascist organisations. He even turned to Vivian Hancock-Nunn. Having already asked Eric Roberts and Jimmy Dickson to do the same, M instructed this gentleman barrister to reinvent himself as a Fascist and in late 1938 Hancock-Nunn duly joined an extreme right-wing organisation called The Link.

  In his new guise as an enthusiastic Fascist, the country squire went off to have lunch with the man who ran The Link, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, previously Director of Naval Intelligence. Domvile encouraged Hancock-Nunn to visit Nazi Germany with The Link, promising him ‘personal introductions to the principal Party leaders’.14 Although the MI5 agent did not take him up on this offer, the following year one of M’s other agents did.

  In July 1939, a new agent codenamed ‘M/T’ made her way to Nazi Germany on a trip organised by The Link. On 2 August, the group went to visit Berchtesgaden, in the Bavarian Alps, to admire from a distance the Kehlsteinhaus, or Eagle’s Nest, where Hitler liked to stay. As they took in the view, their coach was boarded by two uniformed men. They began to shout. To her horror, M’s agent realised that they were yelling out her name.