M

by Henry Hemming

  When Mrs Mackie told Anna Wolkoff that she had taken a job in Military Censorship, the fashion designer’s response was characteristically spiky. She told Mackie that she could easily get uncensored messages out of the country using her many diplomatic contacts. Wolkoff added that she was planning to get a job in the Ministry of Information’s Censorship Department and that an old family friend might pull a few strings for her.

  That friend was Admiral Sir Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, the ex-Conservative politician who had set up the Economic League – the organisation that had employed K during the 1924 General Election. Admiral Hall was a prominent figure from M’s past and a man he would ordinarily trust. Hall had got to know Anna’s father when he had been the Russian naval attaché. Since then he had supported her application for British naturalisation, describing the Wolkoff clan as ‘a fine example to others’.5 M was about to reach a rather different conclusion.

  By the time M’s agent had been introduced to Anna Wolkoff, M appears to have undergone a profound change. His wife, Lois, had moved away from the capital and for the first time in his adult life he appears to have been without his collection of animals. In anticipation of London being flattened by the Luftwaffe, an estimated 400,000 animals had been put down during the first few weeks of the war, most of them cats. Outside veterinary hospitals one would see piles of animal corpses covered by tarpaulins. Although M never wrote about the fate of his pets during the early stages of the war, by the end of September 1939 he and Lois were no longer living in the flat on Sloane Street. Some of his pets would have been taken in by his long-serving daily, Mrs Leather, while others were no doubt passed on to friends, but the rest were probably put down.

  This left M in a cold and unfamiliar world, and he must have felt strangely cut off from his past. At about the same time, he experienced a political and moral shift in his outlook. Perhaps the change came over him suddenly. One secretary described him wandering around with one of his black cigarettes in his mouth, being ‘suddenly immobilised by a plan of action which came into his head’ and ‘standing with a pair of drumsticks in his hand while he worked out the details’.6 Or else it crept up on him in the wake of Joyce’s departure and the outbreak of war. Either way, in October 1939, he told a British Fascist that ‘there was little difference between Communism and present day National Socialism’.7

  This may not sound like much, but to a man who had long seen international Communism as the great existential threat to his country, and whose former comrades now identified themselves with National Socialism, this was a huge departure. M had come to see the war as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship. In principle, this MI5 spymaster had resolved to turn against his Fascist past. Now he had to decide how far he was willing to go.

  35

  THE MYSTIC

  During the first few months of 1940, M launched a fresh assault on the Fascist movement. He took on four new officers and at least six new agents. All were directed against right-wing targets. The scale and intensity of this harked back to his days working for the Makgill Organisation when he had dispatched Fascist agents into the Communist Party. Now he was facing the other way, the stakes were higher and he had less time. The Phoney War, or Sitzkrieg, in which there was no major offensive in Western Europe, was unlikely to go on much longer. M’s challenge was to get inside Britain’s Fifth Column of Nazi sympathisers as quickly as possible. First, he had to find it.

  M did not have time to recruit new agents who could patiently work their way up within extremist right-wing groups. He had little choice but to approach current and former Fascists and persuade them to work for MI5. This required all his considerable tradecraft: his charm, his wit, his understanding of human frailty and his ability to lie.

  Needing better intelligence on Neil Francis-Hawkins, a senior figure in the British Union of Fascists, M approached this man’s brother-in-law, Arnold Bristol, and told him that Francis-Hawkins was actually a Communist agent. Bristol was shocked, and agreed to report to M.

  Francis-Hawkins later described the idea that he was working for Moscow as ‘ludicrous,’ which it was.1 It was a simple trick, and not one that M would have been proud of. But his country was running out of time and so was he.

  Other new additions to M Section included ‘M/B’, ‘M/D’ and ‘M/M’ – all well-connected in Fascist circles, all unidentified to this day – and ‘M/A’, who was probably a right-wing taxi driver from Brighton. Another of M’s new recruits was ‘M/I’, a Belgian called Hélène de Munck, who had spent most of the last few years working for Henry and Mary Hope, later Lord and Lady Rankeillour, as a nanny. By the start of 1940, this twenty-five-year-old was no longer working for the Hopes and had described herself soon after the start of the war as a ‘mannequin’, that is, a model. But she appears to have been out of work. She also wanted British citizenship, which was what M promised when he took her on.

  The other woman working for M who had once been described as a mannequin was Friedl Gaertner, whose looks had helped her win over key Nazis in London. Hélène de Munck had model looks, but she would not be using them to tease secrets out of middle-aged German men. Instead, M wanted her to penetrate the mostly female gang of Right Club members that had formed around Anna Wolkoff. Her entrée to this group was that she had once met Anna’s father.

  M’s instructions to Hélène de Munck were to visit the Russian Tea Rooms, the café in South Kensington run by the Wolkoff family, and there to renew her friendship with Admiral Wolkoff. Typical clientele at the café included ‘several aristocratic Russian speaking ladies’, noted M, probably from first-hand experience, ‘a couple of French-talking individuals’ and ‘a few elderly Englishmen [were] regular customers, since they had their reserves of bottles put in front of them’.2 Above an open fireplace was a portrait of the deposed Tsar Nicholas II. Downstairs in the kitchen was a cook who had been working in the Russian embassy in 1917 at the time of the revolution and had been kept on by the Soviets before Admiral Wolkoff managed to poach him. It was the old man’s solitary revenge on the Soviet Union.

  This cook made excellent Russian pastries, or pirozhki, and was famous for his tyanuchki, a potent blend of milk, cream and sugar. The caviar was also very good, as customers at the Russian Tea Rooms were told by the charismatic maitre d’hôtel, Admiral Wolkoff himself, who was no doubt pleased to see Hélène de Munck when she came to visit unexpectedly in February 1940.

  ‘I noticed that there was a group of people who met there very often,’ reported de Munck, after several further visits.3 ‘They generally sat together at the same table and talked in low voices. The group consisted mainly of women, but occasionally there was a man or two.’ This was Anna Wolkoff and her clique. Hélène de Munck was unable to find a way in.

  The MI5 officer that de Munck passed this on to was not M but one of his new additions to M Section, the Hon. John Bingham, later the seventh Earl of Clanmorris.4 Bingham was an impoverished Irish aristocrat who would later become the physical model for George Smiley in the Le Carré novels. He was soon known to everyone in M Section as ‘the Hon. John’: although he was a married father of one, Bingham had a reputation as a Don Juan. Hélène de Munck was probably the first agent he had been told to run and without doubt the most attractive.

  M would always urge each of his officers to ‘set himself the task of getting to know his agent most thoroughly’,5 and that it was ‘a thing much to be desired’ for the officer to become a ‘firm personal friend’ of the agent.6 Yet he did not recommend they start sleeping together.

  Very soon after they began to work together, Bingham and de Munck were ‘in the throes of a reckless affair’.7 It was M’s responsibility to stop this kind of thing, but the subject of sex seemed to scramble his radar. ‘It is difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than for an officer to become landed with a woman-agent who suffers from an overdose of Sex,’ he once wrote, a sentiment that may not have been shared by Bingham.8 ‘But as it is to be hoped that no
such person would be chosen for the work, there is no need to go further into this point.’ The danger was that this affair would end, and with it de Munck’s desire to work for MI5. M must have realised this, yet he did nothing.

  Meanwhile, Mrs Mackie had come under suspicion. Shortly after de Munck had begun to frequent the Russian Tea Rooms, Mackie endured what she called ‘practically three hours of third degree’ from Captain Ramsay and his wife, who wanted to know just how extreme her political views actually were.9 To pass this test she must have released a torrent of anti-Semitic bilge.

  It worked, and over the next few weeks Mrs Mackie became an even more trusted member of the Right Club. She even acquired a nickname: ‘the little Storm Trooper’.10 To anyone else in the country this was an insult. In the Right Club it was high praise. Rather than make herself invisible, as M’s agents usually did, the talkative Mrs Mackie began to dominate the group around Wolkoff. ‘Anna Wolkoff used to tell her mysterious information she had got,’ recalled one of her friends, ‘and Mrs Mackie used also to give her a bit of mysterious information back, and it used to sound like a competition.’11 This was perfect for the MI5 agent, and no doubt she encouraged it. Wolkoff’s characteristic desire to outdo the little Storm Trooper made her more inclined to brag, which provided Mackie with more intelligence to pass on to M. The problem was that not all of it was necessarily true.

  Although Mrs Mackie was by now an accepted member of this right-wing gang, she was excluded from some conversations. In February 1940, Mackie was within earshot of Wolkoff when a friend addressed her in French, ‘as it was considered that those standing near would not understand’.12 Wolkoff’s friend had taken one look at Mackie and presumed that this working-class mother from Essex would not speak French. Mackie later reported, with some satisfaction, that she had been able to understand the conversation perfectly and that Wolkoff had been asked, in French, for ‘information about Sir Vernon Kell’.

  The fact that Anna Wolkoff knew the name of the Director of MI5 was impressive, yet the idea that she was personally acquainted with Kell was remarkable. ‘Anna Wolkoff claims to have met some members of Sir Vernon’s family,’ Mackie went on, ‘and she is to endeavour to renew the acquaintance.’13

  It is not often that an individual under investigation by MI5 applies for a job at MI5. But this is more or less what happened on 22 February, 1940, when Anna Wolkoff wrote to Kell, reminding him of a dinner thrown by Mark Pepys, the Earl of Cottenham, now an MI5 officer, at which they had met. Apparently, Wolkoff and Kell had had much in common, especially when ‘a certain subject’ came up.14 This was probably Communism and the threat of the Soviet Union. The rest of the letter was taken up by Wolkoff explaining to Kell that she was now unemployed, living at home and looking for a job. The implication was clear.

  The previous day, M had received a report on Anna Wolkoff that changed the way she was seen, and underlined why she must not under any circumstance be offered a job in the Office. Until then, MI5 had seen her as a propagandist. Now, it seemed that she was involved in espionage.

  ‘Wolkoff is in contact with the Belgian Embassy,’ reported Mrs Mackie, who had been told that the Second Secretary of the Belgian Embassy, Jean Nieuwenhuys, had agreed to send Wolkoff’s messages to Berlin.15 He would use the Belgian diplomatic pouch to get these letters to a Monsieur Price, a friend of Wolkoff in Brussels, who was to forward them on to Nazi Germany. Theoretically, this gave the Right Club a means of communicating with the Nazis in Berlin.

  That was not all. Mackie had also discovered the name of the club’s contact in the German capital. To say that this figure was well known to M would be the understatement of his career. Wolkoff wanted to get letters out to William Joyce.

  First M had to find out whether this system actually worked. Were Wolkoff and the other members of the Right Club really in touch with Berlin? M remembered that one of the other women in Wolkoff’s cabal had earlier given Mackie a letter addressed to Monsieur Price in Brussels and asked her to use her position in Military Censorship to get this to Belgium uncensored. This gave M an idea.

  He made arrangements for the letter to be sent. ‘If by any chance a reply is received (in God’s good time),’ he wrote, ‘we shall at least know that the system works.’16

  Before he could find out whether it did, John Bingham had good news. His agent – and mistress – had been approached by Anna Wolkoff and introduced to her group. Now it was time for Hélène de Munck to use her special powers.

  M always urged his agents to make judgements about ‘the character and temperament’ of their subjects and to observe their ‘personal characteristics, strength and frailties’.17 With this in mind, Mrs Mackie had noticed earlier that ‘Wolkoff, like many Russians, was extremely superstitious,’ wrote M, after reading a report from Mackie.18 ‘She was interested in spiritualism, clairvoyance, astrology, and in fact anything to do with the Occult.’ So was Mackie, who would later throw drinks parties, or soirées, as she liked to call them, which ended with a séance. Indeed, many of M’s female agents had an interest in spiritualism. Mona Maund bequeathed her estate to a spiritualist association. Another of his agents, Joan Miller, wrote about consulting clairvoyants. Yet Hélène de Munck was the only one with a skill that could be made to sound like evidence of some kind of hidden spiritual prowess.

  The Belgian nanny possessed ‘to a remarkable degree the ability to read characters from hand-writing,’ explained M – what we would call graphology.19 Now he planned to harness these powers to the British war effort.20 De Munck was instructed to tell Wolkoff all about ‘the Occult, and gradually to introduce her own interest in character-reading’. ‘She was told to elevate her ability from the fairly material level of the formation of handwriting into the realms of psychic phenomena.’

  Anna Wolkoff ‘swallowed this bait avidly’. She asked de Munck to read her character based on a sample of her own handwriting. This was ‘a splendid opportunity’ for the MI5 agent ‘to cement her friendship with Wolkoff, for the latter was extremely susceptible to flattery’.

  Hélène de Munck produced a reading of Wolkoff’s character that was ‘suitably edited and embellished’ by Bingham and M. Wolkoff was so impressed by de Munck’s – and Bingham’s and M’s – gushing portrait of herself that she asked for readings of her friends’ handwriting.21 This was an excellent opening for M. ‘It was possible for us to increase Anna’s confidence in some of her colleagues,’ he wrote, ‘and to decrease it in respect of others, according to the way in which we wished to direct her feelings.’

  The idea of directing her feelings is striking. Counterespionage is supposed to be centred on observation, not manipulation. The investigation of Anna Wolkoff had already reached the point when M might be able to steer his target in a particular direction, or even engineer a situation in which she was likely to incriminate herself.

  Hélène de Munck’s hold on Wolkoff also allowed M to remove any suspicion Wolkoff may have had about Mrs Mackie. When the Belgian nanny was given a sample of Mackie’s handwriting, she gave it a glowing write-up. This was just one of the ways in which having two agents inside the same group was useful. Another was the potential for corroboration in court. The danger, from M’s point of view, was that these two agents might somehow find out about each other.

  For M, a basic principle of agent running had always been that his operatives must be kept in the dark about one another. ‘This is not necessarily due to any personal mistrust or reservations in respect of an agent,’ he explained.22 ‘It is to safeguard all the agents concerned against certain very human temptations, such as the temptation to glance too much at another person,’ he went on, ‘or even at times to exchange a humorous, surreptitious wink.’ ‘The temptation to indulge in them is very real, and very strong,’ he added, sounding like a man writing from personal experience. Again his long history as both spy and spymaster informed his handling of the situation. For as long as it was practicable, M would try to keep Mrs Mackie and Hélène de
Munck unaware of the fact that they were both working for MI5.

  M had successfully penetrated to the heart of the Right Club, thanks to the skilful work of his two new female agents. But he had nothing to show for it. There had been no arrests, nor were any imminent. M had not yet found the fabled Fifth Column.

  Meanwhile, the tension between Britain and Germany was beginning to be ratcheted up. Although there had been no full-scale engagements between these two warring nations, isolated attacks had been reported with casualties on both sides. More worrying was that Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, had recently flown out to Rome to discuss with Mussolini a possible military alliance.

  36

  A SMOKESCREEN

  In spite of Britain being at war with Nazi Germany, the membership of the British Union of Fascists actually grew during the first few months of 1940. Many of these new recruits were men and women who wanted Britain to join the Fascist bloc rather than fight against it. ‘No war was being conducted by Germany against this country,’ argued Captain Ramsay, leader of the Right Club.1 Like many others on the Right, he was emboldened by the lack of any major German offensive against Britain and he continued to call for peace. Yet the reports coming in to M suggested that Ramsay and his ilk were after much more than an end to hostilities.