M

by Henry Hemming

  Even as the scale of the threat to British security was reduced, the size of M’s section continued to grow. Four officers had been added to his office shortly before the arrests of Kent and Wolkoff, and several months later M took on another five. In the space of just over a year, M Section had gone from one officer – M himself – to twelve. Most of these new recruits had no experience of running agents. M’s response was to take an almost unprecedented step in the history of MI5.

  ‘There was nothing in the way of a regular “course”,’ wrote the new head of MI5 and the first to be called Director General, Sir David Petrie, in 1941. Hitherto training ‘was acquired in the school of experience’.2 ‘The only thing to do,’ echoed Liddell, ‘is to start in at the bottom rung.’3 During the summer of 1940, M broke with MI5 tradition by giving his new officers basic training. ‘I was given permission to conduct a sort of “school” at Wormwood Scrubs,’ he explained.4 ‘I think it can be justly claimed that this little school achieved its object.’

  Preparing this new course also forced Major Knight, as he now was, to set out on paper the rudiments of his tradecraft. Over the years that followed, M would often be asked to regurgitate what he had learned, and this changed the way that future MI5 spymasters were trained. For the first time, his career was starting to be retrospective and some of his principles of agent running began to be enshrined in MI5.

  Having so many officers working in his section also required M to learn the art of running a large office, which did not come easily. One of his blind spots was sex. Guy Liddell later described the atmosphere in M Section as ‘deplorable, both from the sex point of view and organisationally’.5 By this he meant that too many people were having affairs. As well as John Bingham, Jimmy Dickson had a string of relationships with female MI5 staff. Another problem, wrote one secretary, was ‘M’s attitude to paperwork’.6 This ‘was representative of his general disinclination to involve himself in the trappings of bureaucracy’. Liddell also noted a ‘laxity of control in financial matters’.7

  Yet what M lacked in organisation, discipline and financial prudence he made up for with charisma and an absolute mastery of his craft. His record as a spymaster inside MI5 was without equal. Bingham described him as a ‘tremendous leader’, adding that ‘we would follow him anywhere’.8 ‘We adored him for he made serious work great fun – a unique quality.’9 When the bombs began to fall on London in September 1940, Bingham recalled how M ‘clucked round like a mother hen for he regarded us as his family’.10 He also tried to protect his officers from the scrutiny of MI5 Headquarters on St James’s Street. As a result, wrote Nigel West, his unit was ‘held in some awe by personnel based in St James’s Street because of its mystery and the amount of autonomy granted to it’.11

  M Section sounded like an exclusive members’ club, which was pretty much how officer recruitment worked. Sometimes an existing member of M’s staff proposed a new officer, such as Tony Gillson, the playboy and racehorse owner, yet each addition had to be personally approved by M, the one-man membership committee. Other additions were old friends of his like Guy Poston, whom he had known since he was a boy growing up in Mitcham, or Henry Brocklehurst, ‘an explorer of world-wide experience with the most amazing number of personal contacts, which ranged literally from personal friendship with the Royal Family to cockney coffee-house keepers in the East End of London’.12 Other new officers had more in common with the agents that M liked to take on. They were quietly watchful and quick-witted, and often came to see him as a father figure. In many cases they had carried through childhood some kind of handicap. Bill Younger had been crippled by polio, John Bingham was short-sighted and had a squint, Jimmy Dickson had a weak heart. Perhaps this helped to bring them together.

  M’s officers soon had a nickname for themselves. They were ‘Knight’s Black Agents’, after the lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

  Light thickens, and the crow

  Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.

  Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;

  Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

  Thou marvel’st at my words: but hold thee still.

  Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.

  There is a hint in this last line of the swagger of M’s elite unit, and a sense that they might do more or less what they pleased. In one sense they really could. MI5 was not recognised by law, so there were no legal limits to the range of its powers. Although its officers took their unwritten responsibilities seriously and they rarely lost sight of their role to provide other branches of government with reliable intelligence, there were times when corners were cut. Most notably during the panic that had gripped the country in spring 1940. One particular incident from this period would haunt M and two of his agents for the rest of the war.

  Ben Greene was a gentle giant, an enormously tall man who was also a Quaker, a committed pacifist and a cousin of Graham Greene. During the first few months of the war, he had become a prominent campaigner for a negotiated peace with Germany. Ben Greene belonged to the British Council for a Christian Settlement in Europe and had joined the Peace Pledge Union and the British People’s Party. Each of these bodies had attracted well-meaning pacifists like him as well as some much less benign Fascists. Several months into the war, MI5 received a complaint from a magistrate who believed that Ben Greene’s real sympathies lay with Hitler. M was told to investigate. Soon after the Nazi invasion of Norway and Denmark he laid a trap.

  M engineered a situation in which two of his agents, Harold Kurtz and Friedl Gaertner, sat down for dinner with Greene and during the meal asked him to post a letter to Germany, hinting that this would go to a Nazi official. This happened less than three weeks after Anna Wolkoff had taken a similar bait. It had worked in her case because she was anti-war and pro-Hitler. Although Greene was a pacifist to his core, he was not a supporter of Nazism and he refused to take the letter.

  M’s ruse had failed to show that Greene owed any allegiance to Berlin, yet he was one of the first men to be rounded up in May 1940 after the introduction of Defence Regulation 18b(1a). Greene appealed immediately. The case against him was based on reports made by or attributed to Harold Kurtz, and after a year and a half in prison Greene was told that the Home Office had rejected Kurtz’s evidence and he was released.

  Greene’s response was to sue the Home Office for libel and false imprisonment. Although he was unsuccessful, and was ordered to pay costs of £1,243, it was a moral victory. The Greene clan would later exact a further revenge on the MI5 agent at the heart of this scandal when his cousin Graham Greene named a villain in The Third Man ‘Kurtz’.

  Had Harold Kurtz lied? M was always deeply protective of his agents and assured his colleagues that the Home Office’s rejection of Kurtz’s evidence was part of its ongoing assault on MI5. This was a widely held view. Liddell, for one, was convinced that in April 1940 Kurtz had been ‘present at a treasonable conversation with Greene’, and that this gentle giant had been released only because Kurtz’s memory had proved to be hazy on several details.13

  Yet after the war Ben Greene claimed to have been approached by a former MI5 officer who told him that they had forged one of the documents used against him. The same officer suggested that some of his colleagues ‘had become very uneasy at the part they were required to play in the case of some of the detentions,’ wrote Greene, and that this former officer ‘was particularly uneasy about the part he had played in mine’.14

  M once suggested that ‘what is fatal in good detective work is to twist the facts so that they line up with the theory’.15 He also told his agents that ‘if you are going to tell a lie, tell a good one and above all stick to it’.16 For M and his agents to do their job well, they were required to be not only models of truth and integrity when called before a judge, but fraudulent fantasists when out in the field. Perhaps the real surprise here should be that these two competing drives did not overlap more often. In all likelihood, Kurtz had either
embellished Greene’s statements or had made them up entirely, or this was done by an MI5 officer. We will probably never know.

  The Ben Greene case did not reflect well on either M or his agents, yet the effect of this on his career was later exaggerated out of all proportion. Long after M’s death it was claimed that this detention of Greene effectively ended M’s time at MI5. The problem with this theory is that M remained in his job for almost two decades after this incident, which is a long time to spend treading water. Nor was it true that M was solely responsible for providing the Home Office with evidence against Greene. The case was written up by a different MI5 officer, S. H. Noakes. When representatives of MI5 were asked to appear before the Home Office Advisory Committee, it was both M and Noakes who came to see them. The meeting that followed was written up by Noakes, and Noakes rather than M was contacted by the Home Office when they decided to release Greene.

  Nor are there any clear indications that M’s superiors in MI5 turned against him on account of this case. Shortly before the conclusion of Greene’s libel action, M was even made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1943 King’s Birthday Honours. More recently, a retired senior MI5 officer has described the Ben Greene incident as obviously ‘a low point’ in M’s career, ‘but not the only mistake made over internments or post-war purges’ and probably not one that ‘had a long-term impact on his reputation’.17

  Other investigations involving M’s officers and his stable of agents were more successful. In late 1941, Irma Stapleton, a worker in a munitions factory in Staffordshire, was approached by an undercover Abwehr officer asking her to smuggle a twenty-two-millimetre Oerlikon shell out of the factory. She did so, and handed it over to the man she presumed to be a German spy. Instead, he was one of M’s officers, John Bingham, doing his best German accent. Stapleton was sentenced to ten years in jail.

  After an official in the Portuguese embassy, Rogerio Menezes, was identified by intercepted German radio communications as a Nazi spy, M gave Bingham the job of posing as a Nazi officer again and winning his trust. The Hon. John did so with great skill. Soon there was enough evidence to secure the young diplomat’s conviction. Although Menezes was sentenced to death as an enemy agent, this was later commuted to penal servitude for life.

  There was also the case of Norah Briscoe and Molly Hiscox, the latter a founding member of the extreme right-wing group The Link, who had come to MI5’s attention after she wrote to Hitler to let him know that ‘I have unlimited trust in you.’18 Briscoe was a typist in the Production Executive of the War Cabinet. She told several friends, in 1941, that she had access to important documents and wanted to send some to Germany. One of the people present when she suggested this was an M agent, John Hirst. He encouraged her to go ahead with the plan and put her in contact with Harold Kurtz, who had been told by M to play the part of a German agent.

  Kurtz performed his role with restraint and composure. To avoid any possible accusation of exaggeration, M bugged the room in which Kurtz was to meet the putative spies. Briscoe produced a pile of documents for him to pass on to Berlin. The arrest was made. Briscoe and Hiscox were both sentenced to five years in jail.

  The rest of M’s wartime work resembled a succession of opening chapters. Very few cases kept him and his section occupied for more than a few months, and they usually resulted in an arrest, were taken over by the police or the initial lead proved to be inaccurate. M did some work for Special Operations Executive (SOE) on its internal security. He continued to run agents inside the Communist Party and other left-wing groups. He also interviewed Fascists who had been detained, in the hope of learning more about hidden right-wing networks within Britain. This produced an important cache of intelligence. The only danger here was that some of these detained Fascists might recognise him. They were certainly intrigued as to how this officer knew so much about British Fascism. In Brixton prison, M’s interrogations ‘were the favourite topic of conversation’ among the Fascists, as was M’s real identity.19 The men who knew him by sight were kept away from the others for this reason. Otherwise he made a point of interviewing some men in civilian dress and others in full military get-up. According to one historian, M’s ‘ruses were remarkably effective, and his identity never became known to the men at Brixton’. Having struggled in the past to make himself anonymous, it seems that M had at last become a master dissembler.

  M’s section also did important work on security for the D-Day landings. Most of this involved breaking in to factories that were producing specialist material for the invasion, on the principle that if one of M’s men could get in, so could an enemy agent. Burglary and illegal entry remained this spymaster’s signature dish. On most occasions his men were able to slip into these plants undetected, after which the factory manager, usually indignant about the idea of MI5 breaking into his plant, was told to have security tightened up.

  As the war progressed, M and his staff also began to spend more time in an MI5 safe house in Camberley, Surrey, not far from London, which allowed him to build up his collection of pets again. Soon there was a Himalayan monkey sleeping in the conservatory of this safe house and elsewhere a dim-witted Great Dane called Gloria, several white ferrets, Mr Socks the Pekinese dog, a ginger cat and a host of other creatures, many of them handed on to M by people who no longer knew what to do with them or, in the case of a springer spaniel called Ben, because their owner had been killed on active duty. It is easy to imagine the equilibrium returning to M’s life as his home filled up once more with animals.

  On 8 May, 1945, the German Instrument of Surrender was signed in Berlin. The war in Europe was over. European Fascism had been defeated. In the days that followed, M recalled listening to one of his favourite jazz recordings: the trombonist Jack Teagarden playing ‘Junk Man’, a sunny, carefree number that might have been written with that moment in mind. Yet this phase of his life still had a few more months to run.

  ‘That boy will either do something very great in the world, or he will finish on the end of a rope’ had been the canny judgement on William Joyce from one of his schoolteachers.20

  The man known to most Britons as Lord Haw-Haw had been arrested in Germany soon after Victory in Europe (VE) Day and then flown back to Britain to face trial on three counts of high treason. In September 1945, Mr Justice Tucker, who had presided over the Kent-Wolkoff trials, heard arguments centred on Joyce’s nationality and whether he owed loyalty to the British Crown when he began to broadcast from Berlin. After a legal debate of byzantine complexity, it was established that although Joyce was now a German citizen, when he had started to broadcast from Germany as Lord Haw-Haw he had been an American citizen, having been born in New York, who was living in Germany under British protection. This peculiar status snaked back to 1933 and his fateful decision to lie about his nationality to get a British passport. As such, he had owed allegiance to Britain when making the first of his broadcasts as Lord Haw-Haw.

  Joyce had come of age in an era when ideology and friendship seemed to trump nationality. British law, however, was rooted in an older tradition. His technical allegiance outweighed his ideological preference, and Joyce was found guilty on one count of high treason. This carried a mandatory capital sentence.

  On the morning of 3 January, 1946, a small crowd gathered outside Wandsworth Prison. Shortly after nine o’clock a notice was pinned to the door. William Joyce had been hanged.

  It is tempting to wonder whether M paid one final visit to Joyce in the days leading up to his death, and to speculate on what might have been said, but it is unlikely that he would have done this. Early on in the war this MI5 spymaster appears to have severed his personal connection to William Joyce and everything he represented. Now the man who symbolised for M not only the potential of the movement he had once joined, but its capacity for betrayal, subversion and treachery, was dead. A chapter in M’s life had closed. His focus could go back to where it had been at the beginning of his career.

  44


  THE COMINTERN IS NOT DEAD

  ‘In dealing with Communism in particular, it should be borne in mind that the Russians are past-masters at the art of long-term policy,’ wrote M in 1945, prophetically.1 ‘It is not unusual for a Soviet agent to be “planted” in some position in order to carry out work which will probably not fructify for a matter of years.’ ‘The Russians are very patient,’ he was also quoted as saying at around the same time.2 ‘They will recruit a young man at university with Communist views, tell him to dissociate himself from the Party, watch him, and keep him on ice for years. Then one day they will come to him and say: “Now we want you to do this ….”’

  M was correct, and uncannily so. Although most of the Cambridge Spies, such as Kim Philby, were recruited as graduates, their intellectual conversions to Communism took place at university. As M had predicted, each one was told to distance himself from the Party and would only become active later. M was able to guess what his opposite numbers in Moscow Centre might be doing because it was what he would have done himself. He shared his concerns about Soviet sleeper agents with various colleagues, including John Curry, who was then researching the first history of MI5. He even alluded to them in his summary of M Section’s wartime exploits. What he did not record, however, because it was scandalous and he had no proof, was the name of the MI5 officer whom he believed to be a Soviet agent. Which is a shame, really, because he was right.

  M’s suspicions had been aroused four years before the end of the war when one of his agents, Tom Driberg, had been expelled from the Communist Party after being accused of working for MI5. This had been a major operational setback. Driberg was a long-standing Party member and, although he was by no means a senior figure, he had access to many high-profile Communists and was ‘perhaps the best informed of all’ M’s sources on the Left.3 Far more worrying, however, was the nature of Driberg’s dismissal. He had been accused of being ‘M/8’, a term that was only used in MI5 reports.