ALTHOUGH THE MPSB had its functions reduced in 1931 when MI5 became the lead organisation for protecting the security of the state, it still retained its responsibilities for prosecuting cases of espionage within its jurisdiction.
The Communist Party of Great Britain continued attempts to foster discontent in the British armed forces, as it had been doing since its formation in 1920, prompting Parliament to pass the Incitement to Disaffection Act in 1934. The communists also infiltrated the trade unions to incite industrial unrest and many communists travelled to Russia in order to be schooled in these matters. All these activities were monitored by the Branch and the Security Service. Between 1934 and 1938 a secret radio link between an address in Wimbledon and Moscow was monitored by Special Branch, on behalf of the Security Service. This was codenamed ‘Operation Mask’.
The Security Service could only request police action and not order it, and it still lacked powers of arrest and search of its own. Operational decisions remained with senior police officers. With only between twelve and twenty-six officers during the 1930s to carry out its many tasks, the Security Service relied increasingly on the good will of senior police officers for any executive action that was necessary. With the outbreak of IRA violence in mainland Britain at the end of the decade, the resources available to cover all aspects of the security of the state were seriously stretched. Nevertheless, the Branch still contrived to render valuable assistance to the Security Service in its constant probing of communist activities.
In 1939, Sir Vernon Kell, the Director General of MI5, boasted to the French foreign intelligence service, ‘Soviet activity in England is non-existent, in terms of both intelligence and political subversion.’1 He was wrong, but the scale of Russian penetration of the British establishment was certainly not apparent as we now know, with the benefit of hindsight. This was partly due to the Security Service’s inability to cope with their task, given the resources available to them. Churchill regarded them as inefficient and by the end of the decade, when he became Prime Minister, he dismissed an ageing and ailing Kell.
Soviet espionage was organised in three different ways:
(a) through legal residents with diplomatic status in the Russian embassy,
(b) by illegal residents working independently with false identities,
(c) through a secret group within the CPGB.
In fact, far from being non-existent, Soviet activity in this country was considerable, as the following cases will show. And all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, required Special Branch involvement, whether through surveillance, interrogations, arrests or prosecutions.
In 1929, a Foreign Office cipher clerk employed in Geneva, Ernest Holloway Oldham, ran into financial difficulties through heavy drinking and offered his services to the Russians. He was handled by an NKVD agent, Dimitri Bystrolyotov. In 1933 Oldham was sacked by the Foreign Office for drunkenness, and committed suicide. Despite information from two Soviet defectors in 1929 and 1930, his betrayal was not fully appreciated by the authorities, who believed he was leaking information to the French, rather than the Russians. Before his death he put his Russian handler in touch with another cipher clerk, Raymond Oake, who introduced him to his colleague, Captain John Herbert King, who was to assume an important role in Soviet espionage activity here.
In 1930, a series of articles in the Daily Mail by Sava Popovitch, a Serbian living in London, revealed that he had been approached by a Soviet agent, using the name Staal, to obtain British military secrets. Staal was identified as Ludwik Poretsky, alias Ignace Reiss, operating from Amsterdam, who became a Soviet illegal resident in Paris. Popovitch was interviewed by MI5, but nothing came of it at the time, although Poretsky was later to become the handler, together with Walter Krivitsky, of Henri Pieck, both of whom were to play prominent roles in the complex case narrated in the following pages.2
Throughout the 1930s, Special Branch was the public face of the Security Service and initially dealt with any approach from the public. As a result of one such approach, DI Kitchener was given information, in 1937, by one Conrad Parlanti. Parlanti was a young businessman who lived in Herne Bay and commuted to London, where he worked for a firm of shop-fitters. One day Raymond Oake, who had recently returned to this country from abroad to work at the Foreign Office, and was a fellow commuter, introduced Parlanti to a Dutchman. As the relationship developed, the Dutchman, Henri Christian Pieck, who described himself as a surveyor and artist, suggested they set up together in the shop-fitting business; he generously offered to provide all the capital for the proposed venture.
Parlanti accepted the offer and they acquired a suite of offices near Victoria Station at 34a Buckingham Gate, SW1. Pieck left the day-to-day running of the business to Parlanti, as he apparently had other business interests, but he retained one of the rooms in their premises for his exclusive use and always kept it locked. Although Pieck usually lodged in Herne Bay or stayed at the Lancaster Gate Hotel, he had a permanent home at 3 Emma Park in The Hague and occasionally returned there for short visits. Parlanti became curious about the contents of the locked room and one day, during Pieck’s absence, had a look inside. He found a Leica camera fixed about three feet over a table arranged for photographing material that was placed under it.
Their friendship developed and Parlanti was invited to his partner’s home in The Hague, where his wife lived. Mrs Pieck seemed overly friendly towards the Englishman and one day when her husband was suddenly called away to do some work in Germany, she attempted to seduce Parlanti; she told him that she and her husband worked for a large organisation and that they were borrowing confidential documents from a man in the code section of the British Foreign Office, which would help their company bring off financial coups. Parlanti was inclined to believe her at first, being unaware of the communist tactic of using ‘honeypot’ methods in order to ensnare people they wished to use. As time went by, Parlanti became suspicious of Pieck’s activities and questioned his partner, who admitted that he was a Soviet agent and that the source of his Foreign Office information was Sir Robert Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary, who had a mistress called Helen Wilkie. Thoroughly alarmed, Parlanti sought other employment, the business was wound up and Pieck returned to Holland.
On reflection, Parlanti decided to inform the police of his misgivings and was seen by Kitchener, who in turn reported the matter to the Security Service. In particular, Parlanti was most suspicious about a meeting he had witnessed between Pieck and a stranger, who had handed the Dutchman some papers. Shortly afterwards Pieck left the hotel, where he had been drinking with Parlanti, ostensibly to return home, but when the latter walked round to their office in Buckingham Gate he noticed that a light was on in the room where Pieck kept his camera. Presented with this narrative, the Security Service decided to take no further action, as Pieck had not previously come under their notice and they could not believe that Sir Robert Vansittart was a spy.3
The story did not end there, however. In the autumn of 1939, the Saturday Evening Post in New York ran a series of articles by a Soviet defector named Walter Krivitsky; they were ghosted by a Russian émigré journalist, Isaac Don Levine. As the head of the Soviet Military Intelligence organisation in Western Europe, Krivitsky had been Pieck’s controller. Krivitsky told Levine about John Herbert King, a Russian spy within the British Foreign Office’s Communications Department, and another unnamed Soviet mole in the Cabinet Office. Levine informed the British ambassador, who passed the information immediately to Sir Robert Vansittart’s replacement at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, on 3 September 1939. King was easily identified but the identity of the Cabinet Office source remained a mystery. The Foreign Secretary instructed Brigadier Jasper Harker, the head of the Security Service’s counter-espionage division, and Colonel Valentine Vivian, the head of SIS counter-intelligence division, to conduct a joint inquiry into Krivitsky’s revelations. Arrangements were made to keep King under surveillance and to monitor his mail and telephone calls.4
From this point on, accounts of the joint investigation are confusing. According to Nigel West, a confession was extracted from King by two MI5 officers after he had been plied with drink and his office burgled to obtain evidence of his guilt.5 Christopher Andrew, however, tells a different story. Both Raymond Oake and John Herbert King were interviewed on 25 September in the Foreign Office by DI William Rogers of Special Branch in the presence of Harker and Vivian. Oake was questioned first and described how he had introduced Pieck to King in the International Club in Geneva, probably in 1934. He denied having passed any official information to him. King was interviewed next and, apparently not realising how little real evidence there was against him, made a number of damaging admissions. He verified that he had first been introduced to Pieck by Raymond Oake in 1933 or 1934 at the International Club in Geneva. He admitted that he had accepted money from Pieck and, having given him information, was then blackmailed. His flat at 9 St Leonard’s Mansions, Smith Street, Chelsea was searched by DI Ernest Tansley and he was arrested by Rogers. In October 1939 he was sentenced at the Central Criminal Court to ten years’ imprisonment.
Two other members of the Foreign Office Communications staff, Helen Wilkie and James Russell, were also suspected and the home of the former, at 218 Hamlet Gardens, Ravenscourt Park, in west London, was searched; it was discovered that she had a safe deposit box at 63 Chancery Lane, in which DI Rogers and DS Evan Jones found £1,300 that Wilkie said she was looking after for Captain King. She had been on holidays in France and Spain with King as the guest of the Piecks (she was not, as Parlanti had been led to believe, the mistress of Vansittart, but of King). She was arrested and charged with offences against the Official Secrets Acts but was discharged when King made a written statement exonerating her. Both Wilkie and James Russell were later sacked for what was euphemistically described by the Foreign Office as ‘irregularities’.
The notes found in Wilkie’s safe deposit box were traced to a bank account operated by Teodor Maly6 in the name Paul Hardt at the Midland Bank, Russell Square. Some £4,700 had passed through the account between January 1936 and June 1937. Official documents retained by a Major Quarry, another Foreign Office official, were also found in Wilkie’s safe deposit box. The explanation for this was more mundane. Helen Wilkie’s sister, Ellen, had been Major Quarry’s mistress since 1932 and he had retained the documents that dated from his service in Germany, just after World War One, for sentimental reasons; he had given them to Helen for safe keeping. As a result of the inquiry and King’s conviction, Cadogan recommended to Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, that the whole of the staff of the Foreign Office Communications Department be replaced. This was done.7
After the conviction of King, the spy in the Cabinet Office who had access to the Committee of Imperial Defence had still not been identified. By January 1940, the MI5 case officer was Mrs Jane Archer, née Sissimore, a former barrister, who over the course of the next two months led a team that interviewed Krivitsky in his room at the Langham Hotel in London. In a wide-ranging series of interviews, Krivitsky disclosed information concerning some sixty Soviet agents over whom he had exercised some control. Their identities were not all known to him but he was able to provide clues about who they were, such as ‘a Scotsman of very good family working for the Foreign Office who wore a cloak’ and ‘a journalist who was educated at Cambridge University who fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War’. With hindsight they can be identified as Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. Later he provided other information about the Cambridge spy ring.
In 1935, when the Soviet intelligence service was setting up its agents in Britain, MI5 infiltrated a nineteen-year-old girl, Olga Gray, into the Communist Party. Eventually she was enlisted by the party as a courier of funds to India. By 1937 she had developed a relationship with Percy Glading, a communist who had also visited India on party business. At Glading’s request, Gray rented a flat at 82 Holland Road, Kensington, to use as a ‘safe house’ for meetings with his Soviet contacts. Glading provided Olga with the cash for the rent of £100 a year and agreed to pay her £5 a week to do some photographic work for him. Soon Glading introduced her to one of his visitors, who called himself Peters but was in fact Teodor Maly. In August 1937, after Maly had returned to the Soviet Union, a couple calling themselves Mr and Mrs Stephens arrived at the flat and Olga Gray assisted Mrs Stephens in photographing plans that Glading brought there. Gray memorised a reference number on one of the plans and subsequent enquiries by the Security Service disclosed that it related to a gun being developed for the Royal Navy at Woolwich Arsenal. The Security Service decided to let the case run and in September Mr and Mrs Stephens were reported to have left the country for Paris en route to Moscow, travelling on false Canadian passports in the names Wily and Mary Brandes, showing that they were born in Romania.
On 12 January Glading told Gray that he had to photograph a book of about 200 pages at his home in South Harrow over the following weekend. He was seen to enter his home on 15 January 1938 with a parcel and leave the next day with a similar package. He was followed to Charing Cross Station where he met a young man and handed the package to him in the public lavatory. The young man was followed to his home in Plumstead and identified as Charles Munday, who worked in the War Chemists Department at Woolwich Arsenal. On 20 January Glading told Gray that he had information stored all over London waiting to be passed on to his Soviet masters and he asked her to prepare for an urgent photographic job. She believed that another meeting was due to take place between Glading and a Soviet agent at Charing Cross the next day and told Maxwell Knight, her MI5 handler. At this stage Special Branch was informed.
At Charing Cross Station Glading was approached by a man who handed over a parcel to him. DI Tommy Thompson arrested him and the second man was detained by DS Sidney Barnes. Inside the package there were four blueprints marked ‘secret’, but Gray was wrong, the meeting was not with a Soviet agent. The second man was an employee of Woolwich Arsenal called Albert Williams. The photographic session was not to prepare films for a visiting courier to take away but to photograph secret documents removed from Woolwich Arsenal. The Security Service was aware of Glading’s association with George Whomack, who was also employed at the Arsenal where Glading had once worked himself. DS Evan Jones searched Glading’s house and DIs Frank Bridges and Peel searched the home of Williams. A few days later George Whomack and Charles Munday were arrested. All four were charged with offences under the Official Secrets Acts. The police investigation was thorough and scientific examination, including fingerprint evidence, left little doubt about the guilt of the accused. The trial took place in March 1938, at the Central Criminal Court. The Crown offered no evidence against Charles Munday, who had been charged with Glading with obtaining information concerning explosives. The evidence against the other three was overwhelming and they were convicted. Glading was sentenced to six years’ penal servitude, Williams to four years and Whomack to three years’ imprisonment. Press reports at the time described Glading as an important member of the Communist International and disclosed information concerning his activities in India. It was also revealed that during 1932 he had been concerned with the production and distribution of the seditious newspaper the Soldiers’ Voice, and in 1933 with the establishment of communist cells in factories in east London.
Although the prosecution of Glading was considered to be a textbook operation, it was one that failed to uncover the principal Soviet agents and to stop secret drawings being removed from the country. A much more serious failure, as it turned out, was that in examining Glading’s documents, the investigators failed to discover the significance of an entry in his notebook regarding Melita Norwood, née Sernis, who was later discovered to have been one of the Russians’ most productive atomic spies.
1 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p. 185
2 TNA KV3/232
3 Kitchener, The Memoirs of an Old Detective, Chapter 12
4 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, pp. 263–8
5 Nigel West, MI5: British Security Service Operations, 1909–45 (London: The Bodley Head, 1981), p. 73
6 In 1936, Maly, an NKVD illegal, was posted to London to take over the running of King from Pieck
7 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p. 264