There were various qualities that M hoped to find in Olga Gray. First, he had to be sure that her outlook was unimpeachably anti-Communist. Olga had been spotted at a Conservative garden party and came from a family with a diligently patriotic and right-wing outlook, so there seemed to be no problem there. It was also important that Olga was an experienced secretary. As she explained during their interview, she had spent more than five years as a commercial typist.
Next came the question of trust. Could M trust Olga, and might she trust him back? ‘The agent must trust the officer as much as – if not more than – the officer trusts the agent,’ he wrote.1 Much like a meeting between a potential bride and groom before an arranged marriage, he had to decide right away whether they were compatible. During their first interview, he asked about her ‘home surroundings’ as well as her ‘family, hobbies, personal likes and dislikes’.
They seemed to be a good match. She could also see a joke, which helped. ‘A vivid imagination and a schoolboyish sense of humour’ were, wrote Eric Roberts, vital attributes in any undercover agent.2 Another question in M’s mind as he got to know Olga Gray was whether this young woman was, at heart, a watcher.
David Cornwell, better known as the author John Le Carré, worked for several years under M and would use him as the model for Jack Brotherhood in A Perfect Spy. Le Carré also drew a series of cartoons to illustrate two of M’s books (Talking Birds and Animals and Ourselves), which is to say that he knew M pretty well. In Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there is a memorable exchange between the spy-turned-schoolmaster Jim Prideaux and his podgy, picked-upon pupil Bill Roach, in which Prideaux calls Roach the ‘best watcher in the unit’.3
Le Carré’s erstwhile spymaster was always on the lookout for the best watcher in the unit. Indeed, Prideaux and M were both officer-ish prep-school games teachers at one point in their careers, and it is possible that this remark belonged originally to the MI5 man. Either way, M was good at spotting a watcher – the diffident outsider who had never really excelled at games and who was used to sitting it out on the sidelines, waiting and watching, because this is what espionage boils down to: patient observation. The word itself comes from the French espionner, meaning to watch or observe, and before that specere, to look out for. Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond books, James Schlesinger, at one time the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Andrew Parker, who became MI5 Director General in 2013, all described themselves as keen bird-watchers. Indeed, Fleming named his most famous literary creation after a little-known American ornithologist called James Bond. The real Bond, the circumspect birder, was undoubtedly closer to M’s ideal of an agent than his fictional namesake. Strip away the mythology, the tradecraft, the gadgets and the romance, and spying is watching.
During the course of their interview, M decided that Olga might well be a watcher. She may have had another quality that drew him in. M prided himself on being able to chart the contours of anyone’s personality during a long conversation like this one, and although it is unlikely that Olga opened up at this early stage about her childhood abuse at the hands of her father, M would have noticed that when she spoke about her family, and in particular her father, something was not right. For a different type of spymaster this might have set alarm bells ringing; for M it probably had the opposite effect.
This MI5 officer would later write twenty-nine books about natural history and looking after animals, and though a lot of this material is dry and factual, there are occasional glimpses of his past, or material which sheds light on the way he recruited and ran his agents, his ‘tradecraft’, to use Le Carré’s well-judged term. From the hundreds of thousands of words written by M about pets it becomes clear that he had a preference for taking on a particular type of animal.
‘There are few more pleasant experiences,’ he once wrote, ‘than the successful rearing of some young wild creature – particularly if it has come into one’s possession through being orphaned, or through being the victim of an accident.’4 ‘I have hand-reared many British birds,’ he explained elsewhere, ‘but all of these were birds which had been found exhausted, wounded or deserted, or have been birds that I rescued from some predator.’5 Other places he described an interest in rearing ‘deserted or stray young birds’,6 ‘fledglings fallen from their homes, or found slightly injured’.7 In another book, he wrote, ‘I have reared many injured and deserted birds by hand.’8 In an identical sense, when recruiting new agents M was always drawn to people like Olga who were in some way injured by their past. Perhaps he thought they would attract less suspicion, or that they were more biddable. It is also possible that deep down, in ways that he may not have understood about himself, he wanted to fix them.
What did Olga make of M? She found this MI5 spymaster ‘charming’ and endearingly unconventional. One secretary remembered him ‘crawling on hands and knees in pursuit of some unlikely insect or animal’,9 or grabbing a pair of drumsticks mid-conversation, with a jazz record playing in the background, and ‘beating out a tune on the marble mantelpiece’.10 He was attractively tall and athletic-looking. There was nothing slight about him. He was big without being large – long nose, flappy ears and chunky shoulders – and although he was not classically good-looking, M had presence. Olga called him ‘avuncular’, a word which jars, given he was only six years older than her, yet already there was a powerful certainty to this man, one that was set off nicely by a hint of lawlessness. There was also his voice.
Much of M’s charisma, and the impact he had on people, can be traced back to the way he spoke. As a boy, he had been fascinated by the effect of his voice on animals. He learned that a gentle, firm and reassuring tone could put almost any creature at ease. He encouraged pet owners to utter ‘soothing words’ to their animals while feeding them,11 and that ‘the tone of the human voice influences animals to a considerable extent’.12 One woman described M’s delivery as ‘hypnotic’.13 M claimed to be able to make a parrot ‘dance, whistle and shout just by stimulating it with my voice; I can also quieten it and make it responsive in an affectionate manner by speaking to it softly.’14 His speech had an irresistibly rich and mellifluous timbre, and he knew it. But if Olga had fallen for M and the way he spoke, she did not admit to this.
‘I didn’t have any sexual feeling for him,’15 she protested, ‘largely because I didn’t see how he could possibly be attracted to me. It just seemed impossible because at the time I felt totally unfeminine.’
Of course that might change as they got to know each other, as they now would. M decided either during or after that first interview that he wanted to recruit Olga as an MI5 agent.
He made her an offer, which she accepted. Olga Gray was then told to make her way to London for training.