Every agent remembers the first job. M had instructed Olga Gray to attend a meeting of the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU). This was a bland, left-of-centre organisation with branches all over the world. It raised money for impoverished Russians or else campaigned against the negative media portrayal of the Soviet Union. The FSU attracted political progressives and milk-and-water liberals, all of whom sympathised with the plight of the Russian people and subscribed to some of the basic tenets of Marxism, but few of them went so far as to call themselves Communists.
Unknown to most of these people, the FSU was a Communist ‘front’ organisation secretly under Soviet control. The many branches of the FSU, including the one Olga was about to visit, were referred to as ‘Innocents’ Clubs’ by Willi Munzenberg, a senior figure in the Soviet body quietly pulling the strings in the FSU, as well as many other front organisations. Munzenberg worked for the Communist International, better known as the Comintern. Based in Moscow, the Comintern had been set up by Lenin in 1919 to coordinate the overthrow of global capitalism. Since then its agents had been midwives at the birth of almost every national Communist Party, supplying instructions, expertise and money, before staying on as governesses while each national Party agitated for a worker-led revolution. By 1931, the Comintern was a vast centralised network unparalleled in scale and ambition. Each day a flood of messages, propaganda and money pulsed out of its nerve centre deep in the Soviet Union, while in the opposite direction came intelligence, fresh recruits and a growing sense that momentum was on their side and capitalism would soon crumble. One of the ways the Comintern broadcast its message was through the activities of front organisations such as the FSU. ‘These people have the belief they are actually doing this themselves,’ wrote Munzenberg, of those who joined the FSU, and ‘this belief must be preserved at any price’.1 Olga’s task was to become one of them.
M had instructed her to play the wide-eyed innocent and to present herself at an FSU meeting as ‘an ordinary, interested and sympathetic enquirer’ who wanted to know more about the Soviet Union.2 She was going to ‘trail her coat’, in spy parlance, in the hope that a Party official might befriend her and take her on as his secretary.
Playing the part of a willing ingénue might sound easy. For Olga it was not. She had been brought up to see Communism as a political aberration. Now she had to pretend the opposite, to twist her mind inside out and convince a part of herself that what she had once believed to be wrong was instead right.
It worked, as far as Olga could tell. During the meeting, she got into conversation with various attendees. Nobody accused her of being anything other than what she claimed to be, and by the end of that session she had made several acquaintances. But that was it. She went home empty-handed.
This was Olga’s first taste of life as an MI5 agent. She might have to endure hundreds of meetings like this, forever playing the political naïf, seizing upon ideas and phrases she found absurd as if they were full of genuine possibility, and even then there was no guarantee that she would be taken on.
Yet at a subsequent FSU meeting, ‘very shortly after’ the first, Olga was approached by the Assistant Secretary of the FSU.3 ‘He may have had,’ reported M, an ‘interest’ in Olga, seeing her ‘as a personable young woman’. This was one way of saying he took a fancy to her. He listened carefully to her cover story about the job she had as a secretary for an author with unpredictable hours. This was wish fulfilment on M’s part, as he had always wanted to be a professional writer. It was also designed to be tempting bait. The supposedly ‘unpredictable’ nature of his hours implied gaps in Olga’s schedule that she needed to fill. The FSU man asked whether ‘she had any free time which she could devote to doing voluntary work for the FSU’.4 She replied that she did.
Very soon after, Olga Gray began to work as a part-time and unpaid secretary at the FSU office. M’s first cuckoo egg looked set to hatch.
Her new surroundings turned out to be shambolic, yet this allowed her to demonstrate her considerable abilities as a secretary. She ‘speedily reduced the existing chaos to some semblance of order’.5 Her new colleagues were impressed.
‘Form the habit of taking notes of what you see and hear as soon as possible after an incident or observation,’ wrote M.6 ‘We may have good memories, but they play us false every now and then.’ Olga soon got used to writing down or memorising key details about anything unusual that she observed. She would then produce a written report and post it to M, or else she held the information in her head and either gave him a call or passed it on in person. They might meet in the lobby of a shabby hotel, in the cinema or in one of their homes. M preferred his agents to get their intelligence down on paper right away, but, as he soon discovered, Olga had a phenomenal memory and this was not always necessary for her.
During those first few months of working for the FSU, Olga Gray supplied her spymaster with ‘a considerable amount of information’.7 The main problem, for M, was that none of it had any great intelligence value. The other issue was that Olga’s chances of being offered a more senior position inside the Communist Party had plummeted, for reasons that were out of her control.
‘Efforts are being made to send spies into the Party,’ revealed the Communist-run Daily Worker on 29 March, 1932, very soon after Olga had begun to work at the FSU.8 The wife of a Party member had been approached by a Special Branch detective who had tried to recruit her as an informant. Instead, she had reported him to her comrades.
‘Revolutionary vigilance against spies and provocateurs is an essential part of the working-class fight against war,’ thundered the newspaper where Graham Pollard worked. There had never been a good time to be a government agent inside the British Communist movement, but the weeks after this exposé were especially tough.
M was livid. This botched Special Branch recruitment had caused ‘an acute attack of spy mania, and I have already heard from two sources that instructions are being given to [Communist Party] Locals to tighten up considerably, so as to make it very difficult for any unauthorised persons to obtain details of Party procedure etc.9 Recruits are to be examined more carefully, and the closest investigation is to be made into the reliability of persons offering themselves as members of the CP. It will be readily understood that this sort of thing increases the difficulties of our work most enormously, for it always has the inevitable results of making leading comrades extremely reticent, even to those whom they believe to be quite trustworthy.’
Olga could only bide her time. She continued to pass on to M any titbits she picked up at the FSU, yet by the summer of 1932, after half a year as an MI5 agent, she had not been offered a job as a secretary by a senior Party member. Instead, Olga had reached the point when, as M put it, ‘an agent becomes a piece of the furniture, so to speak: that is, when persons visiting an office do not consciously notice whether the agent is there or not’.10 The only danger was that she had blended in too well and had been all but forgotten.
M/2, M’s other female secretary, was not doing any better. On 9 February, 1932, she made what appears to have been her first report, telling M that Reg Bishop, a prominent Communist, would soon be ‘coming into local activity in S. E. London’.11 This was quickly followed by M/2’s second report, several days later: ‘Bishop is not now going into the S. E. Local.’12
M’s experiment with female agents was not working. Both women were being outperformed by his more experienced male agents, such as Graham Pollard. In June 1932, Pollard reported to M that the same Reg Bishop had set sail for the USSR. Pollard also supplied the date of Bishop’s departure and noted the presence on board this ship of workers from the Government Experimental Aircraft Works at Aldershot. This was precisely the kind of valuable, timely intelligence that neither Olga nor M/2 had been able to provide. As M pointed out, these government employees travelling to the Soviet Union ‘might be pumped for very valuable information while in Russia’.13 He was right. As a result of that trip, two of these men, Frederick Meredith and Wilfred Vernon, who would later become a member of Parliament, were recruited to a Soviet spy ring.
Meanwhile, M’s agent in Liverpool, M/4, continued to send in useful, if unspectacular, details from the Merseyside Local. The Glaswegian gun examiner, M/5, was also getting closer to the action. Although some of his reports revealed little more than the peccadilloes of senior Party figures, in the summer of 1932, to M’s delight, this agent was asked to take part in illegal Party work. Back in London, the Daily Express columnist, M/8, was still feeding his spymaster crumbs from the edges of the Communist movement. The only drawback to using him was his refusal to meet in the lobbies of grungy hotels or in any other out-of-the-way place. M/8 was a more flamboyant character and insisted on expensive lunches at the Overseas Club, the Grosvenor Hotel or Hatchett’s, the scene of M’s ill-advised lunches with Colonel Carter of Special Branch. Although most of M/8’s intelligence was gossipy and low-grade, this agent was important to M. He may not have been a penetration agent like Graham Pollard or Olga Gray, for he had been recruited long ago as a Communist student, but he was an ‘access agent’ whose material from lower down the Communist food chain often made sense of the higher-grade information coming in to M.
These four agents were valuable to the new MI5 spymaster, yet by the summer of 1932 there was another source who was becoming one of the most prized assets in his stable of agents. This was a barrister who belonged to the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court. He was referred to in all MI5 reports as ‘M/7’. He gave free legal advice to Labour Monthly and the Daily Worker, two well-known left-wing publications, which involved checking copy for libellous material and giving advice about future legal actions against the Communist Party. This gave him access to sensitive details about how the Party was being run. M/7’s intelligence was remarkable in terms of how much of it there was, its value and, ultimately, the fact that it was being delivered at all. Arguably M/7’s greatest achievement as an MI5 agent was that he was able to persuade the people he worked for that he was a genuine Communist, given his personal background.
Although the identity of M/7 has remained a secret for many years, it can now be revealed. Later on in his career, as we shall see, M instructed M/7 to have lunch with a political extremist who had come to the attention of MI5. The meal was not a success. M/7 found his target to be ‘very deaf’ and ‘almost childish in what he says’.14 Yet the feeling was mutual, for the man he was spying on later described M/7 as ‘rather an odd fish’.15 We know this because his target kept a diary, which was deposited with the National Maritime Museum long after his death. Elsewhere in this same diary entry M/7 is referred to as ‘Nunn – a barrister’.
M/7 was Vivian Hancock-Nunn. He may not have been a well-known or particularly successful barrister, but he was a superb MI5 agent. This was largely because of his canny ability to play a part, which M had correctly identified. Hancock-Nunn’s father had been the president of the local Conservative Party Association, which may explain how he first came to M’s attention; his wife, Eileen Hewitt, was also a staunch Conservative and the daughter of Edgar Hewitt, KC, a prominent ‘Die-hard’ Conservative. Indeed, everything about Vivian Hancock-Nunn screamed dyed-in-the-wool Conservative. He had grown up in a large country house, Lealands, in Sussex, and was fond of hunting, shooting and fishing. His ancestor was Thomas Hancock, famous for the discovery of vulcanisation, and his family had made a fortune in the rubber industry. He was a cricket-playing, privately educated, straight-down-the-line younger son of a landed country squire. Yet M had felt that Hancock-Nunn might be able to pass himself off to suspicious Communists in the offices of the Daily Worker and Labour Monthly as an ardent Socialist, as he successfully did.
Like his spymaster, Vivian Hancock-Nunn saw Moscow as the greatest threat to the future of his country, and the British Communist Party as the enemy within the gates. Although Hancock-Nunn found some of the people he spied on ‘quite agreeable to talk to, for a short time’, most left him cold.16 In a novel he later wrote under a pseudonym, some years after leaving MI5, Hancock-Nunn railed against the ‘haughty disdain’ of Marxists very similar to the ones he had been reporting on for M, men and women for whom economics was ‘a subject which they seemed to regard as peculiarly their own and on which nobody was so well informed as themselves’.17 Yet Hancock-Nunn kept at it, diligently passing on to his spymaster every pertinent detail, while doing valuable legal work for people he did not much like.
Just a few miles from the offices of the Daily Worker, where both Hancock-Nunn and Pollard worked part-time, Olga Gray had started to flourish among the well-meaning progressives of the Friends of the Soviet Union. ‘The increased efficiency of the administration of the FSU began to be noised abroad in Communist circles,’ wrote M, until ‘officials in other Communist organisations began to be a little jealous of the “find” of the FSU’.18
One of those Communists who heard about Olga’s secretarial prowess was Isobel Brown, a tiny political activist from Newcastle-upon-Tyne who had been jailed previously for making an inflammatory speech to a group of British soldiers. More recently, the Home Office had described her as an important Communist ‘engaged in some particular form of revolutionary activity’.19 MI5 thought she was involved in ‘anti-militarist work’ and suspected her of having recently gone to the Soviet Union for ‘a special course of instruction’.20 But they had no further details. In August 1932, that looked set to change after Isobel Brown offered Olga Gray a part-time position at the two organisations where she herself worked. Both were Communist fronts with a more direct connection to Moscow than the FSU.
M was thrilled, about Olga’s new position as much as the manner in which she had acquired it. Rather than volunteer her services, Olga had waited for the approach to be made to her. ‘It is an immense safeguard if an agent can be actually invited by some member of an organisation to join up’, for if the agent’s bona fides were ever questioned, it would always be remembered ‘that the agent did not in any way thrust himself forward’.21 It had taken almost a year, but M’s experiment with female secretaries was at last starting to pay off.