In July 1935, M was in the seaside town of Eastbourne, on the south coast, recuperating from a case of pneumonia, when he heard that Olga Gray had been rushed to hospital.
On her return from Mumbai the year before, Olga had resigned from her job with the Anti-War Movement and the League Against Imperialism. Although she kept in touch with the two leading Communists Percy Glading and Harry Pollitt, and she continued to pass on gossip to M, Olga no longer worked inside the two front organisations. The strain of her work had become too much, and over the months that followed she had begun to build a new life for herself, even if the old one was not yet ready to let her go.
‘I was approached by Glading,’ she recalled, ‘and asked to take on a paid job as Secretary to Harry Pollitt at Communist Party Headquarters.’1 This was February 1935. M had never before had an agent working inside this office, known as the ‘Kremlin’, least of all one employed as secretary to the most powerful Communist in Britain. ‘No official or other single individual ever has the same opportunity for obtaining information covering a wide area as does a clerk or secretary,’ wrote M.2 ‘A woman so-placed will have a much wider grasp of the day-to-day doings in a movement, than any of the officials of the movement will ever dream of. I would state categorically that if it were possible for any business magnate or government official to be able to see into the mind of his secretary, he would be astounded at the amount of knowledge concerning the general affairs of the business or department in question which lay in the secretary’s brain.’
M was desperate for Olga to accept this offer. He later suggested that the ‘temptation’ of taking the job ‘was too much both for the Department and Miss “X”’, yet the ‘temptation’ was undeniably greater for him than it could ever have been for Olga.3 Ultimately, she agreed to become Harry Pollitt’s secretary.
‘The work was very hard,’ she wrote.4 It was also varied. One afternoon in the so-called Kremlin, Olga was ‘stitching reports into the lining of Soviet sailors’ great coats to carry home’.5 Another, she was taking minutes at staff meetings of the Daily Worker, typing up Pollitt’s letters, going through his correspondence or sitting in on meetings with key Communists.
The quality of Olga’s new intelligence was exceptional. M must have been in a state of controlled, rolling euphoria as he went through her reports and passed on to his colleagues the ‘most valuable information’, including, at last, proof of ‘the existence of Harry Pollitt’s covert link with Moscow’.6 Olga also ‘explained how the cipher system was based on a book’.7 As the historian Nigel West has shown, this key piece of intelligence enabled British government codebreakers to begin their decryption of ‘MASK’ wireless communications between Moscow and London, a breakthrough that transformed MI5’s understanding of undercover Soviet operations inside Britain.
Olga’s new job was different from her earlier work in terms of its intensity, its secrecy, the number of reports she had to write up for M. It was also unusual because her relationship to the people she was spying on had changed. Previously, she had been reporting to her spymaster on the activities of suspicious Communists. Now she was informing on people that she had occasionally come to like. What had once been espionage was starting to feel like betrayal.
Harry Pollitt was, she insisted, ‘an honest Communist’, a likeable individual who clearly trusted her.8 Percy Glading ‘was a very nice man with a little daughter,’ she recalled.9 ‘I remember him being a very stimulating conversationalist and about the only person who could make an account of a film or play he’d seen absolutely riveting.’
You can only betray the people you love. During her three years inside the Communist movement, Olga had naturally grown closer to some of her targets, and there was even a rumour that around this time she started to have an affair with Percy Glading.
Joe Thomas, a Communist who claimed to have known both Glading and Olga at the time, later suggested that Olga ‘had been sleeping with Glading throughout the whole adventure’.10 We may never know whether this was true. If it was, however, M would not have approved.
‘It is important to stress that I am no believer in what may be described as Mata-Hari methods,’ he wrote.11 ‘I am convinced that more information has been obtained by women-agents, by keeping out of the arms of men, than ever was obtained by sinking too willingly into them.’ His reason was simple: the man ‘will very speedily lose his interest in her once his immediate object is attained’.
Yet M did not want his female agents to be too austere either. ‘A clever woman who can use her personal attractions wisely has in her armoury a very formidable weapon,’ he wrote.12 ‘Closely allied to Sex in a woman, is the quality of sympathy; and nothing is easier than for a woman to gain a man’s confidence by the showing and expression of a little sympathy.’
A little sympathy. It is hard to say whether, in Olga’s case, this extended to sleeping with Glading or merely being fond of him. Either way, the distance between them had shrunk dramatically and this was making her job harder.
The other problem in Olga’s life concerned a song. ‘Olga Pulloffski, the Beautiful Spy’ was a catchy number that had come out just after she began to work at King Street. The song was so popular that when this MI5 agent walked into Communist Party Headquarters her colleagues used to sing it out to her in greeting:
She’s Olga Pulloffski, the beautiful spy.13
The gay continental rapscallion,
Some say that she’s Russian,
And some say she’s French,
But her accent is gin and Italian.
Shame on you, shame on you,
Oh fie fie!
Olga Pulloffski, you beautiful spy.
You could make this kind of thing up, but nobody would believe you. An MI5 operative deep inside the Party was being serenaded by the people she was spying on with a song that made her out to be a spy. Olga became convinced that her colleagues knew her secret and were merely waiting for the right moment to punish her.
M tried to see Olga as often as possible. If he did not meet any of his agents in person, he fired off letters to them, spoke to them on the phone, reassured them, even when there was no operational need to do so. It was the same with his pets. ‘Some “superior” people are inclined to sneer at the idea of fondling captive animals,’ he wrote, ‘but this attitude merely shows their ignorance of what a young – and often an adult animal – requires.14 Stroking, gentle scratching and, what for want of a better word we call fondling is not only much appreciated by many animals, it gives them security too.’
In May 1935, however, M had come down with pneumonia and for the next two months he was mostly bedridden. His duties were carried out by the only other employee in M Section, Rita Retallick, who later became an officer for MI5 and then MI6. She did her best to look after his family of agents, yet she was only a surrogate for M. The umbilical connection between Olga and her spymaster had been broken.
With M still recovering, Olga bumped into a man she had known from Birmingham, possibly a former boyfriend. Her instinct was to unburden herself about the last few years of her life, to tell him about Mumbai, Glading, Paris, M and the strange, debilitating pressure of leading two lives that had been set up, as if part of some cruel joke, in direct opposition to one another. But she did not. She could not. Instead, she held everything in.
Olga had never felt either so trapped or so alone. We are used to thinking of spies as the heroes of their stories. Now Olga had become the victim of hers. In early July 1935 she had what was later described as a nervous breakdown. She was taken to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square. Soon her room was filled with flowers, presumably including those from her two sympathetic employers, MI5 and the Communist Party – a floral reminder of how she had ended up there in the first place.
Later Olga described the pressure of those weeks leading up to her breakdown, of a life spent ‘looking over your shoulder, all the time.15 Even when sleeping, you’re not at ease.’ It was like being afraid of the dark as a child, she said, ‘but permanently so. It did a lot of damage.’
The pressure of lying to people you know, not once or twice, but hundreds, possibly thousands of times, requires some form of release. For some people it is enough to talk it out; others may turn to drink, become depressed or experience panic attacks – perhaps the only constant is that the pressure of this work requires an outlet and that usually the spymaster is a vital part of this process. It was no coincidence that Olga’s breakdown took place during one of M’s few absences.
We have become used to thinking of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a condition experienced by soldiers after an acute traumatic experience, or by victims of accidents and natural disasters. But it can also be rooted in the experience of spending years pretending to be someone you are not. In 2016, a former MI5 agent appealed against his murder conviction on the grounds that he was suffering at the time from PTSD, adding that ‘he was told that his flashbacks and nightmares were not uncommon for undercover agents’.16 Historical diagnoses are tricky, but it seems extremely likely that by 1935, as a result of her work for MI5, Olga had begun to experience a condition very similar to what we would today call PTSD.
When she next spoke to M, presumably at the hospital, Olga was clear about her next step.
‘I informed the officer of the Intelligence Department for whom I worked, that I found the work too great a strain and would prefer to drop my connection with the Communist Party and return to ordinary life.’17 If M had pushed her before, he did not do so now. He accepted that Olga’s career as a government agent was effectively over.
‘As may be readily understood,’ M conceded, ‘she was tired, suffering from some nervous strain; and rather disposed to feel that she had done enough.’18 Guy Liddell would tell Eric Roberts that ‘in an agent context, no man could go on indefinitely.19 Sooner or later, he became tired and jaded, if not blown.’ For more than three years, Olga had reported with tenacity and skill on the Communist underground movement. The intelligence she had produced had changed the government’s understanding of Soviet activities in Britain and Moscow’s relationship with the British Communist Party. Now her life as an MI5 agent was set to finish. Soon after being discharged from hospital, Olga was elected to be Secretary of the Ealing Ladies Hockey Club and before the end of the year she had found a job working for an advertising company.
M also knew that Graham Pollard’s career was essentially over, now that he had been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to write a history of the book trade. But his link to M was not severed. If Pollard happened upon anything interesting, he would pass it on to his spymaster. And the same went for Olga; the bond between M and his agents was one that never fully broke.
‘On instructions,’ she wrote, of the months after her nervous breakdown, ‘I continued to maintain purely friendly contact with Pollitt and Glading.’20 There might still be another chapter in her MI5 career.