When Percy Glading met his Soviet handlers in London for the first time, around the time of Gwladys’s death, he was surprised to discover that neither man was actually Russian. They made a comic-looking pair. One was tall with long dark hair swept back from his forehead like Count Dracula. The other was short with mousy, curly hair and no visible neck. Their names were Theodor Maly and Arnold Deutsch, and they worked for the Inostrannyi Otdel (INO), the foreign intelligence department of the Soviet secret police, the notorious People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). Both were living in Britain as ‘illegals’: elite Soviet intelligence operatives deployed outside Russia without the protection of diplomatic cover. If discovered by MI5, Maly and Deutsch would not be rescued by Moscow, which was why they had no intention of getting caught.
Maly and Deutsch would later be hailed as two of the finest ‘illegals’ ever to be employed by Moscow Centre. Deutsch was the shorter of the two. He was an Austrian academic once famous in Vienna for his crusading belief in the importance of better orgasms. Since then he had shown himself to be a superb spymaster. In just two years in London, Arnold Deutsch had personally recruited some twenty agents for the NKVD. Kim Philby had been the first, followed by Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and up to fifteen others, including several who have never been publicly identified.
Deutsch’s boss in the London rezidentura, the local Soviet intelligence apparatus, was Theodor Maly, a tall, languid Hungarian with gold fillings in his front teeth and a past that had come to haunt him. An ex-seminarian, Maly had been captured during the First World War and taken to Siberia where he learned Russian, lost his faith and joined the Red Army. In the years that followed, he took part in some of the worst massacres of the Russian Civil War, the memory of which tormented him for the rest of his life and was part of the reason why he had asked to be posted abroad – anywhere, really, other than the Soviet Union. This was how Maly came to be running the NKVD rezidentura in London, in late 1936, at around the time that he and Deutsch recruited a former factory worker called Percy Glading.
Deutsch described Glading, their bespectacled new agent, as ‘a devoted communist, courageous, daring, painstaking and industrious.1 He is also well-read and well-educated. He is a good organiser and writes well.’ Glading’s only weaknesses, believed Deutsch, were that he could be too trusting of his comrades and sometimes he lacked patience. It was a prescient judgement.
Whereas Philby and the other wide-eyed Cambridge recruits had been won over at once by Deutsch’s mittel-European charm, his easy sophistication and his worldliness, Glading was more acerbic. He found Deutsch too cautious, at one point complaining that he was ‘bumptious’.2 There was also a part of Glading that resented being told what to do by a foreigner, an incipient sense that one day he should be doing Deutsch’s job himself.
For all this, Glading was flattered to have been chosen by the NKVD from among so many other Comintern agents. His instructions from Maly and Deutsch were to recruit a team of subagents inside the Woolwich Arsenal, the industrial complex in which he had worked before being kicked out on account of his Communist beliefs, and to have these agents ready to remove secret plans from the factory, photograph them and then have the negatives couriered to Moscow.
Finding British factory workers who were willing to betray their country was surprisingly – depressingly – easy. This says a lot about the political ferment of the time. Several months earlier, in July 1936, a group of Spanish officers had launched a rebellion against the democratically elected government of Spain, an uprising that sparked the Spanish Civil War. This appeared to be part of an ongoing conflict between the Right and the Left, and as such it would attract thousands of idealistic volunteers who were willing to give their lives in defence of one side or the other. The world had entered an age of political extremes in which antipathy towards Fascism could easily become sympathy for Communism, and vice versa, which was why Percy Glading did not have to look hard to find three Woolwich Arsenal workers who were willing to help Moscow in the belief that by doing so they might be fighting Fascism.
The other part of Glading’s job was harder. He needed to find a place in which to have the stolen material photographed. He decided to set up a safe house. But who to run it? Ideally, this person would be a trusted comrade with experience of illegal work and a clean record, yet one who did not formally belong to the Communist Party.
Olga Gray was not entirely sure why Percy Glading had asked to see her, after he contacted her unexpectedly in February 1937, but she had a pretty good idea. Three days earlier she had told Harry Pollitt that she was finally leaving the Communist Party. She probably thought Glading wanted to talk her into changing her mind.
Instead, he asked her to run a safe house. Olga was to find a flat that did not belong to a block with a porter, because Glading did not want anyone keeping tabs on his movements, and to move into this place and carry out certain tasks. He would have his own set of keys. Glading planned to visit the property several times each month, and in return she could live rent-free in a fully furnished flat.
The easiest course of action for Olga, the most attractive, simplest and safest response, was to say no and to carry on with her life after MI5 as if this conversation had not happened. M would never find out. Instead, she told Glading that she would think about it. After that she made a call to her spymaster.
M must have gone into shock. Having endured the worst few months of his life, bar none, an agent he had written off had now presented him with what might be the biggest break of his career. MI5 had been investigating Glading for more than a decade. M’s agents had repeatedly got themselves to within touching distance of this man, but no closer. M/5 thought that ‘Percy Glading is the comrade in charge of the whole Illegal Apparatus’ for the entire Communist Party and had even been told that Glading wanted to speak to him personally about weaponry he examined at work.3 This same agent heard that Glading was in charge of a series of illegal factory groups, including one in the Woolwich Arsenal. Jimmy Dickson, the civil servant and novelist, had been grilled by Glading about variable-pitch aircraft propellers and on how to get information from Communists inside the government. Graham Pollard’s career as an agent had recently spluttered back to life when he reported that Glading had rebuked a comrade for being so naïve as to accept at face value a statement made by the Comintern.
Yet Percy Glading was meticulous. On the telephone he gave away nothing. He had guessed correctly that MI5 was reading his post and was shadowing him intermittently around London. As the MI5 watchers reported wearily, Glading ‘seemed to be somewhat suspicious of being followed’.4
Now the man who seemed incapable of slipping up had invited an MI5 agent to help him carry out an act of international espionage. All that remained was for M to convince Olga to accept.
‘To be quite frank,’ admitted M, she ‘was none too keen to be drawn again into the Party activities’.5 It had been less than two years since Olga’s nervous breakdown. This new mission would be the most challenging of her career. But it also provided a chance for her to bow out, and do so to a standing ovation. None of M’s agents had ever been given an opportunity like this to catch a Soviet agent. Although it would be a waste to say no, it required nerve to say yes.
Olga Gray was later described by a Scotland Yard detective as ‘the bravest girl I ever knew’, one who ‘had forgotten more about courage than many soldiers ever learn on the battlefield’.6 No doubt her spymaster helped to build up her self-belief. Another agent marvelled at ‘M’s ability to instil confidence’ in his informants.7 Whatever it was that helped to persuade her, in the days after Glading made his proposal to Olga Gray she agreed to join his underground cell.