It was not long before Percy Glading was starting to feel the strain. Several months after Olga had moved into the safe house, he came by drunk one night and began to pour out his worries to her. The MI5 agent made a good listener. Glading explained that he had just seen six of his people, that is, agents, and complained that he was doing very little work these days for the British Communist Party. Instead, he was at the beck and call of ‘other people’, meaning his Soviet controllers, Maly and Deutsch.
Glading was starting to crack up, and so was the NKVD rezidentura. Shortly after this drunken encounter, one of Deutsch’s other agents lost a diary. It contained a complete list of the men and women in Britain who were secretly working for Moscow. There was enough in this document to warrant shutting down the entire NKVD operation in Britain, which is what now happened. Deutsch fled the country. Maly was already overseas, either organising or carrying out the murder of a Soviet defector. The entire NKVD network in Britain ground to a halt, leaving Percy Glading, Kim Philby and the rest in limbo.
The incriminating diary had been misplaced by Edith Tudor-Hart, an Austrian photographer and NKVD agent who had once talent-spotted Philby. It is hard to say just how far Tudor-Hart might have gone in her attempts to recover this document, and what levels of coercion, bribery or violence had run through her mind. Yet three weeks after it had gone missing, the diary was found. It had fallen down the back of her sofa.
Moscow’s response, however, was not to reactivate its British networks. At least, not right away. At that moment the Russian capital was in the grip of ‘Stalin’s Terror’, a period of murderous paranoia in which almost anyone in the Soviet Union who was accused of being an enemy of ‘the people’ was either shot or sent to a labour camp. Although this was unrelated to the missing diary, Theodor Maly came under suspicion at around this time of being a Nazi agent and was summoned back to Moscow.
Maly was not working for the Germans. He was a loyal NKVD officer, and on being told to return to the Soviet Union to stand trial the man who had recently interviewed Olga might have tried to seek asylum in the West, or to go underground. Instead he returned to Moscow, knowing that he would probably face a firing squad. Soon after his return, Theodor Maly was executed. Some have argued that he was driven back by his crippling sense of guilt, and that this was suicide-by-show-trial. Either way, in the weeks and months that followed, the NKVD operation in Britain was leaderless and inactive.
M was a man who understood how to wait. As a naturalist, he had spent hundreds of hours camped out near nests and burrows, anticipating the emergence of a particular animal. He knew within himself the power of patience, yet by July 1937, three months after Olga had moved into the safe house, he was getting fidgety. None of the espionage once hinted at by Glading had taken place. Or perhaps it had, and M was simply unaware of it. Was there another safe house, and another Olga? Did this Mr Peters have tens of Percy Gladings dotted around the capital? Or should M be pouring his limited resources into investigation of the Fascists rather than the Communists?
Several weeks later, Glading arrived at Olga’s safe house with two people who were introduced to her as Mr and Mrs Stephens. As usual, these were not their real names.
‘They were clearly foreigners,’ wrote Olga.1 ‘They spoke to each other in French.’
She described Mr Stephens as ‘very self-assured’, with ‘large hands’, ‘very thick short fingers’ and a ‘very slight but almost unnoticeable hesitation in speech’.2 Mr and Mrs Stephens were in fact Mikhail Borovoy and his wife, then travelling under the names Willy and Mary Brandes. They were NKVD illegals, like Maly and Deutsch, who had previously been in the United States. Moscow Centre had sent them to London to activate Glading’s spy ring and use it to steal the plans of the Royal Navy’s new fourteen-inch gun. The following month, the two illegals returned to Olga’s flat where they ran through the details of the planned operation. A date was set for the dress rehearsal. The actual operation would take place three days later.
The practice run was a near disaster. This was mainly because the woman operating the camera had never taken a picture before. Borovoy had originally lined up an experienced female photographer from the Soviet rezidentura, but there had been a hitch: she was in love with Borovoy (or so Borovoy claimed). The feeling had not been mutual, he explained, and the photographer had apparently had a breakdown and been ordered back to Moscow.
In her place had come Borovoy’s wife. Having no idea how to work a camera, she was, as you might imagine, in an age before autofocus and automatic exposures, ‘decidedly nervous regarding her ability to use the apparatus efficiently’.3 Glading was also ‘very jumpy’ during the rehearsal.4 Although ‘Mr Stephens’ tried to remain calm, he was under immense pressure. As Glading put it to Olga, illegals like him ‘live on a volcano the whole time they are over here’.5 It was a feeling Olga knew all too well.
At last, they finished photographing a map of the London Underground – a stand-in for the blueprints they planned to photograph during the operation itself. The negatives were developed and left to dry overnight, and the next day Olga took them to Victoria Station and handed them to Glading.
He told Olga that he was annoyed by the stand-in photographer’s performance the night before. As he had predicted, the first roll of film was a failure. But the second was legible. Everything was now in place for ‘the job’ to go ahead.
The forthcoming operation ‘is obviously regarded as important’, Olga told M, and it would involve photographing blueprints.6 It was up to M to decide when and where the arrests should take place.
At last the day of the actual operation arrived. At seven o’clock in the evening, the team of MI5 watchers observed Mrs Stephens enter the safe house carrying ‘a large oblong parcel’.7 Inside the flat, Olga watched her unfold this package. Inside was a series of plans. She laid them out on a broad refectory table, where a state-of-the-art Leica camera had been set up on a tripod. Olga tried to see what the plans were, but Mrs Stephens shooed her out of the room, telling her to make some tea. The MI5 agent reappeared a few minutes later and after handing round the mugs she tried to get a look at the plans, but was told to go to her bedroom.
Olga sat in her room for the next three hours while Mrs Stephens finished her photography. Having wrapped up the original plans, she left the flat at about ten thirty. Olga emerged from her room and found forty-two negatives drying in the bathroom.
Meanwhile, as Mrs Stephens left the building one of the MI5 watchers began to follow her. She hopped into a taxi, as did her tail, and the two cars drove to Hyde Park Corner, in west London, where Mrs Stephens got out. One of the MI5 watchers did the same. She was then observed meeting Mr Stephens as well as another man. This would turn out to be a middle-aged councillor from Bexley, in the East End of London, George Whomack, who had worked at the Woolwich Arsenal since the war and had once been described by MI5 as an ‘active and dangerous Communist’.8 Now he was part of Glading’s NKVD cell. Whomack took the blueprints from Mrs Stephens and left.
Back in the safe house, Olga stood on tip-toes in the empty bath, squinting up at the drying negatives. Amazingly, given how small they were, she was able to make out the serial numbers of the plans. She called up M to report what she had seen. He made enquiries, and established that these plans were for the Royal Navy’s new fourteen-inch gun. Now he had grounds to order the arrest.
Yet Mr and Mrs Stephens were not apprehended by the police. Instead, they were kept under observation the following day and were shadowed onto a train that took them to Dover. From there they left the country.
The Soviet plan had worked to perfection. The two illegals made it safely out of Britain and copies of the secret blueprints were soon received in Moscow. Percy Glading’s first NKVD mission had been an unqualified success. Olga must have been completely baffled.
Knowing precisely when to call in the police and make an arrest is often the hardest part of an intelligence operation. Just as there are risks attached to coming in too late, by striking too soon you might destroy the possibility of uncovering more valuable information. After the arrest of the Soviet spies Wilfred Macartney and Georg Hansen almost a decade earlier, there had been a feeling among some MI5 officers that they may have jumped in too early, and that, in future, in a similar situation, it would be wise to delay the arrest in the hope of gathering more intelligence. Perhaps this was in the back of M’s mind when he chose not to order the prompt arrest of Mr and Mrs Stephens. Or had he developed a sentimental attachment to Olga? Calling in the police would have effectively ended her undercover career, and he may not have been ready for that. It is also possible that in the glare of the moment, when faced with a momentous, career-defining decision, the MI5 spymaster had frozen.
By then M had mastered the art of running agents. His infiltration of the Communist Party on a shoestring budget had been an extraordinary feat. He possessed an unparalleled ability to turn unqualified men and women – bankers, secretaries, barristers, booksellers – into reliable and consistently productive agents, and to keep them going for many years. But knowing exactly when to call in the police in the course of an investigation was a very different skill, and one that M had not yet acquired.