“THE INCIDENT,” AS IT CAME TO BE KNOWN, HAPPENED SHORTLY before Maxwell Knight joined MI5 in late 1931. It took place in Invergordon, a port in the Scottish Highlands, after word spread among the naval ratings that, as part of the government’s sweeping austerity drive, their salaries were about to be cut. On the morning of September 15, 1931, the crews of several warships refused orders. Others followed suit, and by midday there were mobs of sailors gathered on the forecastles of several ships giving boisterous speeches, singing songs, and otherwise enjoying themselves. On board one ship a piano was hauled up on deck. Several crews refused to put out to sea for routine exercises.
This was the Invergordon Mutiny. Nobody was hurt. It lasted less than two days, and the rebellious sailors carried out all their essential duties. Yet for the British public the idea of a mutiny in the Royal Navy was truly shocking. News of “the incident” sent the London Stock Exchange into meltdown. Markets plummeted. There was a run on the pound. Sterling lost a quarter of its value, and several days later the government made the momentous decision to leave the gold standard.
The reaction in MI5 was no less dramatic, largely because one of the songs that was sung by the mutinous sailors had been “The Red Flag”—the Communist anthem.
In Russia, the Bolshevik uprising of 1917 had begun after a group of sailors refused orders. The Wilhelmshaven Mutiny in Germany, the following year, had been another naval uprising inspired by socialist ideals. Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, which came out soon after, was a riff on the same theme. For many people, and not just those in MI5, the Invergordon Mutiny was a near miss, and a reminder that the possibility of a Communist uprising in Britain was entirely real.
This was an age in which dictatorship was not yet a dirty word. Universal suffrage was still a recent innovation, and during the war Britain had been effectively run as a totalitarian state. By 1931, a growing number of people across Europe saw dictatorship as a viable and sensible solution to the worsening economic recession. With the Soviet Union apparently thriving, a significant chunk of the British population was at least open to the idea of a strong socialist government, and with it a reduction in democracy.
Under its new charter, MI5 was responsible for investigating Communism throughout the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Its task was to infiltrate the many tentacles of the British Communist movement, to find out what was being planned, and to identify channels of communication between British revolutionaries and their controllers in Moscow, all of whom were working toward the same basic goal: a socialist revolution in Britain. The task that had been given to MI5 was about much more than keeping the peace or guarding secrets. At stake was nothing less than democracy in Britain and the future of the British Empire.
To meet this new challenge, MI5 had been given more resources and greater powers. For the first time it would have a specialized agent-running section. Yet the man chosen to run this new wing of MI5, on which so much depended, was not one of the service’s established senior officers. Instead, he was a thirty-one-year-old outsider whose indiscretions at MI6 had triggered the Treaty of Westminster. He had also asked, rather unusually, that his new colleagues refer to him as “M.”
Maxwell Knight’s first visit as a member of staff to MI5 Headquarters, or “the Office,” as it was known, came toward the end of 1931. MI5 was then based just south of Hyde Park on Cromwell Road, a short walk from one of M’s favorite buildings in London, the Natural History Museum, famous then, as it is today, for its collection of fossils. The scene inside MI5 was not so very different. M was introduced to a galère of aging former soldiers, ex-Indian policemen, washed-up colonial administrators, and civil servants, most of whom had reached the twilight of their career. They were older than average, poorly paid, and, with the exception of just one officer, none of them had gone to college.
There were also surprisingly few of them, as had been the case for most of the last decade. Two years earlier, MI5 had had just thirteen officers distributed between A Division, which dealt with administration, and B Division, responsible for counterespionage and countersubversion. All were sworn to secrecy. M was told that MI5 “should never be referred to in conversation with civilians.”
Most of his new colleagues had been drawn into the world of intelligence by their romantic sense of patriotism, or this had rubbed off on them over the years. They were bound together by a shared affinity for intrigue, a dwindling sense of ambition, and the feeling that working for MI5 was less a job than a vocation. Although many of those in the Office were hard-working and competent, for years they had been held back by MI5’s limited resources and its relatively low standing within Whitehall.
The atmosphere inside the Office was said to resemble that of a school staff room, or a small family business, while the canteen looked like a café for debutantes on account of all the glamorous women from “good” families who carried out MI5’s clerical duties. One officer who joined the Office soon after the Second World War described that canteen as “a showpiece for some of the best-looking women you ever saw, and they were all the prettier because we men were so dowdy by comparison.”
M was told that a relationship between an officer like him and one of these dazzling women was forbidden, unless, it seemed, the man in question was Eric Holt-Wilson, deputy director of MI5, and the female member of staff was the beautiful Aubrey Stirling, thirty-five years his junior, who joined the Office at the same time as M. Two months later she married the man fondly known in MI5 as “Holy Willy,” who got away with this largely because of his close friendship with the only officer who outranked him in MI5, the central point within this miniature merry-go-round, Sir Vernon Kell.
Kell was the person M most needed to win over, and on the face of it this should have been easy. Both M and Kell were dedicated fishermen who kept parrots at home and were known for their occasional eccentricities. M often had a lizard or mouse in his jacket pocket. Kell insisted on being chauffeured to work each day in a car with a flag on the hood depicting a tortoise, an unusual mode of transport for anyone, but truly peculiar for a spy chief whose job was so secret that it did not officially exist. Kell and M were both polite and principled. Their values were Edwardian, their politics were die-hard Conservative. Yet Kell lacked M’s charisma. Although he had natural authority and a manner that was both reassuring and equable, Kell was often slow to come round to new ideas, including the radical one that M proposed for infiltrating the Communist Party.
By the time M had joined MI5, “the amount of information in the possession of the Department regarding secret and illegal activities” of the Communist Party was, he wrote, “strictly limited.” This was something of an understatement. Most of the intelligence that came into MI5 fell into one of two categories. There was “human intelligence,” or HUMINT as it is sometimes known today, that mostly came from agents, informants, and defectors; and there was “signals intelligence,” SIGINT, that was generated mainly by telephone checks or “Home Office warrants” (HOWs), which allowed MI5 to intercept letters sent to a named individual at a given address. The difficulty was that each HOW had to be individually authorized by the Home Office, making these cumbersome and slow to operate. Telephone checks were easier to set up, yet with no reliable recording equipment the listening was done in real time by telephone switchboard operators who might not always understand the nuances of the conversation that they were listening in to, or indeed the language.
Meanwhile, the human intelligence trickling in to MI5 when M arrived generally came from the police, ex-Communists, Soviet defectors, or from John Baker White, the former member of the British Fascisti who had once brought Max to Makgill’s attention. Baker White was now a senior figure at the right-wing Economic League, where he ran his own intelligence network and supplied information to the police and MI5. Codenamed “B. W.” or “B/W,” he liked to provide his material over a pint in the pub to his old friend Con Boddington, another ex-Makgill man who had gone on to join MI5. After “a little leg-pulling” between the two, Baker White passed on scraps of gossip from his sources inside or close to “the Party,” as Communists called their organization. The quality of human intelligence coming in to MI5 was fine, but there was rarely enough and it was not always reliable, especially if Boddington and Baker White had spent too long in the pub.
Already M had several agents inside the Party. One was a young bookseller who had married a Communist; another was a Glaswegian gun examiner. M also had a well-known gossip columnist at the Daily Express on his books, and a young writer whose comedy sketches were being performed on the BBC. The intelligence they supplied was good, sometimes excellent, yet none of these agents had tapped the fountainhead. No matter how hard they tried, and they could never appear to be trying too hard, M’s agents had been unable so far to break into the senior ranks of the Communist movement. Rather than wait years for one of these men to secure a top position, M’s new idea was to find a female secretary and engineer a situation in which she might be given a job working for an important Party figure.
An efficient and reliable secretary is a valuable asset in any organization, yet by 1931 good secretaries in the Communist movement were in particularly short supply. If M could find a suitable candidate, “she might stand a very good chance of obtaining a secretarial position in a Party organisation.” It sounded like an excellent, low-risk plan. But M’s new boss did not agree.
“Women do not make good secret service agents,” wrote Kell, unambiguously.
He was not the only MI5 officer to be against the use of female agents on principle. Some of M’s new colleagues believed that women lacked the staying power of men. Others worried that they were more prone to falling in love with their targets than men.
M felt otherwise. “It is frequently alleged that women are less discreet than men,” he wrote, “that they are ruled by their emotions, and not by their brains: that they rely on intuition rather than on reason; and that Sex will play an unsettling and dangerous role in their work.” And yet, “it is curious that in the history of espionage and counterespionage a very high percentage of the greatest coups have been brought off by women.” He went on, “this—if it proves anything—proves that the spymasters of the world”—in other words, Kell—“are inclined to lay down hard and fast rules, which they subsequently find it impossible to keep to, and it is in their interests to break.”
Recruiting a female agent at the start of his career as an MI5 officer was a risk, and it would put him up against his new chief. So it was vital to M, or “Captain King,” as he had introduced himself, that Olga Gray was up to the task.