IT IS HARD TO SAY PRECISELY WHAT OLGA EXPECTED TO FIND AS SHE walked into M’s apartment in Knightsbridge, west London, only that it was entirely different from what she saw. In most of the spy films she had watched, the fittings and furnishings of a spymaster’s quarters had the male gravitas of a presiding judge. The walls tended to be clad in paneled wood, brass-tacked leather chairs were dotted around like icebergs, and in the middle of it all a monolithic desk, larger than it needed to be, behind which you would see the spymaster himself. What Olga observed as she ventured into M’s apartment was, she later said, “like the den of some amiable scientist rather than a spy.”
Fish tanks bubbled away against one wall, there were cages for M’s animals as well as boxes for his insects, petri dishes for larvae, bags containing different feeds for his animals, and bowls of food littering the floor. Among the various pets running or flying around the apartment as Olga walked in was a small dog and a magnificent blue-fronted Amazon parrot, who was also a talented mimic. “It would make the squeak of the corkscrew, the pop when the cork comes out and the gurgling noise of the contents being poured.” There were harvest mice in there, at least one tortoise, and probably a snake and a bush baby. Elsewhere Olga would have seen M’s vast collection of jazz records as well as his roommate, an orthopedic surgeon known as Val, who may have been wandering about in the background as she entered. Olga could have been forgiven for wondering to herself whether “Captain King” was really the MI5 spymaster he claimed to be.
M had only recently moved into this apartment with a private entrance at No. 38 Sloane Street, which had previously been rented by his sister, Enid. She appears to have moved out just after her brother was given his job at MI5. He might have preferred a larger setup, yet that was impossible given his tiny salary. Unlike most of his new colleagues, M was unable to fall back on a private income. But even if he had been paid more, or his allowance had not been cut off by his uncle ten years earlier, he probably would have spent most of it on records and pets. Throughout M’s life, whenever he had more money than he needed his instinct was to spend it, just like his father before him.
Olga may have imagined that a car would come to take them from M’s chaotic home to the calm of MI5 Headquarters or to an imposing country house where she and the other trainee spies could begin their lessons. Instead, her instruction, such as it was, lasted little more than a weekend and it took place at M Section Headquarters, that is, her spymaster’s apartment.
M refused to run his section from the Office, where the rest of MI5 was based. Although his new agent-running unit was formally under the aegis of MI5, it remained, as far as he was concerned, the child of the Makgill Organisation, a more maverick and independent outfit than MI5 would ever be. It was under Makgill that M had learned his craft and had recruited most of his agents, a number of whom had come over with him to MI5. Even “M Organisation,” the name he liked to use to refer to his wing of MI5, was a reference to the Makgill Organisation. Dick Thistlethwaite, a senior MI5 officer, later referred to the Makgill Organisation as “the real ‘M’ organisation,” adding that in 1931 it “technically joined up with us,” meaning MI5, “but was careful to keep its separate identity.” Not only did M see his new section as a continuation of the Makgill Organisation, it is also likely that the moniker he chose for himself—“M”—was a reference to his own Christian name as much as to Makgill, the man who had first brought him into the world of intelligence.
Perhaps M explained some of this to Olga. “I state unhesitatingly that I think it is not only desirable, but essential that an agent should know exactly what his position is,” he later wrote. “I am against any complicated system of cut-outs; and equally against employing an agent who thinks he is working for, let us say, a news-agency. If this sort of subterfuge is practised, there inevitably comes a day when the agent has to be told what his real position is, and I think this has a very bad effect on the agent himself: he feels that he has been led up the garden, and made a fool of; and worst of all, that he has not been trusted.” He told Olga that she was working for M Section, part of “the British Intelligence Department,” and that her task was to penetrate the Communist movement.
It was hard to guess how far she might get, but for M the holy grail was finding proof of a link between Moscow and the Communist Party of Great Britain. Along the way she should look for evidence of illegal activities, the names of “closed” Party members, communications between undercover comrades, and any other details about left-wing underground networks. She might also need to answer specific questions from M’s new colleagues. In M’s reports, Olga would be referred to as “M/12.” Her pay was to be £2.50 a week, approximately £150 ($188) in today’s money. So she was not doing this to get rich. Yet it was vital that she received a regular salary. From his own experience, M understood the effect of being paid by results and how this could militate toward exaggeration and unnecessary risks. It would also undermine the basic lesson he preached to Olga repeatedly during that weekend, until she was probably sick of hearing it: be patient.
“The great thing is not be in too much of a hurry,” he told another agent. “We shall not mind if you do not show any very tremendous results for a month or two. You have to be very patient in this game.”
This applied to Olga as much as to M. It was vital that he did not rush her.
M then gave her a crash course in what to report, the paramount importance of accuracy and objectivity, and the need to keep her mind supple with memory exercises.
That was it, more or less.
“The very best training,” M always argued, “is for an agent to be put into contact at the earliest possible moment with the organisation to be investigated.” This young spymaster had learned not to overload his agents with instructions and warnings. Like a film director obsessed with realism, he wanted his recruits to give untutored and naturalistic performances.
Olga was now ready to begin her mission to reach the heart of the Communist movement, which would be further than any of M’s existing agents had gotten. Yet by the time her training finished, in 1931, there was one other M operative who might arrive there at about the same time.
M HAD GIVEN THIS OTHER AGENT THE CODENAME “M/1,” POSSIBLY because this person had been one of the first people to be taken on by him. Having worked for M over the last few years, M/1 had recently secured a job at the new Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, and was now providing M with a stream of valuable intelligence about who was employed at the paper, the stories its editors planned to publish, editorial policy, authorship of anonymous articles, and other valuable scraps picked up inside this Communist propaganda machine. M/1 seemed to be just one or two promotions away from the upper reaches of the Party. M’s operative was talented, courageous, and resourceful, and until now this agent’s identity has remained a carefully guarded secret.
MI5 does not publicly name its agents. The basic contract of trust between spymaster and informant is rooted in the understanding that the former will never give away the latter, even after death. Yet sometimes MI5 releases enough material about a particular agent to make an identification possible, but only if you are prepared to do a bit of digging.
In the National Archives in Kew, in southwest London, there are thousands of declassified MI5 files. Some include fragments of reports written by M/1. By trawling through enough of these documents it is possible to build up a rough picture of who M/1 was, where this agent worked, and the names of the Communists that this agent reported on. Most of these people were employed at the Daily Worker. Four were not.
M usually asked that intelligence relating to any one of these four “should be disseminated with very great care,” a clear sign that this information came from personal conversations between one of these targets and M/1. If that intelligence was acted on by the police, it would be easy for the person arrested to guess who had tipped off the authorities. These four people were Elsie McMeakin, Edith Martin, Arthur Glyn Evans, and his wife, Peggy Evans. They had various things in common, yet one stands out: they all lived in the same building.
Indeed, M/1 was something of an expert on the comings and goings at No. 22 Adelaide Road, a large house in Camden, north London, where these four people lived at different times. In one report, M/1 described a letter arriving at this address late in the day before it was taken by hand to Communist Party Headquarters early the next morning. In itself this indicates that M/1 probably spent the night at that house. Yet reading between the lines of this and many other reports, it seems pretty clear that M/1 either was sleeping with someone who lived at No. 22 Adelaide Road or was living there, too.
According to the annual electoral registers, during the years that M/1 was active, nine individuals were based in this property at one time or another. Five of the nine were reported as being in conversation with M/1 or were under suspicion by MI5, which means they cannot have been M/1 themselves. This leaves just four people registered as living there who might have been M/1.
Here are some other details about this MI5 agent: he or she was employed by the Daily Worker; belonged to the St. Pancras branch of the Communist Party in London; and frequently attended meetings of the Workers Press Commission. This allows us to cross off several names from the list, leaving just two people.
The strangest thing about these last two is their relationship to each other: they were husband and wife. Their names are Kathleen Beauchamp and Graham Pollard. Both professed to be devout Communists. One of them appears to have been an MI5 agent.
There is another clue about M/1’s identity, but it is confusing. In one report, M appears to refer to M/1 as “H. G.” Usually a detail like this is redacted before a file is released to the public, but this one slipped through the net. The initials “H. G.” seem to rule out both Beauchamp and Pollard, who were, of course, K. B. and G. P.
Perhaps M/1 did not live at No. 22 Adelaide Road after all? Or was “H. G.” a codename?
The “H. G.” clue appears to blow us off course but for one thing. “Graham” was not Pollard’s first name. It was his middle name. He was “H. G. Pollard,” and, just as H. G. Wells was sometimes known to friends as “H. G.,” so was H. G. Pollard.
Not only did Graham Pollard live at No. 22 Adelaide Road during this period, he belonged to the St. Pancras Local at the same time as M/1, he attended meetings of the Workers Press Commission when M/1 did, and, crucially, he was on the staff at the Daily Worker at the same time as M/1. So, too, was his wife, Kathleen, a director of the newspaper’s controlling press. As a result of her position, she was found in contempt of court when her newspaper printed an article protesting against the conviction of a leading Communist, and in January 1933 she was arrested and jailed. Shortly after her imprisonment M received a report from M/1, which appears to rule out Kathleen Beauchamp as an MI5 agent.
Graham Pollard was hailed after his death in 1976 as one of the most distinguished bibliographers of his generation. He was a learned, twinkly eyed civil servant whose birthday toward the end of his life was noted each year in the London Times. Pollard had an extraordinarily catholic range of interests, including bookbinding, type design, the history of medieval Oxford and newspapers, nineteenth-century literary forgeries, and the book trade. He was admired for his remarkable “facility in mastering a new subject and his convincing manner when talking on almost any topic.” Now it seems that we can add to his long and varied career a stint as an MI5 agent deep inside the Communist Party.
It is even possible to pinpoint the period when Pollard was recruited. In 1921, when M began to teach at a prep school in Putney, southwest London, a seventeen-year-old Graham Pollard happened to be living just a few hundred yards away, and he had good reason to visit the school: he had recently been a pupil there himself.
The year after these two presumably met, Pollard won the top history scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, where his father, the great Tudor historian A. F. Pollard, had once been. Roughly a year later, M began to insert penetration agents into the Communist Party. One of the first appears to have been Graham Pollard, a teenager, who told his Oxford friends at exactly this time that he had suddenly become a Communist.
“Pollard did not often proclaim his faith,” noted Peter Quennell, critic and author, with evident suspicion. Indeed, the only time that Communism seemed to enter Graham Pollard’s life was “when a railway-strike happened to coincide with an important London book-sale; and he was much exercised as to whether he should miss the sale, or run the risk of travelling on a train behind a black-leg engine-driver.” Pollard was far better known at Oxford for his love of rare books, being a member of the aesthetes’ den the Hypocrites Club, for having a room that looked “like a bookseller’s shop,” and for the occasion when he beat Evelyn Waugh in the “half-blue” at spitting (at a distance of ten feet). Hardly the portrait of a devout Communist.
Yet on leaving Oxford, Pollard married Kathleen Beauchamp, a young Communist and a former pupil of his father’s. M’s young agent became increasingly accepted in Party circles after coming down from Oxford and involved himself in the production of various Communist publications. He also began to run part of the famous Birrell and Garnett bookshop in Soho, central London, having bought a share of the business from the Bloomsbury luminary David “Bunny” Garnett.
Pollard’s life was now a heady mix of books, extreme politics, and espionage. He started each day with lunch at Chez Victor, one of the most fashionable restaurants in town, before drifting into his bookshop for an afternoon of work. Then he might head off to a Party meeting, file a report for M, and go home to his Communist wife. His life as a Bohemian, a political activist, a bookseller, and an undercover agent was exciting and exacting, and it required him to play many parts. By the end of 1931, as Olga was about to launch herself at the Communist movement, it seemed that Graham Pollard might just reach the heart of the Party before she did.
All the same, M had so much riding on his experiment with female secretaries, and was so determined to see it succeed, that he recruited another one. “A cuckoo is not content to lay one egg only,” he once wrote, “but only one egg is normally laid in one nest.” Rather than enlist just one undercover secretary, M took on two, and launched them at different parts of the Communist movement. As well as Olga, codenamed M/12, he began to run another female typist referred to as “M/2.” Like Olga, she came from a respectable, middle-class family from outside London and she had strong connections to her local Conservative Party.
There was no way of telling which of these two women would flourish as an intelligence agent, or whether he had given them enough training. Rather like a cuckoo hen in the hours after depositing her eggs, all that M could do now was wait.