THE WOOLWICH ARSENAL CASE WAS A MOMENT OF TRIUMPH FOR M. His transformation from jazz-playing animal enthusiast and family misfit to successful MI5 spymaster appeared to be complete. Fifteen years earlier he had been challenged by Sir George Makgill to take on the Red Menace. Here was his answer. Breaking up this Soviet spy ring, a network that had been primed to steal vital industrial and military secrets for years, was the great MI5 success story of the 1930s. Yet behind the scenes, unknown to the public, the greater achievement was the extent of his agents’ infiltration of the British Communist movement.
In MI5 a certain mystique was starting to form around M’s section. As well as being the most independent, economical, and unconventional of MI5 sections, it was one of the most effective. The Woolwich Arsenal case was a vindication of M’s tradecraft, especially his preference for long-term penetration agents and for taking on women.
The weeks that followed might have been a moment to bask in this success, but there was no time for that. The reaction to the trial in Communist circles had been explosive. Olga’s performance in court confirmed that MI5 was able to get agents inside the movement. Their assumption was that there must be more. The Communists were determined to root them out—all of them.
“An organised ‘spy hunt’ is to take place with as little delay as possible,” reported M’s man in Liverpool. Any Party members who had been reluctant in the past to go canvassing now came under suspicion, as did those who sent their children to religious schools or did not socialize with other Party members. M also heard about the reaction in London. Indeed, the best intelligence he received about the Communist spy hunts in the wake of Glading’s conviction came from the unlikeliest source. After more than six years of struggling to be taken seriously within the Party, remarkably, his female agent M/2 had been taken on as a secretary at the Communist Party headquarters on King Street, the same office in which Olga had worked shortly before her breakdown.
M/2 was now providing MI5 with regular, accurate intelligence about what she called “the most exhaustive investigations, enquiries and heresy hunts,” all of which had been set up to uncover people like her. Over the months that followed, M/2 produced a considerable haul of information. As well as being the most resilient of M’s agents, having gone for so long without penetrating the Communist movement, she had suddenly become one of the most prolific.
Yet M/2 rarely appears in later accounts of MI5’s work during the 1930s. This is partly because her name has never been revealed. That can now change.
From a recent official history of MI5 there is little doubt that during the late 1930s this particular agent belonged to a trade union called the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries (AWCS). By going through her declassified reports, it also becomes clear that M/2 made it on to the executive committee of this union. This may not sound like much, but it is enough to open a door onto her identity.
Almost every Communist who made it onto the executive committee of a trade union like this one would also join the relevant Communist “fraction.” A fraction was a secret cell of Communists on a particular committee who gathered before each session and agreed on how they were going to vote in the forthcoming meeting. Although there is no evidence of there being a Communist fraction on the AWCS executive committee, we can presume that such a thing existed, and that M’s agent would have been required to join it.
Although it is still theoretical, this edges us closer to M/2’s identity. The point of a Communist fraction was to influence voting on a particular committee. So, by looking at the voting records of the AWCS executive committee, on issues of interest to the Communists, it might be possible to build up a list of women who belonged to this Communist fraction, one of whom could be M/2.
At the Working Class Movement Library in Manchester there is a collection of AWCS papers, including a little-known history of this trade union. Among many other details this gives the names of several prominent Communists who sat on the executive committee during the 1930s. One of these was a Mrs. Williams—who could not have been M/2 because she was too old (and too prominent). Crucially, this archival collection also holds the voting records of the AWCS executive committee during the 1930s. During the period that M/2 was active on this committee, there were forty-eight different women who voted with the strident Communist Mrs. Williams, for one reason or another. Some of those would have done so simply because they thought she was talking sense, others because they belonged to the same Communist fraction. One of these forty-eight women may have been M/2.
Most of these names can be ruled out as M/2 on the basis of other details gleaned from her MI5 reports, such as her approximate age, and when she joined and left this trade union. This leaves nine possible candidates.
How to whittle these nine names down to one? This is the trickiest part of the puzzle (and one that took me some time to work out). But there is a way to do it.
If you map the locations mentioned by M/2 in her reports to M, and correlate these with the dates when these reports were made, an interesting pattern slowly emerges. It seems that in the years before 1938, M/2 was living south of the River Thames, perhaps near Stockwell or Brixton—as most of her reports before this date mention places close to or inside this area. After this date, however, she appears to have been based in Hammersmith.
In London today most councils have a local history center that holds a complete set of annual electoral registers for the surrounding boroughs. By visiting enough of these centers dotted around the capital, it is possible to work out roughly where these nine women who might have been M/2 lived, and when. It turns out that just one of the nine candidates for M/2 lived in Stockwell until 1938, after which she moved to Hammersmith. Her initials were M. M.
When she was at school, M. M. was twice awarded “Honours” in the Royal Drawing Society Certificates. We know that M/2 was a good sketcher; indeed, some of her drawings have survived in MI5 files.
M. M. worked on the China Campaign Committee in 1939. So did M/2.
M. M. also attended the International Peace Campaign in 1938. As did M/2.
We also know that after the start of the war M. M. was an air raid warden in Hammersmith. M/2 had the same job in the same place at the same time.
The agent known as M/2 can now be revealed as an enterprising, brave, and selfless woman named Mona Maund. Her name also explains M’s codename: M. M., with her two Ms, was M/2.
Similar to Olga Gray and Vivian Hancock-Nunn, Mona Maund had almost certainly come to M’s attention through the good offices of the Conservative Party. Her father, Captain Maund, was a staunch Conservative and at one time high sheriff of Worcester. Like so many of M’s agents, Mona Maund had had an interrupted childhood. Her mother died when Mona was just four years old. For the rest of her life, she was particularly close to her father, who referred to her touchingly in his will as “my darling daughter” and “my best of all God-sent daughters.” Indeed, Maund’s career as one of M’s agents may have finished in 1940, not, it seems, because she was exposed as a spy, but as a result of her father moving into a nursing home in Worcester. She moved back there to look after him.
Mona Maund’s great skill as an agent was her extraordinary perseverance as well as her ability to persuade so many Communist Party members to see past her right-wing background—even if this had taken several years to achieve.
It is striking that M chose to use agents like Maund, from resolutely right-wing families, to penetrate extremist left-wing groups. Moscow Centre often asked successful upper-middle-class Englishmen to masquerade as, well, successful upper-middle-class Englishmen. Yet few of these agents were ever fully trusted by their controllers, even after they had defected to the Soviet Union. By contrast, M liked to recruit Tories or Fascists and turn them into Communists. The transformation was harder to achieve and it required superior tradecraft, yet the payoff was significant: he had no cause to question their loyalty.
Mona Maund was a doting daughter and a resilient spy, yet the most valuable intelligence she passed on to MI5, and it was priceless, would go to waste. When the police searched Percy Glading’s house after his arrest in 1938, they found a diary that listed six names. As MI6’s Valentine Vivian pointed out, two of these names actually referred to the same person—a young Communist named Melita Norwood. Also, in Charles Munday’s apartment, a slip of paper was found with Norwood’s address on it. Clearly, Melita Norwood was important. She was also honorary secretary of the AWCS Cricklewood Branch. Mona Maund was honorary secretary of the AWCS Central Branch. The two women knew each other.
“This girl is a rather mysterious character,” wrote Maund about Melita Norwood. “She is quite an active person in her trade union but a certain amount of mystery seems to surround her actual Communist Party activities. She has a husband about whom nothing is known except that he looks rather like Charlie Chaplin.” Maund then supplied M with the crucial detail: “it is also certain that she is doing some especially important Party work.” This “Party work” was so important, she added, that Norwood had told her comrades “she will not be able to undertake any open Party work for some little time.”
This was not all that Mona Maund provided on Melita Norwood. “Suppose you can draw and paint,” M later wrote. “What an advantage this will prove to be!” Although he was a hopeless sketcher himself, M urged his agents to make drawings of their targets. Having provided excellent intelligence on Melita Norwood and a character sketch of this woman, Maund made an actual sketch of her. Her likeness was so striking that it was later reproduced in an official history of MI5 next to a photograph of Norwood. But Maund would have hoped for much more from her intelligence than it would be used many years later to illustrate a book.
M had passed Maund’s reports about Melita Norwood to the head of B Division, Jasper Harker, a handsome former Indian policeman who was rumored among the MI5 secretaries to have either no toes or “very small feet.” He was also known to be not very bright. Harker examined the reports carefully. He then decided not to have Melita Norwood investigated.
It later emerged that Norwood had been recruited as an NKVD agent by either Theodor Maly or Arnold Deutsch in 1937—just a year before Mona Maund’s reports. Norwood went on to spend most of her career as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, which coordinated British nuclear projects, where she used her position to pass on to Moscow Centre an avalanche of atomic secrets. She became one of the most successful Soviet agents in Britain with the longest record of service. She was finally exposed at the age of eighty-nine, in 1999, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “I’ve been rather a naughty girl,” she said, when her cover was finally blown, which endeared her to some. But there was nothing charming about what she had done. Melita Norwood is seen today as having had a greater impact on the Cold War than any other Soviet agent active in Britain.
Although there may have been relatively few officers working for MI5 when Harker made his disastrous decision not to follow up on Mona Maund’s reports on Norwood, and, yes, it was not possible for MI5 to pursue every lead produced by the Glading case, this was the most important. MI5’s ability to prevent espionage depended on both the intelligence it received and the quality of its analysis. In this instance, the two were woefully mismatched. Jasper Harker’s failure to exploit this intelligence about Melita Norwood was a blunder of Homeric proportions. The greatest intelligence coup to come from M’s most persistent agent ultimately came to nothing.