In these higgledy-piggledy papers the police found a blueprint of the Hawker Horsley single-engine torpedo bomber (an obsolete wooden machine that was no longer used by the RAF), pencil notes on the thoroughly up-to-date Avro Anson aircraft, information on aircraft performance and assessments of anti-aircraft equipment apparently prepared for anti-war propaganda. There were also receipts from Harry Pollitt of the CPGB, and lists of contacts. Vernon told HOPS that the Blackshirts, who were prosecuted for their burglary in September, were a blind to misdirect attention from the ‘Whitehall authorities’ who had instigated the burglary. This seems unlikely. The trial of Ford and his fascist associates had undoubted peculiarities: prosecuting and defence barristers seem to have worked in tandem; the defending counsel was rough in cross-examining Vernon about his communist sympathies; the prosecutor announced just before the jury retired that ‘certain documents’ had been discovered in the stolen stash – ‘I need not say anything more than that, but I think it is right to say that there was a discovery made of some importance that has not been referred to here.’ This mysterious and prejudicial remark may have helped the four burglars to avoid imprisonment: they received the lenient sentence of being bound over to keep the peace for twelve months.18
This was a lighter penalty than that imposed on Vernon when, in October, he was tried under the Official Secrets Act on a specimen charge of having retained official information (by keeping pencilled notes on bomb-dropping exercises), and another of not taking due care of documents. These charges were light, because the authorities had no wish to make a drama of the case. Denis Pritt was briefed to defend Vernon, who was fined a total of £50. This conviction enabled the RAE to dismiss him from the civil service, which was the chief purpose of prosecuting him. The Strange Case of Major Vernon, a pamphlet published by the National Council for Civil Liberties, argued that he had been the victim of injustice engineered by Whitehall mystery-men. In fact Vernon continued helping Weiss and Meredith in their aviation spy network until the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939.
The foe of armaments manufacturers and industrial preparedness Fenner Brockway, who spent his early manhood imprisoned in the dungeons of the Tower of London, Chester Castle and Lincoln Castle’s isolation wing, ended in the House of Lords; Vernon was elected as Labour MP for Dulwich in 1945; Hiss became Director of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs; but Percy Glading, England’s equivalent of Cremet, party activist and industrial spy, was condemned to penal servitude and spent his old age in the inglorious recesses of the London suburbs.
MI5 watch Percy Glading
Glading was born in Wanstead, Essex in 1893. His father was then a railway labourer. After a boyhood in Henniker Road, Stratford, he worked as a grinder in the Royal Ordnance Factories at Woolwich until 1918. In 1921 he was employed as an engineer by the Belfast shipyard of Harland & Wolff, but thereafter had spells of unemployment. He was known to MI5 by 1925, when he was best man at Harry Pollitt’s wedding and travelled as the earliest CPGB courier to India using the alias of Cochrane. There he met the activists who later figured in the Meerut conspiracy trial of 1929, which centred on plans to start Comintern operations in India. After his return, Glading rejoined Woolwich as an examiner in the naval ordnance department. Research, design and testing remained significant functions there, although Woolwich’s limited productive capacity made it obsolete as a national arsenal according to the new doctrines of total wartime mobilization. His dismissal from Woolwich in 1928, on account of his revolutionary beliefs, was the occasion for the CPGB to issue an indignant manifesto denouncing capitalist exploitation and praising class war.19
Sabotage was one of Moscow’s interests. The Soviets’ paranoia about foreign saboteurs was partly a projection of their own plans for their western enemies. In 1924 a company called Russian Oil Products Ltd was registered in London. All of its shareholders were Russian subjects. Ostensibly it was to act as a trading organization, but it collected technical, scientific and commercial intelligence for Moscow: in one case in 1932 an employee of ROP’s Bristol branch – Iosif Wolfovich Volodarsky using the alias of Olsen – posed as a Romanian journalist and was fined for offering bribes to staff at Shell Mex House in the Strand in return for confidential data on the petroleum business. (Volodarsky subsequently moved to Canada, where he was known as Armand Feldman, and helped Soviet illegals to obtain false Canadian passports.) The activities of ROP were monitored by MI5 and Special Branch. By 1930 ROP had a network of thirty-three offices, installations and depots which were being operated at an estimated loss of up to £390,000 a year. MI5 feared that if Britain went to war with the Soviet Union, ROP lorry tankers filled with petrol would be detonated at fuel storage depots and munitions works. It was also apprehensive that ROP ship tankers might be exploded at British ports.
ROP laundered money as well as preparing for large-scale sabotage. After the ARCOS raid in 1927, Moscow’s cash subsidies for communist organizations in Britain had to be funnelled through the London branch of the Moscow Narodny Bank. They were then distributed by Thomas Quelch, whose father had provided work-space in his Clerkenwell print-shop for Lenin during the latter’s exile in London, and by Frank Priestley; both men were employed by the Soviets’ London-based trading company known as Centrosoyus (the Central Union of Consumers’ Co-operative Societies). Quelch and Priestley were dismissed from Centrosoyus in 1928 as scapegoats when the money-laundering was under investigation by Special Branch, but soon had new jobs at ROP. MI5 believed that from 1929 cash from Moscow was collected from Soviet oil tankers, after they had docked at ROP port storage depots, by Richard (‘Dick’) Beech. Beech’s cash haul was then distributed by Priestley, Quelch and a Scotsman, Alec Squair. (Before joining ROP, Beech had been twice torpedoed in the Atlantic, fought with the Red Army in the Russian civil war, served as a Soviet spy-saboteur in Finland and as a Comintern courier, and worked at ARCOS. His father-in-law was James Connolly, the Irish republican executed in 1916.)20
Glading, after his dismissal from Woolwich, became an employee of ROP. He was one of about 1,000 staff, of whom approximately one-third were (like him) members of CPGB. He combined the three leading traits that Moscow thought promising in a potential undercover source: idealism, vanity and greed. In 1929 he was elected to the London party’s Politburo and went to Moscow to study at the Lenin School under the alias of James Brownlie. After returning to London in 1930, he was given a cover job in the CPGB’s colonial department. There was nothing stealthy about his allegiance. He became an officer in the League against Imperialism, alongside Brockway, and an activist in the Anti-War Movement. Installed in offices on the top floor of 23 Great Ormond Street, he served as a conduit between ROP and the CPGB, and worked for the illegals as a cut-out obtaining military intelligence which was funnelled to Moscow.
In 1933 Eric Holt-Wilson, by now Kell’s Deputy Director at MI5, prepared a memorandum on ‘Seditious and Revolutionary Incitements to Public Violence’ about such insidious threats as ROP. ‘Not all of our enemies work in the light of day. Those … most dangerous to our public security and peace today are doing evil work in the dark.’ It exasperated him that these hidden adversaries, while working to break the English legal system, exploited English laws for their personal protection. ‘In this free land of ours in recent years we have been permitting the growth of the most sinister organisation for evil the world has ever seen. An organisation with … one object and one only: the forcible destruction, at first by secret methods and then by open methods, of our liberty, our constitution, our laws, our religion and our heritage.’ The conspirators’ intent was, Holt-Wilson warned, ‘that we shall be subjected to the tyranny of a powerful alien body which has never enjoyed our freedom or any freedom, and is determined that we shall enjoy it no longer’.21
One such plotter was Glading, who was kept under observation. On a Sunday evening in July 1936 he was seen loitering at Cambridge Circus on the edge of Soho until he was joined by Charles Moody. Part of MI5’
s file on Moody was burnt when a German bomb set fire to the Service’s archives stored in Wormwood Scrubs prison, so his significance can only be surmised. He had been dismissed in 1920 from a job with Richmond Council as a communist. After his reinstatement, he drove a lorry emptying rubbish bins, was communist nominee to the Trades Union Congress in 1927 and sat on the executive committee of the CPGB in 1930, but thereafter went undercover. SIS reported to MI5 in 1933 that Moody was a CPGB member charged with weakening the armed forces in south-east England. He had five or six party members answerable to him, SIS believed, and had been provided with a car and money for petrol to make night-time visits to Chatham, Aldershot, Portsmouth and Southampton, where he threw subversive literature over barracks walls.
The purpose of Glading’s meeting with Moody is unknown. They went to a Charing Cross Road newsreel cinema, where they probably heard reports about the deadlock between Britain, France, Italy, Russia and Turkey at the Montreux naval conference on access to the Black Sea, and about a speech at Southampton by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Samuel Hoare, on the urgent need for rearmament. ‘The Bolsheviks in Russia have embarked upon an armament programme in comparison with which ours is a mere bagatelle,’ declared Hoare. ‘As our life depends upon free passage through the seven seas, the Fleet must be strong enough to go anywhere.’ Hoare deplored socialist leaders voting against rearmament: ‘this miserable, this inconsequent, this improvident attitude shows how far the Labour Party has drifted from reality’. From the cinema Glading and Moody repaired to a public house in Glasshouse Street, no doubt to discuss the implicit threats to Soviet security being revealed at Montreux and Southampton.22
Glading prospered during the 1930s, as many people living in south-east England did. He bought a salubrious, newly built house in Warwick Avenue, South Harrow. There were Crittall windows, front and back gardens, instalment-plan furniture, a neat porch. It was part of a development of semi-detached houses for quiet, respectable bourgeois, which had been built when the Piccadilly railway extension to South Harrow brought the area within commuting distance of central London in 1932. Although Glading is usually seen as an ideologue, the comforts of his existence suggest that he prospered from his Moscow connections. The comment by Sir Anthony Hawke, the judge at his trial, that he had been money-motivated may not be completely awry.
At this point the duo of Maxwell Knight and Olga Gray must be introduced. Knight was a former sports master at a preparatory school, a former jazz clarinettist, an ex-member of the British Fascists and failed manager of a hotel on Exmoor. The discovery by Special Branch that Knight, whom it employed, was also being used by SIS to run a small network of domestic informants had resulted in an inter-departmental storm and the repromulgation in 1931 of the rule that all domestic intelligence work was reserved for MI5 and must not be encroached upon by SIS. Knight was a Pied Piper figure who exerted almost mesmeric charm over wild creatures (he lived in a small flat with a fascist bride named Gwladys, a mongoose named Rikkitikki, a sherry-drinking bush baby named Pookie and a wheezing bulldog named Fattie). He studied the kinks of human nature with the keenness that he afforded to the responses of wild animals. After 1931 he became MI5’s best agent-runner. Unlike many of his colleagues, he had faith in women agents.
Olga Gray was a young secretary in the Automobile Association office in Birmingham. There was little remarkable about her, except that she had been treated with savagery by her long-dead father, who had been night-editor of the northern edition of the Daily Mail, and she had in consequence been an unruly schoolgirl. ‘I say, old thing, have you ever thought of working for the secret service?’ she was asked by a woman called Dolly Pyle while playing clock golf in Birmingham in 1931. ‘Gosh, Doll, that sounds jolly exciting, I’d love to,’ she replied without realizing that Pyle’s question was in earnest. She was contacted by Knight, whose preferred strategy for infiltrating a penetration agent into a subversive body was to put the agent in a place where the target body would make the first recruitment approach.23
Knight induced Gray to move to London, where she worked as a secretary, joined Ealing Ladies’ Hockey Club, attended meetings of Comintern front organizations, volunteered as a typist for the Friends of the Soviet Union, and waited. In time Knight’s strategy succeeded. Gray was approached to do paid secretarial work at the League against Imperialism, where she achieved the enviable position for a penetration agent, said Knight, of being as unremarkable as a piece of furniture. In 1934 she was sent on a mission to India carrying funds and instructions for Indian communists. Next year she became Pollitt’s personal secretary at CPGB headquarters, but found the strain of her double life too much and withdrew from secret work. She had the less nerve-racking job of advertising agency typist when in 1937 she telephoned Knight to report that Glading had asked her to arrange a safe-house for communist meetings. She took a flat in her own name at 82 Holland Road in April 1937. The rent of £100 a year was paid by the CPGB. Holland Road was a busy, dingy traffic artery running north from Kensington High Street. In a fit of depression Lord Loughborough had defenestrated himself from a bedroom there a few years earlier. Lord Lee of Fareham, a poor man until as Military Attaché in Washington he had married a New York banker’s daughter, had lived in the next street, which he called an ‘unromantic neighbourhood’.24
After Gray had been installed at 82 Holland Road, Glading brought a foreigner called ‘Mr Peters’ to vet her. ‘Mr Peters’ then arranged for a Viennese-born photographer and London talent scout for Moscow, Edith Tudor-Hart, to provide the flat with a Leica camera to photograph secret material. Gray reported that ‘Peters’ had a bumptious colleague, whom Glading disliked. Krivitsky, during his debriefing by Jane Archer at the Langham Hotel three years later, identified these two men as Theodore Maly and Arnold Deutsch.
Deutsch, who had been born in 1904, had a PhD in chemistry from the University of Vienna, but psychology was his primary interest. He was a votary of the Vienna sexologist and communist Wilhelm Reich, who sought to integrate Freudianism with Marxism and outraged Austrian Catholics by opening advisory clinics offering contraception, sexual enlightenment and erotic pleasure to Vienna’s proletariat. Deutsch believed that sexual and political repression were intertwined. He described himself at university as a practising Jew to mask the fact that communism was his true faith. He envisioned humanity as freed from capitalist exploitation and bourgeois sexual ethics, both of which were (he felt sure) historically doomed. In 1932 he left Vienna for Moscow, where he was assigned to the Comintern’s international department and trained as a secret agent.
Two years later, in 1934, Deutsch reached London as an illegal under the cover of an academic researching psychology at the University of London. He moved among radical theorists, and took Flat 7 in the newly opened Isokon Building in Hampstead’s Lawn Road with his wife Josefine, a Comintern-trained wireless operator. The architect of the Isokon Building, Wells Coates, was defiantly anti-bourgeois: ‘that idea of property – so much of this little garden is for you, m’dear, and this tweeny little wishy bit is for me, so there! – is dead, dead, dead. It’s that idea which makes peoples, nations, set up borders, and put troops on them, and forts too, and makes wars between nations.’ The building was designed as a prototype for high-quality proletarian dwellings, as pioneered in Vienna. Early tenants included the Bauhaus refugees Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer; Agatha Christie; Nicholas Monsarrat; and Henry Moore. Other residents were communists involved in espionage: Jürgen Kuczynski, who recruited the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs; Andrew Rothstein; and Eva Reckitt, Moscow’s money-launderer in London. For four years Deutsch worked as a London illegal under the aliases of STEPHAN, LANG, ARNOLD and above all OTTO. He looked people straight in the eye, made them feel important and was shrewdly humorous.25
Glading subsequently introduced Gray to ‘Mr and Mrs Stevens’. ‘Stevens’ was the alias of a member of the NKVD’s scientific and technical section, Mikhail Borovoy @ Abraham Hoffman @ Willy
Brandes, who had recently arrived in London using a false Canadian passport. His cover was that he was London agent of the Phantome Red Cosmetics Company of New York. He was accompanied by his wife Mary, who was supposedly a photographer for the Charak Furniture Company and was handy with the Leica camera which Edith Tudor-Hart had supplied. In London Maly and his wife (whom Moscow had coerced him to marry in order to restrain his drunken bouts), posing as Paul and Lydia Hardt, lived at 8 Wallace Court, 300 Marylebone Road. A few minutes’ walk away ‘Mr and Mrs Stevens’ occupied 31 Forset Court, 140 Edgware Road.26
Harry Hunter, Ottaway’s successor as head of MI5’s surveillance section B6, allotted his two best watchers, named Hutchie and Long, to follow and report on visitors to 82 Holland Road. Glading brought secret documents and blueprints, which had been filched overnight from Woolwich Arsenal, to be photographed in Holland Road before the originals were smuggled back into the arsenal next morning. He sometimes stored illicit material in a safe-house at Finchley belonging to Melita (‘Letty’) Norwood, the secretary to the director of research at the Euston headquarters of an armaments sector supplier called the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association.
Norwood had been born in Bournemouth in 1912, the daughter of an exiled Russian revolutionary called Sernis. She studied Latin and logic at the University of Southampton, and was politicized after visiting Heidelberg in the early 1930s. Living with her mother and sister at 173 Hendon Way (a house similar in style to Glading’s in Harrow), she went on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings with Hilary Nussbaum, a chemistry student at North London Polytechnic, to tout the Labour Leader and the communist Daily Worker outside Golders Green station. Nussbaum introduced her to Andrew Rothstein, who was then forming a scientific and technical intelligence network which had the Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association as one of its targets. In 1934, at a discussion of collective farms held by the Friends of the Soviet Union in Finchley, Melita Sernis approached Rothstein with an offer to supply secret material from BNFMRA. She and Nussbaum joined the CPGB in 1935, and married two months later after Nussbaum had changed his surname to Norwood.
Enemies Within Page 22
