Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

added and taken off the recording device, or ‘pooled’, thus eliminating the hitherto tedious task of GPO workers having to switch them manually.²⁸

      The first agent identified by MI5 as acting as a Comintern courier was Percy Glading, a member of the British Communist Party who in 1925 travelled to India under the alias ‘R. Cochrane’. Glading’s covert trip was revealed to MI5 and IPI by intercepted communications through a HOW. Over the following years he also used his secretary, a pretty twenty-five-year-old blonde named Olga Gray, to deliver funds to communists in India. However, unknown to Glading or anyone else in the British Communist Party, Olga Gray was in reality an undercover MI5 agent, who had been recruited and planted into the British Communist Party in 1931 by MI5’s legendary agent runner, Maxwell Knight, one of MI5’s most successful counter-espionage officers in the twentieth century. After retiring from MI5 as a spymaster in 1946, Knight embarked on a highly successful broadcasting career, becoming known as ‘Uncle Max’, a colourful presenter of children’s radio nature programmes. According to a later report on Knight’s agent-running section, ‘M Section’, the six-year penetration of Gray into the British Communist Party had been so successful that she had achieved ‘the enviable position where an agent becomes a piece of furniture, so to speak: that is, when persons visiting an office do not consciously notice whether the agent is there or not’.²⁹

      Olga Gray’s courier mission in 1935 to India for the British Communist Party provided MI5 and IPI with an extraordinary insight into how Comintern agents were run, and also revealed the identities of communist agents in India. However, her trip was an extremely delicate task for MI5, which had to go to remarkable lengths not to blow her cover. As Maxwell Knight later recalled, it was so badly organised by the British Communist Party that without MI5’s help it is unlikely that she would ever have got to India. Knight helped her devise a suitable cover story – that she was a prostitute – without making it appear that she had received help in concocting it. He also feared that if her passport and other paperwork for travel to India were approved too quickly, her superiors in the Communist Party might become suspicious. Her MI5 handlers therefore ensured that it was delayed sufficiently not to arouse any suspicion. After her trip, Gray revealed to MI5 the existence of a substantial Soviet espionage network operating in Britain. Its ringleader was none other than Percy Glading, and it was based at the Woolwich Arsenal in London, where Glading worked as a mechanic, and where he and his agents gained access to sensitive information on British armaments.

      The strain of acting as a double agent began to take a toll on Olga Gray – she appears to have had at least one nervous breakdown – so in 1937 MI5 decided to wind up the Soviet network at the Woolwich Arsenal and have its agents arrested. Gray testified at Glading’s trial for espionage at the Old Bailey in February 1938, appearing anonymously behind a screen as ‘Miss X’. Her evidence helped to convict him of spying for Soviet intelligence, for which he was imprisoned for six years. The trial judge congratulated her for her ‘extraordinary courage’ and ‘great service to her country’. Soon afterwards, she left for Canada under a new name.³⁰

      As well as providing intelligence on Soviet networks in India and Britain, Olga Gray’s position in the British Communist Party – unassuming but central – provided her, and thus MI5, with unique access to codes used by the Party to send radio messages to Comintern networks in Europe. Her information helped the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), Britain’s first official peacetime SIGINT agency, established in 1921, to break radio traffic messages passing between the headquarters of the Comintern in Moscow and its numerous representatives abroad, in countries as far apart as China, Austria and the United States. GC&CS gave this radio traffic the codename ‘Mask’. The Mask traffic revealed to the British government that Moscow provided secret subsidies to the British Communist Party and also to its newspaper, the Daily Worker. In January 1935 Mask revealed the existence of a secret radio transmitter, based in Wimbledon, in south-west London, which was being operated by a member of the British Communist Party’s underground cell to send messages to Moscow. MI5 closely monitored the activities of those agents identified.³¹

      MI5 and IPI identified other Comintern couriers, such as British Communist Party member George Allison, alias ‘Donald Campbell’, who, following a tip-off from MI5, was arrested in India in 1927 for travelling on a forged passport. However, the most important direct involvement of British intelligence in the empire at this time was with the so-called ‘Meerut conspiracy case’, a long-drawn-out trial that opened in India in 1929. Although their involvement was not publicised, both MI5 and IPI provided crucial evidence of the Comintern’s attempts to use communist agents in India to incite labour unrest there. In August 1929 the Deputy Director of MI5, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, led a delegation of British officials to India to provide evidence at the trial and to testify to the authenticity of the intercepted documents – thus overcoming any objections the defence counsel might raise that the documents were unreliable ‘hearsay’ evidence, and should be inadmissible. The delegation, travelling First Class by ship and train, included five London Metropolitan Police Special Branch officers, as well as the head of the special censor section of the GPO, Frederick Booth, and the official in charge of the team in the GPO that actually photographed the documents, H. Burgess. They liaised closely with Sir David Petrie at the IB in Delhi, and judging from existing IPI records, it also appears that GC&CS provided intercepted communications passing between Moscow and a communist cell operating in India.³²

      After providing evidence at the Meerut trial, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson embarked on an enormous worldwide tour, visiting and liaising with security officials from Hong Kong to New York. Holt-Wilson’s extensive trip was all the more remarkable given that it was made in an age before long-distance air travel, when the journey from Britain to India took weeks. More than any other MI5 officer in the first half of the twentieth century, Holt-Wilson – nicknamed ‘Holy Willy’ on account of his strong Anglican beliefs and because he was a rector’s son – was responsible for promoting the idea that MI5 was an imperial agency. In fact, he often referred to it as the ‘Imperial Security Service’. Holt-Wilson returned to India in 1933, at the conclusion of the Meerut trial, which led to the prosecution of a number of communist agents. Upon his return to London the next year he gave a closed lecture to the London Special Branch, at which he emphasised MI5’s imperial responsibilities:

      Our Security Service is more than national; it is Imperial. We have official agencies cooperating with us, under the direct instructions of the Dominions and Colonial Offices and the supervision of local Governors, and their chiefs of police, for enforcing security laws in every British Community overseas.

      These all act under our guidance for security duties. It is our duty to advise them, when necessary, on all security measures necessary for defence and civil purposes; and to exchange information regarding the movement within the Empire of individuals who are likely to be hostile to its interests from a security point of view.³³

      Holt-Wilson went on another extensive overseas journey in 1938. The main purpose of this trip was to review local security and intelligence services in India and a number of other colonies and Dominions, and ensure that their security standards were adequate to meet the needs of the looming war with the Axis Powers. However, during the trip he himself displayed a remarkable disregard for basic security procedures – certainly far less care than he was attempting to instil in the colonial authorities he visited. In a series of soppy love letters that he sent by open, unsecured post back to his wife – a vicar’s daughter twenty years his junior – in England, Holt-Wilson described in detail the local intelligence officials he met, and also lamely attempted to glamorise for her benefit the nature of his ‘cloak and dagger’ work. If these letters, found in his personal papers now held in Cambridge, had been intercepted by the Axis Powers, they would have revealed a range of sensitive information on British imperial security and intelligence matters. The fact was that Holt-Wilson, a keen huntsman and one-time President of the Ski Club of Great Britain, was not one for modesty – which is surprising for someone whose career necessitated working in the shadows. In his own words he was ‘a champion shot’, and in the official description he penned for himself in Who’s Who, he stated that he was the Director-General of the ‘Imperial Security Intelligence Service’, and also accurately but pompously noted that he was ‘author of all pre-war