Percy Glading

First edition cover of Glading's 1931 India Under British Terror.

In 1925 Glading was the first member of the CPGB to travel to India[1]—under the pseudonym Robert Cochrane[1][note 4]—pushing the CPGB policy of promoting revolution in Britain's colonies.[36][note 5] Arriving on 30 January, he visited various cities[38] and met individuals who were later to be central to the Meerut Conspiracy Case.[1] This occurred in 1929 when a number of Indian men—all members of the Communist Party of India, then an illegal organisation—were arrested and tried for organising a railway strike there in 1925.[39] They were charged with conspiring to form a branch of the Comintern in India and overthrow the government. Robinson says Glading saw their trial as violating the men's "fundamental civil liberties"[40]—particularly as the group had to wait over two years to even be brought to trial—and that this made them "the final justification for the eventual overthrow of the ruling class" in India.[40] Glading had been arrested along with M. N. Roy (who has been described by William E. Duff as a "paid Comintern agitator") and fifty-six other men, but, there being insufficient evidence to hold him, was released. The Indians were less successful and had to wait three or four years before their case even came up.[34] It has been suggested that Roy both opposed Glading's expedition and had been irritated by it, as he believed that the CPGB had opened and read the letters they had promised to pass to Roy.[41]

Glading's original purpose in India, on behalf of the CPGB, was seeking to forge links with Roy as well as to study Indian working conditions specifically and more generally to promote the Communist Party.[22][note 6] Nigel West says Glading was unimpressed by the efforts of the Indian Communist Party to organise the workers.[42] Indian Political Intelligence noted that Glading had particularly focussed his attention on "shipyards, munitions works, dockyards and arsenals where strike committees or 'Red Cells' existed".[27][note 7] Rajani Palme Dutt, in Glading's 1970 obituary, reported that Glading was eventually "deported under the authority of the Viceroy".[2] Covert journeys to India such as these were common for the CPGB during this period. Pollitt was to persuade Olga Gray to make such a trip in 1934[43][note 8] to transfer funds from Glading to the Indian communist movement.[44] She left England on 11 June 1934 and met Glading in Paris to receive the money and instructions.[4] On her return, Glading obtained work for Gray as Pollitt's secretary.[45]

Based on his experiences in India, Glading wrote articles for The Labour Monthly and produced two books: India Under British Terror in 1931, and The Meerut Conspiracy Case two years later. The first he self-published; the CPGB published the second.[47] Glading left India on 10 April 1925.[38] He returned to Britain by way of Amsterdam, where, in July 1925, he presented the results of his studies to a communist conference that was taking place.[22] R.W. Robson later reported how

On Saturday morning I met two trains arriving from Flushing, expecting to intercept Glading and others who were to be present at the Conference, but as they did not arrive I again visited the contact address and discovered that Glading, Dutt and Uphadyaya were already there, having arrived by an early train and gone to the meeting place immediately.[20]

Also attending the conference were M. N. Roy and his wife, Henk Sneevliet, Gertrude Hessler, N. J. Uphadayaya, Clemens Dutt and R. W. Robson, also of the CPGB.[48] Glading reported that "no Indian Communist groups existed at all",[38] and that those he had met "were useless".[20] Roy disputed this. He claimed that Glading had not encountered any Indian communists because they were unsure whether to make themselves known to him.[49] Conversely, Glading believed he had found a communications problem between Indian communists and those aiding the movement from the outside.[50][note 9]

Letter of 20 December 1933 from the Postmaster General authorising the interception of Percy Glading's mail

In the post-World War One period, an upsurge in communist activity in British industry, particularly in armaments and munitions factories led to employers in these sectors beginning to lay off workers suspected of left-wing sympathies.[27] Although the CPGB had been of interest to the security services from its foundation, MI5's information on its activities had been confined to surveillance and technical data. When surveillance uncovered what they believed to be a "more sinister cadre"[72] within the CPGB, MI5 infiltrated it with undercover agents. From the late 1920s, the OGPU—and from 1934 its successor agency the NKVD—were active in Britain.[73] Recent scholarship has suggested that their rezidentura were the single biggest threat to British security during the interwar period.[74] As well as Glading's ring, Nigel West says that John Herbert King was "haemorrhaging"[73] information from the Foreign and Colonial Office. Farnborough RAF base had been penetrated by its own spy network, and Kim Philby and Donald Maclean had been recruited. London, comments West, "had become a veritable centre of Soviet espionage".[73] Meanwhile, MI5 at full strength had a complement of only 26 agents at the beginning of 1938.[75]

MI5 believed that it was in the mid-1930s that Glading turned his attention from "domestic subversion to international espionage".[76] The KGB's own files state that Ignaty Reif had recruited him by June 1934.[77] He may have felt, as others did, that to be a "good communist" one should "carry out intelligence work which strengthened the USSR".[78] Either way, the first indication that Glading was shifting his focus came in 1936 when he resigned from the CPGB.[note 16] Like Glading, all his agents were either present or ex-members of the CPGB. Unlike most Soviet agents, Glading did not have a cover job; nor did he organise a cover story.[79] John Curry, in the official history of MI5, notes that Glading—indeed, all Soviet CPGB recruits—effectively ceased all party activity from the point that they were recruited.[80] These were effectively "fake resignations" (and, indeed, were described as such later by Pollitt himself, who was almost certainly aware of Glading's espionage career).[6] The Soviets gave him the codename "GOT", and named their "G" Group—based in Copenhagen—after him.[81] Historian David Burke says it seems likely that the Woolwich spy ring was created by the NKVD to gain possession of a top-secret large naval gun that the Arsenal was believed to be researching.[82] Glading had been informed of these plans—of which only five copies were ever made—at some time in 1935 by contacts in the War Office and Admiralty:[note 17] Glading's mission was to report on the gun's arrival at Woolwich and obtain an example.[84][note 18]

Glading was the subject of frequent covert surveillance operations. On one such occasion in July 1936, he was observed at Cambridge Circus meeting up with Charles Moody.[note 19] Much of Glading's operation at this time would have been concerned with the on-going deadlock at the Montreux Convention, at which Britain, France, Italy and the Soviet Union disputed their proposed access to the Black Sea with Turkey. At the same time, a faction within the government led by Sir Samuel Hoare was urging for swift British re-armament, and claiming, Hoare said, that Russian re-armament made the Royal Navy look a "mere bagatelle". Doubtless, says Davenport-Hines, Glading and Moody went to a pub, having much to discuss in the "implicit threats to Soviet security being revealed at Montreux and Southampton".[86]

In 1936, Glading was asked to vouchsafe for Theodore Maly and Arnold Deutsch,[88] both "top class"[89] Comintern recruiters.[90] Maly was a Hungarian ex-priest and Deutsch an Austrian Communist,[91] and they had been tasked with recruiting a Foreign Office civil servant, John Cairncross.[92] Maly and Deutsch requested the assistance of James Klugmann[note 20]—then living in Paris—later an important asset for Soviet Intelligence within the Special Operations Executive (SOE)[88] who was acquainted with Cairncross. But Davenport-Hines says Klugmann refused to meet them, "until they had been endorsed by a CPGB member whom he trusted".[92] That man was Glading, who travelled to Paris and vouched for the KGB men; Cairncross was soon recruited.[92]

Glading maintained a network of contacts from when he worked at the Arsenal,[80] such as George Whomack (an assistant foreman of the Works),[94] Charles Munday (an assistant chemist at the Royal Arsenal),[26] and Albert Williams (an examiner in the Inspectorate of Armaments Department),[95][note 21] all of whom later provided him with secret material and blueprints.[97] Glading's group was one of two active in England in the early 1930s; little is known of the other but it is thought to have been associated—as Glading himself had been—around the Russian Oil Products front.[98]

In January 1937, after Maly's recall, Glading was summoned to meet Maly's successor as controller of the Royal Arsenal ring. This was Mikhail Borovoy, a member of the OGPU's Technical Section, who was travelling with his wife under false Canadian passports (as Willy and Mary Brandes) and had arrived in London in October 1936. They lived in Forset Court off the Edgware Road.[99] With Maly the Soviets' resident spy, the Brandes' were to act independently of the rezidentura and deal specifically with the Soviets' special assets: the Cambridge (and, to a lesser extent, Oxford) spy ring.[97] To Glading they went under the names "Mr and Mrs Stevens", but they only stayed in London a few weeks before making their way to Paris. In that time, Glading met them at Forset Court. This in itself was a "highly unusual step" according to William Duff but essential in assessing the material Glading expected to collect and the resources he needed to do so.[97][note 22] They also met Glading's agent within Royal Arsenal, George Whomack, and photographed some secret documents in the Holland Road safe house.[101] Glading and the Stevens also received blueprints from George Whomack in Hyde Park.[26] Mrs Stevens, who was travelling in the guise of a photographer for a furniture company, assisted with the photography during their stay.[102] It was immediately after Glading met the Brandes that he instructed Olga Gray to find a suitable flat or apartment (for example, he specified that there should be no porter to espy their comrades' comings and goings).[97][note 23] Glading's operation at Woolwich consisted of George Whomack smuggling out blueprints at the end of a late shift—past military police guards—on the day the document had been released to the arsenal.[82] Around this time Glading told Gray that he was "doing hardly any work for the party now, it is mostly for other people".[104]

The MI5 mole, Olga Gray did not discover his spying for several years.[22] In 1937, she assisted Glading to purchase the ground-floor flat at 82, Holland Road in West London.[106][note 24] MI5 likely enabled the sale.[97] The CPGB paid Glading the flat's annual £100 annual rent[43] (equivalent to £6,865 in 2021), and he paid Gray the monthly instalments to settle herself.[108] Glading also provided £60 to buy furniture on hire purchase, including a gateleg table for their large-scale photography work.[109] Three sets of keys were cut, of which Glading kept two.[108] During his later prosecution, Gray described some of the activities that went on. The team focussed on photography[110]—which Glading told her was of "a very secret nature"[109]—and began extensive testing (on local bus maps) with home-made cameras to make the end product as clear to their Russian recipients as possible.[110] Glading saw Gray as a valuable member of his team: in May 1937, he suggested she give up her job, take a professional photography course, and work for him in the flat full-time.[111] In return, he offered to make up her salary to five pounds a week;[112][note 25] Gray accepted, although she was worried that she knew far too little of photography to be of much use; Glading reassured her.[109] He also paid for her to take a holiday[94] which she took at the end of June.[109] Gray was expected to reside at the flat, and Glading promised her that he would only arrive by appointment. On 11 October 1937, Glading instructed Gray to replace the gateleg table with a refectory table[108] as the former had turned out not to be strong enough to bear the weight of the equipment. In the event, Glading bought one himself from Maple & Co. four days later, and it was installed on the 17th.[104]

During their tenure in London, the Stevens' were regular visitors to the flat. Mr Stevens was often deep in discussion with Glading while Mrs Stevens assisted Gray with the photography.[26] Gray also met other acquaintances of Glading's at the flat.[112] For example, in April that year, she met a Mr Peters, whom Glading told her had been "an Austrian who had served during the War in the Russian cavalry".[112] Peters was sometimes accompanied by a colleague; MI5 later identified them as Maly and Deutsch. Glading, Gray said later, found Deutsch an unpleasant individual; Glading told her that he had to tolerate Deutsch "for business reasons".[112] Deutsch had run the Soviet spy network in England since February 1934, and Glading began introducing other people to him for recruitment (in one case, a father, swiftly followed by his son).[116] Throughout this time the flat was under occasional observation by the secret service; Glading could spend hours in the flats and sometimes as little as twenty minutes, often bringing Gray with him and then leaving her there.[108]

John Curry's Official History of MI5 describes how Glading would receive various important blueprints which he would photograph[80] at Holland Road,[117] and return the same night.[80] Gray, who was responsible for the photography, was to take and develop the photographs, but not to print the negatives.[109] When the house was later searched, it was found to contain a camera, aircraft bomb plans, and even an anti-tank mine.[69] Glading did not live far from Holland Road himself, having purchased a "salubrious" new development in South Harrow.[1][note 26]

The right-hand door is number 82, Holland Road, W14; the ground floor flat was Glading and Gray's safe-house.

In November 1937 the Brandes[117] were recalled to Moscow, supposedly for family reasons.[note 27] By now, Glading was "running out of money and patience".[117][note 28] Glading told Gray on 17 January that he would be reduced to borrowing money to fund the operation, "if something did not happen within a week or so".[120] Until the Brandes' replacements arrived, Glading could not send any of the material which his agents had passed to him. As for money, Brandes had left him with the best part of £300 to finance operations before he left. But this had to run out at some point,[121] especially as Glading had been instructed to purchase gifts for all his agents and contacts, presumably as a means of keeping them in touch. This further irritated Glading. This was a large number of people, many of whom he already considered as little more than mercenaries. Glading had also been instructed to take at least one of them out for lunch—"a fine figure of a woman", he told Gray, "who had done her best to impress him with her beauty, without success"[122]—and whom he hated. Glading took such a dim view of her—and of his having to reward her—because, as he put it, she only did "about one job in five years".[122] She could not be ignored, however, as she "knew enough to be nasty".[122]

Gray later said Glading was becoming anxious; work seemed to have dried up after the naval gun affair.[94] On at least one occasion around this time, Gray said Glading arrived at the flat drunk and jittery. She also reported his detached attitude towards the recall—and presumed execution—of their controllers. "These blokes", Glading had observed to her, "live on a volcano the whole time they are over here, and when they do go home you do not know if they will ever come back".[84] Also, she said, Glading was keen to "continue to practice with the photographic apparatus to perfect their technique as he did not like being dependent on the vagaries of foreigners".[82] It was his lack of trust in Brandes' competence that led him to place so much reliance on Gray's newly-learned skills.[94]

Glading was probably attempting to keep the cell operating under his own aegis. Yet, aspects of Gray's report suggest that Glading was himself insufficiently trained to do such specialised work. His attempts to keep the cell made him a "liability", according to David Burke.[82] The reason he gave Gray for wanting to take the camera from Holland Road to South Harrow was that his own camera was the wrong size for the stand, and he had had to balance it "on a pile of books".[82][note 29]

Glading's operations within the Arsenal were extremely risky, due to its high-security status and his own impatience. He no longer had the Russians supporting him which also increased his chances of capture.[117] Robinson has described him as "somewhat of an over-zealous renegade who, at times, needed to be reined in by his superiors".[123] In November 1937, the CPGB Secretariat wrote to him asking him to reconsider his earlier resignation and re-join the party "of which you were such an active member". Burke suggests that, far from being a solicitous invitation to reconnect with old comrades in struggle, it was "little more than an instruction to sever connections with the 'secret' party and to re-join the 'open' party".[82]

By the end of 1937, a provisional case against Glading had been established. MI5 knew of his interest in the fourteen-inch heavy naval gun that was now in production at the Royal Arsenal, and that Whomack was removing the blueprints for it and bringing them to Holland Road for copying.[124] The copying was done by Stevens in 42 exposures on the evening of 21 October 1937,[102] and then the blueprint was returned over night[124] or the next day. Although the men could be searched by the Arsenal's security on entry, even the simple expedient of folding the plans between a folded-up newspaper was sufficient to avoid detection on at least one occasion.[79] Olga Gray, says Davenport-Hines, brewed a pot of tea for the group "while the films were hung in the bathroom to dry".[102] Gray was later able—by standing on the edge of the bath—to surreptitiously note down the serial numbers of the pieces of blueprint.[125] In November, Glading removed the camera to his own house in South Harrow. The following January, Glading informed Gray he had a major operation coming up. This was the copying, not just of a blueprint, but a 200-page manual. For this purpose, the security services laid on extra watchers at Glading's house, where the work was to take place. It began on 15 January; it must have been completed overnight, as the following day, Glading was observed taking a package to Charing Cross station. Meeting Charles Munday in the public lavatory, they adjourned to a nearby restaurant where the handover took place.[124]

The station yard at Charing Cross where Glading and Whomack were finally arrested, as seen in 2007

After a seven-year operation, Olga Gray set Glading up for arrest.[22] On 20 January he telephoned Gray at the safe house, asking her to meet him the next day.[120] Glading took Gray out to lunch at the Windsor Castle bar[95] to discuss a "significant" operation he had planned for 82 Holland Road that same night. He had brought a suitcase with him; she was to be at the safe house by 6:00 PM. William Duff quotes Glading as telling Gray that Glading had "got the stuff parked all over London"[124]—negatives of blueprints he kept at various locations[95]—and that he mentioned a pre-arranged meeting with someone that evening, again at Charing Cross. This was the cue the security services had been waiting for.[124] Gray telephoned MI5 and duly reported what Glading had told her.[120]

That evening, 21 January 1938, Glading was tailed to the station yard.[126] MI5 did not have the necessary statutory powers to perform arrests, and had briefed Special Branch to do so.[124] This took place almost immediately. Inspector Thomas Thompson (of the Special Branch) observed Glading receive an envelope which was later discovered to contain blueprints.[127] The suitcase in his possession was found to have a false bottom; it was thought that this was the means by which plans were smuggled out of the Arsenal.[128] The man he received it from—Albert Williams—was also arrested.[129] The envelope was found to contain a blueprint of some pressurized machinery under development at the Arsenal.[26] When the police searched Williams' flat, photographic equipment was found.[26] Whomack, who lived in East London, was arrested the following week.[69] Williams believed that their capture was mainly due to Glading's recklessness which led him to take insufficient precautions.[123]

Glading and Williams were taken to Scotland Yard, where the package they had been caught exchanging was opened in front of them: it contained four blueprints for a pressure-bar apparatus.[130] Glading and his companions were charged under Section 1, sub-section C of the 1911 Official Secrets Act.[22][131] A search of Glading's home revealed cameras, exposures of blueprints,[23] and a photographic film of 1925's Manual of Explosives textbook.[126] Also found was a diary. This—described by McKnight as "cryptic, though decipherable"[23]—revealed that Glading was "less than thorough"[23] in his tradecraft. One diary entry the secret service was unable to crack made a reference to Melita Sirnis, who later revealed British nuclear secrets to the Soviets.[23][note 30] Glading's diary listed not only her name, but her family home in Hampstead.[134] Another made reference to Edith Tudor-Hart.[114] Along with the explosives manual on film, they also found blueprints for a new aircraft design.[26] Although Glading had been careful to wear gloves whenever he used the camera at Holland Road, he had slipped up once when he changed a lightbulb: this was all that the police needed. Chief Inspector Birch of Scotland Yard found fingerprints with a microscope, as he later told the press.[126]

Imprisoned before trial, it is possible that he confessed his leading role in the organisation to a fellow inmate, although doubt has been cast on whether the Woolwich spy ring was ever big enough to warrant a strict hierarchy of its own.[123]

Olga Gray, although she was able to give her evidence at Glading's trial anonymously, had been "terrified" at the prospect. Hennessey and Thomas have argued that, at this point, "the reality of her role struck home: that she had effectively destroyed a man who had trusted her implicitly and of whom she had become extremely fond".[135][note 31]

The Woolwich spy ring has been used as an example of the patience of early Soviet spymasters in creating and providing for their networks.[97] The case showed, for example, how "Soviet intelligence did not possess a monopoly of 'sleepers' and 'moles' permeating targets",[44] and was a "significant, if limited" MI5 success.[149] The case exposed a concrete connection between the CPGB and Soviet espionage.[136] It had the negative consequence (for the service), however, of reinforcing the erroneous notion that the CPGB was the most dangerous security threat of the period,[149] and that members of the party were all willing tools of the NKVD.[150] According to Richard Thurlow, this meant that the idea that "Soviet moles and secret communists could be recruited into the governing class from British universities was not considered as a plausible possibility in the 1930s",[151] even though it allowed the recruitment of the Cambridge Five.[151] Thurlow has also described the Glading case as an example of how MI5 could, on the one hand, successfully penetrate a subversive organisation, and yet, on the other, still not understand the significance of the intelligence it received by doing so.[152] And Glading's was not to be the last case of its kind. Less than five years later, the CPGB's national organiser Dave Springhall was also found guilty of spying for the Soviets and received seven years' imprisonment.[153] Ultimately, Richard Thurlow says little is actually known of both the Glading Case in particular, and Soviet spy rings of the period more generally, for the simple reason that "so few files have been released".[154]

By the time of his arrest, Glading had been responsible for the recruitment of at least eight other spies, probably all within Woolwich. To this day, however, they are known only by their codenames, and it is impossible to identify the roles they played within Glading's group.[note 35] Although two of the three members arrested in the "Arsenal Spy Case" (as the papers dubbed it) were successfully prosecuted, Glading's handlers were never uncovered.[76][note 36] NKVD operations in London were temporarily curtailed, while agents, who may have been compromised by contact with Glading—such as Melita Sirnis—were "put on ice" until their safety could be ascertained.[75] Conversely, MI5 bizarrely failed to follow up some of the leads they had been given. On Sirnis, for example, the file that was started on her in 1938 "was soon closed without any effective consequence".[140] Tudor-Hart, too, even though clearly (although perhaps peripherally) involved in Glading's cell, faced no effective action from the secret service.[140] MI5's own report into the Glading affair was itself removed, copied and transmitted to Moscow in 1941 by the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt.[111][note 37] Soviet espionage in Britain remained a priority for the security services into the next decade, culminating with the revelations of Walter Krivitsky—a defector from Soviet Military Intelligence—in 1940.[157] Overall, the situation has been described as a "basically unequal contest".[158] Lord Robert Cecil compared it to "an imaginary soccer match between Manchester United and Corinthian Casuals",[159] such was the disparity between the Soviet and British security services in resources, professionalism and influence.[159] In the context of Cecil's analogy, MI5's success in breaking up Glading's cell has been compared to a home draw for the latter against the former.[44]