page_title: Percy Glading
section_title: Recruitment by Moscow
hierarchical_section_title: Percy Glading / Later career / Recruitment by Moscow
caption_attribution_description: English: Letter of 20 December 1933 from the Postmaster general authorising the interception of Percy Glading's mail.
context_page_description: Percy Eded Glading was an English communist and a co-founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was also a trade union activist, an author, and from the mid-1930s he spied on Britain for the Soviet Union, for which activity he was convicted and imprisoned. Glading, who was born in Wanstead and grew up in East London, left school early to find work. Starting with menial jobs such as delivering milk, he found skilled work at the Stratford marshalling yards. Later he worked as an engineer at the Royal Arsenal, which was then the national production centre for military materiel. Glading spent World War I at the Arsenal, and after the war, chose to involve himself in working-class politics. He joined the forerunner of the CPGB, which, with his friend Harry Pollitt and others, he later founded.
  Glading was a national organiser for the CPGB and acted as its ambassador abroad, particularly to India. He was active in other groups, such as the National Minority Movement and when he married, his wife Elizabeth joined him in his political activity.
context_section_description: 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. 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" within the CPGB, MI5 infiltrated it with undercover agents. This was codenamed Operation MASK. From the late 1920s, the OGPU—and from 1934 its successor agency the NKVD—were active in Britain. Recent scholarship has suggested that their rezidentura were the single biggest threat to British security during the interwar period. As well as Glading's ring, Nigel West says that John Herbert King was "haemorrhaging" 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". Meanwhile, MI5 at full strength had a complement of only 26 agents at the beginning of 1938.
  MI5 believed that it was in the mid-1930s that Glading turned his attention from "domestic subversion to international espionage". The KGB's own files state that Ignaty Reif had recruited him by June 1934. He may have felt, as others did, that to be a "good communist" one should "carry out intelligence work which strengthened the USSR". Either way, the first indication that Glading was shifting his focus came in 1936 when he resigned from the CPGB. 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. 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. 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). The Soviets gave him the codename "GOT", and named their "G" Group—based in Copenhagen—after him. 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. 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: Glading's mission was to report on the gun's arrival at Woolwich and obtain an example.
  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. 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".
  In 1936, Glading was asked to vouchsafe for Theodore Maly and Arnold Deutsch, both "top class" Comintern recruiters. Maly was a Hungarian ex-priest and Deutsch an Austrian Communist, and they had been tasked with recruiting a Foreign Office civil servant, John Cairncross. Maly and Deutsch requested the assistance of James Klugmann—then living in Paris—later an important asset for Soviet Intelligence within the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who was acquainted with Cairncross. But Davenport-Hines says Klugmann refused to meet them, "until they had been e
caption: Letter of 20 December 1933 from the Postmaster General authorising the interception of Percy Glading's mail.
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