M (38 page)

In reality he was now an employee of the Secret Service Bureau, which had been set up in 1909 and would later evolve into what we know today as MI5 and MI6. I was able to tell Bill that Mr M was in fact William Melville, who had previously been Head of Scotland Yard's Special Branch in which capacity he had been described by the Times as ‘the most celebrated detective of the day'. The blank look on Bill's face told me that this was the first time he had heard the name. This was not really surprising, given the fact that Melville's role as ‘M', the Secret Service spymaster remained a closely guarded secret for the best part of a century, giving credence to the view that the most accomplished spies are those whose cover was never revealed or exposed during their lifetime.

The reason I had suggested that Bill and I meet in Russell Square was that it was just around the corner from an address that figured in a story Bill had partly alluded to when we spoke on the telephone two weeks earlier. During our brief chat, Bill had told me that his grandfather had been involved in tracking down an accomplished German spy in the First World War who had posed as a Russian. He and Mr M had ‘searched high and low' for the spy, and had eventually found him in a town ‘somewhere up north'. I asked Bill if there was anything else about this story he had first heard as a young boy that he could remember. When he told me that the spy had a partner who was a baker and that he had somehow managed to escape the firing squad, the case of Karl Muller immediately sprang to mind.

Nearly two years earlier while reading through a set of MI5 case files on German spies arrested during 1915, I had been particularly intrigued by Muller's. A Russian born German, Karl Muller had, before the war, run a successful marine engineering business in Antwerp. Following the occupation of the city by German troops he was recruited for espionage work, given a basic training and put on a boat with a party of Belgian refugees which left Rotterdam for England on 9th January 1915. Little did he know that the Rotterdam PO Box number he had been given by German Intelligence to send his reports back to was already known to the British Secret Service. They had been intercepting all mail sent to that address for some time and had been testing the notepaper for secret ink. Several of Muller's reports had been posted from Deptford, south London, and were intercepted shortly after his arrival. Copies in his case file suggest that he was particularly interested in troops movements; ‘today I visited Hampstead in London where the quarters of the Australian troops are. Saw 600-800 men, mostly recruits who will require training.'

According to Bill, Harry had been involved in a raid ‘on a dirty little room above a baker's shop in Deptford High Street', where a supply of secret ink had been discovered, along with envelopes and writing paper which matched those that had been addressed to the Rotterdam PO Box. The baker, Peter Hahn was arrested, but no clues as to the identity and whereabouts of the letter writer were found. Mr M, who seemed to relish the opportunity of going under cover, decided to move into a lodging house a few doors away, where he befriended a number of his fellow tenants. A man they described as a Russian had been seen in Hahn's company on several occasions of late and had been drinking with him in the local pub. Apparently the Russian had lodgings near Russell Square and had been particularly noted by the other drinkers for the lingering odour that seemed to accompany him. Armed with a description, Mr M had then scoured the lodging houses and hotels in the Russell Square area until he found his man.

Not long before Harry Fitzgerald's death he recited the story of the spy's capture for the last time to his grandson, on this occasion referring to a few details he had not told him as a child. Apparently Mr M had been put on Muller's trail by ‘a madam who ran a brothel in Bloomsbury'. The girls remembered Muller as a particularly ugly man with an unpleasant odour. Mr M had told Harry that a lot of useful information came out of brothels and after all, ‘didn't the bible tell how Joshua had a spy in Jericho who was a prostitute?'

Muller was ‘away on business' when Mr M, Harry and a posse of police officers came calling at his lodgings. As a result, information was obtained that led to his arrested in a Newcastle hotel room the following day. Four months later, in June 1915 he was tried, found guilty and condemned to be shot at the Tower of London. When his time came he apparently walked along the line of men who were about to shoot him, solemnly shaking each one by the hand, before his eyes were bound and he bravely faced the firing squad.

Had Muller managed to evade detection, his file makes clear that he would have represented a serious threat to British security; intelligent, well educated and personable he spoke English with only the faintest of accents and was highly convincing in his guise as a Russian travelling salesman.

With a new pot of tea on the way, Bill's story was drawing to a close. ‘Muller's trial and execution were never announced in the papers' Harry had told him. So far as his German controllers were concerned, Muller was still alive and at liberty. His death was followed by one of the first recorded ‘double-cross' operations employed by the Secret Service. Experts from the Bureau's Imitation Section perfected his handwriting and continued to file reports containing false intelligence to his chief in Rotterdam. The case officer writing the reports even managed to negotiate Muller a pay rise, which was duly paid into Secret Service funds along with the regular money orders made out to Karl Muller that arrived from Rotterdam each and every month. According to the case file, there was soon enough money for the Secret Service to purchase a much needed second hand motor car, which was “promptly christened ‘The Muller'”.

According to a 1919 list of MI5 staff recently released to the National Archives in Kew, Harry Fitzgerald left the Secret Service before the war ended, which I found puzzling. I wondered if Bill knew anything about the reasons surrounding his departure from the service. Bill gazed into the distance, almost as if he hadn't heard the question, and then shrugged his shoulders. “All he ever said was that things were never the same after Mr M died, when that was I haven't a clue”. On that point I was able to volunteer that Melville had died of kidney disease in a south London hospital on 1st February 1918. What precisely happened to the ‘Special Staff ' section of the Secret Service he had headed so successfully is still somewhat of a mystery. It seems clear, however, that its independence as an autonomous entity did not long outlive its creator. At some point during 1918 it became a victim of administrative re-organisation. Those hand picked men who worked under Melville, like Harry Fitzgerald, may well have coveted the idea of succeeding him, and no doubt greeted such developments with some despondence.

Harry Fitzgerald clearly felt that Melville's death changed things for the worse – he certainly didn't leave to improve his prospects. According to Bill, he went into the licensing trade, where he failed to make his mark. He died fifteen years after the end of the war, with no police pension and barely enough to his name to pay for his funeral.

Melville's legacy, however, lived on. His attitude to policing was nothing short of revolutionary in its day and it was he who passed on this attitude to the Secret Service. He was focussed to the point of ruthlessness, discreet to the point of secrecy. He had begun work in the days of the hansom cab and the street sweeper; he had seen the first motor cars and speaking tubes; he had come to recognise cryptography, fingerprinting and forensic analysis as the tools of his trade. He had also seen the potential of telephone tapping and mail interception and had determinedly lobbied the Government to create an effective counter-intelligence service that utilised these approaches. Today MI5, the organisation he strove to create, is a household name and one of the world's leading intelligence agencies.

Chapter 1: The Man From Kerry

1    Memoir of William Melville MVO MBE, 31 December 1917, (TNA KV1/8).

2    For this and other points about the village and its history, I am indebted to T.E. Stoakley's
Sneem: The Knot in the Ring,
Sneem Tourist Association 1986.

3    M From Sneem', by Dan Downing and Ferrie Galway, 1999 edition of
Sneem Parish News, incorporating Sneem Past and Present,
p.6.

4    Summarised from the diaries of Father John O'Sullivan, later Archdeacon of Kenmare, quoted in Stoakley, ibid.

5    Primary Valuation of Tenements 1852, Parish of Kilcrohane, village of Sneem; The pub/bakery is today known as the Blue Bull in South Square, Sneem. Years later it was named after a line in Synge's
Playboy in the Western World,
in Act III of which there is a reference to ‘my blue bull from Sneem'. See Stoakley, ibid.

6    Registration Office, Births, Deaths and Marriages, Southern Health Board, Killarney, County Kerry; Correspondence between the author and Father Patrick Murphy (Parish Priest, Sneem) 8 January 2004, 18 January 2004, 19 March 2004. On early documents and records, the family name appears as Melvin as opposed to Melville.

7    Sneem National School Roll Book. The school operated a six-day week and membership of the class was allowed by ability rather than age, which varied in this case between ten and eighteen.

8    
Police Review
26 September 1896.

9    The story about William and his disappearance at the railway station was first published in the 1999 edition of
Sneem Parish News, incorporating Sneem Past and Present,
p.6. It is from an interview with Val Drummond, a village elder who heard it from Winnie Hurley, whose family ran the Blue Bull when it was known as Hurley's. The Hurley family took over the pub from the Melville family in the 1920s and ran it until the 1950s.

10  London's population in 1871 was 3.89 million. B.R. Mitchell,
British Historical Statistics,
Cambridge University Press 1988, Ch.1 Table 6.

11  Register of E Division, No 310, Metropolitan Police.

12  Family Records Centre, 1871 census. RG 10/657 ff 6-11.

13  Gathorne Hardy's remark to Disraeli quoted p.81 of Christy Campbell,
Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria,
Harper Collins 2002.

14  Information on the police strike of 1872 from Martin Fido and Keith Skinner,
The Official Police Encyclopaedia,
Virgin Books 2000.

15  
The Times
25 September 1876 p.12 col. a (Lambeth).

16  
www.met.police.co.uk
.

17  
The Times
18 Dec 1877 p.11 col. c (Lambeth Police Court) and
The Times
8 January 1878 p.11 col. f (Surrey Sessions).

18  PhD dissertation by Lindsay Clutterbuck of Special Branch, ‘The Methodology of Police Operations', p.167.

19  
The Times
Monday 3 Feb 1879 p.12 col. a (Southwark).

20  This is Littlechild's version. It is one among many, all of them slightly contradictory but emerging at the same point: the admitted corruption of Detectives Meiklejohn and Druscovitch. Sir Basil Thomson's much later account (Thomson headed the CID before the Second World War) does not mention Littlechild at all. Basil Home Thomson, KCB,
The Story of Scotland Yard,
1935. John Littlechild,
Reminiscences of John George Littlechild,
Leadenhall Press, 1894.

21  S.H. Jeyes, concluded by F.D. How,
The Life of Sir Howard Vincent,
George Allen and Co. 1912.

22  Quoted in Jeyes, ibid.

23  Jeyes, ibid., p.65.

24  Jeyes, ibid.

25  Ibid., p.69.

26  Patrick McIntyre in
Reynolds' Newspaper,
14 April 1895.

27  George Dilnot,
The Story of Scotland Yard,
Geoffrey Bles, 1930.

28  
The Times
Thursday 8 Jan 1880, p.11 col. e.

29  File on Tarn's Department Store at the Southwark Archive.

30  
The Times
29 September 1880, and
The Times
22 October 1880 p.9 col. 9.

31  
The Times
21 January 1882, p.4 col. f.

32  
The Times
Tuesday 19 Dec 1882, p.5 col. f.

Chapter 2: Dynamite Campaign

1    Major Henri Le Caron (Thomas Miller Beach),
25 years in the Secret Service: Recollections of a Spy.
Reprinted from 10th edition of 1893 by EP Publishing Ltd, Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1974.

2    Sir Robert Anderson KCB,
The Lighter Side of My Official Life,
Hodder and Stoughton 1910.