In December 1918 the Daily Mail published a news item headlined ‘Woman Spy Story – Mr MacDonald’s Charge’. Speaking to an audience in Leicester, James Ramsay MacDonald, the city’s Labour MP for more than a decade, complained about ‘the spy system carried out by the Government on the Labour Party’. MacDonald revealed that he had been targeted by at least one agent provocateur during the recent Great War; ‘a woman’ who had ‘endeavoured to get him to send a message by her to Germany’.
This revelation prompted cries of ‘Shame!’ from those attending the meeting. Had he agreed to the mysterious woman’s suggestion and made contact with German officials, the famously pacifist MacDonald would’ve found himself in breach of Defence of the Realm regulations. This was a potentially fatal transgression during the war. MacDonald had already endured years of abuse and reputational harm, for his belief in disarmament and open diplomacy had aroused bitter hostility in wartime Britain. That night in Leicester, MacDonald went on to allege that ‘the Government had also examined private bank balances’, and he raised cheers when he insisted that ‘the guilty must pay the penalty.’
The guilty parties, however, were not to be found in David Lloyd George’s coalition government. For the ‘woman spy’ who had approached MacDonald in early 1917 had been carrying out an opportunistic and hitherto overlooked mission for the young MI5. There is no evidence that the government knew anything about it. At that time Britain’s Security Service was a somewhat ad hoc creation, driven less by cogent state policy than by the fancies of its senior personnel.
It is unclear which MI5 officer decided to target Ramsay MacDonald with a sting operation. But most of the story can be gleaned from MI5 files released to the National Archives in 2002; files which have gathered dust ever since, it would seem. Perhaps these files have remained unexamined because they are so daunting: 1,000 pages of esoteric and wrongly-sequenced information, conveyed in a dozen varieties of handwritten scrawl. Perhaps it is because they are the files on a woman spy; and woman spies, having gripped the public imagination for much of the twentieth century, have only recently been rediscovered by a twenty-first century audience.
Either way, we know that the Security Service considered the Ramsay MacDonald operation a bust. When pasting the Daily Mail article into one of her files, an MI5 officer noted dismissively that the woman in question, a ‘clever Pole’, had ‘acted as a kind of “Double-Cross” [but] we had doubts and misgivings as to her trustworthiness’. Moreover, while in London she had ‘stayed at the Carlton, and cost M.I. a nice little sum’ for ‘poor results’. So who was this controversial and disappointing provocateur?
She was Marie Brett Perring, one of the twentieth century’s most idiosyncratic practitioners of espionage. Although she gets the odd mention in spy books, her story has largely been ignored. She was obsessive, sometimes deluded, and a natural deceiver; perhaps she is ignored because her exploits were far from heroic. But to overlook Marie Brett Perring is to miss out; for her experiences, in both world wars and the years between, were the stuff of box-set spy drama. They also shed light on neglected aspects of twentieth century history.
Marie Brett Perring was born Marie Styczinska in Warsaw on 11 November 1886. Her English surname derived from her third marriage, although she was soon estranged from her unwanted husband, John Brett Perring. Her MI5 files, remarkably, date from 1916 to 1948. During this period she lived in various countries and acted as an agent for intelligence services in France, Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union; possibly also Poland, Japan and Greece. Moreover, she enjoyed numerous friendships with important members of diplomatic missions around Europe.
When not spying, Perring earned a living as an investigative journalist, before such a term existed. She tended to write articles on sensitive subjects such as military technology and secret policing, based on her own clandestine enquiries. This line of work made use of her exceptional ability to persuade, create networks, and gain access to confidential information. Yet what Perring really wanted was to play a leading role in the intelligence profession: to be a respected secret agent or spymaster. Ultimately, her ambition was unfulfilled. This was partly because she was unreliable; time and again Perring rendered herself difficult to trust. But it was also due to her fascination with intrigue and conspiracy, for which she showed an almost maniacal zeal. This zealotry, although considered forgivable in a male spy, did not recommend her. One British intelligence officer wrote scornfully of Perring’s ‘vivid imagination’ and ‘unholy passion’ for secret service.
By the late 1930s Perring’s addiction to intrigue was landing her in serious trouble. After souring her own reputation with such bizarre acts as sending a gift of flowers to Adolf Hitler, the Second World War saw her transgressing with abandon. Perring misused diplomatic communications with the United States to circumvent Britain’s censorship rules, intrigued with renegade factions of the exiled Polish government in London, and attempted to publish secret information about escape lines from occupied France to Britain. Finally interned under the Defence Regulations, she ended up spending much of the war in Wandsworth prison.
At the time of her attempted sting of Ramsay MacDonald, all this was to come. Perring took a strange, circuitous route to MI5’s door. Early in the First World War she began to work for the French Red Cross as a nurse. At some point she was hired by the French army for ‘contre-espionnage’ duties. In this capacity she visited Le Havre, where she was spotted as a potential asset by British military intelligence officers. In September 1916 they dispatched her to London for tasking.
Perring’s first mission for British intelligence was a flop – an abortive attempt to enter Poland and gain information on the mood among Polish army officers. Dismissed by Mansfield Cumming, the first chief of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, Perring found herself in Bern, where she resumed her close friendship with a senior diplomat at the German legation, Carl von Schubert.
Von Schubert, soon to be famous for allowing Lenin to travel by train through Germany to revolutionary Russia, tasked Perring with returning to Britain and befriending peace campaigners. Two, in particular, were of interest to the Germans as potential propaganda assets – Emily Hobhouse and James Ramsay MacDonald. But Perring’s return to London was noticed, and she was interviewed at the Carlton Hotel by legendary detective William Melville, formerly of Special Branch and now the head of MI5’s investigation section.
Perring explained to Melville the instructions given her by Carl von Schubert. She was to persuade Hobhouse and MacDonald, whom Schubert considered ‘important personages’, to make connections with German officials in order to amplify their calls for peace. Melville reacted coolly. ‘I do not see any harm in her seeing Miss Hobhouse or Ramsay MacDonald, if they would see her,’ he wrote in his report of the meeting. ‘I told her that both those persons were regarded as mere cranks in this country.’ Thus Perring’s deployment as an agent provocateur began, almost out of idle curiosity on the part of MI5; for if either Hobhouse or MacDonald were to take the bait and establish provable links with Imperial Germany, it might make them liable to prosecution, and so cause irreparable damage to Britain’s peace movement.
In a series of meetings at the Carlton, Perring kept Melville informed of her progress. Her campaign met with mixed fortunes. On receiving a letter in which Perring presented herself as a pacifist Pole with useful contacts in Germany, Emily Hobhouse gushingly invited her to stay in Cornwall. (‘As Miss Hobhouse is an entire stranger to Mrs Perring, her letter to the latter does not seem very clever,’ Melville reported pithily.) But beyond gaining an introduction to Ramsay MacDonald and other advocates of peace, Perring’s stay in Cornwall didn’t amount to much, and her acquaintance with Hobhouse fizzled out.
As for Ramsay MacDonald, he later claimed to have been wise to Perring’s game from the start. When Perring contacted him, he invited her to his home at 9 Howitt Road in London’s Belsize Park. According to Perring, this meeting was a success. She reported to Melville that MacDonald had expressed interest in communicating secretly with German politicians, including Germany’s chancellor, Theobald Bethmann Hollweg. She also claimed that MacDonald ‘evidently wishes to use me as his special messenger’, and she showed Melville a secret compartment in her handbag in which she proposed to carry MacDonald’s missives to Germany. But at subsequent meetings, MacDonald behaved more cautiously. He told Perring that she had been seen out on the town with British army officers, which didn’t look right. He also gave her flavourless chickenfeed to provide to her purported contacts in Berlin; to remind Bethmann Hollweg, for example, of how he and MacDonald had once chatted about German music at a Reichstag banquet.
MI5’s interest in Perring, and in stinging Ramsay MacDonald, dropped sharply. A few months later, with Perring back in Europe, an MI5 officer noted that the failed sting operation had mostly demonstrated that MacDonald himself had ‘a secret service at his disposal of considerable efficiency’. Desperate to become a major player in espionage, over the next three decades Perring would throw herself repeatedly at MI5, not to mention the Soviet OGPU, Canada’s RCMP and other intelligence services: ‘My fervent wish is to serve,’ she wrote to MI5 in 1940; ‘I know how to obey.’ But her feverish investigations into secret matters met with increasing scepticism. When interviewed in the late 1930s by Special Branch, a female friend of Perring’s opined that she was ‘the most remarkable woman I know’. But Major Maxwell Knight, who appreciated the value of woman agents more than most MI5 officers, and himself no stranger to eccentricity, had almost the last say in her file: ‘a most unreliable woman in every way’.
J Boulter is the author of First Class Comrades: The Stasi in the Cold War, 1945-61