Soviet Spies and British Counter-Intelligence in the 1930s: Espionage in the Woolwich Arsenal and the Foreign Office Communications Department

Among the recently declassified security documents from the MI5 archive have been files about British counter-espionage against the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The collaboration between Russian archivists and western academics and journalists has produced official and unofficial accounts of such espionage from the Soviet perspective. The management of the spies Percy Glading and John Herbert King, and their discovery by British counter-espionage, were interesting examples of the contest between Soviet intelligence and the British security authorities, which highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of both sides in a basically unequal contest.