WHEN I RETURNED to work in April 1971 there had been a few changes. Much less attention was being paid to what might have gone on at the universities in the 1930s and ’40s. The effort had been redirected onto the re-examination of specific cases and the pursuit of any information which was still unexplored and might produce an undiscovered spy. The Director of Counter-espionage when I arrived back at work was Michael Hanley, a large, gruff, red-faced man, who had a reputation for being abrupt and having a fierce temper. This was perhaps not surprising considering that he had himself fallen prey to the paranoia of the 1960s and ’70s and had been investigated as a possible KGB mole because he appeared to fit the description produced by a defector from the Eastern bloc. I was surprised to be called into his office to be to welcomed back to work and to the counter-espionage branch. His kindly interest was unusual in those days when personal contact between directors and junior staff was rare. He moved on very shortly afterwards to become Deputy Director-General and then in 1972, Director-General. It was he who when Director-General finally managed to get Peter Wright away from the counter-espionage field, and ultimately out of the Service altogether.
My section consisted, as usual, of a number of male officers supported by a collection of female assistant officers. I worked in an office with two men who had been friends in the Colonial Service. They fell firmly into the cynical camp and while they were together, not a great deal of useful work was done. They spent a lot of time in the office telling jokes about their colonial experiences, and took extremely long lunch hours. It was routine for them to return from lunch at about four in the afternoon (they had some ‘arrangement’ with a pub up the road), and then we all settled down to afternoon tea laced with whisky accompanied by peppermints in case the boss called them to a meeting. He rarely did and the days passed quite peacefully, with them occasionally going out to interview someone and me sitting at my desk writing summaries of files and sorting out papers. I used to go home to my baby daughter some evenings rather the worse for wear if the whisky tea had been too well laced. I suppose there was some plan in what we were doing and some strategic direction somewhere, but I certainly did not know what it was – perhaps I was too lowly to be told.
In and out of all this strode the extraordinary figure of Peter Wright. I believe he had at one time been regarded as an effective counter-espionage operator, but by the time I knew him well he was quite clearly a man with an obsession and was regarded by many of the newer arrivals in the Service and even by some of the older hands as quite mad and certainly dangerous. He had briefly been made the Assistant Director of the section I was working in, but according to rumour, he had been so bad at giving any direction or leadership that he had been ‘promoted’ to be a special adviser to the Director.
Counter-espionage work is not a glamorous business, however it has been presented by the spy-story writers. It is hard work. It is all about painstaking and rigorous analysis, the detailed following up of snippets of information and perseverance in the face of disappointment. A bit of luck helps of course. But it is not the quick jumping to conclusions and the twisting of the facts to meet the theory which Peter Wright went in for in those days. He was in fact by then everything which a counter-espionage officer should not be. He was self-important, he had an over-developed imagination and an obsessive personality which had turned to paranoia. And above all he was lazy. By this time his theories of high-level penetration of MI5, which had resulted in his ruthless pursuit of the former Director-General Roger Hollis, were very largely discredited. But he had established a very comfortable corner for himself.
It is hard to explain why he was allowed to stay for so long. As Special Adviser he had the right to pick up anything he liked and drop it when he tired of it. He used to wander around, finding out what everyone was doing, taking cases off people, going off and doing interviews which he never wrote up, and then moving on to something else, while refusing to release files for others to work on. He always implied that he knew more about everything than anyone else, but that what he knew was so secret that he could not possibly tell you what it was. That gave him the right to disagree with everything anyone else thought without challenge. He spent a lot of his time in those days leaning on the bar in the Great Marlborough Street office talking and talking endlessly to whoever would talk to him. That bar and bars in other office premises became the subject of earnest and long-running debate later after excessive drinking was focused on as a major threat to security. The debate was between those who thought in-house bars were inappropriate and those who thought it was better for staff to be encouraged to meet and socialise securely on office premises, where any extreme behaviour would be noticed, rather than in nearby pubs.
Everything with Peter Wright was expressed in nods and winks, designed to make him seem important and all-knowing. I remember sitting through one or two of the lectures he gave occasionally to the newer staff on the subject of the KGB. He was not a good lecturer – he had a monotonous voice and a lisp. He spoke with great conviction about the KGB, about their cunning, their operational effectiveness and their successes. But though I was quite junior, I found him completely unconvincing. We called him the ‘KGB Illegal’, because, with his appearance and his lisp we could imagine that he was really a KGB officer himself, living under a false identity, perhaps like Gordon Lonsdale, the ‘Canadian businessman’ who ran the Portland spy ring in the ’60s and was really the KGB officer, Molody. Maybe, we thought, he had been sent into MI5 to confuse everyone. It was all a joke of course, but as things turned out it was strangely prophetic. Though he did not turn out to be a spy, he caused almost as much trouble then and later as if he had been.
I worked in this section for more than three years and after some time I was asked to accompany the officer I was working with when he went out to do interviews. By then we knew a great deal about Cambridge in the 1930s, but we still did not know exactly how the recruitments of the Ring of Five were done – who put who in touch with whom – and we were still trying to satisfy ourselves that there were no more university-recruited spies who had not yet been discovered. It was all a long time ago by then of course. Everyone relevant was getting old and whatever they once knew they had conveniently forgotten and were not prepared to try to remember and there was no sanction we could apply to make them change their mind.
We went to Cambridge one day to interview a don who had tutored Philby and had, we thought, played some part, exactly what is probably still not known, in putting him in touch with the Russians. It was a strange occasion. The old man, sitting in a high-backed chair in a dark old college room, was immensely courteous and gave us tea from china cups, but not surprisingly he had no interest in casting his mind back to the 1930s in order to help us and volunteered nothing. He must have wondered why it had taken us so long to come.
It was during this period that my colleague and I re-interviewed John Cairncross, who wrote about the experience in his autobiography, The Enigma Spy. He had been exposed as a spy for the KGB by Anthony Blunt and had been interviewed by, amongst others, Peter Wright, to whom he had made some limited admissions. At the time we re-interviewed him he was working for the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome and was allowed entry into this country only if he made himself available for interview by us. We met him in the evenings after his day’s work, in some gloomy rooms in the old Ministry of Defence, which were kept specifically for our use. I remember him as a thin, grey, stooping figure, coming in out of a dark night, always wearing a mackintosh. He describes me in his book as ‘a personable young lady in trousers’.
Those interviews were part of the push to establish the whole truth of the pre-war KGB university recruitments. Cairncross seemed to take pleasure in trying to turn our conversations into intellectual sparring matches and was quite determined to do everything he could to tell us no more than he had already admitted, which was nothing like the full story. In his book, which he wrote just before he died, he admits only to that much. But we had good reason at that time to believe that his espionage involvement was greater than he had admitted, and since then Oleg Gordievsky, the defector from the KGB, has stated that Cairncross was indeed the Fifth Man and was in contact with his KGB controllers for many years.
While I was working on counter-espionage, things were beginning to change inside the Service. The supply of ex-Colonial Service officers was drying up and new sources of recruits had to be found. In those days, recruitment to MI5 was still broadly by a tap on the shoulder from a friend or contact, the method by which I had been recruited. There were a number of contacts in various places with their ears to the ground, actively looking for the ‘right sort’ of men to come in as officers. Men with previous work experience in some walk of life were much preferred; they were thought to be more mature and therefore likely to make better intelligence officers.
In the mid-1970s, it was decided actively to seek out men in industry and commerce who, after working there for a few years, might be looking for a change and, as an experiment, also to try bringing in some young men straight from university as officers. I had already started to feel disgruntled about my second-class status. By then, I knew enough about the Service and the people in it to know that I was just as capable as many of the men, if not more, and I resented being given less responsible work to do and above all being paid less than they were. I couldn’t stand working for people who were less competent than I was.
The last straw for me came one day when a nice young man arrived in my section to share my office. He had just come down from university, with a BA in something or another and he was about twenty-three. He had been recruited as an officer. There was I, having been in the Service already for three or four years, having previously had a career in another profession, aged thirty-seven or thirty-eight and still only an assistant officer. I thought carefully about what I should do. I knew that open protest was not likely to be successful. If one got a reputation as a revolutionary, one would be regarded as suspect and written off. So I waited until it was the time for my annual interview with my personnel officer and I took the opportunity to ask what was the reason that prevented me from being an officer.
The poor man was completely taken aback. I felt rather like Oliver Twist when he asked for more. The personnel officer was an ex-Army officer with a moustache and a pipe clamped firmly between his lips, given to wearing very hairy tweed suits and khaki braces. I do not think it had ever occurred to him that a woman might want to become an officer in MI5. He certainly had no idea that I was nurturing a grievance. After all, no doubt the women he knew stayed at home and did the flowers, so why was this woman, who had already broken all known conventions by returning to work with a baby, now demanding to be treated as if she were a man? He muttered about all the things one could not do as a woman, which made one less than wholly useful.
Indeed in those days there was a long list of taboos. As I have mentioned before, it was taken for granted that women could not work in agent-running sections, recruiting and running human sources of information. The theory was, and of course it had never been tested, that no KGB officer or foreign intelligence officer of any kind would take direction from a woman. Moreover, the theory went, you certainly could not put a woman to make direct contact with someone from an Arab country, because the cultural differences were too extreme for that to work. Nor was the Irish terrorist target suitable work for a woman. Again the cultural differences were too great, and in any case it was dangerous, and dangerous work was not for women. It was even said that women could not work in sections where they would have to deal a lot with the police, as policemen would not take women seriously as colleagues.
All this sounds quite bizarre from the standpoint of the present day. We take it for granted nowadays that women are often particularly good at so-called inter-personal skills, which is what agent-running and sharp-end intelligence work is all about. Presumably that’s why there are so many women in personnel and human relations departments in the commercial world. But in those days these ex cathedra statements had never been questioned and there was no experience to show whether they were right or wrong. It was too much to expect my colleague of the tweed suit and khaki braces to have the imagination to look at things differently and take a risk.
But word of my remarkable demands filtered out, and there were other men around who were sufficiently open-minded to think that perhaps I had the qualities that made a good intelligence officer, in spite of my sex, and that if I got too fed up, I would probably leave. So, in 1973, I was at last promoted to be an officer and my salary took a healthy lurch upwards, enabling us to do some of the work on the house, which was by then badly needed.
What was it that I had and they had seen that made me a success in this rather unusual career? I have heard it said that women make particularly good intelligence officers, both spies and counter-spies. Some say that it is because they have orderly minds, some say that it is because they are discreet, some say it is because they are psychologically tough, and better than men at keeping their own counsel. I think all that is pretty much nonsense. In an intelligence organisation, just as in any other organisation, you need people of varied qualities and talents, and you find them among both men and women. It is vital to have balance and common sense and an ability to relate what you are doing to ordinary life. Intelligence work inevitably takes up much of your time and affects your private life, but it is important to have something to go home to, so you can keep it in proportion. Again, in so far as women are very frequently managing work and family in a more intense way than men, they may be better able to keep that balance. Patience and persistence are also virtues in an intelligence officer, which are frequently seen as more feminine than masculine attributes. But this cannot be carried too far. The so-called ‘masculine’ qualities of dynamism and self-confidence are equally important. And a sense of humour is essential, and that is found in both sexes.
So what had I got? I don’t think my mind is particularly orderly. I certainly don’t think in a very orderly way. If I am faced with a problem, I either immediately know what my answer is, or I pick at it, rushing towards it and then retreating, constantly reviewing the information I have, until I’ve sorted it out to my satisfaction. I do dislike unsolved puzzles and ambiguities of all kinds, including in personal situations. Where others might let things alone, I can’t resist trying to sort them out, and that is why I tend often to seek to change the status quo. And I am a very practical person. I don’t like sitting around theorising. Above all, I like to get on with things, to get things done. So sorting out muddles and getting facts or information in order is what I really enjoy. Maybe that is what drew me to the archives profession in the first place. I used to love being faced with an old muniment room or an attic full of papers and parchments and finding out what was there and sorting it all out. It was exciting: you never knew what treasure you were going to find. But I also enjoy finding out what makes people tick. I have rather a cool, detached and analytical approach to people, which is helpful in the sort of relationships you have to develop in intelligence work. Also, of course, I have had the children to go home to and to help me keep my feet firmly on the ground.
How much of all that was apparent to my colleagues when they first recognised that I might make a decent MI5 officer, I don’t know. Not much, I would guess. They probably saw a determined female, with an unusual amount of energy and the ability to get things done, whom it was quite difficult to ignore.
That promotion was actually no great shakes. After all, ‘officer’ equated to Principal in the Civil Service, a rank fast-stream civil servants expected in those days to reach when they were about twenty-eight. But in terms of my career, it was much more significant than it sounds. What it meant was that I had crossed the barrier between being a permanent ‘assistant’ and being someone whose career was taken seriously. My promotion did not mark the opening of the flood gates; it was not followed immediately by a great surge upwards of female graduates. It took a revolution, albeit a discreetly conducted revolution to achieve that. Not long after I had been promoted, some of the other women graduate assistant officers sent a round robin to the Director of Personnel, complaining about the discriminatory policy that MI5 was operating. Sex discrimination was just getting onto the political agenda, and someone’s father was a lawyer, who had advised them that they might have a case against the Service. I can’t imagine that in those days anyone would have thought seriously of taking legal action, but things got quite heated. The men in charge were genuinely surprised at the strength of feeling and sufficiently concerned that so many of their good female staff, essential to the running of the Service, appeared to be disgruntled, that the policy was changed. A number of female assistant officers were promoted and other women began to be recruited directly as officers, just as the men were. As usual in crises, some not very sensible decisions were taken, and some of those who were promoted and recruited were probably not up to the job, but neither were some of the men. It took much longer for the taboos on what the women could do to be removed.
My promotion meant that I was allowed out to do interviews on my own and one of those I interviewed at that period was a rather grand old lady, who had been the Head of Personnel in a large company, but was by then retired. She had been a friend of the Philby family and had known since the beginning the important fact, which Kim Philby had successfully disguised, that he had been a communist since the early 1930s. In the 1960s, she had revealed for the first time that he had made what she had interpreted as an attempt to recruit her as a Soviet agent. Peter Wright had interviewed her about all this several years earlier, but it was quite clear that she knew a great deal more about Philby and his activities than she had ever revealed, and we thought it possible that she even knew how he had been recruited as a Soviet agent in the first place; that was something we desperately wanted to know. I called on her in her flat in Mayfair, in 1974. Though she must have been in her late sixties by then, she was a formidable figure. I was pregnant by then with my second daughter, and she, used to controlling the personnel of a large company, thought she could have people like me on toast. Unfortunately, in this case she could, as I could offer no inducement to persuade her to talk and, very wisely, whatever she knew, she kept her own counsel.
It was also in 1974 that I went to Paris to interview someone who was living in France, whom, again, we thought might have some useful knowledge of that period. Or at least I thought I had gone to interview someone. Our French opposite numbers, a largely police service, were, at the time, very considerably behind us in the equality stakes. Finding that I was obviously pregnant, they insisted that I sit behind a screen, so I could not be seen by the person being interviewed, presumably in case he should be embarrassed by my condition. So there I was in their offices, which in those days were like a 19th-century French hotel, something out of a Maigret novel, all dusty bare wooden floors, tall double doors and shutters at the windows, a disembodied voice behind a screen. History does not relate what the poor man being interviewed thought, but as far as I remember he did not tell us anything interesting, not surprisingly in the circumstances.
Why did we rake over this period for so long? It has to be seen in the context of the Cold War, which was still at its height. There was a strong feeling that not enough was known about the KGB’s activities against this country in the ’30s and ’40s and a real dread that there might be other highly placed spies, still operating, who had not yet come to attention. It was felt to be important to do all that could reasonably be done to flush out any there were. The best and most successful spies are the quiet, apparently boring and dull people who go on doing the same thing in an unostentatious way year after year, and the best counter-espionage officers are those who match them for perseverance. Ultimately of course it took defectors and, finally, the end of the Cold War to get anything like a full account of what had been going on. But when we did get that, it was clear that MI5’s counter-espionage work had been well focused and there were few British names that emerged that had not already crossed our sights and been investigated and negated.
The criticism that can be levied at that period was that thoroughness tended to generate a certain dilatoriness, a lack of prioritisation and of the urgency and direction that I would expect nowadays. The Soviet Union had achieved a very considerable intelligence coup in recruiting some of the brightest of our undergraduates between the wars. Their recruits did great damage to the West before they fell under suspicion and the consequent investigations and the leads they generated tied up a good deal of the resources of British and US counter-espionage for many years.