Open Secret

My parents on their wedding day in 1929, ‘in high hopes of a prosperous future’.

In my pram in 1935. ‘I seemed pretty well set up.’

With my mother and my brother, Brian, on holiday in Bournemouth in 1938.

‘Night after night the German bombers came over to try to flatten the Liverpool docks,’ 1941.

5 Ilkley Road, Barrow, 1942. ‘We stuck tape over the windows and battened down to see out the war.’

Unwelcome guests in Edinburgh, 1956: Bulganin and Khrushchev. ‘Bulge and Krush go home!’

Graduation day, 1958. ‘A degree in English seemed to qualify one for nothing.’

Visiting families who had interesting historical papers, 1961.

The India Office Library Reading Room, 1963. ‘The old East India Company clock ticking loudly presided over everything.’

The Establishment Club, hotbed of early ’60s satire. ‘My cutlery drawer to this day contains some of the Club’s knives and forks, which have gone round the world with me.’

The Denning Report, 1963. ‘I waited in a queue to buy one hot off the press.’

'The part I enjoyed least was the diplomatic wife role.' I stand in line to be received by the President of India, 1968.

On the voyage to India, 1965. 'Got up very patriotically as the lion and the unicorn, we won a prize.'

I was playing Marcelle in ‘Hotel Paradiso’, 1968.

‘All this work came at an untimely moment. I needed to learn my part,’ 1968.

Walking up the garden path to my first job in MI5.

On the road to Kabul, 1968. ‘John’s cheque passed through half the camel and carpet bazaars of Central Asia.’

Our engine boiled and we lost all power and stopped. ‘Disaster, I thought, we will never see Afghanistan!’

‘In 1909 two officers were plucked out of the armed services and told to form a Secret Service Bureau.’

Mansfield Cumming.

Vernon Kell.

‘With my wardrobe of exotic Indian clothes, I could not quite see how I was going to fit in,’ 1969.

‘My intention of returning to work after having a baby was incomprehensible to most of my male colleagues,’ 1971.

‘By the time I worked on the Ring of Five we still did not know how they had been recruited or who had put who in touch with whom.’

Burgess

Maclean

Philby

Blunt

Cairncross

Viktor Lazine leaving Heathrow in a hurry after being expelled from the UK for 'unacceptable activities'. 9 August 1981. 'When the news reported the expulsion of a certian Russian officials, I seemed unusally cheerful.'

Georgi Markov, later poisoned with an umbrella by the Bulgarian Secret Service, while on Waterloo Bridge. 'I was notified of the incident by the police in a telephone call one evening ...I did not take the reported stabbing seriously at first, though of course it turned out to be true.'

The miners’ strike, 1984. ‘The activities of picket lines and miners’ wives support groups were not our concern, even though they were of great concern to the police.’

Miners warm themselves by braziers at Corton Wood Colliery near Sheffield.

Arthur Scargill at Orgreave coking plant.

In the garden of Spion Kop, 1978.

John and me at a party, 1983.

We put Spion Kop on the market, 1984.

‘The new house had been restored in a very stark scraped-out way, with everything painted white.’ Harriet at Alwyne Villas, 1984.

The New Statesman turned up at the front door and later covertly photographed me in the street, 1986.

Sir Robert Armstrong confronts a photographer on his way to Australia for the Spycatcher Trial, 1987.

The CAZAB conference, 1988. 'We met on an island inhabited by kangaroos, with a level of security I personally thought was ridiculous.'

‘We were focused on the Provisional IRA’s efforts to kill British military personnel in Europe.’ A shooting at Roermond, Holland, in 1988.

Vadim V. Bakatin, whom Gorbachev had put in charge of the KGB – ‘a true democrat who was seriously interested in reforming that organization’.

'Our meetings with the KGD were held in their HQ in Dzerzhinsky Square,' 1991.

'In the gaps between meetings we sightsaw in Moscow in temperatures colder than I had experienced.'