Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  All that the Welshman and his colleague were prepared to offer me, as a female, was a job at the equivalent of Civil Service Executive Officer. It did not matter that I had a degree, that I had worked for several years already in the public service, at a higher grade than they were offering, or that I was thirty-four years old. The policy was that men were recruited as what were called ‘officers’ and women had their own career structure, a second-class career, as ‘assistant officers’. They did all sorts of support work – collating, indexing, ensuring the papers were filed in the right place and simple, straightforward enquiries, but not the sharp-end intelligence-gathering operations. What the two recruiters were offering me, that June day in 1969, was a post as ‘Junior Assistant Officer’, the bottom rung of this rather humble ladder.

  In adopting this policy towards women, MI5 differed markedly from the mainstream Civil Service where women had been accepted into the senior ranks since the early 1920s. By the time I joined MI5, there had already been several women Permanent Secretaries.

  I often wonder why I took the job. In salary and responsibility terms it was clearly unattractive. Certainly my motives were nothing like those they look for in recruits nowadays. I did not feel a particular urge to serve my country, though I was averagely patriotic, nor did I have a strong sense of dangers to the state to be tackled or wrongs to be righted. Apparently I told them that I liked the orderly collection of information and research, but I added, rather ironically in view of the way my life turned out, that I would certainly not enjoy public speaking. But all that was probably what I thought they wanted to hear. In fact, I was still romantically dreaming about the Great Game, and my experiences in India had reinforced the dream rather than destroyed it.

  Nowadays, my recruiters should have tried to flush out that attitude and if they had succeeded it would have rung alarm bells. People with romantic illusions about spies dressed as Pathan tribesmen would not be thought at all suitable as recruits to MI5 in the serious 21st century.

  The truth was that I hadn’t seen enough of the dull side of the work to be put off; I thought it would be interesting and that I would get some amusement and fun out of it. I was also curious to find out more. What did they really do in this mysterious Head Office to which I had despatched so many letters from India? But I was still taking quite a dilettante attitude to my work. I saw this just as a job, something I might do for a time, something to keep me interested and amused, hopefully until I had a baby, but possibly until something else cropped up. I didn’t look at it as a career and it never occurred to me to see if I could do better elsewhere. So when I was offered the job, I took it.

  In July 1969 I started work in MI5’s headquarters in Leconfield House at the Park Lane end of Curzon Street. Leconfield House is now the glitzy London headquarters of banks and property companies. In 1969, like many government offices in those days, it was dreadfully run down. The inside had not been painted for an age, the windows were dirty and everything about it was dark and gloomy. There was a canteen on the top floor. The most you could say about that was that it functioned. The lady in charge was one of those office ‘characters’, with whom everyone seems to be on good terms but whom they secretly despise. She would slop the food onto the plates with a huge spoon and a great splat, making it, if possible, even more unappetising than it looked in the container. Out of the grimy windows you could watch the rich and famous going in and out of the White Elephant Club and the other gambling dives on the other side of the road or driving up to the Bunny Club on the corner of Curzon Street. The contrast was acute. I thought the whole set-up was grim, and after one lunch there, I never went again.

  The partitioning of Leconfield House had left some of the rooms without windows and the size and shape of cupboards, but I was put to work in a long narrow room with about ten or so other people, mostly women. This was the section where all new joiners, whether they were men (officers) or women (assistant officers) were put for a few months to be trained and it was presided over by a couple of training officers, two well-bred ladies ‘of a certain age’, from the twin-set-and-pearls brigade.

  On my first day I was intrigued when at 12 noon, these two opened their desk drawers and produced exquisite cut glasses and bottles of some superior sherry, and partook of a rather elegant pre-lunch drink. I realised then that I had arrived in the land of eccentrics and that this promised to be a lot more entertaining than spending my days in Woking.

  The job of the section was to identify as many members of the Communist Party of Great Britain as we could and, having identified them, to open files on them. The purpose of this activity was primarily to provide the raw material for the vetting system introduced by Clement Attlee’s government in 1947. The rules of the vetting system were that access to official information vital to the security of the state, ‘classified information’ to use the term of art, should be denied to members of certain organisations regarded as ‘subversive’. ‘Subversion’ was closely defined in the directive under which the Security Service worked in those days and that same definition applies today. It meant activities designed to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy, by political, violent or industrial means. So organisations such as the Communist Party, the various Trotskyist parties and fascist organisations, whose declared or covert purpose was to change the democratic system of government, were deemed to meet the criteria.

  The assumption, which the government had adopted, was that members of such organisations could not automatically be assumed to be loyal to the country and so could not be trusted with the nation’s secrets. Although people who were being considered for jobs with access to classified information were asked to fill in forms, declaring any membership of such organisations, it was assumed that they might not tell the truth. So MI5 had the responsibility of finding out, insofar as it could, who the members were, and keeping a record of them. If they applied for work giving them access to that sort of information, they would then be checked out with MI5 and the results would be taken into account in deciding whether they should get the job. This was a safeguard but of course it only went so far. A good number of ideological spies for the Soviet bloc either never joined the Communist Party or cut their overt links.

  There were various sources of information to keep us up to date with the membership, some documentary, some human. The human sources were called ‘agents’ in the jargon. Unlike in the FBI, where ‘agents’ are the employees of the Bureau, in the British system ‘agents’ are never employees of the intelligence services, they are the people with access to the required information who are persuaded or paid to provide it. Getting used to the jargon was a big part of feeling one belonged to this strange world. All the agents had code words to disguise their identity, as did all the other sources of information. So, on first reading, any file was almost meaningless. It was not until one came to recognise the code words which explained the origin of the information, that one could interpret it and evaluate its reliability, vital of course to forming an assessment.

  The meeting and controlling, or ‘running’ as it was called in the jargon, of the agents was regarded as a separate rather esoteric skill and was done in a different section. In those days, it went without saying that no females were allowed to work in the agent-running sections or to meet these human sources; we had to ask the male officers who ‘controlled’ them to find out the specific information we required. One very good source of information, which was readily available, was the Morning Star, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, from a careful perusal of which we could learn a lot about who was where in the Communist Party and what they were doing. I am sure that the vast standing order for Morning Stars for Leconfield House kept that newspaper on its feet when it might otherwise have gone under. We and the Soviet Embassy were, I believe, its main large-scale supporters. Keeping up the circulation was always a problem for them and members were constantly being exhorted to spend time selling the paper on the street corner, thus
conveniently drawing attention to themselves.

  The key to the proper operation of the vetting system was precise identification and accurate recording in files. A security service lives by its records. The first and most important thing is to know precisely who the person is on whom you have a file. It may seem obvious, but it is sometimes not as straightforward as it sounds. The information on the file must be accurate, relevant and must clearly distinguish between what is hard fact and what is speculative or unconfirmed. If you do not know who the information in your files actually refers to and you do not know whether it is true or not, you are not likely to be very effective in any action you take on it. So accuracy, precision and the proper assessment of information are fundamental skills for a security service officer, and those were the skills we were learning in our training section, on a comparatively simple target. We were not responsible for taking decisions on the information we gathered, which involved making recommendations about whether people should be employed or not. That required sometimes quite difficult judgements about the interpretation and assessment of the information and was regarded as more skilled work, requiring far greater knowledge and experience than we novices had. The ultimate responsibility for deciding whether somebody got a job or not lay with the employing department, a decision they took in the light of MI5’s assessment.

  In that summer of 1969, I was learning the first principles of intelligence work and I must say that at that stage I found it pretty dull. Trainees were given responsibility for the rural branches of the Communist Party where membership was low and not much was going on. I got Sussex, where there were very few Party members and many of those were fairly ancient. Such revolutionary activity as there was in Sussex in those days was of a different kind and was centred on its new Basil Spence-designed university, where every form of protest from vague student revolutionary fervour to the full blown Trotskyism of Militant Tendency was to be found.

  But as for the Sussex comrades, as far as I could see not much of interest was happening so, after I had found out what I was supposed to be doing, I whiled away the time reading Dornford Yates novels under the desk. I followed with enthusiasm the exploits of agreeable upper class people with names like Boy Pleydell, as they roared across Europe in their limousines to rescue beautiful ladies from the clutches of international villains. If the ladies in charge of training us had known what I was up to, they would have thought I was unsuitably frivolous.

  As part of the early training, one spent a period working in the Registry. This was where all the Service’s files were stored; where the new files, which we and other people working in the different parts of the Service asked for, were actually created and where names would be looked up in the indexes at the request of desk officers, when they needed to find out if a person had a file. All parts of the Registry, the file making, storing and the indexes, were staffed by female staff in those days. There were a number of very senior ladies, known as Registry Examiners. Their job was to preserve the purity of the files. They scrutinised the requests which desk officers made of the Registry, whether it was to make a file, or to put papers away in a nominated file, or whatever it might be. If anything that had been requested did not comply with the strict rules in force, they would send back what was known as a ‘green note’, drawing your attention to whatever error you had made. The arrival of the files one thought one had got rid of, covered in green notes, was a sort of ritual humiliation that one was required to suffer as an embryo desk officer. These ladies were known to the male desk officers, in a show of bravado, because they were secretly terrified of them, as ‘The Registry Queens’.

  The only men to be seen among the Registry staff were the Head of the Registry, and his two assistants. The Head of the Registry at that time was a Scotsman who rather reminded me of Mr Sargeant, the Chief Archivist in my Worcester days. He was a bully with a heart of gold. He hectored and shouted at his lady employees constantly, but they all seemed to love him. One of his great delights was making new joiners, particularly female joiners feel small. A favourite trick was to yell at new arrivals, ‘Where is the Great Bed of Ware?’ If you did not know the answer (and I didn’t), then as far as he was concerned, he was one up and you were one down for life.

  The entire Registry was paper-based for this was long before computerisation. The indexes were on cards in row upon row of brown wooden drawers, stored in a big room in the basement, which had no natural light. The files were all in great racks in basement rooms and overhead, through all the rooms, a railway system rumbled and rattled. This railway went through much of the building, carrying tin box-like containers into which the files were put to be transported to local registries in the sections which had asked for them. Even in those days the railway was getting rather decrepit, and from time to time a tin box fell off or flew open, causing alarm and occasionally injury to those underneath it.

  In the parts where the railway did not penetrate there was a Lampson’s tube, similar to the system I remember in shops in my youth, by which the counters used to send off your money to the cashier when you bought anything. In our system, you put your paper or whatever it was into a container and shoved it in a pipe and with a great sucking noise and a clatter, it disappeared – only to pop up in someone else’s pipe seconds later.

  The Registry ‘ladies’, as they were called, were under a draconian regime, particularly those who worked in the index. They were not allowed to take anything into or out of the room where they worked, certainly not their handbags; they were not allowed to eat at their desks, and there were innumerable other regulations, all designed to safeguard and preserve the purity of the index, which, together with the files, was the lifeblood of the Service.

  We trainees were learning to be ‘desk officers’. A desk officer, working in a team or group, carries out the main investigative and assessment work of the service on its different targets. The desk officers, who are nowadays usually graduates with good degrees, often recruited directly from university, can deploy, as appropriate to the investigation, various sources of secret intelligence against their targets.

  Nowadays, training and development for desk officers is highly structured and sophisticated. When I joined, it was fairly haphazard. Indeed some of my older-established colleagues used to assert proudly that they had never been on a training course at all. We were advised to read The British Road to Socialism, the programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the classic work, R. Carew Hunt’s The Theory and Practice of Communism and we sat through occasional after-lunch lectures on Marxism-Leninism from a senior officer who had made a study of the subject; but the time of day and the boring delivery meant that all of us, including the lecturer, ended up more asleep than awake. Later, more relevant and sophisticated training courses were developed and those of my intake period were guinea pigs for an emerging training régime.

  In those days, as a newcomer, you were not sure what you were allowed or expected to know and you were not encouraged to seek information. I was always quite inquisitive and I wanted to know what was going on, but I soon realised that people regarded you with suspicion if you asked too many questions, so I learned to keep quiet. Indeed, you were hardly sure whether you were even meant to know the name of the Director-General, and since you certainly never saw him or received any communication signed by him, you might just as well not have known. There was a joke going around the Service that you would know which was the Director-General because he was the one who always wore his dark glasses indoors so that he would not be recognised.

  Outside the Service of course very little at all was to be said. It was impressed on those joining that they must be extremely cautious about confiding where they worked to anyone. Young people joining were told they should think whether it was even necessary to tell their parents who their employer was and a sharp distinction was made in those days between spouses, in whom you might confide, and boyfriends and girlfriends in whom you definitely might not.

&nbs
p; I remember a circular came round setting out the position with regard to fiancé(e)s, but I can’t remember now which side of the fence they fell on. When I was Director-General I was told by a man who was retiring after a long career in the Service that he had never informed his wife where he worked. Even in Cold War days that would have been regarded as carrying things too far.

  This almost obsessive secrecy was not unique to the British intelligence services during the Cold War. All intelligence services in East and West behaved in much the same way because of the well-founded fear of infiltration of one side by the other. That was indeed the top priority intelligence target for both sides and success in that objective could do immense harm.

  In the late 1960s the top-priority intelligence target for both sides in the Cold War was the infiltration of the others’ intelligence services. In the British intelligence community everyone was acutely aware of the notable Soviet successes in the not-far-distant past – the Cambridge spies, Philby, a member of MI6, Burgess and Maclean of the Foreign Office and, very recently uncovered and not at that time publicly known, Anthony Blunt, the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures and spy for the Soviet Union, who had worked in MI5 during the war. Their shadows hung heavily over us when I joined in 1969. Both sides responded in similar fashion, by cutting themselves off as much as possible from the outside world. But that had bad effects. In the Eastern Bloc it resulted in repressive organisations, which saw their own citizens as the main threat rather than what they existed to protect. In the West, it resulted in old-fashioned, inward-looking organisations, cut off from modernising influences and afraid and unwilling to change.