Information was, very properly, held tightly and there was a series of circles within circles. As a newcomer, you were in the very outer circle, but as you carried out your day-to-day tasks you became aware that there were lots of other circles of which you were not a member. From time to time, when I asked for a name to be looked up in the index, to see whether someone already had a file, the answer would come back that I must refer to someone else, as I was not on the relevant list for seeing whatever there was. You knew, when that happened, that either the person you had stumbled upon was an agent, a human source, whose identity was kept very closely guarded, or there was information on the file which revealed some other secret source of information or some operation which you were not allowed to know about.
This system was necessary, as some of the human sources whose identity it was protecting were at risk of imprisonment or death should their activities be revealed. And there was the ever-present fear that one of us might be a spy, a penetration agent for the Soviet bloc. But the difficulty lay in applying those rules sensibly. It was important not to make the principle of ‘need to know’ – that is that no-one should be told anything unless they could demonstrate a real operational need to know it – so important that the principle of communication was overlooked. And in those days in the ’60s and ’70s the balance was quite understandably weighted on the side of secrecy.
There were risks from this Cold War ethos. Firstly, there was a real danger of inefficiency, because information might be so squirreled away behind rings of secrecy that its existence was not known to those who needed it and investigations might be damaged as a result. Secondly, of course, extreme secrecy can lead to paranoia. What I did not know when I joined was that MI5 had recently almost torn itself apart because of this fear of infiltration. A faction, led by Peter Wright, had nearly brought the Service to a standstill by its conviction that there was penetration both at high and middle levels of the Service. They had become convinced, wrongly as was later established, that, amongst others, the then Director-General, Roger Hollis, was a Russian spy. Wright and James Angleton of the CIA fuelled each other’s paranoia, which was reinforced by defectors from the Soviet Union, and convinced themselves that many Soviet-run moles had penetrated the CIA and British intelligence, and that Moscow was manipulating the United States and Britain through disinformation and propaganda. One has only to read Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher to understand the level which this obsession reached.
As a newcomer, arriving fresh from the relaxed world of India with my wardrobe of exotic Indian-made silk clothes and sandals and a residual suntan, I felt like a real outsider. I could not quite see how or where I was going to fit into this very curious set-up. It was indeed, as the recruitment process had made clear, unashamedly male-dominated. The men were the ‘officers’ and the women were the ‘other ranks’ in military parlance, and there were still quite strong military overtones. The men were largely from a similar background. To me it seemed that they all lived in Guildford and spent their spare time gardening. Many had fought in the armed services during the war; some had performed heroically and some, perhaps not surprisingly, seemed drained by their experiences. I remember one, who had been a Dambuster and had flown the most dramatic and dangerous sorties when he had been very young. He regularly withdrew into his office and locked the door after lunch. I used to jump up and down in the corridor to look over the smoked glass in the partition, to see what he was doing, and he was invariably sound asleep. No-one thought it appropriate to comment.
Many of the men had come in to MI5 from a first career in the Colonial Service. They had come in in little groups as each of the colonies had become independent, and there were circles of friends known as the Malayan Mafia or the Sudan Souls. They had come in as ‘officers’, broadly equivalent to Principal in the old Administrative Class of the Home Civil Service, but they were given no promise of progression through a career. Most had a pension and a lump sum which had enabled them to buy a house, so they were not on the breadline. Though some did well and rose to senior positions, others did not and, not surprisingly in the circumstances, many of them lacked any motivation or drive and did not exactly exert themselves.
Some of them, far from exerting themselves, seemed to do very little at all and there was a lot of heavy drinking. I remember one gentleman, who was supposed to be running agents against the Russian intelligence residency in London. He favoured rather loud tweed suits and a monocle. He would arrive in the office at about 10 and at about 11 would go out for what was termed ‘breakfast’. He would return at 12 noon, smelling strongly of whisky to get ready to go out to ‘meet an agent’ for lunch. If he returned at all it would be at about 4pm, for a quiet snooze before getting ready to go home. Eventually, he collapsed in the lift returning from one of these sorties and was not seen again.
Maybe it was not as bad as I remember. I was very lowly in the hierarchy and from low down you often get a very partial view of what is going on. But I know the various drinking clubs around Soho were much frequented by the older MI5 officers in those days, because occasionally I went with them. These were the kind of places where drinks were available at all hours; you signed your name in a book as ‘Mr Smith and two guests’ and you could drink all day.
The women were a curiously mixed bunch. There were still some of the debs around, the generals’ and admirals’ daughters who had peopled MI5 as clerks and secretaries during and just after the war – recruited more for their obvious reliability, for whom they knew and who could vouch for them, than for their brains or education – though some of them were very bright women being seriously underemployed. But there were also beginning to come in women like me, with a good degree, some straight from university, some who had already had a career in some other profession. But, even so, not much regard was paid to your qualifications or ability if you were a woman.
The nearest the women got to the sharp end of things in those days was as support officers to the men who were running the agents. They would be asked to go and service the safe-house where the agent was met – making sure there was milk and coffee there and the place was clean and tidy, and very occasionally they might be allowed to go with their officer to meet a very reliable, long-standing agent on his birthday or some other special occasion.
This attitude to women seems incredible now, looked at from the standpoint of the 21st century. So much has changed in women’s employment expectations since those days. But I don’t think it ever occurred to my male colleagues that they were discriminating against us and in those days it was not really questioned inside the Service. And to be fair to them, even I, coming in from the outside, did not question it at first.
9
AFTER A FEW months I escaped from the training section and the Sussex communists. Perhaps helped by my experience as an archivist, I had mastered the intricacies of the files without too much difficulty and I was chosen to go to a new section which was just starting up to focus on the situation in Northern Ireland. This must have been about October 1969.
The year 1969 had seen increasing violence in Northern Ireland and deepening divisions between the two communities. The Civil Rights Movement which had been gaining ground since the mid-1960s was in full flood; in April, the twenty-one-year-old Bernadette Devlin had been elected to Westminster as MP for mid-Ulster; and at about the same time there had been a series of bombings carried out by the extreme loyalist group the UVF. August brought the loyalist Apprentice Boys march in Londonderry which resulted in stone throwing and violence and then, as the police arrived in force, barricades, petrol bombs and the first use of CS gas in the UK, in what came to be known as the Battle of the Bogside. After forty-eight hours of continuous attacks British troops were sent in to help restore law and order in the Bogside but then violence broke out between the two communities in Belfast. The affairs of Northern Ireland, which for many years had hardly impinged on the government at Westminster, began to preoccupy it more and more and minister
s and senior civil servants looked round for intelligence to help them understand and manage the situation.
At that time MI5 had practically no sources of information and very little intelligence was available. It is a feature of a democracy that a security service will follow a new security threat rather than foreseeing it. Of course, resource is devoted to assessing likely new threats but before an investigation can be mounted, using the full panoply of covert resources – interception of communications, covert surveillance and agent sources – it has to be demonstrable that a serious threat to national security exists. Stated baldly that sounds ineffective, and indeed it does sometimes mean that at the beginning of any new threat, intelligence lags behind and takes time to catch up. But it is important for the protection of individual rights and freedoms that the resources of the secret state are applied only when a serious threat exists. During my time in a senior position in MI5, we assessed on several occasions whether the level of the threat from serious organised crime, for example, or animal liberation extremism justified action by MI5 or whether such activities represented primarily a law-and-order issue properly left to the police to handle.
So the Irish section to which I was sent in autumn 1969 was a small affair. In fact at the Leconfield House end, it consisted at that time of one experienced lady assistant officer and myself. We were supporting a small group who had gone to Northern Ireland to work with the RUC and to assess what MI5 should do. My job was to try to create some order in the papers which began to be generated and to get them put on files so that they could be located and used. My boss and I very rapidly became almost submerged, trying to make sense of the information that began to come in. I looked back with some nostalgia to the underemployment of the training section, as I began to have to stay late into the evenings just to keep up with the flow of paper. My colleague had a habit of talking out loud all the time, telling herself what to do next and, as the days wore on and the pressure mounted, her instructions to herself became more and more manic. Anyone coming into the room was faced with two dishevelled-looking women, one chattering like a parrot and the other peering out squirrel-like from behind a tottering pile of paper. As far as I recall, the tottering pile did not at that stage contain much in the way of real intelligence. It was largely assessments of the situation on the ground, reports of meetings and newspaper cuttings but as is always the way with paper, once it had started coming in, it was very difficult to stop. Such were the beginnings of what was eventually to become a large and very successful intelligence operation against terrorism in Northern Ireland.
At the time I did not realise it, but looking back now it is clear that that period in 1969 marked the beginning of a big change for MI5. The emergence of a serious threat of terrorism on our own doorsteps, and the almost simultaneous development of what was to become so-called ‘international’ terrorism, marked the start of a significant shift of resources away from the traditional Cold War targets. With that came what was eventually to be a huge change in the way we worked and in the whole culture of the Service. But I did not stay in the new section more than a month or two, and it was many years before I was to return to the counter-terrorist field. When I did it was as the Director, responsible for our work against what had by then become the major security threat to the UK and to a large part of the world. I moved on because it was rapidly realised that more than one lady assistant officer and a raw recruit was needed to cope with everything that was beginning to happen in Northern Ireland. The section was expanded, more experienced staff were drafted in and I was sent off elsewhere.
I left dark and gloomy Leconfield House with no regrets at all, for a building in Grosvenor Street, one of the many offices around Mayfair which MI5 occupied at that time. Then began what turned out to be quite a long period working against what was still in those days very much the main enemy, the intelligence services of the Soviet Union.
What I was now to do was work which resulted directly from the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 and Philby in 1963 and the assessment which had by then been made, that they had been recruited by the Russian intelligence service, the KGB, while they were undergraduates at Cambridge and directed into various parts of the public service. It was not known at that time how they had been talent-spotted, or who had done the recruiting. An extensive programme of interviews had been launched, of people who had been at various universities, not just Oxford and Cambridge, in the 1930s and ’40s, some who had been in the university Communist Parties and some who had not, to see whether any leads emerged to indicate that there had been more serious penetration of the Civil Service than we knew. A team of four or five officers (male) was put together to do the interviews, supported by a number of assistant officers (female) to do background research and organise the papers. It was a big undertaking, and many interviews were done and long reports written, but ultimately nothing emerged to show that there was a more serious problem than we knew about.
After a few months of this I, with the wisdom of inexperience, had decided that we were not going to uncover more spy rings and that this was a bit of a side-show. I knew that in other parts of the Service, what I regarded as much more interesting things were going on. Real, current espionage was being investigated and I was eager to get my teeth stuck into it. However in April 1970 I learned that, unlikely though it seemed after so long, I was pregnant. I first realised that this was probable one beautiful spring day as I was sitting in Cambridge University Library, doing some research. Considering that I had wanted a baby for such a long time, the pregnancy came, as seems so often to happen, at the most inopportune moment.
In February that year, John and I had taken the plunge and had bought a house in Islington. Our time in Delhi had enabled us to save up some money and with that as a deposit we had been able to afford to buy a forty-three-year lease on a small terraced house in Canonbury Grove, just off Canonbury Road in Islington. It was a charming little Georgian terrace house with a beautiful view at the front over the gardens of the New River Walk, which were full of flowering trees in spring. But buying it was a risky enterprise for us as we could only just afford the deposit and the mortgage on our salaries. A lease was not a very sound investment, but we hoped that the BP Pension fund, the owners of the freehold, might sell it one day and that at that stage we would be able to afford to buy.
Restoration work was going on all over Islington in the early 1970s, as the young middle classes began to focus on it as a convenient and stylish place to live. The Victoria Line of the Underground had arrived and from Highbury and Islington Station one could get to Oxford Street in under twenty minutes. We could see that property prices were going to take off and we felt we must get into the market. But we had not bargained on my becoming pregnant almost immediately after we had moved in.
To make matters worse, things were not going well with John. After much anxious thought, and following a transfer to the Department of Employment, which he hated, he had succumbed to the wooing of Parsons and the Comac team and had joined them. What they had not told him was that immediately before he arrived, the deal with the City merchant bank, on the strength of which he had joined, was off. The collapse of that deal merely presaged worse problems for the enterprise and after a few months the company which had recruited him broke up. John was offered a job in one of the company’s assets, a large bank in Detroit, but neither of us felt that would be a very wise move, particularly with me pregnant. So John left them and sought and got reinstatement in the Civil Service. Unfortunately, under the draconian pension rules then operating in the Civil Service, he effectively had to start again and lost his pension entitlement for the years he had already worked.
This was an anxious period. Knowing we had probably overstretched our finances, I worried inordinately about the house. Though some modernisation work had been done by our predecessors, it had some serious problems, in particular ferocious rising damp and a dangerous, old-fashioned central heating boiler. At the time we had no spare
money to deal with any of this. Before we had the money, that central heating boiler had killed our two Burmese cats whom I had christened Burgess and Maclean, though later, when our daughter Sophie was learning to speak, they had become known as Pussy Red and Pussy Blue from the colour of their collars. The boiler almost killed Sophie as well on the same occasion. The cats had been shut in the kitchen for the night and the baby was asleep in the room next door. The boiler’s ventilation system, it later turned out, was almost totally useless and allowed its fumes to blow back into the kitchen. When I went into the kitchen first thing one morning, I discovered the room full of fumes and both the cats dead on the floor. I rushed into the bedroom next door, but mercifully the fumes had not got in there and Sophie was unharmed.
Another problem we had not foreseen came from the Council block at the back, whose walkways overlooked our garden. At the time we first moved in, the flat directly at the bottom of our garden was occupied by an Irish lady whose custom it was to come out on the balcony and prophesy at the top of her voice, wearing a nightgown, with her hair blowing in the wind, like some Irish Cassandra. When instead of prophesying, she started to let loose a stream of foul language, she was taken away by the social services as unable to look after herself.
Peace returned temporarily, until a family moved in with two children, Roy and Elaine. For a long time we did not see the children and we only knew their names because their father used to come out on the balcony, lean over and bellow in a huge voice, ‘Roy, Eelaine. Come up ’ere or I’ll belt the daylights out of yer.’ Not surprisingly, Roy and Eelaine seemed reluctant to obey, and the bellowing went on for some time, several times a day. We imagined Roy and Eelaine as recalcitrant, knife-wielding teenagers in motorbike kit, and wondered if they were dangerous. But one day there was a knock on our door, and there outside was a very small girl in glasses with one lens covered with sticking plaster, holding by the hand an even smaller boy with muddy knees. They had come to get their ball, which had come over into our garden. In a moment of inspiration John said to them, ‘Are you Roy and Eelaine?’ They nodded. We never felt the same about Roy and Eelaine again.
Open Secret Page 13
