Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  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.

  11

  CHANGES FOR WOMEN were not the only changes taking place in MI5 in the 1970s. The new requirement to tackle terrorism, which started early in the decade, was beginning to bring about what were to be profound changes in culture and methods of working. But I did not realise any of this until later, because by the middle of 1974, John had been offered another posting abroad. This time he was to go to be Counsellor (Social and Regional Affairs) in the UK Representation to the EEC in Brussels, as part of the British team which was to ‘renegotiate’ the Treaty of Rome. My second baby was due in November, and I decided to stay on in London when he left for Brussels in July and continue working until October and then go out to join him.

  With my new officer status secured, and a rather firmer grip on the career ladder, I was not anxious to leave and throw away what I had worked hard to achieve. Having got the bit between my teeth by then, I hoped that the Service might be prepared to offer me some work while we were in Brussels so that I could continue my career. Several possibilities occurred to me. There were security adviser posts in the EEC and in NATO, which were often filled by MI5 officers, or maybe I could be seconded to work for another department in Brussels for the duration. I went off to see my personnel officer, this time a somewhat more open-minded man than before, to put these ideas to him. But even he was amazed that I should be thinking of such a thing. He told me firmly that those security posts were for experienced officers (I took him to mean men) and I would not be regarded as suitable. As for secondment to another department, he did not think that was a sensible idea. I went away, firmly put in my place. Yet again I was asking for too much, and the imagination of those in charge could not or would not stretch to include what I wanted. I was told that I could have up to two years special leave to accompany John on his posting abroad. My pension would be frozen and I could pick up where I left off when, and if, I returned. I really do not think they expected to see me again.

  Though I was anxious not to lose my position on the career ladder, I was not sorry to be leaving London. The previous winter had been particularly grim. We were having modernisation work done on the house, including an improved central heating system and a much needed damp course, which meant that we had had to evacuate the kitchen and live in the bedrooms, cooking on a camping stove. All this was made worse by the fact that the lights kept going out at irregular times, as Mr Heath slugged it out with the unions and the country struggled with the three-day week. At the office we were all issued with candles, which we stuck in our in-trays, and with a printed warning not to use the lifts.

  Of course, as I now know, the industrial disruption in 1973 and 1974 meant far more than candles in the in-tray to some of my colleagues working in a different part of the Service, though the operation of the ‘need-to-know’ rule meant that, at the time, the rest of us knew nothing of what they were doing. The Communist Party of Great Britain then, as later when I was
involved at the time of the second great miners’ strike, had a large so-called ‘industrial department’, which was focused on achieving influence at executive level in the key unions, with the objective of controlling their policies. My colleagues then, as I later, had the difficult task of deciding what aspects of the industrial unrest were properly their concern and should be investigated, assessed and reported to ministers and what were not. Making these distinctions is not straightforward and lays open to suspicion and criticism those who are responsible for deciding them.

  I left London behind with no regrets. By that time the IRA had launched a bombing campaign on the mainland which had come close to home with bombs in high-profile locations including Oxford Street and it was difficult to avoid a feeling that civilised life was coming to an end. The renegotiation in Brussels, in which John was involved, was by that time in full swing and the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EEC was due the following June. A ‘No’ vote would probably have meant that we would have returned straight home. As it was, we stayed in Brussels, thankfully somewhat insulated from strikes, bombs and the inflation which began to rage its way upwards in Britain.

  Sophie and I left London to live in Brussels at the beginning of November 1974, accompanied by the eighteen-year-old daughter of a colleague of mine in the Service, who was to be our au pair. I remember the journey well. I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, driving a desperately overloaded Sunbeam Rapier car. We were travelling on the Dover to Zeebrugge ferry. As we were waiting on the dockside to board the ferry, all of a sudden smoke and a strong smell of burning filled the car. We grabbed Sophie out of the back, where she was sitting on a pile of luggage and I yelled to a policeman that we were on fire. I thought the car was about to blow up at any minute, and he greatly annoyed me by pausing to call into his radio, ‘Car on fire on Dock No. 2,’ before coming over to help us.