Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  The year 1976 was the height of the Cold War and a very serious effort was being made by the Soviet bloc to acquire information of all kinds to advantage them against the West. There were some 12,000 KGB officers in the First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence-gathering part of the KGB, when Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and very many of them were posted abroad. In the UK they were looking to acquire information of all kinds, military, economic, political, scientific and technical. They targeted not only people who were ideologically committed to communism, for there were less of those than there had been since the Hungarian revolution; they were also on the look-out for people who were disaffected for various reasons or who were just plain venal. This massive intelligence assault on the West had its successes, not surprisingly. It has been estimated, for example, that about 150 Soviet weapons systems depended on technology stolen from the West. The Soviet and East European intelligence officers were also trying to subvert Western democracies by funding and directing national communist parties to try to gain influence in legitimate protest groups like the unions or CND, in the hope that those parties would thus achieve influence beyond anything they could get legitimately through the ballot box.

  To support us in our job of trying to deal with the residencies, we had the backing of a number of policies which the government had put in place. The first was the ‘exclusions’ policy which meant that any visa applicant who was firmly identified as an intelligence officer would be refused a visa. Not surprisingly, our colleagues in the Foreign Office scrutinised our identifications very closely indeed, as a visa refusal by us nearly always met with a tit-for-tat response from the other side. In gloomy moments I, as a desk officer, sometimes wondered who the true enemy was, the Foreign Office or the Soviet Union.

  Many hostile intelligence officers were negated in this way before they ever arrived, but, of course we did not manage to identify, still less to exclude, them all and when each new official arrived in the country, our job was to study them to establish whether they were genuinely what they claimed to be or intelligence officers under cover. We watched the Soviet and East European embassies very closely indeed; we interviewed as many of their contacts as we could to find out what was going on; we ran double agents against them; we fed them false information (‘chicken feed’), and we tried, with various ruses, to recruit them to the Western side.

  If this all sounds rather like a John le Carré novel, it’s not surprising. In many ways his account of those days is fairly accurate. Foreign intelligence officers were leaving packets of money in hollow trees on Hampstead Heath or, more frequently, in the Home Counties, for their agents, in exchange for secret documents left behind loose bricks in walls; they were communicating with them by making chalk marks on lamp posts or by leaving empty drinks cans on the top of walls, just as he describes. But though that period has been much fictionalised, it would be totally wrong to write it off, as some people do, as spies playing games. When our defences failed, the consequences for the West were serious. The loss of American submarine technology to the Soviet Union through the activities of the Walker family in America cost millions of dollars. The activities of Philby in an earlier age and Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer, more recently, cost lives as well as information.

  But serious though all this was, it did have its lighter side. It was well known that the Moscow spy masters took information much more seriously if it was stamped ‘secret’, so we found ways to feed them false ‘secret’ documents which we hoped would mislead them. We watched as some of the intelligence officers, the military ones in particular, spent much of their time in libraries, copying out reams of publicly available information from technical and scientific journals. We speculated that they sent it back to Moscow stamped ‘Secret’, no doubt claiming that it had been obtained at great risk and expense from a delicately placed source.

  Though some of these intelligence officers were engaged on serious and damaging espionage, the tasks which others appeared to have been given seemed a strange use of all the covert skills which were put into them, though to their own countries no doubt their tasks were very important. There was one East European intelligence officer, for example, whose main aim appeared to be to acquire the technology for fast-chilled foods. He went to a lot of trouble to get alongside people who worked in the right sort of companies and was prepared to pay considerable sums for the information. Inevitably he came to be known as the chicken tikka spy. But although those activities were clearly not threatening to national security, they were a potentially serious threat to the companies concerned. That, and the fact that our chicken tikka spy might well be doing other things we did not know about, and even if he wasn’t then, if left to himself he might, was enough for us to want him out of the country and he was duly asked to leave.

  Our counter-espionage efforts in the UK over that period were effective, though by no means every attack on our national security was detected and prevented. We heard from various sources that though London remained a very popular posting for hostile intelligence officers, because of the sheer pleasure of living there, the UK was known as a most difficult place in which to do their business. When Oleg Gordievsky defected from the Soviet intelligence residency in London, we learned that our identifications of the intelligence personnel in the UK had been consistently accurate over the years and our operations therefore well directed.

  More difficult was the task of detecting the attack on our security from hostile intelligence officers in other countries. The challenge was to ensure that the UK did not present a soft target in countries where there were large British communities and a comparatively weak security regime. A number of successful recruitment attempts and some offers of assistance were made abroad and Berlin, in particular, with its large Western civilian and military presence cheek by jowl with an even larger Soviet presence, was a constant cause of concern. Geoffrey Prime, the GCHQ employee, volunteered to the KGB when he was serving in the RAF in Berlin and was encouraged to join GCHQ from which, undetected, he supplied secret information to his controllers, left in dead letter boxes in southern England.

  Running in parallel with my section, where we were identifying and disrupting, was the agent-running section, whose responsibility it was to try to recruit the foreign intelligence officers in the UK, or those with close access to them, to work for us as long term ‘agents’. This was the sharp-end activity, and of course, in the spirit of the times, it was still entirely staffed by men, except for the support workers. The section was jointly staffed by MI5 and MI6 officers and was a valuable place for the two cultures to meet and learn to understand each other. It was of great value to a young MI6 officer to learn how a sophisticated security service worked so that he would understand what he was up against when he went out undercover to his foreign postings. For the MI5 officers, there was much to be learned from their MI6 colleagues about the techniques of agent-running and the behaviour of intelligence officers under cover. Much imagination was expended in thinking of ways to get alongside the targets, who were mostly fairly well protected inside their embassies. Many a bizarre scheme was dreamed up to strike up an acquaintance with them. Nothing you read in a spy story is more unlikely than some of the things that went on in those days. If ever I see a jogger in the park apparently spraining his ankle or a dog suddenly keel over and look sick, I look carefully at the scene to see if I can make out a likely target there and detect at work the successors of those agent-running officers of the 1970s.

  Much of this fevered activity was unsuccessful because the other side very frequently saw us coming, but now and again there were successes, and a defector or an agent in place in the KGB residency was invaluable.

  It is a mistake to ridicule all this activity, as some have done now the Cold War is over. The intelligence services of the Soviet bloc presented a serious threat to our national security at a time when the world was divided into two armed camps. If we had gone to war, the
advantage would have lain with the side with the best intelligence. I for one felt that I was helping to preserve democracy against the forces of totalitarianism.

  13

  JOHN RETURNED FROM Brussels in November 1977. By then I had managed largely on my own for more than a year and it was questionable whether it was worth trying to keep our marriage alive. Rightly or wrongly we decided to try and in early summer 1978 we sold our house in Canonbury Grove and bought a much larger, half-modernised Victorian villa in Alwyne Place in Canonbury, already by then a rather fashionable part of Islington. On the fanlight over the front door the name ‘Spion Kop’ was painted, in authentic-looking Victorian script. However it wasn’t in the least authentic. It had been put there by the previous owner, Kenneth Griffith, the actor and television producer, from whose wife we bought the house. Kenneth Griffith had produced an anti-establishment television series on the South African war at the time he was living in the house. Spion Kop was the name of a hill in KwaZulu/Natal on which hundreds of British lives had been lost at a battle on 24 January 1900. Later the name was adopted for the home end of the Liverpool football ground, the Kop, frequented at that time by those who lived to tell the tale. We resented living behind its name and always intended to paint it out, or change it for something else, but it was one of the many things we never got round to doing. In some ways I suppose ‘spy hill’ was a rather suitable name for the house I lived in.

  We were able to afford the house only because a controlled tenant lived in the basement, so the market value of the house was less than it would have been with full vacant possession. Our tenant was an old lady, who paid us £1 a week for her flat, including central heating. Quite frankly, in buying the house we had gambled that she would not last long and that proved to be the case. After a year or so she moved to a home for the elderly and we were able to let her flat at a market rent, which together with my increased salary made our finances look a lot healthier.

  The Alwyne Place house was full of character and space and light and it was a pity that we were not all able to be happier there. Its ground floor rooms were high ceilinged, the fireplaces were intact and the tall windows still had their shutters. All the wood, including the front door had been stripped and those floors which were not stripped floorboards were covered with cork tiles – it was all very Islington 1970s. The ceilings had their original high-Victorian cornices and one of the first things we did was to steam all the accumulated paint of years out of them so that the design was visible again – a terrible, long-winded job, which we undertook ourselves. I marvel, looking back, at the things I casually took on in those days. I remember that I was always exhausted, and after one Christmas, while we were trying to do some ambitious DIY job, I fell over a railing onto our ice-covered basement steps while trying to hurl our large Christmas tree into the garden and almost killed myself. It was the sort of accident you only have when you are too exhausted to behave sensibly.

  I was rushed off to Hoxton Hospital, now long since closed in one or another NHS rationalisation, with a fractured skull and a huge bruise, which quickly turned into a haematoma, on my thigh. I was still attached to a bottle draining off the fluid from the haematoma three weeks later when I went to Washington for talks with the CIA and the FBI about East European espionage. My doctor was not at all keen for me to go, but my main concern was what to wear that would conceal the bottle without making it look as if I were pregnant. I thought the Americans would be more enlightened than the French about these things, but I did not want to repeat my experience with French colleagues in Paris when I had to be hidden behind a screen because I really was pregnant.

  By the time we had got the house into reasonable order, I began to think seriously about trying to move on in my career. Until then I had regarded my life and career as an adjunct to John’s; I had assumed that where I got to in life would be dependent on his success. And so the various roles I had played, the diplomatic wife, the reluctant working mother, had followed the course of his career but I had not found them at all satisfactory or fulfilling. By this time I had grown out of my early insecurity; I felt much more self confident and I wanted to explore what I could achieve for myself.

  At this stage it did not occur to me to look for another job. I was focused on trying to break through the glass ceiling of the job I had and that involved persuading the men in charge to let me try my hand at agent-running, despite the fact that no woman in MI5 had ever done that work. The first response I got from my bosses was a delaying tactic. They sent me on the newly created agent-running course. This was designed to teach some of the skills thought necessary for recruiting and running the human sources of information, but being new it was rather experimental. As it turned out, I found it most uncomfortable, and it almost put me off wanting to do that sort of work for good. Perhaps that was their aim.

  The first thing the students on the course had to do was to go to a given pub, strike up a conversation with anyone there and try to find out all about his private life. I say ‘his’ because when I got to my designated pub, somewhere near Victoria, there was no-one in the bar except men. You obviously had to be prepared to give some sort of fictional cover story about yourself in case the person was inquisitive, and I had prepared a suitable tale. What you were not told was that while you were doing this, someone from the course would arrive at the pub and recognise you, address you by your real name and do his best to disconcert you and blow your cover story. The test lay both in how much you could learn about your target and also how well you were able to keep up your cover story in the face of this unexpected disruption. For a female, of course, faced with a bar full of males, this was particularly difficult. Those customers in my bar who were not already in a group or a twosome, were a sleazy-looking bunch – the sort of people I would not normally have gone anywhere near. The man I accosted and started to chat up was just beginning to show a worrying degree of interest – he clearly assumed I was a woman of easy virtue – when my so-called ‘friend’ strode in to disrupt me. I treated him as a saviour rather than a nuisance, which was not quite what was intended. Of course I didn’t dare protest that this was not really a very sensible exercise for women, for fear women would have been written off for all time from undertaking this sort of work. And when I did eventually become an agent-runner, I always took care to find suitable surroundings where I would not stand out.

  In its early, primitive form that course was attempting to test and teach a vital skill of an agent-running officer, the ability to relate to and get on with anyone, whoever they are. It was also aiming to teach the ability to merge into the background, to be unmemorable, which is another important skill. Unfortunately, because like everything else in those days it was geared to men, that part did not work for me and I stuck out in that pub like a sore thumb. Afterwards, those courses became a lot more sophisticated, and for those who were training to do agent-running in dangerous circumstances such as in Northern Ireland or the Middle East, a lot tougher too. But these were early days for any form of training, and especially for training women.

  Eventually, when both the Director of the Counterespionage Branch and the Assistant Director in charge of the agent section were less conservative and more open minded than others had been, the barriers fell. I was posted to the ‘joint section’ as it was called, trying to recruit human sources of information on some of the Warsaw Pact countries. I was delighted with this. My first case was a regular visitor from one of those countries. On one of his visits, he contacted a policeman in a small coastal town and said that on his next visit he wanted to meet someone from the intelligence service as he had information of value to give. The case came to my desk. We monitored the movements of his ship around the world and next time he was due to put in at a UK port, I set off all primed and ready to meet him and find out what he had to say.

  The plan was that the policeman would make the first contact and would lead our man to where my interpreter and I were waiting. We would then drive off to
a quiet pub, which we had already reconnoitred, where we could hear what he had to tell us. I was very excited about this operation, even though I knew that whatever the man had to say, it was hardly likely to be the crown jewels in intelligence terms or anything that would alter the course of the Cold War. But that did not matter to me. This was the great breakthrough; women were on the way up.

  At the time I hardly thought about something which has troubled me much more since, the ethical dilemma of intelligence work. How far are you justified in persuading or encouraging someone to put their liberty or, much more, their life at risk to give you information? The answer, of course, lies in proportionality and in professionalism. The level of harm you are seeking to prevent should be in proportion to the risk to the source. And you should not let people put their lives into your hands unless you are confident of your own professionalism and that there is an acceptable chance of being able to protect them if things go wrong.

  None of that was in the forefront of my mind that day in the excitement of the moment. But the excitement was soon to be swallowed up by mortification. While my police colleague and our man made the first contact, I stood back, lurking, in what I hoped was a casual but purposeful way. I could see the police officer pointing me out. But I could also see our man’s face when he saw the representative of British intelligence who was waiting to talk to him. It fell; he shook his head and the policeman came back to report that our friend was not prepared to talk to a woman. My future career flashed before my eyes – a wasteland of boring desk work. I wondered if all the taboos about what women could not do had been right after all. Having come so far, I was not going to take no for an answer and I sent the policeman back to negotiate. After some diplomacy on his part, and the realisation on our contact’s part that I was the best thing on offer that day, indeed the only thing on offer, he agreed to talk. We drove off to our chosen pub and no more strange quartet can ever have drunk in this rural saloon bar – the lady MI5 officer, the rather scholarly interpreter, the young police officer and the visitor from Eastern Europe, seeking to establish the value of the information he had to trade. Strange to say, once we got talking, things went quite well, and an odd rapport was established among the ill-assorted group. The contact continued for some time and produced some useful information but by far the most important thing about it for me was that it saw the breaching of a major barrier to the progress of all the women in MI5 and the beginning of a real cultural change.