Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  I stayed in the agent section until the spring of 1983 and for my last two years there I became the deputy head of the section, working under an MI6 officer who was the section leader. During that time we mounted a number of operations against the Soviet bloc intelligence officers in the UK. Some were recruitment operations, aimed at those whom we thought, from careful observation, might be venal, disgruntled or in some way vulnerable or susceptible to such an approach. The difficulty was to get close enough to them, without them or the security team at their embassies, whose job it was to guard them, seeing us coming. If they did, the prey would withdraw where we could not reach them. The Sovbloc officials needed to be out and about making contact with British people, either to do their jobs if they were genuine trade or diplomatic officials, or to gather their intelligence, if they were intelligence officers. But the security people were acutely aware of the risk that in being out and about, their charges might come across us. Those security officials knew that a good many of their people were disgruntled with life behind the Iron Curtain, and might well be attracted by what we had on offer, if we could get close enough to make our pitch and they had the nerve to accept it. It was a battle of wits.

  We adopted all sorts of covers, carefully designed to achieve the objective of getting alongside and cultivating the chosen target, until the moment came to drop the cover and make the pitch. Some of my colleagues specialised in cover stories which required the adoption of particularly flashy lifestyles, involving expensive sports cars and flats in stylish parts of town. Later on, such extravagances would have foundered on the need for sharp budgeting, but in those days things were more relaxed.

  My own cover stories were rather more modest, but in the course of ‘living my cover’, to use the term of art, I had to spend nights in a flat I had rented under a cover name and on other occasions in a hotel. It was a rather odd feeling to know that only a few miles away the girls were going to bed in our house, while I, as somebody totally different from their mother, was sleeping in a flat they had never seen.

  Once the two parts of my life came together in a way that was unprofessional but unavoidable. There was a sudden transport strike. One of the girls was by then at a school on the other side of London from our Islington home. She travelled there by tube. The only way she could get home, on the day of the strike, was to be picked up. But John was away and the au pair had to collect the other girl from the other side of London. Inevitably, as always seemed to happen in those days, I had a meeting arranged with a contact, which I did not feel able to cancel. The flat I was using to meet this particular person was, by lucky chance, very near the school. So I told my daughter how to get there by walking from the school, gave her the key and a cover story to use in case anyone should ask what she was doing and told her to let herself in and wait. When I arrived I made her some supper and shut her in the bedroom to do her homework while I had my meeting. We both spent the night there and I walked with her to school in the morning. She was eleven at the time. By then she knew that I did something secret for the government but heaven knows what she really thought was going on, and nowadays all she will say about those sort of experiences is that they made her independent.

  It is impossible totally to compartmentalise your life, however hard you try. On another occasion I was due to meet an agent who was considering defecting. The meeting was, of course, to be in conditions of strict secrecy, because he would have been at great risk if it had become known to his own authorities that he were in touch with British intelligence. I had agreed to meet him in a safe house in the Barbican and just before I set off to go there, the telephone rang. It was the nanny, to say that my younger daughter, Harriet, had gone into convulsions; she had rung for an ambulance to take them to St Bartholomew’s hospital. Would I meet them there? This was a real dilemma. If I did not turn up at the safe house, my contact would be left standing in the street, exposed and vulnerable, though, being a sensible man with a fall-back plan, he would go away and come back later – but far worse, he might think I had let him down, which I did not want him to do. In the end I managed to do both by going via the safe house to St Bartholomew’s, where delays in NHS Accident and Emergency, even in those days, ensured that Harriet and the nanny were still waiting to see a doctor. I had to borrow money from the would-be defector, though, to pay for all the taxis involved in this complicated bit of manoeuvring, as I had not had time to go to the bank that morning. Whether the apparent scarcity of funds available to British intelligence influenced his decision or not, I don’t know. But he did eventually decide not to make the jump across.

  I was amused not long ago to see a distinguished financial journalist doing the same balancing act. She broke off a conversation with the chairman of a company to take a call from her daughter, who had just come back from the doctor, to discuss with her whether or not she should go to school that day. Then, having resolved that, she got back without a flicker to the conversation in hand. I recognised the problem, though I suspect that mobile phones have made it worse rather than better than it was in my day.

  I was working odd and unpredictable hours in the agent section for much of the time we lived in Spion Kop. The ground floor rooms of the house had been knocked through to form one huge area. In the kitchen at the back, overlooking the garden, was an Aga around which the dramas of the family were played out. In succession a nanny, three German au pairs and a French au pair looked after the girls and cooked on the Aga – or tried to, as all the foreign girls found it a deep mystery. When I did see them, the children complained mightily about the strange meals served up to them.

  My frequent absences on operations and the stressful nature of the work and all the things we were trying to do to the large house ourselves, without having enough money to pay anyone to do it for us, did nothing to bring John and me closer together, in fact quite the opposite. John had by then moved to be Director-General of the Health and Safety Executive, which was not a job he had particularly wanted. When we were together we were both tired, cross and seemed to be continuously arguing. I still have a tragic little note written by one of the girls from those days and left on the stairs for me to find when I came home late one evening. It reads ‘Mum. pleas dont argew with dad’. I kept it to remind me what effect our problems were having on them. Not that it made it any easier.

  To do well at agent recruitment you needed a fairly well-developed imagination and good amateur dramatic skills. But none of it was any good unless you could also make a convincing recruitment pitch to your target when the moment came to drop your cover and emerge as a member of British intelligence. The skill was to be able simultaneously to explain the deceit you had been practising on your target and to inspire his confidence in you, all in a very short time before he panicked and left. After all, you were effectively asking him to put his life and liberty and the well-being of his family in your hands. Many of our targets saw us coming before the recruitment pitch was made, but not all, and if only one of those operations worked, the intelligence that it could provide was worth the effort. In any case this activity kept our targets on their toes and made life more difficult for the hostile intelligence officers who were themselves trying to recruit British citizens and others in this country with access to the information they wanted.

  One way of trying to find out what our opponents were doing in this country, what their intelligence targets were and their methods of operation, was to run long-term double-agent operations. This involved playing back against them some of those people they thought they had recruited. Soviet bloc intelligence officers in London in the ’70s and ’80s were prone to try to recruit members of the ethnic minority communities as agents, working on the usually mistaken assumption that they would not be loyal to this country. In fact a number of them reported the approaches, and with considerable courage and the expenditure of much time and nervous energy, agreed to be played back as double agents, sometimes putting themselves at serious risk by travelling behind the Iron
Curtain for training sessions and faithfully reporting what they learned – all this for very small recompense. I worked very closely with several of these people and the following case is typical though for reasons which will be obvious it is not one specific case but an amalgam of several. The agent was of African origin and had a comparatively humble job, which gave him no access to any information of value. He was being cultivated by an East European intelligence service for some undefined purpose, possibly to be activated as an agent in place in time of war. Periodically he was taken to training sessions in a safe house behind the Iron Curtain, where he was kept incommunicado for several days, cooped up with one or two training officers, and taught how to communicate by short wave radio and how to decypher coded messages and reply by post, using special paper and secret ink. He found his excursions behind the Iron Curtain terrifying, as he was in constant fear that his ‘controllers’ would discover that he was a double agent and was reporting to British intelligence.

  One of his most alarming experiences came as he was returning home to the UK after one such session. His controllers, with what seemed to me scant regard for tradecraft, had given him a pile of dollars as payment. He had put these in his wallet, not really thinking anything about the risk of carrying such a sum around. If he thought about it at all, he assumed that he was under the protection of whatever organisation his controllers worked for, and that at the London end, if there was any difficulty, I would sort it out. On that evening, the authorities at the airport seemed to be taking an inordinately long time to get everyone on board the plane. They seemed to be examining everyone’s luggage with enormous care. At first he was irritated by the slow-moving queue, but as he got near to the front and saw what was happening, he began to get nervous.

  When it was his turn, they unpacked his suitcase, and examined everything, though to his relief they did not ask him to turn out his pockets. Eventually he got on board, and sat down in his seat with a sigh of relief to try to calm down. Everything seemed to be just about ready for take off when some men in uniform appeared at the front and started calling out names and taking people off the plane. Terrified lest they should call him, he took the bundle of notes out of his pocket and shoved it in the sick bag in the pocket in front of his seat – and they did call him. He was taken off the plane and made to turn out his pockets and the contents of his wallet were scrutinised. Nothing incriminating was found and he was allowed back on the plane, to find the money was still in place in the sick bag. Finally the plane took off, with him by that time a nervous wreck, reaching with trembling hand for the drinks trolley.

  What that was all about, we never knew. Perhaps one part of the system was trying to embarrass the other, or, possibly more likely, it had nothing at all to do with him and was just a coincidence. But bravely, and in spite of everything, he stuck with it, solely out of patriotism and a sense of public service, for he made no money out of it. He handed in the money he was given, and we gave him in return very little beyond his expenses. As a result of the actions of him and others like him, we learned a great deal that was useful about the methods and targets of our opponents, which made our protective measures much more effective.

  I met my agents all over the country, to fit in with their lives, and to give them as little need as possible to make up complicated stories to cover our meetings. I can remember sitting with my African friend in a hotel bedroom in Huddersfield, helping him with his secret writing, in May 1982, during the Falklands War. The television was on, broadcasting the gloomy tones of Ian Macdonald, the Ministry of Defence press spokesman, telling us of the sinking of HMS Sheffield.

  Writing about this now, several years after the Cold War has ended, it sounds like another era. But in this post-Cold War world spying and counter-espionage still goes on and always will, though the targets are different and for the most part the intensity is less. In times of war and peace governments will always seek other countries’ information to give them an advantage in international situations. When the state is in danger internally, from terrorism for example, intelligence information is a vital tool in dealing with the threat. Though those who do this sort of work almost invariably enjoy it; they also take it very seriously. It is not a game. It is always testing and sometimes it is frightening too. For the spouses and the children who are at home wondering where their nearest and dearest are, as they work all hours of the day and night, without ever saying precisely what they are doing, it is far from a joke. For those who were carrying out the same sort of operations against terrorists then, and even more later as the threat increased, it was utterly serious.

  The inclusion of women in the agent sections in MI5 during the late ’70s was a big cultural change. It came because of quiet pressure and the logic of a situation which found by then a number of competent and well-educated women in the Service, on whom it in large part depended and who naturally wanted to do the sharp-end work. Not surprisingly, many were good at the role and particularly good at running the agents. Agent-running is the process which begins once a person has been recruited to give information, and has agreed to remain where they are, working on a long-term basis, covertly from inside whatever organisation they belong to. Controlling or running these people is very much a full-time job. It involves directing the agent, explaining to him precisely what information is required and trying to move him gradually into the place where he has optimum access, while at the same time guarding his security and preventing him from drawing attention to himself. In many cases it also involves being confidant, adviser and friend to the agent, who will not be able to talk to anyone else about the stressful and often dangerous role he has agreed to perform. Agent-runners frequently find themselves becoming financial advisers, marriage guidance counsellors and psychiatrists, ready at all times of the day or night to respond if there is a crisis.

  It was not until the early 1990s that women were involved to recruit and run agents against terrorist targets. The idea persisted that the culture of Arab countries and even of Ireland would make it difficult for women to recruit and run male agents from those societies. There was also some paternalism left in the Service right through the ’80s and the men then in charge sincerely believed that the most dangerous work was not suitable for women.

  After I had been in the Sovbloc agent section for about three years or so, and was again wanting to move on, I pressed to be sent to do similar work against the Provisional IRA. My Director at the time was Cecil Shipp, whom I had first come across in my first year in MI5 when he was in charge of the group investigating the ramifications of the 1930s Cambridge spy ring. In the interim Cecil had been in Washington as liaison officer to the CIA and the FBI and had established a reputation as an interrogator and a counter-espionage expert.

  Like all the best counter-espionage officers, Cecil was a details man. He did not feel comfortable, even as Director, unless he knew everything that was going on; not for him the delegation of the operations to the desk officers while he got on with the strategy. He wanted to see the papers and make his own mind up, then he would call you in to discuss what you were doing while puffing clouds of cigarette smoke over you and the files. This detailed approach could slow things up, particularly later when he became Deputy Director-General and files would be incarcerated in his cupboard for days while action ground to a halt.

  He was the man who had been open minded enough to post me as the first woman in the agent section and I had a lot to thank him for. But for me to run agents against terrorists in Northern Ireland was a step too far even for him. He told me firmly, ‘A family needs its mother,’ and who is to say he was wrong? My daughters would certainly have agreed with him if they had been asked.

  Nowadays these considerations do not apply only to women; everyone’s circumstances as well as their qualifications would be taken into account before they were asked to do dangerous work. Women are working very successfully in all areas of the Service, even the most dangerous, and are proving, as most people would ex
pect nowadays, to have a valuable contribution to make.

  14

  OF COURSE I did become involved in counter-terrorist work eventually. Considering that within a few years terrorism was to rise to become far and away the major threat to the security of this country, it was inevitable that I would. But as things turned out it was not until I had reached a much more senior position.

  My next move was in a different direction. In 1983, after about three years as deputy head of the Soviet bloc agent section, I began to pick up vibes that I was about to move on again. My boss had been told not to tell me where my next job was to be until I had been formally told by Cecil. But he was an MI6 officer and MI6 officers have their methods. One day he brought the conversation round to moves and then pointedly opened the office telephone directory at the relevant page. The open page was for a section I knew almost nothing at all about and I spent the next few days trying to learn what I could. What I picked up, I found disappointing. It seemed that I was going to a rather quiet backwater, involved in monitoring subversive influence in particularly sensitive parts of society. I did not know what that involved, but I gathered that the present Assistant Director was retiring, and nothing of much interest had happened there for quite some time.