Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5

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 ministers 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.

I had worried a lot about how we were going to manage when the baby was born. It had never been my intention to be a working mother and I was extremely uneasy about the idea. In the early 1970s, it was still regarded as quite unusual for professional women to go straight back to work after having a baby. Those were the days when, in the Foreign Office, women diplomatic staff had to leave when they got married, let alone when they had babies.

My mother was much against the idea of my going back to work. She was firmly of the view that a mother’s place was with her baby, at least until the child was old enough to go to school.

She was not the only one – there were lots of people around to add to my sense of guilt by expressing their amazement that I should even consider such a course. Certainly this situation had not arisen before in MI5. I discussed the options with the personnel people in the office and it was made clear to me that if I wanted to come back even at my then grade, I would have to come back full time. And I would be expected to return after three months, if I wanted to be certain that there would be a job for me to come back to. There was no part-time work in those days, except for clerks and typists, and job-sharing had not been invented. It was taken for granted that intelligence staff worked full time or not at all. Inevitably, John’s loss of years of pension affected my own attitude to my career. Although we always hoped that it would be restored, even right up to the time of his retirement, I felt that it was more important than ever for me to go on working to make sure that I had a pension in my own right.

I stayed in the group working on university research until November 1970, when I left to have Sophie, though with all this going on at home, the problems of the possible infiltration of the Civil Service by Russian spies seemed to pale into insignificance, as far as I was concerned. When I left to go on maternity leave, my boss wrote on my annual confidential report: ‘She is a most acceptable, warm-hearted and engaging colleague’, but then he spoiled the sentiment by adding ‘even though she is an upholder of women’s rights.’ I don’t think I was aggressively feminist, but my intention of returning to work after having the baby was incomprehensible to most of my male colleagues in those days and must have seemed like an advanced case of ‘womens’ lib’, a phenomenon both scorned and feared by many men in 1970.

Sophie was born on 30 December 1970. Almost immediately I had to start planning how I was to manage to go back to work, though I certainly did not at all want to do so. I think I would have felt better about it all if I had been able to afford to have someone to live in the house and look after her but on my salary, and with our commitments, that was not possible. With a heavy heart, I started to investigate the prospect of day nurseries for babies, but in Islington at that time they were few and far between and places in them were limited to what were known in the jargon of the times as ‘problem families’. Whatever they were, we obviously were not one of them. I did not know what to do next, but our local health visitor suggested the idea of a child minder who would look after our baby in their house. I had never heard of this – in those days it was not nearly as common as it is now – and did not at all like the sound of it. However, the health visitor put me in touch with the wife of a police officer with a family of her own, who lived in the police flats in Canonbury, not far from our house. I was greatly cheered when I met her and found a friendly, sensible down-to-earth lady who it turned out also looked after the daughter of our doctor.

Nancy looked after Sophie from the time she was three months old until she was four-and-a-half. It was an arrangement that worked very well for the two of them and they developed a warm, happy relationship. For me it provided what I needed at the time, the comfort that my daughter was being well looked after in a secure and caring environment.

But I was the one who suffered most from this arrangement and I found it at its most difficult when I first went back to work. I couldn’t escape a sense of guilt every morning as I handed over my baby in her pram to Nancy at the gates of Canonbury School. When Sophie got a bit older, and knew what was going on, she used to cry and cling on when I left her in the morning, as children of that age will. I found it distressing, even though I knew that as soon as I had gone, she cheered up. All this is the currency of many people’s lives nowadays and is not taken as at all unusual. But in the early 1970s, with lots of people ready to tell you it was wrong and that you were risking long-term damage to your child, it was tough. My mother always asserted that Sophie’s rather anxious personality was caused by her early upbringing. I forbore to remind her that my own early childhood experiences had hardly been secure and that I was probably an even more anxious child as a result.

There is never going to be any perfect answer to the dilemma faced by mothers who opt to work full time, whatever their reason for doing so. Even today, though it is not regarded as the strange and unusual thing it was then, and though the support mechanisms are better organised, it is no easier. I am now watching one of my daughters trying to do what I did then, and manage work and a family. And twenty-five years on, it is no easier for her than it was for me. She is still trying to fit being a mother in around the edges of her working life, or to fit working round the edges of being a mother, depending on what the day brings, and my granddaughter is looked after in much the same hand-to-mouth way as she was.

The debate has moved on from stereotyping men’s and women’s roles as worker and homemaker, but we still define everyone in society in terms of what they ‘do’, i.e. their job, and we have not yet managed to come to grips with the relationship between work and home.

Though it is much more socially acceptable now for the male parent to share what was traditionally ‘the mother’s role’, that causes its own tensions. It can mean merely that both members of the partnership, instead of just one, are attempting the difficult task of balancing the competing pulls of career and home and feeling dissatisfied with their performance in both. Women are doing well at work and society needs them to. Most neither can nor wish to return to being segregated in their homes, as ‘housewives’. The result is that even nowadays most mothers, particularly when their children are very young, are strongly pulled in two different directions. Of course, it helps if one is strongly committed to one’s work or, to be brutal about it, if one is earning large sums of money and can afford everything of the best in one’s own home, as nowadays some young people can.

I don’t know what the answer to this conundrum is, and neither does anyone else.

When I hear of increasing ‘family-friendly’ policies, more ‘rights’ for employees to maternity leave, paternity leave, special leave during the early years of their children’s lives, I worry.

Obviously, I would like things to be easier for my daughters and their children than it was for us when they were little and I want those women with the will and the capacity to rise to the top in employment, to be able to do so. But I don’t want young women to become disadvantaged in one way because we have sought to give them more advantages in another. I have seen enough of employers in the public and private sector to know that those employees who take all they are entitled to, even now, are less likely to get on than those who do not.

Getting to the top, for a woman in particular, is still a question of having enormous energy, determination and focus.

At that stage, I was neither strongly committed to MI5, nor was I earning large sums of money. I went back to work solely because I felt I had no option, though I would not have admitted this at the time, and if asked I would have talked about the importance of my career.

But it was difficult. I would call at Nancy’s on my way home from work and collect Sophie in her pram and later her pushchair. As soon as we got home I would give her tea and a bath, aware that however tired I was I must be lively and jolly as I was cramming all my mothering into these few hours. Those were the days of terry-towelling nappies, disposables were just coming into the shops, and they had to be washed by hand every evening as at first we did not have a washing machine. Luckily, I had and still have a robust constitution and more energy than most people. And I certainly needed it. But in spite of that, my memories of those early years of Sophie’s life are primarily of hard work and exhaustion and of relations between John and myself going into severe decline.

It was at this stage of my life that I began to acquire the skill, essential for a working mother, of compartmentalisation. You have to learn to divide your life up into boxes; not to worry about one thing when you are doing something else. It is not easy at first and for me it was not made any easier by concerned friends constantly asking, ‘Don’t you worry about your baby when you’re at work?’ I did at first, very much, but I soon realized that if I were to survive, I would have to learn to put her out of my mind while I was in the office. I did manage to do that in the end, but even years later when I had two children at school, if I drove past a school on my way to a meeting, just when all the children were coming out and being met by their mothers, I would feel a twinge of guilt that I was not there meeting mine and taking them home for tea. I have to admit, though, that however much I enjoyed doing that occasionally, I felt a sense of satisfaction and fulfilment – that I also had something else interesting and even important to do.

There is another skill, related to compartmentalisation, which all successful working mothers have to develop to a fine art, which I began to learn at this stage, though I became much more skilled at it later. It is sometimes said that women are better than men at doing several things at once and I think that is probably true, but more than that, you have to develop the skill of keeping your eye on lots of different things at once. Without having time to focus on anything in much detail, you begin to recognise when something is getting out of place in the big picture. You are constantly reviewing things, whether at home or at work, then when you spot something getting out of line, you focus on it at the expense of other things until you have pushed it back into place. It’s what successful senior managers do and hard-pressed working mothers, whatever level they have reached in their profession, do it too or they don’t survive long.