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

12

My first task on returning to London in July 1976 was to find a nanny. I was determined that, with two children and me on my own, we would have someone living in with us. So I acquired a copy of The Lady, the magazine I have always turned to in times of domestic crisis (though never at any other time), put in an advertisement and waited to see what turned up.

Choosing domestic help has always seemed to me much more difficult than any other personnel decision. My first choice seemed a delightful young woman. She had all the right references; her previous employer spoke very highly of her, though perhaps I should have taken more notice of the fact that she had employed her to look after horses not children. She came and worked, apparently satisfactorily, for three or four days and then suddenly disappeared with no explanation. When I found a half-smoked joint rolled up in some towels put out for the washing, I was rather glad she had gone, though as by then I had gone back to work, it was extremely awkward to be left stranded. I was even more glad when I went round to the address she had given me to try to get the door key back, and found it was a squat in Dalston, where a very shifty-looking man with dreadlocks, peering at me through a crack in the door, denied all knowledge of her. We never saw her or the door key again.

We had more luck the second time and Jane stayed with us until Harriet went to school. But she was only the first of a long succession of nannies and au pairs whose lives became intertwined with ours over the next few years.

Dealing with nannies I first met the phenomenon, which I later encountered at work when I began to be in charge of groups of people, of the way people remorselessly unburden their anxieties onto the one in charge as soon as they get the chance. As the one in charge, it is your responsibility to be always positive, cheerful and supportive. As soon as I opened the door in the evening, the au pairs in particular would tell me all the disasters that had happened during the day. My only defence was to develop the habit, which I kept until I retired, of ringing up home before I left work, so that I had a chance to get used to whatever had happened and I knew that when I arrived at the front door there would be no nasty surprises. I might even have thought of a solution to the problem, but at least I could ensure the kettle was on or the gin and tonic poured out, so that things would start to look better. On the other hand, I rarely ring home when I am abroad. Male colleagues are always telephoning home and reporting on what the weather is doing, or how their football team is faring. I never want to know what’s going on, because I know I can’t do anything about it, and if there is a major disaster I know someone will tell me about it before long.

One evening, when I made my telephone call before leaving work, I was told that a swarm of bees had invaded the house and what were they to do? I had no answer to that one except to advise them to go to my sister-in-law who lived round the corner. I did consult a colleague at work who knew about bees and I tried ringing around various Bee numbers that I found in the Yellow Pages before I left work, but I could not arouse anyone’s interest. When I arrived, there were indeed bees everywhere, crawling up the insides of the windows, walking down the stairs, all over the beds. I hoovered them all up in the vacuum cleaner, which was probably quite the wrong thing to do, but it did eventually solve the problem.

On another occasion the house was burgled while the children were being collected from school. They had all arrived home to find they couldn’t open the door, because the burglars had climbed in and out of an upstairs window at the back and had put the bolts on the front door so they would not be disturbed at their burgling. I got back to find a confused huddle of assorted adults and children at the front door, unable to understand why they couldn’t get in.

We were frequently burgled during that period. It was one of the prices you paid for living in Islington, and our locks and bolts got ever more complicated. Once, after the days of nannies and au pairs, when Sophie was just old enough to look after herself and Harriet during the holidays, the telephone rang on my desk at work. It was Sophie who whispered,

‘Mum. I think there’s a burglar in the house.’ She had been sitting in her bedroom on the top floor painting a picture, having left the door into the garden open, when she had looked up and seen a large young man in the doorway clutching my jewellery box (not much left in it to steal by then). Thankfully, when he saw her he rushed off down the stairs, muttering, ‘Sorry, wrong house,’ but they were afraid he was still there. In those days I was not well known and had no special security and those were the sort of telephone calls that put some strain on the working mother’s principle of compartmentalisation. I rang up the police from the office and by the time I had rushed home the excitement was all over.

Exactly the same sort of unburdening that the nannies and au pairs practised used to happen at work, for example when I got back after being away on leave. On my first day back, each of the section heads would come in to tell me what had been going on and as the morning wore on, I felt that I had sunk further and further down in my chair as one after the other unburdened their problems and worries onto me, and they would go out looking taller than when they came in.

When I went back to work, in the summer of 1976, after being away for nearly two years, things seemed to be changing. More young people had been recruited, there were more women officers and the place seemed to have a livelier feel to it. By this stage I was committed to working. It looked as though I was likely to be dependent on myself alone in my old age, as John’s pension situation was no nearer resolution, so I thought that I’d better knuckle down and get myself as good a career as I could manage. It did now seem possible that there might be a decent career for me in MI5, the way things were going.

On my return I was put into a section which was working to counter the activities of the Soviet intelligence officers and their Warsaw Pact allies in the UK – the ‘residencies’, as the groups of intelligence officers living here in various guises were called. As an officer, I was in charge of a small team of people responsible for a group of East European residencies.

Another team across the corridor dealt with the rest of the East Europeans and in a long room round the corner a much larger team was looking at the Soviet residencies. My team was a mixed bunch, all women, one was the daughter of a diplomat, one had a degree in astronomy and one had left school at sixteen and had worked her way up after joining as a clerk. We worked in yet another run-down building, now demolished, at the corner of Warren Street and Euston Road. In its day it had been at the cutting edge of design, we were told, in that the heating came from pipes in the ceilings. Perhaps because hot air rises, the heating never seemed to work. I spent the winter of 1976-7 and the following one, working there wrapped in a blanket and clutching a hot water bottle to keep warm.

In the 1960s, the Soviet Union and their East European allies had been allowed to build up their diplomatic and commercial representation in London practically unchecked. Among all those people had been a large number of officers of their civilian and military intelligence services, present in Britain for the sole purpose of spying on us and our allies and spreading propaganda and disruption. In April 1971, the government, acting on advice from MI5 and the Foreign Office, had expelled from the country 105 Soviet intelligence officers in what was known as Operation Foot, which effectively damaged the Soviet intelligence operation in this country for some time. In the five years or so since Operation Foot, Soviet intelligence officers had begun to creep back into some of their old positions in the embassy and the trade delegation, and into some new ones in other Soviet organisations too. The Warsaw Pact countries’ intelligence services were also well represented in London under various covers.

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.