Open Secret

19

I left Counter-terrorism at the end of 1990 on promotion to one of the two Deputy Director-General posts which existed at the time. I was appointed on the retirement of David Ranson, a long-time Security Service officer who had made his reputation in the counter-subversion branch at the time of the 1974 miners’ strike and had been very involved in the early days of the Service’s work in fighting international terrorism. His retirement turned out to be sadly short, as he died only a couple of years later.

My promotion to Deputy Director-General was the first time I seriously wondered if in fact I might end up as Director-General. It still seemed to me that the other deputy, Julian Faux, was much more likely to be given the job than I. He was responsible for the operational and investigative work, had served in Moscow and had run the surveillance section. More recently he had directed the surveillance operation against Michael Bettaney which led to his arrest in 1984. Julian kept a velvet glove pinned to his office wall to remind him that in earlier days he had been accused of being rude to senior officers. My job, in charge of the support side – finances, personnel and recruiting, accommodation and all the general underpinning – was dull in comparison. It is tempting to think that it was because I was female that I was given the ‘soft’ subjects but I don’t believe that was the reason. The fact that I was a female had almost ceased to be relevant to the progress of my career by this time.

As far as colleagues in the Service or in Whitehall went, I did not think it was an issue. Some of the police still found it difficult to treat a senior woman like a normal human being, and felt the need to treat all engagements with me and senior female colleagues as trials of strength they had to win, though by that time there were a considerable number of more up-to-date senior police officers who did not have that problem. Abroad, attitudes differed.

Mediterranean colleagues, who were often generals or admirals, tended to be charmingly gallant. In Northern Europe, being female was not an important factor and even the French had by then ceased to hide pregnant women behind screens. The Danish intelligence service had been headed up by a woman for a few years by the time I became Deputy Director-General. I had yet to find out about the attitudes of our Cold War opponents.

By the time I left Counter-terrorism, I was exhausted. The level of terrorist activity in both Irish and international arenas had increased to the point where, when I left, we decided to split the branch in half and two Directors were appointed to do the job I had been doing.

I felt that what I needed more than anything else was a break before I took up my next post. I asked for and was given a short sabbatical to go off and polish up my French; I had been taking conversation lessons already for some time. So just after Christmas 1991, I set off to France in my ancient Beetle Cabriolet car to take a course of lessons at the Chamber of Commerce school in the Market Square in Lille. The French loved the Beetle, and whenever I stopped someone would come up and offer to buy it. In those days I had no commercial instinct and I never pursued their offers.

Setting off to France, I felt more carefree than for very many years. I left the girls and MI5 behind with no qualms at all. Sophie was by then at university and Harriet went off to stay with a cousin. It was a wonderful feeling to have no responsibility for anything or anyone except myself. I stayed with a young family in a small house in the outskirts of Lille and had their young son’s bedroom. He had piled up all his stuff in the corner when he vacated his room for me, and somewhere among it all was some sort of electronic gadget which played a tune at 3.30 every morning. I never found where or what it was, so I never managed to turn it off. But this did not matter because although it usually woke me up, I had no difficulty in my responsibility-free state of mind in going back to sleep again. Even Desert Storm, the invasion of Kuwait, which I watched on the TV news, seemed remote from me, though I knew that my colleagues would be very much on the alert for any terrorist strikes by Saddam Hussein or his friends on his enemies in the West.

In some countries, even those with a far less serious terrorist threat than we had, it would be remarkable that the deputy head of the internal security service could go off totally alone and unprotected on such an ‘ordinary’ sabbatical abroad. It was thanks to the anonymity which had been until then a feature of a career in MI5 that I was able to do so. My hosts and the teachers at the school had no idea what I did for a living, though, as ever, my job made ordinary human relations rather difficult. The teachers were anxious to help me with particular vocabulary that would be useful in my profession, but I did not think it would be appropriate to ask them for the vocabulary for surveillance and running agents and tapping telephones. So I represented myself as some kind of an expert in physical security, and engaged the Manager of the Chamber of Commerce in earnest conversation about locks and security systems, which I did not know a great deal about in English let alone in French.

When, only a year later, there was much publicity about my appointment as the Director-General of MI5, they were surprised to discover whom they had been harbouring.

I pottered about Northern France in my little car on those dark, freezing-cold January days, and watched Lille readying itself for the arrival of the cross-channel trains. And on the way home, I stopped in Bruges and re-visited the museums which I had known well when we lived in Brussels, and watched the ducks sliding on the frozen canals. But all too soon it was time to go back to work, and I returned to the gloomy Gower Street offices, where I had last worked as Director of Counter-espionage, feeling little enthusiasm for my new job.

Resource management was not something that appealed to me at all. The Treasury was beginning to take a close interest in the resourcing of the intelligence agencies, thinking, rightly, that over the years we had got away with less rigorous scrutiny than other departments, because we had been able successfully to hide behind our veil of secrecy. So the late 1980s and early 1990s marked the introduction of a whole new system of resource and priority scrutinies, which would have made our predecessors pale. Their objective had been to keep such things away from Whitehall, particularly the Treasury, on the grounds, which they successfully held for a remarkably long time, that it was all too secret for anyone except the most closely involved to know anything about.

In the 1970s, when Michael Hanley was Director-General, we heard tales of the DG becoming apoplectic at the insensate demands of Whitehall for information to substantiate and justify resource requirements. To do them justice, he and his successors were not seeking to cover extravagance, or anything worse, it was just that they had no faith in Whitehall as it then was to understand what the task of the intelligence agencies was, and to resource it properly. It was another manifestation of the distance and suspicion which existed in those days. Nor did that lack of openness lead to profligacy; I believe it was quite the opposite. In their desire not to raise their heads above the parapet, our predecessors may well have failed to introduce changes which might have cost money, when perhaps they should have done. The housing of the Service in so many, rather unsuitable buildings was an example.

But in the late ’80s, as Mrs Thatcher got to grips with public expenditure, the veils of secrecy were gradually being torn away. Each year, a new system was tried for scrutinising the expenditure of the intelligence agencies. In fact the administrative time, thought and energy which went in to tackling the subject was in our case totally out of proportion to the sums involved. But it had by then become a sort of challenge and, as far as we were concerned, the torture of the public expenditure round got more and more refined as the years went on.

Within the Service we started to make huge changes in our management processes, not only financial management but also the way we managed our staff. We greatly improved our assessment of staff performance, we introduced performance-related pay, we made our separate businesses cost centres with their own budgets and performance targets. In doing that we took advice from a wide range of senior managers in different fields, not only in the public service. Because our business was regarded as mysterious, such people were interested to come and meet us and give us advice. So as time went on, we felt we had a good story to tell to the Whitehall scrutineers. But that did not make the process any less agonising.

The system that had been put in place meant that the staff of the Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office were responsible for the first scrutiny of our plans. Then the Treasury moved in, and questioned everything in that suspicious, combative manner which was the professional style of Treasury officials in those days. They cultivated an incredulous tone of voice, designed to make one feel an idiot and I had to force myself not to get cross, which was exactly what they wanted. The whole process culminated in the heads of the intelligence agencies having to appear before a committee of the ministers of those departments which were the ‘customers’ for their product, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Northern Ireland Office etc, with of course the Treasury in attendance. It was a sort of refined ‘Star Chamber’, where the ministers had all been provided by their officials with the most awkward questions they could think up. To the unfortunate scrutinee, it seemed like a sort of competition of beastliness. You knew that whatever you were proposing, you would be given less, and drawing attention to the comparative cost to the country of a successful IRA bomb in the City of London and a few more thousands of pounds spent on counter-terrorism never seemed to work. I came away wondering ruefully why I had put so much effort into stopping them all getting blown up.

Even the most normally pleasant and friendly people seemed to change when public expenditure was involved. When John Major was briefly Chancellor of the Exchequer he visited us for a briefing with his Treasury officials. All was going well until I, knowing it was my turn to speak next and unsure of a figure I thought he might question me about, wrote a note to my colleague sitting next to me, who I thought would know the answer. John Major noticed, stopped the person who was speaking, and accused me fiercely of ‘cross-briefing’, whatever that meant. I felt like a schoolgirl who had been caught cheating in an exam. My later encounters with John Major when he was Prime Minister were much more friendly.

By the time I retired, the scrutiny process had been refined further. The ‘Star Chamber’ grilling had been written out of the script, and things had become much less aggressive. The version in operation at that time culminated in the three agency heads and the Cabinet Secretary and his staff meeting the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and his staff in his office in the Treasury. It was never a pleasant occasion, but when William Waldegrave was Chief Secretary, at least he managed to make it more humane by offering us sandwiches and a glass of wine. Previously we had not even been offered a cup of coffee. Although the questions were no less searching, he smiled and was polite and friendly, which was a much more effective way of getting at the facts than the rather bullying style that had been in vogue previously. But he took a real interest, and was well informed, and comfortable with the subjects we were discussing.

A main responsibility for me in the year I was one of the Deputy Director-Generals, was to conclude successfully the work On Thames House, the building which Tony Duff had acquired to house the whole Service, and get us moved in on time. Thames House had had many occupants since it was built speculatively in the 1930s, including the Department of Energy during the 1984 miners’ strike. To make it suitable for MI5, with its special needs, there was major work to be done. It effectively had to be rebuilt internally, two buildings had to be joined together and a road permanently closed. Some elegant panelled rooms and art deco staircases covered with original 1930s linoleum had to be preserved and in some cases removed and replaced. It fell to me, first as Deputy Director-General and then as Director-General to preside over the refurbishment and the move into the new building, though the hard work was done by others.

At first the government had hoped that both MI5 and MI6 would fit into Thames House, but when that proved clearly impossible, a new building was acquired for MI6 too, so they could move out of their squalid 1960s block in Lambeth, Century House, which was falling to bits. The exotic Terry Farrell building on the Thames, now well known because of its appearance in a James Bond film, was identified as their future home.

Like all huge building projects, particularly in the public sector, the Thames House refurbishment had been fraught with difficulties throughout. Initially, there had been a great deal of discussion in Whitehall before it was finally decided that the building should be acquired to re-house MI5. That meant that when the building was ultimately purchased, the purchase cost was higher than it might have been if decisions had been made earlier. Initial estimates of the cost of converting the building, which were done by the Property Services Agency, had taken no account of the special requirements of the Service, nor of the fact that the building contained, as well as a number of listed features, a considerable amount of asbestos. Inevitably, when it was finally decided that we were to be the occupants, the conversion costs were greater than had been originally envisaged. Mrs Thatcher became alarmed at the rising costs and, concerned that we might be ordering gold-plated taps for the toilets, persuaded Stuart Lipton of Stanhope Properties to cast his eye over the project. There were no gold-plated taps, but with his expert knowledge and experience, he was instantly able to achieve large cost savings and he remained as our adviser until the project was completed.

With his help, when a final budget was set, we succeeded in completing the project on time and within budget, but only at the cost of detaching some of our best intelligence officers to work in the project team, rather than against our intelligence targets. All their brains, determination and covert skills were needed to bring the project safely home and towards the end it was clear that dealing with the building industry was just as tricky as dealing with the KGB. It struck me then and it strikes me now that the public sector does its building projects in a curiously inefficient way.

There was one thing I had to do as Deputy Director-General which I could not possibly have foreseen, which compensated me for all the above and turned out to be the most fascinating of all the things I did in my time in MI5. During 1989, with startling speed, the communist governments of the former allies of the Soviet Union in what was then called Eastern Europe began to unravel, and the Cold War, which had dominated the work of MI5 for the whole of my working life, came to an end. The suddenness with which it all happened had not been foreseen by the intelligence services of the USA or Europe or of the Soviet Union itself. But when it happened, it had a dramatic effect on all intelligence professionals in both East and West.

For our part, we saw both threats and opportunities in the new circumstances. In spite of the increasing amount of work we had been doing against terrorism in recent years, many people still associated MI5 with the Cold War, and began to assert loudly that there was no longer any need for it and it should be disbanded. We felt a need to explain ourselves and to justify our existence in a way that we had never felt before. But we also saw huge opportunities in the situation, and we sat down with colleagues in MI6 to consider how to turn it to our advantage.

In particular, we saw an opportunity to offer help to our former enemies in the intelligence and security services of the former Soviet bloc countries, to adapt themselves to working in democracies. They were going to need to convince the citizens of their newly democratic countries that they had changed, and that instead of working against the people to keep totalitarian governments in power, as they had under communism, they were now working for the citizens, to protect democracy. If security services were to exist in these countries and were to be effective, and it was important for the preservation of the new world order that there should be security systems in place, they would have to learn rapidly how to work within a system of laws and controls. The new governments needed help too in putting together appropriate systems of laws and oversights to control those services. We in this country had quite recent experience of setting up systems which were working well. We had up-to-date advice to offer.

They would also need advice on recruiting and training new people to staff their services. Many of the Cold War veterans were either not suited to working under a democracy or were fatally tainted by their activities under communism. The important advantages to be gained seemed to all of us to make it worthwhile putting resources into this work. By making allies of these people we could help the diplomatic initiatives that were then under way to develop friendly relations with the new democracies. In our own professional field, we hoped that we could convince the new intelligence services that by allying themselves with us, they would no longer feel it necessary to spy on this country, which would save us resources for more important things, while also enabling us to clear up some of the old cases of the past and assure ourselves that no harm was still being done. But also, very importantly, because their former communist governments had often helped and harboured terrorists as a way of damaging the West, they had information which would be invaluable in countering terrorism.

So, with the encouragement of the Foreign Office and working closely with colleagues in MI6, we moved swiftly to contact our former enemies and to offer friendship and assistance.

After a time, we found ourselves in an Alice Through the Looking Glass situation, training and advising Bulgarians, Hungarians, Poles; the representatives of services who had been our enemies all my working life.

I was responsible for our own in-service training, so I was frequently called upon to preside over the end-of-course dinners for our new allies. They must have regarded us and particularly me, a female, as something from another planet, our style and ethos was so different from theirs. I remember making a light-hearted speech at one dinner, telling some Bulgarians, I think it was, that one of the great advantages they now had in this post-Cold War era was that they would soon have a female at the top of their service. They gazed at me in stony silence and did not at all see the joke. But the speeches of thanks which our guests made were both emotional and touching. They had very recently been through the most earth-shattering experiences. Their world had been turned upside down, and if we found it all astonishing, for them it was many times more so. I was presented with an eclectic collection of cap badges and other insignia and objects engraved with friendly messages from organisations with which I had never expected to have anything but the most hostile relations.

It was a very exciting and quite bizarre period.

This was particularly true when I found myself in the headquarters of the intelligence service who would have imprisoned and possibly killed the volunteer who had been my very first agent case ten years earlier, had they found out what he was doing. Much vodka and whisky was drunk far into the night as we swapped stories about the sorts of things, though not the details of cases, we had been trying to do to each other during the Cold War. But I also found it deeply satisfying to see these former totalitarian states, who had oppressed their citizens for so long, coming to terms with democracy. On one occasion I attended a dinner at the British Embassy in Budapest to which the Ambassador had invited the Hungarian intelligence oversight committee, set up under their new legislation. It had only just been created and comprised people from both wings of Hungarian political life, which meant that on that committee were old communists and former samizdat writers who had been political enemies for years, all cautiously eyeing each other up but sincerely trying to work together in that most sensitive area of political life, national security.

That was unexpected enough. But far and away the strangest experience of my working life was a visit I paid in December 1991 to Moscow to make our first friendly contact with the KGB. Some months before, Douglas Hurd, who was Foreign Secretary at the time, had met the man whom Gorbachev had put in charge of the KGB following the failed coup against him, Vadim V. Bakatin. Douglas Hurd had recognised that Bakatin was a true democrat who was sincerely interested in reforming that organisation. He asked him, in the spirit of the times, if he would like some people from the British Security Service to go over and talk to the KGB about working in a democracy. He said he would. I was delighted to be asked to lead the team. We were three, myself, a colleague from MI5, a man who had spent much of his Security Service career in counter-espionage work against the Soviet intelligence services and whose hatred of communism was matched only by his love of Russia and its language, and an official from the Home Office. Together we set off on what was for all of us a unique experience.

It is difficult to describe the excitement and incredulity that we felt at the events that were taking place in Russia in those last days of 1991. Suddenly everything was turned on its head, nothing seemed fixed and nothing was impossible. It was breathtaking for me, after more than twenty years spent combating the activities of Soviet intelligence, to be setting off to Moscow to meet them for what we hoped would be friendly talks. It was obviously equally amazing for the other side, though I think they looked at events rather more cynically than at that time we did. We were met at Sheremetyevo airport by a KGB team led by a man whom, I found out later when I got back home again, I had already come across once before. He had been a member of the KGB office in New Delhi in the 1960s when I was a locally engaged clerk-typist working in the MI5 office there and, as one was required to do, I had written a note which was faithfully stored on a file in the registry, reporting that I had encountered him.

I am not sure he knew that we had met before as he did not refer to it. There he was clutching a small bunch of red roses, a traditional gesture of greeting – I gathered later that they had agonised over whether as a senior professional woman I would be insulted or flattered to be offered flowers. While we waited in the VIP lounge for our luggage to appear, we made stilted conversation, none of us quite sure what tone to adopt for this remarkable occasion.

We stayed with the British Ambassador, Rodric Braithwaite, in the embassy just across the river from the Kremlin. We arrived just as winter gripped Moscow, and from my bedroom window I watched as over the few days we were there the river turned first to ice and then to a snow field.

There was a sense of complete unreality in the embassy, a reflection of what was going on in the street outside. Everything was changing incredibly fast and no one knew what would happen next. The USSR was in its terminal stages (by the end of December it had ceased to exist) and the leaders of the Soviet Republics had agreed to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, but what that would mean in practice was not clear at all. Out on the street, there was every sign of economic breakdown. Little old ladies were selling a single tin of soup or a pair of worn shoes. In the Gum department store practically all the shelves were empty; there was hardly anything at all to buy. No-one knew what the rouble was worth, and prices at the tourist stalls in the Arbat where we bought the then current version of the Russian doll – a big Yeltsin, containing Gorbachev, Khrushchev, Stalin and a tiny Lenin in the middle – varied minute by minute.

Inside the British embassy the old Cold War feel of being in a hostile environment was still much in evidence. All the security rules were still in force, but attitudes were already changing and a new self-confident approach to security was taking over. It was as though the old enemy was beginning to lose its teeth. So though we went into the safe room to discuss with the embassy staff the strategy for our meetings, and though everyone was still conscious that there were microphones everywhere and that all the Russian staff were working for the KGB, there was far less concern about what they overheard than there had been. In fact, we all took rather a delight in speaking freely. The rules of the game had completely changed. At dinner in the embassy dining room on our first night there, conscious that we were being overheard, we spoke quite openly about the KGB and how we judged they were reacting to the new situation. I caught one of the women who were serving our dinner looking at a colleague and raising her eyes to the heavens at our conversation – or was it to the large crystal chandelier which hung over the table and was no doubt picking up everything we said?

Our meetings with the KGB were held in their headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, a complex of large, forbidding buildings which also includes what had been the Lubyanka prison, over the years a place of torture and death. The statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, the predecessor organisation of the KGB, had not long before been dragged off its plinth by the mob and carted off to rust in a park somewhere. My colleague, who has a well developed imagination, muttered, ‘Can’t you sense the blood in every stone?’ as we went through the door. We were shown to a meeting room, where Mr Bakatin welcomed us at the door. At a long conference table, what seemed like an immense line of KGB officers, all male of course, was drawn up on one side. We assumed they were a mixture of the First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence service, the counterparts of MI6, and the Second Chief Directorate, the domestic security service, our own counterparts. Four rather isolated chairs had been placed on our side, for the three of us and our interpreter. It was an eerie atmosphere as we sized each other up, and there was much smiling and handshaking and remarks about historic moments. But in fact, on both sides, we were rather like wild animals suddenly being presented with their prey in circumstances where they couldn’t eat it. We had been watching each other for years, competing and trying to catch each other out. But for those few days we were all friends, though the friendly feelings did not run very deep in some of those present.

We had come with prepared scripts about the need for laws and oversight in democracies, the ostensible reason for our visit, and with some requests. Mr Bakatin invited us to give our presentations and make our requests, then he would leave and let us, the ‘professionals’, talk to each other. We went through our description of the laws and regulations which controlled the activities of the intelligence agencies in the UK. These were met with polite incredulity by our KGB interlocutors. I then made my requests.

Over the years, members of the staff of the British embassy in Moscow and their families, who for the most part lived in blocks of flats reserved for the staff of foreign embassies, had been subject to harassment of various descriptions. It was clearly done either by or with the tacit support of the KGB. Flats had been entered when their occupants were out and obvious signs of someone’s presence had been left around. Freezers had been turned off, and small things broken. Possessions had been removed and returned on another occasion – a favourite trick was to take away one shoe of a pair and then bring it back a few weeks later. Quite frequently, the tyres of diplomatic cars parked outside flats were punctured or other damage was done. The idea presumably was to frighten and unsettle the people concerned. Sometimes the harassment was more threatening. When diplomats or their wives were driving in and around Moscow, they were very frequently followed by surveillance cars, that was expected, but sometimes those cars drove dangerously and threateningly close or even, apparently on purpose, hit the car they were following. My request was that if, in this post-Cold War era, we were to get closer and cooperate, that sort of behaviour should stop.

Mr Bakatin’s response to my opening remarks was friendly and welcoming. As for my request, he said that he would do what he could to look into the harassment, but in a surprisingly frank admission of his position, he added that he doubted whether he would be able to do anything about it. Turning to the man who had been in charge of the welcoming party at the airport, my one-time acquaintance from Delhi, he said that he knew that when enquiries were made, he would be told that it did not happen. That turned out to be true.

Before we left, we were told that if such things occurred, it was not the KGB which was responsible. For a time after our visit such incidents became much rarer. I believe that later on they started again.

Mr Bakatin lasted only about six months in that post, and by January 1992 his imminent departure was announced. Others tried to push ahead with his reforming policies but eventually after a couple of years things began to go slowly into reverse and the successor organisations to the KGB took on many of its characteristics. Bakatin has since written a book about his time in charge, Izbavleniye ot KGB (Getting Rid of the KGB). But when my own appointment as Director-General of MI5 was made public, shortly after our visit to Moscow, he was still in post. Amongst all the congratulations I received, the letter from him, still head of the KGB, was the one I most enjoyed. It seemed the crowning unexpectedness of that whole unexpected period.

I recently had a rather extraordinary sidelight on that episode. In the autumn of 1999, I visited Kazakhstan with a delegation from BG plc, on whose Board I sit as a Non-Executive Director. We had gone there to look at the work the company and its partners are doing on the oil and gas fields in the north of the country. The very competent security men who were looking after us, who were employed by Group 4, were all ex-KGB men. They knew exactly who I was and we developed a very friendly rapport on the basis of our past employment. I told them I had been to Moscow to visit their headquarters in 1991 when Bakatin was the Chairman. ‘Ah yes,’ they said. ‘That was a very low period for the KGB. We thought all our influence was being taken away.’

The KGB in Moscow were not at all interested in our presentations about laws and oversight arrangements. They could not wait for Mr Bakatin to leave so we could get down to discussing the protocol they wanted me to sign, which would set out the terms of our future collaboration. I got the very obvious impression that if I had signed such a document, as a few Western services did, it would have been used as part of a public relations campaign the KGB were engaged in to prove their democratic credentials to their own citizens. It was obvious from all the meetings we had that at that stage, not surprisingly, they had little idea where they or their country were going.

On the second day we had meetings in another building within the Lubyanka with what we took to be the intelligence services of the group of independent states which was just being formed. There was no clear explanation given at any stage of who anyone was or what they represented. When we asked how they intended to organise themselves and operate now the USSR was being abolished, they just did not know.

In the gaps between our meetings, we sightsaw in temperatures colder than I had experienced. We filed past Lenin, still lying in state in his mausoleum, paid our ‘respects’ at Stalin’s memorial and went inside the marvellous cathedrals in the Kremlin, where religious services were again being held. While we did so, we were followed around closely by some part of the KGB, clearly not the A Team, as they were fairly conspicuous. ‘Perhaps,’ we thought, ‘they are making sure no harm comes to us,’ but I think it more likely that in that massive bureaucracy, people were merely doing what they always did.

One afternoon we drove out to Chekhov’s house outside Moscow. It was clear that we had got there before the local surveillance officers expected us. When we arrived we were the only group present, but a few minutes after we had gone into the house, there was a sound of running feet and suddenly a panting lady joined us, trying, without much success, to appear like an interested tourist looking round the house. In the evening we attended the Bolshoi ballet, sitting in the front row of the stalls in gilt armchairs, reserved for guests of the KGB.

As well as the request for an end to harassment, I wanted to establish what scope there was for a reduction in the espionage attack by the KGB on this country. It seemed to me not unreasonable to expect that if the Cold War was over, there should be less aggressive spying.

This was a matter for the First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB, so on the second evening of our stay, the head of the First Chief Directorate, Mr Primakov, later Russia’s Foreign Minister and briefly Prime Minister, invited me to a meeting to discuss that topic. My small party and I drove in the Ambassador’s Rolls Royce to what seemed in the dark to be a rather leafy suburb, to what I took to be a KGB safe house.

It was difficult to avoid the feeling that we had somehow slipped into a James Bond film and that reality had become confused with fiction. It was a dark, cold and snowy night.

As I was taking off my snow boots in the hall, Mr Primakov materialised on the stairs to welcome us. We went upstairs to a lamplit sitting room, furnished with heavy curtains and drapery behind which anything could have been lurking. We had a brief, rather cool discussion. I asserted that in the new post-Cold-War conditions, there was much scope for cooperation on security matters, like terrorism and serious organised crime. However, if there was to be true cooperation, the level of KGB espionage on the UK should be reduced. Mr Primakov made it very clear that in his view that was a ridiculous idea. I was barking up completely the wrong tree. Espionage would continue to be necessary, for the defence of Russia, and they would continue to engage in it at whatever level they chose.

It was clear that the conversation was not likely to be very fruitful, so we called it a day before too long and he disappeared behind the draperies. When I regaled the Ambassador later with my account of this meeting over dinner, another frisson passed through the waitresses.

We went once more to that house the next evening for a farewell dinner with our new KGB ‘friends’ and the Ambassador. Mr Primakov did not reappear, but a fair cross-section of the others we had met did. I sat next to the man who was heading the KGB’s PR department, who advised me most sincerely, but surely with his tongue firmly in his cheek, of the need for intelligence services to be more frank and open. A couple of years later, one of his successors in that post was reported to have said, ‘There are friendly states, but no friendly intelligence services,’ a sentiment which characterised the nature of our ‘cooperation’ with the Russians for years to come.

Much champagne was drunk on that occasion and innumerable toasts, with many references to the number of women in top positions in the UK, along the lines of ‘Your Queen is a lady, your Prime Minister is a lady and now in MI5, dear Mrs Rimington, we have a lady.’ I made a speech in English, my colleague and the Ambassador made speeches in Russian. Everyone on the KGB side made a speech in one or the other language. The wheel had come full circle from the cocktail party in the Russian embassy in New Delhi in 1968.

If the level of later cooperation had matched the level of bonhomie that night, we would between us have cracked the problems of terrorism and organised crime for all time.

Unfortunately it did not and it took several years for any real collaborative work to be done with the KGB’s successor organisations, the SVR and FSB, and when I left MI5 in 1996, cooperation had still not reached any significant level. In the new democratic Russia many of its former officers have joined new elites of various kinds and are making reputations and fortunes for themselves.

That will surely always remain the most extraordinary period of my life. Up to that point, it was inconceivable that I would ever visit the former Soviet Union or the countries of Eastern Europe, let alone that I would meet our opposite numbers there. For someone in my position, travel there, even on holiday, was prohibited until the early 1990s. The nearest I had got was looking over the wall into East Berlin in the early 1980s, seeing the desperately run down blocks of flats on the other side, the spikes and dogs in no-man’s land and the guards in the watch towers, and thinking how awful it was. Yet ten years later I met my German colleagues in East Germany at the hotel in Potsdam where Churchill, Truman and Stalin met in 1945 to organise the occupation of Germany.

I still find it hard to get used to being able to travel freely behind the former Iron Curtain. My feelings persisted into the summer of 1999 when I spent a holiday in Poland and found myself being punted on a raft down the river which forms the boundary between Poland and Slovakia. It was unimaginable, when I first worked in MI5 that that could ever happen, unless I had been under cover on some operation.