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

6

After the euphoria of learning that we were to go to India had passed, I began to worry. My first anxiety was whether, with my migraines and claustrophobia, the Foreign Office doctor would discover that I had some incurable illness and was unfit to travel. He did not, and probably as a result of that, and of stopping taking the pill, because we thought that this was the ideal time to start a family, I started to feel better shortly afterwards. My next worry was whether I had the right clothes. I was given a copy of the Post Report on India, dated January 1964, a strange buff-coloured booklet which had been written by members of the British High Commission in India with the aim of giving staff who were going there for the first time some suggestions on how best to prepare. It was meant to be helpful, but I found its long lists of things to bring quite daunting. We were told we would need a lot of summer dresses, a minimum of a dozen.

In another section we were told

‘Thank God for that,’ I thought, as I had no fur coat and no prospect of getting one. I went into an orgy of sewing to make myself a wardrobe which would meet these stringent requirements and be suitable for this great adventure.

Then there were the provisions – a long list of them which the Post Report advised were worth taking. It seemed that many of the basic requirements for civilised life were unobtainable in India, including custard powder, vanilla essence and cocktail cherries – ‘not necessary to bring cocktail onions’. Decent lavatory paper was extremely expensive, we were advised, and we should definitely bring all the make-up we would require for the entire posting. Thank goodness we did not have any children; the list for them seemed endless.

We pored over the catalogue of Saccone and Speed, the diplomatic suppliers, and went one exciting day to their offices in Sackville Street with a long order for quantities of strange things we did not know existed, like butter and bacon in tins and huge whole Edam cheeses. A lot of this stuff was wasted, partly because it did not keep in the heat, and partly because when we got there we found that India was nothing like the gastronomic desert we had been led to believe. One Saturday morning we went off early to Sainsbury’s in Victoria Street and filled three trolleys with domestic necessities including what seems in recollection to have been hundreds of toilet rolls. And we ordered a car, something we had not imagined we would be able to afford for a long time. It was a white Ford Escort with a sun visor and it took us to many strange places, and let us down badly in some alarming circumstances. All these assorted worldly goods were to travel with us on the Anchor Line’s ship RMS Caledonia, which sailed from Bootle on 9 September 1965.

In giving up my job at the India Office Library I took back the pension contributions which had been transferred from Worcestershire, thinking it unlikely that I would ever work again. If our plan to start our family in India worked out, I expected to spend the rest of my life as a wife and mother.

I can well remember the excitement of leaving our flat in Roland Gardens, early that September morning, with all our cabin trunks and suitcases labelled and packed, to catch the train to Liverpool. There had been doubt right up to the last minute about whether we would go. The Indians and the Pakistanis had decided to start one of their periodic wars over Kashmir, so the Commonwealth Relations Office had waited before confirming that we should go. John’s sister, Rosamund, who had just come to London to start a job in the House of Commons Library and was taking over our flat, was hanging out of the kitchen window with tears streaming down her cheeks that morning to wave us good-bye. My parents came to Bootle to see us off and board the ship to have tea with us before we sailed. There was a party air about the whole occasion; my mother had bought a new hat but I think they were secretly wondering if they would ever see us again. They stayed the night in a hotel overlooking the Mersey and we went up on deck in the dark after we had sailed to look at the shore and imagine them watching the ship as it sailed past.

The sea journey to India was an unforgettable experience for someone who had never been further away from home than Italy. It divided two eras in my life and, as it turned out, our stay in India also crossed a watershed in the modern development of that country.

The RMS Caledonia had been built in 1923 to carry out to India officials of the Empire, tea planters, missionaries and businessmen whose lives were to be spent there. In 1965 it still did so, though we were the rather humbler substitutes for the Imperial officials.

Underneath an awning at the stern of the ship a cast of traditional characters assembled at noon each day to drink their chota pegs. There were planters in knee-length khaki shorts, going back from leave to their lonely lives in the hills around Darjeeling or to Assam, businessmen and engineers and plant managers bound for Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and upcountry too. There were missionaries, lots of them, travelling on the bottom decks of the boat in much less grand conditions than we, but joining us in the evenings to watch films under the stars or to make up bridge fours, playing interminably in a smoky lounge. At Port Said the magic man, the goolie-goolie man, boarded the ship and travelled with us through the Suez Canal, with white chickens up his sleeves, making them and various rings and watches disappear and reappear, just as he had for forty years. But by 1969, when we returned from India, the Suez Canal was closed, the British businessmen and tea planters were leaving for ever and India had shifted the whole direction of her diplomacy and industrial development.

Looking back on it now, the journey was a constant wonder. We were young, just thirty, and amazed with the tremendous excitement of sailing slowly in a sort of time capsule to the Orient. There were breathtaking things to see -flying fish and shooting stars, the planet Jupiter over Africa, and as we sailed through the narrow passage of the Suez Canal, camels loping along beside the ship on the Sinai side, at the same level as the deck and almost close enough to touch. There was an immense storm over Arabia, the desert and hills visible for thirty miles and more, under the huge, prolonged flashes.

There were shocks too and the first of those came with our arrival at Port Said. We docked in the very early morning, and I awoke to feel flies walking over my face and to take in for the first time the smell of the Orient. We disembarked for the day into Port Said docks but the heat, the smell, the noise and the sheer aggression of the traders, soon forced us back to the safe haven of the ship. How feeble we were.

In fact the Caledonia was a tub, and had no air conditioning, but as we reached the Red Sea and the weather started to warm up, we slept out on the deck under the stars and wrote letters to our friends, so wet with perspiration that we feared they would never be deciphered. We thought it was all fantastic. In the fancy dress competition, got up very patriotically as the Lion and the Unicorn, we won a prize.

Aden brought further excitement – the troubles there were in full swing, the speaker of the legislative council had been shot a few days earlier by terrorists demanding independence and an explosion on shore greeted the ship as we sailed in. That didn’t stop us going ashore to bargain for watches and a camera at duty free prices but all the time I felt an uneasy sensation in the small of my back, wondering if anyone had a rifle trained on it. In fact the biggest excitement at Aden was the Caledonia’s fouling her anchor – round and round we went in the bay all afternoon as the crew tried to unwind it. We wondered if we would ever get to India.

At Bombay we were met by a superior-seeming person from the Deputy High Commissioner’s office, whose job it was to look after us and put us safely on the train for the twenty-four-hour journey to Delhi. I was taken aback by what seemed to me the immense luxury of his style of life – servants in cockaded hats and long sashes offering tea and whiskies in cut glass tumblers, in surroundings of opulent furnishings and oriental rugs.

Having no experience of diplomatic life at all, I had never seen anything like it. Strangely contrasting with all this were his wife’s complaints about their living conditions -the shortage of hair lacquer, problems with the servants and the inconveniences of her apartment. All her conversation was complaints. I wrote rather laconically back to my mother, ‘People here are terribly fussy about their accommodation. I think it is all a pose to make people think they are used to something better at home. I bet most of them live in semis in Surbiton.’

We were further amazed on being presented with a hamper of provisions for the train journey. There was everything in there, whole chickens, pudding in a tin and the inevitable bottle of whisky, without which one seemed to be able to go nowhere in India. We were told that on no account were we to touch a. morsel of food or drink offered to us on the train; that way, they said, lay instant death. Actually it was a wise warning to greenhorns like us, with our shipboard-cosseted stomachs. Quite a long time later, when we had been in India for some years and become much more cavalier, John landed himself with a nasty dose of worms through incautiously eating the food on the train.

The train journey to Delhi was a trip back into biblical times, enjoyed by us from the comfort of the leather-covered seats of the Air-Conditioned Class. Already we felt many social layers away from the people we saw walking along the platforms or squatting on the station benches, their sandals neatly arranged on the platform beneath each owner.

When we arrived in Delhi in the autumn of 1965 it was only eighteen years after Independence. Signs of British influence and past domination were everywhere. One of the guests at our ‘welcome’ lunch in one of the big bungalows in the High Commission compound was the last British Chief Justice of the Punjab, still in place, as was, at that time a British Chief Administrator in Madras, both having elected to stay in the Indian Civil Service at Independence in 1947. After lunch our prospective bank manager, the elegant Mr Wroe of the Chartered Bank, a regular sahib, took us out in his car into the countryside and stopped by the well-kept towpath of a large canal where there was a wooden building. He said nothing.

We walked in. No key. It was as though time had stopped still. The darkwood furniture, with its chintz covers lay undisturbed. There were mildewed-looking English novels of the 1920s in a glass-fronted bookcase. A big fan hung from the ceiling, the string for the punka wallah to pull as he fanned the sahib, still dangling down. The lodge was one of ten or so on the 270-mile canal, in which canal superintendents had stayed each night on their tours of inspection.

Perhaps they still did, for there was no dust. Mr Wroe meant it as a kind of elegy on the order of the Raj, and indeed it was a strangely impressive tribute to some such thing, and perhaps also to the honesty of the Indians, for there had been no vandalism or robbery.

In New Delhi, statues of British Governor-Generals still stood on their plinths at the intersections of the major roads, which were still called by British names. The largest and grandest colonial-style bungalows were lived in by British and American diplomats, businessmen and military officers and most of the bathrooms contained lavatories and wash basins by Shanks and Thomas Crapper, their brass pipes sometimes polished to a brilliant shine. The dignified Bearers in their splendid turbans and smartly pressed uniforms had been trained by the British and knew how to make a pink gin and how to cook jam roly-poly and bread-and-butter pudding. Any attempt to modernise their menus was met with gentle but firm resistance.

But India was changing fast and by the time we left, in 1969, that era with its recall of the Raj had ended. The British were out of favour. The statues were being pulled down and replaced by local heroes and the roads were being renamed. Mingled with a certain sadness at seeing the statue of King George V being pulled from beneath his canopy on Rajpath, there was a certain understanding among the British community of the justice of these proceedings – the British had simply stayed too long and won too much. Our boss, an old India hand, said that he had been told, on applying for the Indian Civil Service in 1937, that we had ten years and must then get out.

And so the Anglo-Indian community, some still clinging to their solar topees, left for Australia and Canada, able to take very little with them, their possessions often looted, the most pathetic victims of the prevailing anti-British feelings. Mrs Gandhi, the Minister of Information when we arrived, was the genius behind these events and became Prime Minister before we left. She was no friend of the British, nor for that matter the Americans; her sights were set on the Soviet Union and as the British left, colonies of Russians moved in.

At the time we arrived, Delhi was in an uneasy mood. The north east routes to Assam and Sikkim had been closed three years before in a brush war with China; the north west routes similarly in the war with Pakistan, which was just flickering out after the biggest tank battles since the Second World War. Delhi itself, and even more the towns and villages in the Himalayan foothills, were full of Tibetan refugees, selling rough metal artefacts, all of which purported to be antique silver and lapis lazuli and many of which undoubtedly were. Some of the windows in the government buildings were crisscrossed with sticky tape to prevent shattering during air raids – an eerie flashback to my war-time childhood. On our first visit to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, there was an alert. Sirens wailed and aeroplanes screamed overhead, something I never thought to hear again, though as far as we could see no bombs fell.

Shortly after our arrival, we were sent on a familiarisation course for newly arrived diplomats in Indian history and culture, at Delhi University. The course was dominated by Americans who had the largest representation in the country, apart from the Soviet Union whose diplomats did not attend the course (no doubt they had a separate one). I found it surprisingly hostile and uncomfortable. The Indian academics were noticeably anti-West and pro-Soviet and their presentation of Indian history did not defer at all to our feelings. We had been equipped by the High Commission with a paper of useful rejoinders. Our paper said: ‘After the Amritsar massacre, General Dyer was court-marshalled and dismissed from the Army.’ Sure enough, the Indian version was that he had been fêted at tea parties by Imperialist ladies. Perhaps he had; it all depends what you chose to emphasise. Our particular difficulty, apart from our colonial past, stemmed from the fact that Mr Wilson was believed to have blamed India for the declaration of war with Pakistan. Actually, he had also criticised Pakistan, but the Indian press had not reported that. The Americans did not escape unscathed. They came under a lot of criticism at that time for their heavy bombing raids in Vietnam.

After the course was over, political and international affairs did not figure much in my thinking for some time, as I rapidly became submerged in the role of diplomatic wife. My first letters home were all about cocktail parties and dinners and Scottish dancing on Burns’ Night, with sixteen haggis flown in by BOAC. I spent quite a lot of time at first improving our flat, but I did not think much of the Indian workmen sent round by the Ministry of Works detachment at the High Commission. They were all long-standing employees with large families whom nobody wanted to sack in spite of their incompetence. So I painted the walls myself, which amazed our white-uniformed, turbaned Bearer, Nunkhu Ram, who did not think that was at all a suitable occupation for the memsahib.

Every day Nunkhu Ram and I went through a wonderful ritual, the household accounts. He would list in an exercise book his purchases of the previous day and what they had cost. The trouble was, he wrote it all down in Hindi, because although he could speak some English, he could not write any, and he also used the old currency of annas and pice. I think there were four annas to the rupee and sixteen pice to the anna, but the mathematics involved was far too much for me and I just took his word for it and gave him what he suggested. I still have his account book, with his Hindi and my English translation beside it.

In December, as forecast in the Post Report, it started to get cold. Anxious not to ‘expose shoulders covered in goose pimples’, I had a fire lit in the grate in our sitting room but clouds of smoke billowed out so Nunkhu Ram summoned a chimney sweep. ‘We had the chimney sweep today,’ I wrote home. ‘Two men came. One sat cross legged in the hearth, holding a piece of blue-and-white spotted material over the grate ostensibly to stop the soot flying all over the room, while the other went up on the roof and dropped down the chimney a heavy weight on a rope. They then hauled it up and dropped it down again, and finally in a stroke of genius, the man at the bottom untied the weight and tied to the rope a great bunch of leafy twigs, like a sort of green bouquet, which was hauled up by the man on the roof. Some soot came down so it must have been partially effective, but I think they would have done better with a brush.’ The chimney went on smoking.

I also spent quite a lot of time at first making clothes, an odd thing to do in India, where the tailors are so good. I reported to my mother that I thought my clothes were as good as most people’s, except for a lack of long dresses. However, by the time we had been there a year, I had given up painting and dressmaking and was bemoaning the fact that I was too busy, exactly the same phenomenon that I experienced after I had been retired for a year. I have obviously learned nothing in thirty years about how to relax. Maybe as a consequence of my father’s work ethic, I did not then, and I don’t now, feel entirely comfortable unless I am busy and playing a part in whatever is going on.

I started looking round for something to do not long after we arrived. I went one day with some of the High Commission wives who helped in an orphanage in Old Delhi, thinking to offer my services, but I am ashamed to say that I could not cope with it. I found the sight of the babies lying in rows in their cots, hardly ever changed or picked up, and the young children, many very traumatised and banging their heads and rocking, more than I could deal with. Instead I joined a scheme to teach English to some of the girls who taught the children in the village schools. I used to drive early in the morning several miles out of Delhi to Pipavit, a village of mud houses, where the small children were taught sitting on the earth floor of a compound shaded by trees. I loved those drives, before the sun was properly up, while it was still comparatively cool and the smell of wood smoke and dust hung in the air.

The teachers were delighted to see us and the village women welcomed us and showed us their babies while the teachers interpreted as they told us about their lives and problems, which were many. My Hindi never reached conversational standard in spite of lessons from a well-intentioned gentleman who came to our flat each Tuesday evening – though I did learn that the word for ‘today’ is the same as the word for ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’. I can also remember how to say in Hindi, ‘Please get in my taxi, Memsahib,’ though surely that ought not to have been my side of the conversation.

The village visiting came to an end when one of the teachers got married and the other left. We were invited to the wedding, which I found a profoundly sad affair. The girl who was getting married came from a very modest family and she was not particularly handsome, but she was charming, sensitive and intelligent. Her marriage was, of course, arranged, and I believe she had not seen her husband until he arrived with his friends at the wedding, riding on a white horse in traditional fashion. He was awful, presumably the best her parents could get for her. He was loud and vulgar, as well as late, which I gathered was a protest about some aspect of the arrangements, possibly the dowry. I felt desperately sorry for her. She must have thought he was as ghastly as I did. I never saw her again, but I have often thought about her since, and wondered how she got on.

I was also at various times teaching English to the children of the Sudanese Ambassador, coaching an English girl who was trying to get into Roedean, and teaching Latin to a ferociously intelligent American boy. In my spare time from all that, I helped out at the Servants’ Clinic in the High Commission compound. I was effectively the dispenser. The doctor, a venerable old Sikh with a long white beard, would say, ‘Twenty four green pills, third bottle along,’ and I’d pop them in an envelope, or ‘bottle linctus,’ which meant I was to fill up a little bottle of some brown substance from the big one. Many of the children suffered from hideous sores which the doctor called ‘monsoon sores’, which I had to paint with gentian violet. It didn’t seem to do very much good as they were always there again the following week with their ‘monsoon sores’ even bigger and looking more frightening than ever, having turned bright purple from the gentian violet. The clinic could get rather gruesome, but as far as I was concerned it was nothing like so awful as the orphanage.

Everyone we knew was, as we were, required to act as nanny to the teenage children of friends who came through Delhi on the hippie trail. In those mid-1960s years, the Beatles had discovered India and every young person with a claim to be ‘with it’ had to make the journey overland from Europe, and go up into the Himalayas to commune with a Maharishi in an Ashram. Worried parents would write to ask if we would lend their young a hand, and in due course the young would turn up in kaftans and beads, filthy, exhausted and suffering from a variety of stomach ailments, with hair-raising tales of weeks spent travelling on buses through Iran and camping in Afghanistan. We would get their clothes washed, take them to the doctor, and feed them on decent food until they seemed well enough to go on, when we would stuff them and their rucksacks into our car and drive them to New Delhi railway station, where we would watch them climb into the packed, cattle-truck-like third-class railway carriages for the next part of their journey, while we went back to our whisky sodas and air conditioning. For some of them it turned out to be a disastrous experience and I remember on a trip to Nepal, seeing some youngsters at Kathmandu airport, who were obviously completely out of their minds on drugs, being repatriated to Britain.

In spite of my sorties into the countryside, it was inevitably a very privileged life, largely insulated from anything other than the very top end of Indian society. Some of the wives who lived in the High Commission compound rarely, if ever, went out, regarding the world outside the walls as too strange and threatening to risk. Their lives were a round of bridge parties and shopping from the many salesmen who arrived offering jewellery, brass trays, carpets, papier-mâché boxes and shawls from Kashmir. Many, though, were much more adventurous, the principal joy for the better off being the thousand-mile trip to Goa for the Portuguese cooking, or the journey to Kashmir for a stay in a houseboat and, it was said, the delights of cheap ganga. Others, like ourselves, went off to scrabble round the sites of ancient Hindu or Buddhist temples, to the hill stations in the foothills of the Himalayas or to one of the game parks in the hope of seeing tiger. The nearest we came to seeing a large wild animal was one evening in Corbett Park.

We had gone at dusk with some friends to the edge of the forest, where a clearing sloped gently down to the river and where, we had been told, animals came to drink before nightfall.

We climbed up a rickety ladder into a large tree, where a worm-eaten wooden platform was precariously balanced. We settled gingerly down on it, with our hip flasks for nourishment, and waited in silence for something interesting to happen. As darkness fell, we listened to the sounds of the forest preparing for night, the cry of peacocks, the grunting of wild pig and innumerable rustlings. Then right at the foot of our tree we heard a much louder rustling that was clearly being made by an animal of some significant size. The rustling stopped. We knew it was still there and I am sure it knew we were there. I held my breath. Quite frankly I was terrified. I knew big cats could climb trees and we were sitting there like tethered goats, well within the reach of whatever this was and completely unprotected.

But I need not have worried. Just as the suspense was becoming almost too much, we heard the sound of a car coming along the forest track beneath us. A Cadillac with all its lights on pulled up beneath our tree and an American, smoking a large cigar, leaned out of the window and shouted up to us, ‘You guys seen anything?’ At that, a loud, angry snarl came from beneath our tree and whatever it was, and John swears he saw it was a panther, bounded off back into the forest. So we packed up and went back to our cabin, disappointed but for my part rather relieved.

The part of my life I enjoyed least was the diplomatic wife role. I could never take too seriously the rules of High Commission protocol, which to one not brought up in that world could seem decidedly arcane. I understood the logic of arriving five minutes early at the High Commissioner’s house if he were entertaining, so as to help greet the guests, and also that one should not leave before the last guest had gone. All that seemed to me to have a purpose. But what was the logic of the rule that if you entertained the High Commissioner at your own house, you should make sure that he sat at the right hand end of the sofa? (I think it was the right-hand end, though it might have been the left, and I can’t now remember whether that was from a position sitting on it, or looking at it.) I remember agonising over this when such a visit to our flat swam into prospect. How was I to achieve it? What if someone else grabbed the right-hand end? Was I to move them or would that be rude?

The High Commissioner at the time was John Freeman. From what I had seen of him, I could not imagine that he would care a fig about the protocol but John came home with an alarming tale. Accompanying John Freeman to a meeting in the ambassadorial Rolls, John had happened to get in to the car on the wrong side protocol-wise. The High Commissioner had barked, ‘Offside is for me! If anyone throws a bomb, it’s supposed to hit you first!’ On reflection, maybe it wasn’t the protocol that concerned him, just self-preservation. Anyway, much to my relief, after dinner I did manage to get him installed in the right place on the sofa.

But disaster soon followed. Unhappily our downstairs neighbour, a rather grand Indian businessman, sent up to complain that the Rolls was blocking his exit. His chauffeur having disappeared, John Freeman had to go down and move it. By the time he returned, the seat of honour had been appropriated by an Indian lady who was blissfully unaware of the niceties of diplomatic protocol.

My great coup as a diplomatic wife was organising the Thrift Sale, a kind of up-market jumble sale, run every year by the Diplomatic Wives’ Association and regarded in Delhi as something of a social occasion. The year I organised it it made more money than ever before, but I found it more stressful than running MI5.

Even the diplomatic life had its funny side. After Harold Wilson had messed up his relationship with India by saying the wrong thing over Kashmir, a major effort was made to improve relations and the Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, was persuaded to come out. A grand dinner was held at the High Commissioner’s Residence, No. 2, King George’s Avenue, known to all as 2KG, at which the guest of honour was the then Indian Foreign Secretary, Moraji Desai. Moraji was a very austere and religious man, not only a strict teetotaller but also eating only the most restricted vegetarian diet, and, so it was reported, drinking only the milk of one particular cow. He also regularly drank his own urine, and lived to be ninety-nine.

The dinner was regarded as a very important occasion and we were all rather tense. A secret bar had been set up in the High Commissioner’s study and we had been told to indicate this discreetly to those of the guests who were unable to get through the evening without alcohol. Unfortunately, as the tension rose, some of the guests paid increasingly frequent visits to the secret bar, and pockets of hysteria began to break out. The hysteria was encouraged by Michael Stewart’s Private Secretary, Donald Maitland (later, as Sir Donald Maitland, our boss, when he was Head of the UK Permanent Representation to the EEC).

Unable to resist improving on a dodgy scene, Donald insisted on giving extremely funny imitations, only just beyond the ears of our Indian guests. Things got worse and just before dinner was served, the news went like wildfire round the dinner party that Moraji’s cow, which had apparently been tethered in the garden, had broken loose and was savaging the High Commissioner’s shrubbery.

After a delayed dinner had been consumed, Michael Stewart addressed the company at great length from his position on one of the sofas in the drawing room. When he concluded, there was a pause, which lengthened and lengthened. No reply came from Moraji.

Nervous conversations broke out round the room to cover the silence. The High Commissioner (at this stage it was Sir Morrice James) eventually decided that Moraji was not going to reply and the signal was given to Lady James that the ladies could leave the room to go to the bathrooms upstairs. Whether or not that was the signal Moraji was waiting for no-one ever knew, but just as the ladies were halfway up the stairs, he started to speak. The long line of ladies paused, uncertain whether it would be more polite to return or to proceed, and we finally stood, frozen immobile on the stairs, while he delivered a very lengthy oration.

At the time of the devaluation of sterling against the dollar in 1968, the Indian government, whose monetary reserves were in sterling, was to be briefed by two senior officials, Mr Milner-Barry of the Treasury and Mr Stone of the Bank of England. Preceding these two dignified persons by some days came three immensely long top-secret telegrams, which presumably contained the brief for their meetings with the Indian government. John was the representative of the Treasury in the High Commission at that time and so the telegrams came to him, with the accompanying instruction that they were not to leave his sight until they could be handed to the visitors. As he had no intention of spending the next few days in the office, the only solution seemed to be that he should carry them around with him and so we procured some oilcloth from the High Commission hospital, wrapped the telegrams in it and taped them around his midriff with elastoplast until they were needed.

After a certain time the diplomatic life began to pall for me. Although I got some enjoyment out of the family atmosphere that came from living for the first time as part of a community, something that the Foreign Office does provide, with it went a sort of identity crisis. I loved living in India and there was lots to see and places to go but I was not used to being just identified in terms of my husband’s job – a First Secretary wife – with nothing of my own that I had to do each day. Everyone who was working in the High Commission seemed to be doing interesting and important things and I felt I was really just frivolling around. I was wondering how to solve this conundrum when one day in the summer of 1967, as I was walking through the High Commission compound, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Psst… Do you want to be a spy?’

What actually happened was that one of the First Secretaries in the High Commission, who I knew did something secret, though I did not know exactly what as one was not encouraged to enquire about these things, asked me whether, if I had a little spare time on my hands, I might consider helping him out at the office. He was a baronet and a bachelor and lived a comfortable life in one of the more spacious High Commission houses in Golf Links Road, very near to our flat. He was best known for his excellent Sunday curry lunches, which usually went on well into the evening, and for driving round Delhi in a snazzy old Jaguar.

I went into the High Commission office the next day and he told me that he was the MI5 representative in India and he had more work on hand than he and his secretary could cope with. Would I be interested in working for him on a temporary basis? I thought I would be very interested, though I knew nothing at all about MI5 except what I had read several years earlier in the Denning Report on the Profumo case when I was working in the India Office Library. What was it all about? He gave me a thin paper-backed pamphlet to read, which was probably the only thing in print about MI5 in those days. In about five or six pages, it told me that MI5 was part of the defence forces of the realm, with the special responsibility to protect the country against serious threats to our national security, like espionage and subversion (terrorism had hardly been heard of in those days). Its mandate was a directive given by each incoming Home Secretary to the Director-General. He told me that, among its other duties, MI5 was responsible for offering advice, training and assistance to Commonwealth countries on their security and he was one of a number of Security Liaison Officers posted all over the Commonwealth. He was also responsible for the security of the High Commission and its staff. Before I could work with him, he explained, I had to be positively vetted. I filled in a form, which asked me all about myself and my family. We talked it through and he sent everything off to London to be checked out.

I wrote home, ‘They have offered me a job working in the secret part of the High Commission, for £5 a week which I think I will take. It will help to keep me out of gonk-making.’ (Gonks were the Teletubbies of the 1960s and I was at that time on the Committee of the Toy Fair, which meant endless sewing afternoons making stuffed toys.) MI5 beat the gonks as far as I was concerned. I warned my parents, ‘As this job is in the very hush-hush part of the office I have to be what they call “positively vetted”. So if you see little men in bowler hats lurking outside the house don’t be surprised. They will just be checking up on you. They will find my form very boring as I haven’t done anything sinister at all.’ John took it even more light-heartedly and wrote to my parents, ‘I do hope you are leading sinless lives during this period of examination in connection with Stella’s security clearance. The least suggestion of improper entanglements or any attempt on your part to communicate with the Red Chinese Embassy or to manufacture atomic weapons in the garage could have the most far-reaching consequences; most importantly that Stella will not get the job and will be a perfect pest. You may judge their thoroughness in that I was rung up the other day and a husky mysterious voice enquired whether I or Stella had ever been incarcerated in a prison camp subject to Fascist or Communist influences.’

My baronet friend does not seem to have taken it much more seriously himself. He wrote back to Head Office, ‘She and her husband frequently take a picnic lunch by the High Commission swimming pool,’ as though that were a prime consideration in giving me the job, and added, ‘I have won her in the face of stiff competition from other parts of the High Commission [the gonks, I suppose]. I consider she would be entirely suitable for the work even though she is only a two-finger typist.’

All my references must have checked out because a few weeks later I was in. I later learned that references had been taken up with my school and that my headmistress, obviously somewhat dubious about these prospective employers, had written: ‘She is the kind of girl who does not shirk unpleasant jobs. She is reliable and discreet, or at least as reliable and discreet as most young ladies of her age.’

The MI5 offices in the High Commission were at the end of a corridor behind a security door. My first problem was learning how to work the combination lock. There was something about the Indian climate that combination locks did not like and they were perpetually sticking and refusing to open unless you hit them sharply in between each number. The men used their shoes, but the flip-flop sandals I wore did not have the same effect. When I got behind the security door, I discovered that there was another secret part of the High Commission that I did not know anything about, the office of the MI6 representative, which was cheek by jowl with ours. I knew him as a genial, rather low-profile character, with some sort of job in the political section, but notable mainly for his performances in character parts in the plays put on by the British High Commission Amateur Dramatic Society. I was amazed to find him there, beaming at me, behind the security door.

My MI5 job did not turn out to be particularly exciting. I was merely a clerk/typist, though, as my recruiter had observed, my typing qualifications were not of a high order.

However it was thought more important that I should be a sound and reliable person (which as the wife of a First Secretary in the High Commission I was presumed to be) than that I should be especially good at the job I was there to do. For the most part, I stayed in the office while my boss went out to meetings and interesting-sounding assignations. I had to answer the phone and type the reports he sent back to London every few days in the diplomatic bags.

In writing to my mother, I was rather scathing about the bag arrangements: ‘Friday is an exceptionally busy day as the bag goes out to London and all the letters have to be got ready.

We are so secret in our office, that not only do our letters have to go in the Diplomatic Bag, but we have to have our own bag-within-the-bag which has to be listed and stuck up and sealed personally by me with three great red sealing-wax seals on every corner, making 9 seals in all. It’s a great and complicated business. Anyway, I now wait for repercussions from London. If I have sealed up the bag wrongly they tend to send cypher telegrams, telling us so, in theory in case spies have tampered with the mail, but in practice I suspect because they like drawing attention to someone else’s mistakes.’

As far as I was concerned, all this work had come at an untimely moment. The High Commission Amateur Dramatic Society, in which I was a leading light, was putting on a play at the time and I needed to learn my part. The only consolation about the work was that I got paid by the day and ‘each day ends with the delightful ceremony of paying Stella and I come away 15 rupees the richer’. My enthusiasm for amateur dramatics was obviously a sign that I was beginning to feel pretty comfortable and self-confident in the Delhi diplomatic world. I was learning that I could do a lot of things just as well, if not better than others. It was a far cry from my appearances in St Joan at school as the Executioner, when even though I did not have a speaking part, I found my time on stage so traumatic that I had to be provided with a stool to sit on, in case I fainted. I was probably the only executioner so weak that he has been unable to stand up. The play we were doing when I joined the MI5 office in Delhi was

Georges Feydeau’s farce Hotel Paradiso, in which I was playing the part of Marcelle. Most of the male members of the High Commission seemed to be growing beards and other face-fungus to fit their parts – artificial beards and moustaches tended to fall off in the heat. From my new position as a security officer I observed in a letter home, ‘I should think the East Europeans, aware that beard-growing is the first sign of a character breakdown, are moving in their operatives in a big way.’

The amateur dramatics came back to haunt me twenty-five years later. When my appointment as Director-General of MI5 was announced in December 1991, it turned out that someone who had been in those plays had some connection with the Daily Mail. Pictures of me dressed up as Lady Julia Merton in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime appeared all over the front page of the newspaper under the headline ‘Mistress of Disguise’.

It was the height of the Cold War when I joined as clerical assistant to the Security Liaison Officer in New Delhi. The battle for influence or control in India which had been being waged between Russia and Britain since the 19th century continued. In Delhi in the 1960s it had turned into a struggle between the Soviet Union and the West and the weapons were ‘aid’ and the troops were ‘advisers’. The country was overrun with foreign advisers, military advisers, agricultural advisers, industrial advisers, economic advisers and every other kind of adviser you can imagine. As we toured around the country we kept falling over them.

On one trip we made to Lucknow, entirely as tourists, to explore the ruined Residency where the British community had been besieged in 1857, we were astonished to be greeted as we drove up to our hotel by the best part of the local business community, who garlanded us with marigolds and swept us into the hotel on a cloud of bonhomie. Just as John was beginning to think up a suitable speech, our welcoming party faded away and attached itself instead to a pair of heavy-looking Russians who had driven up in a car behind us and for whom the marigolds were obviously intended. Our erstwhile hosts, clearly confused by the diplomatic number plates on our car into thinking we were the Russian commercial adviser whom they had invited on a goodwill visit, left us to find our own way to the gloomy room that had been allocated to us, which was made more gloomy when the light over the washbasin blew up in a rather sinister way as soon as we switched it on.

The Russians had more so-called advisers than anyone else, though the Americans came a close second. Very many of them were officers of the KGB or the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service or, of course, the CIA, and there was even the odd one from MI6.

The Soviet Union’s efforts were meeting with considerable success at that period. There were many influential communist and pro-communist politicians, including Mrs Gandhi herself. One state, Kerala, already had a communist government, and it was thought likely that more would follow.

One of the tasks of the MI5 office in the High Commission was identifying who were the intelligence officers on the opposite side, and monitoring any efforts they made to get alongside our colleagues. Everyone in the High Commission was supposed to treat all invitations from the Russians or East Europeans with great suspicion and report any social contacts. People did as they were asked, though some took it more seriously than others, but most people realised that the recruitment as a spy of a member of the British High Commission or of another Western embassy could have resulted in great damage to Western interests. We worked closely with the representatives of the security services of other friendly nations in India in a combined defensive effort.

The Russians had a great white palace of an embassy just down the road from the British High Commission, never visited in those days by Western diplomats. They astonished the whole Delhi diplomatic corps one day by inviting all First Secretaries and their wives in the various missions to a cocktail party. Whatever it was all about, it was not thought that much good was intended, but as no-one could think of any reason why we should not go, we dressed ourselves up and went along in a state of considerable excitement and some suspicion, expecting to be propositioned or to have our drinks spiked or our coats bugged when we put them in the cloakroom. The party itself took place in a huge ballroom, glittering with enormous glass chandeliers. Nothing obviously very remarkable happened, rather disappointingly as far as I was concerned, except that we were all plied with excellent Russian champagne and chatted up by charming Russian diplomats, who were also no doubt assessing us all for later cultivation. Whatever else went on that night, at the very least some good photographs of us all were obtained for their records.

Just before I joined the MI5 office, John and I were the subject of what I later recognised as a targeting operation. We got to know a young lecturer at Delhi University and his wife, and they invited us to their house for supper several times. We reciprocated. We found them interesting to talk to – they were very left-wing and they gave us a different angle on India and its problems. This went on for several months and we became quite friendly with them. Then one day when we went round to their flat for supper, they had, without warning us, also invited a Russian diplomat and his wife. The Russians were most amiable.

Would John like to join a chess club? What about duck shooting – did we shoot? Could we possibly get him an invitation to see the film of the World Cup final which he understood had reached the High Commission? Would we come to their flat for supper? When on reporting back we found that he was a KGB officer and our friends from the university were communists, we could see where it was all leading, and we had to break off the contact.

Before we did so, what seems to have been a classic sting operation was tried on us.

Our Indian friends tried to get us to import into India, through the diplomatic bag, some drugs which they said one of their children needed and which could not be obtained in India. It may have been true, but had we done as they asked, we would have been in breach of diplomatic regulations and of the Indian law and very vulnerable to pressure. The story was very convincing but thankfully we saw through it. I am glad we did or both of our careers might well have been scuppered. Of course, after that we had to end the relationship, which was a pity, as we had enjoyed our conversations. But that sort of thing was going on all the time in those Cold War days of the mid-60s.

One Cold War episode that really set the British High Commission by the ears was the arrival of a defector. All British posts have a detailed drill laid down for how to cope with such an eventuality. I wasn’t really on the inside of this, being merely a clerk/typist, but it was clear to all that something exciting was happening and that things were not going according to plan. The complicated balancing act that has to be achieved in such circumstances is for you to keep the prospective defector safe from his own side, which may well have some inclination of what he is up to, while assuring yourself, as far as you can, that he is genuine and has something interesting to offer. At the same time, you have to check out with home that some department or agency is interested enough in him to be prepared to pay the substantial cost that will be incurred. All that, while simultaneously not alerting the host government to what is going on, and trying not to do anything that they will later regard as an abuse of the hospitality of their country.

Of course, the great moment always comes when it’s least expected. On this occasion, when the time came to send a cypher telegram home to alert the Head Offices to what was happening, the cypher clerk could not be raised as she was in bed with her Sikh boyfriend and would not respond to phone or doorbell. I was not allowed to know how the cyphers worked as I was only locally engaged staff, and all I was aware of at the time were earnest and angry consultations going on in huddled groups at a cocktail party on the High Commission lawns which most of the diplomatic community was attending. Miraculously, it all got sorted out, and the defector and a minder were shipped safely out of Delhi.

I worked with the MI5 office in Delhi for a year or so, until the baronet went home at the end of his posting, and his successor thought he could manage without me. I moved to work briefly with the Delhi end of a rather curious and at the time very secret Foreign Office Department called the Information Research Department (IRD). Nobody ever explained to me what was going on there. I was merely told to carry out the rather basic task of stuffing envelopes with all sorts of printed material, which was sent out from London, and posting them off to a whole series of addresses. It was very important, I was told, to get the right stuff in the right envelopes – not everyone got everything – and the whole operation and in particular the names and addresses were very secret. It did not take much wit to grasp that what I was actually doing was sending out covert propaganda of various kinds to a series of contacts of all sorts, some journalists, some politicians, some academics, who I guessed had been recruited to use the material unattributably. I didn’t have time to read it all as I packed each envelope, but from what I could see most of it was anti-communist in tone and some of it was quite personal stuff about individuals. The objective of IRD, as I now know, was to influence public opinion in different parts of the world by planting stories and articles hostile to our enemies and favouring the British position. Whether any of it had any effect I was not in a position to judge, though I did notice from time to time articles in the newspapers which seemed to have drawn on the stuff I had put in the envelopes.

I did not work for IRD for very long. It was a very boring job and by then we were almost at the end of our posting. But, before we left, there was one journey I really wanted to attempt, and that was to drive from Delhi to Kabul over the Khyber Pass. I had been reading Kipling’s Kim and I wanted to see something of the area where the Great Game had begun. I thought the North-West Frontier and the Khyber Pass would turn out to be very exciting and romantic. And they did, not because of foreign spies disguised as Pathan tribesmen (though there may have been some of those there still in the 1960s), but for a much more mundane reason.

We set off in late September 1968 with a couple of friends. We drove in two cars, partly because we thought that would be safer and partly because as well as our luggage (which, along with spares for the car, tyres, tubes, and cans of petrol, included a hamper full of tinned food, a case of whisky, an ice box full of beer, three thermoses of Martini, an apple pie, a bedding roll, a large walking stick and a shovel), we had the entire costumes for a production of Cinderella, which was to be performed by the British Embassy at Kabul at Christmas. How times have changed.

The journey was eventful and at times frightening, as such a journey was bound to be.

We eventually reached Peshawar without too many problems but just as we entered the town, everything began to go prematurely dark. An eclipse of the sun was in full swing and in the villages on the outskirts of Peshawar they could not understand what was happening. People stood in the middle of the dusty streets in a reddish haze, pointing at the sky in amazement.

The general eeriness and the excitement of the crowds made our task of finding the Residence of the British High Commissioner, where we were to stay the night, much more difficult and we only found it after much driving round and round the crowded streets.

The Residence had long since been deserted by High Commissioners but was still kept up for occasional use by British official visitors. It was an old house with a big gate to which we had been given the key, which let us into a courtyard in which there was a great tree. As we were installing ourselves an ancient servant materialised and indicated that there was hot water and though he could not provide food, he had plates and cutlery. So after cold beer and hot baths in that order, we ate a supper from our supplies consisting of pate, salmon mayonnaise and spam using silver cutlery off china plates bearing the Royal monogram. We slept the night in linen sheets, all for five rupees a head.

The following day, fortified by all this luxury, we were interviewed in an upper room downtown – the Afghan consulate – by a hookah-smoking official and several casually interested loungers, who after the closest scrutiny of our credentials eventually stamped our passports for Afghanistan and we set off to drive the twenty-five miles or so to the beginning of the Khyber Pass. All went well until we had just begun to climb and twist up the first steep part of the Pass. We were following a great lorry that was grinding up in first gear. It was very hot and, before we had gone far, our engine started to boil and then the car lost all power and stopped. ‘Disaster,’ I thought, ‘we will never see Afghanistan.’ We waited and drank some of our supply of cold beer, interestedly watched by two village boys in turbans with antique-looking rifles slung across their backs. I remembered being told that it was not safe to stop on the Khyber Pass, but they were all smiles when we gave them the empty beer bottles. After about half an hour the engine had cooled a bit, so we sacrificed some of our drinking water to it, started it up again and with our fingers crossed, nursed it, coughing and choking up to a flatfish bit of road on the top, after which there was a slight slope down to a frontier town called Landi Kotal where we hoped there might be a mechanic.

We asked at the petrol pump and the group of ancient tribesmen, sitting smoking on string beds, with their rifles on their shoulders and bandoliers of cartridges strapped across their chests, nodded wisely. One of them got into the car with John, leaving me with our two friends who had waited for us in the other car at the petrol pump. Off John drove into the dust and distance with this ferocious-looking character on board, while we stood there eating melons and watching the madly overloaded buses and lorries go by and never expecting to see him again. Those clapped-out old vehicles seemed to manage the hills with no trouble at all and I realised why. They had no bonnet over their engines, but instead they had a wooden platform at the front on which a man sat, and when they went uphill it was his duty continuously to pour water onto the engine from a great skin water carrier.

After we had observed the passing scene for a bit, we thought we should go and look for John, so we all piled into the other car and eventually found him at the mechanic’s ‘shop’, a little wooden hut with a de-gutted twenty-five-year-old Dodge outside. He was sitting in the shade, drinking green tea from a china bowl and talking to the owner about the US President, Lyndon Johnson. I think he had tried to explain he was English not American, but had given up. The conversation went:

‘He not good man. You like?’

‘No.’

‘He set man against man. You like?’

‘No.’

The ‘no’ was John’s contribution to the conversation. Meanwhile, a young man who looked exactly like Peter Sellers trying to look like a Pakistani mechanic, was slowly and resolutely taking our car to pieces, blowing through each piece and putting it in his pocket. I was sure the car would never move again and I was saying to John:

‘That’s twelve pieces he’s got in his pocket, thirteen…’ etc, etc.

There did not seem anything we could do except pray, so we all accepted the tea and talk (still about President Johnson), until after about an hour, Peter Sellers suddenly said, ‘Ready. You trying,’ and John and Peter Sellers drove off into the distance, trying. When they returned, miraculously all seemed well. So we took everyone’s photograph, handed round Peek Frean’s ginger nuts, paid what seemed a very small sum but seemed to please Peter Sellers, and set off.

We reached the frontier without any more problems, and the Pakistani frontier guards bowed us out of their territory with many diplomatic courtesies. On the Afghan side, most of the guards seemed to be having a siesta. The few who were on duty regarded us with Central Asian contempt through their Afghan eyes and wrote what seemed like pages of elegantly turned insults in our passports in spidery writing, from right to left (we never discovered what it all meant). Then on we roared into the afternoon, already slightly worried in case we should not reach Kabul by dusk. We had no desire to drive through those parts in the dark. In the end, we got there safely, and the next day we delivered the Cinderella costumes to the British Embassy. The hats for the ugly sisters were travelling in my hat box, a rather expensive leather creation which I used for my wedding and funeral hats and which I rather treasured.

Unfortunately, when we left to drive back to Delhi, I forgot it, and I have often wondered what became of that hat box through all the vicissitudes that Afghanistan has suffered since.

At the Embassy, we sought advice on which was the best bank to use to change our money into Afs. We were told, ‘Don’t on any account go to a bank. You’ll get a much better rate of exchange in the bazaar.’ We were directed to the shop of a barber, who also traded in transistor radios, as did everyone in that part of the world in those days. His shelves were piled high with huge PYE models and as they all seemed to be turned on at full volume, we had to shout to make ourselves heard. Our man was in the street outside his shop, using a cut-throat razor to shave around the beard of a wild-looking figure. Beside his client was propped a beautiful hand-crafted rifle, with a silver and carved wood stock. We shouted at our man that we wanted some Afs, would he prefer dollars or pounds? We could hardly believe our ears when he said, ‘Give me a cheque.’ So John wrote him a cheque on his Bank of Scotland, Dalkeith Branch, bank account and we took possession of a pile of exotic-looking currency.

Later, back at the Embassy, we were told that our cheque, in sterling on a British bank, was a very valuable commodity which would be traded on, as currency in its own right.

This turned out to be true. More than a year later, the Dalkeith Branch of the Bank of Scotland returned John’s cheque (as banks did in those days) and all over the back of it were strange scrawls in various hands. It had apparently passed through half the camel and carpet bazaars of Central Asia before returning home to Dalkeith.

It was in that bazaar, after we had changed our money, that I had an alarming experience. We were wandering around, admiring the brilliantly coloured spices in open sacks and the strange vegetables, when all of a sudden a nasty jagged stone landed near my feet. I looked up and saw a huddle of men on the other side of the market, one of whom had another stone in his hand, all ready to throw. They made it clear by gestures and shouting, that they wanted me out, and if I did not go, I was going to get the next stone pretty soon. So, without waiting to argue, we left. They clearly saw me as a half-clothed Western woman and an obscenity. I was not aware that I was wearing particularly revealing garments, but I certainly did have short sleeves and bare legs. The majority of women in Kabul at that time were not veiled though some did wear a yashmak and a few wore the full head-to-toe veil.

We finished our posting in Delhi and came home to England in February 1969. Again, we travelled by sea, but this time the journey took even longer than when we went out – five weeks instead of three – as the Suez Canal was closed and our ship had to go round the Cape.

The ship, the Victoria, was an Italian vessel of the Lloyd Triestino Line, which sailed from Bombay to Venice. We stopped at Mombassa, Durban and Cape Town, but then there was a long stretch to Brindisi with nothing much to do. Boredom began to set in and most people on board, including the crew, seemed to spend most of the time drinking so that when we eventually reached the Straits of Gibraltar there was hardly a sober person on board. The Captain invited some of us up to the bridge after dinner as we sailed through the Straits. The radar screen was covered with bright blips, the chart was lying on a table with a pair of ladies’ evening sandals on top of it, and the Captain and the owner of the sandals, a glamorous German lady, were nowhere to be seen. A solemn-faced sailor was at the wheel and I remember hoping that he at least was sober enough to navigate his way through.

We arrived in Venice just as the sun was rising on a cold February morning. The buildings floated out of the mist, all shadowy with golden highlights. It was a breathtaking reintroduction to Europe. We travelled on by train to London, and then as a banal end to our journey, took British Rail from Waterloo to Woking where we were renting a house from a High Commission colleague until we decided where we were to live permanently.