Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  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.’

&nbs
p; 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 25 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.