Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  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 pâté, 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 flattish 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 handcrafted 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 yashm
ak 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.