Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  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.

  7

  BOTH JOHN AND I returned from India in a very unsettled state. We had become used to an interesting and exciting life. We had travelled to fascinating places. We had been treated as people of significance, representing our country at a senior level in far-flung parts of the world. And here we were, living in Woking, in someone else’s house, people of no significance at all – John a middle-ranking, moderately paid civil servant and me a suburban wife. It was not what we wanted.

  I was quite a different person from the rather anxious, socially unconfident young woman who had set out. I had learned to deal with any social situation and my war-time hangover, the claustrophobia, had totally disappeared. But I had wanted to start a family while we were in India and this had not happened. With nothing much to do, cooped up in Woking from dawn to dusk and knowing nobody, I soon became quite depressed and obsessed with the baby I was not having. I remember the two of us going out in the garden in Woking in July 1969 and gazing at the moon on which Neil Armstrong and his colleagues had landed, and reflecting that lots of interesting things were happening in the world but everything interesting and exciting seemed now to be passing us by.

  Before we left India, John’s opposite number in the American Embassy, a US Treasury official called Sam Costanzo, had suggested to him that he should consider leaving the Civil Service to join him in a company called Comac. Comac was part of an American banking corporation, which had struck a deal with a British merchant bank to start a new lending institution in London. Almost as soon as we got back to England, the Americans started to court John assiduously with the offer of a job in this institution. The boss of the outfit, a man called Parsons, came to London on several occasions. He was a loud, larger-than-life figure; one of those lean, enormously tall Americans, at least 6ft 6ins, to my recollection, wearing a button-down Brooks Brothers’ shirt and loafers, who at that time at least, had the world at his feet. When he came to London he invariably stayed either at the Savoy or the Connaught, where, as far as I could see, he lived on well cooked mutton, washed down variously by champagne or first growth claret of the better vintages.

  Once, we invited him to dinner in Woking. We had given careful instructions on how he should get there, by catching a train from Waterloo, and then ringing us up from the station, but he was not interested in any of that. On emerging from the Savoy Hotel he hailed a taxi and commanded the astonished driver to take him to Woking, where he turned up hours after he had been expected, describing the taxi’s rate of progress as ‘quaint’. What he thought of our domestic arrangements or the dried up meal I had waiting for him he did not say (at least in my hearing). On another occasion he invited John to dinner at the Connaught and amazed him by ordering a magnum of Château Mouton Rothschild, which the two of them consumed. I also experienced his hospitality once when I joined him and some others for dinner at Simpson’s in the Strand. To go with our roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, he ordered a jeroboam of Krug. After our travels around the East, we thought we had seen a bit of the world, but nothing had prepared us for the lifestyle of corporate America let loose in London in the early 1970s.

  While this courting was going on, we agreed that I would go back to work, as the best way of avoiding my sinking into total depression. I had no enthusiasm for returning to the archive profession, so I thought I would see whether there was any chance of joining MI5 as a permanent employee. I contacted my baronet friend, who put me in touch with the recruiters and I was invited in to the office in Great Marlborough Street, just a step along the road from Dickens & Jones, which at the time housed the personnel department of MI5.

  To understand what MI5 was like in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you need to know some of its history. Although the Elizabethan Sir Francis Walsingham is sometimes thought of as the first head of the Security Service, the true origins of MI5 lie in the period before the First World War, when a sort of spy mania developed in Britain. Newspapers were full of reports of German agents going round the country, measuring the bridges, inspecting railway tunnels and even counting the cows in the fields. Though this sounds hysterical, it was not quite as exaggerated as it may appear.

  Quite early in the century, a fairly sophisticated German intelligence operation was already in place in Britain. As early as 1904, Germany had inserted into the country what we would now call ‘illegals’ – people with false identities, whose job it was to find out key strategic information, and communicate it covertly back to Germany. Many of them were set up as language teachers, near to the naval dockyards, where they had good access to both military and civilian staff who worked there. Ports and dockyards were a priority target for the Germans in those pre-war days, as they were later in the Second World War, and for both East and West in the Cold War.

  By 1909, the Committee of Imperial Defence, under the Presidency of the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, was becoming concerned. When they asked what defences there were against all this activity, they were told that effectively there were none. So in a move which has a rather modern ring to it, they set up a Working Group to examine the German espionage threat, which proposed detailed arrangements for creating a Secret Service Bureau. Two officers were plucked out of the armed services and told to get on with it. One was Captain Vernon Kell of the South Staffordshire Regiment, who was at the time working on an intelligence desk in the Committee of Imperial Defence, and had made his reputation as a Chinese expert. The other, Captain Mansfield Cumming of the Royal Navy, was formerly Boom Defence Officer at Southampton.

  Kell and Cumming were to undertake their task on behalf of the War Office and the Admiralty respectively and at first they worked jointly to set up the Bureau. But after a short time, they realised that in fact there were two angles to the job and if they were to beat the Germans at their own game, they needed to go at the task from both. One of them would try to find out what was going on in Britain, and try to stop it, and the other would start sending his own agents into Germany to find out what the strategy and the plans were, so they could be thwarted before they ever got off the ground. So Kell took the home end, responsibility for counter-espionage work within the British Isles, finding out what the spies were doing here in Britain, while Cumming, or ‘C’ as he came to be known, took responsibility for gathering information overseas – and MI5 and MI6 were born. The head of counter-espionage in MI5 was until quite recently known as ‘K’ after Kell and the Chief of MI6 is still known as ‘C’, after Cumming – not ‘M’ as James Bond afficionados think. ‘M’ was someone else.

  Vernon Kell rapidly realised that he had taken on a very considerable task. There were at least a dozen German spies in place in 1909 and more coming in all the time, so he started to build up a staff of people to help him. One of them was a retired Metropolitan Police Superintendent called William Melville. He did most of the leg work, going round the country investigating the scores of reports of German spies at work in the country, and it was he who came to be known as ‘M’. At first, Kell had just one rather squalid office near Victoria Station. John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, though it describes a much later period, contains a very good description of what it must have been like in those days, in the episode where Smiley and his police officer helper, Inspector Mendel, operate out of the seedy Hotel Islay in Sussex Gardens in Paddington.

  Melville, ‘M’, developed his role into a fine art. He went round the country adopting various cover identities, befriending suspect spies, drinking with them in pubs, and managing to win their confidence. He recruited their landladies to help him and took rooms across the corridors from
his suspects. For one man he seems to have been everywhere at once. He and Kell and their tiny staff investigated at least thirty-six spies between 1909 and the outbreak of the war in 1914. They were helped by a real breakthrough in 1911, which demonstrates how unsophisticated the espionage business was in those days.

  One of Kell’s helpers was travelling one day on a train in Scotland when quite by chance he heard two men in the same compartment talking German, a language he understood. One was telling the other about a letter he had received from Potsdam asking questions about the British preparations for war. On investigation, the man who had received the letter turned out to be the German-born landlord of the Peacock Hotel in Leith, a Mr Holstein, and the letter, which he handed over, for he was loyal to Britain, was from German intelligence. The letter gave addresses in Potsdam to which Holstein was supposed to send his information. No intelligence service worth its salt would make such a mistake in tradecraft nowadays for Kell quickly got permission to intercept letters to those addresses – an early example of a postal interception operation – and so was able to identify a network of agents and their post boxes and cut-outs which German intelligence had set up all over the country.

  As a result of that and other operations, Kell and his band of helpers had, by the outbreak of war, identified all Germany’s spies in Britain. They were reading most of their communications and they knew practically everything they were up to. Then, just before the war broke out, Kell struck. In an operation which was designed, in his own words, ‘to paralyse the German espionage effort in one powerful blow’, he rounded them all up. On 4 August 1914, twenty-one people of German origin were arrested by the English and Scottish police on the same day, on receipt of a coded telegram from Kell. Several of them were condemned to death, though a number were later reprieved. The first to be reprieved was a woman, which caused MI5 to protest strongly, on the grounds that once it became known to the Germans that Britain was lenient towards women, they would flood the country with them. Sherlock Holmes devotees will remember that the last Holmes story, His Last Bow, is about this sweep-up of German spies. Presumably, though the tale does not say so, Holmes is brought in to help, as MI5 were not up to dealing with the German master spy. The truth is, though, that Kell’s tiny organisation was very effective.

  The effect of Kell’s strike on the German High Command was dramatic. We know this because the man responsible for the network in Britain, Gustav Steinhauer, later wrote a book about it called The Kaiser’s Master Spy. He wrote that the Kaiser was dumbfounded when he heard that all his agents had been arrested and ‘apparently unable to believe his ears, raved and stormed for the better part of two hours about the incompetence of his so-called intelligence officers, bellowing on … Am I surrounded by dolts? Why was I not told? Who is responsible?’, and more in the same vein. So Kell, with his Bureau of only about ten people, had a successful start.

  At the beginning of the war, the Bureau was ‘mobilised’ as part of the War Office and in January 1916 it became part of a new Directorate of Military Intelligence as MI5. During the First War, MI5’s responsibilities increased to include the coordination of government policy towards aliens and other security measures. By the end of the First World War, Kell had acquired more than 800 staff, had responsibility for counterespionage throughout the British Empire and had opened the first foreign links which now form such a vital part of security work. MI5 was there to stay.

  As the years rolled on, the threats came from different sources. Between the wars, the world at first seemed a much more secure place and Kell let his staff numbers fall to only thirty people. At that time MI5 was not responsible for counteracting subversion or sabotage among the civilian population, That fell to the police to deal with. However, after the Bolshevik coup d’état in 1917, Kell and his colleagues began to work on threats of communist subversion within the armed services and of sabotage to military installations. In 1931, responsibility for assessing all threats to the national security of the United Kingdom, except from Irish terrorists and anarchists passed to MI5 and it was retitled ‘The Security Service’, which is its proper name today, though it is still known all over the world as MI5.

  As Hitler rose to power in Germany, subversion and sabotage by fascists became a concern. But when the Second World War was declared in 1939, MI5 was not well prepared for its task. Staff numbers remained low and they had a large number of tasks to carry out, including counter-espionage, advising on enemy aliens and internment, vetting checks, advice on security measures, and dealing with reports from members of the public on suspicious activity. To make matters worse, in 1940, some of the records were destroyed when a bomb hit Wormwood Scrubs prison, to which they had been evacuated.

  In 1941, the Director-General was given the resources to build up an organisation competent to deal with its task. The British government’s policy of internment greatly helped by effectively depriving the Germans of all their agents in the country. When the German intelligence records were studied in 1945, at the end of the war, it was found that all the 200 or so German spies targeted against the UK during the war had been successfully identified and rounded up. Some were turned and used to supply false information to the Nazis about the Allies’ military strategy. A particularly successful plan of this kind was known as the ‘Double Cross’ Operation, which contributed greatly to the success of the Allied forces’ landing in Normandy on D-Day in June 1944 by feeding misinformation to the Germans about the date and place of the landing.

  By 1945, no-one questioned the need for MI5. On the contrary, the threats to our national security were by then seen as so significant that the government thought it necessary formally to define their role and the Director-General was made directly accountable to the Prime Minister, who, as head of the government was personally responsible for the security of the state. It was not until 1952 that the then Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, partially delegated his responsibility for the Security Service to his Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. Maxwell Fyfe issued a directive setting out the Service’s tasks and defining the role of the Director-General. This directive, which was renewed by each incoming Home Secretary of whatever party, provided the basis for the Service’s work until 1989, when the Security Service Act was passed.

  Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Western intelligence turned its attention to the activities of the Soviet Union and what was soon to become the Cold War. By then there were three British intelligence services each with its specific task: the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, focusing, as it had since it was founded, on acquiring foreign intelligence primarily related to defence and foreign affairs; GCHQ whose responsibilities were the gathering of intelligence by technical means; and MI5, the domestic service, responsible for defending the country’s national security against whatever threats arose. At the end of the war MI5 was given an expanded directive, which stressed its duty to provide advice and assistance on security matters to the colonies and the Commonwealth and also to friendly foreign governments. By the early 1950s, there were about 850 people in MI5, including forty or so Security Liaison Officers overseas. My baronet friend in Delhi, who had first recruited me, was of course one of these.

  The main focus of MI5’s work at the end of the war and for many years afterwards was communist subversion, coupled with espionage by the intelligence services of the Soviet bloc. The activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) had already been a matter of interest to MI5 for some time. From the Russian revolution right through the 1930s there was much ideological sympathy among the British intelligentsia for the Soviet Union. Though many people changed their views at the beginning of the war when the Soviet Union formed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, sympathy as well as practical links increased from 1941, when we became allies against Nazi Germany, and consequently the Communist Party of Great Britain grew in numbers. The Party remained large and influential after the Iron Curtain came down in Europe and by 1948, there was such concern about th
e potential for the leakage of vital information to the Soviet Union through members of the Communist Party that the Prime Minister, Attlee, announced that communists as well as fascists would be excluded from work ‘vital to the security of the State’. This was to be achieved through the vetting system which MI5 was charged to support and which I was to help to implement in my first job in MI5.

  8

  WHEN I ARRIVED at MI5’s offices in Great Marlborough Street on a June day in 1969, wearing a striped Indian silk suit with a mini skirt, and a little hat sitting on top of long hair done up in a bun, I had very little idea about the organisation I was seeking to join. Had I known a bit more about its early history, perhaps I would not have been quite so surprised by what seemed its old-fashioned and eccentric aspects. Because, even in 1969, the ethos had not changed very much from the days when a small group of military officers, all male of course and all close colleagues working in great secrecy, pitted their wits against the enemy.

  In the personnel department, I was interviewed by a bouncy Welshman and a rather severe middle-aged lady, who was responsible for the female staff. It soon became clear to me that a strict sex discrimination policy was in place in MI5 and women were treated quite differently from men. They had only recently abandoned the dauntingly entitled post of The Lady Superintendent, whose job it was to supervise the welfare of all the female staff and to ensure that the proprieties were observed. No doubt this position dated from the days when only girls from ‘good families’ were employed, and their mothers and fathers were promised that they would be properly looked after.