Even the most normally pleasant and friendly people seemed to change when public expenditure was involved. When John Major was briefly Chancellor of the Exchequer he visited us for a briefing with his Treasury officials. All was going well until I, knowing it was my turn to speak next and unsure of a figure I thought he might question me about, wrote a note to my colleague sitting next to me, who I thought would know the answer. John Major noticed, stopped the person who was speaking, and accused me fiercely of ‘cross-briefing’, whatever that meant. I felt like a schoolgirl who had been caught cheating in an exam. My later encounters with John Major when he was Prime Minister were much more friendly.
By the time I retired, the scrutiny process had been refined further. The ‘Star Chamber’ grilling had been written out of the script, and things had become much less aggressive. The version in operation at that time culminated in the three agency heads and the Cabinet Secretary and his staff meeting the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and his staff in his office in the Treasury. It was never a pleasant occasion, but when William Waldegrave was Chief Secretary, at least he managed to make it more humane by offering us sandwiches and a glass of wine. Previously we had not even been offered a cup of coffee. Although the questions were no less searching, he smiled and was polite and friendly, which was a much more effective way of getting at the facts than the rather bullying style that had been in vogue previously. But he took a real interest, and was well informed, and comfortable with the subjects we were discussing.
A main responsibility for me in the year I was one of the Deputy Director-Generals, was to conclude successfully the work on Thames House, the building which Tony Duff had acquired to house the whole Service, and get us moved in on time. Thames House had had many occupants since it was built speculatively in the 1930s, including the Department of Energy during the 1984 miners’ strike. To make it suitable for MI5, with its special needs, there was major work to be done. It effectively had to be rebuilt internally, two buildings had to be joined together and a road permanently closed. Some elegant panelled rooms and art deco staircases covered with original 1930s linoleum had to be preserved and in some cases removed and replaced. It fell to me, first as Deputy Director-General and then as Director-General to preside over the refurbishment and the move into the new building, though the hard work was done by others.
At first the government had hoped that both MI5 and MI6 would fit into Thames House, but when that proved clearly impossible, a new building was acquired for MI6 too, so they could move out of their squalid 1960s block in Lambeth, Century House, which was falling to bits. The exotic Terry Farrell building on the Thames, now well known because of its appearance in a James Bond film, was identified as their future home.
Like all huge building projects, particularly in the public sector, the Thames House refurbishment had been fraught with difficulties throughout. Initially, there had been a great deal of discussion in Whitehall before it was finally decided that the building should be acquired to re-house MI5. That meant that when the building was ultimately purchased, the purchase cost was higher than it might have been if decisions had been made earlier. Initial estimates of the cost of converting the building, which were done by the Property Services Agency, had taken no account of the special requirements of the Service, nor of the fact that the building contained, as well as a number of listed features, a considerable amount of asbestos. Inevitably, when it was finally decided that we were to be the occupants, the conversion costs were greater than had been originally envisaged. Mrs Thatcher became alarmed at the rising costs and, concerned that we might be ordering gold-plated taps for the toilets, persuaded Stuart Lipton of Stanhope Properties to cast his eye over the project. There were no gold-plated taps, but with his expert knowledge and experience, he was instantly able to achieve large cost savings and he remained as our adviser until the project was completed. With his help, when a final budget was set, we succeeded in completing the project on time and within budget, but only at the cost of detaching some of our best intelligence officers to work in the project team, rather than against our intelligence targets. All their brains, determination and covert skills were needed to bring the project safely home and towards the end it was clear that dealing with the building industry was just as tricky as dealing with the KGB. It struck me then and it strikes me now that the public sector does its building projects in a curiously inefficient way.
There was one thing I had to do as Deputy Director-General which I could not possibly have foreseen, which compensated me for all the above and turned out to be the most fascinating of all the things I did in my time in MI5. During 1989, with startling speed, the communist governments of the former allies of the Soviet Union in what was then called Eastern Europe began to unravel, and the Cold War, which had dominated the work of MI5 for the whole of my working life, came to an end. The suddenness with which it all happened had not been foreseen by the intelligence services of the USA or Europe or of the Soviet Union itself. But when it happened, it had a dramatic effect on all intelligence professionals in both East and West.
For our part, we saw both threats and opportunities in the new circumstances. In spite of the increasing amount of work we had been doing against terrorism in recent years, many people still associated MI5 with the Cold War, and began to assert loudly that there was no longer any need for it and it should be disbanded. We felt a need to explain ourselves and to justify our existence in a way that we had never felt before. But we also saw huge opportunities in the situation, and we sat down with colleagues in MI6 to consider how to turn it to our advantage.
In particular, we saw an opportunity to offer help to our former enemies in the intelligence and security services of the former Soviet bloc countries, to adapt themselves to working in democracies. They were going to need to convince the citizens of their newly democratic countries that they had changed, and that instead of working against the people to keep totalitarian governments in power, as they had under communism, they were now working for the citizens, to protect democracy. If security services were to exist in these countries and were to be effective, and it was important for the preservation of the new world order that there should be security systems in place, they would have to learn rapidly how to work within a system of laws and controls. The new governments needed help too in putting together appropriate systems of laws and oversights to control those services. We in this country had quite recent experience of setting up systems which were working well. We had up-to-date advice to offer.
They would also need advice on recruiting and training new people to staff their services. Many of the Cold War veterans were either not suited to working under a democracy or were fatally tainted by their activities under communism. The important advantages to be gained seemed to all of us to make it worthwhile putting resources into this work. By making allies of these people we could help the diplomatic initiatives that were then under way to develop friendly relations with the new democracies. In our own professional field, we hoped that we could convince the new intelligence services that by allying themselves with us, they would no longer feel it necessary to spy on this country, which would save us resources for more important things, while also enabling us to clear up some of the old cases of the past and assure ourselves that no harm was still being done. But also, very importantly, because their former communist governments had often helped and harboured terrorists as a way of damaging the West, they had information which would be invaluable in countering terrorism. So, with the encouragement of the Foreign Office and working closely with colleagues in MI6, we moved swiftly to contact our former enemies and to offer friendship and assistance. After a time, we found ourselves in an Alice Through the Looking Glass situation, training and advising Bulgarians, Hungarians, Poles; the representatives of services who had been our enemies all my working life.
I was responsible for our own in-service training, so I was frequently called upon to preside over the end-of-course dinners for our n
ew allies. They must have regarded us and particularly me, a female, as something from another planet, our style and ethos was so different from theirs. I remember making a light-hearted speech at one dinner, telling some Bulgarians, I think it was, that one of the great advantages they now had in this post-Cold War era was that they would soon have a female at the top of their service. They gazed at me in stony silence and did not at all see the joke. But the speeches of thanks which our guests made were both emotional and touching. They had very recently been through the most earth-shattering experiences. Their world had been turned upside down, and if we found it all astonishing, for them it was many times more so. I was presented with an eclectic collection of cap badges and other insignia and objects engraved with friendly messages from organisations with which I had never expected to have anything but the most hostile relations. It was a very exciting and quite bizarre period.
This was particularly true when I found myself in the headquarters of the intelligence service who would have imprisoned and possibly killed the volunteer who had been my very first agent case ten years earlier, had they found out what he was doing. Much vodka and whisky was drunk far into the night as we swapped stories about the sorts of things, though not the details of cases, we had been trying to do to each other during the Cold War. But I also found it deeply satisfying to see these former totalitarian states, who had oppressed their citizens for so long, coming to terms with democracy. On one occasion I attended a dinner at the British Embassy in Budapest to which the Ambassador had invited the Hungarian intelligence oversight committee, set up under their new legislation. It had only just been created and comprised people from both wings of Hungarian political life, which meant that on that committee were old communists and former samizdat writers who had been political enemies for years, all cautiously eyeing each other up but sincerely trying to work together in that most sensitive area of political life, national security.
That was unexpected enough. But far and away the strangest experience of my working life was a visit I paid in December 1991 to Moscow to make our first friendly contact with the KGB. Some months before, Douglas Hurd, who was Foreign Secretary at the time, had met the man whom Gorbachev had put in charge of the KGB following the failed coup against him, Vadim V. Bakatin. Douglas Hurd had recognised that Bakatin was a true democrat who was sincerely interested in reforming that organisation. He asked him, in the spirit of the times, if he would like some people from the British Security Service to go over and talk to the KGB about working in a democracy. He said he would. I was delighted to be asked to lead the team. We were three, myself, a colleague from MI5, a man who had spent much of his Security Service career in counter-espionage work against the Soviet intelligence services and whose hatred of communism was matched only by his love of Russia and its language, and an official from the Home Office. Together we set off on what was for all of us a unique experience.
It is difficult to describe the excitement and incredulity that we felt at the events that were taking place in Russia in those last days of 1991. Suddenly everything was turned on its head, nothing seemed fixed and nothing was impossible. It was breathtaking for me, after more than twenty years spent combating the activities of Soviet intelligence, to be setting off to Moscow to meet them for what we hoped would be friendly talks. It was obviously equally amazing for the other side, though I think they looked at events rather more cynically than at that time we did. We were met at Sheremetyevo airport by a KGB team led by a man whom, I found out later when I got back home again, I had already come across once before. He had been a member of the KGB office in New Delhi in the 1960s when I was a locally engaged clerk-typist working in the MI5 office there and, as one was required to do, I had written a note which was faithfully stored on a file in the registry, reporting that I had encountered him. I am not sure he knew that we had met before as he did not refer to it. There he was clutching a small bunch of red roses, a traditional gesture of greeting – I gathered later that they had agonised over whether as a senior professional woman I would be insulted or flattered to be offered flowers. While we waited in the VIP lounge for our luggage to appear, we made stilted conversation, none of us quite sure what tone to adopt for this remarkable occasion.
We stayed with the British Ambassador, Rodric Braithwaite, in the embassy just across the river from the Kremlin. We arrived just as winter gripped Moscow, and from my bedroom window I watched as over the few days we were there the river turned first to ice and then to a snow field.
There was a sense of complete unreality in the embassy, a reflection of what was going on in the street outside. Everything was changing incredibly fast and no one knew what would happen next. The USSR was in its terminal stages (by the end of December it had ceased to exist) and the leaders of the Soviet Republics had agreed to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, but what that would mean in practice was not clear at all. Out on the street, there was every sign of economic breakdown. Little old ladies were selling a single tin of soup or a pair of worn shoes. In the Gum department store practically all the shelves were empty; there was hardly anything at all to buy. No-one knew what the rouble was worth, and prices at the tourist stalls in the Arbat where we bought the then current version of the Russian doll – a big Yeltsin, containing Gorbachev, Khrushchev, Stalin and a tiny Lenin in the middle – varied minute by minute.
Inside the British embassy the old Cold War feel of being in a hostile environment was still much in evidence. All the security rules were still in force, but attitudes were already changing and a new self-confident approach to security was taking over. It was as though the old enemy was beginning to lose its teeth. So though we went into the safe room to discuss with the embassy staff the strategy for our meetings, and though everyone was still conscious that there were microphones everywhere and that all the Russian staff were working for the KGB, there was far less concern about what they overheard than there had been. In fact, we all took rather a delight in speaking freely. The rules of the game had completely changed. At dinner in the embassy dining room on our first night there, conscious that we were being overheard, we spoke quite openly about the KGB and how we judged they were reacting to the new situation. I caught one of the women who were serving our dinner looking at a colleague and raising her eyes to the heavens at our conversation – or was it to the large crystal chandelier which hung over the table and was no doubt picking up everything we said?
Our meetings with the KGB were held in their headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, a complex of large, forbidding buildings which also includes what had been the Lubyanka prison, over the years a place of torture and death. The statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, the predecessor organisation of the KGB, had not long before been dragged off its plinth by the mob and carted off to rust in a park somewhere. My colleague, who has a well developed imagination, muttered, ‘Can’t you sense the blood in every stone?’ as we went through the door. We were shown to a meeting room, where Mr Bakatin welcomed us at the door. At a long conference table, what seemed like an immense line of KGB officers, all male of course, was drawn up on one side. We assumed they were a mixture of the First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence service, the counterparts of MI6, and the Second Chief Directorate, the domestic security service, our own counterparts. Four rather isolated chairs had been placed on our side, for the three of us and our interpreter. It was an eerie atmosphere as we sized each other up, and there was much smiling and handshaking and remarks about historic moments. But in fact, on both sides, we were rather like wild animals suddenly being presented with their prey in circumstances where they couldn’t eat it. We had been watching each other for years, competing and trying to catch each other out. But for those few days we were all friends, though the friendly feelings did not run very deep in some of those present.
We had come with prepared scripts about the need for laws and oversight in democracies, the ostensible reason for our visit, and with some requests. Mr Bakat
in invited us to give our presentations and make our requests, then he would leave and let us, the ‘professionals’, talk to each other. We went through our description of the laws and regulations which controlled the activities of the intelligence agencies in the UK. These were met with polite incredulity by our KGB interlocutors. I then made my requests.
Over the years, members of the staff of the British embassy in Moscow and their families, who for the most part lived in blocks of flats reserved for the staff of foreign embassies, had been subject to harassment of various descriptions. It was clearly done either by or with the tacit support of the KGB. Flats had been entered when their occupants were out and obvious signs of someone’s presence had been left around. Freezers had been turned off, and small things broken. Possessions had been removed and returned on another occasion – a favourite trick was to take away one shoe of a pair and then bring it back a few weeks later. Quite frequently, the tyres of diplomatic cars parked outside flats were punctured or other damage was done. The idea presumably was to frighten and unsettle the people concerned. Sometimes the harassment was more threatening. When diplomats or their wives were driving in and around Moscow, they were very frequently followed by surveillance cars, that was expected, but sometimes those cars drove dangerously and threateningly close or even, apparently on purpose, hit the car they were following. My request was that if, in this post-Cold War era, we were to get closer and cooperate, that sort of behaviour should stop.
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