by Adam Sisman
Lincoln College, Oxford, in the mid-1950s.
David’s friend and mentor, Vivian Green, a prototype for the character of George Smiley.
David and Ann, mid-1950s. Her parents became impatient at his failure to propose to her.
27 November 1954: the newlyweds sign the register, at St. Luke’s Church, Redcliffe Square, in South Kensington, while Ronnie watches over them.
Outside the church: (left to right) Ronnie, Jean, the best man Robin Cooke, the bridesmaid Charlotte (in front of the newlyweds), Ann’s mother Alison, her uncle (who gave her away in the absence of her father), and Ann’s sister ‘Winkie’, the Maid of Honour.
David and Ann on holiday in North Devon.
The Pilton Players’ production of Emlyn Williams’s ‘Night Must Fall’. David, standing in a bow tie, takes the part of the charming psychopath Danny, a character that had fascinated him since the late 1930s, when he was taken to see the play by his aunts.
Broadway Buildings, headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in David’s day.
‘The Circus’, David’s fictional equivalent.
David poses as a spy for a photographer from Life magazine, soon after he was outed as the author of The Spy who Came in from the Cold. At the time he claimed to be nothing more than an ordinary civil servant.
The successful author, c. 1964. David looks uneasy in this publicity shot, taken with Ann and the boys, (from left to right) Stephen, Timothy and Simon.
* Marsh had been James Thurber’s confessor. He told David that he had required the entire sea-voyage back across the Atlantic to recover from Thurber’s confessions.
* Perhaps not so; see next paragraph.
* Leiser distracts his girlfriend with a version of this story in the closing paragraphs of The Looking-Glass War.
10
‘A dead-end sort of place’
‘Have you got over your father yet?’ asked MI5’s head of personnel, John Marriott, once David was seated in his office. It was a shrewd question. Marriott was a taut, upright man with the air of a country solicitor. During the war he had been secretary to the XX Committee, which supervised the double agents controlled by MI5. Like many of the older MI5 officers, Marriott had an impressive war record. From the beginning it was clear to David that there was an absolute distinction within MI5 between those who had served in the war and those who had not.
The interview took place in a seven-storey Mayfair office building: Leconfield House, where the Service had been based since 1948. The fact that this was MI5’s headquarters was supposedly secret, though taxi drivers knew it, and as buses pulled up at the nearest stop on Park Lane conductors would shout, ‘Curzon Street and MI5,’ embarrassing the well-bred girls waiting to alight every weekday morning.1 The surroundings were curiously mixed, with opulent town houses, embassies and hotels uncomfortably close to the seediness of Shepherd Market. Prostitutes patrolled the streets even in daylight.
Leconfield House dated from 1939, constructed perhaps to withstand bombing, since it had a large underground basement and a windowless ground floor. It was said that its angled corner, with windows pointing down Curzon Street towards Hyde Park, had been reinforced to support machine-gun emplacements, to counter the threat that German parachutists might land there. One entered the building through glass doors with a hessian screen behind, showing one’s pass as one did so. The Registry occupied the whole of the ground floor; in the basement below were the ‘Dungeons’, a collection of storerooms and workshops; on the top floor was a canteen which served good food at cheap prices, and the staff bar, where officers could drink without fear that their conversations might be overheard by anyone from outside. In between were the six directorates (‘branches’) of MI5, designated A to F and divided into sections. The interior of Leconfield House had once been plush, with teak inlaid corridors and corniced offices, but by the late 1950s it had become as shabby as most other government departments. The inside had not been decorated in recent years, the windows were grimy and internal partitioning had left many of the rooms an awkward shape. A senior MI5 officer from the period remembers it as ‘ludicrously overcrowded, with officers crammed four to a room’.2
Mrs Grist ran the listeners’ room, a stuffed parrot on the wall above her. Her typists sat in cubicles muttering and occasionally giggling at the conversations they were monitoring through their headphones.
At the heart of MI5 was the Registry. Its central hall housed the main file index and the files themselves. Rooms leading off from the concourse held other specialist card indexes. The concourse was always busy, with trolleys transporting files from the shelves to special lifts. The trolleys ran on tracks so that files could be shifted speedily to case officers working on the floors above.3 The Registry was the largest section of MI5, staffed entirely by women.4 Known as the Registry Queens, they were traditionally recruited from upper-class families; a high proportion of them travelled in each day from Kensington. ‘They were stunners,’ David remembered. ‘Country policemen, down for a couple of days to examine our methods, couldn’t believe their luck.’ At lunchtime the canteen was ‘a showpiece for some of the best-looking women you ever saw, and they were all the prettier because we men were so dowdy by comparison’.5 The desirability of these young women was thought to account for the high number of marriages within ‘the Office’, to the point where it was joked that the average career expectancy of a Registry Queen was nine months.6
David was twenty-six years old when he joined MI5 in the spring of 1958. His starting salary was £1,100 a year, a sizeable increase on his pay as an Eton schoolmaster, but still not a lot on which to support a family.* He and Ann lived frugally, drinking little at home beyond the occasional glass of Cyprus sherry. David told an MI5 colleague that he planned to supplement his salary by illustrating children’s comics. When John Shakespeare came for lunch, it was obvious to him that David was struggling financially. He was particularly struck when David showed him a list of the life insurance policies that he had taken out to provide him with cash in old age.
Using Ann’s inheritance from her father for the deposit, the Cornwells bought Orchid Cottage, a modest, two-bedroomed house on the fringe of Great Missenden, a village in the Chilterns. Each weekday David would leave home at 7.30 in the morning, bearing a thermos and sandwiches for lunch, and walk for half an hour down the hill to the railway station, served by the Metropolitan Line, not yet electrified and still running steam trains. A quarterly season ticket into London cost just under £14, roughly £1 per week. He would ride the sixty-five minutes into Marylebone, take a bus down to Park Lane and then stroll up Curzon Street, pausing to show his pass to the retired policeman at the doors of Leconfield House. In the evening he would make the return journey, this time taking a bus back up the hill to Orchid Cottage, usually arriving around eight o’clock, sometimes later.
At first Ann commuted into London too, finding a job as a magazine sub-editor, while a German au pair looked after Simon; but soon she decided that she would rather stay at home and care for her infant son herself. Dick Edmonds’s bride Sarah remembers a happy atmosphere at Orchid Cottage when she went there for dinner, with Ann cooking while David put the baby to bed. Around this time Robin Cooke married, and David acted as his best man, just as Robin had done for David.
At home Ann began writing again, using an Olivetti portable typewriter which they bought on hire purchase. She submitted several short stories with such innocent and old-fashioned titles as ‘The Incompetent Girl’ and ‘Summer Bazaar’ to women’s magazines, but none was accepted. Then she wrote a play about King Arthur entitled ‘The Conscience of the King’, drawn from Malory and intended to be broadcast over the radio. David read it through and annotated it extensively. ‘How’s the play going now, I wonder?’ he wrote to Ann during a period when he was away for a few days on an operation. ‘It was really quite funny watching you alternate between spontaneous pleasure and spontaneous rage at my suggestions!’7 Ann was obliged to conce
de that her husband’s additions had substantially improved her play. When a couple from Eton came over to Orchid Cottage, the four of them read through it together, each taking different parts. Later there would be another read-through with another couple, one of David’s MI5 colleagues and his wife. Once she was satisfied with it, ‘The Conscience of the King’ was submitted to the BBC; she received a kindly rejection, encouraging her to try again once she had written something else.
New entrants to MI5 had no formal training: just a ten-day immersion in the exercise of ‘staff duties’, which above all meant how to call up files from the Registry and how to use the amazingly efficient card index. For the average humble desk officer, it was the Registry, rather than their superiors, that ruled their destiny. ‘Sh’d you l.u. sub’s aunt and req. connected PFs?’ an icy handwritten note might enquire (Should you look up the subject’s aunt and request connected personal files?). In premises above an art gallery in Cork Street a chain-smoking former solicitor taught David how to apply for a Home Office warrant to tap a telephone, while talking incessantly about his children.8 Applications for a warrant had to be signed personally by the Home Secretary; as David would discover, operations could be held up while awaiting his signature, though local police seemed able to ask whatever they wanted of the telephone exchange without one. There were four levels of warrant, permitting different levels of surveillance, starting with ‘Return of Postage’, which meant no more than a list of the letters delivered. Current and former members of the Service could be bugged without a warrant. There were ways of getting around the legislation, as the Americans, who had strict laws to prevent telephone tapping, had found: for example, by using an induction coil, which provided a means of monitoring calls without being connected to the telephone itself. The technical experts within MI5 tended to be mavericks, disdainful of the rules: MI5’s principal scientific officer Peter Wright would boast in his memoirs that ‘for five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State’s behest while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants pretended to look the other way’.9
Soon after joining, David attended a talk given by Courtenay Young, head of D Branch (Counter-Espionage), in which he talked about ‘illegals’, agents of a foreign power living in Britain, often under false identities. Such men and women kept well away from their Embassies, so as not to attract the attention of MI5, and communicated directly with central command or with some controller by covert means. But Young (a close friend of Anthony Blunt, whom he would refer to as ‘poor old Anthony’) assured the young recruits that they need not waste time looking for ‘illegals’, because if there were any ‘we would already know their names’.
MI5 was not a very impressive organisation. ‘For a while you wondered whether the fools were really pretending to be fools, as some kind of deception,’ David wrote later; ‘but alas, the reality was the mediocrity. Ex-colonial policemen mingling with failed academics, failed lawyers, failed missionaries and failed debutantes gave our canteen the amorphous quality of an Old School outing on the Orient Express. Everyone seemed to smell of failure.’10 Many of the older men seemed to be living on credit they had accumulated from their wartime records. David noted wryly that ‘anyone who was old enough to have fought Hitler was deemed a hero’.11 Stella Rimington, who would eventually rise to become MI5’s first female Director-General, has related how, even at the end of the 1960s, ‘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’.
Many had fought in the armed services during the war; some had performed heroically, and some, perhaps not surprisingly, seemed drained by their experiences. I remember one, who had been a Dambuster and had flown the most dramatic and dangerous sorties when he had been very young. He regularly withdrew into his office and locked the door after lunch. I used to jump up and down in the corridor to look over the smoked glass in the partition, to see what he was doing, and he was invariably sound asleep. No one thought it appropriate to comment.12
There were no Jews among the 150-odd MI5 officers, and certainly no black faces to be seen in Leconfield House. Nor were there many women in senior positions: one of the few was the fiercely loyal and hardworking Milicent Bagot, the Service’s expert on international Communism, who had been with MI5 since 1931, the first woman within the Service to reach the rank of assistant director. Bagot was also one of the first to raise doubts about Kim Philby. Younger officers were wary of her as a stickler for meticulous office procedure; moreover she was a difficult colleague, whose robust opinions were expressed with passionate conviction. But her memory for facts was so extraordinary as to have passed into Service folklore.13 Bagot has often been named as the basis for David’s character Connie Sachs, the obsessive, eccentric spinster who first appears in his novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and seems to share many of Bagot’s personality traits. He insists, however, that his inspiration for Sachs was not Bagot but Diana Mumford, a member of the English ladies’ bridge team who had worked at Bletchley Park. Within MI5 there were several such women, who had sacrificed their youth to England in the struggle against Hitler.
To Stella Rimington, it seemed that the men in MI5 all lived in Guildford and spent their spare time gardening; David later commented that his colleagues all seemed to come from places like Tunbridge Wells or Gerrards Cross. Almost two-thirds of those recruited in the decade from 1955 onwards would come from the Colonial Service.14 They joined in clusters as each of the colonies became independent, forming cliques known to their colleagues by such tags as the ‘Malayan Mafia’ or the ‘Sudan Souls’. Most of these men were recruited in middle age; with no promise of a career progression, they lacked motivation or drive to exert themselves; many were merely serving out their time until they could collect their pensions. Perhaps as a result, some took refuge in drink, as Rimington recalled:
I remember one gentleman, who was supposed to be running agents against the Russian intelligence residency in London. He favoured rather loud tweed suits and a monocle. He would arrive in the office at about 10 and at about 11 would go out for what was termed ‘breakfast’. He would return at 12 noon, smelling strongly of whisky, to get ready to go out to ‘meet an agent’ for lunch. If he returned at all it would be at about 4pm, for a quiet snooze before getting ready to go home. Eventually, he collapsed in the lift returning from one of these sorties and was not seen again.15
For MI5 officers, a sense of humour was regarded as indispensable, both for preserving a sense of proportion when dealing with issues of national security and for maintaining team spirit.16 The prevalent atmosphere when David joined seems to have been informal, jolly, almost schoolboyish. David remembers a wild Christmas party, when the police complained about bottles tossed out of upstairs windows into the street below. In his memoirs Peter Wright recalled that ‘in the main, the 1950s were years of fun’. To a young recruit like David, much of what went on in the Office seemed ludicrous anyway. MI5 encouraged a level of secrecy that bordered on the absurd. New recruits curious about the identity of their mysterious employers were fobbed off – ‘just the War Office, old boy’. A desk officer who shared an office with David had been at Leconfield House some weeks before David informed him, over coffee one morning, that he was working for MI5. Stella Rimington quickly learned that ‘people regarded you with suspicion if you asked too many questions’. Indeed, she was not even certain whether she was supposed to know the name of the Director-General. ‘There was a joke going around that you would know which was the Director-General because he was the one who always wore his dark glasses indoors so that he would not be recognised.’17 Successive director-generals had maintained an aloof management style. In David’s day the Director-General was Roger Hollis, a shy, kindly man who resembled an undertaker in his habitual dress of black jacket and striped trousers. He was having a long-term affair with his secretary, who had resisted opportunities for promoti
on so that she could remain working alongside him. Despite being one of the most junior officers in the building David would spend a fair amount of time with Hollis, carrying his bag at parlays with chief constables in regional cities, or crouching at the back of the room on the fifth floor when operations were being proposed. He recalls an operational meeting in which it was proposed to install a microphone in a suspect’s bedroom; perhaps thinking of his own case, Hollis said that he could not easily reconcile such an invasion of privacy with his conscience.
During his time as Director-General Hollis would have to cope with the repercussions from a series of spy scandals. Such security failures, and the ‘revelations’ of Soviet defectors (some of them questionable), would convince Peter Wright and his colleague Arthur Martin that the Service had been penetrated at a high level.18 Their fears had been fed by the CIA’s James Jesus Angleton, who would come to suspect everybody, even Henry Kissinger. Angleton had been trained in the art of running double agents by Kim Philby, and had become unhinged by the humiliation of being duped in this way, leading him to see the KGB’s hand in everything – particularly everything British. The effect on MI5 was one of paralysis, ‘a wilderness of mirrors’,* in which nothing could be taken on trust and nobody, not even the Director-General himself, was above suspicion. Following his retirement in 1965 Hollis (who had been knighted in 1960) would be summoned back to MI5 to face a grilling by his former subordinates. No evidence against him was found, either in this investigation or in several subsequent reviews. In the 1980s, testimony from a senior KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky, revealed that the Soviets themselves were baffled by the allegations against Hollis, and attributed these to ‘some mysterious, internal British intrigue’.