Why Women Make Better Spies

A few years after leaving MI6 I bumped into a young woman who had worked with me on a particular mission. We had only a few moments of snatched conversation on a crowded platform, but when I asked her how the job was going she told me that she had left the service. I looked surprised because she had been very good at the job, but she simply shrugged and said: “Well, it’s just a game for big boys, really, isn’t it?”

This is part of the problem for the Intelligence Services in attracting female applicants today. There is a sense of Boys’ Own adventure which first interests many men (including myself) in the idea of working as a spy. For women, this is often not enough – and there are other problems as well.

MI5 has already had two female director-generals (Stella Rimington and Eliza Manningham-Buller) , but there has been no sign of a woman at MI6 even at director level, the grade below chief. This is partly because MI6 works overseas, where all the usual problems of being a spy are often worse for a woman.

A female officer must have all the qualities of her male counterpart – courage, ingenuity, resourcefulness – but she must also deal with the fact that in most nonWestern countries she will be a woman working in a man’s world.In many parts of the world a woman, especially a good-looking one, attracts attention – the last thing a spy wants. In Muslim countries this attention may be openly hostile if she is unaccompanied, and there may be other practical problems: for instance, if she is sent to Saudi Arabia, she will not be allowed to drive a car. There are also the risks of being mugged or worse, and sadly spies are not allowed to carry guns as often as the movies lead us to believe.

Even in more civilised areas, although a pretty face may help an officer to gain access to a target, there is often a sense of disappointment when the target finds out the reason for her interest in him – and that can make it even harder to recruit him as an intelligence source.

All this is coupled with the fact that being a spy can be a very lonely life – few partners are prepared to follow their wives around the world.

Of course, it is possible to be a very successful female spy. A woman with the strength of character and qualities to become a spy will find a way around the difficulties: it may not be possible to recruit a Muslim terrorist but his wife might be prepared to talk, especially to another woman.

The very fact that other societies often underrate women may also allow a female officer to gain access to a target where a man would come under suspicion and fail. There are certainly two successful female spies currently sitting in the House of Lords: Baroness Park of Monmouth, who later became principal of Somerville College, Oxford, and Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, who sits on the Intelligence and Security Committee that oversees all the intelligence services. Both are remarkably strong characters and you cannot imagine either of them allowing a man to take the lead.

This impression is backed up by another female spy: Sandy Williams, a former officer who worked with me on the BBC Two series Spy.She is absolutely clear that to be a successful spy today, a woman must be “self-contained, self-reliant and must have the sense never to rely on a man to get the job done”.

Being a female spy has never been easy, but a determined woman will still find ways to “get the job done”.

HARRY FERGUSON

The author is a former MI6 officer,

the author of Kilo 17 and

presenter of the BBC Two series Spy.

The wartime spymaster

On the Employment of Women as Agents By Maxwell Knight, 1945

There is a very longstanding and ill-founded prejudice against the employment of women as agents, yet it is curious that in the history of espionage and counterespionage a very high percentage of the greatest coups have been brought off by women.

It is frequently alleged that women are less discreet than men, that they are ruled by their emotions and not by their brains, that they rely on intuition rather than on reason, and that Sex will play an unsettling and dangerous role in their work. My own experience has been very much to the contrary.

During the present war we have investigated probably hundreds of cases of “loose talk”, and in by far the greater proportion of these cases the offenders were men. In my estimation this is due to one principal factor: it is that indiscretions are committed from conceit. Taking him generally, Man is a conceited creature while Woman is a vain creature. Conceit and vanity are not the same: a man’s conceit will often lead him to indiscretion in an endeavour to build himself up among his fellow man, or even to impress a woman; women, being vain rather than conceited, find their outlet for this form of self-expression in their personal appearance, dress, etc.

It is not entirely true that women are ruled exclusively by their emotions, and it is to be hoped that no officer, when selecting a woman for training as an agent, will choose the type of woman whose make-up is overemotional. On the other hand, the emotional make-up of a properly balanced woman can very often be utilised in investigation; and it is a fact that woman’s intuition is a direct result of her rather complex emotions. That a woman’s intuition is sometimes amazingly helpful and amazingly correct has been well established, and, given the right guiding hand, this ability can at times save an Intelligence Officer an enormous amount of trouble.

On the subject of Sex, in connection with using women as agents, a great deal of nonsense has been talked and written.

The first consideration for choosing any agent, man or woman, should be that the individual in question is a normal, balanced person. This means that, in connection with Sex, they should not be markedly oversexed nor undersexed. If oversexed, it is clear that this will play an overriding part in their mental processes; and if undersexed, they will not be so mentally alert and their other faculties will suffer accordingly.

It is difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than for an officer to become landed with a woman-agent who suffers from an overdose of Sex, but as it is to be hoped that no such person would be chosen for the work, there is no need to go further into this point.

It is true, however, that a clever woman who can use her personal attractions wisely has in her armoury a very formidable weapon. Closely allied to Sex in a woman is the quality of sympathy, and nothing is easier for a woman than to gain a man’s confidence by the showing and expression of a little sympathy. This cannot be done by an undersexed woman.

However, it is important to stress that I am no believer in what may be described as Mata Hari methods. I am convinced that more information has been obtained by woman-agents by keeping out of the arms of the man than ever was obtained by sinking too willingly into them, for it is unfortunately the case that if a man is physically but casually interested in a woman, he will very speedily lose his interest in her once his immediate object is attained, whereas if he can come to rely upon the woman more for her qualities of companionship and sympathy than merely for those of physical satisfaction, the enterprise will last the longer.

The aforegoing rather cold-blooded statements must not lead an officer to ignore the possibility of a woman-agent genuinely falling in love with an opponent. There is always an outside risk of this, but I can state quite definitely that in 20 years’ experience, I have never known a case of this occurring.

The last Miss Moneypenny recalls her war

Peggy Harmer never asked to be a spy. One day in 1941 she was a pretty and vivacious 22-year-old secretary, heading up to London for her first job. The next, she found herself inducted into MI5’s “Double Cross” team, the top-secret wartime unit responsible for intercepting Nazi spies, turning them into double agents and using them against the enemy.

“I never said I wanted to join MI5,” laughs Harmer, pictured above as a young woman. “I thought it was just a secretarial job.”

In 1941 she was one of the youngest recruits to an organisation whose very existence remained a closely guarded secret until the 1970s. Today, at 88, she is the last survivor of the Double Cross team and the only person left who can describe, from first-hand experience, the extraordinary role it played in helping to win the war.

Harmer’s career in MI5 began when she was sent to prison. The daughter of an army officer, she had just completed a secretarial course when a friend of the family asked her mother if her daughter would be interested in working at the War Department. No one asked Peggy’s opinion.

A few days later a letter arrived at the family home in Fleet, Hampshire, marked “Most Secret and Confidential”, instructing her to report to Wormwood Scrubs prison in London.

“I took the number 15 bus to the prison,” she recalls, as we sit together in the kitchen of her home near Banbury in Oxfordshire. “I walked in and these great big iron gates clanged behind me. It was quite daunting. Then I was taken up an iron staircase to a cell.” She pauses with a giggle as delightful and girlish as it must have been 70 years ago. “It was just like being in Porridge.”

In the cell was an officer, who instructed her to sit down and begin taking dictation. “It was bizarre; he kept referring to ‘Snow’, ‘Tate’ and ‘Summer’. I had no idea what was going on. I thought I was in a madhouse.”

Peggy would soon discover that Snow, Tate and Summer were all codenames for double agents, and that she was now part of a fledgeling counterespionage unit based in the grim London prison.

The Double Cross System created by MI5 during the Second World War would prove to be one of the most successful espionage operations of this or any other war. Back in 1936, a Welsh electrician named Arthur Owens, who travelled extensively in Germany, had been recruited by the British Secret Service and given the codename Snow (as a partial anagram of his name). Owens had provided some useful information, but it transpired that he had also made contact with the Abwehr – German military intelligence. When confronted, Owens agreed to work as a double agent against the Germans.

“Snow” was only the first of dozens of agents recruited by the Germans to spy on Britain but then intercepted and turned – or “doubled”, in spy parlance. From late 1940 the Abwehr began pouring agents into Britain: they came by rubber dinghy, U-boat, seaplane and parachute; they came disguised as refugees, workers, farmhands and seamen. Some were professional spies, some Nazi fanatics, some the victims of blackmail; most were quite hopeless. And every single one was captured. What the Nazis never discovered was that the code used by the Enigma encryption machine had been broken by the brilliant cryptographers at Bletchley Park. By reading the Abwehr wireless traffic, the British secret service learnt where and when every agent was due to arrive, and lay in wait.

Captured spies were taken to a secret interrogation centre in Richmond codenamed Camp 020 and grilled by its commander, Colonel Robin Stevens, a particularly terrifying figure nicknamed “Tin-Eye” on account of the monocle that he never removed.

Offered the choice between execution and cooperation, most Nazi spies readily agreed to work against their spymasters and were then handed over to a new sub-section of MI5 codenamed B1A, responsible for running double agents: the so-called Double Cross system.

This was the world into which Peggy Harmer was plunged when she entered Wormwood Scrubs on that spring morning in 1941. While MI5 officers (exclusively male) coordinated the elaborate task of deception though the growing team of double agents, Harmer and the rest of the (exclusively female) secretarial staff carried out the more humdrum but equally vital task of record-keeping: taking dictation, filing, transcribing interrogations and passing information between the different sections and agent-runners.

“I hate to say it but I found the war really exciting,” says Harmer. Despite a series of strokes, her memory of those days is as sharp as ever, and her face lights up with the recollection. “There was a wonderful atmosphere; such camaraderie. We all had a common enemy. That made a huge difference.”

The Double Cross team came under the direct command of Colonel Tommy Argyll Robertson, known as “Tar” from his initials, a charismatic young officer of the Seaforth Higlanders who wore tartan trousers in the office and was universally adored by his staff. “Tar was very good-looking,” says Harmer. “Terrifically well organised, but in a relaxed way. He was delightful.”

Robertson was also a brilliant spymaster with a knack for recruiting gifted amateurs who instinctively understood the intelligence game. Section B1A, which eventually moved from Wormwood Scrubs to rather more refined surroundings at 58 St James’s Street, included lawyers, academics, an industrialist, a circus owner, an artist, an art dealer and a poet.

For young Peggy Harmer, fresh from the Home Counties and secretarial school, it was thrilling to find herself part of a secret society, fighting an underground war of which even her family was unaware. “We didn’t talk about it at all: not to friends, not to anyone. I didn’t tell a soul. We were so secretive. If I ever met boyfriends for lunch, afterwards I would walk in the opposite direction [from MI5 headquarters] in case I was being followed.”

The Double Cross system was an overwhelming intelligence success. In the words of John Masterman, an Oxford academic who played a crucial role in liaising with other war departments on behalf of B1A: “By means of the double-cross agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country.” Intercepted wireless messages, decoded at Bletchley Park, proved how thoroughly the Germans had been bamboozled. Even today Harmer is triumphant: “Every day in B1A we got the typescripts from Ultra [decrypted German messages] and we knew from these if they were believing our double agents. Now that was brilliant, wasn’t it?"

Some 480 suspected enemy spies were detained in Britain during the war. Perhaps a quarter of these were used successfully as double agents, of whom perhaps 40 made a significant contribution. Only a handful of Nazi fanatics refused to cooperate. One of these was Karl Richter, who was tried “in camera” and hanged at Wandsworth. Harmer recalls: “He was killed because he wouldn’t work for us. We all hated it in the office. I think it was a horrible occasion.”

Some of these double agents are now well known, such as Juan Pujol, the agent codenamed “Garbo”, and Eddie Chapman, the British crook recruited by the Abwehr who would become “Agent Zigzag”.

A few, such as Chapman, managed to delude their German handlers until the end of the war: sending false information, diverting resources, misdirecting the doodlebug bombs and, perhaps most importantly, convincing German Intelligence that its spy network was working well when in reality it was working for the British.

The finest hour for the Double Cross team came with Operation Fortitude, when double agents were used to send false information that helped to persuade Hitler that the D-Day invasion of France was aimed at Calais, not Normandy.

Occasionally, to her delight, Harmer was entrusted with courier work and made personal contact with the double agents. On one occasion she was sent to take some documents to Tor Glad – double agent “Jeff”, one half of a pair of Norwegian double agents nicknamed Mutt and Jeff after the cartoon characters. “I was supposed to meet him in Piccadilly Tube station. We wore red carnations, I seem to remember, for recognition.” She laughs, not out of embarrassment at the theatricality but from sheer pleasure. “I suppose we were all taking part in the adventure. One got quite sort of blasé about it all.”

In a way, Harmer’s role was that of a Miss Moneypenny – vital to the success of the counterespionage operation but operating principally behind the scenes. In the Bond stories, Miss Moneypenny’s love for her spy is always unrequited. The same was not true of Peggy, for while she was guarding MI5’s secrets assiduously, she was also keeping an important secret from MI5.

Soon after arriving at Section B1A she was assigned to work with an agent-runner named Christopher Harmer, a young lawyer recruited by Tar Robertson and a rising star within the section. They fell in love but told no one else.

“We were very secretive. I don’t know why. I think we were embarrassed. We were well trained, you see. We didn’t want people to know we were going out together, so we pretended. Funny old business.”

One night the two young lovers were dancing in a nightclub when they were rumbled. “We were spotted by someone from the office. Then everyone knew.”

In 1943 Christopher and Peggy Harmer were married, beginning a long and happy marriage but ending her career at MI5. “There was a rule that married couples were not allowed to be in the same section,” she recalls, with just a wisp of regret. “I was moved to another section which wasn’t nearly so interesting.”

After the war, both Christopher and Peggy left the security service: he to return to the law, she to bring up their young family.

Every year the veterans of B1A would meet up to recall their wartime exploits. Slowly, over the years, their numbers dwindled. Tar Robertson died in 1994. Christopher Harmer died two years later.

“I’m terribly old. They’re all dead now,” says Peggy Harmer. “I seem to be rather all on my own. More cake?”

The survivor’s remark is utterly English, offered without a trace of self-pity. Indeed, as we talk, with the afternoon drawing on, Harmer might be 22 again, dashing through the blitzed streets of London, taking dictation from a handsome MI5 officer and fighting her own secret war.

The events that she recounts are now on the farthest tip of living memory but described as if they happened yesterday, by a young woman who came to London expecting to be a secretary and make tea but ended up in the company of spies, making history.