It has been 15 years since I returned to Moscow for The
Independent. Back then, I was a twenty something writer, coming to terms
with my father’s death and the many questions about his life that
remained unanswered. Among them, what was the impact of learning via a
newspaper headline, at the age of 19, that his own father, Kim Philby,
was a double agent?
As I trudged along Moscow’s grey, snow-covered streets for
the first time since I was a child, tracing my grandfather’s footsteps through
the city to which he absconded after being unmasked as the “Third Man” in the
Cambridge Spy Ring, I found ever more questions opening up in my mind. Among
them, where were all the women?
In the many books, plays and films I had encountered over
the years about my grandfather’s life and those he worked with as a Soviet
mole, all the stories seemed to be about the men.
There were a few female faces, granted, but these were
generally the secretaries or the wives – like Kim’s fourth wife, Rufina (or
Rufa, as we knew her), who spoke tearfully about her late husband as we sat
side by side on the same sofa that was there when my parents and I visited in
the 1980s, in the apartment Kim was given after arriving in the Soviet Union on
a tanker from Beirut.
Listening to Rufa – who some say was given to Kim as a
reward and a distraction once he arrived behind the Iron Curtain, others that
she was placed there by the KGB to keep an eye on him – it was impossible not
to wonder about her true part in his story. It was equally impossible to expect
I’d ever find out.
Women spies have played some of the most important and
varied roles in espionage throughout the ages, as I discovered in researching
my new narrative non-fiction book for readers young and old.
The Secret Lives of Women Spies is a collection of
stories bringing to life the riveting private world of female spies from the
19th century to the present day. From armed scout for the Union army Harriet
Tubman, through to Zandra Flemister, the first black woman to serve in the
Secret Service, or the likes of Special Operations Executive agent Noor Inayat
Khan, Russian “illegal” Anna Chapman and eccentric US performer turned star of
the French Resistance Josephine Baker, the 20 or so women (and girls) featured
here operated in all parts of the spy world, risking everything for what they
believed in – their actions making make them heroes to some and traitors to
others.
As well as telling their astonishing personal stories, the
book explores their historical contexts in an attempt to understand their
choices. Some, like Indian National Intelligence officer Saraswathi Rajamani,
who at the age of 10 told Mahatma Gandhi, “When I grow up, I’m going to shoot
an Englishman”, are straightforward. Others, like that of Mata Hari, whose
legend as a German agent using her powers of seduction has been undermined as a
new vision emerges of a disempowered woman doing everything she could to be
reunited with the daughter taken from her by an abusive husband, are less so.
In recent years, there has been a drive towards more
transparency and diversity in the British intelligence game. Under the
directorship of Dame Stella Rimington – appointed in 1992, the first of two
female MI5 chiefs, followed in 2002 by Eliza Manningham-Buller – the domestic
security service was ordered to release files to the National Archive after a
certain period.
It was thanks to the release of a bundle of papers under
this protocol in 2015 that it became clear an Austrian woman named Edith
Tudor-Hart, also a brilliant photographer and devoted single mother to a
mentally ill son, had been the person responsible for my grandfather’s
recruitment by the Soviets in the 1930s. Tudor-Hart was so important that
Cambridge spy (and relative of the late Queen Elizabeth II) Anthony Blunt
referred to her under interrogation as “The grandmother of us all”.
Interestingly, it was another woman – MI5’s first female
officer, Jane Sissmore – who first tried to out Kim as a Soviet mole, though
following a row with the acting director general, she was fired for
insubordination before she could amass the necessary intelligence to prove her
claim.
Women were not regularly recruited as intelligence officers
in MI5 or MI6 until the late 1970s. In a recent interview with Harper’s
Bazaar, Dame Stella said, “When I first joined MI5 in 1969, the women did the
support work and the men did the ‘finding things out’.” She and a group of
fellow disgruntled women employees got together and wrote a letter demanding
better assignments. Her first test was to go into a pub and find out as much as
she could about a person without attracting attention. “I practically got
thrown out under suspicion of soliciting!” she added.
Indeed, when Vernon Kell co-founded MI6’s precursor in 1909,
he described his ideal recruits as men “who could make notes on their shirt
cuff while riding on horseback”.
Until
now, a woman had never been at the helm of the UK’s foreign intelligence
service, MI6. But that has all changed. As Richard Moore stands down this year
as chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service, the government has now named
Metreweli, a career intelligence officer, as his replacement.
Metreweli, 47, who is currently MI6’s head of technology,
known as “Q”, joined the Secret Intelligence Service in 1999. She has spent
most of her career in operational roles in the Middle East and Europe.
Three of the top four jobs in the agency are already
occupied by women, who gave an extensive group interview to the FT in
2022. In it, the director of operations, who grew up in the northwest of
England and attended a grammar school, is quoted as saying being a woman can
“be a secret sauce … When you’re playing into a culture which is particularly
male-dominated, women tend to be underestimated and therefore perceived as less
threatening.”
