He talked animatedly about the Russian obsession with secrecy, and how the modern KGB had its roots in the Tsar's Secret Police. He was perceptive in his analysis of the historical importance of the KGB to the Bolshevik Party. The Russian Intelligence Service was the guarantor of Party control in a vast and often hostile country. He spoke, too, about why the British and Russian Intelligence Services were inevitably the main adversaries in the game of spies. Secrecy and intelligence went far back in both their histories, and both services, he believed, shared a caution and patience which reflected their national characters. He contrasted this, much to the amusement of his audience, with the zealous and often overhasty activities of "our American cousins."
But Dick White, for all the elegance of his delivery, was essentially an orthodox man. He believed in the fashionable idea of "containing" the Soviet Union, and that MI5 had a vital role to play in neutralizing Soviet assets in the UK. He talked a good deal about what motivated a Communist, and referred to documents found in the ARCOS raid which showed the seriousness with which the Russian Intelligence Service approached the overthrow of the British Government. He set great store on the new vetting initiatives currently under way in Whitehall as the best means of defeating Russian Intelligence Service penetration of government.
He believed that MI5 was in the midst of great reforms, which in a sense, under his guidance, it was. The clearest impression he gave was of an intense pride in the Service. This emotion remained strong with him throughout his career, even after he had left MI5 to join MI6. He was above all a team player, and he believed very much in preserving the morale of the organizations he ran. This made him a popular and humane man to work for, even if he always remained a slightly distant, ascetic figure.
Toward the end of my training I began to tour the building, often escorted by Cuckney or Winterborn. The whole place was ludicrously overcrowded, with officers crammed in four to a room. I had the luxury of my own office - more like a broom cupboard - next to Hugh Winterborn on the fifth floor. The space problem was a legacy of the longstanding antipathy between MI5 and MI6. At the end of the war, plans had been drawn up to create a joint Headquarters of Intelligence to house both Services. A site for new premises was even acquired in the Horseferry Road. But for years a working party of both Services bickered about the precise division of office space, and MI5 muttered darkly about being unable to trust MI6 because of Kim Philby. The situation remained unresolved until the 1960s when MI6 were finally banished across the Thames to their own building, Century House.
In a sense, the indecision over office space was indicative of the lack of clear thinking in Whitehall about the relative roles of MI5 and MI6. It was not until well into the 1970s that MI5 finally persuaded the Treasury to fund a move to permanent, purpose-built headquarters at Curzon House. Until then the constant overspill problem was dealt with by a succession of short-term leases on buildings. Firstly there was Cork Street, which in the 1950s housed the booming empire of C Branch. Then in the 1960s Counterespionage operated from an office building in Marlborough Street, and we all had to pick our way through the peep shows, flower stalls, and rotting vegetables of Soho Market to get to our Top Secret files. It may have been appropriate, but it was hardly practical.
MI5 in the 1950s seemed to be covered with a thick film of dust dating from the wartime years. The whole organization was rather like Dickens' Miss Havisham. Wooed by the intellectual elite during the war, she had been jilted by them in 1945. They had gone off to new pursuits in the outside world, leaving MI5 trapped in her darkened rooms, alone with memories of what might have been, and only rarely coming into contact with the rest of Whitehall.
The atmosphere reminded me of a minor public school. The Directors were treated with that mixture of reverence and sycophancy reserved by schoolboys for their schoolmasters, and section heads were their prefects. But the DG and DDG were the only people addressed as "Sir," and first names were normally used. Within the atmosphere of MI5 flowered exotic and extravagant personalities, men and women so drawn to the Great Game of intelligence that they rose above the pettiness of it all, and made a career there endlessly fascinating.
On the face of it, life was a mixture of the quaint and the archaic. Every year the Office virtually closed to attend the Lord's Test Match, where MI5 had an unofficial patch in the Lord's Tavern. And every morning senior officers, almost without exception, spent the first half hour of the day on THE TIMES crossword. The scrambled telephones, which normally hummed with the most highly classified secrets in the Western world, relayed a series of bizarre, coded questions from office to office.
"My left rump is giving me trouble," meaning "I can't make head or tail of seven down in the bottom left-hand corner," or "My right breast is vacant," meaning "What the hell is twelve across in the middle?" Courtney Young, who ran the Soviet Counterespionage Section (D1) in the 1950s, was the undisputed Security Service crossword king. He always claimed that it was too easy to do the crossword with a pencil. He claimed to do it in his head instead. For a year I watched him do this, until finally I could resist the temptation no longer. I challenged him, whereupon he immediately wrote in each answer without hesitation. Every night for a week I had to stand drinks for a gleeful Courtney in the local pub.
The nerve center of MI5 was the Registry. It spread across the whole ground floor of Leconfield House. The Registry had been moved to Wormwood Scrubs Prison during World War II to ensure the files would be safe if their London home were bombed. It was an unwise move. Within the year the prison was bombed and many files were destroyed or damaged by fire. Those that could be saved were stored in moisture-resistant polythene bags. In the 1960s, when we began to study the history of recruitments in the 1930s, I often examined prewar files. It was a difficult process, prizing apart the charred pages with tweezers and wooden spatulas.
After the disaster at Wormwood Scrubs MI5 put a lot of thought into designing an effective Registry. Brigadier Harker, who, as Sir David Petrie's wartime Deputy, was the ideal administrative foil, recruited an expert in business systems, Harold Potter, to reorganize the Registry. Potter was an excellent choice. He had a neat, methodical mind and the will to impose order even in the chaos of wartime.
In 1955 Potter was approaching retirement, but he took great delight in showing me around. The Registry was based in a central hall, which housed the main file index and the files themselves. The rooms leading off from the central concourse held the other specialist card indexes. Duplicate copies of all files and indexes were routinely made on microfilm, and stored in a specially protected MI5 warehouse in Cheltenham to prevent the catastrophe of Wormwood Scrubs occurring again. Potter's office, tucked in one corner of the Registry, was a paragon of neatness.
"Make sure you return your files promptly, won't you, Peter? I don't want to have to start chasing you like I do some of these buggers!"
He could have been a kindly, small-town librarian. Sadly for Potter, I became one of the worst abusers of the Registry, routinely holding scores of files at a time, though never, I suspect, as bad as Millicent Bagot, the legendary old spinster in F Branch who kept tabs on the International Communist Party for decades. I have always assumed Millicent to have been the model for John le Carry's ubiquitous Connie. She was slightly touched, but with an extraordinary memory for facts and files. Potter and his successors in the Registry despaired of Millicent. "I only hope we get the files back when she retires," he would mutter to himself after a particularly heavy file request from F Branch.