Neither Swallows Nor Amazons
BOOK REVIEW: SECRET SERVANTS OF THE CROWN: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence.
By: Claire Hubbard-Hall / Citadel Press
Reviewed by: Tim Willasey-Wilsey
The Reviewer — Tim Willasey-Wilsey is a Visiting Professor and King’s College London and a former senior British diplomat. He is the author of the forthcoming book: “The Spy and the Devil” and is a Cipher Brief Expert
REVIEW — The role of women in the British secret services has forever been demeaned by their portrayal in the James Bond movies. The reality is far more impressive. From their beginning in 1909 the services have always employed lots of women and their role has been essential. In the early days women tended to play support roles and only recently have they broken through into senior management. The appointment of Daphne Park as Controller Western Hemisphere in MI6 in 1974 and then Stella Rimington as Director General of MI5 in 1992 were defining moments.
It is extremely rare to encounter a book about British espionage which provides a mass of new information and insight. This is because MI6’s archives remain closed (possibly forever) and because MI5, GCHQ and SOE historical files were deposited in the National Archives many years ago with only a drip-feed of additional material each year. This is why most new books about spying consist of reinterpretations of existing and well-known stories.
Clare Hubbard-Hall, in her book Secret Servants of the Crown, being published in the U.S. on February 25th has managed the impossible and she has done so by discovering that many people who served the Crown in a secret capacity often felt the need to write a private memoir so that their children and grandchildren could know what they really did for all the years when they pretended to be boring civil servants performing humdrum tasks. Such memoirs were never intended for publication, and they were always careful to avoid identities of agents or specific operations.
This is the culture of British secrecy which kept ULTRA (the breaking of Nazi Germany’s cyphers, including the famous ENIGMA machine) secret for 29 years and explains the outrage felt by thousands of former employees of Bletchley Park (three quarters of them women) when the man responsible for ULTRA security wrote a book in 1974 revealing the spectacular success.
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Hubbard-Hall focusses mainly on MI5 (Britain’s domestic Security Service), MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service which operates overseas), The Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS, the forerunner of today’s GCHQ SIGINT service), SOE (the wartime Special Operations Executive responsible for “setting Europe ablaze” sabotage operations) and NID (Naval Intelligence Department for which Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, worked).
The author’s efforts are doubly intriguing in that she concentrates exclusively on the women who served secretly. There is a curious irony here. In the case of MI5, MI6 and GC&CS almost nothing has ever been written about women whereas for the sabotage organization SOE the majority of publicity has been about its women. Violette Szabo was the subject of the great 1958 film “Carve Her Name with Pride” and Odette Sansom “Odette” 1950. The case of Noor Inayat Khan, a radio operator of Indian ancestry, is also well known in the UK, as is Virginia Hall from Baltimore, Maryland.
Films about NID have also featured their women, albeit in subordinate roles. In Sink the Bismarck (1960) a Wren (from the Women’s Royal Naval Service-WRNS) provides tireless support to the fictionalized hero played by Kenneth More as they hunt the German battleship from the Admiralty operations center. In The Man Who Never Was (1956) a Wren writes the love-letter for the Germans to find on the dead body washed up on the Spanish coast with fake secrets in his briefcase.
The author is careful not to belittle the women who played these subordinate roles. At the time it was almost impossible for women to break through the glass ceiling. For example, by 1945 only one woman had ever served in the British Cabinet. However, in these support positions women played essential functions. For example, the MI6 secretaries were not just typists. They performed a range of other jobs including encoding, accounting, and on occasions, surveillance and meeting agents in the field. Kathleen Pettigrew became a legend in MI6 serving in the outer office of four Chiefs of the service. She came from a humble background but knew every secret of the service. She even went to Number 10 Downing Street with Stewart Menzies (the wartime Chief) to read aloud ULTRA messages to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
In MI5 the heart of the whole organization was its Registry which (in the days before Information Technology) held all the information on potential spies, terrorists, anarchists etc. The effectiveness of the service depended on the ability to store, retrieve and cross-reference these millions of pieces of information. The MI5 Registry was one of the wonders of the 1930s and 1940s and it was entirely managed by women led by Edith Lomax.
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A few women did break through the glass ceiling. Perhaps the best-known case is Jane Sissmore of MI5 who (as Jane Archer) later transferred to MI6 after being sacked for insubordination in 1940. Kim Philby would later describe her as the best counter-intelligence officer and thus the biggest threat to his own treachery. Indeed, her debrief of the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, nearly identified Philby as a Soviet agent.
Switching from officers to agents, Hubbard-Hall tells the story of Olga Gray who penetrated the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and uncovered for MI5 a plot to provide details of weapons at Woolwich Arsenal to the Soviet Union. She charts the huge pressures to which such agents are subjected living a clandestine life and the insufficient care and support provided following the success and conclusion of the case.
A less celebrated case was the Russian-speaking Winifred Spink who was part of a 17-strong MI6 station working in Petrograd in the months just before the Russian Revolution. She was fortunate that the first two Chiefs of MI6 had positive views of the role of women in the service. Under the third Chief (Menzies) there served the courageous Margaret Reid who escaped the Nazi invasion of Norway, and Ena Molesworth who served in Berlin issuing thousands of British visas to Jews while at the same time ensuring that intelligence continued to flow to London. The story of her subsequent dash from Geneva to Bordeaux with her longtime friend Rita Winsor is grippingly told.
There are some blemishes and a few factual errors. The author finds it hard to understand why the talented Lunn sisters were investigated by MI5. Lucy worked for MI6, Peggy and Helen worked for GC&CS where their fluent Russian was a godsend, but Edith was a member of the CPGB and married to Andrew Rothstein who recruited Melita Norwood for the KGB. It was surely sensible to check if the three secret servants were in touch with or sympathetic to their rogue sister. In the end, all three were cleared, which seems like a good outcome, but Hubbard-Hall observes that “MI6 had an unhealthy obsession with the Bolsheviks.” And yet Melita Norwood was described by a Soviet defector as “both the most important British female agent in KGB history and the longest serving of all Soviet spies in Britain.”
I also question the author’s views on diversity. Given that Britain was dominated by white men the secret services were surprisingly diverse. Yes, there were a few debutantes in MI6, but they served alongside women like Kathleen Pettigrew from the humblest of backgrounds. Furthermore, MI6 was not regarded as posh. Indeed, the Foreign Office regarded MI6 officers as socially inferior and refused to give them diplomatic rank in embassies. Patrick Reilly was seconded to MI6 and observed that there were very few officers from the top public schools and few members of the prestigious London clubs. In 1930 there was only one university graduate. What marked out MI6 officers in the 1920s and 1930s was their military service during the Great War, their overseas experience, their languages and a taste for adventure. It was only at the outset of the Second World War that MI6, under pressure to increase recruitment, began to recruit louche society types and with insufficient vetting of their politics.
This is a marvelous book and a valuable addition to what is known about the early days of the British secret services.
Secret Servants of the Crown earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats
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