FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

Q. What made you decide to apply to MI5?

​A. I have two teenage sons who think it would be dead cool to have a mum as a secret agent. I mean, it kind of would be, wouldn’t it.

Apparently, that is not the right answer, and I think it may have put the kibosh on any chance I might have had of working for Military Intelligence, Section 5, even though I said it with my tongue very firmly in my cheek. I don’t think the UK secret intelligence has much of a sense of humour.

This happened several years ago, and I’d all but forgotten about it until I started my latest bit of research, albeit into another subject entirely, and I wanted to learn more about the history of my previous unrealised employer.

CHANGE IN WARFARE

The Russo-Turkish War and Boer Wars in the late 19th and early 20th century, exposed the external security threats to Britain. It became obvious the War Office needed reform; the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) was created from the remnants of the Colonial Defence Committee (CDC)

The conduct of warfare was changing, and as weaponry, science and technology advanced, along with a shift in political policy, various committees started to form under the umbrella of the CID.

WORLD WARS

Captain Vernon George Waldegrave Kell, born 21 November 1873, enjoyed something of a cosmopolitan upbringing, and discovered he had an aptitude for foreign languages. A diminutive stature, he suffered from asthma.

He joined the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in 1892, and was later involved in the eight-nation alliance that defeated the Boxer Rebellion 1898-1901. When he returned to London, he worked for the German Intelligence section of the War Office, and joined the CID in 1907.

By 1909, with the growing fear of German invasion, the CID was tasked with investigating the threat of German espionage. The new Secret Service Bureau (SSB) was formed, and Kell became their military representative.

He soon established links with a group of Chief Constables and government officials, and he was given the job of secretly registering 30,000 resident ‘aliens’. The then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, supported Kell, and the work SSB carried out.

On 3 August 1914, the SSB pulled off a major coup, rounding up all agents of any significance working for German naval intelligence. Thirty-one agents were charged, and one of them, Carl Hans Lody aka Charles A Inglis, was found guilty of war treason and killed by firing squad at The Tower of London on 6 November 1914. He was the first person to be executed at The Tower for 150 years.

It was at this time that the SSB became known as Military Intelligence Section 5 (MI5), and by 1917, they had registered 40,000 people, including the British peace movement who they branded as pro-German.

At the end of the Great War, MI5 had its budget slashed, and over the next few years, Kell had to fight hard to protect the organisation.

​During the intervening years between the World Wars, MI5 carried out comprehensive surveillance of over 5,000 people, but they were struggling with limited resources and very few staff.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, MI5 was unprepared when faced with vetting requests averaging 8,200 per week. It was made all the worse by the introduction of internment (detention without trial). Between September 1939 and March 1940, 64,000 German, Austrian, and Italian UK residents had to be interviewed.

According to John Curry who worked for MI5, and later wrote an account of his time there, the organisation was ‘in a state of confusion amounting almost to chaos’.

By 1940, sixty-seven-year-old Kell had been in the post for thirty years. Having done the best he could, he must surely have felt betrayed, when in May of that year, when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, he didn’t hesitate in replacing Kell with Brigadier Oswald ‘Jasper’ Harker.

Over the following decades, MI5 evolved, and following the controversial publication of Spycatcher in 1986, the Security Service Act 1989 gave it legal recognition, transforming it from a secret society to one of openness. It advertised job vacancies for the first time in 1997, receiving 12,000 applications in the first day.

I had a quick look at the kind of questions they ask applicants… I don’t think I’d get much further than I did before, I’d have to tell them things I don’t even put in my diaries!

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