Peter Hillmore
Women make good spies. Maybe because men are putty in their hands, maybe it’s because they are believed to be duplicitous anyway, or perhaps the reason is best left to psychologists.
Women have entered the second oldest profession from such diverse areas as Hollywood film sets, smoky French cabaret bars and the playing fields of England.
It’s very American that a Hollywood actress should be the inspiration for a trick that made spying safer. Hedy Lamarr, who caused a scandal in the Thirties by appearing nude in the film Ecstasy, hit on the idea, while playing the piano, that if you constantly change radio frequencies while transmitting messages the enemy can’t jam them.
There’s something very French about Josephine Baker entering the world of espionage via a cabaret act. And it is especially English that MI5’s first woman spy was recruited while playing clock golf at a Conservative Party fete: that’s how it was done in the Thirties when Olga Gray entered their service.
Spies and traitors could be found in the same social circle. Gray was recruited by Maxwell Knight, an MI5 agent who later became “Uncle Max”, a BBC Radio children’s presenter – perhaps the record requests were really coded instructions.
Espionage is an equal opportunities employer (even if former CIA station chief Janine Brokner won $400 000 from her old employers after exposing the career obstacles faced by female spies).
Women have spied and died for their country, women have run spy organisations and they have betrayed them, just like their male counterparts. Stella Rimington ran MI5, and Kathy Massiter left it to reveal its secrets and the way it kept tabs on legitimate protest groups.
A Dublin-born Quaker, Lydia Darragh, was America’s first woman spy and she went into the closet to do it during the War of Independence. In 1776, Sir William Howe, commander of the British forces, took over a room in her house to plan an attack. Darragh hid in a cupboard, listened through the keyhole, took notes and passed them on to George Washington’s top spy.
The American army was saved, and the rest is history.
Similar ingenuity was shown by the cabaret singer Josephine Baker, who passed secret information from occupied Paris to the Allies in the 1940s by copying it on to her sheet music in invisible ink.
A cruder style was shown by the beautiful unnamed Mossad agent who posed as an air hostess to lure nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu back to Israel by means of the age-old “honeytrap” technique.
The American Velvalee Dickinson betrayed her country; the owner of a New york doll shop, she became fascinated by Japanese culture while living in California and sent coded messages to her former customers in Japan. “A doll in a hula skirt” meant a ship was in from Hawaii.
The Germans called Mata Hari “dud shell” because she couldn’t remember her World War I pillow talk with French officers. But the French recruited her as a double agent, then accused her of treason and executed her. She cried “Harlot, yes, but traitor – never”, and blew kisses as the firing squad took aim.
British diplomat Pauline Neville Jones now works in the City with Nat West, but is a former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Eliza Manningham-Buller is now MI5’s deputy director. The daughter of a former Conservative Lord Chancellor, it is not known whether she, too, was recruited at a Tory garden fte while playing clock golf.