On the 4th of March 2018, Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious
on a park bench in Salisbury, Wiltshire. The former British double agent and his daughter
had been poisoned with the Novichok chemical nerve agent. They were lucky to survive.
Since then a series of thrilling spy stories have filled the headlines from the further
Novichok poisoning of Alexei Navalny to cyberattacks on Iranian nuclear facilities and the peddling
of disinformation by hostile foreign governments.
These news stories appear to give us a glimpse into the secret world of today’s spies – but
how much can we really know about what intelligence agents are up to? How has espionage changed
since in the 21st century, and are spies really anything at all like James Bond?
Let’s look at the history behind the headlines.
My name is Gill Bennett. I'm a historian who specializes in secret intelligence.
The first thing we need to understand is what the word 'spy' actually means.
It's a rather vague umbrella term, but of course, in the end, espionage is to do with
secret intelligence which means acquiring information that other people don't want you
to have. So we talk about intelligence officers and they are the people who work for intelligence
agencies. If those intelligence officers recruit agents, they're the people who get the information
for them. So really officers and agents is what you might call the correct terminology.
Now we've got the basics down let's go back in time to the golden age of spying - the
Cold War. This is a photograph from a seemingly normal garden party at Cranley Drive in Ruislip
in the 1950s. Standing next to Frank and Nora Doel is a man known as Peter Kroger. His wife
known as Helen is behind the camera. Despite their seemingly normal lifestyle, both were
Russian spies. Along with three others, they formed the Portland Spy Ring who passed secrets
from a Royal Navy research facility back to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold
War. To tell us more about the Portland Spy Ring here's Simon Innes-Robbins part of the
Cold War team at Imperial War Museums.
The Portland Spy Ring was based in Portland, Dorset which is where the admiralty had a
research centre. HMS Dreadnought was the first British nuclear sub and a lot of their technology
and highly secret materials was going through Portland and this is what the Russians were
after. They had been able to get two spies, Harry Houghton and his girlfriend Ethel (Gee).
She actually had a lot of top-secret material that was passed through her hands. How it
worked was that Harry went up to London and met Gordon Lonsdale and handed over lots of
incriminating top-secret documents to him. He then microfilmed them and took them over
to the Krogers who were living in Ruislip and then they were in contact with Moscow
by radio that's how they were then passed on to the Russians.
A classic example of Soviet operations to try and get hold of Western technical intelligence
at the time. Even though the technology, in this case, is fairly primitive as we see it
now. There's nothing that different from the Portland spy case to other cases ever since
before and after.
If we go back to that photograph, the Krogers or so they call themselves are what are called
'illegals', people living their cover in another country under an assumed identity. The chosen
cover for the Krogers was a rather strange one.
They set themselves up as antiquarian booksellers and they bought this house in Ruislip and
it was a place where they used to entertain quite regularly. And it was only through an
accident really and through the defection of a polish spy that MI5 actually managed
to get onto them. Frank and Nora who are the neighbours, their house was actually used
by A4 who were the surveillance team of MI5 who were keeping tabs on the Krogers. They
were able to keep a non-stop surveillance and it was there that they were able to make
the link between them and the Portland Spy Ring.
But hang on a minute if the portland spy ring is our sort of classic espionage operation,
then how do we understand the poisonings and cyber attacks that have made headlines recently?
I wouldn't, I wouldn't class that as espionage. Bumping somebody off because you regard them
as having betrayed you in the past, it is a crime yes, but it is not espionage in any
way that we really recognize. Because intelligence agencies have by the nature of their work
to be secret, most of what they do you would not hear about it.
Only the most exceptional examples of espionage rise up to the surface of public knowledge
so the stories that make it to the headlines are actually the exceptions rather than the
rule. So how did the public react then when they found out about the Portland Spy Ring?
It was a very embarrassing case because initially, the wife of Harry Houghton had some time before
approached the admiralty and said that she thought her husband was undertaking espionage
activities and nobody took any notice of her. They thought she was a disaffected wife doing
it out of spite. One thing that's really important to remember here is that at this time none
of the UK's intelligence agencies were avowed. That means you know they weren't mentioned
in the newspapers or anywhere else. Whatever emerged was just the kind of very top level
of the story.
In the vacuum left by real-life spy stories, the public turned to fiction instead. So how
accurate are characters like James Bond when compared to the officers and agents that really
exist.
Well of course James Bond is a fictional character. He doesn't really ever collect much intelligence
and he doesn't really recruit agents and people who work with him for a while are liable to
find themselves dead.
IWM actually has the Browning Hi-Power, that's James Bond's pistol, in our collection. And
in fairness, this is a weapon used by British operatives in places like Northern Ireland.
But stepping back for a moment do officers and agents even carry firearms, would they
have a licence to kill?
No assassination is very much not part of the day job of the intelligence officer. I
mean obviously, espionage is by definition a hazardous world, but those things are dramatized
because that makes them exciting to read about and to watch. If you think about the Krogers
I mean it's actually more exciting than a lot of public depictions would be.
In the 1940s, Nora Cohen, to use her real name, passed information from inside the U.S
atomic project back to the Soviet Union. The Cohens even had to flee the US after their
friends and fellow agents the Rosenbergs were executed.
They were long-term professional intelligence operatives, so within their story there's
a huge amount of drama in a way that surpasses a lot of the spy stories one can read.
Bearing all that in mind then, how different are the officers and agents of yesterday to
the ones active today?
Really over the past century espionage has changed far less than you might think. The
spreading of disinformation for example or indeed cyber hacks obviously they have transformed
the way of collecting intelligence. The fact remains that you still have to have people
collecting it, you have to have people analyzing it. That the whole point of espionage, whether
it is technological or human, is to acquire secretly, covertly information that the other
people don't want you to have.
I'm afraid those are all the secrets we're going to spill today. Thank you so much to
Gill for her expertise and to Simon for taking us through those objects. This is the first
in a new series from the IWM institute called History Behind the Headlines so please do
let us know what you thought of it in the comments below, we'd love to know what you
think. Finally, of course, subscribe so you don't miss the next episode and i'll see you
then!