Spycatcher by Peter Wright Page A

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