The spying game

It’s been a year since we lost our dear friend Reg. I first met Reg not long after moving to our little Cornish village twenty-odd years ago. He was at that time in his mid-60s, a slightly stern-looking man with a very old-fashioned dress sense. I didn’t think at the time that we’d have much in common.

Knowing we were new to the village, he and his wife invited us over for coffee in their sunny conservatory and it wasn’t long before we discovered that beneath Reg’s staid exterior was a wicked - if rather deadpan - sense of humour and a masterful talent for storytelling.

I also discovered that we shared a knowledge of Russian and an interest in Russian literature and theatre. While I studied Russian at university, Reg’s route into the language was rather less conventional. He was an alumnus of the Joint Services School for Linguists, or JSSL - Britain’s school for spies.

The JSSL was founded in 1951 and cherry-picked some of Britain’s brightest students as they embarked on their national service to train them for Cold War intelligence work. Rather than military training, they followed a rigorous regime of Russian language tuition, supplemented with regular performances of Russian drama and poetry. The teachers were a motley mix of émigrés who had fled Russia at the time of the revolution, and a few Soviet defectors.

Some of Britain’s best known writers and directors, as well as many eminent academics and a former Bank of England governor were all students of the JSSL at one time or another. From my point of view, the most bizarre thing about the JSSL was that it was located, while Reg was a student there, on an industrial estate in Bodmin, just a few miles from our village, where I do my weekly Zumba class.

Reg shattered all my illusions about the glamour of Cold War espionage. Having been brought up on James Bond and stories of the Cambridge Spies - the legendary group of ex-Cambridge University students who spied for the Soviet Union during WW2 and the early Cold War period - I had a rather romantic notion of what spies got up to. And to a small degree, it felt quite personal. 

I clearly remember one Sunday, probably in the early 1980s, waking up to our phone ringing repeatedly, and overhearing my Mum talking loudly and angrily to one caller after another. Once things finally calmed down I asked her what was going on. 

At that time, the hunt was on to find the Fifth Man in the Cambridge spy ring that included Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald McLean. One of the Sunday newspapers had named a close relative of my mother’s (I don’t remember who, possibly it was my great-uncle - a classics scholar and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge - on the British rather than the Ukrainian side of my family) as a suspect. An “utterly preposterous” notion, Mum insisted. 

Some years later, John Cairncross was named as the Fifth Man. Cairncross was no relation of mine but possibly as a result of that erroneous newspaper article, I’ve always had a keen interest in Cold War espionage.

So when I got to know Reg, I was very excited to hear about his past life as a real-life spy. Having completed his intensive Russian language course, Reg was assigned to a job at RAF Gatow military airbase in Berlin, eavesdropping on wiretapped conversations of Soviet servicemen. In the many long months Reg sat wearing headphones in a cramped room listening in to gossip of what they’d eaten for dinner or the arguments they’d had with their wives, never once did he uncover a single snippet of information deemed of interest to the British establishment.

Espionage has changed dramatically over the years, and most notably as a result of the war in Ukraine. Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, and some weeks later the revelations of murderous war crimes carried out by Russian troops in Bucha and other liberated towns, triggered mass expulsions of Russian diplomats from embassies in the European Union and NATO countries. Within a year of the full-scale invasion, hundreds of Russian diplomats had been expelled, often countered by tit-for-tat ejections of foreign embassy staff from Moscow. 

Many Western countries, led by the UK, had already booted out large numbers of Russian diplomats in 2018 following the poisoning of the former spy Sergei Scripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury. The expulsions were intended to curtail Russia’s ability to destabilise Western nations through malign activities.

The director general of UK security service M15, Ken McCallum, said in November 2022 that 400 of the 600 Russian officials expelled from Europe that year were thought to be spies. 

Throughout the Cold War and beyond, foreign embassies were the mainstay of the intelligence industry. Diplomats enjoy immunity from prosecution, making embassy work an ideal cover for spying. But with that option severely curtailed, Russia has sought out more innovative means to continue its espionage activities. 

In large part, the Kremlin’s tactics have involved hiring amateur agents - often with criminal backgrounds and whose motivations are more likely to be financial than ideological - to undertake sabotage tasks. These are commonly aimed at disrupting the supply chains of military equipment to Ukraine, as well as sowing fear and paranoia among Western governments.

Increasingly, Moscow is professionalising these operations, recruiting foreigners - who can travel more freely than Russians - training them and dispatching them into the field: essentially outsourcing its covert activities to individuals for financial reward. The Bulgarian spy ring recently convicted in the UK for Russian espionage activities is a case in point. The Bulgarians tracked enemies of Vladimir Putin’s regime, notably investigative journalists, across Europe plotting ways to kidnap and murder, with sums of up to €1 million discussed.

The thin veneer of glamour that coated the spying game during the Cold War has long since worn off; Russian espionage today is downright sinister.


Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash