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My life as a spy

The nine of us, crammed into the Bedford minibus, were silent as we drove through Portsmouth. It was 8.30pm and the streets were almost empty. Jonathan Dell and Nick Long, our training officers, dropped us off one by one to merge into the night.

Ian Castle, a former merchant banker, went first. Andrew Spender, a laid-back former Scots Guards officer, followed, scuttling into the darkness under a Burberry umbrella. My turn was next.

We were taking part in Ionec, the intelligence officers' entry course, which trained recruits to step into junior desk jobs in MI6, Britain's secret intelligence service.

In the first of many increasingly complicated tests, we had each been assigned a pub in which we had to approach a member of the public and extract his or her name, address, date of birth, occupation and passport number.

Pushing open the door of the Hole in the Wall on Great Southsea Street, I was alarmed to find it empty. I was on my second pint of Guinness before the first customers, a smooching couple, appeared. A rowdy bunch of youths marched in to play pool. The exercise was getting awkward.

At last two girls wandered in. They were casually dressed, one pretty, the other overweight. I had to act quickly. Swearing that I would never do this again, I asked to join them. To my relief, they agreed. "You're not from round here are you?" the fat one asked.

"I'm a yacht skipper and I'm delivering a Contessa down from Scotland to Cherbourg. But my mate just got ill and went home. I've called in to Portsmouth to find a new hand and restock."

I fabricated everything on the spot. It was alarming that the art of deception came so easily, and surprising how gullible strangers could be. They told me that they were nurses. Encouragingly, they had done some sailing.

"Do you know anybody who might be interested in helping this weekend?" I asked. The girls glanced at each other. "Perhaps yourselves?"

"Sure," the pretty one replied hesitantly, then turning to her friend as if to speak for her, added: "Sure, we're free this weekend."

It was easy once they were baited. I asked for their names, addresses and telephone numbers, which they neatly printed in my notebook. On the pretext that I needed to clear them with Customs, I asked for their passport numbers. The pretty one telephoned their flatmate to get them. With only a few minutes to go, all the details required were in my notebook.

The Ionec minibus was bursting with animated chatter when I climbed back in. The others, some a bit tipsy, were describing how they had conned innocent pubgoers. Andrew Markham, a modern languages graduate, had affected a silly French accent and bet a drinker £5 that all British passport numbers ended with the numbers "666". His incredulous target had hurried home to collect his passport, chuffed to be making some easy money out of a stupid Frenchman. Castle had posed as a marketing consultant and distributed to each drinker a questionnaire that requested names, addresses and passport numbers.

Everyone was back except Spender. We drove round to his watering hole, the Coach & Horses on the London Road, and found a lively party. Unsure what to do with himself, Spender had started playing the fruit machine. On the third pull the machine had disgorged its contents. A crowd gathered and he had bought everybody a round. He became hopelessly drunk, forgetting the exercise.

Sitting at the back of the bus, I pondered the morality of my actions. The girls were looking forward to a sailing trip that would never happen. But as we drove through the portcullis entry to the "Fort", MI6's discreet training establishment in Portsmouth, I dismissed such concerns. We were lying for Britain. Unwittingly, I took the first step down the long path of indoctrination towards becoming an MI6 officer.

Fort Monckton, MI6's dramatic and atmospheric training base, is situated on the bleak tip of the Gosport peninsula. The only access through the thick walls is across a drawbridge. Spread among its wings are a gymnasium, an indoor pistol range, photographic studios, technical workshops, laboratories and lecture rooms. At the extremity of the east wing is a helicopter landing pad and an outdoor pistol and submachinegun range. We also trained at a drab, yellow-brick building opposite a police station in south London. Officially, it was a government stationery store.

We learnt that, in the company of the CIA and Russia's revamped service, MI6 has one of the few genuinely global intelligence networks; but with a staff of approximately 2,300 it is the smallest of the three.

About 350 of the staff are intelligence branch or IB officers, the fast stream which we were being trained to join. About 800 are general service (GS) officers, who mostly do technical and administrative work. The remainder are secretaries, clerks, guards, cooks, drivers, cleaners and mechanics.

About half of the IB staff are based in London. Their main task is to support those in the field, plan operations, liaise with foreign intelligence services and distribute intelligence to decision makers in Whitehall.

MI6's intelligence "product" is known as CX, an anachronism from the earliest days of MI6 when the chief was Mansfield Cumming and intelligence reports were marked "Cumming Exclusively", abbreviated to CX.

Intelligence is worthless if it is not passed on to decision makers, and nowadays CX is disseminated far more widely. The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence are the most important recipients, but any government department can receive CX if the material is relevant. Some large British companies have MI6 liaison officers who receive relevant CX.

IB officers working undercover as diplomats in British embassies gather the majority of CX. These officers normally work in a small cell within the embassy known as the "station". This has its own highly secure communications with Head Office, and only MI6 staff are allowed access to its rooms. In many stations there is also a special "safe speech" room.

CX reports are graded before being disseminated. Most of MI6's CX output got two-star gradings, which meant the information was of minor interest and would be seen only by a junior desk officer. A three-star might influence the head of a Foreign Office or Ministry of Defence department. A four-star would perhaps be seen by a permanent secretary. A five-star grading would be seen by the government at cabinet level.

The scruples of MI6 officers varied. Some had reputations as "CX embellishers". The problem was widespread, but few cheats were exposed. One who was went down in MI6 folklore.

During the early 1970s, when Britain was negotiating its entry to the European Common Market, the tactics and negotiating position of the French government were an important requirement. The number two of the Paris station successfully recruited an agent in the French agricultural ministry. Soon a steady stream of two and three-star CX started flowing. A few eyebrows were raised in Century House at the financial demands of the new informant, but his productivity gave good value for money. Over the next 18 months this agent became the mainstay of intelligence production by the Paris station.

When the posting of the number two in Paris came to an end, he seemed reluctant to introduce his successor to this star agent.

Eventually Head Office became suspicious and a Security Branch officer was sent out to Paris to interview the number two, who cracked and confessed to what his colleagues had started to fear. Like Graham Greene's agent in Our Man in Havana, he had invented the agent, fabricated the CX and pocketed the money.

He was dismissed from the service, although no charges were brought. Fearing adverse publicity if the fraud were exposed, MI6 bought his silence with a payout and used its contacts to arrange a job for him in one of the big clearing banks. Eventually he rose to become a prominent figure in the City.

There are about 50 MI6 stations around the world. The head of station, usually a senior officer in his forties working undercover as a counsellor, is normally "declared" to the secret service of the host country. The other officers are mostly "undeclared".

The stations are administered and serviced from Head Office in London. Each has its own "Production" or P officer who determines the station's strategy and targets, oversees and plans operations and administers the budget. "Requirements" or R officers distribute the intelligence product to customers. These P and R officers are organised in pyramidal structures into "controllerates" which have either a regional or functional focus.

The bread and butter of the work of an intelligence officer is targeting, cultivating, recruiting and then running informers who are prepared to give or sell secrets about their country to MI6. During the first weeks of training we practised these skills in a series of small exercises such as tracking down a "South African diplomat" who was vulnerable because of financial problems.

We were told that he was returning from Portsmouth to London by train. Our assignment was to cultivate him so that he would agree to have a drink on arrival at Waterloo station. Dell showed us a surveillance shot, but our only other information was that he had radical pro-apartheid views and always carried a copy of The Economist.

One of the Ionec trainees, James Barking, a former law student, decided that the best way to woo his target was to pretend to be a racist. Soon the two were enthusiastically discussing the merits of racial segregation. When two men with beards, wearing tweed jackets, entered the compartment and began to argue with them furiously, Barking presumed they were MI5 role-players sent to see how he would handle the situation. He refused to back down and the exercise degenerated into a shouting match that ended only at Waterloo - where the two bearded men turned out to be left-wing lecturers at Portsmouth Polytechnic.