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Building a perfect false identity

Soon after I joined MI6's old Soviet department I was asked to research a "legend" or alias for use undercover in Russia.

I needed to tailor the cover to match the likely inquisition by the FSB, the new Russian counter-intelligence service, which relied heavily on visa applications to screen visitors, examining every detail against records.

It would be easy for the FSB to check the birth date, as in the UK every birth is registered and open to inspection. It is impossible to enter backdated births and MI6 does not use "dead baby" aliases, as described in Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, for fear of legal action by angry relatives if the operation should be exposed.

The solution was simple. Inquiries by the Buenos Aires station revealed that in Argentina they had no verifiable register of births. MI6's central facilities department was able to obtain a British passport in the name of Alex Huntley, born in Buenos Aires. It also got me a driving licence and then provided an alias cover address, a bank account and a credit card.

All Department of Social Security files on Britain's 54m inhabitants are computerised. Central facilities occasionally used these DSS computer files to obtain information on people of interest to us. What if the FSB could hack into the DSS computer? The log-on procedure was not complicated. The only way to make my alias stand up to hacking was to enter the details falsely. After a few weeks' negotiation with the DSS, Huntley had a full DSS record with National Insurance number and registration card.

The next task was to research a legend for Huntley's life. The Public School Handbook revealed that Scorton grammar school in Yorkshire had gone into liquidation in the 1980s, leaving no public records of its former pupils, so he could claim to have studied there.

The records of the University of Buenos Aires were disorganised, so this is where Huntley claimed his economics degree. I knew of a small university in Boston, the Massachusetts Community College, which had gone out of business, so I awarded Huntley an MBA there.

Drawing on Companies House records, I invented a CV in a series of companies that all went bankrupt shortly after Huntley supposedly left, and then I fudged his tax records.

Central facilities maintained a list of small companies that were prepared to vouch for an MI6 officer as an employee. East European Investment, which worked in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, took Huntley on.

Regular use of Huntley's credit card built up a spending pattern, and "payments" from East European Investment into my bank account ensured that it would appear realistic. My documentation was beefed up with "wallet litter" provided by the forgery department.

Some genuine Argentine documents would also be useful. The station in Buenos Aires had just entered into a tetchy liaison relationship with the Argentine security service, SIDE, so I fired off a telegram asking whether SIDE might provide Huntley with documentation.

I expected a curt response, but SIDE agreed and sent a genuine Argentine passport, driving licence and identity card in the name Huntley. Printing and forgeries department photographed them for its files in case it became necessary to forge similar documents.

It had taken just over two months to build the Huntley cover.