The spy who DIDN'T love me! Former secret service officer and Labour peer Baroness Margaret 'Meta' Ramsay says it was important NEVER to let male spies 'make a move' on her when she was recruiting them
In the make-belief world of James Bond, it was always the pretty girls who swooned over the suave super-spy.
But for real-life Scots secret agent Meta Ramsay, who rose to the very top of MI6, the problem was how to stop the foreign agents she was trying to recruit from falling in love with her.
As one of Britain’s most accomplished spies, the now 87-year-old Labour peer has revealed that one of the unlikelier threats she faced to her field operations was when she sensed the men she had targeted as possible agents were becoming too romantically attached.
Revealing some of the niceties of the art of spycraft, Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, as she is now styled, told The Sunday Herald: ‘You’re cultivating someone and you haven’t got to the stage - because you want to recruit them - of asking them that.
‘Yet you’re making all the signs of being very happy, and wanting to see him and have lunch and all these things,’ she said. ‘That’s an absolute killer if you don’t get it right. You must never let a man make a move thinking that it will be welcomed and then it’s not because then you’ve really ruined your own project.’
Baroness Margaret 'Meta' Ramsay was once tipped as a future head of the Secret Intelligence Service
Flirting was, therefore, never a weapon in her arsenal: ‘No, it’s a very bad idea - the last thing you want,’ she said. ‘The real danger is that it might make you go much earlier when it comes to putting the question. The rule is that you should never get a “no”. You shouldn’t be asking the question if you’re not going to get a “yes”.’
While she strove hard to keep sex out of her job, Ramsay was forced to battle institutional sexism throughout her career, which nevertheless saw her rise through the ranks to the point where it is rumoured she was in contention to be the first woman head of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.
She refused to be drawn on the topic, saying only that when she retired at the statutory age of 55 she was ‘the most senior woman in the service’.
Before that, she had proved herself adept at managing dicey situations, including during her time as MI6 ‘head of station’ in Helsinki when the double-agent Oleg Gordievsky was sprung from inside Russia at the height of the Cold War in one of the most audacious spying operations of the 20th century.
Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who ran Russia’s spying operations in Britain, had been recalled to Moscow in 1985 after his cover was secretly blown by a CIA officer turned traitor.
Knowing Gordievsky faced execution, an MI6 officer arranged to smuggle him over the border to Finland in the boot of his car.
At the border, Soviet guards were using sniffer dogs to search for Gordievsky.
The MI6 officer had taken his wife and baby along as cover and as the guards approached their car, his wife got out and changed her baby’s nappy on the boot, with Gordievsky hiding inside, literally throwing the dogs off the scent.
Ramsay admitted that coping with danger was part and parcel of the job: ‘If you get yourself into a difficult situation, the adrenalin goes so hard your training kicks in, it prepares you. There are times when you’re in a place you’d never in a million years have gone, especially as a woman. You’re there in the pitch black in the wrong bit of town,’ she said.
‘You’re making yourself extremely vulnerable, somewhere no woman in her right mind would ever go.’ However, she added: ‘You’ve got to always be on edge a little if you’re meeting an agent or doing something you shouldn’t be doing and there’s no way of explaining away why you’re where you are. If you don’t keep on edge, that’s when it gets dangerous. You don’t relax. If you do, you do something wrong.
‘I mean, it happens, people are human, but when you’re meeting an agent you really mustn’t be so relaxed that you haven’t noticed surveillance somewhere.’
Giving a rare insight into the relationship between a spy and the agent they’ve recruited, she said: ‘You’ve got to have chemistry, they have to trust you with their life - at best disgrace, at worst their lives. You have a special rapport but it can’t be too close. It’s a very delicate balance. You have to give enough of yourself for them to feel you’re real.’
Roger Moore and Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Love Me
She added: ‘They must feel comfortable... It’s like being an actor. It’s tricky. You give a lot of yourself. In a way they use you if it’s all working properly. You’re the one person in the world they can tell anything to. I sometimes thought it was a cross between priest and psychiatrist. You’re the person they can call in the middle of the night who’ll never be put out.’
A lifelong socialist, Baroness Ramsay worked for New Labour as a strategist at the behest of then-leader, the late John Smith, with whom she became friends at Glasgow University.
She has remained active in Labour circles ever since and sits on the executive committee of Scottish Labour.
Like many women agents, she has never married but does not regret it: ‘There just wasn’t the right man at the right time, or if the time was right, the men weren’t.’
■ Click here to visit the Scotland home page for the latest news and sport
