Hell Hath No Fury (47 page)

Reference: Jean Overton Fuller,
Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan: Madeleine,
1952.

KROGER, HELEN,
see
COHEN, LONA, Chapter 11.

MANNINGHAM-BULLER, ELIZA

Director-General of MI5, b. 1948

In her days as an undergraduate at Oxford University, Manningham-Buller played the fairy godmother in a student production of
Cinderella.
She later became godmother to MI5 and the guardian of some of Britain's most valuable intelligence secrets. In the age of global terrorism, many of these are more nightmare than fairy tale.

She was born the Honourable Elizabeth Lydia Manningham-Buller, the daughter of an attorney-general and lord chancellor under two British Conservative prime ministers, Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home. She attended the exclusive girls' public school Benenden at the same time as Princess Anne, where she earned the nickname “Bullying Manner.”

At Oxford she studied English and, as often happens to very bright and well-bred undergraduates, was approached by MI5. However, after graduating she worked as a teacher at the exclusive Queen's Gate School in London, where the future celebrity chef and journalist Nigella Lawson was one of her pupils.

She joined MI5 in 1974, at the height of the Cold War, and progressed swiftly from typing up transcripts of tapped telephone conversations between Warsaw Pact diplomats to becoming a full-fledged spy catcher. Specializing in counterterrorism rather than counterespionage, she was one of only five people in British intelligence in the early 1980s who knew that Oleg Gordievsky, the deputy head of the KGB at the Soviet embassy in London, was a double agent. Gordievsky's life was literally in Manningham-Buller's hands, as two of her assistants shared an office with Michael Bettaney, a traitor working for the KGB (see
Rimington, Stella
, Chapter 11). An incautious word in front of Bettaney would have resulted in the KGB yanking Gordievsky straight back to Moscow for a hot date with a firing squad, at best.

Manningham-Buller was heavily involved in the investigation that followed the 1988 bombing of Pan-Am flight 103 in the skies over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. A Libyan, Abdel Baset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, was convicted of planting the bomb and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. However, many believe that he is a fall guy and that the mastermind behind the operation goes unpunished to this day.

During the Persian Gulf War, Manningham-Buller worked in Washington as a senior intelligence officer liaising with the Americans. In 1992 she was put in charge of the newly created Irish counterterrorism section when MI5 took over responsibility for this work from the Metropolitan Police. She moved steadily to the top, having been promoted to the Management Board of the Security Services in 1993 and then appointed director of surveillance and technical operations. In 1997 she was appointed MI5's deputy director-general and succeeded Stephen Lander in the top job in 2002, becoming the second woman to take on the role (see
Rimington, Stella
, Chapter 11). A doubtless grateful Oleg Gordievsky said that her appointment was “the best news for the service in a decade.” In 2005 she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath.

After taking over as director-general, Manningham-Buller's working life was dominated by the threat from al-Qaeda, which obliged her to adopt a higher profile than her predecessors. In June 2003, at a conference at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), she pledged complete backing for the “war on terror” and warned that renegade scientists had provided terror groups with the information needed to create chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. She stated that the fight against terrorism “would be with us for a good long time.” In November 2006, in a speech at Queen Mary College, London, she announced that MI5 was tracking thirty terror plots and two hundred groupings or networks in the United Kingdom, comprising some sixteen hundred individuals. She repeated her 2003 warning that terrorists would not flinch from using a nuclear weapon.

In contrast, Manningham-Buller has been reluctant to respond to accusations that MI5 is not overscrupulous in acting on information obtained in other countries by torture. In January 2006 she refused to appear before the Joint Committee on Human Rights in the British Parliament to speak about “the extent to which the Service [MI5] is, or could take steps to ensure it is, aware that information it receives from foreign agencies may have been obtained by the use of torture.” She also declined to talk to the committee about the use of airports in the United Kingdom in the program of “extraordinary rendition” (see
Rice, Condoleezza
, Chapter 2).

When not battling al-Qaeda, Manningham-Buller lived in the city of Bath with her husband, a retired lieutenant colonel in the army, who, appropriately perhaps, used to lecture in moral philosophy. Reportedly, Manningham-Buller still found the time to cook for her large family (she has inherited her husband's five children from a previous marriage) a roast lunch on Sunday. In April 2007 she was succeeded as director-general of MI5 by Jonathan Evans.

Reference: Marie Hollingsworth,
Defending the Realm: Inside MI5 and the War on Terrorism,
2003.

OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES

OSS, US Intelligence Agency, World War II

The American equivalent of the British
Special Operations Executive
(SOE, see Chapter 11), the Office of Strategic Services was established in 1942 to support Resistance movements in Axis-occupied countries.

Friction sometimes arose between OSS and SOE, particularly over dealings with the Vichy French authorities in North Africa. This prompted General Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander from 1943, to bring the two agencies together under one roof. This was the Special Forces Headquarters, which formed part of the Operations Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF).

OSS was run by General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a much-decorated World War I hero and postwar New York lawyer. In its early days, recruitment for OSS was mainly from fashionable and well-connected men and women on America's East Coast, earning the agency the nickname “Oh So Social.” Its early structure broke down into seven main branches, all of which employed women in support functions or in operations:

• Research and Analysis (R&A), the amassing of background material to aid the planning of operations

• Secret Intelligence (SI), the obtaining of covert information, principally through agents in the field

• Special Operations (SO), clandestine activities including sabotage and guerrilla warfare

• the Operational Group (OG), which deployed service personnel with foreign-language skills on clandestine activities

• the Maritime Unit (MU), which concentrated on the destruction of enemy shipping

• the Counterintelligence Branch (X-2), which monitored and manipulated enemy intelligence operations and liaised with the British over the latter's penetration of the Enigma code, which the Germans thought unbreakable

• Morale Operations (MO), which included “black propaganda”

Few women took part in SO, OG, or MU operations, and in the somewhat patronizing words of General Donovan, “The great majority of women who worked for America's first organized and integrated intelligence agency spent their war years behind desks and filing cases in Washington, invisible apron strings of an organisation which touched every theatre of war.” Nevertheless, in the field of Special Operations there were notable exceptions to the rule (see
Brousse, Amy Elizabeth,
Chapter 11, and
Hall, Virginia
, Chapter 11).

One of OSS's most effective morale operations against the Germans in the European theater was the so-called Musac Project, which was launched in July 1944 and run jointly from London with the British Political Warfare Executive. The OSS liaison officer in Washington was a woman, Rhoda K. Hirsch.

The Musac Project took the form of radio broadcasts, supposedly from German stations but actually from London, bringing slanted news and music items to troops on the front line. The British handled the news and the Americans the entertainment. The songs were provided with lyrics written by an OSS operative, Lothar Letzl, and orchestrated by Bertolt Brecht's collaborator, Kurt Weill, whose wife, Lotte Lenya, sang many of them. Another regular performer on the project was Marlene Dietrich, one of the few theatrical participants who was aware of the material's OSS connection—the songs, recorded in a secret New York studio, were a breach of US copyright laws. Not all the songs had a direct propaganda slant, but they were intended to supply mood music to enhance the war weariness felt by many of the Third Reich's service personnel and their disillusionment with the Nazi leadership.

One OSS agent, Canadian-born Betty Lussier, had a distinguished wartime career with X-2 in southwest France. In 1942 she joined the British
Air Transport Auxiliary
(see Chapter 6) but resigned in 1943 when she was told that female ATA pilots would not be permitted to fly in European combat zones after the Allied cross-Channel invasion secured a foothold in France. She joined OSS in the same year and became one of the first OSS personnel to train in England for counterespionage and code work.

Lussier became one of the select few who were privy to the Ultra secret—the British breaking of the German Enigma code—and joined one of the top-secret Special Liaison Units (SLUs). These were tasked with passing Ultra-derived information to Allied commanders in the field in northwest Europe, while simultaneously preserving the all-important secret itself. Originally based in Algiers, Lussier's SLU followed the Allied advance to Rome and was then earmarked to operate from Toulon in the wake of Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France. Lussier, however, remained in Italy, as women were forbidden to serve near the front line.

In spite of this setback, the resourceful Lussier hitched a ride with the Army Air Corps, landing in Grenoble and eventually linking up with an SLU attached to the US Seventh Army in northeast France. On a visit to liberated Paris, she was formally reassigned to X-2, and dispatched to Nice to help start a counterintelligence unit.

She was next posted to Perpignan, on the French-Spanish border, where the X-2 chief was a flamboyant Catalan leftist, Ricardo Sicre, whose nom de guerre was Rick Sickler. With Sicre, Lussier formed a highly effective partnership, controlling a stable of double agents and exposing collaborators and stay-behind members of German military intelligence. Lussier was not overly impressed by her Nazi enemy. After the war, she recalled: “I got this impression over the years reading their cable traffic. Their messages were banal, trivial; much of it was about social plans. It never seemed to occur to them that their agents could be captured and turned. They had a certain arrogance about them that you couldn't miss.”

Reference: Elizabeth P. McIntosh,
Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS,
1998.

RIMINGTON, STELLA

Head of MI5, Cold War, b. 1935

Rimington was the first woman to be appointed to the post of director-general of MI5, the first M15 head to be publicly identified, and the first to publish a volume of memoirs in which she described her years in British intelligence. These covered a changing and challenging era from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, a period that saw the queasy certainties of the Cold War give way to the first alarming intimations of the global “war on terror.”

Rimington was born in South London, the daughter of a draftsman father and a health-worker mother. At Nottingham High School in the English Midlands, her fourth-year report read, “With consistent effort Stella could do well.” After gaining a second-class degree in English from Edinburgh University, Rimington worked for a time as an archivist and in 1963 married John Rimington, a childhood boyfriend and civil servant.

When her husband was posted to the New Delhi High Commission in India, as a first secretary, Rimington became a dutiful diplomatic wife until 1967, when she was recruited to work part-time with the local MI5 station. It was her introduction to a world that was “intensely male, public school, and clubby. They were all men from the same colonial service/military sort of background. In those days the organisation was very closed. I think the arrival of women like me—and people like me—did begin to challenge that.” Reflecting on her own lower-middle-class background, she drew this conclusion: “I always felt slightly revolutionary because I was clearly quite different. There were a lot of women like me scattered around but we weren't able to exert much influence. But I've never felt like working for people who I didn't think were as competent as me. You can call it a sort of arrogance, if you like. I suppose it caused me to push to get into more senior, more responsible positions.”

When the couple returned to London in 1969, Rimington secured a permanent post with MI5 and went on to work in all three of its main arms—counterespionage, countersubversion, and counterterrorism. In countersubversion, she played a part in government action against the 1984–85 miners' strike, the Greenham Common women's antinuclear protest, and the growth of the far-left Militant Tendency and the Socialist Workers Party. She was also involved in the monitoring of the left-leaning National Council for Civil Liberties at a time when it was run by Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman, suspected “pinkos” who by 2005 were senior figures in the United Kingdom's New Labour government.

In 1990 Rimington was appointed one of MI5's two deputy director-generals, in which post she oversaw the agency's move to new headquarters. In December 1991 she led a team to the Soviet Union to establish friendly contact with the KGB, a shadow of its former self and soon to pass into history. In a complex that contained the infamous Lubyanka prison, a chilling symbol of the Cold War, Rimington was presented with a bunch of roses by a KGB man whom she remembered from her days in Delhi. The rest of her dealings with the grizzled veterans of Soviet intelligence were less cordial. Rimington was told in no uncertain terms that in spite of the disintegration of the Soviet Union—a phenomenon that she admitted in her memoirs took her by surprise—normal service would continue uninterrupted in the intelligence game.