He spent much of his career working in absolute secrecy, even as he fought to bring greater openness to the intelligence services. Now, whether on how he made his wife an unwitting cold war intelligence asset or he went about inviting prospective spies to be interviewed, David Bickford is illuminating at least some of the agencies’ work.
The former lawyer and legal director of MI5 and MI6 is due to release his second book, the fictional story of a Russian agent named Katya, and said his years of intelligence service experience informed his writing.
He described some of his work during a three-year posting to Berlin from 1979 to work for the British military government that oversaw the British-occupied sector of Germany after the second world war.
Bickford told how his wife, Cary, crossed the divide from west to east Berlin with their son so he could go for a sleepover, passing the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie. “You can imagine [the checkpoint] covered in barbed wire, with searchlights and the 100-yard killing ground that was a no man’s land.”
He described how his wife and son crossed as a pair, then she returned alone. “Armed guards started demanding to know why she had come back by herself.” He said she had followed procedure, placing her ID in the window and insisting on speaking only to a senior officer.
The next day, she made the reverse journey alone and, again, was stopped by armed guards demanding to know why there were now two people coming back. “They kept the searchlights on her for about an hour. Eventually, a senior officer came down and sent her through. I was in the office with some colleagues when she came back and she could see we were up to something. We told her she had passed the test.”
Bickford said British intelligence had wanted to know the procedure if people were picked up on one side of the divide and transported to the other. The key, he explained, was that the officer sent down was German, not Russian. This offered valuable intelligence to the British about what the Germans would deal with themselves without escalating to a Russian officer. “We hoped she wouldn’t have to be interviewed by the Russians,” he said.
He also described one of the saddest episodes of his career: when he had to break the news to a widow who had asked why her husband’s pension was not being paid that the man had never been an MI5 asset – as he had apparently told her their whole lives together.
And he revealed that it had been his task to invite prospective agents to their job interviews in room 055 of the Ministry of Defence – a longstanding practice he thought unnecessarily anxiety-inducing. As a way of apologising, and acknowledging the liberty he was taking, he said he began signing the letters with a surname and the initials TB – standing for “That Bastard”.
Bickford’s Katya follows a Russian agent who must track down a money launderer protected by dangerous forces, while also confronting her own brutal past. While he has avoided including any detail in it that could identify a real-life intelligence operation – and had to get the book vetted by the services to ensure compliance – he said the contextual detail around the plot was heavily informed by his own experiences.
It is due for release on 6 July and is being published by Coinkydink, a publishing house set up by his son and an associate specifically for the task.
