Why the time is now for MI6 to have a woman boss

Independent

16-06-2025

It has been 15 years since I returned to Moscow for The Independent. Back then, I was a twentysomething writer, coming to terms with my father's death and the many questions about his life that remained unanswered. Among them, what was the impact of learning via a newspaper headline, at the age of 19, that his own father, Kim Philby, was a double agent?
As I trudged along Moscow's grey, snow-covered streets for the first time since I was a child, tracing my grandfather's footsteps through the city to which he absconded after being unmasked as the Third Man in the Cambridge Spy ring, I found ever more questions opening up in my mind. Among them: where were all the women?
In the many books, plays and films I had encountered over the years about my grandfather's life and those he worked with as a Soviet mole, all the stories seemed to be about the men.
There were a few female faces, granted, but these were generally the secretaries or the wives – like Kim's fourth wife, Rufina (or Rufa, as we knew her), who spoke tearfully about her late husband as we sat side-by-side on the same sofa that was there when my parents and I visited in the 1980's, in the apartment Kim was given after arriving in the Soviet Union on a tanker from Beirut.
Listening to Rufa – who some say was given to Kim as a reward and a distraction once he arrived behind the Iron Curtain, others that she was placed there by the KGB to keep an eye on him – it was impossible not to wonder about her true part in his story. It was equally impossible to expect I'd ever find out.
Women spies have played some of the most important, and varied, roles in espionage throughout the ages, as I discovered in researching my new narrative non-fiction book for readers young and old.
The Secret Lives of Women Spies is a collection of stories bringing to life the riveting private world of female spies from the 19th century until present day. From armed scout for the Union Army, Harriet Tubman, through to Zandra Flemister, the first black woman to serve in the Secret Service, or the likes of Special Operations Executive agent Noor Inayat Khan, Russian 'illegal' Anna Chapman and eccentric US performer turned star of the French Resistance Josephine Baker, the 20 or so women (and girls) featured here operated in all parts of the spy-world, risking everything for what they believed in – their actions making make them heroes to some and traitors to others.
As well as telling their astonishing personal stories, the book explores their historical contexts in an attempt to understand their choices. Some, like Indian National Intelligence officer Saraswathi Rajamani, who at the age of 10 told Mahatma Gandhi, 'When I grow up, I'm going to shoot an Englishman', are straightforward. Others, like that of Mata Hari, whose legend as a German agent using her powers of seduction has been undermined as a new vision emerges of a disempowered woman doing everything she could to be reunited with the daughter taken from her by an abusive husband, are less so.
In recent years, there has been a drive towards more transparency, and diversity in the British intelligence game. Under the directorship of Dame Stella Rimington – appointed in 1992, the first of two female MI5 chiefs, followed in 2002 by Eliza Manningham-Buller – ordered that the domestic security service must release files to the National Archive after a certain period of time.
It was thanks to the release of a bundle of papers under this protocol in 2015 that it became clear an Austrian woman named Edith Tudor-Hart, also a brilliant photographer and devoted single mother to a mentally-ill son, had been the person responsible for my grandfather's recruitment by the Soviets in the 1930s. Tudor-Hart was in fact so important that Cambridge spy (and relative of the Queen) Anthony Blunt referred to her under interrogation as 'The grandmother of us all'.
Interestingly, it was another woman – MI5's first female officer, Jane Sissmore – who first tried to out Kim as a Soviet mole, though following a row with the acting director general, she was fired for insubordination before she could amass the necessary intelligence to prove her claim.
Women were not regularly recruited as intelligence officers in MI5 or MI6 until the late 1970s. In a recent interview with Harper's Bazaar, Dame Stella Rimington said: 'When I first joined MI5 [in 1969], the women did the support work and the men did the 'finding things out'.' Dame Stella and a group of disgruntled women employees got together and wrote a group letter demanding better assignments. Her first test was to go into a pub and find out as much as she could about a person without attracting attention. 'I practically got thrown out under suspicion of soliciting!' she added.
Indeed, when Vernon Kell co-founded MI6's precursor in 1909, he described his ideal recruits as men 'who could make notes on their shirt cuff while riding on horseback'.
To date, a woman has still never been at the helm of the UK's foreign intelligence service, MI6. That might be about to change. Since Richard Moore announced that he is to stand down this year as chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service, the agency is recruiting for a new 'C' with rumours abound that the likely candidate is a woman.
Three of the top four jobs in the agency are already occupied by women, who gave an extensive group interview to the FT in 2022. In it, the director of operations, who grew up in the northwest of England and attended a grammar school, is quoted as saying being a woman can 'be a secret sauce … When you're playing into a culture which is particularly male-dominated, women tend to be underestimated and therefore perceived as less threatening.'
It is little wonder, then, that an insider tells me: 'There's a woman who it is widely expected is going to be appointed [as the new Head of MI6] soon.'
Why spy stories about women remain largely untold is hard to say. Perhaps it's because books about spying have mostly been written by men. Or maybe it's because female spies have rarely been caught? Part of the magic of women spies is the ability of the wife or mother or secretary to disappear into the background, unsuspected. The first female spy I ever read about was a woman called Ursula Kuczynski, also known as Agent Sonya, a Soviet spymaster awarded two orders of the red banner for services to the Soviet Union, who was all but dismissed by the British as a mere housewife.
It was in 2014 that I first learnt about Agent Sonya in my interview for this paper with 'the spy-catcher of Fleet Street', journalist Chapman Pincher, shortly before his death. In his study, he unveiled his prize possession, a slide enlarger which belonged to the sister of 'Sonya'. He told me, '[Bridgette Kuczynski] was responsible for a lot more than people know.'
As part of a recruitment drive to bring more women into the secret intelligence services, that same year, an MI6 officer explained, anonymously, how being a mother and a spy can be an advantage in more ways than one, 'because it enables you to connect with a whole range of people from terrorists to political leaders … I'm less of a threat than a single female,' said the intelligence officer who was married with young children. 'They [the terrorists] have mothers, sisters, daughters.'
In writing this book, many questions have been answered, while others – inevitably – remain. One thing is for sure, the absence of women in popular accounts teaches us as much about how we have thought and talked about history, over the years, because of who gets to record it. But that, thankfully, is changing. Recent historians, including Shrabani Basu, Clare Mulley, Amy Butler Greenfield, Anne Sebba, Claire Hubbard-Hall and Dr Helen Fry, are helping to reframe the narrative, writing the women back into the story – shining a spotlight on those who hid in the shadows and deserve to stand in the light.