The secret lives of MI6’s women spies

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘The secret lives of MI6’s women spies’

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Lilah Raptopoulos
When the FT’s Helen Warrell was growing up, she was really into spy novels.

Helen Warrell
My dad introduced me to the John le Carré novels when I was a teenager, and I really love his kind of cold war thriller-style depiction of what spying was like in those days and that kind of very, very incremental, slow, subtle kind of tradecraft that he just, that John le Carré describes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But as Helen got older and kept reading, she realised something. She couldn’t find any women in John le Carré’s books or in most spy thriller books or movies. Women were kind of missing from the whole genre.

Helen Warrell
Especially with a lot of the coverage of John le Carré’s death last year, I started thinking, actually, you know, there aren’t really any female intelligence operatives in his stories. It just kind of set me on this sort of discussion, I suppose, with friends and, you know, people I was, I would talk about books with, you know, why is it that, for instance, there’s a huge history of female detectives, you know, working on crime, but not so much female spies in the intelligence world?

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Helen went into a relevant career. She spent years covering UK defence and security. And over her time as a journalist, she’s gotten to know a few very senior real-life women spies. She recently wrote an exclusive profile of the three highest-ranked women in the British spy agency MI6 for FT Weekend Magazine. She calls them Rebecca, Ada and Kathy. And they agreed to talk because they’re also worried that pop culture mostly ignores them. It makes it harder for them to recruit a diverse team of spies.

Helen Warrell
You know, there’s a quote in the piece from Rebecca saying that, you know, diversity matters more in the world of spying, you know, than it does anywhere else because if you are going out into the world and trying to persuade people to kind of risk their lives and to, you know, pass intelligence and just to essentially spy for you, you need a whole range of people from different backgrounds, different genders, different ethnicities to do that most effectively.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, we talk to Helen about her profile, which had her going in and out of secret locations to speak to these women over six months.

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Then we have the great Tim Harford on to talk about quitting. Tim thinks quitting is a skill and an underrated one that we should all be practising a lot more in our daily lives. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

Helen, welcome to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you on.

Helen Warrell
Hello. Hi. Thanks for inviting me on.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you wrote a really incredible magazine cover story that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s an exclusive about the women at the top of MI6, which is the most secret intelligence agency in Britain. And you had unprecedented access to real spies. So I guess my first question is, like, how it happened. You know, I know this piece was years in the making. How did it start? How did you first get interested in this story?

Helen Warrell
Well, I got to know, you know, obviously contacts at MI6 and the other British intelligence agencies as well, when I was covering defence and security. And in particular, actually, one of the women who appears in the story, Rebecca, who was the deputy chief, was someone I met a few times in that role. And I always found her a very interesting person. And actually I, you know, I think my first discussions about this piece were with her because she started talking to me about her career and about her attempts to encourage other women in the organisation. And, you know, gradually, I think, through discussions with her and other people there, you know, I was very lucky that MI6 decided this was a story that they wanted to tell and that they wanted me to sort of help them tell.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. And what made them ultimately say yes? Like, do you remember when they said, OK, we’ll do it? Like, what did you have to agree to get that to happen?

Helen Warrell
I mean, there were obviously lots of negotiations in a piece like this. I think they sort of wanted to be very clear about what I wanted to get out of it, which was, I was always very open from the beginning that, for me, this was partly a kind of myth-busting exercise. And I was very clear that I wanted to talk about the culture, both in film and literature. And I think, you know, the Bond legacy has been both good and bad for intelligence agencies because in some ways it’s an amazing brand and it’s, you know, it’s extremely high-profile. But on the other hand, James Bond does a lot of things that are frankly illegal and that (Lilah laughs) spies today certainly wouldn’t be allowed to do even if they wanted to. So I think that the idea probably of sort of myth busting and telling another side to the story was something that in the end was quite compelling. But honestly, Lilah, I don’t know why they said yes (Lilah laughs) in the end so maybe next week you can get them on and you can, you can ask them.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Perfect! (Laughter) I’m sure it’ll be a quick yes to it. We’ll just change their voices. So, as you say, Helen, there’s never been a head of MI6 who’s a woman. But now there are these three women who are really as close as women have ever been to the top . . .

Helen Warrell
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And you got to know them. Can you tell me a little bit about who they are?

Helen Warrell
Sure. So the first one, Rebecca, who I described a little bit earlier, who I sort of got to know first, was the deputy chief and head of strategy. And she actually retired during the course of my reporting for this piece. So she’s no longer there. But she is the most senior woman that MI6 has ever had in the organisation. And then there is Ada, who is Q or head of technology, and there is Kathy, who is director of operations. And all three of those are on the level kind of directly below the chief, so they report straight up to him. And they represent the most kind of senior layer of management in the organisation.

Lilah Raptopoulos
As you might imagine, Rebecca, Ada and Kathy are not these women’s real names. Those names are classified, but they were all willing to talk to Helen because they care a lot about their work and because it felt like it was time. It’s not always been an easy path internally, but now there’s more of an opportunity than ever for women to move up the ranks.

I wonder if we can talk through a little bit of history. As I understand from your story, there were a group of women who really distinguished themselves as spies during world war 2, but then they weren’t allowed to get to the highest levels of power. Can you tell me what happened after that?

Helen Warrell
I mean, I should probably point out at this stage that I’m, you know, I am not a historian (Lilah laughs) of espionage. I wish, I wish very much that I were. But essentially, there was an organisation called the Special Operations Executive, which was essentially carrying out espionage against the Nazis during the war. And a lot of women — you know, like Noor Inayat Khan and Odette Hallowes and Violette Szabo — did extraordinary and daring and very brave things during that time in the service of their country. But I think what was strange about it is that, you know, after the war, there were not women regularly being recruited into MI5 or MI6 as intelligence officers, which means essentially being entrusted with the core job of recruiting and running agents.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Right.

Helen isn’t exactly sure when women started getting hired again as spies versus secretaries and clerks because she couldn’t get access to the MI6 archives. But from interviewing older women spies, she thinks it was in the 1970s. New equality legislation had come into force across the UK, and women who were working at intelligence agencies were making a big push for things to change.

Helen Warrell
But I have a feeling that they didn’t actually change very fast, and this is something, you know, that I would actually love to do a bit more research in to because I think it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when more, you know, when it became more of a regular occurrence that women were being recruited into intelligence officer jobs.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Even once women were allowed to be spies, for a long time they had to hide their duties by pretending to be secretaries. But today, it’s the opposite. MI6 is now desperate to diversify its workforce and specifically to attract women. All that said, it isn’t going great. Alongside Britain’s other intelligence agencies, which are MI5 and GCHQ, Helen says that MI6 has been struggling to recruit quality women candidates.

And I imagine that part of the problem is this, like, James Bond energy. You know, like, one of the most fascinating parts of your story to me was reading about the difference between how women spies are portrayed in James Bond and other books and movies and what their lives are really like. Like, I think we know the caricature of these, like, sexy villains (laughs).

Helen Warrell
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But do you have any, like, scenes in your head that kind of epitomise how wrong our perception of women spies is?

Helen Warrell
I mean, I think it’s difficult to highlight specific scenes because in many ways it’s just an absence. I mean . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Helen Warrell
 . . . one person who I think is a very kind of strong vision of a female spy is Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love, the Bond film. And Rosa Klebb is a, is a character who was described by Ian Fleming in his novels in a very, very kind of unattractive, quite mean way. And she’s meant to be, he describes her as, you know, sort of hag who’s just sort of quite mean and blunt and has really no redeeming features at all. And I think the idea is that, you know, women in intelligence are not, she’s not a normal person. It’s like she’s some sort of ghoulish figure who has to be completely off the normal spectrum of human behaviour and appearance.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Right. That they’re not, that they can’t be human beings . . .

Helen Warrell
Yeah. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
 . . . with the complex emotions of human beings and also be spies.

Helen Warrell
Exactly. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. So if now you’re thinking, what is an agent at MI6 actually do? Here’s a general sense. This is if you’re any agent, man or woman. You probably have a focus, like a type of threat or a region that you’re working on. Maybe it’s cyber warfare or terrorism, or you’re working with one of Britain’s main adversaries, like China, Russia and Iran. You’re probably based at a UK embassy in another country and disguised as embassy staff. So in that sense, there’s a lot of bureaucracy. If you have a family, then they might be abroad with you. And a lot of what it is, is going to a desk job pushing papers, doing bureaucratic work and going home. But meanwhile, and this is the fun part, you’re also going out and meeting people and trying to identify possible intelligence sources. Ideally, you find the right people, you connect with them, you get them to trust you, and ultimately you have them give you information.

And just for our own pleasure, like what are the exceptional things to some of their jobs? I mean, not even getting into gender, like what makes the life of a spy so weird?

Helen Warrell
For people in the, in the intelligence agencies, It’s a job where, even when you’re not on operations, you will, you know, you are exercising a level of deception, whether that’s from your friends who are asking you what you’ve done at work that day or from someone you meet at a party and they ask what you do and you have to describe something that sounds deliberately very boring (Lilah chuckles). And I’m sure this is something you get used to, and the point that all three of the women I spoke to made repeatedly is that at the beginning you think it’s gonna be very obvious and you feel very sort of awkward doing it, but you very quickly kind of get used to the fact that work is just not something that you would talk about. But I think the fact that this is something you have to be alert to all the time sounded to me quite kind of wearying and exhausting.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah, me too. Did they tell you, were they able to tell you any stories of them sort of trying to get sources overseas to give up intelligence, like the sorts of things that they would have to do in order for that stuff to happen?

Helen Warrell
I mean, we didn’t go into details of any actual specific cases because agent, you know, talking about agents with any level of specificity is something that makes spies extremely nervous.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes.

Helen Warrell
I think that what we were talking about more was the ways in which you approach people. And actually this is an area where I think being a woman can be very helpful . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Helen Warrell
 . . . because if you’re in especially quite a conservative culture where people don’t necessarily expect women to be working in espionage and that element of surprise, it’s the unexpected, can really work in your favour because you’re not conforming to the kind of stereotypes that people might expect and therefore it might be more likely that you’re able to kind of get that meeting with them or maybe present something in a different way that might have a more positive result.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Helen Warrell
So, for instance, Ada talks in the piece about, you know, instead of approaching somebody necessarily as a, as a kind of professional equal, they might see more as a sort of daughter or sister or an aunt, depending on the kind of age differential. And that can allow maybe an emotional closeness that might be harder if you’re approaching them in more of a kind of professional context.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Yeah. The other thing that stood out to me, Helen, is it’s just like the different dynamics that having a woman in place of a man as a spy would create. Like, you mentioned that spies have to meet in really intimate locations to have sort of quiet conversations, like in a car or at someone’s house. And that, that with a woman can be misread, I imagine that people could misread the intentions as sexual, or it means that women might have to navigate different kinds of grey areas than a man in an intimate setting would. Did I read that right?

Helen Warrell
Yes. I think it’s definitely the case that women have an added layer of difficulty potentially, because, you know, the nature of these relationships, which is very close and there’s a lot of trust involved and there has to be a real bond between spy and agent. And I think there are, there is a potential for that being misconstrued. I think the thing that I was really surprised by in, you know, talking to the women who I interviewed is that it’s not all downside, though, because there are real advantages as well in that, you know, you don’t necessarily have to sit up all night drinking with an agent. You can meet them during the day. You can invite them over to your house. You can find other ways to connect with them that maybe won’t be as kind of fraught or potentially misunderstood. And also, you know, let’s not forget that some of the sources you may be trying to recruit are women in the first place. So maybe in that situation, being a woman is an advantage as well.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Helen, you mentioned that the women that you spoke with were able to talk to you about their work in a maybe more rounded way than they are able to talk to anyone about their work. Can you tell me a little bit about what in those conversations really stood out to you?

Helen Warrell
Yeah. I think, gosh, it’s hard to kind of distil these conversations down to distinct impressions like this. But I think fundamentally, these are people who feel incredibly strongly that women have been kind of under-represented so far and just very much want to make it clear that if they can do these jobs, then other women can. And Rebecca in particular, I think, is concerned that the cultural and literary portrayals of espionage kind of put women off and are a deterrent to applicants. And I think she sort of, her point to me was always, you know, if people really understood what it was about, that it’s, that it’s actually a kind of intellectual exercise of engagement and getting to know people and reaching out beyond, you know, cultural barriers, you know, then that’s something that people would find a lot more interesting than maybe the perception that they have. And I think also there is definitely a sense that all three women have had to, you know, probably make sacrifices in order to do this career. I think it takes a toll on your family. And I think you have to, you know, it’s not like a normal 9-to-5 job. And I think, you know, there was a sense in which, you know, in order to be a success at this, you have to have a kind of community of people around you who are supportive and who, to some extent, understand what you’re doing and are able to support you in that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Helen, this was so fascinating and so cool. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Helen Warrell
Not at all. Thanks for having me.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
If you’d like to read more about these spies, we’ve put Helen’s cover story in the show notes.

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The New Year is a time where people are reflecting and making big resolutions about how to succeed in life. But my colleague Tim Harford — he’s a famous behavioural economist — he thinks the one thing we don’t do enough when we’re trying to succeed is learn how to quit. We’re hard-wired not to wanna give up. Tim has this example of why sometimes quitting is actually the best choice. It’s poker. He got this from a book he recommends called Quit by poker player Annie Duke.

Tim Harford
From the perspective of a poker player, it is obvious what the cost of not quitting is because you’re playing hand after hand and there’s a price to play each hand, and it can get very, very expensive to play the wrong hands. And so one of the key skills, maybe “the” key skill, of a professional poker player is just to continually assess at what point do I give up and save my money for the next hand? Because there’s always a next hand and you’ve just got to choose your battles. And that’s what, that’s what quitting is about —it’s deciding that this is, this one’s not worth fighting. Cut my losses and leave.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Tim writes a weekly FT column called The Undercover Economist, and he wrote one recently called “In praise of quitting”. So I’ve invited him on the show to talk through it.

Tim, thank you so much for coming back on the show. We love having you.

Tim Harford
It’s my pleasure. Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You wrote a column recently, “In praise of quitting”, and I’d love to talk about it. And first, I’m curious if you could tell us what kind of quitting you’re recommending we do?

Tim Harford
Well, I think it’s, it’s quitting the kind of things that we tend to not quit, actually. So we tend to stick to toxic jobs and toxic relationships and stupid projects and houses that, apartments that are making us unhappy. And all of these things are various reasons why there is a bias towards sticking with things . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Tim Harford
. . . longer than we should. For all that our culture venerates persistence and durability and endurance and all of these things, we don’t venerate quitting.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And why do you think quitting is seen as weakness?

Tim Harford
I’m not sure. It seems to be synonymous with surrender almost, isn’t it?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Tim Harford
So you’re being, you’re being defeated by something. But actually if you’re, if you’re just doing something that’s no good for you, that’s no fun — you’re working for a boss you hate, you’re in a relationship that’s not working for you or whatever it is, or even just something fairly trivial, like you’re reading a book and you’re really not liking the book . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Tim Harford
. . . I mean, what? It’s not admitting defeat to say “you know what, I have got better things to do with my time and with my life and with my energy than hang around doing this”. That’s not admitting defeat. That’s making space for something better.

Lilah Raptopoulos
There are a couple of different cognitive biases that keep us from quitting when we probably should. One is called the sunk cost fallacy. It’s the feeling that you’ve already sunk so much time or money into something that you should just keep going until it pays out, even if it’s unlikely to.

Tim Harford
I mean, a trivial example is if you go shopping, maybe your favourite shopping mall is an hour’s drive away. And so you drive for an hour and you get to the shopping mall and you’re really excited to go shopping and maybe buy yourself something nice. And then when you look around, there’s nothing really there that catches your imagination. Now that’s annoying because you’ve spent an hour, you’ve spent your money on fuel. You wasted your time.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Tim Harford
It doesn’t make it better to now buy something that you don’t want (Lilah laughs). But most people would do that. And most people would feel that that was the intuitive thing to do. And that it was somehow, somehow getting value out of, you know, this journey that they had made. But it is, it is just that. It is just a fallacy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. It justifies the trouble (laughs) you’ve gone through to get there and to do all that.

Tim Harford
And it’s very, it’s, it’s very, very common. We have these clichés to remind us of these mistakes that we make, like, “Oh, that’s water under the bridge” or “throwing good money after bad”. But the reason we have the clichés is because we need to keep reminding ourselves, because we keep making this sort of mistake.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Tim says on this one that instead of asking yourself what this has cost you until now, it’s good to ask yourself what it’s going to cost you from now on. The other cognitive bias is the “status quo bias”, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s when we start to feel like we’re in the wrong relationship or the wrong job. And often we stick with the status quo because in the short term it’s easier. We forget that staying or leaving are actually both decisions, and instead we go for the more passive one. We stay. On this one Tim points to this fascinating experiment carried out by the economist Steven Levitt.

Tim Harford
So what Levitt did, he set up this website and he told the world, look, if you’re struggling with a difficult decision, come to my website, answer a few questions about your decision and then the website will toss a coin for you and tell you what to do (Lilah laughs). And a lot of the decisions that people were making were, should I quit my job, should I move, should I leave my partner? And what Levitt was able to do was toss the coin, and of course, people didn’t always take the coin’s advice, but they often did. Six months later, Levitt sends a survey to everyone and says, well, did you follow the coin’s advice and how are you feeling? And the people who had been told by the coin to quit were feeling better than the people who had been told by the coin not to quit. And what it tends to indicate is that by the time you’ve got to the point where you’re tossing a coin, actually you don’t need to toss a coin because you already should or know the answer by then. You should actually make the change.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

I wouldn’t exactly call Tim a quitter. He’s been married happily for nearly 20 years. He’s written 10 books. He has a multi-season podcast, Cautionary Tales. He’s done a lot of stuff that requires real commitment.

Are there any situations where you would advise us not to quit? Are there examples in your mind where it’s like “I don’t know, it’s a little hard, I might be a little unhappy, but it might still be good for me”?

Tim Harford
Yeah. No, sure, there are hard things in life that is worth sticking with. People’s bias tends to be to stick to stuff because of just this inertia, because of the cultural shame around quitting.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Tim Harford
And it’s not, it’s not a hard and fast rule, always quit. Never stick to anything. Of course not. But it’s worth bearing in mind. And I remember what it was like being in my twenties. I remember specifically having a job that I really hated, and I remember the pressure from everybody to keep going. So I’m not judging anybody. I do remember the pressure, but I also remember that when I finally did quit, and it was because a very smart friend backed me up and pointed out how much it was hurting me, and also why, why am I spending months accumulating skills and contacts in an industry that I don’t wanna be in, you’re just wasting your life? But when this friend finally persuaded me to quit, zero regrets. When I found a new job very quickly and I never looked back. And I think for many people that, they’re afraid because they don’t know what comes next. But if what you’ve got right now is horrible, then what comes next is very likely to be better.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Ultimately, what Tim is saying is that what it really comes down to is the fact that life is too short not to sometimes quit.

Tim Harford
The reason why it even means something to be wasting time is because life is finite. So just, that’s the thing to remember — that all this stuff that you’re reluctant to give up on is getting in the way of stuff that might be so much more fun, so much more enjoyable, invigorating, educational, worthwhile, whatever it is. And yeah, you probably don’t need Tim Harford or anybody else whispering in your ear “you are going to die . . . you are going to die” every hour of every day. But you are going to die. And so (Lilah laughs), you know, don’t mess around with stuff that isn’t worth it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Tim, you always make us think. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Tim Harford
Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I highly recommend Tim’s podcast, Cautionary Tales, and his column called The Undercover Economist. I’ve put links to both in the show notes.

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That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. Next week we are talking about the rise in AI-generated art. We think it might have a pretty significant impact on human creativity. We are also talking winter cooking with two of my favourite chefs. They’re known as the Honeys. Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer are the chefs and founders of the beloved London restaurant Honey & Co, and authors of our popular weekly recipe column in the FT. If you wanna say hi, we love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod, and I am on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. You can keep up with callouts and cultural conversations that feed into the show on my Instagram. Links to everything mentioned today are in the show notes alongside a link to the best offers available on a subscription to the FT. Those offers are at ft.com/ftweekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link to get the discount.

I am Lilah Raptopoulos, and here’s my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. And special thanks go, as always, to Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend, and we’ll find each other again next week.