![]() In my day, however, you could simply print a passport, hop on a plane and arrive. So a good operational officer will have six or seven, possibly more, covers and there are specialist departments within those intelligence services whose job it is to maintain those covers. You could get called out anywhere and your target could be anyone. Let's assume that you are based in your home capital. Of course, if the operation goes tits up, the person who is going to suffer is the agent, not me.Ī good operational officer has a number of different cover stories. But I can recruit a scientist who is already there. For example, if I wanted to find out about Iranian nuclear production tomorrow I couldn't wander into a facility in that country, no matter how good my cover was. Normally what happens in the services is that the risks are run by the agents – the people you, as an officer, recruit. In the US it is slightly different because they see themselves as semi-military and put themselves in danger in a way that British officers don't. But you have to balance that out with the buzz of working in the secret world.ĭespite perceptions, working for the secret service is not a very dangerous job. When you start off as a young recruit, you think, 'Fine, that suits me.' But it is emotionally crushing for officers in the secret services and you can never really share that guilt with anybody. Knowing someone else was imprisoned, tortured or killed because you didn't do your job properly is a terrible burden. The trouble is that even though the rules have been slightly relaxed now – certain members of your family are allowed to know – you can never discuss details of operations or what's happening with particular agents. When I joined a long time ago, we were encouraged not even to tell your partner. The buzz is taking part in a world that nobody else knows about – often you are aware of things happening behind world events that other people don't know and possibly will never know. I can forget people's names two minutes after being introduced to them, but I retain a lot of seemingly unimportant details which can be terribly important when dealing with a mass of paperwork on your desk or when you are out in the field trying to remember what your brief was. I am not entirely sure what they liked about me, but I have always had a good memory for small details. You would be laughing if you could look around a room, point and say: "That's the type, that's the person." The idea is that you get as many reasonably intelligent and varied men and women into the job as possible. They look for independent, self-driven people, who do not fit into a particular pigeonhole. There is no "spy type" that secret service recruiters look for. The net is now thrown much wider, though you can still get the tap on the shoulder at university. I was recruited in that old fashioned way, but of course these days the service has a website and a recruitment team which goes round universities and run open evenings at various places. I thought even if I move on from this, it's got to be a once in a lifetime opportunity and it will be interesting to find out what the job is really about. But one interview followed on to the next and I was sent on a training course. It just hadn't come across my radar at all. I didn't even know the difference between MI5 or MI6. I knew the job wasn't going to be James Bond but I was curious to know more. He stood there and replied: "Have you ever thought of working for your country?" I had no idea what he was talking about, but I just said: "Yeah, sure." After that I got an envelope in my pigeonhole from an anonymous government department inviting me up to London for an interview. I was in my final year at Oxford University when my tutor came to me one day and said: "What are you thinking of doing with your career?" I told him I was thinking of the police or the army. I was recruited by the secret service during the cold war. As well as a frequent commentator on espionage, Ferguson is currently helping to promote the hit US TV series The Blacklist, starring James Spader as a master criminal turned FBI informer. In 2005, he starred with Mike Baker of the CIA in the BBC2 series Spy and wrote the book accompanying the series: Spy – A Handbook. H arry Ferguson is a former MI6 intelligence officer and was an undercover agent for the National Investigation Service (NIS).
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