Spycatcher

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Authors: Peter Wright
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography
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from general access. For instance, all suspected spies were Y-Boxed, as were most defectors. An officer could obtain the material from a Y-Box only by obtaining indoctrination into its contents from the controlling officer or sometimes from the Director-General himself.

    "The integrity of the file is vital," Potter told me, and warned me that under no circumstances could papers be removed from a file without the written consent of a senior officer. The sanctity of files was something which, quite rightly, was drummed into every officer from the very beginning of his service.

    Files were located by using the card indexes. Potter had devised a system of mechanically searching these indexes. Each card was classified with a series of punched holes to identify the category of files to which it belonged. To search a category of files, for instance to find a Russian intelligence officer using several aliases, an officer drew a master card corresponding to that category. Long needles were placed through the holes in the master card to locate any other cards which fitted the same constellation. These could then be searched by hand. It was old-fashioned, but it worked, and it meant that MI5 resisted the change to computerization long after it should have happened.

    The concourse of the Registry was always busy with trolleys transporting files from the Registry shelves to special lifts. The trolleys ran on tracks so that files could be shifted at great speed up to the case officers working on the floors above - F Branch on the first floor, E Branch on the second, D on the third and fourth, and A Branch on the fifth. The Registry employed enormous numbers of girls to maintain efficient delivery of files within the building, as well as the massive task of sorting, checking, and filing the incoming material. In Kell's day the Registry Queens, as they were known, were recruited either from the aristocracy or from the families of MI5 officers. Kell had a simple belief that this was the best vetting of all. The debutantes were often very pretty, as well as wealthy, which accounts for the large number of office marriages, to the point where it became something of a joke that the average career expectancy of a Registry Queen was nine months - the time it took her to get pregnant.

    By the early 1970s the staffing of the Registry had become a major problem for MI5. There were more than three hundred girls employed and with the surge of file collection at that time the pressure for more recruits was never-ending. Openly advertising was considered impossible. Yet it was becoming very difficult to recruit this number of girls, let alone vet them properly. In at least one case, the Communist Party managed to infiltrate a girl into the Registry, but she was soon discovered and quietly sacked. This problem, rather than dissatisfaction with the increasingly antiquated filing system itself, finally pushed MI5, belatedly, into accepting a computerized Registry.
    Underneath the Registry were the Dungeons. They were actually a collection of storerooms and workshops run by Leslie Jagger, who worked under Hugh Winterborn in A2. Jagger was one of Cumming's famed contacts. He was a huge, broad-shouldered former Sergeant Major who had served with Cumming in the Rifle Brigade. Jagger always wore a black undertaker's suit.

    Jagger was the MI5 odd-job technical man, and must have felt slightly apprehensive when I joined, but he never showed it and we soon became good friends. Jagger had an extraordinary array of skills, of which the most impressive was his lockpicking. Early on in training I attended one of the regular classes he ran for MI5 and MI6 in his lockpicking workshop. The cellar room was dominated by a vast array of keys, literally thousands of them, numbered and hung in rows on each wall.
    Jagger explained that as M15 acquired or made secret imprints of keys of offices, hotels, or private houses, each one was carefully indexed and numbered. Over, the

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