Spying is a woman’s world

 When Sir Alex Younger, the head of MI6, revealed this week that Q, his organisation’s tech-savvy, boffin Quartermaster, is a woman, it caused the sort of raised eyebrows that Roger Moore made his own during his long tenure as James Bond. We may have got used to M, Sir Alex’s fictional counterpart, being played by Judi Dench in the 007 franchise, but on screen, when it comes to handing out the deadly gizmos that are Q’s stock in trade, it has always been a man’s job.

The tweedy, old-school Desmond Llewelyn spent 36 years and 17 Bond films as the gadget-obsessed Q, dispenser par excellence of killer umbrellas, bagpipe flame-throwers and submersible Lotuses. He was succeeded by John Cleese, who brought a touch more mad scientist to the role in 2002’s ‘Die Another Day’.

Then in the last two Bond outings, ‘Skyfall’ and ‘Spectre’, the producers went for youth, but male youth, in casting Ben Whishaw as Q, channelling his inner teenage-boy geek. For once, then, in the world of espionage, it seems that art is lagging behind life.

The real world of espionage, Sir Alex was anxious to convey, has no glass ceilings any more. “When I joined MI5 in 1991,” recalls Annie Machon, a Cambridge graduate who worked in F2, the counter-subversion department of MI6’s domestic branch, “there was no gender bias in recruitment. It was all about whether you had the skills to do the job. But the older women I worked alongside had had to fight hard for that shift in attitude in the 1970s and 1980s.”

Among such pioneers, she recalls, were Stella Rimington, the first female director-general of MI5 on her appointment in 1992, and her successor-but-one, Eliza Manningham-Buller. “They were the women who had had to overcome the old intelligence service stereotype of female members of staff as ‘girls in pearls’, upper-class women from establishment families who filled the administrative roles but usually left when they started a family.”

The transformation represented by Dame Stella and Lady Manningham-Buller, as they have become on their retirement, has also been reflected in small and big screen portraits of the modern-day business of espionage. When the BBC adapted and updated John le Carre’s 1993 novel ‘The Night Manager’ last year, the central character of the ex-MI6 chief, Leonard Burr, was reassigned as Angela Burr and played by a pregnant Olivia Colman.

And in the cult US series ‘Homeland’, Claire Danes stars as Carrie Mathison, with postings in the CIA (whose overseas brief makes it the US equivalent of MI6) that range from field operative in war-torn Iraq to station chief in volatile Afghanistan.

In both cases, the female spooks regularly outfox the men, and that is just as true in real life, suggests author and espionage expert Nigel West who wasn’t surprised at the news that the real Q was a woman. “In my experience women have a better eye for detail, superior chronological memories, and better emotional intelligence than men, all of which are absolutely vital qualities for a spy.

One US programme for training intelligence operatives, known as ‘The Pipeline’, has shown scientifically that women have a sixth sense when it comes to knowing instinctively that they are being watched.” To which list of attributes should be added a particular gift for keeping secrets. “Emma the Spy”, an intelligence officer at MI6, recently broke with the usual protocol that she must remain silent at all times about her work, and spoke to broadcaster Chris Evans, on his Radio 2 breakfast show.

“Outside my profession I would say that I am rubbish at [keeping secrets],” the mother-of-three told him, “but inside, I’m a Ninja at it.”

So is it a case of mission accomplished as far as gender discrimination is concerned for those on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, especially now MI6 has recently advertised for recruits on Mumsnet, and GCHQ actively seeks out tech-savvy young women to fill their ranks?

Not quite. In 2015, the former chairman of the Labour Party, Hazel Blears, produced a report on women in the intelligence services for the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. It revealed that, while 53 per cent of all civil servants are women, they made up just 37 per cent of the 12,000 people working in MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. And while civil service recruitment is now 50-50 men to women, in the espionage agencies it is 38 per cent overall.

Blears was given access to current staff members. One recently arrived female MI6 operative gave the politician a flavour of the sexism that still exists.

“I was surprised to find on my first day that, out of 12 recruits due to start intelligence officer training, only three of us were women and I also noticed that all of the senior colleagues who came to talk to us were male, except in HR.”

Women are prominent in support and back room roles, argues Professor Christopher Andrew, the Cambridge academic who, in 2009, wrote the authorised history of MI5, because the security services were once in the vanguard of women’s employment.

“The gents who had set up MI5 in 1909 had the idea of recruiting the cleverest secretaries they could find by going to the women’s colleges at Oxbridge and schools like Cheltenham Ladies College. The privileged education and upbringing of many MI5 secretaries,” according to Professor Andrew, “made them more likely to stand up for their point of view.” But progress out of clerical roles was slow. It took until 1929 for Jane Sissmore to become MI5’s first — and, until after the Second World War, only — female intelligence officer.

An expert in Soviet matters, she was sidelined by her then boss, Kim Philby, later revealed to be a double agent, because he feared she would uncover him. She was, he wrote, “perhaps the ablest professional intelligence officer ever employed by MI5”. Such ground-breaking women agents, says Professor Andrew, ultimately put Britain one step ahead when it came to espionage. “It is absolutely no accident that the first female head of an intelligence agency in the world was Stella Rimington.”

However, for all the progress made, there remain areas of today’s intelligence services that are resolutely male, says Cameron Colquhoun, who worked at GCHQ for six years until 2013 and is now appearing as an expert assessor in Channel 4’s ‘Spies’, which sets 15 members of the public a series of challenges as they vie to become the next James — or Jane — Bond.

“There were what you might refer to as some male and female areas. GCHQ [which runs intelligence gathering and listening services] was more male than MI5 or MI6, and that was particularly true when it came to those who were working on coding, hacking or cyber attacks.” These, of course, are precisely the operational areas where Ben Whishaw’s otherworldly Q has shown himself a mastermind, but Colquhoun points out that recruitment of women who can write computer code is not just an issue for the intelligence services, but rather “a huge problem for everyone, even in Silicon Valley

source : gulfnews