Espionage is two things – a career and a lifestyle. Both can be wildly exciting. Those who deny this have never been spies. Children born to SIS agents enjoy this lifestyle which can have many advantages. The home environment is usually stimulating, cosmopolitan and informed. There can also be one-off bonus such as acquisition of a British passport for a non-UK citizen.
If a child’s parents are spies, the child is usually an active participant in espionage at every stage of his or her development. S/he grows up with spies, whether these be SIS diplomats or SIS Whitehall civil servants, and believes espionage to be a normal way of life. That, of course, is one of the many damaging downsides. There are others which are far worse.
To the best of my knowledge, the only spy chief to have touched on the impact that espionage has on an agent’s child, albeit in passing, was ex-Stasi chief Marcus Wolf in his autobiography Memoirs of a Spymaster.
For this reason, it is interesting to note that one of the justifications that Stella Rimington gives for writing her book is ‘to explain things to my daughters’.
I hope that this means that Mrs Rimington will widen this explanation to include the children of all those involved in British espionage, and give her opinion on the balance that needs to be struck between: the rights (both legal and moral) of children; the rights of parents and obligations to their child as well as to the intelligence agencies as employer; and the employers’ obligations to both, where these conflict.
An example would be in Rimington’s sister agency, SIS, where the practice used to be (and perhaps still is) that SIS diplomats communicate directly with the older child in order to acquire information about the parent. Some children can be susceptible to the flattery that accompanies the approach.
Were Mrs Rimington to discuss childrens’ (and their parents’) rights versus the intelligence services, she would be breaking one of the last taboos of British espionage: i.e. the relationship the agencies have with an agent’s child, and how the agencies seek to develop the child with or without parental consent.
Spies, throughout the ages, have preyed on children. British spies are no exception. Were Mrs Rimington to, at least, acknowledge that there might have been – and could still be – a problem, there will be some merit in her book.
Somehow, I feel that she may disappoint.