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Chapter 1: What inspired Annie Macron to pursue a career in espionage?
Espionage, or intelligence gathering, is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information. A person or persons who commit espionage are referred to as a spy. The world of spies and secret government agencies has long been a fascination to many. Much like with the world of crime and the underworld, it's the unknown, the secrecy, a world that not many will ever get to experience.
Annie Macron did experience this world. Not only did she work for one of the world's most famous government spy agencies, but she was also pursued by them.
It was cash only. If we had to grab some money in a city, we would then leave that city and move as far as we could on some intercity train as quickly as we could so that they would miss us.
My name's Jack Lawrence. Welcome to Wanted.
I'm a wanderer of the soul Before the end I plan to be whole But I know I'll lose myself along the way What's gone is gone What's past is past Let me leave what belongs
The British Secret Service was founded in the early 1900s, where its main concentration was focused on the activities of the imperial German government. The Bureau was initially split into naval and army sections, which over time specialised in foreign target espionage and internal counter-espionage.
Prior to the beginning of World War I, due to a number of administrative changes, the Home Section became known as Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 5, and of course its abbreviation MI5. Later on down the track, the Foreign Naval Section of the service was to become known as MI6, of course made famous by British spy Commander James Bond 007.
The headquarters for the British Secret Service is located in the heart of London. It's situated right on the banks of the River Thames. Other than its imposing size, it's a very unassuming building and it's situated almost 300 kilometres away from a small channel island known as Guernsey. And Guernsey in 1968 was the birthplace of Annie Macron.
She was born into a family that had no real government ties, and in fact, quite the opposite, as she had journalists in her family.
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Chapter 2: How did Annie's recruitment into MI5 begin?
And little did you know how much of an impact that would have on you in later life.
Quite, yes.
Annie would end up gaining a very rich education through her high school and would in fact win a scholarship to attend the prestigious Cambridge University. It's a gateway into the British establishment, with many high-profile individuals having been educated here, in fact many spies having their start at Cambridge.
The likes of Sir Isaac Newton, Sir David Attenborough, Stephen Hawkins and even King Charles himself have all been alumni of Cambridge University. And it was while studying here that Annie would get her first contact from the world of espionage. You know, going there, obviously, as you said, it's kind of a golden ticket. You know, the world sort of opens up to you.
There's lots of connections of people that go there. Did you have any aspirations of what you thought you might want to do?
I did. I wanted to be a diplomat. Jaw-jaw rather than war-war is always the best approach to quote, I think, Winston Churchill. And this is something that I found very fascinating. So I applied to the Foreign Office in the UK and then had a weird anonymous letter from the Ministry of Defence saying there may be other jobs you'd find more interesting. If you are interested, ring this number.
And that was it. That's all it said. I opened it. I was back at home, actually, with my pa. I opened it. And since I saw it instinctively, I said, oh, fuck, it's MI5. This is the ladylike education I had, right? Rather, because he was a journalist and because he was a spy novel fan, he just said, please ring this number and see if it is MI5. So it's all my past fault.
That's how I ended up in MI5.
Because he desperately wanted to hear what that conversation, how that conversation went. And how did it go? I mean, do you call and they don't obviously answer, hi, MI5?
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Chapter 3: What was Annie's first experience as an intelligence officer?
Seriously, that's what she looked like. Hair down to her waist and tiered skirts and all the rest of it. Turned out she was a highly regarded officer in MI5 because I ended up working with her when I was in MI5. But she just did not look the part. And we had a three-hour conversation all about my life from the age of 12.
And then halfway through that conversation, she said, why do you think you're here? Who do you think we are? And I said, well, you, MI5. I thought, if I've got this wrong, I'm going to sound like a... Yeah. sign this, which was the Notification of the Official Secrets Act. Right, straight away they got you. Yeah.
But the weird thing was, this hippie chick was so unexpected and also very clear thinking and very reassuring about exactly what the positioning of MI5 was at that time. They were on unequal footing. They did have to obey laws for the first time in 80 years history at that stage. And I liked her. So, you know, it
People always say if they work in sales, you don't buy the product, you buy from the person who's selling it because you trust them. I got on very well with her and she saw me through the entire process. And as I said, I ended up working with her. But yeah, that's how I ended up sort of falling into their grip.
The British Secret Service is just that, secret. In fact, for these organisations which are in every country around the world, secrecy is the biggest thing. You could have passed someone from an intelligence agency this morning, stood behind them as they ordered their coffee, or looked over at them in the commute to the office. That's the point.
They are just ordinary people doing an extraordinary job. And one that Annie says you can't share with people, not even the ones around you.
I mean, I'm talking about, God Christ, 33 years ago. And at that point, they were beginning to open up a little bit. So they were beginning to think about more open recruitment. And in fact, they started implementing it only a couple of years later. But it was very strange.
So my recruiter said, you can tell that you're in the process of being recruited by this organization to your husband, partner, whatever, or your best friend or very close family members. So I did tell my partner. I did tell my partner at the time, and I did tell my best friend. But all I could say was, this is the organisation that I'm talking to, but I can't say anything more.
So from that point, it's like a sort of glass shutter comes down between you and even the people you most trust, and it becomes very difficult to maintain and foster the open sort of relationships you'd have.
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Chapter 4: What ethical dilemmas did Annie face in her role at MI5?
You know, you go out for drinks with people, everyone whinges about their work and, oh, God, the boss and blah, blah, blah. But you can't.
When I started working there, yes, that did become a huge problem. And this is why there are so many sort of incestuous relationships between officers within these types of organisations because it becomes very difficult to maintain a relationship between
if one of you is on the outside so a lot of people end up in relationships on the inside because you can just let it all hang out you can't talk about your day you can talk about the operations you're working on and it's not a problem it's um not alice down the rabbit hole it's more alice through the looking glass i think i would say that's what it felt like and the recruitment process yeah that was the beginning of it it was a very odd time
So Annie has had her first interview, which she successfully gets through, and signs the Official Secrets Act, something that at the time of signing, I'm sure she would have never thought that she would eventually break. After that, it's into the recruitment process.
So you have the first three-hour interview. You sign on the dotted line. Then you have, if you get through that, you go through a two-day intensive recruitment process. It's psychometric tests, it's analytical tests, it's written tests, it's role play, all the rest of it. It's really, really hard. And most people don't get through that. I mean, they might get one out of every batch, so to speak.
Strangely, in my batch, two of us got through and we remained very good friends all the way through our years in MI5. But yeah, it's really, really hard. If you get through that, then you go through a final selection board with the greatest and the good. If you get through that, that's when they start vetting you, which takes months.
So you have to nominate four people from different phases of your life, like a school friend, uni friend, work friend, whatever. And then you get interviewed, they get interviewed, and then they have to nominate another four people each. So the ripples go out very widely. And of course, at that point, everyone knows that you're being recruited by something spooky.
So, you know, the whole idea about being really discreet about it is rather blown out of the window. And then if you get through that, you start work.
And start work she does. At the age of just 22 years old, Annie heads off to her first day as an intelligence officer for one of the world's most secretive government agencies. Do you remember your very first day walking through those doors?
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Chapter 5: What was the significance of the Cambridge Spy Ring in British intelligence?
Most of them were crap, actually. And then once you've gone through that, you are assigned to your work and other desks. Desks being the subject areas. Sorry, that sounds really boring.
That was going to be one of my questions. What is it like in there? Is it just a normal office, the cubicles and, you know, the coffee and tea machines and all the rest of it?
Oh, God, back in the day, back in the old offices, it was pretty crap. I mean, if you think sort of British civil service, threaded carpets and, you know, duct tape holding down wires and all that sort of shit, it was really, really bad. When they moved to the new HQ, back in the old HQ now, back in 1994, it was all terribly high tech and very nice.
But yeah, it was civil service grade, I think is the best way of putting it. It is not ostensibly a glamorous job, would be the best way of putting it. But the weirdness is when you suddenly start having to deploy secret techniques to investigate people and you start reading their communications or listening or getting agent reports coming across your desk and all that sort of thing.
So for the first few weeks when you're learning that, it is really genuinely odd. And after a few weeks, a couple of months, it's fine. It's just the job, right?
Yeah.
It's weird how people can acclimatise themselves so quickly to a very strange world.
Yeah, it becomes the norm. Yeah. Now she's in, what exactly is she going to be tasked with? Well, from the very start, Annie is unsure about just how ethical her first task really is as she's sent to Section F2, which handled counter-subversion.
It's the aspect of counterintelligence designed to detect, destroy, neutralise or prevent subversive activities through the identification, exploitation, manipulation and deception of individuals, groups or organisations.
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Chapter 6: How did Annie's relationship with David Shayler influence her career?
Kim Philby, who was actually questioned on television regarding his involvement, which he denied.
I was asked to resign from the Foreign Office because of an imprudent association with Burgess and as a result of his disappearance. Beyond that, I'm afraid I've got no further comment to make. Can you say when your communist associations ended, if I assume they did? The last time I spoke... to a communist knowing that he was a communist was sometime in 1934.
He would later flee to the Soviet Union in 1963.
Every evening I left the office with a big briefcase full of reports which I had written myself, full of files taken out of the actual documents, out of the actual archives. I used to hand them to my favourite contact in the evening. Next morning I'd get the file back, the contents having been photographed, and take them back early in the morning and put the files back in their place.
British intelligence would later obtain confessions from two other men whose involvement was kept secret for many years. In 1979, Anthony Blunt was outed and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would break the news to Parliament.
In the early part of last week, Professor Blunt was publicly identified as having been a suspect Soviet agent. Professor Blunt has admitted that he was recruited for Russian intelligence when he was at Cambridge before the war.
And in 1990, John Cancross will be revealed and round out the fifth member of the Cambridge Five.
And they became incredibly paranoid about what they called reds under the bed and subversion. So this ramped up the huge scale investigation into people who might potentially be subversive. This meant that hundreds of thousands of British citizens were investigated for their affiliations to not just the Communist Party,
but also things like Trotskyist groups or other subversively deemed groups, WRP, International Socialists, Socialist Workers' Party, all the rest of it. So this went on for about three decades, and we only began to shut it down in the 1990s. And I'm so happy to say I was one of the people who wrote all the reports that said, this is crap, we need to shut it down.
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Chapter 7: What led to Annie's decision to expose MI5's activities?
There are remarkable new revelations in our lead story tonight. Bob Lambert, a former undercover police officer, has told Channel 4 News of the full extent of his clandestine infiltration of pressure groups like the Animal Liberation Front, seducing women who were among his targets, using false identities taken from dead children
Various legal actions followed, including eight women who would take action against the Metropolitan Police, stating they were deceived into long-term intimate relationships by five officers.
I suppose the lesson here is never think that just because you're an activist and you're trying to improve the world or win a cause or, you know, do something for the better, for the better good, that you're not going to be spied on.
Do you think people understand or realise how much that they are being sort of, I mean, use the term spied on? Do you think people understand how much access that these organisations can have on your day-to-day life and your communications?
No, and they bloody should.
Yeah.
I mean, look at what Edward Snowden revealed, and that's a decade ago. So there's this huge intersection between between the government and the nation state level actors, and the corporations who can be backdoored, and also the criminal hackers who can get their hands on spy weapons, cyber weapons. So the whole thing intermeshes all the time.
And people should be aware of this and should be concerned about it. And the fact that I, you know, there's still sort of activist groups organizing on Facebook, I mean, just makes me want to weep. No way. You're going to keep your plans or strategies safe that way.
Yeah, just putting it all over social media.
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Chapter 8: What challenges did Annie and David face after leaving MI5?
David would graduate university with second class honours at the upper division with a degree in English and would later take a job at the Sunday Times newspaper. In 1991, he would join MI5 after responding to an obscure job advertisement calling for people with an interest in current affairs, common sense and the ability to write. Believing it was some form of media-related position, he applied.
Much like Annie, David began his career in F Branch and counter-subversion, where he worked vetting Labour Party politicians prior to the 1992 election. He would later be transferred to T Branch, which handled the threat of Irish terrorism, which is also an area that Annie worked, and again would find herself in a situation which troubled her.
I was given the desk to investigate Irish terrorist logistics. So it wasn't just the Republicans, it was also the Loyalists. So we were trying to stop the infiltration, exfiltration of personnel and material into and out of the UK. So I had to work a lot with organisations like the Customs and Portless Police and people like that.
I would imagine that's extremely high pressure because obviously when you're dealing with a terrorist organisation, especially one who was as active as the IRA was around that time with bombings and all the rest of it, was there that sense of, as I said, pressure with making sure that you were on top of everything?
And I know you've mentioned that there was a bombing that happened that shouldn't have happened or could have been avoided.
Yes, Bishopsgate in 1993. It was a lorry bomb that decimated the city of London. and there were opportunities to stop the attack before it happened and they were missed and therefore the bomb went off and a person died and many people were injured. It was terrible. It was a huge explosion.
That's a big one. That is a huge bomb. Good evening. A tipper truck packed with explosives went off in the city of London this morning. It killed one man and injured more than 40 other people. The bomb exploded in Bishopsgate, near the NatWest Tower.
The column of smoke rising above the city skyline left Londoners in little doubt about the size of the blast. The shockwave was felt over a wide area. The explosion heard several miles away.
The key point that really perturbed my partner, as well as me, was the fact that they lied about it afterwards. In MI5, because they are supposed to be accountable to the Home Secretary, who's supposed to, you know, sign them off to do all sorts of stuff. And they covered up the mistakes they've made. So I think thereby, you don't, an organisation cannot learn from their mistakes.
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