The spy who didn’t love me!
Scots secret agent reveals reason she NEVER mixed romance and espionage
IN the make-belief world of James Bond, it was always the pretty girls who swooned over the suave super-spy.
But for real-life Scots secret agent Meta Ramsay, a highranking MI6 officer, the problem was how to stop the foreign agents she was trying to recruit from falling in love with her.
As one of Britain’s most accomplished spies, the now 87-year-old Labour peer has revealed one of the unlikelier threats she faced to her field operations was when she sensed the men she had targeted as possible agents were becoming too romantically attached.
Revealing some of the niceties of the art of spycraft, Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, as she is now styled, told The Sunday Herald: ‘You’re cultivating someone and you haven’t got to the stage – because you want to recruit them – of asking them that.
‘Yet you’re making all the signs of being very happy, and wanting to see him and have lunch and all these things.
‘That’s an absolute killer if you don’t get it right. You must never let a man make a move thinking that it will be welcomed and then it’s not, because then you’ve really ruined your own project.’
Flirting was, therefore, never a weapon in her arsenal. ‘No, it’s a very bad idea – the last thing you want,’ she said.
While she strove hard to keep sex out of her job, Ramsay was forced to battle institutional sexism throughout her career.
However, she nevertheless managed to rise through the ranks to the point where it is rumoured she was in contention to be the first woman head of MI6. She refused to be drawn on the topic, saying only that when she retired at the statutory age of 55 she was ‘the most senior woman in the service’.
Before that, she had proved herself adept at managing dicey situations, including during her time as MI6 ‘head of station’ in Helsinki, when the double-agent Oleg Gordievsky was sprung from inside Russia at the height of the Cold War in one of the most audacious spying operations of the 20th century.
A lifelong socialist, Baroness Ramsay worked for New Labour as a strategist at the behest of thenleader, the late John Smith, with whom she became friends at Glasgow University.
She has remained active in Labour circles ever since and sits on the executive committee of Scottish Labour.
Like many women agents, she has never married but does not regret it. She said: ‘There just wasn’t the right man at the right time, or if the time was right, the men weren’t.’