My life as a spy

MI5 is expanding by a thousand officers to combat the terror threat and applications are booming from hopefuls inspired by the prospect of a life of derring-do they've seen in the BBC's series Spooks. It does make me a bit nostalgic for my own days as a spy.

It was rather thrilling, fresh out of university and after nearly a year of selection panels, receiving enigmatic letters from an organisation which 20 years ago still didn't officially exist, and having been so thoroughly vetted that even student friends had been called on to attest to my character, finally to enter a secret building in north London to start life as a spy.

There was a drinks party with the director-general to welcome us into a surprisingly friendly organisation: firstname terms throughout the ranks, prowomen - since women with their combination of diligence and intuition make very good intelligence officers, and lots of socialising in the in-house bar where there was less danger of being overheard by a stray KGB officer or Communist militant.

Apart from the business of identifying and monitoring subversives, we were taught how to use scrambler phones, lock away files marked "Top Secret" and make sure that we weren't being tailed to and from work. Even the lady who brought round the ham rolls and the men who came to cart away the waste-paper bins had been thoroughly vetted.

Heady stuff, pure John Le Carré - on the surface at least.

The perceived glamour of a very secret job was both the attraction and the danger. The attraction in that it compensated for the fairly tedious business of intelligence gathering: it might be exciting to order a phone tap, but wading through hours of domestic conversations is far from riveting. And there wasn't nearly as much action as in Spooks.

But the glamour of secret work is also its danger because it leads you to think you are rather special: information is power and when you have access to a lot more information than the ordinary citizen you have to watch how you use it.

How do you decide if that Muslim youth group down the road needs monitoring without first monitoring it? It is a fine balance between letting real terrorists slip through your grasp and indulging in a mass abuse of civil liberties.

On a more mundane level, entering a secret world is taxing as well as exciting. Social chit-chat is difficult when you can't say what you do or moan about your boss or your bad day. In training yourself to look for hidden signals in apparently innocuous exchanges you can catch yourself looking for the double meaning when your partner says they are going out to buy the paper.

It's these personal pressures which lead intelligence officers to spend more and more time in each other's company and mix less and less with the outside world, which promotes that unhealthy feeling of being somehow apart from the society you are supposed to serve.

When I worked for MI5 in the early Eighties, everyone wanted a post on the Russian desk at the end of their eight week training - even if the Cold War was by this time growing rather tepid The Russians were true masters of the game and and an appointment monitoring the Communist Party of Great Britain was considered rather a bore. But the intelligence world was still a polite place: no Russian living in London would have been outraged to find themselves the subject of observation, and for domestic militants it was a point of honour to have a tapped telephone.

There was a fear of IRA bombs in mainland Britain and a more remote concern about Middle Eastern terrorists, but even as MI5 continued to regard them as the number one enemy, few British citizens truly slept uneasily for worrying about a Russian attack.

Intelligence coups were a matter of propaganda victories when one side or other succeeded in tempting a defector through the Iron Curtain.

Now, Smiley and his people belong to a different era. Instead, we live today with a very real fear of attack and the enemy is no longer neatly to confined to a set of borders. Today's young recruits are entering a modern organisation which admits it exists and which they can actually apply to join.

The new entrants' work will still be secret; it will also be a lot more urgent. In one sense this will make the task more straightforward: with a real and immediate enemy to diffuse there will be little time for soul-searching, and they will be doing a job which is more readily appreciated by the public. But the stress levels will be high: spies are measured by their failures and failure today means you are likely to end up being blamed for a huge loss of life - and there's no glamour in that.