I was a teen spy

Scared and dry mouthed, I shuffled in the queue of conscripts towards the pressed and shining sergeant who would deliver my fate. Would it be "cook", "clerk", or, God help me, something to do with guns? The sergeant thrust his mouth towards my ear. "Russian linguist," he rasped. I was instructed to proceed immediately to Scotland and my new life as a spy.

As a gawky 18-year-old National Serviceman from Halifax, I was an improbable cog in an operation to listen in on the Red Menace. Based during 1957/58 in a Berlin still struggling out of the Second World War, I found myself on the nervy front line of the Cold War. The files detailing our activities have only recently been opened and making a film about my life as a spy has taken me on a journey back into the heart of the National Service Linguist operation.

It was back in 1950 that Prime Minister Clement Attlee ordered the creation of a School for Russian Linguists. The Armed services needed men who could listen in on battlefield communications, interrogate prisoners and run propaganda, but too few Britons spoke Russian. During the 1950s, 5,000 young men were trained as Russian interpreters joining JSSL, the Joint Services School for Linguists.

Despite the fact that the Soviets thought we would all become career spies, many of JSSL's graduates (including Michael Frayn, Alan Bennett, Eddie George, Jack Rosenthal and Dennis Potter) had other ideas. Michael Frayn remembers an alarming warning at his selection interview: "If you're trained as a Russian interpreter, you may find yourself dropped by parachute behind enemy lines." Alan Bennett insists: "If anybody had suggested a parachute to me, I think I would have been rather nervous."

I travelled up to Scotland to begin my Russian training on the night the Soviets invaded Hungary. The camp, near Crail in Fyfe, was transformed into a Hogwarts for junior spooks and our days were a surreal cocktail of arms training and Russian lessons.

Over seven months we were coached intensively by an exotic bunch of teachers including Mr Makaroff from the monastery, Prince Volkonsky with his gold-tipped cane, and Colonel Godlevski, who had drunk champagne from ballerinas' slippers. To this day I can remember the Russian for "My undercarriage is down and locked." Alan Bennett, too, remembers the strange military vocabulary. "We learned the Russian for rolling barrage. I didn't realise it was guns. I thought it was some kind of juggernaut."

Finally, I was pronounced ready to do my bit for the free world and dispatched to RAF Gatow, right on the East German border, and set to work in a remote building full of chunky radio receivers. Our job was to trawl key frequencies, listening in on the endless tittle-tattle of Soviet pilots over East Germany. Armed with pencils, we scribbled down changes of direction, bearing and fuel levels onto pads with three carbon copies.

As a job, it had all the appeal of fulltime train spotting. Like all my co-sleuths, I improvised freely. I recall some squadron call-signs had a soothing, pastoral feel - "rain" and "squirrel" and "birch". I suppose the grand idea was to know what Ivan was up to, and whether he was about to try and conquer the free world.

Every few weeks, I was required to take night duty in the Direction Finding Tower. It was very dark and very close to the frontier with the Soviet sector. One night I remember hearing Russian soldiers enjoying a drunken singsong just over the fence. The idea was to locate the bearings of Soviet aircraft, but the equipment - a rusty wheel turning an aerial - never worked, so like everyone else I made up the bearings and filled my nights listening to jazz on American Forces Radio.

In 1959, a year after my release, the JSSL story came to an end. Our forces had built up a reserve of Russian speakers, and spy satellites were ready to take over from youths with pencils.