Wednesday - October 29, 2008

NEVER JUDGE A BATTLING BRIT BY THE COVER. THEY COME IN MANY FORMS, AND THEY WILL GET YA.

THIS BATTLING BRIT DIDN’T DO IT IN A SPITFIRE OR ON THE BATTLEFRONT WITH A RIFLE.
TOO OFTEN WE FORGET THAT THERE ARE MANY WAYS OF SERVING YOUR COUNTRY THAT CAN BE JUST AS LIFE THREATENING.

This woman’s life was spent doing a James Bond for real.  Can you imagine the stress?  I can’t see how there wouldn’t be. I guess she had nerves of steel.  If not that, then something else and whatever it was, she was extraordinary.

RIP and Thanks, Miss Julia Pirie.

Julia Pirie
MI5 agent who for two decades worked at the heart of the British Communist Party

Last Updated: 8:48PM GMT 28 Oct 2008

Julia Pirie, who has died aged 90, spent two decades as an MI5 agent at the heart of the Communist Party of Great Britain, most of it as personal assistant to the party’s general secretary.

A small, dumpy woman with the appearance of a confirmed and rather matronly spinster, Julia Pirie was the most unlikely of spies. But her unassuming demeanour masked a sharp intellect and the powers of observation essential for the task of a secret agent.

She was recruited to infiltrate the party at the beginning of the 1950s, at a time when many Britons still remembered the Soviet Union as a valued wartime ally and Communists retained considerable influence within the trades union movement.

Julia Pirie would pass over her regular reports and photocopied documents to her MI5 handlers during cricket matches at the Oval cricket ground, a procedure that left her with a lifelong love of the game.

She was told to resign from her party post in the 1970s, by which time, she said, the Communist Party had become a rather pathetic and increasingly irrelevant organisation. She went on to collect intelligence on the Provisional IRA during several missions in Europe.

Effortlessly adopting the cover of a harmless, elderly English spinster intent on sightseeing, Julia Pirie once travelled to Barcelona, renting a flat immediately below one occupied by IRA officials. The flat, rented by members of the Catalan terrorist group Terra Lliure, was being used by the IRA as a safe house and a temporary store for shipments of gold bullion supplied by the Libyan President Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Julia Pirie’s inability to control the reverberation and echo coming from her own equipment led to some precarious and alarming moments. At one point her apartment was raided by the Barcelona police, putting the entire operation at risk. Julia Pirie was aware from monitoring their communications that the IRA terrorists were nervous of discovery, and the arrival of a number of armed police officers was unlikely to reassure them.

But she managed to persuade the police that she was simply an innocent English spinster, and calmly continued her monitoring operation until her MI5 handlers, alarmed at the latest turn of events, pulled her out for her own safety.

Elizabeth Mary Julia Pirie (known to her family as Elizabeth, but, later, as Julia to her colleagues in MI5) was born at Harbury, Warwickshire, on July 8 1918, the only daughter of Allen Grant Pirie and Elizabeth Mary Pirie. Her father, an advocate from Aberdeen, died in 1923 as a result of wounds received in France while serving in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Soon afterwards Elizabeth’s mother decided to return to Calcutta, where she had been born and brought up, taking her daughter with her.

Elizabeth was educated at the Loreto convent at Shillong, in a rural area of Assam, where she recalled tigers roaming around the school. On the outbreak of war in 1939 she returned to Britain, determined to join the war effort. She joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women’s section of the British Army, and saw service as a driver of staff cars and ambulances in Shrewsbury before volunteering after D-Day for work in France and Germany.

She was among the first Allied soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and would later speak movingly about the effect this experience had on her.

After serving with the British Army on the Rhine, she left the Army and went to work as secretary and personal assistant to Kitty, Duchess of Atholl, who, as chairman of the British League for European Freedom, was an ardent campaigner against Soviet control of eastern Europe. It was during this time that Elizabeth Pirie joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, which had provided female agents for the Special Operations Executive working with the French Resistance.

She then worked for the International Maritime Organisation before being approached by MI5, possibly as a result of her links with FANY, and asked to infiltrate the Communist Party of Great Britain working as a typist. She worked for F4, the section within MI5 which monitored the Communist Party’s activities and its links with the trades union movement.

Given her position as personal assistant to the general secretary, John Gollan, it seems highly likely that one of Julia Pirie’s earliest coups was to provide information that allowed MI5 to obtain the entire secret membership of the party. Selected members of the party were told to keep their membership secret so that they could be used by the KGB or Soviet military intelligence (the GRU) in operations in Britain.

Peter Wright, a former senior MI5 officer, revealed in his book Spycatcher that in the late 1950s one of the F4 agent handlers obtained details of the location of the secret membership files from an agent inside the party. The files were stored in the Mayfair flat of a wealthy party member, and the property was put under blanket surveillance. When the owner’s wife rang him to say that she was going out for an hour, but would leave the key under the doormat, an MI5 officer swiftly went round to take an impression.

Armed with the key, MI5 simply waited until the occupants went away to the Lake District for the weekend, then let themselves in and copied the secret files, rendering the potential Soviet agents useless. This was Operation Party Piece, one of a number of operations against the Communist Party that led Wright to claim: “For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the state’s behest while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants pretended to look the other way.”

Wright also described how bugging the party’s King Street headquarters was made more difficult by the way in which the leadership constantly changed the location of key meetings, eventually moving them to a windowless basement room.

An agent inside the building tipped off F4 to the location of the room and said that an old coal chute led down to it from the pavement. The response was another MI5 coup, known as Operation Tie Pin. This took place on a Saturday night when no one was likely to be in the party headquarters. The entire staff of MI5’s “A” branch surveillance team, known as “the Watchers”, was carefully choreographed to play the part of drunken revellers walking past the building in different directions, disguising the noise as an MI5 technician surreptitiously placed a false door containing a bugging device over the chute to allow continued monitoring of the meetings.

As personal assistant to the general secretary, Julia Pirie would certainly have been aware of the change of location for the secret meetings and remains the most likely source of the MI5 tip-off.

But within the Communist Party she was completely trusted, accompanying the general secretary to regular meetings and conferences behind the Iron Curtain. The fact that she usually attempted to avoid these “dreary” visits to the Eastern Bloc only reinforced her cover.

Despite the “threat within” that the party was believed to be, Julia Pirie revealed to her handlers that Gollan had very little power and was entirely beholden to Moscow and the Communists within the trades unions.

The Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 was the catalyst for a loss of party members that was to increase with the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. Gollan responded to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia by saying: “We completely understand the concern of the Soviet Union about the security of the socialist campe_SLps we speak as true friends of the Soviet Union.” With membership plummeting, from 56,000 during the Second World War to 20,000 by 1978, Julia Pirie was pulled out.

After retiring from active operations in the 1990s, she lectured to groups of MI5 trainees and the police before indulging her love of travel, visiting Russia, Europe, Africa, Australia, the Caribbean and the United States.

She remained extremely generous with her time and her commitment to those she regarded as her close family, regularly keeping in touch with relatives of all ages.

Despite the intense pressure of working under cover for much of her life, she always retained her quiet sense of humour and warm laugh. She never lost her keen interest in sport, particularly cricket, and was an avid and skilled bridge player.

Until her death on September 2 Julia Pirie continued to receive her pension from the Communist Party, paid monthly into her account from a bank in Italy. She was unmarried.

http://tinyurl.com/5rje8k

Posted by Drew458     on 10/29/2008 at 09:11 AM   
Filed Under: • Patriotism • UK • War-Stories •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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