http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/3275532/Julia-Pirie.html
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 camps 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.
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:25 CST