PROFILE: MEG ROBB

THE SECRET LIFE OF MEG...

by Peter Barr

Lochcarron, October 10, 2018: The producers of the Bond films have declared that there will never be a female 007, but maybe they should visit Lochcarron and have a few words with Meg Robb, a former secret agent whose real-life adventures put the fictional Bond in the shade. The man with a licence to kill may be well known for admiring female co-stars in their underwear, but what would he have thought of Meg, who went to Berlin at the end of the Second World War with a gun in her knickers? “I didn't want to hide it in my handbag,” Meg explains. “That would be obvious.”

Now 97, Meg was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6) in 1942, while working in a bank in central London, when a former colleague home on leave from Egypt told her “girls like you” were welcome at the office in Cairo. At this point, Meg didn't realise what she was in for, but without hesitation, she asked him: “How do I get to Cairo?”

“Phone this number,” he said, handing over a small scrap of paper. And so her adventures began...

After basic training at Bletchley Park, where she learned about coding and how to use “secret ink,” Meg set off for Cairo to work as “a secretary,” under strict instructions to “keep your eyes open” – and not tell anyone what she was up to. In fact, her mother never knew that Meg was an MI6 agent. “If she had known, it would have been all round the district in no time,” says Meg. Her father may have had his suspicions, she thinks, but her role in the war remained secret for decades. The family believed that she worked in the Foreign Office, dealing with passports – a suitable cover because at that time MI6 headquarters were above the Passport Office in St James in London, occupying several floors above the public area.

When you join MI6, it's a serious business –not just for you but also people close to you. Several years later, in 1951, when Meg informed her bosses she intended to marry, her fiancé Alec had to be cleared by the Service – even though he'd been a Major in the Royal Corps of Signals.“For all they knew, he may have been a spy,” says Meg, who turned down an offer to be posted to China, choosing to become a wife instead – and then a mother. Her children Liz (a Special Needs Dental Surgeon) and Sue (who has lived in Lochcarron since 1976) knew nothing about their mother's secret career until they were adults, while Meg's brother Peter, who enjoyed a career as a distinguished specialist in tropical diseases, also knew very little. Meg's “Official Secret” was a subject that the family never talked about...

After six months in Cairo, Meg was posted to Jerusalem, and after working there for 18 months was suddenly told to “drop everything” and head for Tehran – another hotbed in the Middle East where secret agents came together from countries all over the world. The major role of MI6 at that time was to gather intelligence and recruit agents, and Meg's job was to pass on information through the network, from agent to agent, and send encrypted messages to HQ in London, reporting what MI6 needed to know. In addition to her “ordinary work” as a secretary, she also helped her boss, Guy, make contact with people of interest by organising parties where she would discreetly introduce them to Guy as they mixed with the rest of her guests. “Find out what you can about this chap,” were her usual instructions.

“We partied hard, played hard and worked hard,” Meg

remembers, sitting in the home she shares with Sue in Lochcarron. “Sometimes it was also quite a glamorous job.”But not every hour was Happy Hour. When you were ordered to report to the office at two in the morning, while still in the throes of a party, you simply had to jump – and sometimes this could be a painful exercise. One morning, Guy discovered Meg, trying to recover from the night before by resting her sore head against the cool cast-iron safe – and trying to recall the combination.

Asked if she ever felt frightened, plunged into one of the world's major troublespots, Meg replies that she was always well aware of the dangers but like everyone else in the Service, she couldn't afford to be frightened and simply got on with the job. One day in Tehran, however, danger came knocking. “It was the first time I suspected someone knew what I was actually doing,” she reveals. While walking in the street, she realised that she was being followed by a shadowy figure, and immediately headed for home. Inside her flat, she locked the door and sat in silence, holding her breath, waiting to see what would happen – and fearing the worst. Suddenly, somebody knocked very hard on the door, but Meg knew it would not be wise to answer...

In the end, she never found out who had been on her tail, but it reminded her that spying is a dangerous game. Later on, when Meg was based in Bangkok, one of her female colleagues was shot in the street. Was that a random incident or something much more sinister? “I guess we'll never know,” says Meg.

“I had a fascinating war but also a dirty war,” Meg likes to say. “People did a lot of things they wouldn't be proud of,” she explains. “There were occasions when the Service would consider it convenient if someone was silenced, and there were always ways and means to make it happen. But it was war and there were lives at stake, and no-one would last very long if they struggled too much with their conscience.”

Soon after the end of the Second World War, Meg travelled to Berlin (with the gun in her knickers), and found herself in Hitler's bunker, shortly before it was “destroyed”by the Allies. Expecting it to be a modest military structure, Meg was surprised to discover the underground complex was much more extensive, with dining rooms and sitting rooms and other “normal” features of domestic life.

Meg then spent three years in Thailand, a country at the heart of international intrigue. Normal life also continued, however, and “Brown Owl” found time to establish Bangkok's first Brownie pack and receive a trophy from the Queen of Siam at a tennis event.

In 1951, Meg retired from MI6 and settled down to family life in North London. The man who gave the speech at her farewell was Nicholas Elliott, the MI6 agent who later extracted a confession from his old friend, the infamous traitor Kim Philby, just before Philby defected to the Soviet Union.

Looking back now, Meg feels very fortunate to have been a witness to history and regards her “secret life” as a thrilling adventure: “I was doing things and going to places my parents could never have dreamed of,” she says. Her dedication to the Service was officially recognised in 2005 when she was invited by the Queen for lunch at Buckingham Palace, as part of the events to commemorate the 60thanniversary of the end of the Second World War, sitting side by side with military bosses, Prime Ministers and leading clerics.

MI6 today is very different from Meg's day, symbolised by its very public headquarters on the banks of the Thames,“blown to smithereens” in recent Bond film Skyfall – a far cry from the much more “secret” building in St James. But some things never change, says Meg. The Service still gathers intelligence and passes it on to the people who need it. Fake news and social media may seem very modern, but misinformation and black propaganda have always been part of the business.

Nowadays, despite several health scares, Meg still enjoys the occasional sherry and going to church every Sunday, and in recent years she's also continued to travel, including trips with Liz and Sue to Rajasthan (camel trekking) and Mexico (swimming with dolphins). The adventure continues...

Meg's advice to young women contemplating a career in MI6:
“Go for it! Enjoy the opportunities...”

Postscript

Meg Robb died just before Christmas 2018, we all feel privileged that she was able to share some of her exploits and adventures with us.