Good spies hard to find, wartime file reveals

Daniel Craig may be an ideal James Bond but may have had trouble blending in the way Section B6 agents were required to.

Wanted: Nondescript individual, 5ft 7in to 5ft 8in in height, with good hearing and the ability to stand still for long periods in extreme heat and cold.

The ideal candidate must also have a fondness for hiding behind trees in parks and a strong aversion to false beards and moustaches.

It might sound like the job description for an ornithologist, but these are the attributes that MI5 was looking for when it sought to recruit a "watcher" or surveillance officer to its ranks with the purpose of tracking foreign spies and suspected traitors.

A secret file detailing the activities of Section B6, the outpost of MI5 used to tail threats to national security, shows how senior spooks struggled to find sufficiently unobtrusive operatives to carry out this work during World War II.

The document, released at the National Archives in Kew, West London, reveals the Security Service despaired when it received a flood of applications from wannabe spies who had spent too long watching detective films and expected a glamorous existence.

Instead, MI5 felt obliged to underline the drudgery of the task of spending long hours in doorways watching a window. The report, which includes a history of B6 written by an anonymous veteran surveillance officer, said: "This is an onerous and exacting profession ... There is little glamour and much monotony in such a calling as 'observation'.

"The ideal watcher is born and not made, and, unless he has a natural flair for the work, he will never rise above mediocre. Observation cannot be mastered from lectures. Hard practical training in the street is the only way to bring out a man's aptitude for the job."

The file sets out the profile for the perfect "shadower", specifying the ideal height (5ft 7-8), with acute senses, and "hardy enough to withstand cold, heat, and wet during the long hours of immobility in the street". Also important was an appearance "as unlike a policeman as possible" and the ability to dress in "old clothes, cap, muffler" when in the "slum quarters".

The one thing that a B6 operative was never to wear was a false moustache.

The report said: "The writer is against the use of facial disguises. A false moustache or beard is easily detected, especially under the high lights of a restaurant, pub, or in a Tube train."

After its formation shortly before World War I, the unit of trench-coated observers grew to 40 members by the beginning of World War II and was dealing with 140 cases a year by 1942, trailing a colourful range of foreign spies and British agents, including a Nazi operative working as a bakery delivery driver in Mayfair and a taxi driver who was eventually arrested by being asked to drive Wormwood Scrubs and detained once he arrived in the prison yard.

The Section B6 file highlights a particular triumph when a surveillance team followed the naval attache at the Japanese Embassy to Ham Common in West London, where he met his source in the middle of a clump of bushes.

The report states that the MI5 tail was able to creep into the bushes unnoticed and report the men's conversation.

- INDEPENDENT