Spies reminisce about bygone eras of espionage

A remarkable encounter between two veterans of clandestine warfare and intelligence took place in London last night. MRD Foot, now in his 90th year and who served in the wartime SAS, was interviewed by Sir Richard Dearlove, a Cold War warrior in MI6 who rose to become its director.

Organised by Dean Godson of Policy Exchange and held before an audience of 60 at its Westminster offices, the event offered a mass of observations into a little-known and much-misunderstood world.

With the skill of a practised TV chat show host, Sir Richard took Foot back through episodes of his career bringing out a series of sharp truths, observations, speculations and anecdotes ranging from the comic to the sinister. The nonagenarian, bolt-upright and bird-thin, told of his first researches into the files of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) which had to be conducted under the stifling auspices of security minders from the Foreign Office.

His findings were to result in his massive and definitive history of this complex organisation. It was to give shape and structure to the wealth of stories of heroism, betrayal, cock-up and rivalry in the Resistance of the occupied nations which emerged - and continue to emerge – since the end of World War II.

Foot recalled the flurry of anger and legal action that resulted from those in the resistance who felt maligned – actions he was forbidden to defend because the Foreign Office fearing unhelpful revelations, refused to allow the author into court to testify.

Foot recounted how the techniques of the early IRA were the model for SOE

He talked of an awkward encounter with Odette Sansom who was unhappy not be given the heroic status she felt due to her - Foot said when confronted she had been unable to name a single act of sabotage she had committed. He recounted the role of Holland and Gubbins and how the techniques of the early IRA had been the inspiration for the basic operating methods of the SOE.

Dearlove, whose own career ranged from MI6 postings in Nairobi, Prague and Washington among others and culminated in running the Secret Intelligence Service for the five years from 1999 which saw the rise of al-Qaeda, and military intervention in Iraq and the Afghanistan, took Foot through his capture during an operation in Holland to kidnap (or failing that) kill a German officer who was committing atrocities against British prisoners. He was subsequently paralysed by a pitchfork through his spine when he was trying to escape for the fourth time.

After the evening was ended with Viscount Slim citing Foot as the one that his contemporaries in the SAS had always held as their role model, the audience filed out, some wondering if they had been watching and listening to one of the last surviving representatives of a breed that was all but extinct.