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blue eyes and a penchant for grandiose schemes. He was a brilliant organizer and positively bubbled with ideas. I had first dealt with him after the war when he asked me to work under him on a prototype Blue Streak project, which was eventually cancelled when Sir Ben Lockspeiser, then Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Supply, had a crisis of conscience. Ironically, Cook himself came to share a suspicion about nuclear weapons, though more for practical and political reasons than moral ones. He felt that Britain was being hasty in the production of the A-Bomb, and feared that as modern rocketry developed, the Navy would inevitably lose out. He realized too, I suspect, that our obsession with the bomb was faintly ludicrous in the face of growing American and Russian superiority. This, incidentally, was a view which was quite widely held by scientists working at a lower level in the Services in the 1950s.
    I explained to Cook that the new microphone might have as yet unforeseeable intelligence advantages, from which the Navy would obviously benefit if they agreed to fund the project. He smiled at this transparent justification but by the end of the meeting agreed to provide six Navy scientists from his staff and to finance a purpose-built laboratory at Marconi to house the work.

    Within eighteen months we were ready to demonstrate the first prototype, which was given the code name SATYR. Kemp and I presented ourselves at the front door of MI5 headquarters at Leconfield House. Hugh Winterborn met us and took us up to a spartan office on the fifth floor and introduced a tall, hunched man wearing a pin striped suit and a lopsided smile.

    "My name is Roger Hollis," he said, standing up from behind his desk and shaking my hand stiffly. "I am afraid the Director-General cannot be with us today for this demonstration, so I am standing in as his deputy."

    Hollis did not encourage small talk. His empty desk betrayed a man who believed in the swift dispatch of business. I showed him the equipment without delay. It comprised a suitcase filled with radio equipment for operating SATYR, and two aerials disguised as ordinary umbrellas which folded out to make a receiver and transmitter dish. We set SATYR up in an MI5 flat on South Audley Street with the umbrellas in Hollis' office. The test worked perfectly. We heard everything from test speech to the turn of the key in the door.

    "Wonderful, Peter," Hollis kept on saying, as we listened to the test. "It's black magic."

    Cumming tittered in the background.

    I realized then that MI5 officers, cocooned throughout the war in their hermetic buildings, had rarely experienced the thrill of a technical advance. After the test was over, Hollis stood behind his desk and made a formal little speech about what a fine day this was for the Service and how this was just what Brundrett had in mind when he formed his working party. It was all rather condescending, as if the servants had found the lost diamond tiara in the rose garden.

    SATYR did indeed prove to be a great success. The Americans promptly ordered twelve sets and rather cheekily copied the drawings and made twenty more. Throughout the 1950s, until it was superseded by new equipment, SATYR was used by the British, Americans, Canadians, and Australians as one of the best methods of obtaining covert coverage. But more important to me, the development of SATYR established my credentials as a scientist with MI5. From then on I was consulted on a regular basis about an increasing number of their technical problems.

    I still dealt exclusively with Cumming but I began to learn a little about the structure of his Department - A Branch. He controlled four sections. A1 provided resources for MI5, ranging from microphones to lockpicks. A2 was the technical department, which contained personnel like Hugh Winterborn who used the resources of A1. A3 was police liaison with the Special Branch and A4 was the growing empire of Watchers, responsible for