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Could YOU love a spy? But for this woman, dating a real-life James Bond left her more shaken than stirred

For many it's the ultimate fantasy. But for this woman, dating a real-life JamesBond left her more shaken than stirred

By ANONYMOUS
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Spies are lurking everywhere at the moment. The film version of John le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came out recently, the papers are full of stories about the Russian blonde accused of spying after affairs with MP Mike Hancock — and the final episode of Spooks was broadcast last night.

The buzz around Spooks reminded me that, when it first aired in spring 2002, it was every woman’s fantasy to go out with the fictional MI5 agent Tom Quinn, played by Matthew Macfadyen.

I, however, was unwittingly dating a real-life version. We’d been vague friends since university, but I’d never considered him boyfriend material — he was a little square. 

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But three years later, when we bumped into each other in London, he’d changed. He was suave, smart and charming. We swapped numbers and agreed to meet up. He was witty, clever and fun to be with — we’d go to Noel Coward plays, watch arty foreign films, visit exhibitions and dance the night away at jazz clubs.

With all this culture I failed to notice that he was increasingly inscrutable — our activity-filled dates meant we weren’t having deeply personal conversations about ourselves like most newly-infatuated couples.

I’d never visited his flat and he didn’t talk about work. I wasn’t worried because I knew he was a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence and what little he’d told me sounded so dull, I never really thought to ask more.

But cracks were starting to appear. He was often late for our dates, or  cancelled altogether. He was constantly apologising for having to take calls, or for failing to show up with no good explanation. I began to wonder if he might even be dating someone else.

Then one afternoon, several months into our relationship, I was running late for a date. His mobile was off when I rang it, so I called the MoD switchboard. The operator said they couldn’t find him on the system.

Alarm bells rang in my head. Did I know which office he worked in? I did not.

‘Perhaps he works in a different department.’ No, I was sure I knew where he worked.

Despite not being able to tell him I was 30 minutes late, he was still there when I got to dinner that evening. Unwittingly, I found myself talking about Spooks; what must it be like to be a spy, how impossibly exciting yet incredibly difficult it must be not to be able to tell anyone about it.

My usually cool and confident beau shuffled in his seat and looked awkward. Taking my hand, in hushed tones he explained that he worked for MI5. I looked at him in amazement and laughed in disbelief. I’d known him for a decade and we’d been together for several months in a serious relationship — I had fallen in love with him.

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I was desperate to ask him about it, to piece together his erratic behaviour and missed dates. Most of all, I wanted to know more about it. My boyfriend was a spy. A spy!

The worst thing about finding out this gossip of the century? I couldn’t tell anyone about it. To this day, I’ve never told my family about his true identity and disclosed only the briefest of information to two close friends since.

He told stories about the recruitment process, in which he had to walk into an unknown bar and extract the name, passport number and home address from three strangers by any means possible, and a test which involved being kidnapped at random and then interrogated to see how he’d cope with the real thing.

He also told me about the time that Sinn Fein politician Martin McGuinness had wandered into MI5 HQ, (Thames House on London’s Millbank), asking for directions to Tate Britain — with no clue of the function of the offices he was standing in.

They were fascinating tales —were they true? I certainly believed everything he said but then, until five minutes before this, I’d believed he was a civil servant in the MoD.

Later, I began to feel angry and foolish at what I saw as a betrayal — I called him conceited and deceitful and he looked appalled and hurt by the accusation.

What I saw as brazenly and intentionally playing with people’s feelings, to him was about serving his country. He’d never chosen the ugly, but unavoidable, side-effects that his job would play on his private life.

Watching Spooks, I’d always thought how glamorous and exciting it would be to go out with someone in the secret service, but the reality was  horribly different.

Had I been secretly vetted before he could even go out with me? Was my mobile phone bugged or being monitored? Or my emails?

To this day I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I’m still wary of talking about him, just in case. Even though he assured me that spies no longer had to be as secretive, I imagined a future with him that would be filled with lines we couldn’t cross.

And if we were to stay together, my own safety and our future children’s could also be at risk. It ate away at me and I couldn’t let it go. Whenever a story broke in the press about terrorists being arrested or another international drug ring being smashed, I would wonder if he’d been involved in any way, and then feel afraid.

Sometimes he told me about big achievements — drugs hauls, the uncovering of terrorist cells — but only in the most general of details. I knew not to dig any deeper, not least because of my job as a journalist — the one profession MI5 dreads its agents getting involved with.

I loved him dearly and, before I found out about his other life, I really believed he could be the future father of my children. But you can’t ‘un-know’ something and once I found out his secret, it drove us apart — it’s very hard to get over the fact that you’ve been lied to, and you become suspicious about everything else.

I think handled our break-up rather badly and I feel guilty thinking about it now — I made excuses not to see him.

When I finally met him and told him I didn’t think we had a future together, he begged me to reconsider — but I knew that the job would always come first and I wasn’t prepared to play second fiddle to MI5. The spell had been broken. I felt sad for him, because it must be so difficult to know who to trust and he had chosen me.

Life as a spy must be insular, isolating and small — in ending our relationship, I made his world that bit smaller. I’m still sorry I failed to cope with the honourable burden of his job, but I was young and naïve then.

He loved me, and I him, but I couldn’t live with the shadowy spectre of MI5 that haunted our relationship.

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