‘Secret Servants’: The Women That Worked for MI6

Thanks to the recent declassification of once top-secret British documents, Claire Hubbard-Hall sheds light on the brave women working in British intelligence.

"Secret Servants of the Crown: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence" by Claire Hubbard-Hall.

Women played important roles in British intelligence for over 100 years. They served as analysts, interrogators, and spies, worked in cryptography and at codebreaking even before they had the right to vote in Britain. During World War II, they ran agents and double-agents, and even managed intelligence archives.

Most carried their secrets to their graves, never revealing what they really did. Mistaken for stenographers, secretaries, typists, and receptionists, they were content for the misconceptions to serve further cover for their real activities. In intelligence, it paid to be underestimated.

“Secret Servants of the Crown: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence” removes the veil of secrecy from these women. Using declassified files and private documents, author Claire Hubbard-Hall gives a face to these previously anonymous women. It recounts their activities from before World War I through the 1960s of the Cold War. She examines their roles at Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, MI5 (Domestic Intelligence) MI6 (Foreign Intelligence), the XX Bureau (the Double Cross program), Enigma (codebreaking), and within the different intelligence services of the British Armed Forces.

Secretary, Stenographer ... Spy

“Secret Servants” reveals a kaleidoscopic array of fascinating characters. Kathleen Pettigrew started in the Special Branch and later worked in MI6. She interrogated Mata Hari during WWI. In WWII, as MI6 director Stewart Menzies’ personal assistant, she became the model for Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny. Pettigrew even helped unmask the double-agent Kim Philby.

The four Lunn sisters, Clara, Edith, Lucy and Peggy, were translators and agents from WWI into the 1930s, stationed throughout Europe from Helsinki to Constantinople. Olga Grey infiltrated the Communist Party of Britain during the 1930s. She exposed the Woolwich Arsenal spy circle. Winnie Spink was an MI6 agent in Russia during the rise of the Bolsheviks.

Rita Winsor and Ena Molesworth spied on Nazi Germany before WWII, using their positions at the Passport Control Office as cover for their MI6 activities. They made a daring escape across France in spring of 1940 to escape the onrushing Wehrmacht. The pair “retired” from intelligence services in the late 1950s to start a travel agency. They led tour groups through the Soviet Union and China, and during trips they gathered intelligence on the side. 

Claire Hubbard-Hall extracts these and many other women from obscurity, piecing together their stories from fragmentary clues. Whether readers are interested in spy novels or histories of espionage and counterespionage, this book will fascinate them. Claire Hubbard-Hall has turned a light on an overlooked and largely ignored corner of the intelligence world.

’Secret Servants of the Crown: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence‘ By Claire Hubbard-Hall Citadel, Feb. 25, 2025 ‎ Hardcover: 352 pages

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