Leslie Woodhead spent his National Service learning Russian at the Joint Servies School for Linguists in Fife and then used his new-found skills listening in on Soviet radio messages. In My Life as a Spy the director recalls his contribution to the Cold War.
BBC Four: Was it nostalgia that set you making a film on this part of your life?
Leslie Woodhead: I've thought about it for many years. In fact I once wrote to Alan Bennett and suggested we did a play about it. I guess what actually turned it into a documentary was telling Nick Fraser. He said, "That's extraordinary. Have you ever thought about doing a film about it?" So it came out of a conversation with him.
Just as with Bennett and Michael Frayn, the Russian course and learning Russian informed the rest of their lives, in some way it did for me too. I'm now writing a book that's also called My Life as a Spy which is about this but also about other areas of my obsession with the Evil Empire and the "World behind the Wall". I think I've done a dozen films about that in various ways over the years.
BBC Four: There's a sense from the film that a lot of your fellow spy school graduates thought it was little more than a lark. What are your thoughts on your contribution to the Cold War?
LW: At the time, foot soldiers like me were more trainspotters than spies who had no idea what the bigger picture was. We scribbled away in the darkened room every day and what we wrote was spirited away to some analysis place and then sent to GCHQ. But why we were doing it and how it might make a difference wasn't for us to know.
Until I started working on this film I really had no sense what its bigger purpose was. So inevitably I would have been among those who thought it was an agreeable waste of time. Doing the film and talking to people like Richard Aldrich from Nottingham University, who know about intelligence and the Cold War, talking to other witnesses and retracing my steps, has changed my view of its relevance. As Aldrich says, what we were doing was "war warning". Once you know the way things are supposed to be, if you make the most meticulous observations on a day-to-day basis you can get very early indications if a "huge animal" as he puts it, like the Soviet army, is about to invade. What we were doing, it is now apparent, was contributing to that mass of detail that was telling the analysts what it all amounted to.
BBC Four: Since you've made so many films about the Cold War did you ever look back and think of your own role as a footnote to it all?
LW: Very much so. When I went to Moscow in 1986 with a TV delegation, shortly after Gorby had come to power, I remember going to the checkpoint at immigration and the guy looked at me very hard and said apropos of absolutely nothing, "Do you speak Russian?" I thought, "Christ! What does he know? Why does he know it?" In fact it was a completely meaningless enquiry. Unfortunately I was so startled I said, "Niet" which was completely the wrong thing to say!
BBC Four: Did you enjoy going up to the base in Scotland where you trained?
LW: It was absolutely fascinating. I fully expected there to be a housing estate on the camp. Weirdly enough, because it's been preserved as an historic site, it's a pig farm. But all the stuff is there. It's very unusual that you go back to something getting on 50 years after being there. I went into the place that had been the camp gymnasium and I remembered the agonies of having to shin up ropes hanging from the ceiling. As I walked through the door one of these ropes was hanging down in front of my face. That was an absolutely spooky experience - the same rope that I'd laboured over all those years ago was still there. The same was true of Berlin. To go back to RAF Gatow, where I'd been for the best part of a year and to find it was now a Luftwaffe base was the ultimate irony. I was amazed that they let me in. It was all extraordinary recognisable.
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