The spy codenamed Forthwith

There is something wonderfully British about the revelation that Sergei Skripov, the Russian GRU military intelligence officer and double agent now in critical condition after being poisoned with a nerve agent, was codenamed "Forthwith" by his MI6 handlers.It is also comforting that MI6, otherwise known as the Secret Intelligence Service, is still in the serious game of recruiting agents to spill other nations' secrets. MI6 has always been good at recruiting secret agents. While the US for years depended more on signals intelligence (Sigint), the good old British spies from their Vauxhall Cross headquarters in London have prided themselves on their abilities to provide human intelligence (Humint), meeting agents on street corners wearing a Homburg hat and carrying a Harrods shopping bag. Or wearing no hat, if the "meet" has to be suddenly scrapped for fear of hostile surveillance. Spy tradecraft is a great art and it's also fun, strictly in the sense of disguises and secret "drops" and messages hidden in trees or under false rocks. The latter was used by MI6 in Moscow for some time until the FSB (KGB) cottoned on and looked under the rock! Forthwith was plucked from some MI6 codeword book for agents and, rightly or wrongly, suggests that Agent Skripal was a pretty good spy. I am indebted to my Times colleague Ben Macintyre for the Forthwith revelation and for further details about how Skripal was recruited, all of which appear in a story in The Times today. Recruiting in the spying business is done in many different ways, but there are three classic methods: first, the "walk-ins". You might think that this is the easy one, a potential spy comes into the British Embassy in Madrid or Paris or Berlin or wherever and says he wants to see the MI6 representative to offer his services. Actually it's not necessarily as easy as being offered something on a plate. The first instinct is suspicion. Could it be trap, a bluff or double bluff? But walk-ins are great if they turn out to be bona fide. Second, there's the financial spy. He's fed up being poor in Moscow and fancies going to a Chelsea football match and living in a Cotswold cottage. So when it become clear to MI6 watchers that he might be a target for recruiting if a lot of lolly is splashed around, the move is made at an embassy cocktail party or some other social event. Agent Forthwith was one of these. Third, there's the ideological spy. He hates communism, socialism, Putinism, whatever it is, and wants to live in a free society. Oleg Gordievsky, the most famous double agent working for MI6 in the last 40-50 years, was an ideological double agent. I met him after he was brought secretly to Britain when Moscow suspected he was a double agent. I did wonder how he safe he would be living in the UK as a defector. I met him in the upper floor of a famous restaurant in Soho in London. I was wearing a smart dark blue suit. He was wearing a wig and a false beard. Yes, the spying game is fun, but also, as Agent Forthwith has discovered, potetially extremely life-threatening.