Secret agent missed his stop on the Cold War Express

My Life as a Spy

Leslie Woodhead

Macmillan, 16.99

TOO many Christmas repeats of From Russia With Love mean we think Cold War spying involved high-speed car chases and gorgeous double agents in mink. Leslie Woodhead's memoir paints a rather less glamorous picture of British espionage activity at the height of the stand-off between the West and the Soviet bloc.

Woodhead first made My Life as a Spy as a documentary for the BBC. Both the film and the book tell of Woodhead's National Service in the RAF, from 1956 to 1958, and how he was selected to join the covert Joint Services School for Linguistics (JSSL) in Crail, Fife - a secret Russian language school for the military's academic elite.

Leaving behind the post-war austerity of his youth in Halifax, Woodhead's grammar school education and his acceptance for Cambridge University propelled him into a steep indoctrination in the complexities of the Cyrillic alphabet at JSSL, and then on to a posting in West Berlin, spying on the Russian air force.

Woodhead's story contains absurd moments that read like a possible script for Carry On Round Red Square, such as his description of Operation Tamarisk, which gave military linguists the squalid task of deciphering text on Russian documents used as toilet paper due to Communist loo roll shortages. On another occasion, when Woodhead manned a radio tower metres from the boundary with East Berlin (this was before the wall), supposedly listening for unusual military activity, he re-tuned to American jazz radio.

In the main, however, Woodhead is keen to underline the relentless drudgery of his time as a spy. The text is peppered with statistics relating to how many days, minutes or seconds he had left until the end of his service at any given point. He details the endless grammar drills, dictations and progress tests required to learn Russian, and makes Crail in the mid-1950s seem depressingly bleak. Even his Berlin posting, as a radio operative transcribing conversations between Russian pilots and their aircraft control, apparently lacked excitement. He writes that he felt like a trainspotter noting down scraps of information, "while the Cold War Express thundered past to an unknown destination".

Despite a few wryly comic interludes, this does not make for riveting reading. If Woodhead wants to debunk some myths about Cold War secret service activities, he certainly succeeds. Whether he has written an entertaining memoir is another matter. This is a shame, as the existence of a top-secret Russian language school for military personnel in the East Neuk is a fascinating slice of Cold War history.

My Life as a Spy does perk up somewhat in its second half, when the contemporary Woodhead revisits the scenes of his National Service, trying to work out how the experience shaped him personally and whether British spies actually did anything to prevent nuclear war.

Woodhead ends up reassured of his role in history thanks to academic Richard Aldrich's apparently enlightening observations that Berlin was the most important place to be at the time, because it was where East met West, and the monitoring of Russian military aircraft was essential to ascertain if the USSR was preparing for war. But surely, even without being 007, he could have drawn those conclusions himself?