Secrets, spies and Daddy’s life as 006 1/ 2

FREDERICK FORSYTH says he worked for MI6 in a small capacity for years. I am glad to hear it, as many people do not believe my father Denis Wermig worked for British Intelligence all his life. He was in Naval Intelligence while serving in the war, and later shared a flat with Prince Philip in Germany. But throughout his life, until he was very old, he did a little bit of spying. James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming was in Naval Intelligence, and so was Daddy. We had East German scientists to stay, and he pretended they were German relatives. We had funny letters arriving in the post from the Eastern bloc. We had summer holidays in what is now the former Yugoslavia. He could speak six languages. Once, when I was a young girl, I picked up the phone when he was asleep and heard someone gabbling in Russian, saying: ‘Moscova, Moscova.’ When I told him, he said: ‘Oh, that’s all right, then.’ He had a microfilm reader in his desk that looked like a pen. Periodically, he disappeared beneath Admiralty Arch, where British Intelligence was based. He was very good-looking, so my husband used to call him ‘006-and-a-half’. I have a very good photo of him at that time, and a woman who came to our house thought it was a picture of George Clooney on my mantelpiece. Goodness knows what my mother was up to, but she used to be a Wren coder. And what were they doing the rest of the time? Running a horticultural business, which at the time was as big as Hilliers. Mrs Julia Wermig-Morgan, Burton Bradstock, Dorset.