The spy who fooled me
Widow discovers her late husband spent decades as secret MI5 agent who helped infiltrate the Nazis
TO Audrey Phillips, her husband of 64 years Glyn was a quiet family man.
The civil engineer loved to play for his local football team, while his wife worked as a home economics teacher.
But, entirely unkown to his wife, for several decades Mr Phillips was living a secret double life as a spy – once taking part in a crucial counter-espionage mission to help infiltrate the Nazis.
Taking his clandestine exploits to the grave, it was not until Mrs Phillips went through his papers after his death in 2015 that she discovered that he had written down his astonishing life story.
He described how he had been recruited by a mysterious MI5 figure known only as ‘The Captain’ at the age of 13 and went on to take part in missions from the Second World War until the 1960s.
The elusive Captain would appear several times during Mr Phillips’s adult life, each time with another task for him – and each time the recruit would ask: ‘Do I have a choice?’. Along with sneaking through pipes into a prison to recruit German POWs, he helped apprehend a spy working from inside an Army camp, and took part in a shady arms running operation.
Mrs Phillips, of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, said she was amazed to find her husband’s life story in 2017, two years after he died from Parkinson’s, aged 83. She said: ‘I was completely oblivious. I have so many questions now that will probably never get answered.
‘Why did I not know? I never noticed any time that he was away for a long period, as he used to work away from home quite a lot.
‘He wrote in his story that one of his missions was in a place called Portwrinkle in Cornwall. I couldn’t believe it when I read that. I didn’t even know where Portwrinkle was. I had to look it up.’
In his story, Mr Phillips recalls how he was one of 20 boys from around the country recruited by The Captain in 1944. MI5 were looking for someone interested in horses, small for their age, and with a photographic memory.
Pulled out of school, Mr Phillips was made to attend gym two afternoons a week, where he learnt selfdefence, and was made to crawl through a concrete pipe 15 feet long by 18 inches wide.
He soon learnt that this was preparation for top secret Operation XX – a counter-espionage project to get Nazi agents in Britain to broadcast misinformation back to their controllers in Germany.
Mr Phillips would crawl through concrete pipes into prisons, pass messages to German POWs, and then edge slowly out backwards.
But even after the war finished, Mr Phillips’ secret mission days were not over. In his late teens he was asked to keep an eye on a spy feeding information from inside an Army camp. He was paid £20 in exchange for the information.
In Mr Phillips’ final encounter with The Captain, he was told that he would be taken to Cornwall within days to meet a boat arriving to pick up a ‘load of arms’.
His job was to help an agent off the vessel and into a waiting dinghy before it was intercepted by two gunboats. Writing later about one of his missions, Mr Phillips admitted asking the Captain: ‘What do I tell the wife?’
Mrs Phillips has now published her husband’s extraordinary life story in a book. Operation XX And Me: Did I Have A Choice? is on sale on Amazon for £6.99.
Mrs Phillips, who has two children, five grandchildren and three greatgrandchildren, said: ‘I don’t think he was a particularly private man, usually – but I suppose he compartmentalised things. I wish I could ask him, “Why didn’t I know?”.’
‘Do I have a choice?’