'I worked as a secret agent - the grim reality is nothing like a James Bond movie'

A real-life who operated as a spy behind the Iron Curtain has revealed what life was really like as an undercover agent for the British intelligence services.

Forget Martinis shaken, not stirred - former intelligence officer Will Britten says real-life spies are more likely to end up smelling like boss Jackson Lamb than sipping posh cocktails.

Recalling a mission, when he was tasked with rummaging for clues through rotting rubbish, he tells The : “In the summer it was absolutely revolting, the stench, bugs, creatures, maggots, you could feel the rubbish moving.

“I didn’t mind it so much, as the time passed quickly, but the smell was pretty awful and lingered on your clothes for days. There were a couple of dumps that were close to Soviet military and some agents came across needles, syringes and even limbs. People think intelligence work is glamorous or sexy but, in reality, it’s a lot of grind.”

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Will, 65, was a senior officer in BRIXMIS (the British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany), a top-secret elite intelligence-gathering unit of the British Army, operating behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany during the Cold War. After the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, an agreement was established between the UK, United States and the Soviet Union to facilitate liaison between their military governments in occupied Germany.

It was 1989 when Will arrived - just six months before the wall between East and West Germany came down. As a British agent, he had to stay one step ahead of any British ‘enemies,’ playing a vital role as part of NATO’s early warning system. “We found some fascinating military intelligence,” Will says. “Nothing that was classified, but we confirmed that in the Soviets were using chemical weapons through finds on rubbish dumps in East Germany.

"Whenever new equipment came into the Soviet arsenal, it always reappeared in the DDR on the frontline. “We had a very important role in providing technical intelligence, looking at new equipment and how it was used tactically. It allowed our side to evaluate how effective the equipment was and for Nato to take counter measures to negate any advantage the Soviet had. Our job was to stay ahead of what the East block was doing.”

In his book Over the Wall: A BRIXMIS Intelligence Officer Behind the Iron Curtain, Will reveals how every day from 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, agents would tour East Germany in three-man teams with their ears to the ground, looking for clues and watching and recording the military activity of their Cold War enemies.

When they weren’t rummaging through rancid garbage, agents would observe from cover, making full use of camouflage - often hiding out in a G-Wagen which could be easily mistaken for the UAZ-469 Russian jeep. While 007 would have his Aston Martin and his watch with a remote explosive detonator to help him defeat the enemy, BRIXMIS agents only had thermal imaging gear, cameras and cassette recorders to help them.

“We were stalkers, in the traditional, purist sense,” Will adds. “To do the job well, you have to understand the environment within which you’re working, the threats that you’re facing and how far you can push those threats.”

All tours began at the Glienicke Bridge, the infamous exchange point for Cold War spy swaps, which marked the frontier between Berlin and Potsdam, the border between east and west. More than three decades later, Will still remembers clearly what it felt like crossing over the Glenicke bridge to Potsdam.

“It was like you were in another - you were face to face with communism, in amongst the enemy, seeing the citizens of East Germany going about their routines,” he explains. “One really did enter another land, as part of another world, at another point in history – in a word, a parallel civilisation different in every conceivable way - it was that stark. There were few bright lights, little evidence of the aggressive in-your-face advertising of the West, and few enticing shop fronts - it was a land of opposites.”

He also recalls how The DDR was dotted with beautiful unspoilt villages, which had escaped the ravages of the Second World War, as the Soviet Army had bypassed them in the race for Berlin. “Not everything was negative - there were spectacular towns and cities, rich in architectural and historical splendour, where the absence of aggressive consumerism and ugly modernity enhanced a more simple purity and beauty,” he says. “When we stopped to augment our diet with ice cream or cakes, and to make other small purchases, we were not infrequently met with smiles and enquiring and engaging openness."

One date seared into his memory is November 9, 1989 - a day that started like any other. Will remembers how winter was beckoning and it was business as usual in the run-up to . But just after 7pm he got a phone call from his colleague Gary asking him if he’d heard about ‘the Wall.’ Crowds of East German citizens had started to build up on the Potsdam side of the Glienicke Bridge and were seeking to push through the Russian military security there.

There were similar mass gatherings at the main crossing points through the Wall on the eastern side of Berlin city centre, according to reports. It was a complete surprise to everyone. Erich Honecker, the country’s leader, had begun the year stating boldly in a speech that the Wall would still be standing 50 or even 100 years in the future - but, if the rumours were true, this was no longer the case.

Rushing to the scene, looking from the ‘quiet side’ of the bridge, what Will and Gary saw was “truly unbelievable.” “Gary and I had been the last Allied officers to recross into the west from the ‘old’ DDR,” Will explains. “The bridge we surveyed in awe was not our Glienicke Bridge.” A mass of laughing, crying, shouting Potsdamers were excitedly pushing their way past the bewildered guard force – made up of Red Army and East German police. “I took in the sights, sucked up the atmosphere and took an awful lot of pictures. The sheer intensity of emotion was something I had never experienced before or since,” says Will.

Witnessing the collapse of the Berlin Wall has undoubtedly been one of the highlights of Will’s remarkable career in the British Army, but there have been other times he will also never forget. “I’ve been shot at, mortared and artillery shelled, because that’s the nature of war - and when you’re working in intelligence you can be on the frontline and beyond the frontline,” he explains, reflecting on the abduction and murder of military intelligence officer Captain Robert Nairac.

“There’s always the potential for things to go wrong - in Northern Ireland Robert Nairac pushed things so far that things went wrong and he was shot dead by the IRA just south of the border,” he says. Captain Nairac was abducted by republicans from a pub in South Armagh, during an undercover operation in 1977 and killed by the IRA.

Yet, despite the threat to his life, Will says he never felt scared and just saw it as part of the job. “I found myself dissociating from what was happening around me, observing the event as a spectator, it felt like it wasn’t happening to me,” he says. “Being a real life spy is different to what you see on TV. The main difference is that, as an intelligence officer, if you get yourself into trouble then you’ve failed in the job. If we’d have got into some of the scrapes James Bond found himself in, we would have been sacked.”

Over the Wall: A BRIXMIS Intelligence Officer Behind the Iron Curtain is published by The History Press and is out on April 24.