Milicent Jessie Eleanor Bagot,

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding valuable service in a wide range of useful activities. It comprises five classes of awards across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two o ...

(28 March 1907 – 26 May 2006) was a

British intelligence The Government of the United Kingdom maintains several intelligence agencies that deal with secret intelligence. These agencies are responsible for collecting, analysing and exploiting foreign and domestic intelligence, providing military intell ...

officer. She was the purported model for the character

Connie Sachs Connie Sachs is a fictional character created by John le Carré. Sachs plays a key supporting role in the Karla Trilogy, '' Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'', '' The Honourable Schoolboy'', and '' Smiley's People''. Biography Sachs is an eccentric a ...

, the eccentric

Sovietology Kremlinology is the study and analysis of the politics and policies of the Soviet Union while Sovietology is the study of politics and policies of both the Soviet Union and former Communist states more generally. These two terms were synonymous unt ...

expert who appeared in

John le Carré David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 193112 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré ( ), was a British author, best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. A "sophist ...

's novels ''

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ''Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'' is a 1974 spy novel by the author and former spy John le Carré. It follows the endeavours of the taciturn, ageing spymaster George Smiley to uncover a Soviet mole in the British Secret Intelligence Service. The ...

'', ''

The Honourable Schoolboy ''The Honourable Schoolboy'' is 1977 a spy novel by John le Carré. George Smiley must reconstruct an intelligence service in order to run a successful offensive espionage operation to save the service from being dismantled by the government. I ...

'' and ''

Smiley's People ''Smiley's People'' is a 1979 spy novel by John le Carré. The novel features a British master-spy George Smiley. It is the third and final novel of the " Karla Trilogy", following '' Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'' and '' The Honourable Schoolbo ...

'', and the character of Muriel Edge in two of the 'Troy' novels by John Lawton – ''Black Out'' and ''Old Flames''.

Early life and education

Milicent Jessie Eleanor Bagot was born on 28 March 1907 to Ethel (née Garratt) (d. 1944) and Cecil Villiers Bagot, MA (1865–1940), a London solicitor. She was the paternal great-great-granddaughter of

William Bagot, 1st Baron Bagot William Bagot, 1st Baron Bagot (28 February 1728 – 22 October 1798), known as Sir William Bagot, 6th Baronet, from 1768 to 1780, was a British politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1754 to 1780. He was then raised to the peerage as B ...

, 6th Baronet and the maternal granddaughter of Jesse Garratt, of Wateringbury, Kent. Bagot was educated at

Putney High School Putney High School, GDST is an independent girls' day school in Putney, London. Often referred to as simply Putney, the school admits students from the ages 4–18. Founded in 1893 it is a member of the Girls' Day School Trust, a union of 26 ...

and

Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford Lady Margaret Hall (LMH) is a Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent college of the University of Oxford in England, located on a bank of the River Cherwell at Norham Gardens in north Oxford and adjacent to the University Parks. The ...

(MA), where she took a Class IV in

Classical Moderations Honour Moderations (or ''Mods'') are a set of examinations at the University of Oxford at the end of the first part of some degree courses (e.g., Greats or '' Literae Humaniores''). Honour Moderations candidates have a class awarded (hence the ...

in 1927.

Career

Bagot began work as a temporary registry clerk with the Metropolitan Police Special Branch in 1929, at the age of 22. She entered the

Ministry of Defence A ministry of defence or defense (see American and British English spelling differences#-ce.2C -se, spelling differences), also known as a department of defence or defense, is the part of a government responsible for matters of defence and Mi ...

from

Scotland Yard Scotland Yard (officially New Scotland Yard) is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing Greater London's London boroughs, 32 boroughs. Its name derives from the location of the original ...

as a secretary in 1931, when her section was transferred to

MI5 MI5 ( Military Intelligence, Section 5), officially the Security Service, is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Gov ...

. The move resulted in a forced significant pay cut of £8 a year, a not inconsiderable sum at the time. She went on to work for both MI5 and

MI6 The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...

. During her long career Bagot became one of the security service's principal experts on

Soviet Communism Before the perestroika reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev that promoted a more liberal form of socialism, the formal ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was Marxism–Leninism, a form of socialism consisting of a centralise ...

. She was the first person to warn MI5 that

Kim Philby Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 191211 May 1988) was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. In 1963, he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring that had divulged British secr ...

, MI6 officer and

Soviet The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

KGB The Committee for State Security (, ), abbreviated as KGB (, ; ) was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, Joint State Polit ...

double agent In the field of counterintelligence, a double agent is an employee of a secret intelligence service for one country, whose primary purpose is to spy on a target organization of another country, but who is now spying on their own country's organi ...

, had been a member of the Communist party. Philby's denial of this fact led to his eventual resignation from MI6, and his flight to

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

. Bagot also wrote a definitive account of the 1924 Zinoviev Affair in which a forged letter purported to be from

Grigory Zinoviev Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev (born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky; – 25 August 1936) was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician. A prominent Old Bolsheviks, Old Bolshevik, Zinoviev was a close associate of Vladimir Lenin prior to ...

, president of the executive committee of the

Comintern The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern and also known as the Third International, was a political international which existed from 1919 to 1943 and advocated world communism. Emerging from the collapse of the Second Internatio ...

, urged the

British working class The social structure of the United Kingdom has historically been highly influenced by the concept of social class, which continues to affect British society today. British society, like its European neighbours and most societies in world history, ...

to rise up in an armed insurrection. The publication of the letter is thought by some to have had an effect on the subsequent electoral defeat of the

Ramsay MacDonald James Ramsay MacDonald (; 12 October 18669 November 1937) was a British statesman and politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The first two of his governments belonged to the Labour Party (UK), Labour Party, where he led ...

-led Labour Government. It has also been suggested that MI5 or MI6 may have been involved in leaking the forged letter, which probably originated from anti-Soviet emigrants living in Latvia. During the Second World War Bagot worked as a clerk in the Registry and the counter subversion section, at Wormwood Scrubs and later at Blenheim Palace. She later spent time in the Middle East advising on how to counter Soviet subversion to British authorities in the area. By the late 1940s she was recognised as a leading expert on Soviet Communism. Her knowledge was supposed to have impressed J Edgar Hoover. In 1949 she was promoted to officer. In 1953 Bagot became the first female intelligence officer in MI5 to reach the rank of Assistant Director, taking charge of an Overseas Branch section. She retired in 1967.

Recognition and commemoration

Bagot was made an MBE in 1949 and promoted to

in 1967. She lived in

Putney Putney () is an affluent district in southwest London, England, in the London Borough of Wandsworth, southwest of Charing Cross. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London. History Putney is an ...

for most of her life. A

blue plaque A blue plaque is a permanent sign installed in a public place in the United Kingdom, and certain other countries and territories, to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person, event, or former building on the site, serving a ...

was unveiled on 15 October 2021 at Milicent Bagot's former home in Putney.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bagot, Milicent 1907 births 2006 deaths Alumni of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford MI6 personnel Commanders of the Order of the British Empire MI5 personnel People from Putney