I can forget people's names two minutes after being introduced to them, but I retain a lot of seemingly unimportant details which can be terribly important when dealing with a mass of paperwork on your desk or when you are out in the field trying to remember what your brief was. I am not entirely sure what they liked about me, but I have always had a good memory for small details.
You would be laughing if you could look around a room, point and say: "That's the type, that's the person." The idea is that you get as many reasonably intelligent and varied men and women into the job as possible. They look for independent, self-driven people, who do not fit into a particular pigeonhole. There is no "spy type" that secret service recruiters look for. The net is now thrown much wider, though you can still get the tap on the shoulder at university. I was recruited in that old fashioned way, but of course these days the service has a website and a recruitment team which goes round universities and run open evenings at various places. I thought even if I move on from this, it's got to be a once in a lifetime opportunity and it will be interesting to find out what the job is really about. But one interview followed on to the next and I was sent on a training course. It just hadn't come across my radar at all. I didn't even know the difference between MI5 or MI6. I knew the job wasn't going to be James Bond but I was curious to know more. He stood there and replied: "Have you ever thought of working for your country?" I had no idea what he was talking about, but I just said: "Yeah, sure." After that I got an envelope in my pigeonhole from an anonymous government department inviting me up to London for an interview. I was in my final year at Oxford University when my tutor came to me one day and said: "What are you thinking of doing with your career?" I told him I was thinking of the police or the army. I was recruited by the secret service during the cold war.
#Undercover ops game series
As well as a frequent commentator on espionage, Ferguson is currently helping to promote the hit US TV series The Blacklist, starring James Spader as a master criminal turned FBI informer. In 2005, he starred with Mike Baker of the CIA in the BBC2 series Spy and wrote the book accompanying the series: Spy – A Handbook. H arry Ferguson is a former MI6 intelligence officer and was an undercover agent for the National Investigation Service (NIS).