THE SPIES WHO LOVED ME

From an early age, Alistair Wood knew his family was different... he was raised in an M16 training camp, his mother stashed cyanide in her underwear drawer and his father once kidnapped his brother en route to Canada. Now, 50 years on, he has revealed all in a brilliant new memoir

- By Charlotte Heathcote

AS A child, Alistair Wood had been aware that there was something unusual about his parents. In a small attic space above the garage of their family home in Woking, Surrey, he and his brother found shotguns hidden under the lagging. His mother showed him the cyanide pill she hid in her underwear drawer. And, while digging a vegetable patch in the back garden, he found buried radio parts.

Alistair's father had left when he was just a baby but, when he was 13, the family went to live in a Secret Intelligence Service training camp, which is where he spent his formative years. However, amid a culture of secrecy and subterfuge, it took Alistair years to piece together his parents' startling stories of SIS spy craft. "And when something's not talked about, it makes you more curious," he says.

John Bryan Wood, or JBW as even Alistair called his father at their occasional out-of-the-blue meetings spent the Second World War tracking Nazi agents in Argentina. During the Cold War, he was integral to MI6's secret project to dig a tunnel beneath Berlin for the interception of KGB communications.

It was also in Berlin that he met Alistair's mother Margaret Miller, an SIS secretary. She was despatched into enemy territory, on one occasion acting as a double for a spy whose cover had been blown, and on another, assessing sites for excavating the top-secret tunnel.

Then in 1956, a mole leaked the existence of the Berlin tunnel to the Soviets, which sparked fears that JBW was a double agent. JBW was also spotted entering the KGB office in Helsinki. So he was duly ejected from SIS, under the guise of resignation, although it was George Blake who was later unmasked as the KGB mole.

"He was booted out of SIS quite rightly, but on a technicality," says Alistair. "He was innocent of the reason why they booted him out."