Espionage's secret weapon: the underestimated woman

With MI6 appointing Blaise Metreweli as its first-ever female chief, Charlotte Philby, granddaughter of one of Britain's most notorious double agents, explains why women make brilliant spies and should be recognised for their service

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It has been 15 years since I returned to Moscow for The Independent. Back then, I was a twentysomething writer, coming to terms with my father's death and the many questions about his life that remained unanswered. Among them, what was the impact of learning via a newspaper headline, at the age of 19, that his own father, Kim Philby, was a double agent?

As I trudged along Moscow's grey, snow-covered streets for the first time since I was a child, tracing my grandfather's footsteps through the city to which he absconded after being unmasked as the "Third Man" in the Cambridge Spy Ring, I found ever more questions opening up in my mind. Among them: where were all the women?

In the many books, plays and films I had encountered over the years about my grandfather's life and those he worked with as a Soviet mole, all the stories seemed to be about the men.

There were a few female faces, granted, but these were generally the secretaries or the wives - like Kim's fourth wife, Rufina (or Rufa, as we knew her), who spoke tearfully about her late husband as we sat side by side on the same sofa that was there when my parents and I visited in the 1980s, in the apartment Kim was given after arriving in the Soviet Union on a tanker from Beirut.

Listening to Rufa - who some say was given to Kim as a reward and a distraction once he arrived behind the Iron Curtain, others that she was placed there by the KGB to keep an eye on him - it was impossible not to wonder about her true part in his story. It was equally impossible to expect I'd ever find out.

Women spies have played some of the most important and varied roles in espionage throughout the ages, as I discovered in researching my new narrative non-fiction book for readers young and old.