When the FT's Helen Worrell was growing up, she was really into spy novels.

My dad introduced me to the John LaCarray novels when I was a teenager,

and I really love his kind of Cold War thriller-style depiction of what spying was like in those days

and that that kind of very, very incremental, slow, subtle kind of tradecraft that

John Lakerre describes.

But as Helen got older and kept reading, she realized something.

She couldn't find any women in John L Corae's books. Or in most

spy thriller books or movies, women were kind of missing from the whole genre. Especially with a lot

of the coverage of John La Carray's death last year, I started thinking actually, you know,

there aren't really any female intelligence

operatives in his stories. It just kind of set me on this sort of discussion, I suppose, with

friends and, you know, people I would talk about books with, you know, why is it that, for instance,

there's a huge history of female detectives, you know, working on

crime, but not so much female spies in the intelligence world?

Helen went into a relevant career. She spent years covering UK defense and security.

And over her time as a journalist,

she's gotten to know a few very senior real-life women spies. She recently wrote an exclusive profile of the three highest-ranked women in the British spy agency, MI6, for FT Weekend

magazine. She calls them Rebecca, Ada, and Kathy.

And they agreed to talk because they're also worried that pop culture mostly ignores them.

It makes it harder for them to recruit a diverse team of spies.

You know, there's a quote in the piece from Rebecca saying that, you know,

diversity matters more in the world of spying, you know, than it does anywhere else.

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