Secrets, indeed: despite her age, Le Chene has been named as the mastermind of a vast private intelligence-gathering network that collated the identities and confidential details of nearly 150,000 left-wing activists and offered them at a price to British industrial companies.

Among her clients was the defence giant British Aerospace, now known as BAE Systems, according to a source intimate with the company??s security operations.

BAE, which has close links to Whitehall, paid Le Chene for at least four years to spy on opponents of the arms trade, according to the source.

Insight has seen computer files and thousands of pages of reports from the widespread spying operation carried out for BAE. Bank accounts were accessed, computer files downloaded and private correspondence with members of parliament and ministers secretly copied and passed on.

When samples were shown last week to members of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), a key target, one of them collapsed with shock at the extent of the personal detail they contained.

BAE said yesterday it was unable to comment on the specific allegations but would never encourage anyone to do anything illegal.

Le Chene did not respond to requests for an interview about her activities. So who is she, and how did an elegant 67-year-old living in Kent get into such business? She is certainly no Melita Norwood, the elderly widow in nearby Bexleyheath, unmasked in 1999 as a former Soviet spy. On the contrary, Le Chene is a member of the exclusive Special Forces Club and has campaigned as a dedicated anti-communist. She was previously the director of an organisation called the West European Defence Association, which warned of Soviet infiltration during the cold war.

She is now on the board of Threat Response International, a company that advises corporations on security threats. Also on the board is Barrie Gane, who has been identified in the media as a former deputy head of MI6.

As a young woman, she married Pierre Le Chene, a former British agent in Nazi-occupied France who survived the Mauthausen concentration camp and was awarded the Legion d??Honneur and MBE. She wrote books about his life.

In the past she has not avoided publicity. In 1987, eight years after her husband??s death, she attracted news headlines by confronting his former torturer, Klaus Barbie, the ??Butcher of Lyons??, who was on trial.

Nine years ago she wrote an acclaimed book about animal ??heroes?? of warfare, including a cat called Simon and a pigeon called Winkie. But it was at about this time that she was also developing her hidden life as a ??woman of secrets??.

She was first approached by the security office at BAE to carry out surveillance work in the mid-1990s, according to a source. At the time, she had been running a company innocuously named R&CA Publications from an office in an industrial estate in Rochester, Kent. Both the company and the office have since closed. Le Chene was chosen by BAE because she specialised in ??human?? intelligence. ??She wasn??t very good at tapping phones or doing dustbins, but she was very good at running agents,?? one source close to BAE said last week.

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