A LEGENDARY figure in MI5 who was reputed to be the model for one of John le Carré’s characters in the Cold War Smiley series, has died at the age of 99.

Milicent Bagot, a spinster devoted to her secret work, knew more about the spread of Communism than anyone else in MI5, which was why she was thought to be the model for Connie Sachs, the eccentric Soviet expert in Smiley’s People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Le Carré — the pseudonym of David Cornwell — placed his Connie Sachs character inside MI6, but the author worked for MI5 and MI6 and, according to security sources yesterday, Ms Bagot was always considered inside MI5 to be the model for “Connie”.

They shared the same extraordinary knowledge of the Soviet Communist threat and were similar characters, although, reputedly, there was another woman working in MI6 in the same Cold War period who was another potential Connie model.

However, Ms Bagot, an Oxford graduate, had other claims to fame inside the service. Nigel West, the author of several spy and intelligence books, said that she was the first person to warn MI5 that Harold “Kim” Philby, the MI6 officer who was a Soviet KGB double agent, had been a member of the Communist Party. “She didn’t know that Philby was spying for the Russians, but in 1951 she told a senior MI5 officer that she knew from a secret source that Philby was a Communist,” West said.

“When Philby was asked if he had been a Communist, he denied it, and that’s what eventually brought him down. He had to resign from MI6.”

In 1963 Nicholas Elliott, an MI6 officer, flew to Beirut, where Philby was working as a journalist though still employed by MI6 on a freelance basis. He confronted Philby with evidence from key KGB defectors that he was part of a ring of British spies. Philby confessed and fled to Moscow.

“Milicent Bagot was not involved in exposing Philby as a spy, but she knew that he was a Communist, although she never revealed how she knew this,” West said.

Ms Bagot, who died last week in a nursing home, was also the author of the definitive inside account of the Zinoviev affair: the publication in 1924 of a letter allegedly written by Grigori Zinoviev, president of the executive committee of the Comintern, the Soviet body responsible for overseas propaganda, which urged the working class in Britain to rise in an armed insurrection.

The letter was a forgery, aimed at undermining Anglo-Soviet treaties signed by Moscow and the Labour Government of Ramsay MacDonald. Publication of the Zinoviev Letter in a newspaper led to the abandonment of the treaties and the fall of the MacDonald Government. There were questions over whether MI5 or MI6 had been involved in leaking the forged letter.

When the affair was revived in 1967 with the publication of a book by The Sunday Times Insight team, Ms Bagot, then just retired, was asked to look at intelligence files and to write a secret report. Her memorandum was never published as it contained sensitive operational and personnel information.

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