Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton grew up knowing his mother had led an “amazing life.” But there was one chapter she rarely spoke about.
After World War II, Sue Lowther-Pinkerton joined MI5 and worked in British intelligence during the Cold War. But she revealed little to her children about that part of her past.
Decades ago, while watching a documentary with her children, Sue let something slip.
“We were watching one afternoon about 30, 40 years ago,” Lowther-Pinkerton recalled to Fox News Digital. “And there was a thing called the Cambridge spy ring, which were Soviet agents who had infiltrated the British system. And there was a great mystery about who the fifth man was. And up pops the documentary maker saying, Well, it could be Sir Roger Hollis.”
Hollis served as director general of MI5 from 1956 to 1965. He later became the subject of allegations that he had secretly worked for the Soviet Union, claims that were investigated but never proven.
Sue didn’t hesitate.
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“My mother, without missing a knitting stitch, said, Absolute nonsense. He was a total gentleman and a patriot.”
“[My sister and I] both looked at her sideways as if she was completely mad,” Lowther-Pinkerton said. “I tried to get more out of her, but she was of that generation who quite rightly just didnt want to talk about it.”
Lowther-Pinkerton said he was in his mid-20s before he and his older sister learned of their mother’s intelligence career.
MI5, formally known as the Security Service, is Britain’s domestic intelligence agency. According to MI5’s official history, the agency traces its origins to the Secret Service Bureau, established in 1909. The bureau was later divided into domestic and foreign sections that developed into MI5 and MI6.
That rare glimpse into his mother’s past stayed with Lowther-Pinkerton for decades. Now, her extraordinary life has helped inspire his novel, “Beyond the Edge of Light,” a wartime love story. Its central character, Missie, a rebellious young woman who joins military intelligence, was inspired by Sue, who died in 2023 at age 99.
Long before Sue entered the secretive world of MI5, she had already lived a life of adventure.
unfolded, she worked on NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) vans serving tea and food to troops and painted white lines on roads before she was old enough to enlist. In 1942, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the womens branch of the British Army.
She was later posted to the Royal School of Artillery at Larkhill, where she drove gun limbers â vehicles used to transport artillery equipment â across firing ranges. Because the work was considered dangerous, she received an additional four pence a day.
After the war, her work took her into an even more secret world.
“She went into secret service,” Lowther-Pinkerton said. “So she joined MI5, which was the equivalent. It’s a sort of mixture between the FBI, I think, and the CIA. And she was in that during the Cold War.”
Sue’s intelligence career began even before she joined MI5. According to The Telegraph’s obituary, she worked in Army intelligence in Singapore after leaving the military in 1948. There, she was entrusted with secret communications concerning HMS Amethyst’s planned 1949 breakout from China’s Yangtze River.
After returning to Britain in 1951, Sue joined MI5 and worked at Leconfield House. But she remained fiercely guarded about what she did there â even with her son, who would go on to serve in the Irish Guards and the Special Air Servic
