By Withered Vine, Our London Fashion Correspondent (and Daily Mail reader)



"Scottish independence could make it easier for Russian submarines to loiter off the north British coast, eavesdropping on our security services", says a Whitehall expert.

Lord Hennessy, a Crossbench peer who is a historian and former journalist, knows more about the country's secret cubby-holes than most people.

This week he made a deservedly little-noticed parliamentary speech that urged politicians to wake up to the spy-world implications of an independent Scotland.

Would a free Scotland bother to run an intelligence network?

"Would it want its own security agency with a 'McC' in Edinburgh?", he asked (C being the traditional codename for the head of MI6).

"Would we see aerials and antennae springing out of the Cheviot Hills (straddling the English-Scottish border)?

"Would those old, Cold War listening stations on the north-east coast of Scotland crackle back into aural life? In submarine terms, who would warn the Scottish government of a Russian Akula lurking in the Minches (two straits off the West Coast of Scotland)?

Would a Scottish intelligence officer from the Scottish High Commission in London take his or her place every week at the Joint Intelligence Committee alongside the American, Canadian and Australian representatives?"

When my colleague, Quentin Letts, spoke to him, Hennessy said he was deadly serious about the threat of subs prowling off the northern shores.

"The Russians are putting out their subs more than they used to. They have some very sophisticated submarines. People forget about the underwater aspect of intelligence", he said.

"The only way to counter such snooping is to deploy subs of one's own (such as the Royal Navy has). Would a Scottish navy run to such vessels?

The threat to English and Welsh national security is not an idle one, says Lord Hennessy, who notes that some of our finest spies have been Scottish.

He fears that politicians have not started to contemplate these serious matters. Or, as he puts it, "The secret world is not thought about because it does not go round with bagpipes, swinging kilts."

Head of Intelligence at the Russian Embassy, Ivan Offybigwanski (known to us girls as "Bunny Wabbit") took time after the Burns supper he was hosting, and escorted me to a 'safe house' where we had long and intimate discussions about the story.

Bunny said that the Russians had a very poor opinion of MI6, mainly because they provided most of the staff for it. "Our subs aren't spying on the Brits. We're keeping an eye on the American subs. It can get very crowded in the Minches with so many subs tailing each other. It's like a scene from 'The Hunt for Red October' - just like the Solent."

"Anyway, the Brits are really useless. We leaked a coded message to them 60 years ago that they are still trying to decode. It read S37OHSSV-0773H. None of them thought just to turn it upside down."

Then he dimmed the light and whispered, "Now, come here, and I'll give you a richt Ian Davidson ......... " (Censored, Ed)

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