The Times, 21 March 2010
For more than 40 years Mike Lesser has lived with a nuclear secret that once had him on the run from MI5.
This weekend the retired mathematician from London has broken his silence to confess that he was one of the “spies for peace” who caused uproar in the 1960s. He was, he admits, responsible for uncovering Britain’s secret network of undergound bunkers built to protect the government in case of nuclear war.
The prime minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, declared the revelations a breach of national security and the home secretary branded the spies traitors. Despite a huge investigation by MI5 and Special Branch police, the “spies” were never arrested.
Lesser, who fled the country shortly after breaking into one of the bunkers and publicising its existence, fears he could still face prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. However, this weekend he said: “It has been a stressful secret to keep all of this time and I think the time is now right to tell the story.
“Nuclear weapons are still a threat and speaking out like this will hopefully breathe new life into the anti-nuclear campaign. If they decide to punish me now, then so be it.”
Lesser’s involvement began as a 16-year-old after he was asked to leave Charterhouse, the independent school, and fell in with the Committee of 100, a group campaigning for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Its members included Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, John Osborne, the playwright, and Robert Bolt, who wrote such films as Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago.
On February 16, 1963, Lesser and three of his fellow spies for peace acted on a tip-off that a workman was claiming to have installed equipment in a bunker close to Warren Row, just outside Reading. The codename for the site was RSG-6 — Regional Seat of Government 6.
Lesser recalled: “It took us several hours to find it, but as soon as we saw it we knew we had found something significant. The bunker was locked, but next to the main gate there was the door to a boiler room.”
They managed to get in: “Once inside the boiler room there was another door leading to an underground complex and we went down. The first chamber we got to was deserted and there were papers scattered everywhere. We just grabbed as many as possible.”
