Sue Arnold: Never a Mata Hari, I was just not a good spy

'If I could get as much info as possible on Boris and Sergei, the embassy would pay my rent'

A couple of years ago my friend Lenka went out for a while with a spy. His name was Marcus and she met him through one of those upmarket dating agencies that cost a fortune to join. Lenka, who is always broke, got in at a knock-down rate because, since she was so incredibly glamorous and fascinating, the agency was desperate to have her on its books to lure in other customers. "Hungarian divorcee, 36, honey blonde, green eyes, two children, qualified but not practising architect seeks sensitive older man with cultured tastes, preferably for French opera, English churches, Italian food and horseback riding ..."

On average, Lenka gets through half a dozen older sensitive men every year. Marcus lasted longer than most because, being a spy, he was often out of the country. He never admitted to being a spy. When they first met he told Lenka that he was a political negotiator; but once, while she was looking for her shoes under the bed in his pied-à-terre off Eton Square, she came across a box full of passports all containing Marcus's photograph but none bearing his name – which, by the way, isn't really Marcus, of course.

He never flew from ordinary airports, but used to go to that military one near Uxbridge. Sometimes in the middle of dinner at Rules or The Caprice he'd get a telephone call and 10 minutes later a car with blacked-out windows would pick him up and swoop him off. Where to? "Bosnia, I think," said Lenka vaguely. He was well-educated, Harrow and Harvard, spoke lots of languages, including Hungarian, and was good-looking in a brutal sort of way, very muscular with beautifully manicured hands and the coldest steel-grey eyes I've ever seen. I never liked him much. He was one of those people who means it when they say no, and nothing and no one, not even Lenka offering home-made goulash, could change his mind.

I mention all this only because while I was listening to the news the other day about special troops in Afghanistan I said to the cat, "I bet Marcus with his pearly half-moon cuticles is out there doing the same as he did in Bosnia, whatever that was." Only the British and Israelis have efficient intelligence networks these days, a professor of war studies somewhere in the Midlands told a radio phone-in last week. The CIA, he said, had become so bureaucratic it couldn't do a simple thing like bug hotel rooms without six yards of documentation and security clearances.

Talking of cats, I read a piece in the paper yesterday about a bungled CIA mission during the Cold War. Someone had this brilliant idea of bugging one of the cats at the Russian Embassy in Washington, so this wretched moggy was fitted up with all sorts of microphones and miniature cameras and bleepers and buzzers. There was a diagram showing exactly where they put all the devices – in its ear, behind its neck, above its knee, etcetera. The poor thing had undergone a dozen operations before they finally released it outside the Embassy. The cat was supposed to jump over the wall and start transmitting information back to the CIA room where scores of agents hunched over screens were waiting to decode it. Unfortunately the cat didn't jump over the wall. It dashed across the road and got run over by a taxi.

I'm sure I've told you about my brief career as a spy in Iran when I was working for the Tehran Journal. I had met a fairly lowly diplomat at the British Embassy who became very excited when I mentioned I was the Journal's gossip columnist. "Ever met any Russians?" he said. "Yes," I said. In fact, two of them had become good friends. The lowly diplomat said it would be very helpful if I could get as much info as possible on Boris and Sergei – what they ate, what they read, where they went for weekends, and so on. In exchange the embassy would pay my rent. "But I like Boris and Sergei," I said. "And I don't pay rent where I live with my aunt."

For a month I played the Great Game, but in retrospect I wasn't much of a Mata Hari. Boris read The Catcher in the Rye, Sergei went to Isfahan. But so what? They'd have been better off bugging the cat.