What's fact and fiction about working as a British spy?

What's it actually like to work as a spy? Is it all Aston Martins, international travel and disguise?

Six spies from the UK's three intelligence agencies - MI5, GCHQ and MI6 - spoke to 5 Live about working as a spy in Britain. All six are using false names.

Working for MI6 - the foreign intelligence service - is like being James Bond
It's not. Not even close.

"We get that a lot," says Kate, who's worked for MI6 - or the Secret Intelligence Service - for 10 years.

"Obviously we like it a bit as well because it's quite glamorous. No, we don't all get an Aston Martin or a speedboat or any other funky form of transport. You'll more often see us on a bus or a tube than anything like that."

John has spent 15 years with MI6, including working abroad.

"Those myths about carrying guns, having your martinis just don't apply," he says. But there's one aspect the films do get right.

Is life in the secret services just one big James Bond film?

"We do actually have a Q. Q is actually a real thing," he says, referencing the head of research and development division in the Bond films.

"We have some brilliant technologists that supply us with all kinds of gadgets that we use. Only our stuff is better than Bond's."

It's really, really hard to get a job as a spy
Yes and no.

Jo, who works for MI5 and is involved in recruitment, says the vetting process usually takes "anytime between six and nine months".

"It is intrusive," she adds, "but we've got a really skilled group of vetting officers that make it easier for us as well."

Ameesha joined MI5 - or the Security Service as it's officially titled - two years ago.

"I found it quite therapeutic, actually," she explains of the three to eight-hour interview all new recruits face with a "vetting officer".

"They're not trying to catch you out," she says.

You can't join if you've ever taken drugs

GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham

It's not a definite no.

"Everything is done on a case-by-case basis," says Jo.

"Having smoked drugs when you were 16 at a party doesn't necessarily bar you from joining the organisation. But obviously when you apply you can't take drugs."

All six of the spies we spoke to said they were drug tested as part of the vetting process. And the test often involves taking a hair sample.

Lilly, who works for GCHQ - the government's listening and cyber-security agency - says this process created a bit of an awkward moment.

"I'd completely forgotten that this [the test] had happened. Went to the hairdressers the following week. My hairdresser is very chatty, and he was there cutting away. Then all of a sudden [he makes a noise of shock and horror].

"And I was like 'Oh. It's ok. Did you just find some short hair?' And in that moment he thought he'd lopped the back of my hair off. And I said 'It's ok. I know that's there and it wasn't you.'"

You can't tell anyone what you do for a living

Tom Hiddleston in the TV adaptation of John le Carre's The Night Manager

You can. But you have to think long and hard about who you tell.

"The general advice in MI5 that we give," says Jo, "is that you can tell close family members or a close friend."

John says he decided to tell some members of his family that he was applying for a job with MI6 straight away.

"I told my parents pretty quickly. My dad went upstairs and got the entire collection of John Le Carre novels and said 'You better read these before your interview'. That was, at best, semi-helpful.

"I chose not to tell my sibling for quite a long time because I didn't want to burden them with the information. I didn't want them to feel they had to protect me."

Jo adds: "I told my now-husband about six months into our relationship, which was an interesting conversation."

Most tell people they work in "the civil service" or simply deflect the question.

Jo says some candidates who want to join MI5 come with some very strange ideas.

"I've had somebody say, 'Do I have to wear my own clothes to work?' And 'Do I wear a disguise to work?'

"I think my favourite one was when somebody said 'Do I have to dump my girlfriend to work here? Because if I do - I will'."

Spies don't call themselves spies

MI6 headquarters in central London

Actually, they do.

But it's not something they get to say a lot.

Jo says: "Because we don't tell people what we do or who we work for, it's not something we would ever say out loud. So it's really strange saying it out loud."

John, from MI6, says he's happy with the word spy: "I do think of myself as a spy… that's our job, we're here to do espionage, we're doing it for a good purpose, we're going it to keep the country safe and prosperous, but I do very much identify myself as a spy.

"I've told about five people that in my life, you're number six."

Kate who works with John agrees. "I think you've got to own it."

She adds: "We deal with secrets, that's our trade, that's what we do."

It's a really serious job, with no room for fun

All three security agencies are fans of an office bake off

Well, it depends on your definition of fun.

John reveals that MI6 has an annual pantomime, which he describes as "hilarious".

"There are very few things we're competitive about," he says. When competition does arise, he says it involves thing like "who had the best Bake Off".

Dia - who has worked at GCHQ for 10 years - says: "We have a Bake Off - it's a big thing."

Ameesha, from MI5, adds: "We do too."

You only get it in if you went to Oxbridge and your name is Rupert

MI5, GCHQ and MI6 are not filled with Oxbridge graduates, the three services say

Not really.

At least some of the six spies we spoke to did go to Oxford or Cambridge, and because they were using false names it's possible that they're called Rupert.

However, Dia says it's not just an old boy's network.

"That is one of the big myths," she says.

"I haven't been to Oxbridge and we do have people who've gone to state schools, who've not gone to university but that doesn't mean they don't bring something to the table."

All three agencies are keen to recruit people from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds, especially after they were criticised for a lack of diversity in a parliamentary report earlier this year.

Jo says they're "making progress" but that "there's so much more that we need to do".

"There is no 'type of person' that can come and work with us," she adds.

"So if you're sitting there thinking 'they wouldn't have me' or 'I'm not that type' the only thing we can say is 'go ahead an apply and see how you get on'."

You're really hard to get in touch with
Yes and no.

While it's true that visitors to MI5 have to check their mobile phones in with security at the door, staff aren't left totally high and dry. Especially if they have children.

"We have some clever technology so that schools can contact us," says Lilly, who is a parent.

Jo, who is also a mum, adds: "We're never in a situation where a school couldn't contact you if a child is poorly. I don't think I'd be able to come to work if my child was ill and I couldn't be contacted."

And as for the no mobile phone thing?

Jo says: "It's actually quite nice not having a mobile phone all the time. You get used to it."

Spies hate watching 'unrealistic' spy dramas

Ameesha said she "really enjoyed" BBC Three's drama Killing Eve

Not if our group of spies was anything to go by.

All of them had watched Jed Mercurio's BBC One drama Bodyguard.

"I really enjoyed it," says Kate. "It's fun. It's entertainment. That's why it's so popular.

"Of course its intriguing because it's based on organisations that are not really that well known about, that's part of the appeal, but I don't think I can get too hung up on the inaccuracies, of which there are too many to explain here."

Another recent BBC Three series, Killing Eve, which focuses on spies employed by MI5 and MI6, was just as popular.

"I really enjoyed it," says Ameesha.

"I think the acting was incredible. But yeah there are moments where you just want to, like, smash the TV screen and you're just like 'no that's not true!'"

(Source: BBC)

Why are we still teaching reading the wrong way?

Teacher preparation programs continue to ignore the sound science behind how people become readers, writes Emily Hanford in the NYT. Read on: 

Our children aren’t being taught to read in ways that line up with what scientists have discovered about how people actually learn.

It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.

How do we know that a big part of the problem is how children are being taught? Because reading researchers have done studies in classrooms and clinics, and they’ve shown over and over that virtually all kids can learn to read — if they’re taught with approaches that use what scientists have discovered about how the brain does the work of reading. But many teachers don’t know this science.

What have scientists figured out? First of all, while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up.

But talk to teachers and many will tell you they learned something different about how children learn to read in their teacher preparation programs. Jennifer Rigney-Carroll, who completed a master’s degree in special education in 2016, told me she was taught that children “read naturally if they have access to books.” Jessica Root, an intervention specialist in Ohio, said she learned “you want to get” children “excited about what they’re reading, find books that they’re interested in, and just read, read, read.” Kathy Bast, an elementary school principal in Pennsylvania, learned the same thing. “It was just: Put literature in front of the kids, teach the story, and the children will learn how to read through exposure,” she said.

Boyoun Kim

These ideas are rooted in beliefs about reading that were once commonly called “whole language” and that gained a lot of traction in the 1980s. Whole-language proponents dismissed the need for phonics. Reading is “the most natural activity in the world,” Frank Smith, one of the intellectual leaders of the whole-language movement, wrote. It “is only through reading that children learn to read. Trying to teach children to read by teaching them the sounds of letters is literally a meaningless activity.”

These ideas had been debunked by the early 2000s. It may seem as if kids are learning to read when they’re exposed to books, and some kids do pick up sound-letter correspondences quickly and easily. But the science shows clearly that to become a good reader, you must learn to decode words. Many whole-language proponents added some phonics to their approach and rebranded it “balanced literacy.”

But they did not give up their core belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs when parents and teachers expose children to good books. So, while you’re likely to find some phonics lessons in a balanced-literacy classroom, you’re also likely to find a lot of other practices rooted in the idea that children learn to read by reading rather than by direct instruction in the relationship between sounds and letters. For example, teachers will give young children books that contain words with letter patterns the children haven’t yet been taught. You’ll see alphabetical “word walls” that rest on the idea that learning to read is a visual memory process rather than a process of understanding how letters represent sounds. You’ll hear teachers telling kids to guess at words they don’t know based on context and pictures rather than systematically teaching children how to decode.

Many teachers learn these approaches in their teacher preparation programs. Publishers perpetuate these ideas, and school districts buy in. But colleges of education — which should be at the forefront of pushing the best research — have largely ignored the scientific evidence on reading.

The National Council on Teacher Quality reviewed the syllabuses of teacher preparation programs nationwide and found that fewer than four in 10 taught the components of effective reading instruction identified by research. A study of early-literacy instruction in teacher preparation programs across the University of North Carolina system found that instructional strategies based on research were mentioned “in a cursory way, if at all, on most syllabuses.” (Some instructors required students to write their “personal philosophies” about how to teach reading.) Kelly Butler of the Barksdale Reading Institute in Mississippi interviewed more than 100 deans and faculty members of schools of education as part of a study of teacher preparation programs in the state and found that most of them could not explain basic scientific principles about how children learn to read.

It’s not just ignorance. There’s active resistance to the science, too. I interviewed a professor of literacy in Mississippi who told me she was “philosophically opposed” to phonics instruction. One of her colleagues told me she didn’t agree with the findings of reading scientists because “it’s their science.”

There is no excuse for this. Colleges of education have to start requiring that their faculties teach the science of reading. Children’s futures depend on it.

All hail Caesar’s wild mushrooms

When I was growing up in postwar Britain, most people had a very narrow view of mushrooms. Even my own family just thought they grew in fields where horses left their poo, and they were white with pink gills that turned dark brown as they got older. We called them “field mushrooms,” or “horse mushrooms” if they were bigger.

Actually, those field mushrooms (known as meadow mushrooms in America) were Agaricus campestris, while their larger cousins were A. arvensis. We ate both, but called any other fungi “toadstools” and believed they were dangerous to eat.

Many people make that distinction between “good” mushrooms and “bad” toadstools, though there’s no scientific difference between the two — as I learned from Peter Driver, my school biology teacher with whom I went on my first expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1958.

There, I realized that one of those fungi we’d branded as a toadstool was actually quite delicious. Brown on top with thick stems, and known as penny buns (Boletus edulis; a.k.a. ceps or porcini), they were common in the summer tundra along with white puffballs (Calvatia gigantea), which are also edible when young.

However, it was coming to Japan at the age of 22 that really opened my eyes, and alerted my taste buds, to the wonderfully diverse world of edible wild fungi.

The Amanita caesarea, also known as Caesar's mushrooms, mature from red caps into delicate orange parasols on long stems. | C.W. NICOL

Here, this summer’s heat broke records, and it was even sweltering in our Afan Trust woods, 700 meters up in the Nagano Prefecture hills. For three weeks it hardly rained too. Then it started pouring, the temperature dropped and, lo and behold, up sprouted many kinds of mushrooms — some poisonous or just inedible, but several appetizing sorts as well.

The first ones I picked were penny buns, which don’t have gills on the underside but small tubes like a sponge, though their flesh is firm and they’re good for all kinds of cookery. This year there were plenty to feed lots of guests.

However, my favorite wild fungi are Caesar’s mushrooms (Amanita caesarea). If I didn’t know they were edible, I would presume they were poisonous like the rest of the Amanita family — most of which, including the psychoactive fly agaric (A. muscaria) and the deadly death cap (A. phalloides) and destroying angel (A. bisporigera), also grow in our woods.

Caesar’s amanita first shows itself out of the ground like a white egg, which gives it its Japanese name tamago dake, which means egg mushroom. Very soon, a bright, orange-red head protrudes, growing into an orange parasol on a long stem. It is a delicate fungus and has to be picked fresh and cooked, or dried, as soon as possible.

Usually I use them in a meat sauce, or serve them in miso soup, but my greatest culinary triumph with tamago dake was when I kept drying, vacuum-packing and freezing those I collected until I’d saved up enough to feed all our woodland staff and a few friends.

On that occasion, I steeped them in water until they became soft and the water turned saffron yellow. Then I drained them and cooked spaghetti in the water while I fried the mushrooms with butter, salt, black pepper, various herbs and lots of sea urchin roe. All who ate praised the dish.

It was very different some years ago when I was filming a wildlife documentary on the Kamchatka Peninsula way north of Hokkaido across the Sea of Okhotsk in the Russian Far East.

Out in the woods one day I spotted some of those orange-colored delicacies, which I took back to camp. There, our Russian guide insisted they were poisonous and I would die if I ate them. Though he convinced the Japanese film crew not to touch them, I bet him 100 rubles I’d come to no harm. Then I toasted three over our campfire after he refused to let me use the frying plan, and washed them down with tea, beer and vodka.

When I got up hale and hearty in the morning — and demanding my 100 rubles — our guide just shook his head and refused to pay up. Despite all my protestations, he insisted the bet was off because I must be some kind of shaman as those mushrooms would kill any human being.

The guide probably confused Caesar’s amanita with the red, speckled caps of fly agaric. Those can definitely make a person very ill and have hallucinations, though some locals there used them to get high. Not for me, thank you!

What this little Russian recollection does highlight, though, is how difficult it can be to identify wild mushrooms. So anyone thinking of eating any of them must really (really!) know what they’re doing, or take the advice of an expert.

(SOurce: JT)

Dirt and difficulty: Life as the wife of a Buddhist monk

For both writers and Zen Buddhists, paying attention is important. It stands to reason, then, that Tracy Franz’s recently published memoir, “My Year of Dirt and Water: Journal of a Zen Monk’s Wife in Japan,” is full of carefully observed detail — a praying mantis tucked into a corner, the rice-grain-length stitches on a monk’s garments, an urn containing the bones of a beloved cat.

Franz, 44, says that she has been deeply observant since her childhood in Alaska, where she was frequently alone and outdoors. “I spent a lot of time with my mind,” she recalls, “wandering in the wilderness.”

Her parents divorced when she was a child, and her mother remarried — and divorced — three times. One stepfather, Fred, was particularly cruel. Franz’s first marriage ended in divorce as well. She writes, “I was terrified that I’d somehow married a younger version of one of my stepfathers — or a composite of all three of them — and that this was in fact a pattern with me, my only way to understand love, and that I would do it again and again until it destroyed me.”

Solo mission: After following her husband-to-be to Japan
when he became a Buddhist monk, author Tracy Franz
developed her own connection to the country.
| COURTESY OF TRACY FRANZ

She met Garrett, who now goes by his ordained name Koun, while studying fiction writing in the master of fine arts program at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, Washington. Although only close friends at first, when he left for Japan to figure out how to enter a monastery, she shaved his head for him and decided to follow him there.

After two years in Japan, they went back to the United States to marry. But, after just 10 months in Seattle, they returned to Japan. In 2004, Koun entered a 600-year-old Soto Zen temple in Takamori, Kumamoto Prefecture, for a year. While he was cloistered, Franz taught English at Shokei Gakuin University, and took up pottery-making, karate and meditation. She also wrote. “I wanted to create a thing from it,” she says of her year alone.

“My Year of Dirt and Water” is that thing, recounting friendships with other women in her pottery class, failures and small victories at the pottery wheel, changes in weather and exchanges with her students. In one delightful episode, she struggles to make herself heard over the croaking of frogs while teaching an English class.

The memoir is arranged as a diary, divided by seasons, with each entry dated. These vignettes are carefully crafted from “prose, lists of things and email exchanges,” often ending in koan-like phrases. At one point, during a conversation with her Alaskan meditation partner, Loren, Franz says, “‘I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing — being confused. That’s my day-to-day experience in Japan. I never completely understand everything.’ ‘Well — that’s Buddhism!’ laughs Loren.”

Three's company: Tracy Franz (left) with her child and husband. |
 COURTESY OF TRACY FRANZ

There is darkness as well. When a crying student reveals that she was molested, Franz recalls her own experience of being attacked, and of having seen a man thrown out of a moving car by gangsters. Meanwhile, she receives a postcard from Koun describing a drunken fistfight between monks over the nature of enlightenment.

Franz also relates brief visits to her husband, during which she is allowed to cook with — but not kiss — him, and the loneliness she feels at their separation. In addition, she writes about two trips back to the States during that year, where she deals with health issues in her and Koun’s families and confronts childhood traumas. What emerges is a discreet love story, but also an account of a woman discovering her own inner strength while living in Japan.

Franz began putting the book together in 2006, but her progress was interrupted by the couple’s move back to Alaska, and later, by motherhood. In 2010, after the birth of their son, they returned to Kumamoto, where Franz taught at Sojo University while her husband assisted his teacher at the monastery where he had studied in Takamori. And then, in 2013, they relocated to Canada.

Now married for 17 years, Tracy and Koun have two children, ages 7 and 9.

They currently live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Koun leads a Buddhist community and works as an editor of the magazine Buddhadharma. As the wife of a Zen Buddhist monk in Canada, Franz says, with a laugh, that she has “no duties.” She reports that she is not presently doing pottery or karate, which have been made difficult by motherhood, but she does continue to meditate. She is working on a novel and teaching English for academic purposes at Dalhousie University.

Although she initially came to Japan because of Koun, she eventually developed her own relationship with the country. “Living in Japan is hard for a foreigner, but fascinating,” she says. “It’s more difficult in Japan than in Canada, but I loved it. I love the people and I miss the food.” The constant trials that she endured in Japan are missing from her life in Canada, but she says that she really enjoyed them. “Even if I had a bad day, it was interesting — wonderful and very, very interesting.” The same can be said of her book.

(Source: JT)

Will ‘hōjicha’ be the next Japanese tea to take the world by storm?

Danielle Geva and Francois Mathieu love tea, so naturally it made up the bulk of a spring visit to the Kansai region this year.

“We visited a bunch of tea fields, factories, actually. I was interested in sourcing the best matcha for myself,” Mathieu tells The Japan Times from Toronto. “I’m a big tea drinker, and just wanted the best.”

The pair found a whole new world of tea while walking around Osaka’s Shinsaibashi neighborhood. They stopped in a store to get some green tea but, rather than the usual drink, they were served hōjicha, a variety of roasted green tea.

“It was so sweet and smoky. We had no idea what it was, so we had to ask,” Geva says.

Months after encountering hōjicha, Geva and Mathieu are trying to spread the tea to North America. Together, they founded Hojicha Co. in May, the first company to specialize in selling premium hōjicha on the continent. While it was possible to purchase hōjicha directly from Japan and have it delivered to Canada, that process often added extra shipping costs to your order and took weeks to arrive. The Toronto-based venture stores all its hōjicha in the city, keeping customer costs down and making delivery quicker.

It was inspired, partially, by the near-absence of the drink in Toronto.

“You really have to search for it,” Mathieu says, with Geva adding, “We started seeing hōjicha in really small Japanese convenience stores here.” They saw an opportunity to help introduce the drink and spread awareness if it.

Tea lovers: Francois Mathieu (left) and Danielle Geva founded Hojicha Co. in May 2018. | COURTESY OF HOJICHA CO.

The pair is betting that hōjicha will soon become the next Japanese drink to take off internationally. This decade, Japanese food and beverages have enjoyed a boom in popularity internationally — according to data collected by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, there are almost 120,000 Japanese restaurants operating overseas as of late 2017, a 30 percent increase from 2015.

In overseas beverage markets, green tea is the clear champion among sales of Japanese produce. Move beyond the usual “Cool Japan” marketing materials and there are still plenty of reports from the past couple of years talking up the stuff in Asia and beyond, both as a drink and a flavor for desserts. Yet domestically, the situation is different.

“There has been a hōjicha boom of sorts in the past couple of years in Japan,” Shogo Nakamura, managing director of Nakamura Tokichi Honten Co. Ltd. tea sellers, tells The Japan Times. Hōjicha emerged in the 1920s from Kyoto, with some histories (including the one compiled by the Hojicha Co. folks) saying it came from vendors roasting leftover stems and stalks. Nakamura Tokichi sells hōjicha among its other teas, though Nakamura says the company doesn’t have specific records of when it started selling it.

And the recent Japanese interest in the tea goes beyond its liquid form.

“Hōjicha-flavored sweets seem to have become more popular. The market for matcha sweets has become flooded, and a reason for the increase in hōjicha sweets is that businesses and customers are looking for the ‘next thing,'” Nakamura says. Convenience store sweets now feature hōjicha flavors frequently, while most notably, Starbucks Japan had a hit with a limited-edition Hojicha Creme Frappuccino last year. It’s a trend that has carried over to Singapore and Hong Kong, too.

But Hojicha Co. believes hōjicha’s potential in North America lies in its health benefits.

“I think a lot of people are trying to cut back on coffee, and this is a good alternative for them,” Geva says, having herself cut back on her caffeine consumption over the years by drinking tea instead.

Nakamura also thinks health benefits could be the biggest selling point in North America, though he notes challenges exist in that cheaper tea can be sourced from “China or other Asian countries,” and roasted into something similar to hōjicha.

Such competition is not an immediate issue for Hojicha Co., though.

“We had to taste a lot of hōjicha,” Mathieu says with a laugh. “We were specifically interested in bringing one that was from Kyoto, because we wanted it to be the most authentic.”

The company currently offer two roasts, a dark and a gold, and the early response has been good, coming mainly from the “early adapting” tea community.

“Restaurants are reaching out and asking, ‘Hey, do you have the powder?’ This is one thing we’re exploring, along with bottled beverages,” Mathieu says.

Step one, though, is introducing people to a drink that is still relatively unknown in North America.

“The challenge is going to be telling people that hōjicha is roasted green tea. And when we go mass market, that’s what we have to do,” Geva says. But the pair believe they will soon have assistance from food and beverage heavyweights.

“Eventually, I think some of the big brands are going to bring hōjicha to North America, and elsewhere.” says Mathieu. “By that time, our goal is to establish ourselves with a few more products, and when people try it at Starbucks or at a big chain, and they like the sugary version that’s not so authentic and they want to try the real thing, they’ll have some options available.”

(Source: JT)