236 • HART, JENIFER
post in the Home Office, had been interviewed byPeter Wrightdur-
ing amolehunt.Jenifer Hartadmitted that she had been a member
of a covert Communist cell and had been in contact with a mysterious
Eastern European who was probably a key Soviet spy. The references
to his wife inSpyCatchermust have caused Hart some anguish, but
he made no public comment, even when she appeared on television
to discuss her experience at the hands of the mole hunters. Hart re-
tired as principal of Brasenose and died in December 1992.HART, JENIFER.A secret member of theCommunist Party of
Great Britainand wife of ProfessorHerbert Hart, Jenifer Hart
graduated from Oxford and was instructed to join a government de-
partment. In 1936 she was appointed secretary to the permanent sec-
retary in the Home Office, where she had access toMI5’s warrants
issued to intercept the telephone calls of suspects. When she was in-
terviewed by MI5’sPeter Wright, and later in her autobiography,
she admitted having held clandestine meetings with a mysterious So-
viet spy, most probablyNKVDillegalArnold Deutsch, but insisted
she had never compromised any classified information. The suspi-
cion that she had acted in tandem with her friend, novelistIris Mur-
doch, was omitted from Wright’s memoirs,SpyCatcher. Jenifer Hart
lived in Oxford until her death in March 2005.
HASTINGS, SIR STEPHEN.After Eton and Sandhurst, Stephen
Hastings joined the Grenadier Guards in 1939, fighting with the 3rd
Battalion in the Western Desert. He transferred to theSpecial Air
Service(SAS) regiment in 1943. After nine months with the SAS,
he joinedSpecial Operations ExecutiveinCairoand was posted
first tomassinghamin Algiers and then sent on a mission to the
south of France. He landed at newly liberated St. Tropez, and as the
Germans withdrew, he drove to Paris, accompanied byBrooks Rich-
ards. From Paris he was dispatched to Brindisi for an assignment
with No. 1 Special Force. His mission in February 1945, codenamed
clover ii, was to parachute into the area behind Genoa and liaise
with the local partisans.
At the end of the war, Hastings returned to his regiment briefly
before being attached to theBritish Control Commission for Aus-
triafor two years. Then, in 1948 he joined theSecret Intelligence