On a visit to the UK spy agency MI5 earlier this month, I was surprised to see an office filled with people. As I was escorted through the building, staff streamed through corridors. We had to wait for a free lift. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Financial Times’s newsroom has been nearly empty and eerily quiet. In MI5’s headquarters, I remembered the hum of colleagues in conversation.
Spying, it turns out, cannot be done from home. Most office employees have become used to remote working but intelligence-gathering — conducted in secure buildings, heavily defended against outside signals or unwanted surveillance — can’t easily be relocated to the kitchen table.
As a result, the majority of MI5 staff still make the daily commute to Thames House, an austere stone-fronted building along the river from Westminster, even in lockdown. The agency, which is following safety measures, is a useful case study for Covid-19 transmission in workplaces. Public Health England is providing onsite testing facilities and conducting research there.