Secret fund for retired spy care homes is hit by credit crunch

A secret fund set up to pay for care homes for retired British spies has lost hundreds of thousands of pounds because of the credit crunch.

The little-known Century Benevolent Fund helps to cover bills for ageing 007s at special ‘old spy homes’ around the country.

But now the fund – named after Century House, MI6’s former London headquarters – may have to leave some ex-spies in the cold after it lost almost £200,000, about a quarter of its reserves.

For more than 40 years the organisation has gone to great lengths to hide its true purpose.

Its trustees are absent from the Register of Charities after they were granted ‘dispensation’ by the Charity Commission, which stated that ‘in some cases disclosing the name of a trustee may place that person at risk’. The fund doesn’t publish a phone number and gives its address as a Post Office box in Lewisham, South-East London.

The only clue as to what it represents is contained in its deed of trust, which describes its aims as ‘relieving poverty among employees... of the Government Communications Bureau’. But the Government Communications Bureau does not exist – it is a cover name for the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

Last year, the spy fund, registered with the Charity Commission as the Assist Fund, paid out more than £76,000 to help more than 100 ex-officers and agents.

Its work is backed up by another secretive charity, The Pimpernel Trust, which for eight years has been running a ‘housing, healthcare and maintenance’ telephone hotline service for ‘former members of SIS and the Diplomatic Service and others associated with the intelligence community’.

Many of those who call for help are pointed towards specialist homes run by Carr-Gomm, a charity that has 500 homes in the UK – including 50 in Scotland – some of which specialise in caring for people ‘in exile, victims of torture, former spies and former prisoners’.

The Century Benevolent Fund has 65,000 needy former agents on its books and has paid out more than £600,000 in grants over the past seven years.

Those payments were funded by the healthy performance of its investments. Its most recent accounts to June 2007 show the charity had £750,000 of reserves invested through M&G Investments, a fund management group.

Just three months ago it reported: ‘The trustees are confident that the charity remains sufficiently well funded to meet the obligations of its trust deed.’

But within weeks its financial planning was in ruins. M&G’s charity fund invested heavily in the banking sector and was badly hit by the credit crunch. It has seen its value plummet by 22.9 per cent – wiping nearly £200,000 off the value of the spy fund’s investment.

Now the Century Benevolent Fund’s trustees, some of the names of whom The Mail on Sunday has learned but will not publish for security reasons, must find new ways to help their former colleagues.

The fund is likely to have to rely on the generosity of serving and retired MI6 officers to continue its work until its investments recover.