Cold War spy Klaus Fuchs was told to throw a magazine into a London garden to set up a rendezvous with his Russian contact, a slice of everyday espionage life revealed by one of Britain's top intelligence officers in diaries that were released on Friday.

Fuchs, a nuclear physicist who was one of the Soviet Union's most valuable spies before being jailed in 1950, had to mark page 10 of the magazine to show he wanted to meet his contact, who would answer with a chalk-mark on a local lamppost.

The 10 diaries by Guy Liddell, then deputy director-general of the MI5 domestic spy agency, offer an insider's perspective at the dawning of a political system that would dominate the world for decades to come.