Tell me about your first book, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, considered by some to be the first modern spy thriller and said to have inspired writers like Graham Greene and John Le Carré.
Yes, it’s a wonderful book for both the spy enthusiast and the navigator. attests to the fact that if you are writing a novel on a technical basis, it is good to do your research and get it right. this is the only novel he wrote; he became a very committed political partner.
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is basically a serious novel about a sailor named davies who invites a friend to sail with him along the german coast from the baltic sea to the north sea. The narrator is Carruthers, a civil servant who works at the Foreign Office, and he’s at a loose end in August because everyone has left. he all of a sudden he gets this invitation to go sailing on a yacht from someone he used to be with in college. he packs his white shoes, hat, jacket, and white pants, only to discover when he gets there that he is not who he is going to be. instead, he is a pretty dirty sailboat for two people. what they do is sail around the frisian islands and discover that the germans have been amassing resources to invade england. So this kind of mystery gradually unfolds as they explore those sandy channels on Germany’s North Sea coast.
Published in 1903, the book was one of a series of scares that alerted the British public to the possibility that Germany might be up to something evil. At this stage, Germany was England’s main European challenger. Safely protected by living on an island, the British traditionally had little involvement with mainland Europe and remained in “splendid isolation”, secured by the royal navy, the largest in the world. But after Germany joined in 1871, it began to take on global ambitions and tried to emulate Britain by seeking out colonies around the world. And they began to build a world-class navy that many suspected they would use against Britain. there is the idea that they are sending spies to britain to solve its weaknesses. And there is concern that there could be a surprise attack on Britain’s defenseless east coast. this novel is one of the first that focused people’s attention on this.
by 1909 these concerns had seeped into some in the government, and one way to deal with the danger was to set up a new secret service with an internal department to search for german spies in britain (which became mi5) and a foreign relations department (which became mi6). both were founded at the same time in october 1909. and mi6’s job is, of course, to spy on the germans in germany and see the germans’ capabilities and intentions.
your next option is compton mackenzie’s greek memoir.
compton mackenzie was an enormously prolific Scottish humorous novelist and writer, as well as a public businessman. he had already established a reputation as a novelist just before the first world war. but during the war he joins the navy and goes to serve in naval intelligence in greece after being invalided out of front-line work. he was hired by the forerunner of mi6, then known as mi1c. It was run by a wonderful man named Mansfield Cumming, who hired Mackenzie to run his Greek operation, which was primarily to gather information on the political situation in Greece, which was neutral at the time.
the germans were backing the turks at this stage, so there was a lot of anti-british activity in the aegean sea, which is where mackenzie was located. he does it very well and collects a lot of information from 1915-1917. He was sending out these witty reports, sometimes in blank verse, which Cumming liked but others called too light-hearted.
This book was one of the first show-and-tell books to come out of the Secret Service.
Yes, when it was published in 1932, it was withdrawn almost immediately and prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. It was one of the first sensational memoirs by a former spy, revealing details of his secret service. but actually he didn’t divulge much at all. He revealed that the head of the secret service used a single initial c and that he wrote in green ink! and that is still the case today. he also named several people who worked for him, and that’s what made the organization so upset because they don’t like people telling stories outside of school. mi6 is an extremely secret organization; the people who work for him are secret. but mackenzie said, look, this is 1932, and i’ve been doing this for 15 or 16 years, so no harm has been done. but the organization thought very differently. they didn’t like the principle of revealing names.
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that problem continues today.
That’s exactly it. Mackenzie’s book was the first high-level manifestation of an ongoing problem for the secret services. there are people who go astray and try to exploit their time on the service for private gain and self-advertising. the trial when it came had its humorous aspects. Mackenzie had someone from the foreign office say that he didn’t think many secrets would be revealed.
The same thing happened with the spycatcher trial in 1986 when the government ended up with egg on its face, looking stupid for secrecy for secrecy’s sake. there is a balance that needs to be struck. And of course Mi6 didn’t publicly exist until 1994. That’s over 80 years after his lifetime. If you had asked someone in 1993, ‘does it exist?’, they would say, ‘I can neither confirm nor deny it,’ which was, and is, patently absurd. Compton Mackenzie made a big play on his memoir of this absurdity and got his revenge after the trial by satirizing the situation in a novel called Water on the Brain. he was describing a top secret government department, operating out of a building that would become an insane asylum for crazed civil servants serving their country, which makes for good reading.
there are so many james bond books to choose from. what made you leave russia with love?
The James Bond books represent the other end of the spectrum. These are cartoon characters in a way, but they produced the most famous individual fictional spy who worked for mi6. link is very important. it’s also quite difficult to extract the novels from the movies because we visualize them. but from russia with love is on my list for two reasons. the first is that it’s the only one with an irish angle and i’m always looking for the irish angle. And the second is that there is a clear connection to Fleming’s work as an intelligence officer in World War II.
the irish angle is donovan o ‘red’ grant, a smersh assassin, who in the film is a powerful blonde figure who goes around killing people in the blink of an eye, which of course is one of those myths about the secret service that people are always killing each other just like that, and that everyone has a ‘license to kill’…
According to the book, Grant, this Russian assassin, is the son of an Irish mother and a German circus strongman. now, in fact, a circus strongman really did exist. In April 1940 a German agent named Ernest Weber-Drohl landed in the south of Ireland, which was neutral during World War II, and was captured by the Irish police and prosecuted in the Dublin District Court for being a foreign agent. his defense was that he was a professional weightlifter who had appeared as ‘atlas the strong’ with a circus in ireland before the war, and had returned to ireland to find his two illegitimate sons.
and this was the kind of short story that would have made it to britain because they were so worried about german spies in world war two. ian fleming was the personal assistant to the director of naval intelligence at the time, and it seems almost inconceivable to me that the article did not make it across his desk, because the coincidence of writing about it from russia with love is too strong.
what do you think it is about ian fleming that encapsulates so much of the british secret service in the public eye?
is the combination of the graceful skill of the English gentleman and his light-footed ability to move through the highest echelons of society without a hitch, with fantastic technical expertise, backed up with the most unlikely contraptions of one type or another. And even if Bond gets hurt or gets into trouble, he always manages to come out on top in the end.
You have been properly researching the British Secret Service: are the books complete fiction or are there elements of this really?
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is not complete fiction. there was a man named biffy dunderdale whom fleming knew who was the master of the mi6 station in paris in the 1930s. he was a very cool and stylish man who liked fast cars and pretty women and was a quite an important figure. He was traveling under the name of John Green, and was a bit of a Bond-like glamorous figure. on the other hand, one of the reasons i was in the service was because i spoke russian like a native, as well as other languages, which was definitely something you needed, and still do, and something james bond never seemed to be able to to do.
and how do you think the secret service is different from something like the cia?
they [the cia] are just a vastly larger organization and have a lot more resources. They started from next to nothing in World War II. they are much better supported in terms of technical support and resources. But they don’t work in the same way as people like James Bond, who was a bit of a loner and relied on his native wits to get by. there are a few like that on the American side, but they don’t have that languid air of effortless superiority that surely epitomizes the bond and, by default, our perception of the secret service.
let’s move on to your next book, which is about an iconic moment in the history of the British secret service. this is the spy who came in from the cold by john le carré.
This novel shows a very different world and service. it’s a grainy monochrome world with amoral spymasters moving pawns around the board in this bleak cold war era. these are gripping psychological novels as much as anything else. The novel has a smiley face, but the central figure is Alec Leamas, a hardened veteran whose duty of service conflicts with his relationships and the human side of him. he has to work in a world free of amoral values.
This is at the other end of the James Bond spectrum, but it also says a lot about the bureaucracy of the service. the decisions made at home in what carré calls ‘the circus’ -the central office- are really important and you don’t see much of this in the james bond books. le carré’s book is about a moment in history where you have this monolithic kind of soviet enemy with the west challenging it. and you have spymasters on each side who have perhaps more in common with each other than their own countrymen. and there’s a bit of that in the real story too, I’m sure.
Your final choice is the Secret Service: Christopher Andrew’s brainchild of the British Intelligence Community.
I still come back to this book, which was published in 1985. It is a truly groundbreaking and wonderful book backed by proper academic scholarship. but it’s also a great read. it’s the kind of book I would have loved to have written myself and maybe tried to do that a bit with my recent book.
also represents a time when christopher andrew didn’t have any insider information like he does now [as mi5’s official historian]. and it shows how much you could do because he did it pretty well, and we’re talking over 25 years ago. He writes about how the service developed from the ad hoc nature of the early days in 1909 to World War II, when MI5 and MI6 came of age. the book has a wonderful mix of academic rigor and lightness of touch, which is the ideal of how you would like to write from your ivory tower.
How do you think he managed to get it right, given that he didn’t have access to all the information and files that have recently surfaced?
I think professionalism, seeking evidence from a variety of different sources. and then he used them creatively but he didn’t invent anything. some journalists tend to populate their books with recreations and imagine what it would have been like, what might or might not have happened. as historians we cannot do that. and christopher andrew has great professionalism, which means he can’t and won’t do that. he writes well enough that he doesn’t have to do that.
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