Tradecraft
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Introduction
This is part of Tradecraft, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
In my twenties, I found myself living in Brussels and working as a journalist for an English-speaking magazine, The Bulletin. Its readership largely consisted of expatriates working for the European Union institutions, and the average length of time they spent there was less than three years. It seems Eurocrats have a taste for spy novels, because the shelves of the city’s second-hand bookshops were heaving with paperbacks by Len Deighton and others that had been dumped as their owners moved on to new assignments. As a boy, I’d stayed up many a night engrossed in The KnowHow Book of Spycraft—as I picked my way through the bookshops of Brussels, I became a devotee of spy thrillers.
Eventually, I considered writing a spy novel of my own, set in the Cold War. In the meantime, I continued with my day job as an editor and writer at The Bulletin. I wrote about a wide variety of subjects, but whenever possible I tried to pursue stories with espionage angles, or that I thought might help with the background for my novel. The first article in this collection, Whisper Who Dares, published in June 2005, is an example of this. I hadn’t known that the SAS investigated Nazi war crimes after the war, and writing this piece led me to research the topic further. That eventually fed into my novel, which I titled Free Agent and which was published in 2009.
I’ve written several more books since then, and quite a few articles along the way. In this collection, you’ll find 20 pieces I’ve written for newspapers, magazines and for my own website, and if you’ve read any of my books you’ll see how some of them inspired topics and themes in them.
The second piece, Rendezvous With a Spy, is an exception in that it’s previously unpublished. It also has a Brussels connection, as it happens. This dates from 2011, when I was writing Dead Drop (Codename: Hero in the US), my non-fiction book about MI6 and the CIA’s joint operation to run agent-in-place Oleg Penkovsky in the early Sixties. I had planned to write the book with my own footsteps following the operation as a focus, but one strand I’d written in that vein unbalanced the tone of the rest of it and so I cut it. I think that was the right decision for the book, but I remain fond of this as a piece of writing in its own right. I’ve left in a few sentences that made it into the final version of the book for context, and hope it gives some interesting insight into the research process as well as what makes spies and intelligence officers tick. Pete Bagley died of cancer at his home in Brussels in February 2014.
From the inner sanctum of a former CIA officer, let’s head into the world of British spookdom. The Spies We’ve Loved is an overview of spy fact and fiction I wrote for The Sunday Times in June 2009 to coincide with the centenary of the British intelligence services being established.
Several topics and themes I discuss in this piece will crop up in other ones. One is a focus of the next four articles: propaganda. The first combines two articles, both originally published on my website (Close Encounters in May 2011, and The War of Ideas in May 2013), in which I look at how MI6 and the CIA tried to influence public opinion during the Cold War by surreptitiously using writers. When Julian Met Graham and Secreted in Fiction (published on my website in March and September 2013) both deal with the Russian spy novelist Julian Semyonov, and the ways in which he tried to subvert the KGB’s grip on the narrative. And Spies of Fleet Street is an article I wrote for the BBC’s website in March 2013 to accompany a programme I wrote and presented for Radio 4 about how MI6 used journalists.
A couple of lighter pieces are up next: A London Spy Walk was first published in Time Out London in May 2009, while I wrote Top Ten Spy Gadgets for The Times the same month. In From The Cold is a review of the late Keith Jeffery’s official history of the early years of MI6, published in The Mail on Sunday in November 2010.
A version of Paperback Writers was first published on my website. I wrote the article in 2002, and it features interviews with Martin Cruz Smith, John Gardner, Donald Hamilton and William Boyd. The first three I essentially just called up after tracking down their numbers, while I interviewed Boyd in person as part of my day job while he was promoting Any Human Heart. I’ve tweaked a few sentences in the article, but left its description of the spy fiction scene as it was at the time. Few of the film projects mentioned panned out, and sadly John Gardner and Donald Hamilton are no longer with us, but this is a chance to read rare interviews with both of them, and journey back to the world of vintage spy paperbacks.
Published on my website in February 2011, From Sweden, With Love is an interview with the thriller aficionado and muse Iwan Morelius. Iwan died in 2012—I named a character after him in Spy Out the Land in tribute.
From February 2009, Deighton at Eighty is an article I wrote for The Guardian paying tribute to the great Len Deighton on his 80th birthday. This is followed by my interview with Deighton expert and biographer Edward Milward-Oliver, which was published on my website in April 2013. It has a brief update appended.
I interviewed the spy novelist Joseph Hone in 2002 with the intention of including him in Paperback Writers, but for various reasons he didn’t quite fit there. The Forgotten Master of British Spy Fiction was first published on my website in March 2010, and became the basis for my forewords to new editions of Hone’s novels published by Faber Finds in 2014. If you haven’t read him yet, I can’t recommend him highly enough.
As can be seen from many of the previous articles, it’s virtually impossible to write about spies and ignore the influence of James Bond on the genre—even John le Carré was a little fixated by the character. I’m no exception, and the next few articles are something of a Bond buffet.
Waiting for Deaver is an article I wrote for The Daily Telegraph in May 2011 on the eve of publication of Jeffery Deaver’s James Bond novel Carte Blanche, looking at how Fleming’s reputation has changed over the decades.
From the same month, The Lives of Ian Fleming is a piece I published on my website on two excellent biographies of Bond’s creator, by John Pearson and Andrew Lycett. When William Met Ian delves into a rare interview between Ian Fleming and his editor William Plomer, and was published on my website in September 2015. A Letter from ‘008’ is the most recent piece here, first published on my website in October 2015, and as well as being a curio on Fleming is about how technology is easing research and changing our perceptions as a result.
Finally, in Licence To Hoax I look at another Fleming biographer, but one who put his interest in espionage fact and fiction to more unethical use than one might expect. This article was first published on my website in December 2014.
So there we are: 20 articles on spy fact and fiction from my career to date. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did researching and writing them.
Jeremy Duns
Mariehamn, February 2016
Whisper Who Dares
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Jacques Goffinet, 1945
‘Yes, I wanted vengeance in 1945. But if I had killed the Nazis I tracked down, that would have made me as bad as them, wouldn’t it?’
Jacques Goffinet is speaking to me on the phone from Reguisheim in France. Sixty years ago yesterday, aged just 22, he arrested Germany’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in Hamburg. Tracking down Nazi war criminals was his final job after four years as a member of one of the Allies’ most successful units: the Belgian SAS.
Britain’s Special Air Service—motto ‘Who dares wins’—is regarded as one of the world’s greatest fighting forces, and there have been hundreds of books, articles and films about its exploits. But very little attention has been given to its Belgian squadron.
It started life in 1942 as the Belgian Independent Parachute Company, in Malvern Wells in western England (about 30 kilometres from Hereford, where the SAS is now based). The BIPC. was mainly made up of soldiers who had escaped from occupied Belgium and Belgian volunteers from the US and Canada. It included men who had been farmers, lawyers and dentists—as well as three barons.
The company was led by Eddy Blondeel, a former engineer from Ghent nicknamed ‘Captain Blunt’. Despite the difficulties of leading a multi-lingual group, Blondeel commanded the absolute respect of his 130 or so men. They learned parachute jumping, hand-to-hand combat and sabotage techniques at various locations, including Inverlochy Castle in Scotland, where they trained alongside members of the SAS.
The SAS had been set up in 1941 by British officer David Stirling with the intention of wreaking havoc on the Nazis in northern Africa: it consisted of small commando units, who were usually parachuted behind enemy lines.
In February 1944, the B.I.P.C. moved to a training camp in Galston, near Ayr, where it was merged into the SAS. Although a relatively small brigade, 5 SAS, as it was now known, was not some obscure wing of the regiment: it completed several crucial missions. Some of its operations involved just a handful of men being dropped into France, after which they would sabotage the Germans’ communications or blow up bridges. Some involved the entire company—Operation TRUEFORM in August 1944, for example, when, along with British SAS, they landed in Normandy and inflicted substantial damage on the retreating German armoured columns, who were trying to cross the Seine. Others still were long-term missions: Operation FABIAN was carried out by five Belgian SAS members from September 1944 to March 1945, near Arnhem in the Netherlands.
FABIAN was led by one of the first members of the Belgian SAS, Gilbert Sadi-Kirschen, who spent much of the war using the alias of `Fabian King’. The son of the barrister who had defended Edith Cavell in a German military court in World War One, Sadi-Kirschen qualified as a lawyer himself, but when war broke out, joined the Sixth Artillery Regiment. When Belgium surrendered, he, like many others, was arrested, and was put in a truck to be taken to a POW camp. He escaped from the truck, and travelled through France, Algeria, Tangier, Portugal and Gibraltar, being imprisoned for two months on the way, before finally making it to England, where he joined the Belgian parachutists. The aim of FABIAN was to find the locations of the Germans’ V2 rocket launch sites: it was meant to last eight days, but ended up taking six months.
Sadi-Kirschen also led Operation BENSON, in which a six-man team jumped near Beauvais in north-eastern France in August 1944. A couple of the men suffered minor injuries on landing, and were taken to a doctor trusted by the local Resistance. The doctor told them that the previous day he had been sitting in a café with a German major, and had sketched down the map the man had left on his table when he went to the bathroom. The sketch was very simple—but showed every German division on the Somme, and even the position of Army Headquarters.
The SAS men immediately retreated to a barn to transmit the information, but were interrupted by Germans using a self-propelled gun. Quickly hiding their sets, they escaped from the barn, and took cover under some corn-stacks in a nearby field. The Germans searched frantically for them, but gave up once it got dark. The SAS team returned to the barn, rescued their sets, and made their transmission. It was one of the major coups of the latter stages of the war.
Members of the Belgian SAS were the first Allied troops to set foot in Belgium, and the first SAS unit to enter Germany. When one considers all the information they received and all the damage they caused the Germans, it’s by no means far-fetched to say that the they made a substantial contribution to the Allied victory. Their success rate was phenomenal, and by the war’s end, only 15 men of the unit had been killed. One of these was Corporal-Signaller Raymond Holvoet, who was captured, tortured and finally executed by the Germans in April 1945, in Zwolle, in the Netherlands. Three years earlier, Hitler had issued his infamous Kommandobefehl, or Commando Order, in which he stated that Allied special forces would not be afforded the terms of the Geneva Convention—any member of an enemy ‘sabotage unit’ captured alive would be shot.
For many in the SAS, this was a step too far. In the closing stages of the war and in the months following it, British and American counter-intelligence groups began tracking down and arresting Nazis suspected of war crimes. After the liberation of Brussels, some members of the Belgian SAS were attached to these groups. They travelled across Europe, and arrested many leading Nazis, including Admiral Karl Doenitz, the commander of the German navy and, for 20 days following Hitler’s suicide, Germany’s president; Alfred Rosenberg, the minister for the eastern occupied territories; and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazis’ foreign minister.
‘It was a tough job,’ says Jacques Goffinet with typical understatement. Post-war Germany was an anarchic place: liberated P.O.W.s and refugees lined the roads, food and drinking water were scarce and electricity and gas often unavailable. In some of the cities, sewer lines ran into bomb craters and bodies rotted under the debris of destroyed buildings. Neither did peace mean an end to violence: Russian agents were combing D.P. camps hunting down and executing `traitors’ to the Soviet Union, and some soldiers and civilians were conducting their own searches for enemies to avenge. Members of the British Army’s Jewish Brigade assassinated several Nazis around this time.
As a sergeant in the Belgian SAS, Goffinet had taken part in operations CHAUCER and NOAH. Now he was assigned to a British counter-intelligence operation in Hamburg. On the morning of June 15 1945, he arrived at headquarters as usual. Two German civilians were waiting outside the building—they told him that they knew von Ribbentrop was hiding out in an apartment in Hamburg, using the name Von Riese. They gave him the address.
Goffinet wasn’t hopeful—most such leads were dead-ends—but together with a British lieutenant called Adams and a couple of colleagues, he set out for the apartment. The door was locked, but as Goffinet began to try to prise it open, it was opened by a woman in a nightdress. Coming into the bedroom, Goffinet and his colleagues surprised a sleeping von Ribbentrop, who was wearing silk pyjamas. He knew at once that the game was up, and didn’t try to flee. Goffinet checked that he didn’t have a cyanide capsule under his lip and removed a razor from him as he packed. Hidden in the apartment was 200,000 marks and a rambling letter to ‘Vincent Churchill’ blaming the British for ‘anti-German bias’.
Von Ribbentrop was found guilty at Nuremberg the following year and hanged. Considering the execution of Raymond Holvoet, I ask Goffinet if he was at all tempted to hand von Ribbentrop his fate himself. ‘No,’ he says. ‘He was just another Nazi to me.’
The Belgian SAS eventually ‘returned’ to Belgium, where they were based in Tervuren. Blondeel faced many difficulties in keeping such a specialised force operating in a small country in peacetime, and the squadron was merged with the paras. In 1952, the paratroopers and the commandos merged into one regiment, which remains the case today. Belgian SAS veterans, of which there are now around 60, are still very active, though. As well as their own newsletter, they meet up at their club in Brussels once a month, and hold an annual ‘Blunt Lunch’ in honour of their commanding officer, who died in 2000, aged 93.
Jacques Goffinet is about to go into a nursing home. He tells me he rarely thinks about his days in the Belgian SAS, but seals it off in a compartment in his mind. I ask him why he thinks his old squadron is not as well known as some of the others, despite its extraordinary achievements. He laughs, and I try to imagine the face of the intense-looking 22-year-old in the photographs I’ve seen at 82 as he answers. ‘Perhaps we’re just modest,’ he says.
With thanks to Des Thomas, Marc Backx, Paul Marquet and Jacques Goffinet
Rendezvous with a Spy
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Pete Bagley
I had imagined it would be raining in Brussels, but as I step out of the airport terminal I find myself blinded by bright sunshine. When I lived here years ago I had longed for days like this, but now I’m slightly disappointed: it feels like the wrong weather for a rendezvous with a spy.
I find a taxi and the driver speeds me through the streets, past drab factories and glass-encased office complexes. As we reach the city centre, the familiar hodge-podge of architectural styles flits by: a brown monstrosity from the Sixties, soot-stained Art Nouveau villas, a modern hotel in marble and granite, and then a run of pharmacies, kebab restaurants and photocopy shops. My cabbie, conducting an argument with someone through his Bluetooth earpiece, takes a stomach-churning swing of the wheel and guns up a wide tree-lined boulevard. We are now in the diplomatic quarter. I catch sight of a bloom of red roses in an otherwise sparse garden, the flag of a South American nation hanging from elaborate cornices above.
A few minutes later, we reach a quiet crossroads with a flashy-looking Italian café positioned on one corner, customers in sunglasses smoking and drinking beer by the side of the road, squinting at their smartphones and laptops. I pay my taxi driver and walk to the block of flats directly opposite the café.
It is a squat building encased in dark grey brickwork: not beautiful, but not especially ugly either. That, at least, feels right. Because unknown to the Eurocrats sipping Hoegaarden behind me, this nondescript building is home to secrets. The present is unspooling in the sunshine, but I am about to journey back in time, deep into the heart of an espionage operation that changed the course of the Cold War fifty years ago.
I click the door open and walk into the foyer. A bank of buttons has names printed on it, and one of them reads ‘Bagley’. I push it, and a few seconds later a speaker crackles with static. ‘Good morning!’ says a tinny voice. ‘Come up.’ I step into the tiny lift and wonder what I will find when I emerge from it. It has taken me weeks to set up this meeting, and Tennent Harrington Bagley—known to most as Pete—has offered to talk to me for several hours.
I’m nervous. I have spent years researching the Cold War for my spy novels, and Pete Bagley has featured in several of the books on my shelves. Now 85, he is one of the few survivors of the upper echelons of the CIA who battled against the KGB, and has been described as ‘a legendary spy’. He was appointed deputy head of counter-intelligence in the CIA’s Soviet Russia division in 1962 at the tender age of 30. According to one former colleague, there were few in the agency more ‘nakedly ambitious’, while CIA director Dick Helms has said he was a ‘golden boy’ who was seen as a potential future head of the agency.
But Bagley never made it to head of the CIA: instead he became embroiled in a controversy that nearly tore the agency apart, and he ended his espionage career as Chief of Station in Brussels, where he has long since retired. That controversy, the handling of the defector Yuri Nosenko, has featured in several books and films, including a 1986 BBC/HBO production in which Tommy Lee Jones played a fictionalized version of Bagley, ‘Steve Daley’, and Robert De Niro’s 2006 film The Good Shepherd.
In 2007, Bagley wrote a memoir focusing on the Nosenko operation, but at several points his account intersected with another story. The handling of Russian colonel Oleg Penkovsky, codenamed HERO, had the highest stakes of any operation ever run by either agency. Taking place during two of the most dangerous episodes in recent history—the Berlin crisis in 1961 that led to the building of the Wall and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—the operation was packed with human drama, as well as espionage tradecraft familiar to millions from fiction: microfilmed documents, assignations in safe houses in London and Paris, and coded messages and dead drops in Moscow. If it sounds like the plot of a John le Carré novel, this is no coincidence: it inspired one of his best-known books, The Russia House.
I have long been fascinated by Penkovsky and the unanswered questions, conspiracy theories and Chinese whispers that have surrounded the operation, and I looked at it in greater detail when researching a novel set in Moscow during the Sixties [The Moscow Option]. Pete Bagley’s memoir, although primarily about another operation, seemed to me to present new evidence about Penkovsky that warranted further investigation. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Bagley had taken advantage of the new spirit of openness to travel to Russia. He met with several former KGB officers with whom he had fought invisible battles for years, and in time became friendly with a few of them. The days of openness were all too brief, and the door soon shut on many such exchanges, but Bagley had found some answers, and he detailed them in his memoir.
Some of the information was simply staggering. Bagley claimed that former Soviet intelligence officers had told him that the KGB had discovered that Penkovsky was working for the West earlier than they had claimed: the official story was bogus. Bagley wrote that Penkovsky had most likely been betrayed by a double agent working for the Soviets in the West, perhaps a very high-ranking member of CIA or MI6.
I’ve read a lot of books about espionage, and many contain outlandish conspiracy theories, but Bagley’s book stayed with me for months. I realized that it was not simply a matter of detail about a half-century-old espionage operation: Penkovsky’s information is credited as having helped Kennedy face down Khrushchev during both the Berlin and Cuban crises. If Bagley’s claims were true, they had a knock-on effect on both those events for a simple reason: if the KGB had known throughout that a military intelligence officer was giving the West highly classified military secrets, why had they let him continue to do so—and how had it altered their own actions? In short, Bagley’s information had the potential to change the accepted history of two of the major events of the 20th century, both of which had nearly led to nuclear war.
I began reading other material about Penkovsky, a lot of which has been declassified in recent years, and Bagley’s theories became harder to dismiss. In particular, one point he had spotted that is already in the public domain seemed irrefutable, and completely overturned the established version of events. But other information in his book, such as that from former KGB officers, was frustratingly attributed to anonymous sources. I decided I had to see him to find out more.
The lift doors shudder to a standstill and I step out into a narrow corridor. Bagley has ‘vetted’ me in several long phone calls and emails before agreeing to see me, asking a series of questions to test my knowledge about the topic, my journalistic techniques and more. He has strongly hinted on the phone that he might now reveal the names of some of his sources to me, and precisely what they told him—but what if he has had second thoughts, and decides to clam up?
A door to my left is ajar, and I glimpse a parquet floor covered by several Oriental carpets. Pete Bagley steps forward. He is a still-handsome man, standing tall in a light blue button-down shirt, grey flannel trousers, and polished brogues a deep burgundy colour. His crisp white hair is smartly cut and his face is tanned. We shake hands, and he quickly ushers me through the living room and into a darkened study. The walls are decorated with framed prints and photographs, many of which have a maritime theme. Bagley is from a famous naval family—born in Annapolis, his father was an admiral, as were both his brothers and two of his great-uncles. Bagley enlisted in the Marines in 1943 aged 17, and after the war studied political sciences, taking a Ph.D at the University of Geneva. In 1950, aged 25, he joined the CIA.
Apart from the naval theme, the room is a kind of Cold War cocoon, and strangely familiar to my own study. I recognize many of the books in his shelves from my own, only the spines of his have handwritten reference numbers taped to them: his own private library system. Most of the books are non-fiction, but there are also some novels by John le Carré and Alan Furst. On top of a filing cabinet I spot a paperback of my first novel, and my palms feel a little sticky: more vetting. Behind a sturdy desk, home to a computer and copious piles of paper, are further bookshelves, some of which are taken up with large blue binders. ‘My archives,’ he smiles, seeing me spot them. ‘I’m going to tell you about what’s in some of them today.’ He points to a low gold-coloured sofa. ‘Please, take a seat.’
I am here to interview Pete Bagley, but at times it feels like he is interviewing me: trying to eke out answers from a man trained to do the same with others is not always easy. He speaks in a quiet sing-song voice, almost professorial in tone, and every often he lobs a question of his own into the conversation, about certain books, or certain operations, checking for my reactions. I weigh my words very carefully, conscious that he might at any moment decide that I’m not the person to talk to after all.
Bagley’s replies are equally careful, but his recall of names, dates and facts from decades ago is remarkable. As we circle each other and the reason I have come here, I sense that he misses the old days, when he was involved in the highest echelons of the espionage game. At several points his eyes film over when he mentions officers he knew who have died.
After around an hour of discussion, he tells me he has booked a table for lunch nearby, and we take the lift down to the street and walk a few blocks until we reach a large townhouse that has been converted into a restaurant, and which also acts as the clubhouse for a local tennis club.
We walk through a dark vestibule and a waitress spots us and rushes over. ‘Ah, Monsieur Bagley, comment allez-vous?’
‘Très bien, merci,’ he replies, and she leads us to a table near the windows. Once she has left, Bagley asks me if I think the location is okay. ‘She said it was a little windy outside, and I’m not so sure, but this has a nice view and its position means we can talk undisturbed.’
I smile at the small piece of tradecraft. Old habits…
We take our seats and order, both of us going for the plat du jour, and continue our discussion, still feeling each other out. I gently probe to see if I can persuade him to reveal more about the sources for some of his information on Penkovsky. Bagley’s memoirs were primarily about another Soviet agent-in-place, Yuri Nosenko, but the Penkovsky and Nosenko operations overlapped in several intriguing ways, and it’s this I want to discuss. Our dishes arrive, and Bagley looks up for a moment and stares into the middle distance.
‘I’m dying,’ he says suddenly, his tone matter-of-fact. ‘My doctors have given me a few weeks. I don’t know if they’re right this time—they’ve said it before—but they could be.’
I look at him, stunned. He seems a picture of health, a pink glow under his unlined tanned face, and apart from the whiteness of his hair could be a spry 60-year-old about to play a game of tennis here.
‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ I manage.
‘Oh,’ he says, waving his hand. ‘It’s not the end of the world. Well, it’s the end of my world, maybe.’ He smiles ruefully at the poor joke. ‘I only mention it to underline that there is perhaps a little more urgency to these matters, and to our meeting.’
I stare down at my blanc de volaille. The moment passes, and Bagley continues talking. ‘So you wanted to know about Zepp,’ he says…
The Spies We’ve Loved
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
In the spring and summer of 1909, Colonel James Edmonds presented himself at a sub-committee of the grand-sounding ‘Committee of Imperial Defence’ in Westminster. Although nominally head of Britain’s military counter-intelligence, Edmonds’ budget was tiny and he only had two assistants—most intelligence was still being gathered by the Admiralty, the War Office and the Foreign Office. But this sub-committee had been convened to analyse the threat of a German invasion, and Edmonds saw his chance. Over the course of three secret sessions, he made the case that Britain was all but over-run with German spies, presenting detailed information about suspicious barbers and retired colonels plotting dastardly deeds across the land.
When this failed to convince the committee, a dramatic document arrived at the War Office at the last minute. It was said to have been discovered by a French commercial traveller who had shared a compartment on a train between Spa and Hamburg with a German who had happened to be carrying a similar bag. The German, it was claimed, had disembarked with the wrong bag. When the Frenchman perused the one he had left behind in the compartment, he discovered ‘detailed plans connected with a scheme for the invasion of England’. This pushed the sub-committee over the edge: a few weeks later, it recommended to the prime minister the creation of a Secret Service Bureau, divided into two sections, Home and Foreign. These sections would later split, and become known as MI5 and MI6.
If the idea of the country being overrun by German agents sounds like the stuff of spy novels, that is because it was. In a desperate bid to stop the police from taking over what he saw as his rightful domain, Edmonds had brazenly taken many of his ‘cases of German espionage’ from a novel called The Spies of The Kaiser. This had been written by a friend of his, William Le Queux, and had been published a few months earlier. The mysterious document discovered by the French commercial traveller also has all the hallmarks of a Le Queux story.
Spy fiction, then, played a key role in the birth of Britain’s intelligence apparatus. In the century since, this curious relationship has continued, with spy novels often reflecting real-life espionage events and occasionally, as in 1909, influencing them.
The First World War was not much of a success for the Secret Service Bureau, nor any other intelligence agency in Europe for that matter. Most discovered to their cost that it was relatively simple to discover the location and strength of the enemy’s forces, but extremely difficult to gauge what they planned to do with them. Spy fiction prospered during the war, though: Le Queux, John Buchan, E. Phillips Oppenheim and others turned out a stream of thrilling if implausible tales of gentlemen heroes who save England from dastardly plots.
It was not until the 1920s that the genre would receive its first dose of reality. This came from Somerset Maugham, whose short stories about British writer-turned-agent Ashenden were the first to present espionage as a rather shabby occupation, filled with loose ends and frustrating bureaucratic muddles. Ashenden is sceptical of the spying game from the start, when a colonel in British intelligence known only as R. tells him about a French minister who is seduced by a stranger in Nice and loses a case full of important documents as a result. Ashenden laconically notes that such events have been enacted in a thousand novels and plays, but R. insists that the incident happened just weeks previously. Ashenden is not impressed, remarking that if that is the best the Secret Service can offer, the field is a washout for novelists: ‘We really can’t write that story much longer.’
Maugham had personal experience of the espionage world, having worked for British intelligence during the war. But his greatest follower in this new school of spy fiction had no such background, having worked as an advertising copywriter. This was Eric Ambler, whose centenary will also be celebrated this year: on May 28, five of his novels will be reprinted as Penguin Modern Classics.
Ambler brought a new psychological dimension to the genre, and in novels such as The Mask of Dimitrios and Epitaph for a Spy he exposed the murky underworld of European politics and finance. His 1930s novels were also dominated by the spectre of the coming war—but he was not the only one to see the writing on the wall. Published just a few months before the war began was Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household. This is arguably the forefather of the modern action thriller: a British gentleman tries to shoot an unnamed dictator, fails, and is pursued by enemy agents across the English countryside. Like Ambler, Household looked beyond the simplistic vision of good and evil of earlier novels, as well as introducing a dose of physical toughness to the genre.
Household’s unnamed narrator acts not out of patriotism, but principle. Once war had been declared, though, the genre would again struggle to make that distinction. The blackout created a huge demand for escapist reading material, and one of the first to capitalize on this was Dennis Wheatley. His thriller The Scarlet Impostor was published on January 7 1940, making it the first spy novel to be set during the Second World War.
Wheatley was firmly in the Le Queux and Buchan school of scrapes and fisticuffs. In order to make his baroque plots more believable, he also used brand names on a grand scale—the first thriller-writer do so. In The Scarlet Impostor, British agent Gregory Sallust is on a mission to make contact with an anti-Nazi movement in Germany. During the course of the novel we learn that he smokes Sullivans’ Turkish mixture cigarettes, drinks Bacardis and pineapple juice, carries a Mauser automatic and has his suits made by West’s of Savile Row. The romantic vision of the spy had returned with a vengeance.
Wheatley spent the war balancing the fictional and real worlds of intelligence. While still regularly publishing thrillers, he was a member of the London Controlling Section, a team within the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet dedicated to planning deception operations against Germany (such as Operation MINCEMEAT—‘The Man Who Never Was’—and Montgomery’s double). His novels of the time are curious mixtures of thrilling potboilers packed with up-to-the-minute analysis of the politics of the time.
With the end of the war, the Soviets became the new enemy, and it was felt that new methods were needed to defeat them. The Special Operations Executive—‘Churchill’s secret army’—was rapidly disbanded and replaced by the Secret Intelligence Service, more commonly known as MI6.
While a new breed of professional secret agents were trained and sent into the field, the spy novel was also changing. The genre had long been dominated by male writers, but after the war female spy writers emerged, notably Helen MacInnes and Sarah Gainham. But the big development came in 1953, with the publication of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. With his Balkan cigarettes, vodka martinis and Savile Row suits, Fleming’s James Bond was a Gregory Sallust for a new age: the age of the Cold War.
In 1962, the first Bond film was released, and Britain’s fictional spies dominated the rest of the decade. Britain’s real-life intelligence community, however, was in disarray: paranoid, disillusioned, and turning on itself. This was the result of the discovery of an alarming number of double agents operating in its ranks, most notably the Cambridge Ring. As the extent of the deception became clear, spy novelists turned away from the fantasy of Bond. Led by Len Deighton and John le Carré, plots increasingly revolved around the hunt for these ‘moles’—a term coined by le Carré but later adopted in intelligence circles. Like Maugham and Greene before him, le Carré had first-hand experience of espionage, and was able to give readers the impression they were privy to the inner workings of the spy world.
The genre had again turned from gung-ho physical action to the darker world of human psychology. In the Seventies, the more realistic school of Deighton and le Carré gave way to fantasy once more—albeit fantasy presented as realism. Frederick Forsyth emerged as the inheritor of Fleming, with plausible but highly melodramatic thrillers that paved the way for a new field called ‘faction’. Thriller-writers began to explore the Second World War in earnest, and for the first time Nazis were portrayed in an empathetic light (in Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed and Ken Follett’s The Eye of the Needle, for example).
During the Seventies and Eighties, the real world of espionage sometimes seemed more extraordinary than its fictional counterparts. A Venezuelan terrorist-for-hire eluded the world’s security forces in a way that would have made Eric Ambler’s Dimitrios gasp—he was even dubbed the Jackal by the press after a copy of Forsyth’s most famous novel was said to have been found among his possessions. In London, the dissident Bulgarian writer and broadcaster Georgi Markov was poisoned with a ricin-tipped umbrella as he walked across Waterloo Bridge. A thousand would-be spy novelists picked up their pens—but as Alexander Litvinenko’s murder in 2006 shows, such techniques were not a one-off, and have not disappeared.
As the Cold War wound down, so too did the spy novel. Innovations included forays into speculative fiction (Robert Harris’ Fatherland) and new territories (Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, while not strictly a spy novel, certainly felt like one). Deighton retired and le Carré moved on to new subjects. But eventually the genre rose from the ashes, in new forms. Robert Ludlum’s frantic conspiracy thrillers and David Morrell’s brutal action novel First Blood—inspired by Household’s Rogue Male—led to the SAS adventures of Andy McNab and Chris Ryan in the Nineties, and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in 2003.
In this decade, the spy story has flourished: on television and in cinemas, Spooks, 24 and the Bourne films are reflecting the current reality, while novelists such as Charles Cumming, Henry Porter and Tom Cain explore it in print. Meanwhile, writers such as Alan Furst and Tom Rob Smith shed new light on espionage history—I hope to do the same with my own novels set in the Cold War. Nobody can know what will happen in the next century of espionage, but one thing is for certain: spy novelists will be there to tell the story.
First published in The Sunday Times, 17 May 2009
The War of Ideas
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
‘The propagandist writes solely with the intention of appealing to his readers’ interest. He aims to hit, because he cannot afford to miss.
Accordingly his work is based on the formulae of modern advertising, to whose task his own runs broadly parallel.
It differs only in that the propagandist is at greater pains than the copywriter to disguise his medium. The reader of an advertisement should never be provoked into feeling: “This is only an advertisement.” The reader of propaganda should, if possible, never be allowed even to suspect that he is reading propaganda.’
These words, written in April 1943, are contained in the syllabus used at the Special Training Schools of the Special Operations Executive, which were declassified in 2001. Variations of the same text were used in different schools, and this comes from the syllabus used by STS 103 in Canada, also known as Camp X, where members of SOE and OSS were trained together.
As this was document was used to train secret agents, its authors names do not appear anywhere in it, but we now know that two senior SOE instructors wrote it: Paul Dehn and Kim Philby. Dehn, a poet and novelist, became a well-known scriptwriter after the war, working on the screenplays of both The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Goldfinger. Philby went on to rise through the ranks of MI6 and was tipped by many to head it, but was eventually exposed as being a double agent working for the Soviets, having been recruited while a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s.
There is a chilling irony in the fact that Kim Philby was one of the writers of the syllabus used to train British secret agents during the war—and one has to wonder how much of it might be propaganda.
This is what James Jesus Angleton famously referred to as the ‘wilderness of mirrors’ that populates espionage. Even when being taught about propaganda, I may be subject to it.
In October 1953, a new monthly magazine was launched in Britain: Encounter. An Anglo-American publication, it was a literary magazine that also dabbled in politics: it was liberal but broadly anti-Communist. Its first editors were Irving Kristol and the poet Stephen Spender and it was funded by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). It soon became very influential, publishing the work of many of the most famous writers and thinkers of the day, including WH Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Iris Murdoch and Bernard Russell. But in 1967, it was revealed that the CCF was a CIA front, and that most of the finances for the magazine had come straight from the CIA’s coffers, with the remainder being provided by the British Foreign Office’s innocuously named Information Research Department—a secret propaganda group.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory, but fact, as the CIA itself now acknowledges. Stephen Dorril also discusses it at length in his excellent book, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. The idea for the magazine grew from meetings between MI6 and the CIA, who wanted a way to influence the thinking of the liberal intelligentsia in Britain. The mastermind behind the idea was CIA officer Michael Josselson, a former member of the US Psychological Warfare Division. On the British side, the two leaders of the project were initially Tosco Fyvel, a member of the IRD who had been a close friend of George Orwell, and Malcolm Muggeridge, a senior journalist at The Daily Telegraph who also worked for MI6 ‘part time’. Muggeridge eventually grew disillusioned with the way the behind-the-scenes machinations and withdrew from the project. He was replaced by Goronwy Rees, another MI6 agent. But we now know that before the war Rees had passed information to the Soviets, who had given him the codenames FLEET and GROSS.
To ensure that Encounter’s propaganda was effective, its audience could not perceive that it was propaganda. As a result, the CIA and MI6 left the majority of the content alone. That way, the magazine established itself, and was taken by British intelligentsia as a genuine and unadulterated liberal voice. Articles that criticized censorship of the arts behind the Iron Curtain were quietly encouraged, and articles that criticized American foreign or domestic policy were quietly discouraged. Stephen Dorril also reveals in his book on MI6 how British agents write articles in magazines under pseudonyms, and discusses articles about the former Yugoslavia published in The Spectator in 1994.
As a result of this, figuring out today which of Encounter’s articles were written with no agenda and which were placed to plant ideas in readers’ minds is a difficult task. Similarly, some articles might have been sincerely meant by their authors, who had no idea of the magazine’s real backers, but were published either because they served as good propaganda, or because they served as good cover for other propaganda to be slipped between.
A good example of this dilemma is the issue of May 1966. It contains articles by, among others, Anthony Burgess, Eugène Ionesco, Robert Graves, Frank Kermode (by then an editor of the magazine), Tom Driberg, Malcolm Muggeridge and John le Carré. It’s an extremely impressive line-up of contributors, but also an intriguing one from a political perspective. Some of these writers might have been used, without their knowledge, by the CIA and MI6—and some might even have been used against the CIA and MI6.
An example of the latter could be Tom Driberg’s article. Driberg was a prominent journalist, Labour MP and later Baron Bradwell. He was also gay, and on visiting Moscow in 1956 to interview the British double agent Guy Burgess, he made the mistake of frequenting a lavatory behind the Metropole Hotel to try to pick up men. The KGB showed him ‘compromising material’ of these photographs, and he was recruited as an agent, codenamed LEPAGE. One of his first acts was the publication of a book on Burgess that claimed he had never spied for the Soviet Union. But Driberg broke off contact with the KGB in 1968, and his very dull 1966 article about Edith Sitwell is not a piece of propaganda for either side in the Cold War. Still, it is intriguing that a Soviet agent of influence was writing articles in an MI6/CIA-fronted magazine.
Another article in this issue was titled ‘Africa Without Tears’. It was written by Rita Hinden, a socialist South African academic at the University of London, in reaction to news of a series of political murders that had recently taken place in Nigeria—murders that turned out to be the firing shots in what would become a lengthy civil war. I don’t know whether Hinden wrote the article directly on the behest of the CIA or MI6, but I think it might well have suited their aims, as she essentially argued why everyone should turn a blind eye to the worsening political situation in Nigeria and, in effect, let them get on with it.
Hinden made this argument in a way that appears extremely heartless with the knowledge of the deaths that resulted in the civil war, but even without hindsight it is an example of the sort of bizarre double-think some intellectuals engaged in at the time. She developed her thesis over several thousand words, but I think a sense of what she was doing can be seen in the callousness of the title, and the article’s final paragraph:
‘As long as we continue to regard Africans as a “special case” to be courted, flattered, excused, expected-greater-things-from, grieved-over, explained-away, we will still not have recognized that they have, once and for all, severed the naval cord which used to bind us. And Africans will continue to regard us with the irritation—merging eventually into pity—which marks the attitude of grown-up children to their anxious, ridiculous parents.’
I’ve read this article many times, because my first novel Free Agent was set in the Nigerian civil war and I discovered a lot about it while researching. The article shocks me every time I read it. Hinden was the editor of another magazine, Socialist Commentary, which reflected the views of the pro-American right wing of the Labour party at the time, and was also involved in the Fabian Society’s journal, Venture, which was funded by the CCF. Michael Josselson described her as a ‘good friend of ours’ and said that the CIA relied heavily on her advice for their African operations.
This article might not have been CIA propaganda, but it was nevertheless CIA-funded, and I think it was propaganda. Its aim was to plant the idea in readers’ minds that post-colonial guilt was the real crime on which they should focus. She argued that a ‘guilt complex’ and ‘emotionalism’ was preventing people from seeing Africa in its proper perspective, and suggested that anyone who felt that Britain had a responsibility to its former colonies was being condescending to Africans—and perhaps even racist. But her claim to respecting Africans was insincere, a pretence that offered readers a convenient excuse for ignoring a growing crisis in a country that, in 1966, had been independent just six years, following 160 years of British rule. It’s not callous to be indifferent to the situation in Nigeria, she argued: it’s treating them as the adults they want to be. It plants some very unpleasant ideas, which were no doubt repeated at dinner parties across England in various forms in May 1966 and after.
The British government did become involved in the war in Nigeria, but mainly as a supplier of arms to the side they thought had the greater chance of winning and continuing their oil contracts following a ceasefire (the federal side). Many in Britain didn’t feel the way Rita Hinden did, and were deeply shocked and moved by the events that took place in Nigeria, and many did something about it. Many Nigerians were irritated by Western involvement but many others weren’t, as lives were saved by organizations such as the International Red Cross, Caritas and others.
Finally, there’s the article by John le Carré, which is perhaps the most intriguing of the lot. In 1966, he was already very much against American foreign policy, and it is hard to imagine a writer less likely to work for the CIA than him. Even unknowingly, his article goes against what both MI6 and the CIA would have liked the magazine’s readers to think, because although it attacks many of the problems in the Soviet Union, he concludes that ‘there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and a political misery’.
In February 1966, three months before this issue was published, le Carré had been interviewed on the BBC’s Intimations programme by Malcolm Muggeridge. In that interview, Muggeridge had revealed with a mischievous glint in his eye that he had been a spy during the Second World War. In fact, he was still involved in the espionage world. Le Carré didn’t reveal that he too had been an intelligence officer, and I suspect he had no idea he was then used by MI6 and others in service of an elaborate propaganda operation. The part he played in the operation was tiny: he wrote an article about James Bond.
Did Muggeridge put him up to it? Considering his connections with Encounter, his recent interview with le Carré and his own appearance in the same issue, it seems likely he played a part. In his article, le Carré also expanded on remarks he had made to Muggeridge in the BBC interview about Ian Fleming’s character:
‘I’m not sure that Bond is a spy… I think that it’s a great mistake if one’s talking about espionage literature to include Bond in this category at all. It seems to me that he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as is said, a licence to kill. He’s a man with unlimited movement, but he’s a man entirely out of the political context. It’s of no interest to Bond who, for instance, is president of the United States, or who is president of the Union of Soviet Republics. It’s the consumer goods ethic, really—that everything around you, all the dull things of life, are suddenly animated by this wonderful cachet of espionage: the things on our desks that could explode, our ties which could suddenly take photographs. These give to a drab and material existence a kind of magic which doesn’t otherwise exist.’
The previous year, le Carré had commented in a similar vein to Donald McCormick. In Who’s Who In Spy Fiction. McCormick quoted le Carré as saying that Bond would be ‘the ideal defector’ because ‘if the money was better, the booze freer and women easier over there in Moscow, he’d be off like a shot’.
Titled To Russia, with Greetings, his article in Encounter took the form of an open letter to the editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet Union’s leading literary magazine of the day, concerning an article it had published several months earlier by a V. Voinov reviewing two of his novels, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and The Looking Glass War. Voinov had argued that, by assuming the role of impartial observer in the Cold War, le Carré was playing a subtler, but more insinuating, game of propaganda than that played by Ian Fleming, and that his fame in the West was a result of readers growing tired of Fleming’s ‘cheap romanticism’. Voinov also alleged that le Carré had been an intelligence agent.
Le Carré ignored the latter charge (which was true), but rebuffed the rest, pointing out that he was not an apologist for the Cold War at all, but opposed to the methods of both sides:
‘In espionage as I have depicted it, Western man sacrifices the individual to defend the individual’s right against the collective. That is Western hypocrisy, and I condemned it because it took us too far into the Communist camp, and too near to the Communist’s evaluation of the individual’s place in society.’
The letter/essay ends with his analysis of Bond:
‘The problem of the Cold War is that, as Auden once wrote, we haunt a ruined century. Behind the little flags we wave, there are old faces weeping, and children mutilated by the fatuous conflicts of preachers. Mr Voinov, I suspect, smelt in my writing the greatest heresy of all: that there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and political misery. And so he called me an apologist (he might as well have called Freud a lecher).
James Bond, on the other hand, breaks no such Communist principles. He is the hyena who stalks the capitalist deserts, he is an identifiable antagonist, sustained by capital and kept in good heart by a materialist society; he is a chauvinist, an unblinking patriot who makes espionage exciting, the kind of person in fact who emerges from Lonsdale’s diaries.
Bond on his magic carpet takes us away from moral doubt, banishes perplexity with action, morality with duty. Above all, he has one piece of equipment without which not even his formula would work: an entirely evil enemy. He is on your side, not mine. Now that you have honoured the qualities which created him, it is only a matter of time before you recruit him. Believe me, you have set the stage: the Russian Bond is on his way.’
I discovered this article while browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Rome about a decade ago (and some of the ideas in it influenced me when creating my own character, Paul Dark). But while I find le Carré’s comments on Bond fascinating, I think they address a popular perception of the character, especially as seen in the film adaptations, that isn’t borne out in Ian Fleming’s work. Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, is by no means a magic carpet taking us away from moral doubt. Yes, James Bond smokes, drinks and dresses well. But he is also betrayed and tortured, and wracked with doubts about his profession, motivations and more besides. Here is a speech Bond gives in the novel:
‘Take our friend Le Chiffre. It’s simple enough to say he was an evil man, at least it’s simple enough for me because he did evil things to me. If he was here now, I wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, but out of personal revenge and not, I’m afraid, for some high moral reason or for the sake of my country.’
Fleming’s character is a patriot, but as can be seen here he is by no means an unblinking one. And if he were, how would that square with le Carré’s idea that he would defect to Moscow if he thought he could have a better time there?
In this passage and elsewhere, Fleming was influenced by earlier British thriller-writers, notably Geoffrey Household. But he also knew and was a great admirer of Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Somerset Maugham. The influence of the latter is very clear in his short story Quantum of Solace, published in 1960—one could scarcely get further from the idea of ‘banishing perplexity with action’ than that story.
I think le Carré’s article acted as a lure: it was featured on the cover of the magazine, and his name would have attracted readers. But it also acted as cover, because readers of that article might also have then read, for example, Rita Hinden’s, and been influenced by it.
In his article, le Carré wrote of his own novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold:
‘I tried to touch new ground when I discussed the phenomenon of committed men who are committed to nothing but one another and the dreams they collectively evoke. At heart, I said, professional combatants of the Cold War have no ideological involvement. Half the time they are fighting the enemy, a good deal of the time they are fighting rival departments. The source of their energy lies not in the war of ideas but in their own desolate mentalities; they are the tragic ghosts, the unfallen dead of the last war.’
There were, doubtless, a lot of professional combatants who were involved in the Cold War in just this way. But the irony is that, unknown to le Carré, his own words were being used by men who did have an ideological involvement, and who were channeling their energies into the war of ideas.
Secreted in Fiction
I’ve written about the ways in which spy fiction can influence spy fact in The Spies We’ve Loved, but I came across another intriguing example of this when writing my non-fiction book on the Oleg Penkovsky operation, Dead Drop. My research involved interviewing surviving members of the operation, consulting all the available declassified material on it, including debrief transcripts, memoirs, articles and documentaries—and reading spy fiction.
Three novels were particularly helpful. The first was The Russia House by John le Carré, which was loosely based on the operation and which contains several details suggesting inside knowledge of it, perhaps as a result of le Carré’s long friendship with Dickie Franks, who recruited Greville Wynne for MI6 and would later become ‘C’. One snippet, for example, is that the operation in the novel is run from a CIA-funded command centre in London—I discovered in my research that the CIA did fund such a centre, in Pall Mall, but this hadn’t been revealed in any previous literature.
The second spy novel I read was Wages of Treason by Paul Garbler, who was the CIA station chief in Moscow during the operation (its first station chief in the city, in fact), but later came under suspicion of being a traitor in the feverish molehunts of James Jesus Angleton. His novel, self-published in 2004, was an attempt to explain how Angleton had been fooled by a Soviet deception operation into seeing moles where there were none, and also provided some insights into how Penkovsky was handled, and how the CIA worked in Moscow.
The third novel was a Russian one: Julian Semyonov’s TASS Upolnomochen Zaiavit (‘TASS Is Authorized To Announce’), published in 1979, which I had read a few years earlier but which my other research suggested contained incidents that closely echoed the Penkovsky operation. It’s hardly surprising that a Soviet spy novel would draw on one of the most famous operations of the Cold War, just as le Carré had done: in the Soviet Union, Penkovsky was as famous as Kim Philby was in Britain. However, as in The Russia House, some information in the novel wasn’t public knowledge at the time it was published. And one plot point suggested a way that the KGB could have realized the CIA and MI6 were running an agent in Moscow.
Semyonov—whose real surname was Landres—was one of the Soviet Union’s most popular spy novelists. His war-time thriller Semnadtsat mgnoveniy vesny (‘Seventeen Moments of Spring’), was made into the country’s most successful and best-loved television series. In his conversation with Graham Greene (see When Julian Met Graham), Semyonov discussed how Yuri Andropov called him out of the blue in the summer of 1967, shortly after he had been appointed head of the KGB, and asked if he would be interested in being given access to the organisation’s operational archives.
From then on, he told Greene, Andropov had ‘supported him a lot’, although he had occasionally objected to a passage, saying ‘Julian, it is impossible to publish this, because you have bitten us more than Mr Solzhenitsyn!’ On those occasions, instead of cutting his text, Andropov had suggested that Semyonov simply ‘add three lines’ presenting the opposing view: ‘thesis and antithesis’ was the best method. Semyonov told Greene he had never had any problems with censorship as a result, because he simply always added the proverbial three lines presenting the other side of the argument. In another account of this incident, Semyonov said of TASS Is Authorized To Announce: ‘If I asked Mr. Andropov to give me materials, of course he liked my books, and he will give me these materials.’ He also interviewed several KGB officers for the novel.[1]
Having been called by the head of the KGB in this way made for an entertaining anecdote, but the reality must have been at least a little problematic. On the one hand, he was being given an extraordinary opportunity—what spy novelist wouldn’t leap at the chance of being given access to a secret agency’s most classified operational files? On the other hand, even with Andropov’s three lines he would not be free to treat the material however he wished.
His solution was to push the three lines as far as he could. While much of the novel reads like crude propaganda to Western readers today, at times he appears to have been playing a double game. To the KGB and their censors it may have seemed as if he had done precisely what they had wanted him to do, which was to produce an exciting story in which heroic Soviet agents thwarted ruthless imperialist hyenas.
But between the lines, Semyonov smuggled through slivers of satire and criticism of the Soviet system. The wife of one of his protagonists, KGB officer Konstantinov, works as an editor at a publishing house, and he berates her over a manuscript she has asked him to read, calling it a collection of clichés: ‘the bad factory director and the good party organizer, the innovator whom they gagged at first and who in the end gets a medal, the one drunkard in the whole of the workshop… Why do people have to lie so? If there was only one drunkard in ever factory shop, I’d be placing lighted candles in the church! The desire to please—whoever you are trying to please—is a form of insincerity. And then public opinion suddenly realises what is going on, and everyone starts shouting: “Where have all the whitewashers sprung from?”’
It’s mild by modern comparisons, but in 1979, in a novel approved by the head of the KGB and using KGB materials, quite a remarkable thing to have written. He got away with it by balancing it with more obviously ingratiating material. At one point, KGB officer Vitaly Slavin teases undercover CIA officer John Glebb that he would like to make a film:
‘Or not so much make as finish one off. Take From Russia With Love—all I would add is just one more shot! I would put it in just after Bond carried off the coding girl in triumph to London. Just a single line on the screen: “Operation Implant successful. Over to you, Katya Ivanova…’’
This was a crowd-pleasing dig at one of the Soviet Union’s most loathed propaganda figures, James Bond, which also celebrates Russian intelligence’s fondness for maskirovka: deception operations. It is a clever piece of propaganda in itself: an apparent Soviet defeat turned to a cunning victory with a twist at the last moment, MI6’s great triumph revealed as the first stage in a plan to infiltrate a Soviet agent into Britain.
Having warmed the patriotic cockles of his readership, and hopefully had the KGB censors smiling benignly down on his manuscript, Semyonov then added another layer. Konstantinov and his wife visit a film director, Ukhov, who is making a spy thriller. Konstantinov is, on the surface, simply being asked his professional advice as a KGB officer about the authenticity of the film: in reality, there is a more sinister subtext. He is acting as its censor, in just the same way Semyonov’s books, and indeed the films adapted from them, were being overseen by Andropov. Ukhov shows a scene in which his lead actor plays a traitor to the Soviet Union:
‘In the next sequence, the actor tried the role of a spy. Konstantinov immediately reacted against his hunted look: from the very first shot, he conveyed terror and hatred.
“It would be no fun chasing him,’ he observed. “You could see him a mile off!’
“So what? Do you want us to make the enemy heroic?’ Ukhov exclaimed. “They’d have my head!’
“Who?’ Lida asked, placing her hand on her husband’s cold fingers. “Who would have your head?’
“I’m afraid it would be your husband, first and foremost.’
“Nonsense,’ Konstantinov’s face puckered. “If you remember, right through the film I’ve kept emphasizing that your enemies seem naive and stupid. Whereas they have intelligence and talent—that’s right, talent!’
“Can I quote you, when I speak to the Artistic Committee?’
“Don’t bother, I can say it myself. I feel sorry, not so much for the audience as for a talented actor. It’s humiliating to be forced to speak a lie, while making out it’s the truth.’’
Semyonov appears to have discovered an ingenious way of skirting his own Artistic Committee. On the one hand, by having his wise, cultured and noble KGB protagonist point out the foolhardiness of using crude stereotypes, he was laying down a good rule of propaganda: if you make your enemies caricatures, your audience will not be convinced by your arguments, and your efforts will backfire. He was hoping his own censors would see the sense in this and choose to adopt the same line—and in doing so, this would give him greater leeway to insert subtle criticisms of the system. If they objected, he could counter: ‘Do you really want to be like that fool Ukhov, pretending our enemies are all stupid? I thought you might be mature and sensitive enough to realize that such crude propaganda never persuades anyone…’ The tactic apparently worked, as the passage made it into print, although there is also a rather chilling self-awareness in the line that it is humiliating to be ‘forced to speak a lie’.
This novel, then, seems to be propaganda laced with disguised criticism. If so, it was itself a kind of miniature deception operation, carried out by Semyonov against the KGB. Given access to their files on the unspoken understanding that anything he wrote had to be sufficiently flattering, he smuggled a more critical view past Andropov and the censors.
It seems unlikely he was writing with any hope of being read or interpreted this way in the West, but with the benefit of hindsight several details about KGB operational methods in the novel that were let through because they were part of an overall picture painting the intelligence services in a heroic light now suggest a different story, and offer a glimpse into the KGB’s mindset and techniques during the Cold War, and specifically how it might have discovered, and reacted to, the Penkovsky operation.
[1] ‘KGB link adds to author’s intrigue’, Steve Huntley, Chicago Sun-Times, October 13 1987; and ‘In Yulian Semyonov’s Thrillers the Villains Are CIA Types – and Some Say the Author Works for the KGB’, Montgomery Brower, People, April 6 1987.
Spies of Fleet Street
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
In December 1968, the state-controlled Russian newspaper Izvestia ran a series of articles accusing several high-profile British journalists of being spies—listing their names and alleged codenames. The articles caused a storm of protest in Britain: the Russians were claiming journalists and editors at The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail and the BBC worked directly with MI6.
The Soviets’ evidence for all this? A cache of documents they claimed were MI6 memos, and which looked to have been photographed with a miniature spy camera. One showed a table listing each publication, the journalist or editor MI6 had as its contact there, their codename and the codename of their MI6 ‘handler’. Another discussed the procedure for the BBC to broadcast prearranged tunes or sentences that could be used by MI6 officers in the field to prove they were acting on behalf of the British government.
At the time, the claims were dismissed as nonsense by all the newspapers and journalists concerned. The head of the BBC’s External Service—later renamed the World Service—called the articles ‘a fantastic example of secret police propaganda’.
It is true that during the Second World War the BBC had broadcast coded messages to British secret agents behind enemy lines, and that some journalists had worked with MI6 in producing propaganda. But could such activities have really continued into the post-war peacetime period?
When examined by BBC Radio 4’s Document programme, the format, language and tone of the documents all rang true, but establishing whether they were genuine was not simple: MI6 never discusses its operations or declassifies files and all the people named are dead. But a clear consensus emerged among espionage historians and former correspondents contacted by the programme: despite all the denials, the memos were genuine.
‘These are genuine MI6 documents,’ says Stephen Dorril, author of a history of MI6, adding that former MI6 officer Anthony Cavendish had told him before his death that the organisation used journalists in the Cold War.
A clue as to how the Russians got hold of them lay in the date of one of the documents—September 1959. The memos were most likely passed to the Soviets by George Blake, a KGB agent working within MI6, Mr Dorril believes.
At the time, Blake was often the night duty officer at MI6 headquarters in London, and he would roam the corridors with his Minox camera photographing every file he could find, before passing the films to his KGB controller.
Professor Christopher Andrew, MI5’s official historian and an expert in Soviet espionage techniques, suggested an even more intriguing theory. Blake might have originally photographed the documents and passed them over, but the Russians could then have consulted the greatest double agent of all time, Kim Philby, about how they should be used.
Before he had defected to Moscow in 1963, Philby had been under suspicion by MI6 and had been working part-time as a journalist for The Observer and The Economist in Beirut. Philby had been employed at The Observer by the paper’s editor, David Astor—who was one of those named by the Soviet press as an MI6 asset. Mr Astor always denied he was a member of MI6, but the circumstances which led to him being named suggest Philby’s involvement.
‘What Philby was very good at was identifying those things which would be, from the point of view of the British public, the most effective propaganda,’ Professor Andrew said.
Izvestia’s allegations created a brief media storm in the UK in late 1968, but the denials were effective enough that the charges made little impact on how the British public viewed Fleet Street. But at least some of the journalists and editors named by the Russians did have links with MI6.
Phillip Knightley, the Sunday Times journalist, said it was well known among the press pack that his colleague Henry Brandon, who was named by Izvestia, worked for MI6. Mr Knightley also said that one of the others named by the Soviets, The Daily Telegraph’s managing editor Roy Pawley, had arranged journalistic cover for MI6 officers. He said Mr Pawley was ‘notorious’ in Fleet Street for his MI6 connection.
The historian and biographer Sir Alistair Horne also confirmed to Document that he had run three agents for MI6 while working for The Daily Telegraph in Germany in the 1950s, and that Mr Pawley had been aware of his role. ‘A whole new generation has the impression the Cold War wasn’t serious,’ Mr Horne told Document. ‘For those of us who lived through it, it was. We felt we were at war.’
The BBC’s official historian Jean Seaton said the claim that the BBC had broadcast prearranged messages during the post-war period was ‘very plausible’.
The Soviets naturally put the worst slant possible on the memos, but in the main they were telling the truth: during the Cold War, MI6 did have a network of journalists and editors embedded in the British press.
According to Stephen Dorril, the documents offer a rare glimpse into the workings of MI6, and open up a new field of research. ‘We really need to go back and look in detail at some of the key events of the Cold War,’ he says. ‘Look at the newspapers, see what was planted, who were the journalists, and what was it they were trying to put out and say to the British public.’
First published on bbc.co.uk on 3 March 2013
A London Spy Walk
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
‘A South Kensington address is definitely an asset’.
It sounds like an estate agent’s blurb, but it’s actually a secret agent’s. It’s from a report on London written by a Soviet spy in the 1930s, seized by MI5 during the war. The agent recommended South Kensington as a base because it had a good reputation with the police—so furtive-looking men meeting in cafés would be less likely to be questioned.
The whole of Kensington and Chelsea is teeming with espionage locations, in fact. To get a flavour, here’s a quick tour—and don’t forget to check for tails!
First, take the Tube to South Kensington. Head west on Pelham Street and turn left down Old Brompton Road. Take another left at Roland Gardens, turn right to keep on it, and then take a left into Drayton Gardens. If you peek into Holly Mews about halfway down, you’ll find Grove Court. The late-Victorian basement flat at number 18 once belonged to the mother of Kim Philby, the notorious double agent who spied for the KGB while heading up MI6’s anti-Soviet section. In 1955, Philby held a press conference in this flat to gloat over the fact that he had been officially cleared of being ‘the Third Man’. But eight years later the trap finally closed in on him in Beirut, and he fled to Moscow, never to return.
Walk back onto Drayton Gardens and head down to number 102a. In 1941, it was at this address that the poet Stephen Spender and his bride Natasha celebrated their wedding—at the time it was being rented by their friend Cyril Connolly. And the spy connection? The reception was attended by, among others, Philby’s fellow double agent Guy Burgess and the Hungarian-born architect Ernö Golfinger, whose surname Ian Fleming would later appropriate for one of his best-known villains. One can’t help wonder whether Burgess and Goldfinger chatted at the party, about life behind the Iron Curtain, perhaps—or ways to cheat at golf.
Head back down Drayton Gardens. Cross Fulham Road and head all the way down until you reach the King’s Road. Turn left and walk up the King’s Road, past Chelsea Town Hall (a good meeting point according to the 1930s Soviet handbook), until you reach Wellington Square on your right. In Fleming’s novels, James Bond lived in a comfortable flat in a ‘plane-tree’d square’ off the King’s Road. And according to his biographer John Pearson, this is the most likely candidate.
A very short walk from 007 is the address of another famous fictional secret agent: George Smiley. Head back up to the King’s Road and cross over into Bywater Street—John le Carré’s shy but brilliant spy lived at number 9. It’s probably a better location than Bond’s flat, as cul-de-sacs are harder to keep under surveillance.
Now head back up the King’s Road and turn left at Anderson Street. This soon becomes Sloane Avenue, and at number 87 you’ll find Chelsea Cloisters. During the Second World War, this rather posh block of flats was used by the Special Operations Executive to debrief agents on their return from missions overseas. My fictional MI6 agent, Paul Dark, also lives here.
Keep heading up Sloane Avenue and it becomes Pelham Road. Soon we’ll be back at South Kensington Tube, but if the walk has made you hungry or parched, take a right onto Thurloe Square and then a left onto Thurloe Street. At number 20, you’ll find Café Daquise. This cheap, cosy Polish restaurant opened in 1947, and during the Cold War was a stomping ground for Eastern European spies, as well as Christine Keeler, who used to meet here with Yevgeny Ivanov, the senior naval attaché at the Russian Embassy. Savour the atmosphere over some barszcz, round it off with some vodka, and then head up Thurloe Street and back to South Kensington Tube again.
First published in Time Out London, May 2009
Top Ten Spy Gadgets
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
1. Poison-tipped umbrella
Probably the most infamous real-life spy gadget is the umbrella used by the Bulgarian secret services—with KGB help—to kill the dissident writer and broadcaster Georgi Markov. KGB technicians converted the tip of the umbrella into a silenced gun that could fire a pellet containing a lethal dose of ricin. On September 7, 1978, Markov felt himself being jabbed in the thigh as he walked across Waterloo Bridge. A man behind him apologised and stepped into a taxi. Markov died four days later. No arrests have ever been made.
2. Dart gun
It wasn’t just Soviet bloc spies who used such techniques, though. In a 1975 US Senate hearing, CIA Director William Colby handed the committee’s chairman a gun developed by his researchers. Equipped with a telescopic sight, it could accurately fire a tiny dart—tipped with shellfish toxin or cobra venom—up to 250 feet. Colby claimed that this and other weapons had never been used, but couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility.
3. Compass buttons
During the war, the Special Operations Executive—‘Churchill’s secret army’—created a wealth of Q-like devices. One ingenious invention was magnetized trouser buttons, which were to be used for agents who got lost—if they were taken prisoner, for example. By cutting off the buttons and balancing them on each other, they turned into compasses.
4. Exploding briefcase
Another SOE invention was a briefcase designed to hold sensitive documents, but which would act as a booby trap for any enemy agent. If the right-hand lock was held down and simultaneously pushed to the right, the case would open safely; otherwise, the left-hand lock would ignite.
5. Exploding rat
If an exploding briefcase weren’t enough, the SOE boffins created something even more outlandish to battle the Nazis—an exploding rat. Developed in 1941, the device used the skin of a real rat, with a fuse concealed inside. The idea was to use them to blow up German boilers, but they were quickly discovered and so never put into production.
6. Cigarette-case gun
In 1954, Soviet agent Nikolai Khokhlov was sent to Frankfurt to assassinate an anti-Communist leader. But Khokhlov had a last-minute attack of nerves, and instead defected to the Americans. The Americans wasted no time in showing the world press the would-be assassin’s equipment, which included a gold cigarette case that concealed an electrically operated gun capable of firing cyanide-tipped bullets. In Ian Fleming’s novel From Russia, With Love, fearsome assassin Red Grant tells his masters at SMERSH that they gave the job to the wrong man: ‘I wouldn’t have gone over to the Yanks.’
7. Hollowed-out lighter
In 1960, MI5 broke up a ring of KGB spies, at the centre of which were two Americans, Morris and Lona Cohen. The Cohens lived in a bungalow in Ruislip under cover as antiquarian booksellers Peter and Helen Kroger. But when MI5 searched the bungalow, they discovered an astonishing array of spy paraphernalia, including a cigarette lighter made by Ronson (the same brand as favoured by James Bond), inside of which were hidden several one-time cipher pads. These were printed on cellulose nitrate and impregnated with zinc oxide so they would be easy to burn, thus destroying the evidence. But the Cohens weren’t quick enough, and they served eight years in prison before being exchanged with Gerald Brooke in 1969.
8. Wallet document camera
Most intelligence agencies want to recruit people with access to top-secret material, but once they have been recruited they still have to photograph the documents you’re after. If the security is too tight to remove them from the premises, one way of doing this is to smuggle in a camera. During the Cold War, the KGB developed several disguised cameras, including one that looked just like a wallet—the edge of it was rolled against a document to expose the film. In the Sixties, signals intelligence technician Douglas Britten was blackmailed by the KGB into using one of these to photograph material at RAF Digby. But Britten was in turn photographed by MI5 at the Soviet Consulate in London, and when confronted pleaded guilty to treason.
9. Microphone in an olive
Also in the Sixties, American private detective Hal Lipset became famous when he demonstrated an unusual bugging device at a Senate subcommittee on surveillance: a miniature microphone hidden inside a fake olive. Perfect for placement inside a vodka Martini, the toothpick acted as an antenna. The range was short—about thirty feet—but Lipset’s show convinced the Senate to toughen the laws on recording people without their consent.
10. Rock bug
These days, bugs can act as cameras, ‘reading’ digital documents and communicating in other ways. But however hi-tech espionage becomes, it seems nobody can resist an old-fashioned disguised gadget. In 2006, Russian television claimed it had footage of British embassy officials transmitting information via a receiver disguised as a rock in a Moscow street. The British government denied the claim.
First published in The Times, 11 May 2009
In From The Cold
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Keith Jeffery’s MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949 (Bloomsbury) is the first authorized history of the organization best known for being James Bond’s employer—and at times it reads like the script for a Bond film. For example, MI6 really did have a research department that created clandestine weaponry and gadgets, a section of which was called Q Branch and was run by a former army quartermaster colonel designated ‘Q’. According to a memo extracted in the book, in 1947 MI6’s boffins were busy trying to perfect gun silencers, knock-out tablets, methods to open safes, instantaneous ways to burn paper and a ‘device which will increase the security of operators on burglarious enterprises’.
The book is packed with this sort of wonderfully euphemistic jargon, which will no doubt provide fodder for spy novelists for years to come. Professor Jeffery is the first independent historian to have been given the combination to MI6’s safe—although the National Archives regularly declassifies files from its sister service MI5 and its wartime rival the Special Operations Executive, MI6 has never released any of its files, claiming that might jeopardize current operations. As a result, this book reveals little substantial new information, but instead offers a comprehensive and authoritative summary of MI6’s early years.
Although the book is a doorstopper, I wished Jeffery had lingered a little longer on some of the more intriguing operations. For instance, in 1941 MI6 landed two Dutch agents onto the coast of occupied Holland by motor gunboat. One of them, Peter Tazelaar, was dressed in a watertight drysuit, under which he wore formal black tie. When he got ashore his colleague, Eric Hazelhoff, helped him strip off the drysuit and splashed brandy over his evening clothes, and Tazelaar then wove his way past German sentries pretending to be a drunken partygoer in the area, after which he managed to make contact with the Dutch Resistance. This extraordinary operation is about as James Bond-ish as one can imagine, and is in fact strikingly similar to the opening of Goldfinger. But although the operation has been mentioned in several books over the years, including MRD Foot’s official history of the Special Operations Executive and Eric Hazelhoff’s autobiography, Jeffery only quotes a handful of phrases from the MI6 file, leaving us none the wiser about it other than that it happened.
It seems a missed opportunity, but is no doubt less to do with compromising current operations and more to do with space. Jeffery had a lot of material to choose from. He dedicates a few pages to a fascinating double-cross operation in the war conducted by a glamorous but unnamed 22-year-old Central European woman living in Lisbon who took up with a senior Abwehr officer and volunteered to help the British. She was given the codename Ecclesiastic and handled by ‘Klop’ Ustinov, father of the actor Peter Ustinov who, judging by the excerpts of his reports, felt she was enjoying the deception too much without any concrete results. But despite his initial scepticism, Ecclesiastic went on to pass her lover reams of disinformation that had been specially manufactured by MI6 to look as though it had been fished out of wastepaper baskets, which he obligingly sent back to Berlin for the rest of the war.
Other operations were not as successful, and one of the strengths of the book is that even when relaying the events through snippets of reports—MI6 destroyed many of its files as it went along, reasoning that none of it would ever be published anyway—the human stories shine through. We learn that Sidney Reilly, the famous ‘ace of spies’ who was MI6’s man in Russia from 1918 on, was regarded from the offset as ‘entirely unscrupulous’ by some in the intelligence world, and as he was pursuing his own personal mission to bring down the Bolsheviks some of his material was inevitably slanted—proof, if needed, that the idea of sexed up dossiers is nothing new.
Reilly is one of many agents whose motivations proved problematic for MI6. It is often said that spies work for money, ideology, coercion, ego or a combination of these. A steady salary seems to have been the motivation for many agents in the field, and led to a lot of confusion. Sources who initially appeared to be rock solid turned out to be serving several masters at once, sometimes offering all of them forged material—a problem fictionalized in the novel Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene, whose service with MI6 in Sierra Leone is also detailed.
More alarming than greed was deception for the sake of ideology: from the 1930s onward, the Soviet double agents Kim Philby and George Blake were making their way up the ranks of MI6 undetected. For the four decades it covers, Jeffery has provided a comprehensive look at MI6’s successes, failures—perhaps missing Philby being the greatest—administrative struggles within Whitehall and its liveliest characters. Unfortunately, the organization has said that its archives will remain closed to the public and that it has no plans for a history of any later years. On the evidence of this landmark account, it would seem a shame if the agency didn’t one day offer its side of the story on the Cold War.
First published in The Mail on Sunday, 7 November 2010
Paperback Writers
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
I wrote this article way back in 2002, and it features interviews with Martin Cruz Smith, John Gardner, Donald Hamilton and William Boyd. The first three I essentially just called up after tracking down their numbers, while I interviewed Boyd in person as part of my day job as a journalist while he was promoting Any Human Heart. I’ve tweaked a few sentences in the article, but left its description of the spy fiction scene as it was at the time. Few of the film projects mentioned panned out, and sadly John Gardner and Donald Hamilton are no longer with us, but this is a chance to read rare interviews with both of them, and journey back to the world of vintage spy paperbacks.
Bond is back. Although the 50th anniversary of 007’s first appearance, in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, is next year, Penguin has nipped in early and has already reissued all the Bond novels in classy new covers to celebrate. A wise move, perhaps, considering the hype about to engulf us all: 2002 is also the 40th anniversary of the first Bond film, Dr No, and to help hammer that home, the 20th film in the series, Die Another Day (due out on November 22), promises to include several nods to classic Bond moments—including Halle Berry ascending from the ocean in a bikini, à la Honey Ryder. We’re in for a Fleming fest.
But while 007 and his creator seem destined to hog the limelight in coming months, some old foes are lurking in the shadows, gathering strength to do battle with the tuxedoed super-spy once again.
Bond, James Bond is now such a dominant cultural figure that it’s easy to forget that Fleming fashioned him after adventure heroes such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, Bulldog Drummond and The Saint. But following the success of the first few films in the early Sixties, Bond began attracting imitators of his own: TV series such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E and Mission: Impossible, Hollywood films such as Our Man Flint, and a slew of gaudy paperbacks promising slick, sexy and sadistic secret agents.
Most of the ‘Bond clones’ have rightly been forgotten. But for every Man from O.R.G.Y., there was a Harry Palmer. Behind some of the scantily clad sirens on these now dusty covers lurk believable characters, gripping plots and dazzling prose. One lesser known example is John Braine. Braine is most famous for being one of the ‘Angry Young Men’, a group of British writers in the 1950s—including Alan Sillitoe, John Osborne and Kingsley Amis—who rebelled against the establishment in excoriating novels and plays about working-class life. Braine’s novel Room at the Top is a modern classic; the 1959 film adaptation of it, starring Laurence Harvey, won two Academy Awards, despite receiving an ‘X’ certificate in Britain.
The work of the Angry Young Men had a great impact on the spy novel—until their arrival it had predominantly featured patriotic upper-class gentlemen beating off plots by Johnny Foreigner with a customized walking stick as something to while away the time before the hunting season begun. The nameless anti-hero of Len Deighton’s The IPCRESS File and its sequels owes a lot to Room at the Top’s Joe Lampton.
It also worked the other way around: Deighton helped legitimize the spy novel, but the gentlemen adventurers still prospered, notably in the work of Ian Fleming. James Bond might have been expelled from Eton, but he still wore Savile Row suits. ‘Bondmania’ took hold in the Sixties, leading to a proliferation of imitators. In 1968, following Fleming’s death, Kingsley Amis, former Angry Young Man and a friend of Braine, wrote the Bond novel Colonel Sun. This and an earlier book by Amis on the Bond phenomenon went some way to legitimizing Fleming’s brand of adventures. But it wasn’t for another eight years that Braine tried his hand at a spy thriller.
The Pious Agent was marketed as a Bond clone: the cover of my edition has a young woman wearing black lace underwear being held by a man holding a gun, with a rosary wrapped round his wrist. And there are certainly plenty of Flemingesque (or should that be ‘Flemish’?) touches. Braine’s hero Xavier Flynn is a half-Irish, half-British counter-espionage agent. He drives fast, has easy sex with beautiful women and goes after a S.P.E.C.T.R.E.-style terrorist group named F.I.S.T., standing for Fear, Insurrection, Sabotage and Terror. So far, so preposterous. But stylistically, the novel is much more akin to early Deighton (or the other way round). Flynn is working class, a rough diamond, religious but still deeply cynical.
A sequel, Finger of Fire, was published in 1977. While it’s not quite as good as the previous installment, it’s still great stuff. At one point in the novel, a villain calls Flynn ‘a smudged carbon-copy of James Bond’. He’s much more than that, although one of the reasons I like these two books is to see a twist on the familiar themes. Here’s a chance to get all the stuff you like about Bond, but with the thrill of the unfamiliar; to immerse yourself in another formula, a new iconography. Flynn drinks Bison vodka, prays for his victims, and his agency uses CS Lewis’ Narnia novels as a base for its codes. Somehow, it doesn’t feel contrived: Flynn is as much his own man as Deighton’s unnamed narrator or Bond. What really lifts these two books, particularly the first, is the writing: you start out thinking you’re reading a well-crafted Bond clone but by the end feel like you’ve put down a minor classic.
Another writer who managed to mine similar territory to Fleming but created a substantial following of his own is Peter O’Donnell. A script-writer for newspaper comic strips—among them the Daily Express’ adaptation of Goldfinger—O’Donnell was asked in 1962 to come up with a new spy series. He remembered an incident when he had been stationed with the British Army in the Caucasus Mountains during the war: a 12-year-old girl had boldly walked into the camp looking for food. The girl inspired the character of Modesty Blaise, an orphan from Hungary who grows up to head a global criminal organisation called The Network, before packing it all in to carry out hair-raising missions for the British government.
The strip appeared in the Evening Standard the following year—and has been there ever since. In 1966, it was made into a dreadful film starring Monica Vitti, Terence Stamp and Dirk Bogarde. Now, Hollywood is trying again: Miramax has already finished shooting My Name Is Modesty. It’s directed by Scott Spiegel, but ‘presented’ by Quentin Tarantino, who has long harboured the wish to see the character return to the silver screen. It follows Modesty’s early years as a refugee and criminal, seemingly with the aim of introducing a series. Unknown British actress Alexandra Staden plays the lead.
O’Donnell isn’t in favour of the prequel idea, and says he won’t comment publicly on the film. But, in the meantime, his 13 novels featuring the character—arguably the best drawn female in the genre—are available at your nearest second-hand book emporium, and are well worth seeking out.
Modesty Blaise isn’t the only former Bond rival to be resurrected. Even MGM—the makers of the Bond films—are getting in on the act. In the mid-Nineties, they bought the rights to Elleston Trevor’s series about Quiller, a bitten-eared Cold War alley-cat of a British agent. It was reported that they planned to release a Quiller between each of Bond’s excursions, but so far nothing has materialized.
‘I was just looking to write about a good, violent character’
But perhaps the most surprising cold warrior to be slated for a comeback is Matt Helm. In February, Dreamworks announced that they have optioned Donald Hamilton’s 27 Helm thrillers, and that Gary Luketic (Legally Blonde) has already signed on to direct the first film.
Helm previously hit the silver screen in the Sixties, in four Bond spoofs starring Dean Martin. That carousing lush bore no relation to the Helm of the books, who was a ruthless government assassin. Hamilton himself is a little kinder on Dino: ‘Well, he was not the guy I would have picked,’ he says from his home in Gotland, off the coast of Sweden. ‘He was never going to be as tough as I would have liked the character, but I think he did a pretty good job considering the baggage he came with.’ Had he been given the choice, however, he says he would have picked Richard Boone for the role.
After writing several pulps and Westerns, Hamilton wrote his first Helm novel, Death of a Citizen, in 1960. ‘I didn’t know any killers or secret agents or anything. I was just looking to write about a good, violent character,’ he says. At the start of the novel, Helm is a married photographer living in Santa Fe, but he is soon drawn back into a world he thought he had left behind in the war. The transformation from family man to killer is chilling, and it contains some of the greatest hardboiled prose outside Hammett and Chandler.
Although the character has often been called ‘the American Bond’, there are few similarities—Helm is a lanky, laconic Swedish-American who wouldn’t know what to do with a tux—and Fleming was not yet very popular in the US in 1960. Still, Hamilton admits to being a Fleming admirer. And, like Bond’s creator, he has never been popular with feminists. ‘A lady came up to me at a party once and screamed that she detested my monstrous, misogynistic character Matt Helm,’ he chuckles. What did you reply? ‘‘That’s too damn bad.’’
Now 86, Hamilton is increasingly frail, and losing his memory; our conversation is peppered with long pauses. Last year, he completed his 28th Helm adventure, The Dominators, which is set on the East Coast of the US and has Helm trying to stop a plot to assassinate the President. He says it will probably be his last novel, although he plans to write some short stories when he feels up to it.
Although over 20 million Helm books are estimated to have been published around the world, Hamilton’s publisher, Ballantine, has declined to take up The Dominators, saying that there’s no longer a market for this genre. Hamilton probably made more money from Martin’s films than he ever did from his books, but he may have irreparably damaged his legacy in doing so. One can only hope that Dreamworks manage to produce a film worthy of his talent, and that the stain of being a Bond knockoff is finally removed from his character.
‘Bond is a formula, and I was intrigued by the idea of taking that on but, ultimately, it was a no-win situation from the start’
Another novelist stigmatised as being a ‘mere thriller writer’ is John Gardner, who holds a peculiar position in the genre: having penned a series of Bond parodies in the Sixties, he was approached by Glidrose, Ian Fleming’s literary estate, in 1979 and asked if he would turn gamekeeper and continue the series proper.
After Fleming’s death in 1964, Kingsley Amis had written one Bond novel, Colonel Sun, under the pen name Robert Markham. Now Glidrose were looking for someone to bring 007 to a new readership. ‘We didn’t want another Amis,’ says Peter Janson-Smith, Fleming’s former literary agent and Glidrose board member at the time. ‘We reasoned that someone that famous wouldn’t want to take on another writer’s character for any length of time.’
Gardner, who had written numerous spy thrillers and a continuation of the Sherlock Holmes stories, fitted the bill. Still, he was reluctant. ‘I didn’t fancy the idea at all,’ he admits. ‘But when I told my agent—Glidrose had approached me separately—he said ‘You know you could do it. And if you don’t, someone else will.’ Then I started thinking about accepting.’
When he did, he decided not to watch any more of the films, so as not to be distracted. He published Licence Renewed in 1981, and went on to write another 13 original Bond novels. But despite maintaining solid sales over the years, Gardner was much maligned by many Fleming aficionados, ‘mainly for not being Ian Fleming’, he says. Older fans blanched at a Bond who cried at funerals and visited EuroDisney, and Amis lambasted Gardner in the press for letting the agent smoke, drink and gamble less.
Does he regret having taken the job? ‘In a way I do, yes. Bond is a formula, and I was intrigued by the idea of taking that on but, ultimately, it was a no-win situation from the start.’
Ironically, some of Gardner’s earlier novels are more like Fleming than his Bond efforts (perhaps because they were written in the Sixties). His eight novels featuring Boysie Oakes, an assassin for the British government who is so squeamish that he sub-contracts his ‘liquidations’ out, are enormous fun. The first was made into a film in 1965, complete with Shirley Bassey title number. ‘Boysie was a piss-take of Bond,’ he says. ‘But he was mine. Bond was never mine, and he always felt unreal to me. Nobody, however brave, is never afraid. So I tried to put a little of Boysie into him.’
In 1995, Gardner was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. ‘I didn’t think I had much time,’ he says. Without telling Glidrose how ill he was, he resigned from the job. Or, as Janson-Smith puts it: ‘We mutually decided he was running out of steam.’
By the time Gardner had recovered, his wife had died of liver cancer, and a new Bond writer had been appointed: Raymond Benson, a computer-game designer and Fleming fanatic (his sixth novel, The Man With The Red Tattoo, was published earlier this year, and he is soon to ‘novelize’ Die Another Day). Gardner, elated to be alive, nevertheless felt bitterly disappointed with Glidrose. ‘I was appalled that they chose an American,’ he says, in an odd echo of Amis’ scorn towards him.
Now in his mid-70s, Gardner lives in Basingstoke and continues to write every day. He is working on The Streets of Town, the second in a series about a female detective-sergeant in World War Two London (the first, Bottled Spider, has just been released in paperback). I ask him what has inspired him to write all these decades. ‘Hunger, mainly,’ he replies. ‘And the desire to live extremely well.’
The survival instinct is strong in writers. Martin Cruz Smith, bestselling author of Gorky Park among many others, began his career dashing off thrillers under pseudonyms. Between 1972 and 1973, he wrote three Nick Carter adventures to feed his family: The Devil’s Dozen, Code Name: Werewolf and The Inca Death Squad.
Carter was one of the most published characters in fiction—a detective in dime novels since the 19th century, he had been given a swift makeover in the Bond-fuelled spy fever of the early Sixties. By the Seventies, the gung-ho American agent for AXE was battling Russians, Arabs and Orientals around the world and bedding beautiful women along the way in what seemed like a new adventure every week. ‘There isn’t a writer in America today who hasn’t written a Nick Carter novel,’ Cruz Smith notes wryly when I ask him how he got involved. ‘Anyone who has been desperate enough has succumbed.’
Cruz Smith wrote each in six days flat, using locations he already knew well. ‘I tried reading one recently, and couldn’t make any sense of it at all,’ he says. Despite his dismissiveness, all three show glimpses of the writer he would become. There are some particularly delicious descriptions: ‘The odds of survival were slimmer than a scorpion’s waist’, for example. ‘They’re the closest to noir I ever came,’ Cruz Smith says. He also admits to having a soft spot for The Devil’s Dozen, in which Carter figures out a way of smuggling opium undetected. I won’t give the method away—but it is pleasingly ingenious.
After Carter, an editor told Cruz Smith that he was looking for someone to write a new paperback series. ‘I wasn’t interested in another Nick Carter kind of thing, so I proposed my own series,’ says Cruz Smith. ‘I thought it was a fairly entertaining idea, and so did the editor—but we were about the only ones.’ The Inquisitor, an assassin working for the Vatican, featured in six books, and they’re all great fun. Particularly good is The Midas Coffin, in which our hero joins forces with a former British agent called James Carlin to steal 14 million dollars of gold. ‘What those books taught me was pace,’ says Cruz Smith. ‘Then you need to learn how to step away from the pace.’
Cruz Smith’s new novel, December 6, set on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbour, is released in the UK this week, but he’s already set his mind to the next, which will be the fifth in his Arkady Renko series. All he will reveal for now is that Renko returns to Russia, ‘because that’s pretty much all I know myself right now. I’ve got a few ideas, but those can change dramatically as I start to research the book.’
Cruz Smith has left his Cold War capers behind him, but a few so-called ‘literary’ writers are turning to just such stories for inspiration. In his 1997 novel Death Will Have Your Eyes, acclaimed American poet, crime writer and biographer James Sallis turned in a riff on the spy genre. ‘I’d long been a fan of Donald Hamilton and Philip Atlee,’ he says, ‘And the novel began as a homage to them.’ Sallis decided to take various clichés of the genre—the spy drawn unwillingly back into service, rendezvous with glamorous women and counteragents—and ‘like a jazz musician working off a pop tune, see what might be in there.’ The resulting novel is a winding road trip that becomes an elegy for the Cold War.
William Boyd—whose latest novel, Any Human Heart, has Ian Fleming as a minor character—is also considering writing an espionage novel. ‘I think it’ll be in the Fifties—that’s period now. Spy thrillers probably need to be set before the Wall came down to deliver the full weight of the genre,’ he says. ‘I do feel like the Cold War has impinged on my life: I vividly remember being a terrified ten-year-old during the Cuban missile crisis.’ He doesn’t have much time for the internet conspiracies of Clancy et al: ‘I think technology has killed the spy story, in a way. When everyone’s got a cell phone, you lose some of the tension. A Western doesn’t work if they’re driving jalopies around. They’ve got to be on horses with guns around their waists.
As many established novelists hit middle age, could a new wave of Cold War spy thrillers emerge? If so, don’t be diverted by the continuing flurry over Fleming—you might miss out.
From Sweden, With Love
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
‘I was marched smartly across the dark, snow-covered parade ground and shown into an office where a man dressed in civilian clothes awaited me. He wasn’t a civilian, though, because he said, “I am Captain Morelius.” He had watchful grey eyes and a gun in a holster under his jacket. “You will come with me.”’
Iwan Hedman Morelius and Dennis Wheatley in Wheatley’s London home, 18 May 1971
If you’re a fan of thrillers, this passage from Desmond Bagley’s 1977 best-seller The Enemy may contain a familiar, perhaps even comforting, element: the name Morelius. Over the years, characters with that name have appeared in thrillers by several writers. In Raymond Benson’s 2000 James Bond novel Doubleshot, for example, Dr Iwan Morelius is the plastic surgeon who operates on a mercenary to create a doppelganger of 007, while in Walter Wager’s 1982 thriller Designated Hitter, Colonel Iwan Morelius is a target for assassination.
But few people know of the real Iwan Morelius. A deeply tanned ex-soldier with a white beard, he looks fit and lively for a man in his seventies as we sit in the Stockholm sunshine discussing his remarkable place in the history of the thriller. For as well as his cameos, Morelius—also known as Iwan Hedman-Morelius or just Iwan Hedman—has been a friend, supporter and researcher for several renowned thriller-writers, and has known many more. I first noticed him mentioned in the author’s note of Colin Forbes’ The Stockholm Syndicate, and after coming across him a few more times decided to do some research. I eventually traced him to Spain, where he retired in the 1980s after a long career in the Swedish army, and we struck up a friendship over our shared love of vintage thrillers.
When I was at school in England in the 1980s, there was a healthy samizdat trade in creased paperbacks by the likes of Alistair Maclean, Frederick Forsyth, Jack Higgins and Dennis Wheatley. The latter provided the most illicit thrills. He is best remembered now, if at all, for his occult thrillers, but he also wrote epic swashbucklers and spy stories: they were racy, violent, fun books, with cliff-hangers at every turn, and they kept me awake many a night. Morelius had a similar experience. ‘I read my first Dennis Wheatley novel when I was eleven,’ he says. ‘That sort of book was forbidden to youngsters like me—there was sex in them. But for that reason they were quite interesting for a boy to read!’
In his twenties, Morelius joined the army, and started to collect Wheatley’s work. He discovered that Wheatley had written several books that had not yet been translated into Swedish, and in 1961 wrote to the author—‘in bad English’—and received a reply and a signed book. The two corresponded intermittently for years, and became friendly, eventually meeting. ‘Later on he called me Iwan. But at the beginning it was always Sergeant-Major. He was quite old-fashioned.’
Morelius didn’t just read Wheatley, though. He devoured works by Leon Uris, Ian Fleming, Donald Hamilton and others. He also wrote to them, and in many cases received replies. In 1968, he set up the magazine Detective Agent Science fiction Thriller, known as DAST, which opened more doors. His magazine promoted the work of dozens of British and American thriller-writers in Sweden, and Morelius soon found himself invited to conferences and other events, and became friends with several thriller-writers. Subscribers to DAST were given a special card and number: Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint, had number 005, while Wheatley had 008—007 went to a friend at Bonnier’s, the Swedish publisher of Ian Fleming’s novels.
Morelius’ closest bond in the thriller world was probably with Desmond Bagley—known as Simon to friends—and he and his first wife frequently holidayed with the Bagleys. As well as their friendship, Bagley appreciated Morelius’ expertise on firearms, and consulted him on that and other subjects. The Tightrope Men, published in 1973, was set in Norway and Finland, and a key scene involved the failure of a Husqvarna Model 40 to fire at a crucial moment: Morelius had shown Bagley a peculiarity with the pistol’s barrel that meant if it were not forced back the trigger wouldn’t pull. The Enemy, published in 1977, was partly set in Sweden, and as well as featuring Morelius as a minor character was dedicated to Iwan and the other ‘DASTards’.
Morelius also struck up a friendship with Geoffrey Boothroyd, a Scottish gun expert who had written to Ian Fleming to tell him that the Beretta pistol 007 used in the early novels was ‘a ladies’ gun’, and advised him to change it to a Walther PPK. Fleming did, and immortalized Boothroyd as MI6’s armourer, Major Boothroyd of Q Branch (the films changed the character to ‘Q’). Morelius has some splendid photos of Geoffrey Boothroyd both in Sweden and Scotland.
Morelius never met Ian Fleming, but he wrote and had bound and printed 007—Secret Agent, a lavish reference work that only had four copies. One went to Hugh Hefner at Playboy, and Morelius shows me Hefner’s enthusiastic letter thanking him for it. But Ian Fleming is just about the only thriller-writer Morelius has not known or interviewed, and over the years he amassed an enormous collection of signed first editions, many of which he has since sold, as well as a photograph album that is both a private scrapbook and a behind-the-scenes archive of 20th century thriller-writers. Alistair Maclean, Leslie Charteris, Patricia Highsmith, Donald Hamilton, Helen MacInnes, James Leasor, Jon Cleary... he met them all. There’s a wonderful snap of Duncan Kyle, Ellery Queen and Desmond Bagley laughing together—all have similar owlish glasses and beards (they were often mistaken for each other) and the result is almost like a thriller version of the Marx Brothers. Here he is with Jack Higgins at his home in Jersey, and there’s John Gardner at an event at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm in 1981, where he demonstrated the gadgets on a specially designed Saab. Many give a sense of the community of thriller-writers that has developed at conferences and similar events over the last few decades, such as a photo of Desmond Bagley holding court to Jack Higgins, with Morelius looking on.
Morelius later went into the publishing business himself, being commissioned by Swedish publisher Lindqvists in the ‘70s to hand-pick his own line of books, which were sold as ‘Hedman Thrillers’. I suspect that it is, above all, his taste that has stood him in good stead as much as his passion and expertise for the genre, and talking to him, one quickly realizes that this is why so many writers were drawn to him. If you’ve sold millions of books, it can become hard to find anyone willing to give you honest feedback. But Morelius is the archetypal Swedish straight-talker. When Dennis Wheatley dedicated his novel The Ravishing of Lady Mary Ware to Morelius, he told his idol he was honoured, but also that he felt the novel had too much exposition, and pointed out several errors.
Even in retirement, Morelius keeps busy, editing the online thriller journal Läst & hört i Hängmattan (‘Read and heard in the hammock’) with his wife Margareta in Spain. A stickler for detailed research, Morelius helped Desmond Bagley, Colin Forbes and several other writers create some landmark novels in the genre. If you find yourself reading a British thriller set in Scandinavia, he probably played a part somewhere behind the scenes, securing contacts, scouting locations, and digging out the type of local classified information that only true insiders can. When it came to my own debut thriller, Free Agent, as soon as I had a finished draft I sent it to Iwan for his view. His reply came a few agonizing days later, and was short but to the point: ‘Excellent. But there’s too much talking, and not enough action.’ I didn’t like to admit it but he was right, and I went back and rewrote several scenes as a result. I’m proud to have continued that thriller tradition.
Deighton at Eighty
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
‘It was the morning of my hundredth birthday.’
So begins Len Deighton’s Billion Dollar Brain, published in 1966. Yesterday, Deighton himself turned 80. Last year, the centenary of Ian Fleming saw a resurgence of interest in James Bond’s creator—could it be Deighton’s turn? HarperCollins has announced it will reprint eight of his novels this year, including The IPCRESS File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain, all with new introductions by the author. Quentin Tarantino has also said he is contemplating filming the Game, Set and Match trilogy, featuring Deighton’s embattled British agent Bernard Samson.
Now is the perfect moment for a Deighton revival. In the current political climate, his novels—particularly his Cold War spy stories—act as a refresher course in what happened last time round. Unlike John le Carré’s work, they don’t make for bleak or melancholic reading, and are often rather jaunty in tone. But running through them is a deep mistrust and cynicism of the powers that be. His protagonists are anti-authoritarian, laconic, past their best, bitter and seething at the absurdity of their business.
The books have one foot in the realist camp of the espionage genre, in the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, depicting the spy game as a bureaucratic muddle. But Deighton was often very funny, and he had a way of nailing the atmosphere concisely. In An Expensive Place to Die (1967), a courier from the British embassy passes the narrator a dossier and asks him to read it and hand it back while he waits. ‘It’s secret?’ asks our hero. No, the courier tells him—the photocopier’s bust and this is his only copy.
Deighton reinvented the spy thriller, bringing in a new air of authenticity and playing with its form. He added footnotes and addenda on arcane (but always interesting) aspects of espionage, and mocked the genre’s conventions. His first novel, The IPCRESS File, was framed as a story told by the narrator to the Minister of Defence, who is cut off sharply when he tries to elicit an elaboration of a point:
‘‘It’s going to be very difficult for me if I have to answer questions as I go along,’ I said. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Minister, I’d prefer you to make a note of the questions, and ask me afterwards.’
‘My dear chap, not another word, I promise.’
And throughout the entire explanation he never again interrupted.’
In an excoriating essay written in 1964, Kingsley Amis suggested that the reason for this was that the minister had fallen asleep. But he later he changed his mind somewhat: in a letter to Philip Larkin in 1985, he wrote that Deighton’s work was ‘actually quite good if you stop worrying about what’s going on’.
Deighton’s complex plots might be a reason why he is not more widely read today, in a world where we are impatient to cut to the chase, unmask the villain and move on to the explosive finale. Even at the time, Amis wasn’t alone in being befuddled: Deighton initially submitted The IPCRESS File to Jonathan Cape, Ian Fleming’s publisher, but after they asked him to simplify the plot he took the manuscript to Hodder & Stoughton. Their edition became a huge bestseller, bigger than Hodder had prepared for, and Deighton went back to Cape, who published his second novel, Horse Under Water. It sold 80,000 copies in two days. Deighton was feted as ‘the poet of the spy story’, the new Fleming, the anti-Fleming, and much more besides. Soon, the film world came knocking. James Bond producer Harry Saltzman produced three films from Deighton’s work, and Michael Caine rocketed to world fame as the bespectacled, gourmet-food-loving cockney spy Harry Palmer.
Deighton’s output has been enormously varied, from novels about the film industry (Close Up) to cookbooks to military history. But, for me, it has always been his spy novels that have held the most attraction. When I decided to write a spy novel of my own, I avoided rereading Deighton for fear his influence would be too strong. But as my book was taking place in the late 1960s, and partly in London, I did use one of his books for research purposes: London Dossier, a guidebook he compiled and co-wrote in 1967. In it, I found everything from what was on the menu at Ronnie Scott’s to the history of Chinatown—but most of all I found the atmosphere of the era, captured in a beautifully written snapshot.
They don’t, as they say, write them like this anymore. Deighton’s novels usually contain enough elements for several books. Horse Under Water, for instance, featured a wrecked submarine, forged currency, heroin, ice-melting technology and British Nazis. But it was often what Deighton omitted from his books that made them so appealing. It is typical that the protagonist of his first novels wasn’t even named—‘Harry Palmer’ had to be thought up for the films. Deighton’s complexity can initially be off-putting, but persist and you will be entertained, informed, thrilled and dazzled. Long may he, and his creations, live on.
First published in The Guardian, 19 February 2009
The Deighton File: An Interview with Edward Milward-Oliver
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
I have a treat in store today: an interview with Edward Milward-Oliver, author of the excellent reference book The Len Deighton Companion and a forthcoming biography of Deighton.
JD: Edward, thank you so much for agreeing to do this. Can I start by asking you which Len Deighton book you first read?
Edward Milward-Oliver: It was the Hawkey-jacketed Penguin edition of Funeral in Berlin, with the black and white halftone of Michael Caine across the top half of the cover, and diagonal orange and white hazard lines filling the lower half. On the rear cover was a photo of Len looking very cool in aviator sunglasses with a helicopter lifting off in the background and a quote from LIFE magazine claiming ‘Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops’. It was the mid-1960s and I was a teenager. The whole look and feel of the book was very sharp, modern and hardboiled, a frontline report from inside the sodium glow of Europe’s Cold War capital.
A decade later I met Len. We were introduced by a mutual friend, the Italian restaurateur and illustrator Enzo Apicella, at his Meridiana restaurant in London’s Fulham Road. We stayed in touch and in the early 1980s when I was living in Bonn, then capital of West Germany, we’d meet up in Berlin, where he was researching Game Set & Match
I’d read all his books by that time. Having started my working life in publishing, I retained an interest in the publication data, so I wrote a slim bibliography, really intended to satisfy a few readers and modest collectors like myself. Then each time we met, Len told me more stories – he loves to impart knowledge, stir up discussion – and I felt that unless someone wrote them down, they’d be forgotten. So that led to The Len Deighton Companion which I wrote in Germany before I moved to Hong Kong, and I was surprised and delighted when it sold so well in hardcover and then paperback.
What were you doing in Hong Kong?
Before living in Germany I worked for several years with David Hemmings and retained a strong interest in film and TV. I moved to Hong Kong in the mid-1980s as part of a start-up with ambitions to launch the first private satellite system in South-East Asia. Our main interest was in the TV programming opportunities. We secured an option on a refurbished C-band satellite and a deal for an orbital relaunch on NASA’s Space Shuttle. The relaunch was cancelled following the 1986 Challenger disaster and China stepped in and offered the services of its Long March rocket. That was April 1990 and marked not only China’s first commercial space launch but also the first time in history a satellite was returned to orbit. Today AsiaSat is a public company and serves the communications needs of over two-thirds of the world’s population.
You stayed in touch with Len through this time?
Intermittently – one forgets that as recently as the early 1990s, distance created practical hurdles; there was no internet to speak of, no email. I lived in the region for nearly 15 years and was very focussed on its media opportunities. I helped found what became Asia Business News in Singapore, today known as CNBC Asia. It was the region’s first satellite-TV business channel, delivering local, regional and global business news to viewers across the Asia Pacific. After I sold my interest in that I was drawn to the emerging internet-driven economy; this was about 1994. We built several companies and I served as an exec in a couple of publicly listed corporations involved in digital media, first in Hong Kong, and then Tokyo. Summarising it like this makes it sound like one easy ride, but as every founder will tell you, creating any business is a long hard slog and an emotional rollercoaster. But I remain powerfully attached to Hong Kong and the region
When did you start on the biography?
In 2005 Lion Television and Len invited me to act as the adviser on the documentary The Truth About Len Deighton, which was broadcast by the BBC in 2006. Len and I got to see a lot more of each other, and of course by then the ubiquity of email meant one was only a keystroke away. As a result of working on that programme, I was keen to explore the whole IPCRESS phenomenon: the book, the movie, the iconography, the early 60s context. I’ve always felt that The IPCRESS File is where the Cold War meets the Royal College of Art. Alongside some of the pop art of that era, it elevated spies, nuclear paranoia and the commonplace in daily lifeto the level of fine art. One might go so far as to describe The IPCRESS File as a work of pop art itself. Wrapped in its ground-breaking monochrome Ray Hawkey jacket, it should have a place in art galleries alongside the works of Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton and Colin Self!
As a footnote for ipcressphiles, it’s fascinating to see how Deighton’s fictional acronym has gained widespread use, cheekily adopted for a high-profile clinical trial at the University of Bristol (“Internet PsyChotherapy for dePRESSion”), as a product name for High Grade Internet Protocol Cryptographic equipment used by the Government, an IT programme, a Tokyo fashion shop, a record label, a London DJ, and even a pedigree of golden retriever!
Anyway, once I got seriously into the research I quickly recognised that a history of The IPCRESS Filecouldn’t be isolated from the story of its author.
This previously unpublished photograph shows Len Deighton (right) in 1961 with the French couple who owned the isolated cottage he rented in the Dordogne where he completed The IPCRESS File. © Len Deighton. No reproduction without permission. Sourced by Edward Milward-Oliver.
When will the biography be published?
It’s a work-in-progress, with no set publication date. I’m squeezing it in while developing a digital project called AMICI (ami-chi), which is an online cultural network that will enable millions of people to pursue their cultural passions while benefitting the arts organisations they love and support.
Simultaneously with the biography, I’m working on a comprehensive bibliography of Deighton’s work and the associated material with Jon Gilbert, whose recent 736-page Ian Fleming bibliography has set the benchmark for bibliographic scholarship.
Does all this have Len’s blessing? Is it an ‘official’ biography?
Yes, this has his blessing, and no, it’s not an official biography. I never explicitly sought Len’s permission but the lines of research kept expanding and he couldn’t have been more generous with his time and his introductions. He’s never once tried to impose a preferred point-of-view, direct my research, or steered me away from talking to anyone. There have been occasions, not many, when I’ve found that an incident or an event differed significantly from Len’s recollection. There’s no easy way to tell a subject that they have misremembered something important. But when that’s happened, Len has readily accepted that he got it wrong. There’s no question he appreciates solid research.
Even when you have the facts, is there such a thing as an ‘authentic’ version of the past?
André Aciman recently wrote a wonderful New York Times opinion piece about memoirs, in which he suggested there is no single past, just versions of the past. “Proving one version true settles absolutely nothing, because proving another is equally possible”. I think this is right, and when the IPCRESS project expanded into a full biography, I decided to follow the themes and events that I found most compelling, wherever they led, and hope that the things that most interest me also interest the book’s readers.
So I’ve been following a virtual trail from below-stairs life in pre-war London via the camera towers of Tokwe Atoll to the blue skies of Southern California. It’s taken me through St Martins School of Art and the Royal College of Art, espresso bars in Old Compton Street and jazz clubs in Greenwich Village, convivial gatherings in South London kitchens and the fashionable Trattoria Terrazza in Soho’s Romilly Street, quiet photographic studios, international film sets, Chicago’s Playboy Mansion, and abandoned poste restante addresses in Europe’s Cold War capitals. And it hasn’t ended yet.
Writing is a solitary profession. How do you make that life interesting to readers?
That isn’t a challenge in Len Deighton’s case. The working title, DEIGHTON: An Uncommon Man, tells you everything. His lasting influence extends across photography, cooking, design, marketing, publishing, mass media, and movies, in addition to his reinvention of the spy thriller and a body of work covering half a century. The description ‘renaissance man’ never had a more deserving subject.
Matthew Kirschenbaum, who is researching the crossover between computing and literature for a book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, recently wrote in Slate about how Bomber was the first novel written with a word processor, which is entirely consistent with Deighton’s early adoption of practical technology.
I recall you pointing out that one of Len’s intriguing influences on the spy genre was that after The IPCRESS File everyone started using ‘The’ in the title of thrillers! And do you know, he’s among the top 1000 authors and works cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, and is currently quoted 472 times. In six instances he provides the first evidence for a word: pommes allumettes (The IPCRESS File); Stasi, Grepo and Shin Bet (Funeral in Berlin); Stolichnaya (Billion-Dollar Brain), and merguez (Yesterday’s Spy), and in another 47 instances the first evidence for a sense of a word.
If we step back, we can see that the heart of Deighton’s story is the 1960s, when he played an incalculable role in reshaping popular culture in Britain. A decade which opens with him sitting in the garden of the Hôtel Sainte Anne on the island of Porquerolles filling a notebook with ideas for a story about someone much like himself, except that he makes him a spy which he never was, and closes with the publication of what many consider his finest novel, Bomber, which signals a renewal of his creative energies after his bruising experiences in the film trade.
The 1960s has a powerful appeal today because like our current digital era, it was a time of massive disruption and transformation. The rate of change was extraordinary. And Harry Palmer was, to quote Clive Irving, a metaphor for creative insurrection. If you want to understand how the 1960s has shaped our modern world, there’s no better way to begin than exploring the life of Len Deighton.
Michael Caine, cinematographer Otto Heller, and Len Deighton. Contact strip of rarely seen photographs by Jack Nisberg outside London’s Leicester Square Theatre at the opening of The Ipcress File on 18 March 1965.© Jack Nisberg / Roger-Viollet. No reproduction without permission. Jack Nisberg (1922-1980) was a freelance American photographer who worked mainly for Look, Newsweek, The Observer, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, Elle and Vogue. After moving to Paris in 1955, he became a sought-after photographer for cultural, political and social events, in addition to photojournalistic assignments. A friend of Len Deighton, he was also on hand to photograph the only meeting of Deighton and Ian Fleming at a luncheon hosted by Peter Evans in March 1963. Jack Nisberg’s work is being rediscovered by cultural historians and collectors, and his archive is now managed by the French agency Roger-Viollet.
You spoke about there being different versions of the past. Has your research thrown up any big surprises?
Not really, just what I might call course corrections. For me, the most important rule is to go to the source. Don’t accept anything as given. I’m very keen on timelines. They’re a framing mechanism. I build them for every major event, every milestone in the story. I look for unambiguous dates and then add in detail around them to build reliable chronologies. Establishing when things happened helps determine why they happened. And as more detail is added, I’m able to verify people’s recollections against them.
Early on I discovered that The IPCRESS File didn’t start life in the way that’s always been reported. A typically self-effacing publicity line by Len following its stunning success – that the manuscript had lain in a drawer unread and unloved until he unexpectedly met a literary agent at a party – was repeated and reprinted so many times that even Len came to remember it as fact. Whereas what actually happened is much more compelling, and revealing about its author.
Incidentally, I found the woman who typed that IPCRESS manuscript (sadly now lost). Paid by Len with a second-hand television set, she went on to achieve fame and celebrated status in the music world.
Although today we have Google and access to unlimited information online, people reach a certain age and frequently drop below the radar. I was thus delighted to locate and correspond with Robin Denniston, who sadly passed away last year. He was the editor at Hodder & Stoughton who bought The IPCRESS File after it had been turned down by Jonathan Cape and Heinemann. Denniston was a talented publisher – he later brought John le Carré over from Gollancz – whose family was closely associated with the security services. His father, Alistair Denniston, set up and ran the Government Code and Cypher School, the ancestor of today’s GCHQ, and his sister at one time worked for Graham Greene, Kim Philby and Tim Milne in an MI6 London outstation.
Like the manuscript of The IPCRESS File, the film’s screenplay – which had early drafts by Lukas Heller (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Flight of the Phoenix, The Dirty Dozen) and the author Lionel Davidson – has been frustratingly elusive. But I’ve been able to reassemble some of the scenes and plot developments that were substantially changed or thrown-out during shooting, giving me a much better appreciation of what a great job director Sidney Furie did and how it could have been a lesser film in other hands.
The movie’s title theme is widely remembered for the sound of the cimbalom. I searched for and found John Leach, who introduced John Barry to this hammer dulcimer instrument and played it on the Ipcress soundtrack. Sitting in his home and listening to him pick out those distinctive notes on the very cimbalom he played in the CTS recording studio in February 1965, I could have sworn I smelled coffee brewing . . . John Leach knew Kim Philby in Beirut. Another of the unexpected connections among the neural pathways of this vibrant story.
When examining any life, one quickly recognises how serendipity can play a significant role in determining the outcome. Deighton’s books, with their radical covers, would have looked very different had Ray Hawkey left London for Venezuela as the art editor of Shell’s South American publications. The Ipcress movie would be unrecognizable had Richard Harris not committed to Il deserto rosso opposite Monica Vitti, and Christopher Plummer to The Sound of Music . . . And we might not be discussing Len Deighton author, had he not left the Robert Sharp advertising agency after six restless and unsatisfactory months in 1959.
The journey continues, across a terrain that’s always striking. Deighton’s fans run the gamut from the former Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force and the historian Simon Schama, to Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards and the celebrated author J G Ballard. Friends and former friends, people from many walks of life who worked with him, they’ve all given generously of their time. I have over 70 hours of interviews, of which nearly 40 are with Len. Transcribing them is a major undertaking!
A few years ago it seemed that Len Deighton was a recluse, or close to one – he didn’t give interviews at all. But recently he has given several, written articles, and even published an ebook about Ian Fleming and James Bond. It’s wonderful. Do you think we’ll hear more of him – perhaps even another novel?
Len writes every day. It’s a lifetime habit. But now it’s no longer with an eye for publication. He’s written a 30,000-word exploration of fountain pens, the way they work and the changes they’ve undergone, and is completing a study of aero engines called The Secret History of Airplanes. Both reflect private passions, and maintain his reputation for exceptional research. The ebook you mention, James Bond: My Long and Eventful Search for His Father, is a cinematic memoir written at the request of Amazon as part of the launch of their Kindle Singles.
Over the past four years, he’s also been writing new introductions for the complete edition of his 28 novels, which have provided a platform for him to reflect on half a century of writing and the truth of his observation made many years ago that anyone can write one book, even politicians do it; starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer.
The future? To my knowledge, there’s no unfinished novel lying in a drawer and I don’t expect Len to write a new one, but as recent history reminds us, one should never say never . . .
What do you make of the news about the Bernard Samson TV series?
There’s a great team behind the project that appears to have the talent and confidence necessary to create an authentic world around Bernard Samson with its own set of implicit values and touch-points. At the core of Len’s nine novels is a matrix of narratives about the choices people make, and the series has the potential to engage audiences on a very different level to the cold techno-driven apocalyptic approach of, say, Spooks. Clerkenwell Films clearly recognise this. It was a masterstroke to secure Simon Beaufoy, who I understand is due to start working on the adaptation later in the year.
These aren’t the only Deighton novels headed for TV. Originally conceived as a feature film, Bomber is currently in development as a television mini-series by Roger Randall-Cutler and Robert Cheek of First Film Company in partnership with a major broadcaster. This will give them the screen time to develop the multiple storylines of the novel. I expect news on the writer of this project very soon too. It’s all part of an encouraging commitment to long-form drama on television right now. Many notable film writers are working in the medium. The new UK high-end TV tax relief scheme, which is heavily modelled on the successful film tax credit regime, should help sustain this.
And I know that film and TV rights to another two books are currently optioned. That makes 12 of Deighton’s novels in development today.
Aside from Len Deighton, who are your favourite authors?
John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, le Carré, and my late friend Jim Ballard. These are the authors whose work I most frequently return to. Beside the bed right now I have The Infatuations by Javier Marías and Tim Bouquet’s gripping 617: Going to War with Today’s Dambusters.
Thanks again for your time, Edward – I very much look forward to reading the biography.
For more information about Len Deighton, do check out Rob Mallows’ great website The Deighton Dossier.
The Forgotten Master of British Spy Fiction
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Spy fiction can be divided, very roughly, into two camps: Field and Desk. James Bond is a field agent—we follow his adventures, not M’s. John le Carré’s novels, on the other hand, tend to focus on the people back at headquarters—George Smiley is a senior man at the Circus (he later becomes head of it, for a time). Broadly speaking, I think Field tends to win out on the sales front, whereas Desk gets more critical acclaim.
I enjoy both genres, but sometimes find myself wishing that the Field book I’m reading were as deft at characterization and prose style as it is at the suspense and atmosphere. Similarly, I often find myself reading a Desk book and desperately hoping that something will happen. It’s all beautifully drawn, but is everyone going to be searching their filing cabinets for that manila folder forever?
In my own work, I’ve tried to have my cake and eat it: Paul Dark is a Desk man sent unwillingly back into the Field. In this I was partly influenced by the British spy novelist Joseph Hone, who combines the best of both camps in a way that leaves me breathless—and sick with envy. I spoke to Hone about his work in 2002 (his number was in the book and he picked up—sometimes you get lucky), and afterwards he sent me a very charming and touching letter, and enclosed copies of many of his reviews. That probably sounds a little vain of him, but it’s not if you’ve read his novels. While it was reassuring to see that others had also highly valued his work, I found the reviews rather depressing reading. When I see a quote from a newspaper on the back of a novel, I’m conscious that it may have been taken wildly out of context. ‘Better than Deighton’ may, for example, have originally been part of the sentence ‘Better than Deighton at describing the intricacies of Nicaraguan bee-keeping customs Mr Fortescue undoubtedly is; as to the nature of espionage, he hasn’t the foggiest.’ A jacket that trumpets ‘One for le Carré lovers… real suspense’ may have been culled from a review in the local paper that read: ‘One for le Carré lovers in search of a stop-gap only—despite occasional glimmers of real suspense, No Checkpoints for Charlie is dull as ditchwater, with a protagonist so irritating I kept wishing he would use his blasted cyanide capsule and put us all out of our misery.’ (My publishers would never do this, by the way.) But here were perceptive and laudatory reviews of Hone’s work from Time, Newsweek, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, Kirkus and many more, comparing him favourably with Ambler, le Carré, Deighton and Greene. And yet, sadly, he is pretty much completely forgotten today, a footnote in British spy fiction. He deserves to be much better known.
Hone’s main protagonist—‘a man with almost no heroic qualities’, as he describes himself—is Peter Marlow, an MI6 desk man turned field agent. He is repeatedly being taken out of his grubby office in the Mid-East Section in Holborn and dragged into the line of fire. The plots come thick and fast, and feature ingenious twists, action, mayhem, chases—all the great spy stuff you’d want. But it’s all wrapped up in prose so elegant, and characterization so subtle and pervasive, that you put the books down feeling you’ve just read a great work of literature.
Marlow himself is a wonderful character, and I think deserves to be as well known as Smiley. He’s the constant outsider, peering in at others’ lives, meddling where he shouldn’t, and usually being set up by everyone around him. He’s a kind and intelligent man, and terribly misused, but he’s also a cynic—he sees betrayal as inevitable, and tries to prepare for it.
We first meet him in The Private Sector (1971), as an English teacher in Cairo who is gradually drawn into a spy ring. It’s one of those ‘innocents in too deep’ stories, but the evocation of both Egypt and the shifting loyalties of the protagonists is dazzling. Hone alternates between third and first persons, which he makes look like the easiest thing in the world. Set in the run-up to the Six Day War, it is superficially about Soviet moles, but the subtext is about how we can never know anyone else. That’s a poor description of it, though, so here’s LJ Davis writing about it in The Washington Post in July 1972 instead:
‘There are moments in this book—indeed, whole chapters—where one is haunted by the eerie feeling that Joseph Hone is really Graham Greene, with faint quarterings of Lawrence Durrell and Thomas Pynchon. His tone is nearly perfect—quiet, morbidly ironic, beautifully controlled and sustained, moodily introspective, occasionally humorous and more often bitter, with a persistent undertone of unspeakable sadness and irrecoverable loss.’
The May 8 1972 issue of Newsweek featured a full-page review of the book, calling it the best spy novel since Deighton’s Funeral In Berlin:
‘Joseph Hone knows what counts in this kind of fiction: ambiguity, romantic weariness, morality suspended, a precise sense of place, and a hall-of-mirrors effect in which double and triple agents are each caught in a plot more twisted than he can comprehend yet each imagines a plot more twisted yet. The fun is in watching everyone second-guess everyone else.’
The review concluded:
‘Hone answers to all the criteria of good spy fiction; his story is not only good but reinforced by his dalliance. He remembers, as some ambitious but less skilful writers forget, that a good spy story subordinates everything—characters, atmosphere and all—to the necessities of plot. A good spy novel is quite different from a good novel about spies—Conrad’s Secret Agent, for instance, or le Carré’s Looking Glass War—in which plot is sacrificed for the sake of character and atmosphere.’
In the second novel in the series, The Sixth Directorate (1975), Marlow has become just a little wiser. MI5 has caught a chap called George Graham red-handed as a Soviet sleeper, and locked him away. But they need to know more. Marlow looks enough like Graham that he is sent on a mission to impersonate him. The book is partly set in New York. Here’s Marlow describing his arrival there:
‘The city had climbed up in front of us long before, when we’d passed under the Verrazzano bridge eight miles out; the towers, points, all the steps and cliffs of Manhattan growing up on the horizon, poking gradually into the sun, like an ultimate geography lesson—some final, arrogant proof in steel and concrete that the world was round.
From a distance the city was a very expensive educational game, a toy not like other toys. And one had seen those towers so often in so many images—in polychrome and black and white, moving or with music—that all of us standing on the forward deck that morning had the expression of picture dealers scrutinising a proffered masterpiece, leaving a polite interval before crying ‘Fake!’
These preconceptions were a pity since, from a distance, in the sharp light over a gently slapping metal-blue sea, the place looked better than any of its pictures, like the one advertisement layout that had escaped all the exaggerated attentions of the years, come free of Madison Avenue, the press, all the published myths and horrors of the city.
Sharp winds had rubbed the skyline clean, light glittered on the edges of the buildings and all I saw was a place where I was unknown, where unknown people bore ceaselessly up and down those cavernous alleys, between bars and restaurants and offices, all busy with an intent that had nothing to do with me.
The city stood up like a rich menu I could afford at last after a long denial.’
Marlow has come to Manhattan because Graham had a mistress there years ago, and he has studied her letters to learn all about her. But when the MI6 liaison in the city introduces Marlow to his wife, we realize that she was Graham’s lover. Ouch. Before long, Marlow finds himself entangled with her, as well as fending off the advances of a beautiful African princess who works for the United Nations. Yes, only in spy novels, but Hone somehow manages to make the whole thing seem real:
‘‘Having coffee with a spy.’ She said it in a deep, funny voice. ‘Do you carry a revolver?’
‘No, as a matter of fact. No guns, no golden Dunhills, no dark glasses.’
‘No vodka martinis either—very dry, stirred and not shaken. Or is it the other way round?’
I felt the skin on my face move awkwardly, creases rising inexplicably over my cheeks. Then I realised I was smiling.
‘Yes, I drink. Sometimes. Bottles of light ale, though. I’m a spy from one of those seedier thrillers, I’m afraid.’
‘Let’s have a drink then.’
‘Here?’
‘God, no. Upstairs.’
I looked at her blankly.
‘Women are out too, are they? Not even “sometimes”? What a very dull book you are.’
‘I disappoint you.’
‘Not yet.’
She stood up and tightened her belt a notch. She was already pretty thin.’
It’s not that seedy a thriller, of course. Here’s Anatole Broyard’s verdict on it from The New York Times of March 2, 1984:
‘Joseph Hone’s Sixth Directorate, which was published in 1975, is one of the best suspense novels of the last ten years. It has elegance, wit, sympathy, irony, surprise, action, a rueful love affair and a melancholy Decline of the West mood. Only the crimes in its pages separate the book from what is known as serious novels.’
The book also came with a cover quote from the American spy novelist Charles McCarry, who Hone is similar to in some ways. McCarry was forgotten for years, before being rediscovered in the last decade by a new generation of readers. Hone told me that Tony Richardson, the director of Look Back in Anger and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, had intended to film The Sixth Directorate, taking an option on it and commissioning a script, but it didn’t go ahead as result of Joseph Andrews performing poorly at the box office. That’s a real shame, as it could have made a terrific film, and introduced Hone to a wider audience.
After The Sixth Directorate, Hone wrote a standalone spy thriller, The Paris Trap (1977), although its narrator, Harry Tyson, is in much the same vein as Marlow. The plot sounds preposterous when précised, and doesn’t do it justice, but I’ll give it a go. A film, called Hero, is being shot in Paris, starring Julie Christie, Jean-Paul Belmondo and (the fictional) Jim Hackett. The plot of the film: a group of Palestinian terrorists have taken Christie’s husband, a minister in the French government, hostage. Belmondo plays a cop reluctantly working alongside British agent Summers, who is played by Hackett.
The screenplay for Hero is based on the long-running TV series of the same name, which in turn was based on a novel by John Major (really). Major was a pseudonym of Harry Tyson, who now works for British Intelligence (in the same section as Marlow, with the same boss). Former spy writer Tyson and film star Hackett are old friends, but now Tyson is having an affair with Hackett’s estranged wife—and Hackett secretly seeing Tyson’s.
In the meantime, a Palestinian terrorist cell, known only as The Group, takes Tyson, his daughter, and Hackett’s wife hostage. Their demands? Unusual, to say the least. They want a rewrite of the Hero script by Tyson, restoring the original grittiness of Summers’ character (he was a kind of Harry Palmer, but has become more like Bond), and a more sympathetic depiction of the Palestinian cause. The leader of The Group’s operation turns out to be a middle-class British radical: think a younger Vanessa Redgrave to the power of ten.
If you can’t imagine how on earth any of this could make a believable (or coherent) thriller, here’s the opening paragraph, which is typical of the tone throughout:
‘Nothing should ever surprise us. The warnings were all there in the past, ignored or disbelieved, and so all the more devastating when they at last take effect—as a marriage will suddenly explode for the lack of something years before, some mild ghost not laid in bed then, which rises up one fine day and takes a brutal shape from the years of waiting.’
Hone’s next novel, The Flowers of the Forest (1980), brought Marlow back. The book was published in the US as The Oxford Gambit, a move that did not impress the critic of The New York Times Book Review:
‘The title was changed here, I suppose, to identify it more clearly as a complicated thriller and tap the wide market for such books. Pity. It is all of that but a bit more. It is a deft story laced with a mordant wit and deserves a wide readership.’
Like the previous two Marlow novels, the plot again revolves around Soviet penetration agents. The man in question this time is Lindsay Phillips, a senior MI6 officer who suddenly disappears while tending his bees. Has he been kidnapped, murdered—or was he perhaps, as some are now starting to fear, a mole all along? Our man Marlow is sent in to investigate, and begins prying around the family: how much did Phillips’ wife and daughter know of his secret life? The basic set-up is familiar from several spy novels of the era, and would be put to great and best-selling effect by le Carré in A Perfect Spy six years later, but Hone handles it very differently. The narrative is once more a mix of first and third person, and features murders at funerals, chases across Europe, faked deaths and hidden affairs galore. Isabel Quigly wrote of it in the Financial Times:
‘This is the best thriller I’ve found in years, perhaps the best I remember—too serious and rich for the word thriller and what it implies, though sticking closely to the thriller genre—a novel about the mysteriousness of human beings rather than the mysteries of intelligence and diplomacy. The weaving of the story is so close, so tight, that no image, no hint, is ever wasted: everything links up with something else pages or chapters ahead… It all works without pretentiousness, going far beyond the limitations of its genre.’
That ellipsis isn’t to cut parts that weren’t as flattering, by the way, but rather a couple of hundred more words raving about the novel’s merits. Ms Quigly, I salute your good taste.
The Valley Of The Fox (1982) was the final novel in the series. Marlow has retired to the Cotswolds, where he is slowly writing his memoirs. Then a man breaks in and shoots his wife, and he goes on the run. This is a classic chase thriller, in the tradition of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. Some passages pay explicit homage to that book, with Marlow surviving on his wits in the countryside. Here’s how it opens:
‘He’d trapped me. But had he intended to? Had he meant to drive me up against the old pumping shed by the far end of the lake? Or had I carelessly allowed him to do this, moving after him into this impasse where there was no soundless exit, either across the stream ahead or up the steep open slopes behind the ruined building. Either way, I couldn’t move now. And since the laurel bush only partly hid me I knew that if he moved past the corner of the shed he must see me and I would have to kill him…’
So there you have it. Five novels, all superb, all pretty much forgotten. All are also long out of print, but are easily found online, and well worth seeking out. Faber Finds also has the four Marlow novels as print-on-demand titles. They are not only very readable and exciting, but also psychologically astute and beautifully written. The passages I’ve quoted from them give only an inkling of their impact: it’s the melding of the prose style with the twists and turns of the plots that make Hone so special, and it has to be experienced over the course of a novel to appreciate.
Waiting for Deaver
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
James Bond fans around the country are biting their nails as they wait for the midnight publication of Carte Blanche, the latest novel to feature the world’s most famous secret agent.
The book, launched earlier today lavish in style at London’s St Pancras Station, is written by American thriller-writer Jeffery Deaver. Deaver’s stab at Bond follows on from Sebastian Faulks, whose Devil May Care was published in 2008 to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth. Fleming’s original novels have been reissued several times in recent years, most recently as ebooks.
As a result of the shrewd choices made in the last decade by both the literary estate and the film-makers, it seems that Fleming’s reputation is finally being reappraised. Fleming is, after all, one of Britain’s greatest popular novelists and the creator of a globally renowned icon. During his lifetime, his work was admired by writers as diverse as Raymond Chandler and Kingsley Amis, but the more successful the books—and the films then adapted from them—became, the lower Fleming’s stock fell in literary circles. In 1958, Paul Johnson famously decried Dr No’s ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’ in the New Statesman—a bizarre claim to anyone familiar with the likes of Dennis Wheatley and Peter Cheyney, and in 1964, Malcolm Muggeridge attacked Bond as ‘utterly despicable: obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways, with strong undertones of sadism, and an unspeakable cad in his relations with women, toward whom sexual appetite represents the only approach’.
But the James Bond of Fleming’s novels isn’t any of those things, which is perhaps unsurprising considering Muggeridge appears to have only read one Bond book. In fact, Bond falls in love, countermands orders, delights in discovering new cultures and never shows any signs of being a sadist in the novels—the latter is his enemies’ vice, as is often the case in thrillers. There are some embarrassing passages, but on the whole Fleming’s 12 novels and nine short stories hold up remarkably well as fluid, versatile and often beautifully written thrillers.
The best of them, I think, are his first novel, Casino Royale, from 1953, and From Russia, With Love, published four years later. Casino Royale is a short, sharp shock of a thriller. It follows Bond on a small-scale mission at a coastal resort in northern France, and the atmosphere is palpably sticky and disturbing—Bond is far from the superhuman he would become in some of the films. From Russia, With Love is a delectably plotted thriller set in Moscow and Istanbul and featuring one of the genre’s greatest villains, the loathsome Rosa Klebb. Fleming’s phrasing is often journalistic—he worked for The Sunday Times for several years—giving even the most implausible of scenes vividness and authority. The technique would later be developed by Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, and indeed Jeffery Deaver.
So let’s resist the temptation, on the publication of the latest James Bond novel, to mock one of Britain’s greatest exports. Let’s instead cheer on Mr Deaver, enjoy his adventure—and pay tribute to the writer who created a character still taking the world by storm nearly sixty years later.
First published in The Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2011
The Lives of Ian Fleming
This article can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download in the format of your choosing here.
Ian Fleming led a fascinating life: born into privilege, he had three successive and highly successful careers: one as an intelligence officer during the Second World War; another as a journalist in the years immediately after it; and his final stint as one of the world’s most popular novelists. There have been several books and films about his life, but for a complete portrait it’s hard to beat the biographies by John Pearson and Andrew Lycett.
Published by Jonathan Cape in 1966, John Pearson’s The Life of Ian Fleming was the first biography of the writer, coming just two years after his death. Pearson was ideally suited for the job, having been Fleming’s assistant at The Sunday Times. He also ghosted the autobiography of Donald Fish, Airline Detective, for which Fleming had written the foreword, and had written Gone to Timbuctoo, a thriller set in Africa, and Bluebird and the Dead Lake, about the British land speed record-holder Donald Campbell.
Helped by The Sunday Times’ Leonard Russell, who initiated the book, Pearson had access to a staggering collection of people for his biography. As well as members of Fleming’s family and former colleagues, he had the input of several world-renowned writers (Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Truman Capote, Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham), politicians (Anthony Eden, Hugh Gaitskell) and other notable figures (Carl Jung, Alfred Hitchcock, Lord Beaverbrook). Unfortunately, the precise nature of their contributions are not given. This was very much the tradition at the time, but biographies have changed since: for instance, in his 2006 biography of Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader scrupulously footnoted all his sources.
There are several arguments for Leader’s approach. Chiefly, information is rarely fixed. What a biographer takes in good faith at the time may later prove wrong—this is much harder to spot if one doesn’t know who said it, or in what context. As a result of this and a minimal use of direct quotes, Pearson’s is a highly stylised biography: the idea seems to have been to make the research seamless, so that the entire book reads as effortlessly as an extended character sketch. Tonally, Pearson’s prose is frequently reminiscent of Fleming in its lucidity and appreciation of telling detail, and one can’t help wondering while reading it how he would write a Bond novel (Fleming’s estate evidently felt the same, as they commissioned him to do just that a few years later).
A persistent theme in the book is Fleming’s attitude to women. We learn that he had a particularly domineering mother, and that after she vetoed his engagement to a French-Swiss girl in 1931, Fleming told his friend Ralph Arnold ‘I’m going to be quite bloody-minded about women from now on… I’m just going to take what I want without any scruples at all.’ Pearson quotes extensively from Fleming’s notebooks, and they often don’t make pleasant reading: ‘The woman likes the door to be forced’, for instance. But at what age he wrote these snippets, and with what purpose in mind, is not entirely clear.
It’s tempting to see the roots of James Bond in Fleming’s life, and indeed that idea stems primarily from this biography: Pearson describes Bond as Fleming’s ‘dream-self’ and convincingly shows how Fleming’s attitudes and opinions informed the character. But it can occasionally be frustrating: was ‘M’ really modelled on Fleming’s mother? Surely the more likely explanation is that he was inspired by Fleming’s wartime boss, Admiral Godfrey, perhaps with a smidgeon of the Special Operations Executive chief Colin Gubbins, who Fleming knew and who was also known by that initial, and perhaps with elements of Fleming himself. Similarly, Pearson’s assertion that Le Chiffre was modelled on Aleister Crowley has become an unshakeable tenet of Bond lore, but it seems far more likely that Fleming used only a few very superficial elements of Crowley for the character. Pearson cites Le Chiffre’s use of the expression ‘my dear boy’ as evidence, but this was a common expression in the British upper classes of the day and was often used by villains in thrillers. Crowley was menacing, but Le Chiffre’s general physical appearance, presumed ethnicity, character and role in the book do not resemble him at all.
But these are rare mis-steps. Some writers, given the kind of access Pearson was afforded and the expectations surrounding such a project, might have pulled their punches and painted a portrait of a brilliant and kind genius. It is to Pearson’s great credit that, with a few exceptions, he didn’t flinch from discussing some of the darker sides of Fleming’s life, and was not afraid to criticise his writing. By doing so, he probably enhanced Fleming’s reputation on both counts, because the praise he does give seems doubly authoritative.
The result is a novelistic insider job, with Fleming a richly drawn protagonist: at turns ambitious and shockingly selfish, one can’t help hoping for the turning point in the book, when his persistent and shameless thrusts at best-sellerdom finally pay off. The ending is rather bleaker: Pearson presents Fleming as a somewhat Jay Gatsby-esque figure in later life, jaded by success but hinting darkly to people that he may have killed people in dastardly ways during the war.
Writing in 1966, Pearson had direct access to many of the key figures in Fleming’s life, but also had to adopt a certain amount of discretion to the living. This became clear with the publication of Andrew Lycett’s biography, titled simply Ian Fleming and published in 1995 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Lycett was something of a younger Pearson: he had also worked for The Sunday Times, and had written a non-fiction work about Libya. Although he by necessity repackaged much of Pearson’s material, his is a much more traditional biography. It is still not footnoted, but does have an index, and while Pearson was vague on some names and dates, Lycett is usually much firmer. As a result, the book is a lot less impressionistic, but much more useful as a reference manual on Fleming. A few tiny errors aside (and all books contain errors), it is very well researched, and makes two substantial additions to the picture provided by Pearson three decades earlier: the story of Blanche Blackwell, Fleming’s lover in later life; and a much deeper context for the success of James Bond that followed the writer’s death. Neither of these were in Pearson’s book, the first presumably for reasons of diplomacy and the second because most of it hadn’t happened yet. At times Lycett slightly overdoses on the connections and backgrounds of extremely minor figures in Fleming’s life, but he leaves few stones unturned. While the book is generally more sympathetic than Pearson’s, he spares us no detail, even of Fleming’s sexual preferences.
Ian Fleming was a much misunderstood man during his life, and remains an undervalued writer. The popular perception is that his novels are superficial fantasies, simple Boy’s Own adventures. His biographers reveal them to be deeply ingrained fantasies and rather complicated Boy’s Own adventures. These two books also give a context to the era in which Fleming lived and worked, and his achievement both in that time and beyond it. While no book could ever present the complete portrait of a writer, taken together one feels that Pearson and Lycett come very close. All Bond and Fleming aficionados should read these two books.
When Julian Met Graham
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Julian Semyonov was the Soviet Union’s most famous spy novelist. A bearded, burly Hemingway-esque figure of a man, he was best known for his Second World War-set thriller Seventeen Moments of Spring. A bestseller in the Soviet Union on publication in 1969, Semyonov adapted it into a 12-part television series four years later, and it became an indelible part of Soviet culture. It’s regarded in Russia to this day with roughly the same degree of reverence as Brits have for the BBC adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
I was looking at Semyonov when researching Dead Drop, because I realized there were incidents in one of his later novels that closely echoed the real events I was writing about. Semyonov died in 1993, but his official website is crammed with information, including interviews he both gave and conducted (Semyonov was a journalist as well as a novelist). And buried in that website is this remarkable interview he did with Graham Greene.
In early 1989, Semyonov travelled to Antibes to meet Greene in his home there. He had tried to contact him before, in Moscow in 1985, although Greene doesn’t seem to have been aware of this when he mentions it. Greene, who was 84 at the time and would die just two years later, initially seems a little stiff, but soon seems to forget that he’s being filmed, and the interview feels very much like eavesdropping on a private conversation. It’s also fun to catch a glimpse of how Greene lived—if you look very carefully, you can spot a Scrabble box in the background.
This conversation between two of the great spy novelists of the 20th century runs at around an hour and a quarter, and there are several gems in it if you’re interested in the Cold War or espionage. The two men happened to meet at a crossroads in history when, finally, they could speak relatively openly with each other, although there are some guarded moments. Semyonov is by turns solicitous and pushy, while Greene occasionally seems a little lost: despite the almost tangible end of the Cold War—the Wall would fall within a few months—the gulf between their worlds is still palpable. Semyonov repeatedly mentions Greene’s books, and even offers to buy one to translate into Russian (Greene suggests his 1934 novel It’s A Battlefield), but only refers to one of them by title, and doesn’t ask a single question about their content.
Similarly, Greene seems either unaware or disinterested in the fact he is talking to one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent writers. When he relates how a book of his had sold some 14,000 copies in Czechoslovakia despite a decree forbidding it to be reviewed or advertised, Semyonov lets him in on a secret about the Soviet literary scene: a book often sells more if it hasn’t been reviewed or publicized, because word-of-mouth is much more valued by readers than state approval. Later in the conversation, Semyonov asks if Brits can immediately distinguish shades of sense of humour, such as ‘Eton humour’, ‘Cambridge humour’ and ‘Oxford humour’. Greene visibly squirms. Both writers were masters at delineating the idiosyncracies and nuances of their own countrymen but, perhaps unsurprisingly, seem to have had much less of a grasp of each other’s cultures.
Greene talks at length about his close friendship with the Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos, the subject of his book Getting To Know The General, and both men say they disbelieve that his death in a plane crash had been accidental—Greene even points to who he feels is the most likely person to have masterminded a plot to assassinate him! The culprit, he is sure, was Colonel Dario Paredes del Rio.
He also discusses how he ‘detested’ Ronald Reagan, his hopes that the newly elected US president, George Bush Snr, will be more progressive, his time in Czechoslovakia, and reveals his thoughts on Russia and Afghanistan—the latter being a topic both men knew well (Semyonov was fluent in Pashto).
They also discuss censorship, which was something Semyonov was very familiar with: his father had been the editor of Izvestia, but had been arrested by the NKVD and spent time in the gulags. Semyonov talks about how he too had been summoned to the Lubyanka, by Yuri Andropov shortly after he had been appointed head of the KGB in 1967. But rather than being put in a cell, Andropov had wanted to help him with his novels—in a 1987 interview, Semyonov revealed that this included being granted access to KGB operational files. Semyonov tells Greene how Andropov had advised him on avoiding the censor’s pen, by simply adding three lines to any potentially controversial scene setting out the other side of the argument. This technique is a hallmark of Semyonov’s work, and it’s fascinating that it was suggested by the head of the KGB. Semyonov played both sides of the fence like this throughout his career, praising the KGB in his books but doing so in such a way as to almost shame them, by making them conspicuously nobler and more empathetic than their real-life equivalents. His characters often eloquently condemn precisely the sort of narrow-minded behaviour that plagued Soviet bureaucracy as ‘anti-Soviet’, and there are ambiguities galore in Seventeen Moments of Spring. [See the next article, Secreted In Fiction, for a detailed look at this.]
Greene doesn’t seem to have been aware of any of this, and rather peculiarly seems to have seen Andropov as a reformer who paved the way for Gorbachev’s reforms, something Semyonov agrees to. But Greene had also mentioned, almost in passing, how he had blocked all Soviet translations of his work as a result of the Daniel-Sinyavsky trial in 1966, a restriction he had only lifted a couple of years earlier. Andropov had hardly been a saint in that affair, as Greene must have known. Both men seem to dance around the other’s politics, anxious to please and not offend. Safely ensconced in the era of glasnost, Semyonov reveals he felt the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan were mistakes, but he also shows a lot of inside knowledge, and one wonders if it crossed Greene’s mind that Semyonov knew a great many people in the KGB, and that their meeting might well be discussed back in Moscow. At one point, Semyonov asks Greene to sign some books for Raisa Gorbachev, which he duly does. The entire Gorbachev family, he rather unconvincingly claims, are fans of Greene’s work. It seems more likely this would have been a totemic gift for Semyonov, who was a wily networker.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of the discussion comes about halfway through, and revolves around Kim Philby. Greene had known the KGB agent well during the war, when they had both been in MI6, and had (controversially to many in the West), written an introduction to his memoir My Silent War. Semyonov is keen to get his sense of the man, and Greene talks about how fond he was of Philby, and how they had gone to the pub together during the Blitz. He says that he had sometimes asked himself what he would have done if Philby had indicated to him, ‘in an unwise moment’ over such a drink, that he was a Soviet agent. Greene felt he would have ‘given him twenty-four hours to leave the country and then I’d have reported him. In other words, I’d have given him twenty-four hours to get away!’
Perhaps enlivened by the discussion of his old friend Kim, towards the end of the interview Greene suddenly perks up, and he starts to prepare a gin and tonic for the camerawoman, commenting as he does on his most recent (and, it would turn out) last novel, The Captain and the Enemy, which he reveals he wasn’t fond of, as he felt it had ’too many echoes of other books’, and that at one stage he had even abandoned writing it.
And there the footage suddenly ends, with two of the great espionage novelists from either side of the Cold War looking as if they are about to get a little drunk together, in a flat in Antibes in 1989.
When William Met Ian
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can read on this website or download here.
On 5 October 1962, the first James Bond film, Dr No, had its world premiere in London. Since then, the Bond films have become the most successful cinema series of all time, and they were directly responsible for the ‘spy-mania’ of the Sixties. But James Bond was a household name long before Dr No was made into a film. Fleming’s novels had already sold millions of copies internationally, were reviewed and debated in the world’s leading newspapers, and were imitated, parodied and had even been turned into a successful comic strip. Fleming was a major force in spy fiction, and an enormous influence on several other thriller-writers, prior to October 1962.
But from the beginning, his novels had divided opinion—even before publication, in fact. Michael S. Howard, who was one of the founders and later became the managing director of Fleming’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, was initially against publishing the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale:
‘(Fleming) went busily to work, devising headlines for the chapters and ideas for the jacket. To discuss these we met, towards the end of that October (1952), for the first time since the Popski dinner, and I enjoyed his enthusiastic interest in the technicalities of production. I did not tell him that the book itself had repelled me, and caused me sleepless nights. It had troubled me to be associated with its publication, for I thought its cynical brutality, unrelieved by humour, revealed a sadistic fantasy which was deeply shocking; and that the book would do discredit to the list. But in this I was alone; and although my conscience was uneasy I had accepted the majority opinion, especially William’s judgement, and withdrawn my protests.’1
Howard’s reaction might seem quaint, but Casino Royale was a very dark novel for 1952. James Bond considers Vesper Lynd in the following terms, for example:
‘He found her companionship easy and unexacting. There was something enigmatic about her which was a constant stimulus. She gave little of her real personality away and he felt that however long they were together there would always be a private room inside her which he could never invade. She was thoughtful and full of consideration without being slavish and without compromising her arrogant spirit. And now he knew that she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape. Loving her physically would each time be a thrilling voyage without the anticlimax of arrival. She would surrender herself avidly, he thought, and greedily enjoy all the intimacies of the bed without ever allowing herself to be possessed.’2
This passage makes difficult reading even now. The novel also features a long scene in which Bond has his genitals whipped with a carpet-beater. Fleming’s brother-in-law, Hugo Charteris, felt that the concluding chapters of the book contained ‘the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in print—torture such as Japs and Huns eschewed as not cricket’.3
Michael Howard wrote that, despite his concerns over Casino Royale, he accepted the majority opinion in Jonathan Cape, ‘especially William’s judgement’. William was William Plomer, one of Ian Fleming’s closest friends, and perhaps the man who affected his career more than anyone else. Plomer was born to English parents in South Africa, where he started his career as a writer. His first novel, Turbott Wolfe, caused a sensation on its publication in 1925, as it dealt with inter-racial marriage, making him famous in South Africa. It was published in Britain by Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and gained him a fan in Ian Fleming, who wrote to Plomer directly to say how much he had enjoyed the novel. Plomer replied from Japan, and when he moved to London in 1929 looked up Fleming. It was the start of a friendship that would last until Fleming’s death over three decades later.
Plomer wrote librettos, including that of Benjamin Britten’s The Prodigal Son, as well as poetry, biography, memoir, stories for children, essays and reviews. In 1933, he submitted a volume of short stories to Jonathan Cape. The firm’s resident reader and adviser, Edward Garnett, advised publishing it but warned that it would probably not make much money:
‘Plomer is certainly about the most original and keenest mind of the younger generation… He is emphatically in the minority, i.e. of the section of writers, the real intelligentsia, the unconventional critical-minded literary artist whom the British Public in general don’t like, and therefore only buy in restricted quantities. He is a Left-winger in popularity, i.e. what D.H. Lawrence was to Hugh Walpole, and Cape mustn’t expect more than a quiet rise in sales, even after Plomer’s The Case is Altered was “Chosen by The Book Society”. Of course he ought to have gained “The Book of the Month” years ago—as far as original literary excellence goes. But he is too unconventional and keen.’4
Cape published Plomer’s book, and following Garnett’s death in 1937, he took over his job at the firm. The war interrupted this, and Plomer worked alongside Fleming in Naval Intelligence for the duration of it, before returning to his job at Cape.
On the face of it, this ‘critical-minded literary artist’ seems an unlikely champion for James Bond. His friendship with Fleming was clearly a factor in it, but perhaps his unconventionality also allowed him to see something in Casino Royale that Michael Howard had not. Plomer felt that many of the submissions Cape was receiving were ‘safe, genteel, and a bit dull’5, so it is perhaps not surprising that when, during lunch at The Ivy on May 12 1952, Ian Fleming revealed to him that he had written a book, he was intrigued.
Plomer liked Casino Royale and recommended it be published, but he met with resistance from his colleagues: not just from Michael Howard, but from Jonathan Cape himself. Cape didn’t like thrillers, and rarely published them. He also didn’t think Casino Royale was very good, but Ian Fleming had another ‘in’ as well as Plomer: his elder brother Peter was one of the country’s best-known travel writers, and was published by Jonathan Cape. He had also been one of the company’s editorial aides since 1946. With entreaties from both Plomer and Peter Fleming, Cape reluctantly agreed to publish Casino Royale, but he was far from happy about it, telling another author, Frank Pakenham, that ‘Peter’s little brother’ had written a book that was ‘not up to scratch’ but that he would publish it ‘because he’s Peter’s brother’.6 According to Michael Howard, Jonathan Cape never read another James Bond novel after Casino Royale.7
Fleming’s first novel sold moderately well and, due to his position at The Sunday Times, was reviewed in all the right places. In fact, that was one of the oddities about Fleming’s novels. Just as Jonathan Cape didn’t like thrillers, neither did many of those in Britain’s literary establishment. But Ian Fleming had loved thrillers since his days at Eton, devouring books by Sapper and E Phillips Oppenheim. He had continued to read thrillers into adulthood, and although he had dabbled in poetry it was a thriller he ended up writing. His influences were his boyhood reading, American writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and the new generation of thriller-writers such as Peter Cheyney and Dennis Wheatley, the latter of whom he knew. Wheatley was one of Britain’s best-selling writers, but while his novels were advertised and serialized in newspapers, they were rarely reviewed.
By virtue of being published by Jonathan Cape, and through his considerable network of friends, family and acquaintances in literary circles and high society, Fleming was taken a great deal more seriously. The Times Literary Supplement called Casino Royale ‘both exciting and extremely civilized’, while The Sunday Times, Fleming’s own paper, said he was ‘the best new English thriller-writer since Ambler’.
The subsequent Bond novels sold better than Casino Royale, and in 1958 The Daily Express started adapting them into comic strips. The same year, Fleming became a talking point in the literary world when he was attacked as vulgar by the critic Bernard Bergonzi, and accused of being a purveyor of ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’ by Paul Johnson in The New Statesman.8 This was part of a backlash against Fleming, perhaps partly as a result of his having been launched in establishment circles: other thrillers might have had a lot more of all three of those elements in them, but they didn’t make any claims to being literature. Some people didn’t want Fleming seated at the high table—one could argue that they were the snobs, not he, but that their snobbery concerned the world of books, rather than clothes or food.
Despite these brickbats, or perhaps partly because of them, the Bond novels became more successful, and when it came to review Goldfinger, the seventh book in the series, in March 1959, The Times noted that:
‘A new novel by Mr. Ian Fleming is becoming something of an event, since James Bond has now established himself at the head of his profession, a secret service agent who indeed plays for England but who has much in common with the highly sexed “private eye” on the other side of the Atlantic.’9
James Bond was on a roll, and nothing could stop him. Fleming settled into his routine of writing his books in Goldeneye, his holiday home in Jamaica, and receiving editorial encouragement and criticisms from ‘my gentle Reader William Plomer’ (as he wrote in the dedication of Goldfinger). Plomer had always been Fleming’s champion and supporter behind the scenes, but in 1962 he briefly stepped into the limelight, when he interviewed Fleming for a radio programme. I have been provided with a copy of the complete transcript, which is held with Plomer’s papers at Durham University, and which makes for fascinating reading.
The interview was part of a series of programmes titled ‘The Writer Speaks’, which had been produced by The New American Library—Fleming’s paperback publisher in the United States. Other writers interviewed for the series included Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Irving Stone, Erskine Caldwell, James Jones, CP Snow, Theodore Jones and Gore Vidal. The intention seems to have been for these interviews to have been offered free of charge to any radio station that wanted them, but it’s not clear if any took up the offer in this case: it may be that it was never broadcast. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s a rather cosy chat, and it covers a lot of familiar ground. Fleming tells the story of his visit to Estoril during the war that inspired the plot of Casino Royale, mentions the influence of Chandler and Hammett on his writing and says he started writing novels ‘to take his mind off the prospect of getting married’.10
But some of his remarks are more revealing, and often amusing. When asked by Plomer where the best place in the United States would be for a rendezvous with a spy, he offers either the traditional park or a crowded public swimming pool, or this unusual solution:
‘I once had this discussion with Raymond Chandler and he said that, supposing it were a beautiful spy as opposed to a rather dull spy, the place to take her would be to the Rainbow Room at the top of the Rockefeller Center because he said that was a very attractive place to meet anyway, and also almost entirely used by out-of-town Americans and tourists, so that one would be unlikely to run into a friend or an acquaintance.’11
Plomer also raises the question of Paul Johnson’s damning review of Dr No in The New Statesman four years earlier:
‘William Plomer: Do you think your books are studies in sex, snobbery and sadism?
Ian Fleming: Well, I don’t think they are studies in any of those quite proper ingredients of a thriller. Sex, of course, comes into all interesting books and into interesting lives. As to snobbery. I think that’s pretty good nonsense, really. In fact, we’d all of us like to eat better, stay in better hotels, wear better clothes, drive faster motor-cars, and so on, and it amuses me that my hero does most of these things. As for sadism, well, I think the old-fashioned way of beating up a spy with a baseball bat has gone out with the last war, and I think it’s permissible to give him a rather tougher time than we used to in the old-fashioned days before the war.’12
Plomer also asks Fleming if he has any idea of how many books he has sold to date, to which Fleming replies:
‘Well, that’s a very difficult thing to discover because they’ve been published in about thirty foreign languages. But I should say that my sales in England over my last ten or eleven books would be around two or three million, and in America I think they’re certainly that and possibly more. I think they may well be up to four million because they’ve gone into the New American Library paperback edition and been very smartly dressed up and seem to be selling like hot cakes in the States.’13
This seems to be a rather obvious puff, so it may be that if the programme was not broadcast it was because it was felt to be a little too clearly promotional material. But it’s revealing nevertheless, because this interview was conducted before the first Bond film had been released, and the numbers are huge. The sales figures in the States were probably partly the result of an article about John F Kennedy’s reading habits that had appeared in Life in March, 1961, in which the president had listed From Russia, With Love as one of his 10 favourite books.14 Plomer asks Fleming how he had met the Kennedies:
‘Well, it was rather interesting. About a year before Mr Kennedy became President, I was staying in Washington with a friend of mine and she was driving me through, it was a Sunday morning, and she was driving me through Washington down to Georgetown and there were two people walking along the street and she said, “Oh, there are my friends Jack and Jackie,” and they were indeed very close friends of hers, and she stopped and they talked. And she said, “Do you know Ian Fleming?” And Jack Kennedy said, “Not the Ian Fleming?” Of course that was a very exciting thing for him to say and it turned out that they were both great fans of my books, as indeed is Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, and they invited me to dinner that night with my friend, and we had great fun discussing the books and from then on I’ve always sent copies of them direct and personally to him before they’re published over here.’15
‘I think that was an historic encounter,’ Plomer replies. Fleming told his tale masterfully, but he didn’t mention the name of his friend. This wasn’t simply tact: to do so would have ruined the story, as the friend was Marion ‘Oatsie’ Leiter, whose surname Fleming had given James Bond’s friend in the CIA, Felix Leiter. Leiter had introduced Kennedy to the Bond novels, and had just stopped off at the Kennedies’ house to ask if she could bring Fleming to dinner that evening. They weren’t in, but on the drive away she and Fleming happened to see them walking on the street.16 But that wouldn’t have made as good an anecdote as JFK saying ‘Not the Ian Fleming?’
And it is perhaps the keen publicist that lurked beneath the drawling upper-class English veneer that helped catapult Ian Fleming’s thrillers to global success. In an interview in 1964, John le Carré said that for his first two novels he had ‘remained an anonymous and contented civil servant who reckoned on producing a book a year for a fairly small readership, and going on doing an honest and unspectacular job’.17 Fleming was much more ambitious. He had realized very early on in his writing career that selling subsidiary rights, and particularly television and film rights, would be the key to financial security, and he had pursued them relentlessly. At the time of his interview with William Plomer for ‘The Writer Speaks’, those ambitions were finally coming to fruition, as the following exchange shows:
‘William Plomer: You know people often think your books ought to be films. Am I not right in thinking that the first film based on one of your books has just been made?
Ian Fleming: Yes, it has. It was filmed mostly in Jamaica this last winter. And it’s been done by United Artists through a subsidiary of theirs over here called EON Productions, and it’s been produced by the producer of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was a very great success both here and in America.
Plomer: Have you seen a preview of your film?
Fleming: Yes, I have. I’ve seen the rough cut and I must say I think they’ve certainly managed to hit it off very well. They’ve got a very good star as James Bond, a man called Sean Connery, a Scotsman, who weight-lifts in Scotland and boxed for the navy and a very good Shakespearean actor and so on, and they’ve got plenty of excitement and gunplay and what all in the film and I think it’ll probably be a very great success.
Plomer: Well, let’s hope it will be the first of a succession of films.’18
And the rest, as they say, is history.
With many thanks to Caroline Craggs, Mike Harkness and Denise Condron of the Archives and Special Collections, Durham University Library.
Notes
1, 4, 5, 7. All quotes are from Jonathan Cape, Publisher by Michael Spencer Howard, Penguin, 1971.
2. From Chapter 23, Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, Jonathan Cape, 1953.
3, 6, 16. All quotes and information from Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett, Phoenix, 1996.
8. ‘The Case of Mr Fleming’ by Bernard Bergonzi, in Twentieth Century, March 1958; and ‘Sex, snobbery and sadism’ by Paul Johnson, in The New Statesman, 5 April 1958.
9. From The Times, March 26, 1959.
10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18. All quotes from ‘The Writer Speaks’, Ian Fleming and William Plomer, 1962, courtesy the Archives and Special Collections, Durham University Library.
14. ‘The President’s Voracious Reading Habits’, by Hugh Sidey, in Life, March 17, 1961.
17. ‘John le Carré Brings Realism To Spy Fiction’, Matinee Highlights, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast May 30, 1964.
A Letter From '008'
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can read on this website or download here.
James Bond has been with us since the publication of Casino Royale in 1953. Since then, there has been a vast amount of literature about the character — so much that one would be forgiven for thinking that every stone had been turned. It's a surprise to find in 2015 that this isn't so, as several new books are showing.
Some Kind of Hero (The History Press) by Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury (disclosure: a friend, and I helped out with the book in a miniscule way) tells the story of the Bond films in loving detail over 700 pages, which are packed with nuggets of juicy new information. It's a real labour of love by the authors, drawing on a passion for the films stretching back decades: as well as filtering information from a vast range of sources, they have carried out over 100 new interviews, with actors, directors, producers, cameramen and others involved, to present what I am sure is the most comprehensive examination of the Bond films yet published. Some of the highlights include a long interview with George Lazenby in which he recounts how he was cast as Bond, one of the most extraordinary stories in showbiz history; interviews with people who have written Bond scripts, including Purvis & Wade and Len Deighton; and the new light shed on Johanna Harwood's contributions to the genesis of film Bond, finally putting her voice centre-stage. With around 20 in-depth pages devoted to each film, I reckon even the most hardcore Bond fanatic will find their fill of new dope.
Also just published is The Man With The Golden Typewriter (Bloomsbury), a collection of letters to but mostly from Ian Fleming edited by his nephew Fergus. Many of these have been published in full or part elsewhere, but lots haven't been, and offer all sorts of insights into how Fleming wrote and edited his books, his relationships with other writers, and more besides. It's essential reading if you're interested in Fleming and Bond.
In February, John Blake will publish James Bond: The Secret History by Sean Egan, for which I've written a brief foreword. This very entertaining book looks at all aspects of the Bond phenomenon — books, films, comics, video games — and includes some of the more obscure detours the character has taken over the decades. Egan has interviewed several key people, but for me it was not so much the information as the opinions that made the book so rewarding, as they forced me to re-think some of my own hardened views.
There's a rash of books published with the advent of every new Bond film, but the last decade or so feels different. I suspect a book of Fleming's letters wouldn't have been thought commercially viable last century, when Bond's — and Fleming's — critical stock was lower. Now Oscar-winners direct the Bond films and acclaimed novelists write the books, and Bond seems to be rightfully seen as the great fictional icon he is. This renewed interest and advances in technology means that a lot of fresh information is being revealed, which in itself feeds others' curiosity, provides new avenues of inquiry and leads to further discoveries.
In that spirit, I am now throwing a little something into the pot. I think I have just stumbled across something unknown about Ian Fleming. It's this letter to The Spectator in June 1956, purporting to be from '008'. The OCR has slightly mangled some of the text, but you can see a scan of how it originally appeared over on the right of that page. I don't believe this has been spotted before — and I think it's a hitherto unknown letter by Ian Fleming.
The letter is in response to an article by Anthony Hartley published in the previous issue that praised John Buchan's heroes in comparison to 'Mr. Ian Fleming's appalling James Bond'. Hartley's chief complaints were that Bond was a sadist, a snob about food and clothes, and vulgarly sexual. Intriguingly, these were the three key charges that would be made against Fleming two years later, by Bernard Bergonzi in The Twentieth Century, an editorial in The Guardian and, most famously, Paul Johnson in The New Statesman.
The author of this letter defending Fleming has taken on the amusing device of pretending to be a colleague of Fleming's, '008' of Regent's Park, London:
'SIR,—The Secret Service has had to suffer some hard knocks recently, but none unkinder than Mr. Anthony Hartley's disparagement of the head of their 00 section, James Bond. I share an office with Bond and, since I know even more about him than does his biographer, Mr. Ian Fleming, I have exceptionally obtained the permission of M. to break the rules of silence of our Service and come to his defence.'
He goes on to wryly point out why Bond is not the clubland hero Hartley presumed him to be — indeed, that he is if anything 'sub-consciously in revolt' against the Buchan-style Establishment — that his tastes are much simpler than described, and that sex and violence were elements of the modern world.
There are a few people who could conceivably have written this, but I think '008' was most likely Ian Fleming himself. Firstly, the letter doesn't simply demonstrate a lot of knowledge about James Bond, but is very presumptuous with it. It would take some bravado to claim more knowledge of another man's characters than he himself did, and to then co-opt his characters into the bargain: 'I have exceptionally obtained the permission of M.' If someone else had written this, I think it would have to have been someone Fleming would have been happy to have done so. His editor William Plomer, say.
But I think all signs point to this being by Ian Fleming himself. He sometimes wrote for The Spectator, and knew the magazine well: he later became its motoring correspondent. At the time of this letter, his brother Peter had written a column in the magazine under the pseudonym 'Strix' for a decade (the style and content was similar in many ways to 'Atticus' at the Sunday Times, which Ian had taken over in 1953). Peter knew his brother's books well and would have been in a position to have written such a letter, but it seems highly unlikely he would have intruded in such a way and in doing so claimed to know more about Bond than Ian, who was quite capable of defending his own work.
But the 'smoking gun', I think, comes courtesy of The Man With The Golden Typewriter. On May 31 1956 — just a week earlier, and the same day as Anthony Hartley's article attacking Bond for his amorality was published in The Spectator — Fleming wrote to Geoffrey Boothroyd, a reader who had written him a long letter about Bond's guns. Fleming was delighted by Boothroyd's evident expertise, and wanted more:
'At the present moment Bond is particularly anxious for expertise on the weapons likely to be carried by Russian agents and I wonder if you have any information on this.
As Bond's biographer I am most anxious to see that he lives as long as possible and I shall be most grateful for any further technical advices you might like me to pass on to him...'
The chances of someone else calling Fleming Bond's biographer just a week later seem slim. Neither was this the only time Fleming used the device of pretending Bond was a real person in this way. At the end of From Russia, With Love, published in April 1957, Fleming left a cliffhanger that suggested Bond had been killed by Rosa Klebb. When The New Statesman published an article bemoaning Bond's apparent end, Fleming sent them a letter about it and, according to Fergus Fleming, it became his standard reply to fans who wrote to him regretting Bond's demise. In that letter, he described himself as 'Commander Bond's official biographer'.
The Spectator letter is signed by '008', rather than Fleming, but it casts Fleming and Bond in the same roles and makes several points Fleming made elsewhere. In a letter to what was then The Manchester Guardian in April 1958, Fleming argued that in the real espionage world a spy would likely face more violence than in older thrillers, that Bond's tastes were perhaps not as outlandish or high-flown as they initially appeared, and mentioned the security risk of the character's absurdly conspicuous consumption of scrambled eggs. The Man With The Golden Typewriter also reveals that in June 1959, Fleming wrote to a reader who had sent him a card for the Aston Martin Owners Club:
'Thank you very much for your splendid letter of June 17th and for your kind invitation for James Bond to join the A.M.O.C.
Since neither Bond nor his biographer are owners of an Aston Martin, I can do no no more than pass your invitation on to the head of Admin. at the Secret Service from whose transport pool the DB III was drawn.'
As in the 1956 letter from '008', Fleming pretended Bond was real, that he was his biographer, and similarly added some business suggesting that he had to navigate the Secret Service bureaucracy of Bond's world.
In October 1962, The Spectator published a letter from Fleming under his own name. As with the 1956 letter he was defending his books from criticism, this time responding to three separate comments about his work in a previous issue of the magazine. Once again, he adopted the pretext of his character being a real person, starting the letter by saying that
'since Bond is at present away in Magnetogorsk, I hope you will allow me to comment on his behalf.'
Later in the letter he referred to his novels as 'my serial biography of James Bond', and defended the character from a charge of fascism by stating that Bond's politics 'are, in fact, slightly left of centre' — this echoes 008's point in 1956 that Bond is not quite the Establishment character he has been mistaken for.
Fleming took the conceit to its furthest point in You Only Live Twice, in which M. writes an obituary for a presumed-dead Bond and expands on the idea of Bond being a real figure and Fleming being merely a reporter of his adventures:
'The inevitable publicity, particularly in the foreign press, accorded some of these adventures, made him, much against his will, something of a public figure, with the inevitable result that a series of popular books came to be written around him by a personal friend and former colleague of James Bond. If the quality of these books, or their degree of veracity, had been any higher, the author would certainly have been prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act.'
So, presuming the letter was written by Ian Fleming, what does it tell us? Perhaps not a huge amount, but I think it adds something to the picture of how Fleming defended his work. He would later use his own name, but adopt the same amused tone and claim to be Bond's biographer, and it is a disarming tactic: had he written these responses 'straight', it might seem that he was genuinely offended and kicking up a fuss. The technique of pretending Bond was real allowed him to make all his arguments but to do so in a dry, airy way that made him seem unconcerned. In several of these responses, Fleming was defending spurious claims based on misreadings of his own work and the genre as a whole: a secret agent with a knowledge of good food, drink and tailoring had been a staple of the British thriller since at least the first decade of the 20th century, something Fleming knew very well because he had drawn on some of those thrillers for inspiration. Fleming knew the genre better than his critics, but was in the curious position of seeing, in his own lifetime, his creation become synonymous with an entire genre.
It might be that Fleming's letters along these lines acted as an unconscious trial run for the passage in You Only Live Twice, as over time he became attached to the idea. Fleming's letters, journalism and novels are littered with passing ideas that he subsequently picked up in later stories. For instance, in April 1956 he reviewed Scarne on Cards in the Sunday Times: the book, and its topic of cheating at cards, had featured prominently in Moonraker. Fleming ended the review by saying that, because of the criminal uses the book's contents could be put to, libraries and clubs should issue it to readers 'with the proviso "For Your Eyes Only"'. That expression would, of course, be used by Fleming for the title of his collection of short stories published in 1960.
The date of the 008 letter is also interesting, in that 1956 is two years before the main attacks on Fleming's books, and those attacks were on very similar grounds. We also tend to presume that Bond had little cultural impact before the films, but here we see that just three years after the publication of the first novel, Casino Royale, James Bond was a significant enough force that he was being discussed at some length in a British magazine, to the degree that a letter from its author making an in-joke about a character who didn't even exist in his books, ie 008, would presumably have been understood by most of the publication's readers.
Finally, I think this letter shows how the trickle of fresh information about Fleming and his work is gathering pace. This letter hasn't been picked up before, I suspect, in part because it was not signed by Ian Fleming. But it is also thanks to scanning technology that it's appeared on The Spectator's website, where it came up in a Google search I ran for something else. Armed with new information from The Man With The Golden Typewriter and elsewhere, I was also able to put it into more context than I would have been able to a few years ago. So while it's a very minor discovery in terms of Ian Fleming's work, I think it's part of a pattern that suggests there is more out there than previously thought — for example, the latest Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, written by Anthony Horowitz, includes snippets of original material by Ian Fleming that I don't think were previously on record as having even survived.
What else might be out there?