Tradecraft
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Licence to Hoax
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‘The creation of real life intelligence operative and old Etonian Ian Fleming, Bond borrowed his 007 title from Dr John Dee. The 16th century British secret agent used the code for his messages to Queen Elizabeth I. The two zeros meant “for your eyes only”...’ [1]
BBC News, November 22 2002
‘At the outbreak of war, the Beast found himself caught up in further intrigue as the occult and espionage worlds collided. Ian Fleming, working for naval intelligence in M15, contacted him with an outlandish plan to lure Rudolf Hess to Britain by using mystical enchantments and astrology…’[2]
The Daily Telegraph, May 30 2009
‘Behind every great James Bond thriller there is a great Bond girl. The actress Eva Green is winning plaudits for her sultry portrayal of Vesper Lynd in the new film of Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel Casino Royale. But was this exotic femme fatale just a product of the author’s imagination?
As a noted womaniser who had worked in Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, Fleming had plenty of personal experiences upon which to draw. He also enjoyed a cocktail called the Vesper. But more importantly, in the years immediately before writing Casino Royale, he had been regularly seeing a woman named Christine Granville.
She was really the Countess Krystyna Skarbek. When she was born, half-Jewish, in Warsaw on a stormy night, her father, an impoverished count, gave her the pet name “Vespérale”…’[3]
The Times, November 18, 2006
‘The story of beautiful wartime spy Christine Granville, who was Ian Fleming’s lover and the inspiration for the James Bond character Vesper Lynd, is to be made into a major film…’[4]
The Daily Mail, February 27, 2009
Newspapers love stories about James Bond. The world’s most popular secret agent provides several elements that attract readers: glamour, intrigue, sex and danger. Ian Fleming worked in intelligence during the Second World War, and knew a lot of people in the espionage world. This has led to dozens of articles over the years about his exploits and those of others he knew. Some of these have little truth to them, while some are based on outright fabrication.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed that a lot of newspaper articles about James Bond lead back to the same source: 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming by Donald McCormick. Billed on the cover as ‘the definitive biography with important new material’, this short book was published in 1993, 27 years after the publication of John Pearson’s biography of Fleming and three years before Andrew Lycett’s. Pearson and Lycett had both worked for The Sunday Times, and both had access to Fleming’s own papers, as well as interviewing many of the people Fleming had known.
On the face of it, McCormick was also well qualified to write a biography of Ian Fleming. A journalist and author of several decades’ standing, he had published over 50 non-fiction books about espionage, many under the pseudonym Richard Deacon. During the war he had been in the Royal Navy, and after it Fleming had hired him for the news agency Mercury, which was part of the Kemsley empire. For his biography of Fleming, McCormick didn’t have access to Ian Fleming’s papers, but he did make extensive use of newspaper archives, the papers of Ian Fleming’s brother Peter, and consulted several notable names in the Bond world, including Ian Fleming’s former literary agent Peter Janson-Smith.
But unknown to these people, McCormick was a fraud. Between the facts that had already been set out in John Pearson’s book and a sprinkling of new but not especially significant information, McCormick’s biography contained several elaborate hoaxes about the life and work of Ian Fleming, all of which have been reported in creditable newspapers and books, and continue to be to this day. I think it’s time to dismantle McCormick as a source on Ian Fleming once and for all, and to expose both his fraudulence, and how he did it.
McCormick has already been unmasked as a hoaxer in other fields. In 1959, the author and broadcaster Melvin Harris read McCormick’s book The Mystery Of Lord Kitchener’s Death and realized that its ‘only new evidence (telling first-person “revelations”) was simply manufactured.’[5]
Harris then turned his attention to McCormick’s book The Identity of Jack the Ripper, published the same year. He concluded that McCormick had fabricated key documents that he quoted in the book, claiming they were the papers of a Dr Dutton, including a poem supposedly found in the police archives, ‘Eight Little Whores’. In advance of a TV programme on which McCormick would be exposed as a hoaxer, Harris called McCormick to tell him how he knew the Dutton documents were fake, that McCormick was the forger, and that he had fleshed out the rest of his book with ‘uncheckable and bogus documents and statements.’[6] McCormick initially denied it, but after a while apparently became philosophical about his imminent exposure, especially as Harris softened the blow by saying he would not name him as the forger but was prepared to describe the hoax ‘as the work of a man with a wicked sense of humour’. The TV programme was cancelled, but Harris eventually met McCormick:
‘I asked him if he now wished to publicly name the faker of the poem, but he said he was not ready. He was still happy, though, for me to use the old formula, that it was faked by “A very clever man who enjoys his quiet fun”, and he winked as he said it! Yes, he was a likeable rogue. But he was trapped by his very likeability. Over the years he had kept up the bluff with so many people that he found it hard to disentangle himself, as I found out when I later wrote to him. He was, by then, unwilling to commit himself in writing, instead he wrote letters full of teasing, enigmatic clues.
Finally in October 1997 I wrote to him and asked him to stop the fooling and write a candid letter fit for publication. Sadly the reply that came back read “I have an ulcer on my right eye and have great difficulty in writing at present. Please let the matter drop.” I did and there was never to be a further chance. Within a short while I learned that he was dead.’[7]
Harris himself died in 2004. He also wrote that McCormick told him that the starting point for his books was usually the Kemsley newspaper library, which contained cuttings dating back to the Victorian era: ‘Other newspapers, he advised, held similar archives. They saved him a journey and a search at Colindale.’[8] This technique can be seen in 17F: dozens of newspaper articles are cited and often quoted at length. These make the book seem more authoritative and give McCormick lots of genuine sources to footnote, helping to disguise the fabrications woven around them.
I first realized McCormick was a hoaxer because of the Rudolf Hess story in 17F, which has been reported dozens of times in the press but is utterly preposterous. In his 1966 biography of Fleming, John Pearson had described how, following the unexpected landing of the Deputy Führer in Scotland in May 1941, Fleming had contacted the infamous black magician Aleister Crowley:
‘This immensely ugly old diabolist and self-advertiser had thrown himself into certain more unsavoury areas of the occult with a gusto that must have appealed to Fleming, and when the interrogators from British Intelligence began trying to make sense of the neurotic and highly superstitious Hess [Fleming] got the idea that Crowley might be able to help and tracked him down to a place near Torquay, where he was living harmlessly on his own and writing patriotic poetry to encourage the war effort.’[9]
According to Pearson, Crowley wrote a letter to the Director of Naval Intelligence offering to help, but nothing came of it:
‘It is a pity that this had to be one of Fleming’s bright ideas which never came off: understandably, there was hilarity in the department at the idea of the Great Beast 666 doing his bit for Britain.’[10]
Pearson deals with this episode in four paragraphs. McCormick took the ingredients of it – Fleming, Hess, Crowley and the occult – to invent an entirely new story. In his version, Fleming didn’t merely get the idea to approach Crowley after Hess had landed: Hess’ arrival in Scotland was itself the result of an elaborate operation hatched by Fleming to lure him to Britain by means of forged astrological charts. McCormick larded his story with details about meetings in Portugal and Switzerland, Hess’ ‘chief astrological adviser Ernst Schulte-Strathaus’ and the like, with footnotes referring to letters sent to him by several parties, and in one case saying ‘See German Intelligence Personnel Records’, with no indication as to where those might be.
The profusion of names, dates and sources were presumably to give credence to what is, on the face of it, a totally implausible story. McCormick claimed, for example, that Fleming and Crowley engaged in occult rites in Ashdown Forest involving a dummy dressed in a Nazi uniform on a throne-like chair. McCormick quoted at length on this ‘Amado Crowley, Aleister Crowley’s son’. He neglected to mention that Amado was in fact Andrew Standish, a writer on the occult who claimed to be Crowley’s secret illegitimate son and had changed his name as a result. Standish is generally recognized to have been a hoaxer himself.
On reading this chapter, I immediately suspected it was pure fabrication, but two sources cited by McCormick gave me pause for thought: Peter Fleming and Sefton Delmer. Delmer was a well-known journalist who had been a major force in British propaganda and psychological warfare against the Nazis, and who had known Ian Fleming fairly well. Peter was Ian’s older brother, and also a veteran of several ingenious deception operations during the war, a few of them somewhat surreal (although nowhere near as surreal as this episode). In 1940, Peter Fleming had published a best-selling comic novel called The Flying Visit about Hitler dropping into Britain. According to McCormick, Ian Fleming had urged Peter to write the book, ‘doubtless seeing it as a possible means of signalling to the Germans that the British might talk if someone were lured to Britain – if not Hitler or Hess, then possibly Canaris’:
‘When Hess himself enacted Peter Fleming’s fictitious ploy, no doubt it secretly delighted Ian, but the sheer coincidence of The Flying Visit narrative and Hess’s arrival must at the same time have been somewhat embarrassing for him.
However, there is no evidence that the brothers colluded in Ian’s secret operation. Peter Fleming stated long afterwards that Ian had not told him about ‘this idea’, which he described as ‘a new legend about my brother’. On the other hand, Sefton Delmer, who knew Ian Fleming well and had worked with him, commented: ‘As an idea, inducing Hess to fly to England by means of astrological hocus-pocus – and the bait of the Duke of Hamilton – was something that might have appealed to Ian Fleming, or even to have been conceived by him. I am quite ready to believe that.’
Later, anxious to stress that he had no knowledge of any such plans and, by implication, denying that his own novel had any connection with them, Peter Fleming affirmed that he did not believe ‘the elaborate ruses were ever carried out, or even planned’. None the less the undisputed fact remains that Fleming was anxious, once Hess had landed, to follow up his own hunches on the best way to handle him. He not only begged the authorities to allow Aleister Crowley to interview Hess, he even managed to persuade Crowley to offer his services for this purpose. Unfortunately the offer was not taken up…’[11]
And we have come full circle, back to the incident in John Pearson’s biography from which McCormick seems to have developed the entire story. McCormick footnoted his quotes from Delmer and Peter Fleming to issues of The Times from September 1969. I looked them up, and found that McCormick had omitted a rather salient fact: both Delmer and Peter Fleming had written about this incident in terms of dismissing an earlier telling of it. By none other than Donald McCormick.
In 1969, McCormick’s book A History of the British Secret Service was published under the pseudonym Richard Deacon. In it, he wrote that Ian Fleming had masterminded an operation to lure Rudolf Hess to Britain using fake astrological charts. Shortly before the book was published, The Times ran an article on this ‘remarkable claim’ but, very sensibly, sought out the opinions of Sefton Delmer and Peter Fleming on it. Both men dismissed McCormick’s story. Delmer admitted that the idea was the sort of thing that might have appealed to Ian Fleming, or even been conceived by him, as quoted above, but went on to say that he found the details of the story unconvincing:
‘It is all too pat and does not fit the fact that the flight on May 10 was not Hess’s first attempt to fly to Britain.’[12]
Peter Fleming said that Ian had never mentioned the idea to him, and indeed called it ‘a new legend about my brother’ – ie a legend created by Donald McCormick. Three days later, Peter wrote a letter to The Times explaining in greater detail why he thought the story was nonsense:
‘Sir, -- I agree with Mr. Sefton Delmer that the idea of decoying the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich, with the aid of astrology, to rendez-vous with a Duke in Scotland during the opening phase of the German offensive in Europe in May 1940 was one that my late brother, Ian, might well have conceived. But he did not conceive it, nor do I believe that the elaborate ruses described by Mr. Deacon in his History of the British Secret Service were ever carried out, or even planned…’[13]
Peter Fleming went on to explain that because he had written The Flying Visit, he thought it highly unlikely his brother would have neglected to mention to him that he had been involved with such a similar real-life event later on in the war. Peter did not mention, for security reasons, that he had himself been an important figure in deception operations during the war, so there was no question that Ian would not have trusted him with such information.
Ellic Howe, who had also been involved in deception and propaganda operations in the war, wrote to The Times on the same day to dismiss the story, reporting that he had discussed with Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, Hess’ supposed adviser on astrological matters, whether there might be any such esoteric background to the case, and he had said there wasn’t. In addition, Howe wrote, Schulte-Strathaus wasn’t Hess’ astrological adviser, ‘but merely talked to him occasionally about astrology’.[14] Unfortunately, by discussing such nuances, Howe probably gave some readers the impression that there was something in McCormick’s story.
Undaunted by the three-pronged assault from Delmer, Howe and Peter Fleming, McCormick replied to The Times, insisting that he respected their views but asking them to wait for publication of his book before offering their final judgment on it.[15]
One of the advantages of fabricating information about intelligence operations is that it is very difficult for anyone to prove you wrong. It’s a further advantage if the people you’re making the claims about are dead, as Ian Fleming was in 1969. When McCormick revived his hoax 24 years later, Delmer, Howe and Peter Fleming had all since died. McCormick shamelessly quoted their dismissals of his fabrication as evidence to support it. In doing so, he altered some of their words. Peter Fleming wrote: ‘But he did not conceive it, nor do I believe that the elaborate ruses described by Mr. Deacon in his History of the British Secret Service were ever carried out, or even planned.’ McCormick altered this, for obvious reasons, quoting Peter Fleming as not believing ‘the elaborate ruses were ever carried out, or even planned’. No ellipses, either. In doing this, he was not simply misquoting Peter Fleming and disguising the context of his comments, which would have revealed that it was his story under discussion by Peter Fleming, and being dismissed by him. He was also subtly but offensively insinuating that Peter Fleming’s disbelief of his fabrication was in some way evidence that he had been covering up the ‘real’ conspiracy. This insinuation is in the words ‘anxious to stress’: he was suggesting that Peter Fleming had been protesting too much, and wanted to hide what had really happened.
In fact, Peter Fleming had had Donald McCormick pegged.
The ‘Fleming-lured-Hess-to-Scotland-with-astrology’ story, despite being an obvious hoax, still pops up in the press sometimes, and often crops up online. Another of McCormick’s hoaxes that is blindly reported as fact is his claim that the 16th-century English mathematician John Dee was a spy for Queen Elizabeth I and signed his missives with a stylized 007. McCormick wrote that Aleister Crowley introduced Ian Fleming to the works of Dee, and that this was how James Bond got his codename.[16]
This was debunked by Teresa Burns in 2010, who wrote that McCormick’s 1968 bookJohn Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer, and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I, written under the Richard Deacon pseudonym ‘seems the source of the persistent printed and Internet legend that John Dee signed his name “007.”’:
‘Did Dee really sign his name this way? A painstaking search through many, many Dee signatures has convinced this writer that he did not. His real signature took many forms, but looks more like a whirlwind than a 007.
Yet even this writer has fallen for that non-fact. Deacon footnotes works of natural philosopher Robert Hooke (1635-1703), including his Posthumous Works presented to Sir Isaac Newton (which does actually exist) and an alleged work called An Ingenious Cryptographical System, which, though quoted in several scholarly and non-scholarly works since, and listed in two of them as being among the “Gwydir Papers, Manuscript Collection,” seems not to exist at all.
Yet for one who has studied much of the Dee material which has become available after 1968, Deacon’s book reads like a blurred, excited rehashing of ideas slightly out of focus and in the service of someone else’s ego: he footnotes here and there as if for kicks, referring to letters and legend one can find no record of, but weaving a story that is almost plausible…’[17]
This is a good description of McCormick’s technique: alongside genuine material correctly sourced, he added elements he had invented, citing fictitious but authoritative-sounding sources. Much of 17F is recycled material from his earlier works, sometimes barely repackaged and often only tenuously linked to Ian Fleming. His account of the failed plan to block the Danube in 1940 is the same as the one he gave in The Silent War: A History of Western Naval Intelligence, published under the pseudonym Richard Deacon in 1988, with hardly a word changed. There is some justification for that: Fleming was heavily involved in that operation, so it makes some sense to recap his research. But in many cases McCormick repeated material from his previous books that had nothing whatsoever to do with Ian Fleming, and simply repackaged them with Fleming now playing a central role in the incidents in question.
The greatest example of this is chapter 9 of the book, which is about the celebrated SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek, better known as Christine Granville. McCormick had already written about Granville in both A History of the British Secret Service and Spyclopaedia, the latter published six years earlier, but in neither had he mentioned her in connection with Ian Fleming. In this chapter he repeated a lot of material about Granville from those books, and justified its inclusion in a biography of Ian Fleming by fabricating a story that Fleming had had an affair with her.
To bolster this story, McCormick presented several pieces of ‘evidence’. These included quotes and correspondence from Ed Howe, who had been a Kemsley correspondent in Istanbul. Howe and Granville had genuinely known each other, and perhaps it was this convenient fact that inspired McCormick’s tale, because it placed Granville a degree of separation from Ian Fleming. McCormick claimed that after the war Christine Granville had met Howe in Cairo and told him she was looking for work:
‘Howe told me: ‘As a long shot I gave her Fleming’s address, as I felt sure he would be interested in her – as a fascinating personality certainly and maybe as a correspondent somewhere or other.’’[18]
McCormick didn’t provide a date or any other reference for this quote, so we have to take it on trust that he accurately recalled Howe’s words – and that Howe even said any such a thing at all. McCormick claimed that Fleming was interested in Granville, and quotes a letter from Fleming to Howe about her:
‘She literally shines with all the qualities and splendours of a fictitious character. How rarely one finds such types.’[19]
A letter by Ian Fleming! If true, compelling evidence of a connection, at least. But it isn’t shown in the book. McCormick instead footnoted this quote, writing that the letter had been shown to him personally, and had been dated 12 May 1947. He did not reveal the current whereabouts of the letter, again leaving readers with just his word that it ever existed.
McCormick claimed Fleming met Granville for lunch at Bertorelli’s in London and that they went on to have an affair, his source being ‘one of Christine’s Polish friends’, Olga Bialoguski, who told him about it. Conveniently, Olga also revealed to McCormick that Granville was very secretive, often made up stories to cover her tracks so you could never know when she was telling the truth, and that she, Olga, was one of Granville’s only friends to know about the affair.
She’s also one of Granville’s only friends not to be mentioned in connection with Granville anywhere else. She has a convincingly Polish-sounding surname, though. It’s the same surname as Dr Michael Bialoguski, the Polish-born Australian agent who was instrumental in Vladimir Petrov’s defection in 1954, as related in the world’s press and by McCormick himself in his book Spyclopaedia, published a few years earlier. Perhaps Olga was related in some way to the doctor? If so, McCormick didn’t mention it. More likely, I think, is that McCormick wanted a second source, decided it would be a Polish friend of Granville’s and simply looked through his own work for a real Polish surname.
Olga also revealed to McCormick, in long fluent English quotes with no dates or other information given for them, that Granville had once confided to her that Fleming had taken her to a hotel named the Granville ‘somewhere in the region of Dover’. This brought back memories for McCormick, who recalled just such a hotel being mentioned in passing in Moonraker. After quoting the passage in question, he noted that ‘to introduce Christine to a hotel actually named after her would be just the kind of joke Fleming would enjoy.’[20]
Ian Fleming certainly knew of Christine Granville, as he mentioned her by name in The Diamond Smugglers when discussing different types of secret agents:
‘Then there are the colourful spies like Sorge, the brilliant, luxury-loving German who worked for Russia in Tokio, and girls like Christine Granville who was murdered by a love-crazed ship’s steward in a Kensington hotel in March 1952, after a fabulous record in wartime espionage for which she earned the George Medal.’[21]
Granville was well-known, and Fleming knew of her, but there is no evidence anywhere other than in Donald McCormick’s book that Ian Fleming ever even met her, let alone had an affair with her. Considering the access that both John Pearson and Andrew Lycett had, and the thoroughness of their research, one would have expected them to have mentioned a connection with such a well-known woman. All the more so, as someone Ian Fleming did have an affair with was Blanche Blackwell.
Pearson didn’t mention this at all in his biography, perhaps because Ian’s widow Ann was still alive at the time he was writing, as was Blackwell. Writing in 1996, long after all the parties were dead, Andrew Lycett revealed the affair and the extent of it. But he didn’t mention Christine Granville once. Writing in 1993, McCormick devoted a whole chapter to the supposed affair with Granville, his only evidence for which was oral testimony from a friend of Granville’s who has never been identified elsewhere and a letter from Fleming to Edward Howe never seen anywhere else. But Blanche Blackwell isn’t mentioned once in the book.
McCormick went on to theorize that Granville had been the model for Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. His ‘evidence’ for this is very thin indeed. Yes, the description of Vesper sounds a little like Christine Granville, in that she was a beautiful dark-haired woman. The descriptions of Solitaire in Live and Let Die and Tatiana Romanova in From Russia, With Love are also rather similar. But there’s nothing out of the ordinary in the physical description of Vesper: she was standard fare for the genre.
McCormick noted that Vesper Lynd speaks French ‘like a native’, and that according to people who had known her, Granville was also fluent in French. But that’s hardly surprising for an SOE agent who was sent to France. McCormick reported that Granville thrived on disaster – just like Vesper in the novel. But that’s a passing comment from Bond, not a serious assessment of her character, and anyway, Vesper is also involved in espionage: one could say that James Bond thrives on disaster, too. McCormick also noted that Vesper is in love with a Pole in the R.A.F., while Granville had been great friends with a gallant Pole in the British Army (and was Polish herself). All of this is inconsequential, and a game that could be applied to dozens of people.
But McCormick did provide one piece of information that seemed to point firmly and unequivocally to Christine Granville. In the novel, Vesper tells Bond that she was given her unusual name by her parents because she had been born on a stormy evening. This, McCormick revealed, was a secret clue:
‘Further inquiries established the fact that Christine Granville was born on a stormy night and that her father gave her the nickname of ‘Vespérale’, or, as he himself explained, ‘qui a rapport au soir claret vespérale.’[22]
McCormick provided a footnote for this, citing Madeleine Masson’s 1975 biography Christine: A Search for Christine Granville, but he didn’t provide the corresponding page number. There was a very good reason for that: that particular piece of information didn’t in fact appear anywhere in Masson’s book. Instead, Masson noted:
‘Count Jerzy was relieved when his daughter Krystyna, Christine, born in 1915, seemed to have inherited his own good looks. From the start there was a complete rapport between father and daughter. He called her his ‘Happiness’ and his ‘Star’.’[23]
So the one piece of information McCormick gave that compellingly suggested Granville was the model for Vesper is not in the book McCormick claimed as his source for it. And instead, that book contradicts McCormick’s account, saying that her father nicknamed her Happiness and Star. And while vesper can refer to the evening star, that isn’t what McCormick wrote, and ‘Star’ is not a nickname one gives for being born on a stormy night.
This false citation completely undermines McCormick’s claim Vesper was based on Granville, both because he falsified it and because the rest of his evidence is so flimsy: there were plenty of dark-haired French-speaking beauties before, during and after the war on whom Fleming could have based the character, and he also might not have based her on anyone. One could find details in the biographies of many women who could be linked in this sort of way to Vesper Lynd’s first name, her surname, her appearance, or lines snipped from Casino Royale. Vesper is also the name for common kinds of bat, sparrow and mouse. The daring, beautiful, dark-haired, French-speaking SOE agent Violette Szabo used a code based on Three Blind Mice. ‘Vespers’ are evening prayers in various denominations. SOE agent Nancy Wake grew up in a strict religious background, and was known to the Gestapo as The White Mouse.
One could claim any woman was born on a stormy night, or was known by friends to attend evening prayers, or anything else. But without any credible evidence to substantiate a claim of an affair or that Fleming based the character on a particular person, such as correspondence or other material by Granville or Fleming, there would be no reason to believe any such theory.
Why choose Christine Granville? Well, McCormick already knew quite a lot about her, having written about her twice before, and he had presumably sensed already that she was a good subject for his audience: beautiful, heroic, and fascinating to the public. So I think he created the tale of the affair, and to support it he pointed to a book that didn’t contain the evidence he claimed it did, invented a letter from Fleming to a friend who had died, and added a mysterious Polish friend Olga, who nobody’s ever seen. Presumably, he was hoping that the footnote pointing to Masson would in and of itself seem authoritative, and that nobody would bother to look it up, or that if they did would soon give up looking when they couldn’t find the reference, presuming it was in the book somewhere or other. And he was right: a lot of people have taken him a face value. Not everyone was fooled, though. In 2006, John Griswold published an exhaustive examination of Fleming and his work, and did look up McCormick’s reference to Masson’s book. But, he noted, he ‘could not find this information stated anywhere within it’.[24]
In 2004, a Canadian company, Queen Fine Arts, bought the film rights to Masson’s biogaphy of Christine Granville. The following year a new edition of her book was published by Virago, now retitled Christine: SOE Agent and Churchill’s Favourite Spy. In a new afterword, Masson discussed some developments that had taken place since the book had first been published in 1975:
‘Once it became known that my researches might become the basis for a film, a tide of new information about Christine alerted me to the fact that there were lacunae in my book that would need further digging and verification.’[25]
Chief among these lacunae was Granville’s SOE file, which had been declassified in 2003, the contents of which Masson discussed and quoted, and Donald McCormick’s claim that Granville had an affair with Ian Fleming, which Masson discussed at some length. She also mentioned the idea that Granville might have been the model for Vesper, noting their supposed similarities in appearance and that she tells Bond her name is the result of her being born on a stormy evening:
‘In fact, Countess Krystyna Skarbek was born on a stormy night, and her father, Count Jerzy Skarbek, had given his baby daughter the nickname Vespérale or, as he explained, ‘like the evening star’.
One of the many biographies of Fleming – Donald McCormick’s – majors on his affair with Christine. I cannot confirm that Fleming used Christine as the model for Vesper Lynd but there is a real passion in Fleming’s novel and his account of Vesper’s beauty and character adds up to a fair description of Christine.’[26]
Masson was in her nineties when she wrote this afterword, so allowances should be made. But there are several troubling aspects about it. Firstly, it seems that she didn’t dig very far or verify very much about this particular lacuna. She doesn’t seem to have realized that McCormick had given her as the source for Granville’s nickname being ‘Vespérale’ – or that that detail had not in fact been in her book. Instead, bizarrely, she repeated most of McCormick’s information, including the crucial detail he had supposedly got from her. More worrying is the way she did this: in the paragraphs before she mentioned McCormick. This gives the impression that she knew about the nickname some other way, omitting that her source was the same as for the affair she couldn’t confirm mentioned in the next paragraph. If she couldn’t confirm the affair, what was her evidence for the nickname?
So in 1993 McCormick had disguised his fabrication by crediting Masson as his source when she wasn’t. And in 2005, Masson disguised the fact that she got all her new information about Fleming from… McCormick.
This isn’t anywhere near the same as McCormick’s fabrications, but it calls into serious question Masson’s reliability as a source on Christine Granville. Masson said she could not confirm the affair with Fleming – but devoted a couple of pages to it nevertheless. If she had been a thorough researcher, McCormick’s claims should have raised alarm bells at once, because: she herself was the cited source for the information; she wasn’t in fact the source for it; she hadn’t come across any evidence of an affair in writing the first edition of her book; and neither had any of Fleming’s other biographers come across it.
In repeating McCormick’s story, she unwittingly extended his hoax beyond the grave. Now she can accurately be quoted as having mentioned the affair. (Her new edition also added one more myth to the mix: although the title now proclaimed Granville was ‘Churchill’s favourite spy’, that information is not mentioned at all in the book itself, let alone a reference for it cited.)
It is as a result of this sort of Chinese whispers that McCormick’s hoaxes about Ian Fleming and James Bond have survived to date. There’s a lot of other information in 17F that doesn’t appear in either John Pearson or Andrew Lycett’s biographies. Some of it is verifiably true, but in general the more interesting McCormick’s information, the harder it is to ascertain the source. In many cases, he simply states something as fact, as in that Charles Fraser-Smith was ‘unquestionably’ the brains behind Fleming’s Q Branch. Fraser-Smith certainly created ingenious gadgets during the Second World War, but he admits in his own memoir that he only knew Fleming slightly, and there were plenty of other boffins in British intelligence who worked in that line – SOE had a special workshop for them in Welwyn Garden City. McCormick also quotes a KGB file, apparently declassified after the fall of the Soviet Union, which discusses keeping an eye on Fleming’s work for any mentions of SMERSH, but gives no reference to the document’s whereabouts or reference number. There are dozens of such minor snippets of information in the book, many of which have been repeated and expanded on by other writers and in the process made firmer over the years. Unpicking them all would be impossible, but I hope that this article sheds light on some of McCormick’s most widely accepted myths and hoaxes about Ian Fleming and James Bond.
NOTES
1. Will the real James Bond stand up? By Chris Jones, BBC News, November 22, 2002. Available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/newsmakers/2503023.stm
2. Aleister Crowley’s lives by Jake Arnott, May 30 2009, The Daily Telegraph. Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5407318/Aleister-Crowleys-lives.html
3. Larger than life adventures of a real Bond girl by Graham Stewart, The Times, November 18, 2006. Available from: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/graham_stewart/article640268.ece
4. Christine, the spy who loved Ian Fleming, gets her own movie by Jason Lewis, The Daily Mail, February 27, 2009. Available from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1145702/Christine-spy-loved-Ian-Fleming-gets-movie.html
5, 6, 7, 8. The Maybrick Hoax: Donald McCormick’s Legacy by Melvin Harris. Available from: http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/maybrick_diary/mb-mc.html
9, 10. pp117-118 The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson, Companion Book Club, 1966.
11. pp92-93 17F: The Life of Ian Fleming by Donald McCormick, Peter Owen, London, 1993.
12. Horoscope ‘lured’ Hess to Britain by Peter Hopkirk, The Times, September 15 1969.
13. Letter from Peter Fleming, The Times, September 18 1969.
14. Letter from Ellic Howe, The Times, September 18 1969.
15. Letter from Richard Deacon, The Times, September 25 1969.
16. p203 17F, and ppx and 5 John Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer, and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I by Richard Deacon, Muller, 1968.
17. A Golden Storm: Attempting to Recreate the Context of John Dee and Edward Kelley’s Angelic Material by Teresa Burns, Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition, No. 19, Vol. 2. 2010. Available from: http://www.jwmt.org/v2n19/golden.html
18. p143 17F.
19. p141 17F.
20. p144 17F.
21. p54 The Diamond Smugglers by Ian Fleming, Pan, 1965.
22.p151 17F.
23. p7 Christine: A Search for Christine Granville by Madeleine Masson, Hamilton, 1975.
24. p60 Ian Fleming’s James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming’s Bond Stories by John Griswold, AuthorHouse, 2006.
25. p261 Christine: SOE Agent and Churchill’s Favourite Spy, Virago, 2005.
26. pp265-266 Christine: SOE Agent and Churchill’s Favourite Spy, Virago, 2005.
Sillier than Fiction
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can read on this website or download here.
‘But where’s the twist?’ As new information about the resignation of CIA director David Petraeus emerges, this is the thought uppermost in my mind. As someone who writes about espionage for a living the episode seems both bizarre and unsatisfying. In my own spy novels, I would never dare to write such a story—my readers wouldn’t stand for it.
There have been several twists to the Petraeus scandal, of course, from the news of another woman being involved, to an FBI officer emailing bare-chested pictures of himself, to the emergence today—this was almost too much—of one of the women involved having an identical twin. But none of this would pass muster as fiction, except perhaps as a light spoof. As screenwriter Zack Stentz tweeted: ‘Really, General Petraeus? Paula Broadwell? The Roger Moore-era Bond girl name wasn't a tipoff that this was a bad idea?’ The spy chief with his trousers around his ankles is less Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, more Spy Hard. Many photographs of Broadwell show her in elegant gowns the likes of which are usually saved for that scene in which the secret agent and his accomplice infiltrate a swanky cocktail party—all she’s missing is the tiny earpiece with which she can communicate with Tom Cruise while he sips a vodka martini and furtively looks around for the villain.
In fictional terms, ‘The Petraeus File’ is not just clichéd, but poorly written. Events that only occur as a result of characters’ ineptitude frustrate readers—especially if, as in Petraeus’ case, they are a senior official. As head of the CIA, he will have been extremely familiar with the concept of men being compromised by sexual attraction. As a ‘reader’ of the story, the revelation that he and Broadwell communicated by draft emails in a joint account they set up has a satisfying irony, in that Al Qaeda has used the same technique, but it is still staggeringly naïve. If this had happened in a novel, readers would have flung the book across the room: ‘Come on! The head of the CIA doesn’t even encrypt his own emails?’
The episode points to a truth not usually acknowledged by real life spies: yes, fiction often makes them seem more exciting, but it also makes them look better at their jobs. Novelists need unpredictable twists to keep readers guessing, and characters need to be clever to engage attention. Petraeus’s foolishness foils the attractive notion in both fiction and real life that intelligence officers are detached masterminds playing with the rest of the world like pawns. When the film of this is made, as it inevitably will be, the scriptwriters will have a mountain to climb to make it seem more believable.
First published in Intelligent Life, November 14 2012
This Is How Five Eyes Dies
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can read on this website or download here.
This was a speculative piece, written in 2017 but as though looking back from 2019. It didn’t come true, thankfully.
February 2019—“It sounds like a Frederick Forsyth novel.”
The Western intelligence alliance that had held firm since the end of World War II was finally shattered this month by U.S. President Donald Trump. To understand how it came to this, one must consider the above quote, which appeared in the New York Times back in the heady spring of 2017 and would quickly be lent the undue authority to eventually jeopardize the entire Five Eyes intelligence-sharing program.
The speaker was former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson, who left the agency in 1993, and the comparison he wished to draw was between the U.S. government’s relationships with its closest allies and the plots of best-selling British pulp spy novels. In March 2017, Johnson claimed on his blog that Britain’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ—or, as he repeatedly called it, “GHCQ”—intercepted communications within Trump Tower during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His evidence for this? GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan had resigned three days after Trump’s inauguration. Hannigan announced that he would be caring for his ill wife and elderly parents, but Johnson saw a darker plot in the timing, writing, “I do not believe in coincidences.” Like many a conspiracy theorist before him, Johnson sought out a reassuringly malevolent order amid the world’s daily churn of chaos. The real reason, he surmised, was obvious: The Brits had passed intelligence they had gathered on Trump to the Obama administration, and as soon as Trump was apprised of this, Hannigan had been forced to step down.
Johnson repeated this fanciful claim on the Kremlin-funded network RT, after which it was picked up by Andrew Napolitano, a Trump confidant and pundit for Fox News. Two days later, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer cited Napolitano’s comments at a briefing, provoking an unusually forceful denial from the Brits.
Intelligence insiders were aghast. Johnson was best-known for a hoax in 2008 in which he claimed Michelle Obama had been caught on tape using the racist term “whitey.” More recently, he had claimed, without evidence, that it wasn’t the Russians who had hacked the Democratic National Committee but the CIA.
In normal circumstances, nobody close to power would have taken seriously the conspiracy theories of this discredited crank. But since January 2017, the American president has been a man of the same stamp, having entered politics propagating the lie that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Spicer, with Trump’s blessing, clutched at Johnson’s claims in a desperate attempt to bolster Trump’s own fabrication that Obama had wiretapped him illegally.
The invoking of Frederick Forsyth was fitting, though ironic. Best-known for the classic thriller The Day of The Jackal, the British novelist’s specialty is making fantastical near-future plots seem plausible. But even he would have struggled to sell the story of an American president giving credence to a conspiracy theory, fanned by a Russian propaganda network, that the British had spied on him at the behest of his predecessor.
In light of subsequent events, this farcical episode seems less like Forsyth than John le Carré at his most downbeat.
Before its disbandment, Five Eyes was the world’s most significant intelligence alliance. Founded in the aftermath of World War II with an agreement between the United States and the U.K., and later expanded to include Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it entailed the mutual sharing of signals and communications intelligence between these countries—and the understanding they would not spy on each other. The terms of the arrangement had not always been upheld, and relations had occasionally been fraught, with Washington previously threatening others with expulsion or suspension from the group.
But the alliance had borne fruit on countless occasions, particularly between Britain and the United States. Anglo-American cooperation had been crucial in tracking Soviet ballistic missile-carrying submarines during the Cold War, and the United States had for decades relied heavily on British listening posts in its former empire for signals intelligence in the Middle East and elsewhere. Following 9/11, American and Pakistani intelligence arrested Osama bin Laden’s aide Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the strength of an intercepted text message, leading to a wealth of intelligence about planning against British targets.
Some spies in the alliance’s member countries had initially welcomed Trump’s presidency, imagining they would be able to take advantage of his ignorance to increase their budgets and minimize interference in their activities. But looming over everything was the specter of Russian interference. In late 2016, former MI6 officer Christopher Steele had handed the FBI a dossier detailing dozens of sourced claims that Russian intelligence had cultivated and compromised Trump years before he became a presidential candidate.
Investigations by Congress into the relationship between the Trump administration and Russia sparked a Cold War between the U.S. president and his own intelligence agencies. Trump derided every new piece of evidence as fake news, and coupled with the public’s fatigue at a seemingly never-ending political circus, that managed to reduce a scandal that in scale and severity eclipsed Watergate to a mere sideshow for most Americans. But U.S. intelligence officials were less easily distracted and began to wonder how they could share secrets with a president who might be compromised by a hostile power.
The best-selling memoirs of Trump administration survivors have now confirmed Trump’s own insistence that intelligence briefings be as brief as possible (“you know, I’m, like, a smart person”) gave them some leeway. Under the guise of concision, they omitted as much potentially sensitive information as possible. On the rare occasions that Trump asked for more, they buried him in a mix of bureaucratese and espionage jargon. If National Security Agency analysts intercepted a message in Damascus from a terrorist courier working with minimal information about the rest of the organization, they would provide the president with a 45-page report titled “Provisional assessment of ELINT take from interception of cutout to handler in Syria,” knowing he would almost certainly not read it. Pressed to explain the operation face-to-face, they would use similar tactics and retreat to explaining procedures for protecting sources in excruciating detail. Trump, increasingly distrustful, started intimating that he would cut budgets for time-wasters who couldn’t give him straight answers.
Halfway through Trump’s first year in office, even the Russians had concluded that Trump was too volatile. In September 2017, a clip was uploaded to YouTube in which someone looking and sounding exactly like Trump was heard giving explicit requests to prostitutes in a hotel room once frequented by the Obamas in Moscow, backing the most sensational claim of the Steele dossier. And yet even this proved unable to penetrate Trump’s “fake news” defense. There was a media frenzy, and senior Democrats and some Republicans alike called for Trump to resign or be impeached, but Trump claimed the clip had been concocted with an actor and produced by his enemies.
The real bombshell came in December 2018. Overnight, WikiLeaks published a cache of high-level correspondence between British and American intelligence analysts about their investigations into Vladimir Putin’s business dealings. One document quoted by Julian Assange in an interview on conspiracy site and Trump favorite InfoWars seemed to suggest the Brits had recommended that the president be “taken out.” The full context made it clear the suggestion had been to remove Trump from the distribution list for reports on Putin, but the damage was already done. Watching the interview over breakfast in Mar-a-Lago, the president reached for his smartphone.
Trump’s subsequent Twitter rant eclipsed even the wiretapping crisis. In a series of rapid-fire tweets, Trump accused the British of plotting to assassinate him. By the end of the day, he had fired the directors of the CIA and NSA and ordered all U.S. agencies to suspend sharing intelligence with the British. He even temporarily added Britain to the list of countries whose citizens could not enter the United States. After several frantic calls from British Prime Minister Theresa May, who promised an investigation into the allegations, he quietly rescinded that order.
Reporters pressed Trump and his aides for evidence for the assassination claim other than an obvious linguistic misunderstanding but had as little success as they had had with previous claims.
Despite pleas from the intelligence community, Trump’s order to suspend all cooperation with Brits was not lifted but extended. His anger with the British dated back to the Steele dossier and the idea that GCHQ had spied on him. Now he took his revenge, ordering the dismantling of projects with British intelligence piece by piece. This eventually brought to an end Five Eyes’ founding agreement. In response, the Brits naturally also stopped sharing their intelligence, including the fruits of their listening posts in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. Terrorist cells started thinking about how to benefit from the new blind spots.
Today, Britain, already weakened from Brexit and no longer a member of Europol, is looking for alliances elsewhere in this field. Australia and New Zealand are still too small to risk losing their access to U.S. signals intelligence, but Canada has decided to take Britain’s side. The United States has reportedly tried to woo Germany and France into a closer arrangement, but the leaders of both countries envisage their own resignations if WikiLeaks or anyone else ever exposed that they had made a deal with an American administration despised by their voters. Italy, Denmark, and others have filled in some of the gaps left by the Brits and the Canadians, but decades of infrastructure and expertise have not been easy to replace.
Five Eyes had lasted through the Cold War and beyond but had finally been undone by Donald Trump misunderstanding a mischievous leak distributed through Russian cutouts. What happens next depends in large part on the upcoming U.S. presidential election in November 2020. If Mike Pence, who has resigned as vice president to challenge Trump in the Republican primary, wins the election, as the polls indicate, some in the intelligence community are optimistic that Five Eyes could be resurrected under his presidency. Terrorists, criminals, and tyrants around the world have benefited from the collapse of the arrangement, but perhaps, slowly, things can start to return to something like normal again—and the day of the crackpots will finally be behind us.
First published in Foreign Policy, March 30 2017
Spooks in the Mirror
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can read on this website or download here.
Read any list of great thrillers and you will usually find John le Carré’s third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, somewhere on it. Published in 1963, it has sold millions of copies and was adapted into one of the decade’s most successful films. Le Carré’s next book, written in the unexpected glare of fame, is usually overlooked.
And yet The Looking Glass War is his most underrated novel, its themes resonating especially sharply in today’s climate of distrust and disinformation. Penguin is reissuing it in paperback this month as part of its “Smiley Collection”, providing the perfect opportunity to investigate this forgotten gem if you haven’t already, or revisit it if you have.
George Smiley’s role in the book is small, but crucial; he acts as the deus ex machina to an operation run not, as in most of le Carré’s novels, by the Circus, his MI6 stand-in, but a rival agency known as the Department. This half-forgotten group, housed in a “crabbed, sooty villa of a place with a fire extinguisher on the balcony” in Southwark, is staffed with veterans from the Second World War who obsess over their status in the Whitehall hierarchy—are they entitled to an office car?—and are desperate to recapture their glory days.
The Cold War has left these spies behind and they now barely function. Until they catch a glimpse of an operation; an agent informs them that the Soviet Union has established a medium-range ballistic missile base near Rostock, close to the border with West Germany. A man is dispatched to Finland to collect overflight photographs of the area, but is killed in a car crash when he gets there.
In London this is taken as evidence that the Soviets murdered him because he was on to the truth. In fact, as the reader knows, it was a purely accidental hit-and-run—and the tip-off about the missile site is fabricated.
Such a plot could have provided the basis for a dark satire of the espionage world, but le Carré, writing in the wake of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis, instead played the absurdities straight, giving it the quality of tragedy. The Department, convinced its moment has come again in what could be “a sort of Cuba situation” only “more dangerous”, re-recruits one of its agents from the war to cross into East Germany and locate the missiles. We watch in horror as the deluded operation stumbles inexorably towards disaster.
The novel was panned on its publication in 1965, seen as a flop after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It is an austere, uncompromising book; le Carré felt his breakthrough had glamourised the spy game (not a charge many would level at it) and so decided to tell a story in which everyone is deceived—by themselves, others, or both.
Despite the critical drubbing, its influence has quietly spread through the genre in the intervening decades, and echoes of it—the unsanctioned operation behind enemy lines, the expendable agent, the shabby, underfunded rival agency—can be seen in the work of Gerald Seymour, The Sandbaggers TV series and, more recently, Mick Herron’s Slough House novels and Luke Jennings’s Villanelle novellas (adapted into the TV series Killing Eve).
The book angered some in the intelligence community. One MI6 officer, furious that le Carré had painted British spies as “heartless incompetents” in it, bellowed, “You utter bastard,” at him at a diplomatic reception. The CIA’s John Stockwell recounted that he was reprimanded by superiors for using the novel to teach case officers because its bungled operation was too close to reality.
It had its admirers, though, among them Allen Dulles, who was forced to resign as CIA director after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He wrote in 1969 that the novel’s “jumble of unusual personalities, their speech and behaviour, their daily business, and even the awful scheme which carries them in their enthusiasm far from reality—all ring true”.
More than half a century later, The Looking Glass War feels refreshingly sharp, with prose at least the equal to le Carré’s more famous work, especially in the virtuoso opening sequence. Le Carré was writing with the awareness that the book would have a global audience, but refused to pander to expectations by redeeming his characters’ flaws or softening blows with anything but the driest wisps of irony. Smiley’s final intervention is no bittersweet triumph, as it would be in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but merely bitter defeat masked by British restraint, all blame left unsaid.
The former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove recently lambasted le Carré for his “nihilistic” and “corrosive” depictions of British intelligence. This is the most nihilistic and corrosive of all his books, and yet its portrayal of how influential men end up taking decisions with terrible repercussions through faulty intelligence and delusions of grandeur doesn’t feel excessive today. We live in a time in which bluff and deceit are rewarded, disinformation and incompetence are rife, and Pentagon officials anxiously check their screens to learn whether the president of the US has provoked a nuclear war on Twitter.
The Looking Glass War is a bleak and devastating read, but few other novels have so brilliantly described how a thirst for power breeds worlds of fantasy and failure.
First published in The Times, February 17 2020
The Best Spy Thrillers
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can read on this website or download here.
The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler (1939)
A prototype for the thriller as a quest, Eric Ambler’s masterpiece follows the crime novelist Charles Latimer’s obsessive attempts to trace the life of a murdered gangster through the grimy streets of Istanbul, Sofia, Athens, Belgrade and Paris. Ambler expertly seeds political and social commentary through Latimer’s voyage into a frightening world of conspiracy and intrigue.
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming (1953)
James Bond’s mission in Ian Fleming’s first novel, set around a casino in northern France, is to defeat the grotesque Le Chiffre at baccarat, thereby putting the man at the mercy of his ruthless Russian paymasters. However, things don’t go to plan. There are no gadgets or volcanic lairs here, and Bond himself is a much more complex and thoughtful character than his popular image; his anguished discussions of ethics with the French agent René Mathis are closer to Camus than quips with Q. A dark, taut and brutal read.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré (1963)
If you’ve struggled with Le Carré’s longer or later works, you may be surprised how different The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is from them. The plot is Byzantine, but the prose is sparse and gem-hard, at times reading like hard-boiled poetry. Alec Leamas, the archetypal pawn in a wider spy game, is our seemingly cynical companion all the way to the devastating finale at the Berlin Wall.
The 9th Directive by Adam Hall (1966)
Forgettable titles and pulpy cover art might have contributed to Adam Hall—a pseudonym for Elleston Trevor—not being as well known as the writers above, but his 19-strong series about a British agent known only as Quiller are the most exciting spy thrillers ever published. They’re sheer suspense, written in near-hallucinogenic prose that seems to slow time. In this instalment, Quiller must stop an assassin from taking out a British royal by assassinating him first.
Seventeen Moments of Spring by Yulian Semyonov (1969)
Spy fiction isn’t solely the preserve of Brits, as this superb Soviet thriller shows. Both it and the subsequent TV adaptation remain iconic in Russia today, but while its patriotic appeal is clear there’s a lot more going on. Our hero, Max von Stierlitz, initially appears to be a mid-ranking SS officer in Berlin in early 1945. But we soon learn that von Stierlitz is in fact Maxim Isayev, a long-term deep-cover Soviet agent. Ordered by Moscow to discover which high-ranking Nazi is conducting secret peace talks with the Americans, he soon finds the net starting to close in on him.
Berlin Game by Len Deighton (1983)
Two decades after rocketing to fame with The IPCRESS File, Len Deighton reinvented the spy story a second time for the latter leg of the Cold War. MI6 desk man Bernard Samson is sent back into the field and to his beloved Berlin to help a defector to come over, but quickly realises there is a high-level traitor within British intelligence. The novel has eight sequels and a prequel, forming a labyrinthine espionage epic lightened with laconic wit.
The Tiger, Life by Sarah Gainham (1983)
Best known for Night Falls on the City, Sarah Gainham’s Cold War spy thrillers are now scandalously out of print. They are all well worth discovering: her tense, intricate plots take place against a brilliantly realised backdrop of eastern Europe, and often drew on real espionage operations. Her final novel, this is an autobiographical tale set among the press pack of Berlin in the late 1940s. It’s haunting, thrilling and beautifully written.
Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews (2013)
The first in a trilogy by a retired CIA veteran, Red Sparrow follows two mole-hunts, one Russian and one American. The star of the show is Dominika Egerova, a beautiful and hyper-intuitive ballet dancer turned Russian operative. Featuring honey traps, a psychopathic Spetsnaz “mechanic” and surveillance on the streets of Moscow, Helsinki, Washington and elsewhere, this is a great sprawling spy story that revisits the Cold War classics and recasts them for the era of Putin.
Real Tigers by Mick Herron (2017)
Mick Herron’s series about disgraced spooks exiled to a shabby London office known as Slough House has reinvigorated the espionage genre. Jackson Lamb, the brash but cunning overseer of the “Slow Horses”, is a genius creation who will have you howling with laughter. You could start with the first novel in the series, Slow Horses, but I’m opting for this, the third, in which one of the crew is kidnapped. Intricately plotted and tense, it also offers poignant insights into human foibles and follies.
To the Lions by Holly Watt (2019)
While this novel doesn’t technically feature any spies, there is plenty of spying in it, specifically the investigative journalist Casey Benedict and her colleagues, who go undercover to infiltrate a horrifying corporate “sport” in the north African desert. The techniques and ethical conflicts of Benedict’s work are expertly explored, but Watt never neglects the suspense. An excellent sequel, The Dead Line, has just been published.
First published in The Times, June 9 2020
A Heroine of the Resistance
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can read on this website or download here.
Novels about real-life secret agents often arrive in waves, motivated by the declassification of files or some other trigger that sets writers’ minds racing and publishers’ wallets opening. It’s unusual for two inspired by the same person to be released within a week of each other, but that’s the case this month with Liberation by Imogen Kealey and Code Name Hélène by Ariel Lawhon.
Their subject is Nancy Wake, who was born in New Zealand but grew up in Australia before fleeing at 16. She eventually made a new life in France, first as a freelance journalist, then as a socialite wife, and finally as a courageous agent with a price of five million francs put on her head by the Gestapo.
After the fall of France she helped Allied servicemen and refugees to escape to Spain with false papers. But with the Nazis closing in on her in 1943 she had to escape by the same route, made her way to England, joined the Special Operations Executive, and was parachuted back into France to assist the Resistance in the lead-up to D-Day. She lived and fought alongside the Maquis in the Auvergne and earned their respect, bicycling hundreds of miles to reach a radio operator to restore contact with London.
Her extraordinary story has been told before, but Kealey and Lawhon use the freedom of fiction to breathe new life into it. Liberation has been adapted from a screenplay due to be filmed with Anne Hathaway; Imogen Kealey is the pseudonym of the screenwriter Darby Kealey and novelist Imogen Robertson. Lawhon has bestsellers exploring the Hindenburg disaster and the mystery of Anastasia Romanov to her credit.
There are, naturally, huge areas of overlap between the two books. Liberation focuses on Wake’s struggles to carry out her mission in the Auvergne amid the warring egos of the Resistance men, while Code Name Hélène interweaves this with episodes from her prewar career in journalism, her glamorous affair with and marriage to the industrialist Henri Fiocca, and her work with the Resistance’s escape routes in Marseilles and its surroundings.
Wake was given the sobriquet “The White Mouse” by the Gestapo, and both books dramatise the hunt for her through fictional figures. In Liberation this is Major Markus Böhm, a Cambridge-educated officer determined to stamp out the Resistance. Lawhon creates two nemeses for Wake: Marceline, a French collaborator, and Obersturmführer Wolff, first seen wielding a whip against an elderly Jewish woman in a Vienna square. It’s virtually impossible to portray Nazi officers without summoning up leather-coated Herr Flick caricatures, but these are suitably chilling and distinct antagonists.
Which to read? Code Name Hélène is the richer of the two, and the more thoroughly researched; the chapters devoted to Fiocca’s courtship of “Noncee” and their luxurious lifestyle in peacetime Marseilles give the opening third of the book a slower pace, but subsequent events gain power from the juxtaposition.
Liberation is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a touch more Hollywood. In one scene Wake enters a café to meet a contact, despite being warned that the Nazi-collaborating Milice have sealed the town; she coolly introduces herself as the woman pictured in the Wanted poster above the counter before shooting two Milice men dead and killing another with his knife. Another exploit features her disguising herself as a prostitute to infiltrate Gestapo headquarters and then poisoning the officers’ wine. Wake did kill Nazis, but neither of these incidents took place, and these depictions in Liberation of her defiance and courage occasionally feel overly insistent — several scenes ending with her being cheered.
Lawhon’s novel has more than its share of action, but since it is largely told in the first person we see the danger from Wake’s perspective and are rarely instructed what to make of her. These are exciting and well-written accounts of wartime valour, and their protagonist’s qualities shine through. As the authors’ note to Liberation observes, Nancy Wake’s life was too full to be contained by any single novel, and these are two fine additions to the literature on this extraordinary woman.
First published in The Times, March 16 2020
Spy Fake
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
In May 1989, WH Allen published Quiller KGB, the thirteenth in a series of spy thrillers by Adam Hall, a pseudonym for the British writer Elleston Trevor. The novel was Hall’s swan-song for the Cold War, with the bulk of it set in November 1989. British agent Quiller foils a plot by Soviet hardliners to assassinate Mikhail Gorbachev on an official visit to Erich Honecker in East Berlin. They don’t plan to carry out the assassination themselves, but have farmed out the job to a Brit. Completed in 1988, the novel successfully predicted Gorbachev’s visit to East Berlin the next year. There were, however, never any claims of an assassination attempt taking place during the real visit.
Until now.
In September, Hodder & Stoughton published Pilgrim Spy. This claims to be a memoir by ‘Tom Shore’, the pseudonym for a former SAS operative. ‘Shore’ relates how he undertook a series of incredible missions during the Cold War including, pivotally and most spectacularly, that he foiled a plot by Soviet hardliners in October 1989 to assassinate Mikhail Gorbachev when he visited Erich Honecker in East Berlin.
Hodder have marketed Pilgrim Spy as ‘one of the great untold stories of the twentieth century’, but if anything that’s underselling it. In real life, British operatives rarely carry out solo missions, let alone get involved in gunfights with terrorists while saving world leaders from assassination. Add in that the gunfight in question apparently took place in Colditz Castle and that throughout his operation ‘Shore’ repeatedly encountered a young KGB major called Vladimir Putin, who he suspects of being involved in the assassination plot, and it becomes even more remarkable.
This extraordinary operation has never been so much as hinted at in any previously published accounts, and its daring and scale go far beyond any other operation we know about during the Cold War. Without the actions of ‘Tom Shore’, Germany would likely not have been reunited at that time, or perhaps ever. Such an operation would clearly be Western intelligence’s greatest coup of the 20th century, greater than the running of Oleg Penkovsky or Oleg Gordievsky, and ‘Shore’ deserves all our thanks, and several medals.
The book was initially treated as news by both the Sunday Times and The Guardian, perhaps unsurprisingly: Hodder is a highly respected publisher, and it’s very rare for an entirely unknown episode of Cold War history to be revealed; even rarer for it to feature British intelligence; almost unheard of for it to be involved in a spectacular, history-altering operation. It might seem bizarre that the operation has gone completely unknown of for so long, but ‘Shore’ had a ready explanation for this: the only other people who could confirm any of the events he relates are the dead members of the Red Army Faction, his dead SAS commander, and the MI6 officer, ‘Mark Scott’, who sent him on the operation unbeknown to anyone else and who then vanished without a trace.
‘Scott’ turns out to be a rogue MI6 officer chasing after a little black book that contains ‘the NOC list’. It’s complicated, but if you’ve seen the first Mission: Impossible film with Tom Cruise you’ll get the drift. ‘Shore’ ends the book absolutely furious at having been used by ‘Scott’, who along the way has also murdered two innocent people, including Kirstin, the beautiful blonde with ‘cornflower blue eyes’ who he has fallen for. ‘Shore’ notes that some readers might think this sort of skullduggery is just par for the course for spies, but that it really isn’t, you know:
‘Well, perhaps it’s because we have been brought up reading books and watching films about the likes of James Bond, George Smiley and Jason Bourne that we now expect such agencies to be duplicitous, ruthless and murderous as a matter of course. But, in my experience, the sort of duplicity and murderous intention that Scott showed towards someone on the same side – me – was a complete outrage to all the codes and standards by which these organisations live and work. I can honestly say I have never come across or heard of anything similar.’
No, me neither. Outside of spy fiction, anyway, where, as he notes, the agent discovering he’s been used as a pawn by someone on his own side is indeed a cliché. ‘Shore’ says that unless he happens to bump into ‘Scott’ again – ‘which wouldn’t end well’ – he will likely never know what the man’s true motives had been. But strangely, he doesn’t call on the security services to open an investigation into this criminal within their ranks. Forgetful, perhaps.
Of course, the publication of Pilgrim Spy presents an even more puzzling mystery: how on earth did Adam Hall know about ‘Tom Shore’s mission over a year before it happened? Like Hall’s hero Quiller, ‘Shore’ is shot at, chased down, and has a liaison with an East German woman intent on overthrowing the Soviet system, before saving the free world virtually single-handedly. ‘Shore’ doesn’t hang off a window ledge as Quiller does, but even more impressively recounts a pursuit across a rooftop which he escapes by jumping between buildings. The chapter ends in media res with him on the verge of doing so – incidentally, a trademark of the Quiller series. It’s also extremely striking that these plots to assassinate the same leader, in the same place, at the same time, masterminded by the same group of people, both happen to be foiled by British agents; on the face of it both the visit and the idea of an assassination plot during it are Soviet-East German affairs, with little ostensible reason for the UK to be involved. Both books give pretty tortuous motivations for British intelligence to insert itself into the events. This is a familiar suspension of disbelief in British spy fiction, of course: as with the Bond films, Adam Hall constantly had to figure out reasons for the UK to play the lead role in averting disasters around the globe. In the real world, though, British agents only very occasionally save the world, and when they have done it tends not to have involved rooftop chases and gunfights.
In Pilgrim Spy, we’re told that MI6 only received a hint of the assassination plot nine weeks prior to it taking place, and ‘Shore’ only figured out who the target was days in advance. So was British spy novelist Adam Hall a psychic with access to future plans for intelligence operations?
The truth is perhaps more mundane: Pilgrim Spy is not spy fact but spy fiction, and atrociously bad spy fiction at that. Every cliché in the genre pops up, and great gobbets of factual exposition are lifted from the internet, sometimes word for word. The plagiarism is insultingly clumsy, with most of the lifts taken from Wikipedia entries. Here are just a few excerpts from Pilgrim Spy - the text in bold has all been plagiarised from Wikipedia’s entry on the Stasi, while the text in italics is from the entry about Zersetzung. These are all straight lifts, with barely a word changed:
‘I knew all about the East German Stasi. It was the official state security service of the DDR, and has often been described as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in history...’
‘One of the Stasi’s main tasks was to spy on the population, mainly through a vast network of citizens turned informants.’
‘They fought any opposition to the regime using both overt and covert measures including the process of Zersetzung.’
‘During the Honecker era – from May 1971 to October 1989 – the Stasi used the accusation Zersetzung to silence political opponents by repression. German historian Hubertus Knabe wrote: “The goal was to destroy individuals’ self-confidence, for example by damaging their reputation, by organising failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships.” The use of Zersetzung is well documented due to numerous Stasi files published after the fall of East Germany, where it is estimated that up to 10,000 individuals had fallen victim to this barbaric process, with over 5,000 sustaining irreversible damage.’
‘In addition, its Directorate for Reconnaissance was responsible for both espionage and for conducting covert operations in foreign countries and, under its long-time head Markus Wolf, this directorate gained a reputation as one of the most capable intelligence agencies of the Cold War.’
Wikipedia’s Stasi entry also mentions Dynamo Dresden, Vladimir Putin’s time with the KGB in Dresden, and the agency’s military training with the Red Army Faction – all of which feature in Pilgrim Spy.
Wikipedia’s entry on the Red Army Faction contains the following paragraph:
‘Sometimes the group is talked about in terms of generations:
the “first generation”, which consisted of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and others;
the “second generation”, after the majority of the first generation was arrested in 1972; and
the “third generation” RAF, which existed in the 1980s and 1990s up to 1998, after the first generation died in Stammheim maximum security prison in 1977.’
Pilgrim Spy contains this paragraph:
‘The group is often talked about in terms of generations.
The first “generation’ consisted of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and others. The ‘second generation’ came about after the majority of the first generation was arrested in 1972. The ‘third generation’ RAF existed in the 1980s, 1990s and up to 1998.’
An enormous amount of the book’s material is lifted from Wikipedia in this way. ‘Shore’ tells us that in intelligence circles ‘agents under Non-Official Cover (NOC) are operatives who assume covert roles in organisations without any official ties to the government for which they work’. That, too, is virtually word-for-word the same as the opening of the Wikipedia entry on the topic. The hardback sells for just under £14, but Wikipedia, of course, can be read for free.
And ‘Shore’ doesn’t only plagiarise from Wikipedia. The biography of his SAS commander is taken directly from The Independent’s obituary of the man he is based on, Andy Massey, and to whom the book is brazenly dedicated. It’s almost as though this former SAS operative knows virtually nothing about espionage or the Cold War himself.
The dedication to Massey has proven the book’s undoing with veterans of the SAS, a group of whom were so outraged by what they felt was comparable to ‘stolen valour’ that they complained to Hodder, who have apparently now removed the dedication as a result. SAS and BRIXMIS veterans also pointed out several other discrepancies with the book’s claims, such as gunfights happening at Colditz with none of them ever hearing of it despite being on good relations with the staff there at the time. A former commander of the SAS also believes the book’s claims to be ‘utter rubbish’.
Pilgrim Spy isn’t the first special forces memoir to be greeted with such scepticism, and it won’t be the last. This field is open to abuse: it’s hard to disprove a tale of a top-secret operation told by an author whose name is itself withheld. When questioned by The Independent, Hodder admitted that the book contains plagiarism but downplayed this as ‘sloppy but not criminal’ and insisted that there were only three sentences taken from Wikipedia. The Independent’s article already listed several more than that, as have I above, and one passage on coffee plagiarises seven sentences in a row from Wikipedia.
‘Sloppy but not criminal’ is a shocking response from a serious publisher to such an allegation – not long ago they would have investigated this properly and withdrawn the book as a result.
Adding to the mystery over the publisher’s reaction is Pilgrim Spy’s peculiar back-story. It looks to have started life as a totally different book: The Colditz Conundrum, a ‘new complete history’ of the POW camp that promised startling revelations about a ‘hidden hand’ at work behind the famous escapes from it. This had the same ISBN number and publication date as Pilgrim Spy, and the author biography read:
‘Tom Shore was educated at Woolverstone Hall school in Suffolk and Birmingham University in the 60s and 70s.’
On the Amazon page for Pilgrim Spy, we learn:
‘Tom Shore joined the British army in 1970, a few days after his eighteenth birthday.’
So… how was he at university in the 60s and 70s if he joined the army just after he turned 18 in 1970?
When I asked Pilgrim Spy’s editor about this eye-popping discrepancy, he claimed that The Colditz Counundrum ‘with accompanying biography was a dummy title substituted for the real book on the day of publication’. Strange: publishers usually trumpet their ground-breaking books well in advance to try to drum up publicity, rather than giving them detailed synopses for totally different non-existent books, complete with contradictory biographies for the author. Why the subterfuge, especially for a pseudonymous author? What would Hodder have done if a journalist had approached them wanting to write an article about the promised revelations in The Colditz Conundrum? It seems like an unusual PR strategy, let’s say.
Hodder have also been ‘sloppy’ in other ways. Despite their marketing of the book as a memoir and claims to five British newspapers that it gives an honest account of events during the Cold War, the book’s frontispiece features the disclaimer:
‘All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.’
Quite how that applies to Putin and Gorbachev, and whether it was inserted by a sceptical Hodder employee to cover their backsides, isn’t clear – but as Hodder have stated in print that it’s fictitious, even while insisting it isn’t everywhere else, they can’t very well sue the book’s critics for stating the same.
A few years ago, Pilgrim Spy would likely have been more of a scandal: the plagiarism is so blatant, the original writing is so poor, and the supposed events are so transparently ludicrous. A Million Little Pieces, Surviving With Wolves and other fake memoirs have been the subject of enormous interest, and this is probably the most blatant case of it I’ve seen. However, Hodder’s response in the face of the obvious has simply been to double down, Trump-style, and insist they believe ‘Shore’s preposterous story, while shrugging off the kind of plagiarism that would see a student thrown out of university.
The book remains on sale, and little looks to be able change that. It feels like it was an attempt to emulate Soldier Spy, the memoir of pseudonymous ex-MI5 officer ‘Tom Marcus’, which was a bestseller in 2016 and also garnered national newspaper coverage while having its share of doubters. The consequences for failing to replicate that success with a rubbish spy novel masquerading as a sensational memoir are close to nil, both for the author and publisher. Hodder are large enough for their reputation to take this hit – they publish hundreds of books a year, and this is already water under the bridge. The book might not sell as well as they’d hoped, but they will probably still feel it was worth taking a chance on. It’s a shame: it’s a brilliant publisher with a storied history, and this isn’t worthy of going out under their banner.
As a longtime fan of Adam Hall, ‘Tom Shore’ ripping off one of my favourite spy novelists’ books has its funny side. But as someone who also studies Cold War espionage, it feels like a dispiriting defeat: fake history in a time of fake news. The lack of fuss or consequence is partly because chicanery is no longer remarkable in public discourse. Information about espionage has also become so much of a part of our culture that even the most outlandish ideas can seem plausible, because we’re used to seeing them: jumping across buildings is so familiar from spy films that we don’t stop to think how unlikely that is to happen in real life.
Recent years have also seen an inflation in conspiracy theorism, and the line between a genuine expert and someone who has watched a lot of YouTube videos or read a few Wikipedia entries has become eroded. Today, we know more – or think we know more – about the inside workings of the intelligence world thanks to the likes of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. A few years ago, both appeared to promise a brave new era in which the shadowy actions of those in power would be held more accountable. In reality, this has mostly been confined to the West.
Wikileaks has itself become a power whose actions are often obscure, while Snowden’s focus on surveillance by the United States’ spy agencies has almost totally overlooked the actions of the likes of Russia, who have ramped up their use of disinformation and meddling in US politics. Vladimir Putin’s operatives have committed murder on the streets of Britain, and when exposed claimed to be clueless tourists to troll the British authorities and public – this has received scant condemnation from Wikileaks’ and Snowden’s supporters, and in some cases outright denial.
But while the truth doesn’t matter to Russia, it should to us. In his book, ‘Tom Shore’ speculates that a young Putin was involved in a plot to assassinate Mikhail Gorbachev, but one doesn’t need to invent fables about his past to understand his motives or figure out how to tackle his actions. You can’t learn from history if you lie about it, and in muddying the waters between fact and fiction publishers aren’t simply being unprofessional, but playing a dangerous game at a time when clarity and trust are increasingly valuable. It’s already hard enough to figure out what happened during this period. With propaganda, disinformation and even assassination being used to undermine democracies by numerous states, publishers backing simplistic, self-glorying falsifications risk distorting understanding of the intelligence world and the lessons we can learn from the real Cold War.