SPYING
THE LATE SUMMER this year produced more spooks than Hallowe’en: spies, spying, spymasters and spycraft were amply represented from the Second World War to present day.
In the how-to category fell Brian Stewart’s memoir-cum-reflection on his trade Why Spy? The Art of Intelligence, co-authored with the academic Samantha Newbery. Stewart, a Chinese-speaking 70-year veteran of the secret world and one-time secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee, has produced a ‘fascinating’ book, thought the Scotsman’s Vin Arthey: a collection of 13 essays whose insights ‘on types of intelligence, how intelligence is (or should be) assessed and deception operations are riveting, full of illuminating detail’. Alan Judd in the Spectator agreed, finding his musings had ‘the aroma of a good whisky, well-distilled’. He was amused too by Stewart’s rueful observation that customers (i.e. politicians) ‘sometimes use intelligence as a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination’.
Where Stewart stresses the value of HUMINT (aka Human Intelligence), the BBC’S security correspondent Gordon Corera’s latest book Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and
Spies takes a long look at the way technology has changed the face of espionage. It goes back a good deal further than Edward Snowden, as it turns out: Corera begins his book with an account of the British dredger Alert severing Germany’s undersea telegraph cables early in the First World War, meaning that German communications would have to be sent by radio and would be vulnerable to interception. Corera’s account takes in everything from that period, via (inevitably) Bletchley Park and Enigma to the NSA and GCHQ’S bulk interception of data and an age where ‘all you need is to persuade someone unwittingly to click on an email and you have the access you require’.
The Economist noted that ‘Mr Corera has been given plenty of access to western intelligence agencies, and he describes their dilemmas with sympathy. The book’s main message, though, is that computers have automated espionage, and made it cheap and easy.’ ‘If you are looking for a clear and comprehensive guide to how communications have been intercepted’ throughout the last century, said the Guardian’s Richard Norton-taylor, ‘this is it.’
The prolific historian and journalist Max Hastings turns his attention to Second World War espionage in The
Secret War, admiringly reviewed by Roger Boyes in the Times: ‘Hastings is a realist; not a single sentimental whimper slinks into these 600 pages. His measure of military intelligence is how far it influences outcomes on the battlefield. And it is through this prism that he retells the history of the Second World War.’ The view through the prism isn’t always flattering: many of our spies, though brave, were ‘duffers’, the famous Agent Zig-zag was more interested in ‘girls and shoe-leather’ and tales of the SOE are as often as not ‘romantic twaddle’. Michael Burleigh, in the Evening
Standard, saluted ‘vintage Hastings’: a book which debunkingly argues that secret intelligence influenced ‘perhaps one-thousandth of one per cent’ of battlefield outcomes during the war. ‘Given the national fixation with spies and special forces, Hastings’s book is a very necessary corrective,’ thought Burleigh, ‘though one doubts whether his astringent medicine will cure the patient.’
Finally Frederick Forsyth, whose work on fictional espionage is well known, has come clean about his real-life experiences working for MI6 in the Sixties. Outsider: My Life in
Intrigue disappointed the Observer’s Ben East, however: ‘It’s so matter of fact, it has the air of a ghostwritten sports autobiography,’ he complained, unmoved even by Forsyth’s account of losing his virginity to a German countess who had ‘the quaint habit of singing the “Horst Wessel” during coitus’.
Forsyth isn’t the only old spy to sing, incidentally. Next year, it has just been announced, John le Carré will be publishing his first nonfiction book, a memoir called The Pigeon Tunnel.