Sir Alistair Horne
Acclaimed historian who had spied for MI6 while filing copy from Berlin to The Daily Telegraph
SIR ALISTAIR HORNE, who has died aged 91, was a distinguished historian, ex-spy and The Daily Telegraph’s former man in Berlin, a post from which he was sacked for offending Lady Pamela Berry, the wife of the newspaper’s chairman. Horne rubbed shoulders with everyone from Lawrence Durrell to General Pinochet to Jackie Kennedy, gave advice on foreign policy to George W Bush (who ignored it), and wrote a shelf-ful of highly acclaimed works, including travel books, works on 19th and 20th century France and Germany, and political biographies.
His own life, described in two volumes of memoir, A Bundle from Britain (1993), chronicling his adventures as a young boy sent to America to escape the Blitz, and But What Do You Actually Do? (2011) about his later years, was packed with incident from which he was extremely lucky to emerge unscathed. Both his parents died in road accidents; he himself endured three bad car crashes, and as well as undergoing a triple heart bypass and surviving an encounter with a 500lb black bear.
Alistair Allan Horne was born on November 9 1925, the only child of Sir Allan Horne and Auriol (née Haydrummond), niece of the 13th Earl of Kinnoull. Lady Auriol died when Alistair was five, drowned when her car spun off a road into a Belgian river; she would be followed, 13 years later, by her husband, knocked down and killed by a car in the London blackout in 1944.
Young Alistair was educated at Ludgrove School, by his account a “Belsen of the spirit” characterised by “humbug, snobbery and rampant, unchecked bullying”. A blissful interlude at the Swiss school Le Rosey was followed by Stowe, from whose “bullying and buggery” Horne was saved by war, when he was shipped to America.
He was 14 when in July 1940 the Britannic landed him in New York, where he was given a home by the large, prosperous and mostly Anglophile Cutler family, who sent him to be educated at Millbrook School, an enlightened establishment where he befriended the future conservative author and commentator William F Buckley Jr, who remained a lifelong friend. The “ungrateful, ungracious and pompous little English boy I was” gradually became more civilised through American kindness and common sense.
He returned to Britain in 1943 to serve, not as a Spitfire pilot as he had hoped, but, due to poor eyesight, as an RAF squaddie, a lowly status which did not impress the girls: “Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,” said a girl called Irma in response to his 17-year-old fumblings. After a few strings were pulled, he joined the Coldstream Guards, eventually becoming a captain at the age of 22.
Posted to Palestine, Horne was put in charge of intelligence-gathering under the future head of MI6, Maurice Oldfield. After the war he was transferred to the Intelligence Corps, and attended a training school in Surrey. As a subaltern of 21 he was based in Cairo monitoring Soviet satellite powers in the Balkans.
After leaving the Guards, Horne read English at Jesus College, Cambridge. He returned briefly to spying in Tito’s Yugoslavia, then in 1952 joined The Daily Telegraph as a junior correspondent in post-war Berlin and Bonn – a job he got by claiming, falsely, that he could speak fluent German.
The following year he was approached by his old boss Maurice Oldfield, who wanted him to run three agents for MI6, all of whom worked in sensitive posts in various Bonn ministries. “I said I thought the Telegraph wouldn’t be too pleased about me being a spy,” Horne recalled, “but Maurice said they’d have a word with the foreign editor, who’d been a wartime intelligence officer himself, and there wouldn’t be a problem.”
For a couple of years Horne was busily employed filing copy to the paper while transporting secret West German government documents to his MI6 handlers in a suitcase with a false bottom. In 1955, however, he was telephoned at midnight by the Telegraph’s night editor and told to find out what time the Rheingold Express, carrying two of Lady Pamela Berry’s au pairs, was due to arrive in London. Horne responded with the terse suggestion that the noble lady should contact train inquiries at Victoria Station.
It did not go down well and he was ordered back to head office in Fleet Street. Desperate not to be deployed in the newsroom, “a hell of dense tobacco smoke, clattering typewriters and crumpled copy and carbons,” he resigned. With his journalistic cover gone, his career as a master spy, too, was at an end.
Instead, he embarked on a long and successful career as a historian. His first book, Back in Power: A Report on the New Germany, was published in 1955 to enthusiastic reviews from Hugh Trevorroper and others. His second, The Land is
the Bright (1958), part travel book, part paean to the American way of life, was intended to repair Anglo-american understanding after Suez.
His next book, widely regarded as a masterpiece, was on the battle of Verdun,
The Price of Glory (1962). It won the Hawthornden Prize and was followed by his vivid account of the calamity of 1870,
The Fall of Paris (1965).
After consulting Maurice Oldfield, by then deputy head of MI6, in 1971 he visited Salvador Allende’s Chile with William F Buckley, and wrote Small Earthquake in Chile (1973), another travelogue and political meditation. Then, at the suggestion of Harold Macmillan, he embarked on a history of the Algerian civil war, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (1977), a tour de force which received the Wolfson Prize in 1978.
Horne’s mastery of sources and ability to untangle complex issues and make them comprehensible convinced Macmillan to recruit Horne as his official biographer. He spent 10 years writing the work (published in two volumes in 1988 and 1989), in which, among other things, he revealed that Macmillan’s decision to resign, in 1963, had been a terrible mistake. The former prime minister, he explained, was a hypochondriac who had convinced himself, after experiencing some minor prostate problems, that he must have cancer. He resigned as a result.
But it was not cancer and what Macmillan called his “life after death” continued for another 23 years. “If he had stayed on,” Horne surmised, “he’d have probably won the next election, and we’d not have had Harold Wilson.”
Horne believed that if politicians read more history books, they would make fewer mistakes, and he was delighted in 2007 to be invited to the White House to talk about his book on the Algerian war, which, following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, had become of much interest to American military officers looking for ways of extricating their forces from the region. Horne was not, however, convinced that the president took any notice of the lessons he and the book pointed up.
After his visit to the White House, Horne was invited to write an official biography of Henry Kissinger, but declined owing to advancing age and the daunting amount of work involved.
Instead he wrote a volume on one year in Kissinger’s life, Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year (2009), a gripping account of one of America’s most enigmatic political figures during a pivotal year in the country’s post-war history.
Horne’s other books included Canada and the Canadians (1961); To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (1969); Death of a Generation (1970); The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune (1971); Napoleon, Master of Europe 1805–1807 (1979); The French Army and Politics 1870–1970 (1984); The Lonely Leader: Monty 1944–45 (1994, with David Montgomery); How Far from Austerlitz?: Napoleon 1805–1815 (1996) and The French Revolution (2009).
An inveterate traveller, during a visit to Canada, Horne was lucky to escape with his life when a black bear ripped a duffel bag full of fish off his back, as he was climbing up the stairs to his chalet. “I thought it was my wife, messing around,’’ he explained. In France, he narrowly missed being shot in the Café de la Paix in Paris, when a bullet intended for another diner shattered his glass.
Alistair Horne was appointed CBE in 1992 and knighted in 2003. He was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1993 and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Alistair Horne married, first, in 1953, Renira, the daughter of Admiral Sir Geoffrey Hawkins, KBE, CB, MVO, DSC, with whom he had three daughters. The marriage was dissolved, and in 1987 he married, secondly, Sheelin Eccles, an artist with whom he lived at Turville, near Henley-on-thames, Oxfordshire.
Sir Alistair Horne, born November 9 1925, died May 25 2017