A Suspicion of Spies, by Tim Spicer

A biography of the spy Biffy Dunderdale offers an invaluable insight into the key role he played in MI6.
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Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale often features as a daring bit-part player in World War II espionage books, but now this extraordinary character takes centre stage in Tim Spicer’s insightful biography.

Dunderdale was an iron fist in a velvet glove. He combined charm with the ruthless edge necessary to be an effective spymaster. His 40-year career of ‘licensed thuggery’ spanned the Dreadnought era to the Atom bomb.

Biffy was born in Odessa at the turn of the 20th century, to English expat parents. At the time, the area from the Black-sea, across Turkey to the Levant was rich with intrigue and Spicer gives a very vivid portrayal of the environment that shaped Biffy’s formative years. He draws on a colourful collection of characters, including the infamous arms dealer Basil Zaharoff, and George Eady and Edwin Whittal who attempted to bribe Turkey out of the First World War (an event that inspired my novel The Dardanelles Conspiracy).

By 1916 his boxing skills had earned Biffy his nickname and his father had inducted him into the intelligence world. A year later at 18 he was taken on by Naval Intelligence and was heavily involved in operations against the Bolsheviks.

After the Russian Civil War, Dunderdale was sent to Paris to set up a new MI6 Station. Paris was going through the ‘Crazy Years’ (Les Années Folles) and Spicer gives a wonderful account of Biffy’s heady time there, while working firstly against the Soviet Union and then in the 30s switching his attention to Nazi Germany.

When war broke out and Paris fell, Biffy withdrew to London, taking an Enigma machine with him. The networks and contacts he had built in the French and Polish Intelligence Services provided invaluable information. This included the German order of battle and fortifications prior to the Allied landings in northwest and southern France, German ship and U-boat building, and the location of factories making the V-bombs.

Biffy was also involved with Agent KNOPF, a spy in Hitler’s inner circle who provided what Spicer describes as the human intelligence equivalent of Enigma. The identity of Agent KNOPF is still a mystery and Spicer makes a tantalising examination into who it could have been.

After the war Biffy went back to gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union and there are some interesting accounts of his Cold War exploits in Berlin and Vienna.

Biffy was very much a man of his time. John le Carré described him as from the same firm that built Stonehenge. He was a lifelong friend of Ian Fleming and many consider him to have been the blueprint for James Bond. Biffy was a man of action who liked to be in the thick of the excitement and danger, someone who got the raw intelligence rather than an analyst. Spicer certainly does Biffy Dunderdale justice, providing an invaluable insight into the key role he and MI6 played in gathering information from occupied Europe and into the Cold War.

A Suspicion of Spies: Risk, Secrets and Shadows – the Biography of Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale by Tim Spicer is out now.  Alan Bardos is the author of the Johnny Swift thriller series.