In the years just before the First World War, a boy was growing up in Imperial India. He was obstinate and full of life. Still a toddler, he chatted to the servants in Hindustani. His father nicknamed him Kim, after the spy hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, who could speak several languages and flit between identities.
Years later, when the boy was full grown, his Soviet handler would pick up the Kipling novel and read it from cover to cover. His agent, Kim Philby, was elusive. No one could pierce that charming carapace and glimpse the real man beneath. The Soviet handler, trained in manipulation and control, scoured Rudyard Kipling’s book looking for clues to Philby’s personality. Fact and fiction, as in so many areas of espionage, danced together.
There are no other areas of historical inquiry in which fact and fiction are so symbiotic. Many of the best writers of spy fiction were, themselves, spies. And many of the best spies were drawn to the murky world of espionage by a thirst for the stories, for the glamour, for the moral shadiness captured on the page by fiction. As the historian Hugh Wilford points out in his recent book CIA, an Imperial History, the American agency was created and run by men whose imaginations and self-image were informed by Kipling’s Kim.
Sometimes, the creations of the best spy writers leak into the real world of espionage. The term ‘mole’, for example, used to denote someone who has penetrated an intelligence agency over the long term, was invented by John le Carré in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The best spy novelists may not be informed enough to be totally accurate, but unless the worlds they create are credible, they will fail. The greats take their depictions of tradecraft seriously, and it shows. They just leave out the boring bits: the filling out of expense claims, the endless glare of a computer screen.
Spy novels, too, reflect the worlds in which the real spies operate, the mood and the tone of the wider social history. The brash, British bullishness of James Bond, giving way to the tired George Smiley, ceding ground to the cynical Jackson Lamb.
Fictional espionage matters to our souls. These stories of deception and moral hazards talk to us about being human. Real life espionage matters on the ground. As General David Petraeus, former director of the CIA and retired US army General, argues in the first interview in this anthology, good political and military decisions absolutely require strong intelligence.
At the SpyMasters podcast we interview the best writers about espionage, both fact and fiction. Both are endlessly fascinating for similar reasons: these are stories about people operating in dangerous shadows, pulled in different directions and telling lie after lie. The difference, perhaps, is that the historians attempt to disentangle the lies; the novelists seek to tangle them.
Within these pages there are countless extraordinary takes of intelligence, true and invented. There are stories from top writers like Alex Gerlis, Deborah Swift and Mark Ellis, featuring secrets and lies during World War 2 – a war which was fought in the clandestine world as much as on the battlefield.
We meet some of the key figures of historical espionage. Historian Helen Fry writes about Thomas Kendrick, the British spy master. Nancy Wake, the SOE agent, is sketched by novelist Elizabeth Buchan. Michael Smith, the journalist turned historian, traces the ties between the British and American women who forged the special relationship between the two countries’ intelligence agencies.
There are Soviet agents aplenty within these pages. What book on espionage would be complete without them? Ben Macintyre is interviewed about his book on the extraordinary Agent Sonya, the code name for Soviet spy Ursula Kuczynski. Trevor Barnes uncovers the Portland Spy Ring, and the remarkable attempt by MI5 to turn its members into British agents. Thriller writer Michael Ridpath examines the decade which produced a tidal wave of spies motivated by ideology – the 1930s. Simon Kuper, the author and journalist, tells the story of George Blake, the last great ideological spy.
John le Carré once said that the best writers and the most effective spies share a ‘state of watchfulness’. His legacy is explored in this anthology by the writer Peter Tonkin. le Carré argued that spies and writers are both compelled to deceive their neighbours, to prey upon them, to steal and repackage their stories. ‘Like a spy, [the writer] is not merely an outsider, but implicitly a subversive.’
This anthology is stocked with subversives, with writers who bring espionage stories alive, whether through fact or fiction. And sometimes, the distinction between the two, like the life of the spies themselves, is mired in a fascinating murkiness.
Antonia Senior is a journalist and the host of the SpyMasters Podcast.
Mary Renault
