WITH one bound, the spy scare in the US has leapt the Atlantic, and is now roaring through Britain, its natural home.
The former head of MI5 warns that Russian secret agents are “every bit as active” in Britain as they were in the Soviet era. The headlines declare: “The red in my bed, by British husband” and “MI5 hunts 20 ‘sleepers’ [in Britain]” (oddly, sleepers come not as single spies, but in round numbers).
And here is the photogenic Anna Chapman, an alleged Russian spy straight out of central casting (Ealing, not Hollywood): she partied at Annabel’s, she lived in Knightsbridge, worked at Barclays and married a Brit who never suspected. The Russian espionage ring may have been exposed in the US, but the spy scare is a British speciality. Nobody does it better.
“There is a well-certified class of people prone to spy mania,” wrote Winston Churchill; “worthy folk” who tended to see spies and subversives behind every lamppost. And Churchill should know, for few have been more prone to spy mania than he was.
Like most such scares, the latest upsurge of spy mania is about five parts fantasy and speculation to one part reality, a fiction-driven paranoia with a fingerhold on fact. Spy scares are mostly nonsense, but seldom entirely so. Every so often, fact outstrips fiction, and reality proves more extraordinary than the confections of thriller writers. Chapman ought to be a figment of the novelist’s imagination, but she is not.
The task of MI5, for most of the past 100 years, has been to try to establish where the public appetite for spy-spotting ends, and the real threat of subversion, espionage and terrorism begins; separating the chaff of fiction from a few, vitally important kernels of fact.
It is no accident that the greatest writers of spy fiction have all worked in British intelligence: W. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, John le Carre, Ian Fleming. When Stella Rimington stepped down as head of MI5, she started writing novels.
The intelligence services were, in part, founded through fiction. In the years before the First World War, the novels of William Le Queux warned that Britain was under assault from “a vast army of German spies”. His The Invasion of 1910 (published in 1906) sold more than one million copies.
Spurred on by Le Queux’s overheated fantasies, members of the public began to see spies everywhere, and nowhere. In 1909, the Mayor of Canterbury found two Germans on his property. He reported that he invited them to dinner, and gave them so much port that they eventually told him they were spies, reconnoitring the country before a German invasion. It was a joke; but the stolid British mind had failed, as usual, to pick up on the spry and subtle German sense of humour.
The Secret Service Bureau (later split into MI5 and MI6) was founded in 1909, partly in response to Le Queux’s scaremongering and public reaction to it. Yet as Christopher Andrew reveals in his history of MI5, there was a German espionage network operating in Britain before the war. In the dross of cheap fiction and public anxiety lay nuggets of fact.
A similar pattern emerged in the early years of the Second World War, when Britain was seized by a collective conviction that fifth columnists were secretly operating here preparatory to German invasion. The fear, inflamed by press and politicians, was virulent, hysterical and almost entirely bogus.
A generation brought up on John Buchan surged into action: one informant reported seeing a man “with a typically Prussian neck”; neighbour dobbed in neighbour, often on the ground of “suspicious noises”. German spies were said to be disguised as nuns, organising suicide squads among mental patients and poisoning the chocolate supply.
As one acute German spymaster pointed out, Britain’s fondness for spy and detective novels paradoxically made the country much harder to penetrate: “A passionate desire to play the amateur detective is a characteristic common to all classes of Britons, and it is not merely coincidence that Conan Doyle, the father of the modern detective story, and Edgar Wallace, are both Britons and vastly superior to the authors of detective fiction in other lands.”
Literary culture inflamed and distorted the spy threat, yet once again that threat was real. Germany poured spies into Britain after 1939. They came by ship, parachute, even rowing boat. Most were hopeless. Some spoke no English. One was arrested at a railway station after being asked to pay “ten and six” for a ticket and handing 10 pounds and six shillings. Only one German spy escaped detection: he ran out of money and killed himself in an air raid shelter in Cambridge.
The British public were right to fear that Britain was the target of a major German espionage campaign, but wrong to believe that it was any good. The idea that enemies live among us, invisible, malign and waiting, is rooted in our culture, but also borne out by history.
The Cambridge spies were undetected because, in their milieu, they were unexceptional: upper-class, public school and Oxbridge-educated, Philby and Blunt were as invisible as the American suburban spies exposed last week, with their dead-letter drops and their hydrangeas.
The threat of the “enemy within” persists. Five years ago today, Shehzad Tanweer, the 22-year-old son of a former Leeds policeman, played a game of cricket with his friends. The next morning he detonated a bomb on an underground train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, killing himself and seven passengers. The 7/7 bombers were just as invisible, although in quite different ways, as Philby or Chapman. MI5’s extraordinarily difficult role is to maintain awareness of the danger from spies and terrorists within British society, without generating panic, paranoia or prejudice.
The Cambridge moles who served Moscow, the cricket-playing bomber, the alleged Russian spy with the British husband who gave her address as “99 Fake Street”. These are characters that ought to be in novels. But truth is stranger (and generally more interesting) than fiction. And in the strange world of espionage, if the plot sounds utterly improbable, it is probably true.
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