Cloaks, daggers and novelists
T.E.B. Howarth
SECRET SERVICE: THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY by Christopher Andrew
Heinemann, £12.95
There are great advantages in having the adventures and misadventures of the intelligence community chronicled by sev- erely professional Cambridge academics. Their determination not to be caught out by their colleagues in unsubstantiated generalisation or unwarranted speculation secures us against the sensational or 'inves- tigative' excesses to which the subject lends itself. On the other hand, such admirable academic rigour has been known to drain. away nearly all the human colour and psychological extravagance in which the topic abounds. There is no fear whatever of this with Dr Christopher Andrew of Corpus Christi College, who is a very merry fellow, and never misses a chance to regale us with sharply etched personal detail about almost every individual in his cast of thousands.
If there is one overriding theme in the long story which Dr Andrew skillfully traces from Victorian times to the present day, it is the relative success of intelligence gathering as compared with the recurrent ineptitude of those charged with its inter- pretation and utilisation. The War Office attitude to intelligence in the Boer War was aptly compared to a man who 'kept a small brain for occasional use in his waist- coat pocket and ran his head by clock- work'. A classic example, brilliantly re- lated, was the Admiralty's failure to use properly the excellent intelligence pro- vided by Room 40 during the Battle of Jutland. Even worse was Baldwin's clumsi- ness in the aftermath of the Arcos raid in compromising intercepted Soviet tele- grams, so that between 1927 and the outbreak of the second world war signals intelligence in relation to Russia broke down completely. The sorriest chapter of all covers the period of appeasement and Munich, with Neville Chamberlain using MI5 to `tail' Sir Robert Vansittart and appalling breaches of elementary security occuring at the Rome and Berlin embas- sies, culminating in the chief Italian spy in the Rome Chancery being invited to attend the coronation. Despite massive intelli- gence to the contrary about the possibility of a Russo-German accord, Chamberlain informed the cabinet shortly before the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact that it would be quite impossible in present circumstances for Germany and Soviet Russia to come together'.
Dr Andrew's narrative gains in pace and excitement as he clears the decks for his great set-pieces — the German spy scare before the first world war which led to the future MI5 being set up in 1909 under Vernon Kell with just one clerk; the triumphs of Room 40 under Admiral `Blinker' Hall; Sir Roger Casement and the Easter Rising; Reilly and Lockhart in Bolshevik Russia; the Arcos raid and the Venlo incident; Bletchley and `the creative anarchy of its working methods'; the whole rounded off with a coda which encompas- ses, albeit rather sketchily, Philby and Penkovsky.
But for many readers, the abiding charm of this book will derive from the author's sustained capacity to bring his cast of larger than life characters into sharp focus. To what extent the works of John Le Cane have affected the theory and practice of contemporary espionage is no doubt diffi- cult to determine. However, Dr Andrew enjoys demonstrating that the absurd romancing of William Le Quex and E. Philips Oppenheim, building on Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands, con- vinced many in high places that England was honeycombed with the Kaiser's spies, usually posturing as waiters. And this despite the best efforts of P.G. Wode- house, who satirised the spy-mania in a little known novel The Swoop! Or How Clarence Saved England, in which a boy scout spotted the first warning of the invasion buried in the stop press news. 'Fry not out 104. Surrey 147 for 8. A German army landed in Essex this afternoon'. But in the cloak-and-dagger business fiction is hard put to it to outdistance fact. We are, for instance, introduced to both Baden- Powell and the novelist A.E.W. Mason carrying out their secret missions disguised as butterfly collectors. The former consi- dered that 'carrying a sketchbook and a colour box, and a butterfly net in my hand, I was above suspicion'; while Mason, although claiming that he knew nothing about butterflies and detested moths, man- aged to put out of action the German wireless station at Ixtapalapa. We meet, too, a better known writer blurring the distinction between Ashenden and his creator, as Somerset Maugham vainly tried to bolster the failing regime of Alexander Kerensky. Francis Meynell's method of spiriting jewels into Britain in order to subsidise Comintern agents was, we are told, to hide them in expensive chocolates sent by post to C.E.M. Joad. Intellectuals like Dilly Knox, who found that crypt- analysis came more easily if practised in the bathroom, or Dr Shulz, 'the first doctor of philosophy ever to be jailed for espion- age in Britain' vie for our attention with men of action like Sir Mansfield Cumming, `C' of what became the MS from 1909 to 1923, who bought a child's scooter on
which to place his wooden leg so that he could race along the War Office corridors. At every turn and twist of the narrative there are to be found improbable charac- ters like Commander `Pinktights' Pollock, an amateur balloonist, or the agent Frederick `Fanny' Van den Heuvel, who was a Papal Count as well as a director of Eno's Fruit Salts and sported mauve spats. In the author's view the real life agent who most resembled James Bond was Mervin Minshall who operated in the Balkans. After succeeding in having the German naval attaché 'blackballed from the best brothel in Bucharest', he devised a scheme `to sail barges down the Danube with a score of naval ratings improbably disguised as art students and sink the barges to block the Iron Gates'.
Dr Andrew is a staunch believer in Security being more open and more accountable. To judge by his own accounts of how vital secrets were publicly com- promised by Curzon and Baldwin one may perhaps wonder if the national interest would invariably be better served. How- ever, if more open procedures assisted in producing books of the quality of this one it would be worth paying quite a high price.
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