Smilier than Smiley
Patrick Skene Catling
"C": A Biography of Sir Maurice Oldfield Richard Deacon (Macdonald £9.95) • In shogi, a Japanese game like chess, one does not kill the enemy's men on the way to trying to capture his king. All the men of both sides are the same colour and the same shape, flat and pointed in front. When one of them is taken, he can be turned around and later put back into the game, going the opposite way. In this respect, shogi may seem unchivalrous, exploiting disloyalty; but it is certainly realistically worldly. Consider the activities Of spies, counter-spies and double agents. The world's more or less secret services are the most pragmatic of organisations, willing to employ any means to gain their ends. The ultimate purpose is to secure national survival, no matter what the moral cost. Whatever may be their governments' publicly declared ethical principles, the secret servicemen of all countries operate in a world of practical considerations, of which the only one that counts in the final analysis is simply this: will it work? Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, usually known as MI6, is evidently neither more nor less reluctant than the Soviet Union's KGB, the United States' CIA, Germany's Abwehr and Israel's Mossad to resort to the dirtiest of tricks. The recruit- ment of traitors is universal. Bribery and blackmail are routine, and assassination is not very unusual. To a non-spy, perhaps the most shocking story in this admirably moderate and careful biography is one about the British murder of a British agent in World War One: after Naval Intelli- gence and MI6 recruited him to hand over a German cipher book, Alexander Szek, an Anglo-Austro-Hungarian telegraphist working for the Germans in Brussels, was killed so that the Germans would not discover he had carried out his subversive Mission.
Sir Maurice Oldfield, the Director- General of MI6 from 1973 to 1978, was a master of the art of subornation and double-crossing and using enemy agents against their own countries. Donald McCormick, a former Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times and an expert on espion- age, writing under his cover name, Richard Deacon, presents a perplexing paradox: he convincingly portrays Oldfield as a genius of dirty trickery and, by all conventional English standards, an awfully nice chap. The eldest of 11 children of a tenant farmer in the Derbyshire dales, Maurice Oldfield had an arduous, happy childhood. He burned the midnight oil, literally, to do his school homework, as there was no electricity in the four-room farmhouse, and no silence until all his brothers and sisters were asleep. Early in the mornings, he helped with the chores (there were cows) before walking two miles to school. The austere regime apparently stimulated him to exert himself scholastically with notable success at Lady Manners Grammar School, in Bakewell, where he became head boy and achieved a distinction in divinity in the exam for his Higher School Certificate. He went on to read history at Manchester University. Fellow students observed that he sometimes spoke Latin in his sleep, and they believed he was 'destined to be Professor of Mediaeval History some- where'. His actual destiny, Mr Deacon relates in fascinating detail, was more obscure, more difficult, more dangerous, and more amusing.
Oldfield was short, rather plump and owlishly bespectacled — no athlete, but no humourless swot. swot. Phillip Whitehead, the former MP for Derby North, once said that Oldfield 'almost has the look of Sartre'; however, the usual expression on Old- field's face, as photographs in this book show, was endearingly straightforward. Though it has often been proposed that Oldfield was the model for John Le Carre's fictional secret-service chief, George Smiley, the real person was altogether smilier, at once more virtuous and profes- sionally more subtle.
A bachelor, he enjoyed the friendship of many women, and they enjoyed his. He felt that marriage was inappropriate to anyone engaged in his line of work. He made friends all over the world and took care to keep them. His favourite eating places in London included the Savoy Grill, the Athenaeum and The New Friends' Restaurant in the East End, which serves Chinese food, of which he was a connois- seur.
In the terminology of the Nine Star Ki system of Chinese astrology, which Old- field applied quite seriously to the character-analysis of allies and enemies alike, a sine qua non of intelligence and counter-intelligence activities, he was a Rabbit. When necessary, he could be as cunningly devious as Br'er Rabbit himself. His nickname at the Foreign and Common- wealth Office was 'Moulders', which is said to have been meant affectionately. As a guest of honour at his old school one Speech Day, he said all personal rela- tionships should be 'governed by the same principles of honesty, enthusiasm and loyalty', and, according to his biographer, he always tried to practise what he preached, a paragon of speech-day orators. His favourite book L was St Augustine's Confessions. He was a Christian extrovert, a popular solitary — in Mr Deacon's apt phrase, 'a gregarious monk'.
This is a richly informative, extremely interesting, clearly and decently written book. While chronicling Oldfield's illust- rious career, in Army intelligence in the Middle East during World War Two, in MI6 in the Far East, Latin America, Washington and London, and as a special adviser on intelligence in Northern Ireland after his 'retirement', the author anato- mises the service and gives one a good idea of its intended functions, its successes and failures, such as the prevention of a Falk- lands war against Argentina in 1977 and Kim Philby's sabotage of Britain's covert operations in Albania. The subject is essentially solemn, but Mr Deacon's account of it is enhanced by many glints of humanity — for example, the sadly touching detail that the only photograph on Oldfield's hospital bedside table in 1981, when he was dying of cancer, was a portrait of a friend's pet dog.
It was hardly surprising to read that the CIA employs about 20,000 persons and that MI6 has to manage with only about 500. The MI6 annual budget in the early 1980s, Mr Deacon writes, was `ostensibly between £46 million and £40 million, whereas some skilled financial investiga- tors would put it at nearer £250 million'. Even that amount, of course, is less than a fiver a head a year from the citizenry.
Oldfield made the most of his resources. As one of his MI6 colleagues put it, Oldfield was `like a conjuror who held all manner of virtuous tricks up his sleeve'. A telephone caller warned Scotland Yard that the Provisional IRA planned to plant a bomb in Oldfield's coffin in St Matthew's Church, Westminster. Somebody else then suggested that It might be wise on this occasion to substitute an empty coffin for the real one', Mr Deacon relates. It would have been perfectly in the character of Maurice Oldfield not to have attended his own funeral.
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