Introduction
This is part of Agent of Influence, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Why write about Antony Terry? He was a giant of British journalism during the Cold War, but is largely forgotten today. When he is mentioned now it’s usually in relation to Ian Fleming, although this rarely goes beyond noting their friendship and that Fleming occasionally consulted him for his novels. That’s one reason I’ve written about him, as I believe he had a much more significant influence on Fleming’s work than has yet been acknowledged.
In 2007, Terry was the subject of a slim but fascinating biography written by his step-daughter, Judith Lenart, who had discovered his papers while making his funeral arrangements in 1992. She amassed much of the information in them and elsewhere in an attempt to cover ‘what he did through what he left behind’. In an admirable break from the tradition of the seemingly-omniscient biographer, Lenart posed several direct questions to her readers where her information was scant, and I’ve tried to give answers to some of them here using newspaper archives, declassified government files and several other sources, including more recently published ones.
However, this isn’t an attempt at a new biography. Fleming wasn’t the only spy novelist to have been influenced by Terry, and in the following pages I’ll explore those cases as well as the impact he had on shaping public perception. I also hope to shed light on how British intelligence used journalists during the Cold War; the ethical problems this practice raised then and raise for historians of the era now; and something of the inner workings of journalism and novel-writing.
The book unashamedly contains some speculation on my part regarding motives that in many cases were intended to be hidden, or at least submerged. As spies are professional deceivers, this is unavoidable when discussing their activities, and writers don’t leave behind records of their every thought, either. But I hope my guesses are at least well-educated, and that even if a few miss the mark the general thrust of my arguments hit home. This is a book of ‘close reading’ literary criticism as much as of investigative journalism, and I’ve done my best to distinguish the hard facts from where I’ve followed my intuition.
The seed for this book was research I did into journalists’ involvement in espionage for a Radio 4 documentary in 2013, titled MI6 and The Media. Ian Fleming’s Mercury cropped up several times in interviews I conducted for the programme, but I couldn’t find a way to insert that strand into it. One of my interviewees, the espionage historian Stephen Dorril, also commented that the revelations of this kind of activity meant that ‘We really need to go back and look in detail at some of the key events of the Cold War: look at the newspapers, see what was planted, who were the journalists, and what was it they were trying to put out and say to the British public.’ The remark stayed with me, and this is an attempt to address it through the study of the work of one of those journalists.
As someone who also writes espionage fiction, this book is in some ways intended as a defence of the genre. I believe spy novels can offer another kind of reportage than journalism, and in some cases can get to the heart of events in a way non-fiction accounts of espionage activities rarely do.
I hope you enjoy going on this journey as much as I did.
Jeremy Duns
Mariehamn, July 2018