VI. Through The Looking Glass
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.
Judging by Sarah Gainham’s novels, various memoirs and his own correspondence, M.I.6 made ample use of Antony Terry’s journalistic postings during the Cold War. Not all their picks proved so fruitful. A story recently appeared in the British press that shed new light on the BIN network, and its shortcomings.
In February 2018, the Sunday Times reported that, following the defections to Moscow of Soviet agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, another diplomat came forward and confessed to the Foreign Office that he had passed secrets to the Soviet Union—and that the Foreign Office had covered this fact up. Instead of prosecuting the man, David Floyd, they had decided it was a ‘youthful indiscretion’ and, with the help of Malcolm Muggeridge, had found him a job as ‘Communist affairs correspondent’ for the Daily Telegraph.
The Sunday Times neglected to mention that Floyd had left the Telegraph in 1970 and become Communist affairs correspondent for its sister paper The Times, a fact that The Daily Mail pointedly did mention in its follow-up article. Most of the British press ran their own articles following up the Sunday Times’ article, but none mentioned the story lurking just beneath the surface. Why would the Foreign Office help an admitted Soviet agent begin a completely different career in journalism, and at the top of the heap at one of the country’s best-known newspapers to boot? The answer is surely that Floyd had not simply been a diplomat, but that that had been his M.I.6 cover role, and that having considered his confession they decided—rightly or wrongly—that he was still reliable but perhaps not worth risking giving further access to secret files in an embassy. As a rare fluent Russian-speaker, the obvious path would then be to keep him on, and so BIN was charged with finding him a job as a foreign correspondent.
A couple of years later, British intelligence had its eye on another candidate for BIN, a modern languages undergraduate at Oxford University. His name was David Cornwell, but he would go on to become better known under the pseudonym John le Carré. Fluent in German, le Carré was already something of an old hand in the intelligence world by the time he arrived at Oxford, having served as an interrogator for the Intelligence Corps in Austria in 1951. In that role, he had roamed displaced persons camps looking for potential recruits for British intelligence. As his biographer Adam Sisman put it, this was no easy task, and he had to constantly ask himself questions: ‘‘Is this man who he says he is? Is he a security risk? Is he a criminal? Does he have any intelligence we need?’’ At this time, le Carré had to deal with Austrian officials, almost all of whom he soon realized had been Nazis.
Three years later, Cornwell was in danger of being forced to leave Oxford because Ronnie, his conman father, was struggling to pay for his college upkeep. Cornwell had been recruited by M.I.5 the previous year, although his intelligence connections went back further. Now the agency stepped in with a radical proposal for his future:
‘A new possibility had arisen, now that his MI5 handler, George Leggett, had departed for Australia, where he would undertake an extensive debriefing of the KGB defector Vladimir Petrov. Dick Thistlethwaite, Head of Operations at MI5, was talking about ‘taking him all the way through’, meaning that David would masquerade as a secret Communist intellectual and become a double agent while pursuing a conventional career as a journalist, probably as a foreign correspondent. David was sent to see Denis Hamilton, then editorial director of the Kemsley Press, the newspaper group that included the Sunday Times as well as several tabloid and regional newspapers. Hamilton, a war hero known as ‘the brigadier’ by his staff, had strong intelligence connections, and expressed willingness in principle to employ David should he be forced to leave Oxford prematurely. Ann was indoctrinated by Thistlethwaite; as an air vice- marshal’s daughter she was deemed suitable as a potential wife, and signed the Official Secrets Act.’
Le Carré spent some time seriously considering accepting this offer, although he confided to his tutor and friend Vivian Green that he would be ‘committing myself to something I don’t really want to do’. In the event, the matter was taken out of his hands. He was summoned to a meeting with Dick White, Percy Sillitoe’s successor as head of M.I.5, who decided that placing a double agent role on such a young man would be far too much pressure.
And so le Carré did not work for Ian Fleming as a correspondent alongside Antony Terry, reporting back to British intelligence. Nevertheless, he and Terry’s careers in the Cold War were often in parallel. Terry had carried out work for British intelligence in Austria just two years prior to le Carré. He had worked for M.I.6’s Head of Station in Vienna, George Kennedy Young, who le Carré would later use as the model for Percy Alleline in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and its sequels.
In 1960, le Carré left M.I.5 and joined M.I.6, having been interviewed by a board that included Nicholas Elliott, at that point head of the London Station (and therefore Terry’s ultimate boss within the agency). Le Carré and Elliott eventually became friends, with the latter sharing a wealth of inside knowledge about the running of M.I.6, including details about his friend Kim Philby’s treachery, that would no doubt have informed the background of several of his novels.
Le Carré’s first posting with M.I.6 was to Bonn, where his task was ‘to investigate and detect potential Nazi cells or organisations, and to recruit German sleepers who would join any such groupings in order to provide information on them… As it turned out, there was very little for him to do, because the feared Nazi revival never materialised.’
Nevertheless, le Carré once again faced the fact that many German officials had been Nazis and gone unpunished. Describing the genesis of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in 2013 as part of an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, le Carré said:
‘We were fifteen years after the end of the hot war, and West Germany, for all the attractive portraits that were painted of it, was an extremely disagreeable place to live in, I found. It was necessary to forget the past as a matter of doctrine, and the West German government and the assistants, the administration, were peppered with unredeemed Nazis, as indeed they were in east Germany… So it was for a young, and I suppose you could almost say idealistic diplomat, living and operating from our embassy in Bonn, it was sometimes a very hard ticket to swallow, if you swallow a ticket.’
From 1954 to 1963, Terry was also based in Bonn, where he was reporting on escaped Nazi war criminals and the threat of Nazis coming to power again in the new Germany. Could le Carré, working on ‘potential Nazi cells or organizations’, have been one of his sources? In 1994, French journalists Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer published a book on Cold War espionage that had a chapter on le Carré ’s intelligence career. In it, they quoted his ‘friend’ Antony Terry:
‘John was constantly ruminating on some new scene. We often took the little ferry together that he described in A Small Town in Germany.’
Le Carré has said in interviews that he suspects Kim Philby blew his cover as an M.I.6 officer to Moscow along with countless others, but according to his biographer Adam Sisman Terry was partially responsible for blowing le Carré’s literary cover, revealing the name behind the alias:
‘Perhaps it was inevitable that the press would uncover the real John le Carré sooner or later, especially as David had not concealed his identity from the Observer’s Bonn correspondent Neal Ascherson, and perhaps not from other members of the local press corps either. Early in the new year 1964 David was at his desk at the Hamburg Consulate when he received a telephone call from Nicholas Tomalin of the Sunday Times, who had been tipped off by the paper’s Bonn correspondent, Anthony Terry. David felt forced into a half- truth: he readily admitted to being John le Carré, but protested that he was no spy… The reason for keeping his name hidden was ‘the usual Civil Service one’, he told Tomalin. The Sunday Times printed an account of the telephone conversation in its ‘Atticus’ column, accompanied by a recent passport photograph of the author.’
Terry’s surviving cache of published letters gives us one further link between the two men. In March 1986, Terry’s friend and frequent source Tony Divall wrote to him mentioning ‘Cornwell/Le Car’ and ‘his odd letter of last November’. Whether this had been to Terry or Divall is not clear, but the mention of it means both he and Terry knew about the contact so it seems likely this would have been in connection with an area they both knew about. ‘Espionage’ is the obvious answer to that, but one related possibility is that le Carré was already conducting tentative research for The Night Manager. Divall was heavily involved with arms-dealing, and was one of Terry’s most significant sources for his reporting on the topic. Le Carré might then have reached out to Terry to ask him if he knew anyone he could speak to, and Terry then put him in touch with Divall. If so, le Carré either didn’t know Terry had blown his literary ‘cover’ years earlier, or hadn’t been bothered by it.
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Novelists are scavengers by nature, and le Carré’s brush with the BIN network was the impetus for at least two of his characters, both in The Honourable Schoolboy, published in 1977: two characters are journalists who also work for ‘the Circus’, his fictional stand-in for M.I.6. The character of Jerry Westerby shared a similarity with David Astor in that he is the young heir of a newspaper baron, while Bill Craw was inspired by Dickie Hughes, the Sunday Times’ correspondent in Australia. Craw’s role has a slight similarity to the proposal for recruiting le Carré as an intellectual left-winger into Mercury, in that he writes an article that appears to criticise the Circus in order to help it. Had le Carré become a foreign correspondent in the vein his handlers envisaged, it’s the kind of piece he might have written, too.
Le Carré was not the first to immortalize Dickie Hughes as a character in spy fiction: a key part of the Mercury network, Ian Fleming had used him as the model for Dicko Henderson in You Only Live Twice. Le Carré and Fleming were at two opposite poles of British spy fiction in the Cold War, but they were often drawn to the same topics, even if their treatment of them was different. One example of this can be found in le Carré’s fourth novel, The Looking Glass War, published in 1965. Following the enormous international success of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, the novel centres around a British spy agency, ‘The Department’, a fictionalised version of the Special Operations Executive had it managed to survive beyond the Second World War, which deludedly manoeuvres itself into an operation it is ill-equipped to carry out.
The plot was heavily influenced by le Carré’s own experiences in the intelligence world: the realities of spying as he had known them ‘on the ground’, he later wrote, ‘had been far removed from the fiendishly clever conspiracy that had entrapped my hero and heroine in The Spy’. With the follow-up, he aimed to show ‘the muddle and futility’ of the espionage world he had experienced by describing a British intelligence agency ‘that is really not very good at all; that is eking out its wartime glory; that is feeding itself on Little England fantasies; is isolated, directionless, over-protected and destined ultimately to destroy itself’.
This, of course, was radically different from Fleming’s much more romanticised portrayal of British intelligence work. Bond occasionally questions the justness of his orders, but there is never much doubt that M.I.6 is playing with a straight bat and that Bond is an extremely competent operative on the side of the angels.
Le Carré intended The Looking Glass War as a rebuke: to his own success, and to what he felt was his own mythologising of the intelligence world in his previous book. But it may be that the novel is also a kind of rebuke to journalists, Antony Terry among them, and their willingness to turn a blind eye to fabrications when it suited their purposes.
The Looking Glass War takes place in the shadow of the Bay of Pigs disaster and the Cuban missile crisis. It opens with a scene at an airfield in Finland that is perhaps the best piece of prose le Carré has yet written. The plot concerns intelligence reports of a Soviet missile base near Rostock—the very topic Terry had written so much about in the early ’50s and which had fed into Moonraker. But while Ian Fleming had expanded on Terry’s claims to make them even more fantastical, The Looking Glass War does the reverse: the reports about the base turn out to be non-existent, fabrications fed them by a dodgy source. The Department officer who discovers this finding buried in the files decides to ignore it and proceed with the operation to locate the base anyway, with disastrous results. The has-been spooks want another chance to relive their wartime glory days, even if it’s only imagined, and even if they know this themselves in their hearts:
‘‘You’re thinking of Peenemünde, aren’t you?’ he continued. ‘You want it to be like Peenemünde.’’
The details of the plot seem too close to those newspaper stories of the late ’40s and ’50s to be a coincidence, but it could be that le Carré hadn’t read press articles about it at the time but rather had had access to the original intelligence reports about these bases, the filtered content of which had then been passed on to journalists. But there is a hint that a press that was willing to be used by the intelligence agencies was one of his targets. Early in the novel Leclerc, the head of The Department, asks a ministerial under-secretary for permission for an overflight in the area around the supposed base. This is turned down and he is asked to suggest other proposals:
‘‘There’s one alternative, I suppose, which would scarcely touch on my Department. It’s more a matter for yourself and the Foreign Office.’
‘Oh?’
‘Drop a hint to the London newspapers. Stimulate publicity. Print the photographs.’
‘And?’
‘Watch them. Watch the East German and Soviet diplomacy, watch their communications. Throw a stone into their nest and see what comes out.’’
This proposal is also rejected, but in the real world more than a hint had been dropped to Antony Terry, and perhaps for similar reasons, ie to gauge the Soviets’ response to the stories by ‘letting them know we know’. It would certainly have been a cheaper option than overflights.
In a prefatory note to the novel, le Carré claimed that none of the characters or institutions in it existed in reality. This was no doubt the case, but the ideas behind them were all too real. The book was so downbeat that it was a commercial and critical failure in comparison to its predecessor. The novel was also greeted with outright hostility by the intelligence community.
In an article for The Guardian in 1989, le Carré referred to the novel’s rejection by critics and the public, adding that ‘this time the spies were cross’:
‘And since the British secret services controlled large sections of the press, just as they may do today, for all I know, they made their fury felt’.
In a circumlocutory way, he seems to have been suggesting that the intelligence agencies could have had a hand in the book receiving poor reviews. If so that seems unlikely, but it’s perhaps not such a surprising view for him to have held: his invitation into Mercury as an undergraduate meant that he knew M.I.6 ran a wide-ranging network within Fleet Street.