Introduction
This is part of Tradecraft, a section of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
In my twenties, I found myself living in Brussels and working as a journalist for an English-speaking magazine, The Bulletin. Its readership largely consisted of expatriates working for the European Union institutions, and the average length of time they spent there was less than three years. It seems Eurocrats have a taste for spy novels, because the shelves of the city’s second-hand bookshops were heaving with paperbacks by Len Deighton and others that had been dumped as their owners moved on to new assignments. As a boy, I’d stayed up many a night engrossed in The KnowHow Book of Spycraft—as I picked my way through the bookshops of Brussels, I became a devotee of spy thrillers.
Eventually, I considered writing a spy novel of my own, set in the Cold War. In the meantime, I continued with my day job as an editor and writer at The Bulletin. I wrote about a wide variety of subjects, but whenever possible I tried to pursue stories with espionage angles, or that I thought might help with the background for my novel. The first article in this collection, Whisper Who Dares, published in June 2005, is an example of this. I hadn’t known that the SAS investigated Nazi war crimes after the war, and writing this piece led me to research the topic further. That eventually fed into my novel, which I titled Free Agent and which was published in 2009.
I’ve written several more books since then, and quite a few articles along the way. In this collection, you’ll find 20 pieces I’ve written for newspapers, magazines and for my own website, and if you’ve read any of my books you’ll see how some of them inspired topics and themes in them.
The second piece, Rendezvous With a Spy, is an exception in that it’s previously unpublished. It also has a Brussels connection, as it happens. This dates from 2011, when I was writing Dead Drop (Codename: Hero in the US), my non-fiction book about MI6 and the CIA’s joint operation to run agent-in-place Oleg Penkovsky in the early Sixties. I had planned to write the book with my own footsteps following the operation as a focus, but one strand I’d written in that vein unbalanced the tone of the rest of it and so I cut it. I think that was the right decision for the book, but I remain fond of this as a piece of writing in its own right. I’ve left in a few sentences that made it into the final version of the book for context, and hope it gives some interesting insight into the research process as well as what makes spies and intelligence officers tick. Pete Bagley died of cancer at his home in Brussels in February 2014.
From the inner sanctum of a former CIA officer, let’s head into the world of British spookdom. The Spies We’ve Loved is an overview of spy fact and fiction I wrote for The Sunday Times in June 2009 to coincide with the centenary of the British intelligence services being established.
Several topics and themes I discuss in this piece will crop up in other ones. One is a focus of the next four articles: propaganda. The first combines two articles, both originally published on my website (Close Encounters in May 2011, and The War of Ideas in May 2013), in which I look at how MI6 and the CIA tried to influence public opinion during the Cold War by surreptitiously using writers. When Julian Met Graham and Secreted in Fiction (published on my website in March and September 2013) both deal with the Russian spy novelist Julian Semyonov, and the ways in which he tried to subvert the KGB’s grip on the narrative. And Spies of Fleet Street is an article I wrote for the BBC’s website in March 2013 to accompany a programme I wrote and presented for Radio 4 about how MI6 used journalists.
A couple of lighter pieces are up next: A London Spy Walk was first published in Time Out London in May 2009, while I wrote Top Ten Spy Gadgets for The Times the same month. In From The Cold is a review of the late Keith Jeffery’s official history of the early years of MI6, published in The Mail on Sunday in November 2010.
A version of Paperback Writers was first published on my website. I wrote the article in 2002, and it features interviews with Martin Cruz Smith, John Gardner, Donald Hamilton and William Boyd. The first three I essentially just called up after tracking down their numbers, while I interviewed Boyd in person as part of my day job while he was promoting Any Human Heart. I’ve tweaked a few sentences in the article, but left its description of the spy fiction scene as it was at the time. Few of the film projects mentioned panned out, and sadly John Gardner and Donald Hamilton are no longer with us, but this is a chance to read rare interviews with both of them, and journey back to the world of vintage spy paperbacks.
Published on my website in February 2011, From Sweden, With Love is an interview with the thriller aficionado and muse Iwan Morelius. Iwan died in 2012—I named a character after him in Spy Out the Land in tribute.
From February 2009, Deighton at Eighty is an article I wrote for The Guardian paying tribute to the great Len Deighton on his 80th birthday. This is followed by my interview with Deighton expert and biographer Edward Milward-Oliver, which was published on my website in April 2013. It has a brief update appended.
I interviewed the spy novelist Joseph Hone in 2002 with the intention of including him in Paperback Writers, but for various reasons he didn’t quite fit there. The Forgotten Master of British Spy Fiction was first published on my website in March 2010, and became the basis for my forewords to new editions of Hone’s novels published by Faber Finds in 2014. If you haven’t read him yet, I can’t recommend him highly enough.
As can be seen from many of the previous articles, it’s virtually impossible to write about spies and ignore the influence of James Bond on the genre—even John le Carré was a little fixated by the character. I’m no exception, and the next few articles are something of a Bond buffet.
Waiting for Deaver is an article I wrote for The Daily Telegraph in May 2011 on the eve of publication of Jeffery Deaver’s James Bond novel Carte Blanche, looking at how Fleming’s reputation has changed over the decades.
From the same month, The Lives of Ian Fleming is a piece I published on my website on two excellent biographies of Bond’s creator, by John Pearson and Andrew Lycett. When William Met Ian delves into a rare interview between Ian Fleming and his editor William Plomer, and was published on my website in September 2015. A Letter from ‘008’ is the most recent piece here, first published on my website in October 2015, and as well as being a curio on Fleming is about how technology is easing research and changing our perceptions as a result.
Finally, in Licence To Hoax I look at another Fleming biographer, but one who put his interest in espionage fact and fiction to more unethical use than one might expect. This article was first published on my website in December 2014.
So there we are: 20 articles on spy fact and fiction from my career to date. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did researching and writing them.
Jeremy Duns
Mariehamn, February 2016