Spies and counter-spies

The origin of this unique publication is the 1990s Waldegrave open government initiative, encouraging departments to reveal more. MI5 began sending its early papers to the National Archive and in 2003 commissioned an outsider to write its history, guaranteeing almost unfettered access to its files. It retained right of veto over the book’s content, but the judgments were to be the writer’s own.

The lucky man — unsurprisingly, given his record as an intelligence historian — was Chris Andrew, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge. The result, squeezed into one fat volume, is definitive and fascinating. Definitive because, after decades of ill-informed or partial accounts, this book fully defines and describes its subject; no future writer can ignore it. Fascinating because of the fluent clarity of Andrew’s narrative, his eye for colourful individual detail and the sheer interest of his subjects, whether reporting on Hitler in the 1930s, the Double- Cross System of the second world war, Zionist terrorism, the atom spies, the Cambridge spies, the so-called Wilson Plot or the 1988 shooting of the IRA bombers in Gibraltar. Much, Andrew says, was excluded on grounds of sensitivity after vigorous debate — possibly even more for lack of space — but what is here will delight the specialist and general reader alike.

The Secret Service Bureau was established in October 1909 in response to the German naval build-up and alarms about spying. It had two sections, one for home-based counter-espionage and the other for overseas espionage, which later split to become MI5 and MI6. The two heads were a 36-year-old Army captain, Vernon Kell, an accomplished linguist with a cosmopolitan background and Anglo-Polish parentage, and the 50-year-old Mansfield Cumming, a monoglot retired naval officer with an enthusiasm for torpedo defences. The linguist was given MI5, the monoglot MI6.