All successful spies need to be good actors

On 2 October last year, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard Moore tweeted (tweeted!): ‘#Bond or #Smiley need not apply. They’re (splendid) fiction but actually we’re #secretlyjustlikeyou.’ The gesture’s novelty disguised, at the time, its appalling real-world implications. Bond was, after all, competent and Smiley had integrity.

Stars and Spies, by the veteran intelligence historian Christopher Andrew and the theatre director and circus producer Julius Green, is a thoroughly entertaining read, but not at all a reassuring one. ‘The adoption of a fictional persona, the learning of scripts and the ability to improvise’ are central to career progression in both theatre and espionage, the writers explain, ‘and undercover agents often find themselves engaged in what is effectively an exercise in long-form role play’. It should then come as no surprise that this book boasts ‘no shortage of enthusiastic but inept entertainer-spies’.

There’s Aphra Behn, the first woman employed as a secret agent by the British state during the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665: reaping no secret intelligence from her former lover, ‘ASTRA, Agent 160’ made stuff up. As, indeed, did the ‘Man Called Intrepid’, Sir William Stephenson, the subject, in 1976, of the biggest-selling book ever on intelligence history. His recollections, spanning everything from organising wartime resistance in Europe to developing the Spitfire and the jet engine to work on the German Enigma code and nuclear weapons, turned out to be the melancholy fabulations of a man suffering catastrophic memory loss.

‘Would you mind if some students watch while I deliver your presents?’

The authors imagine that their subject — the intersection between spying and acting — is entertaining enough that they can simply start in the England of Good Queen Bess and Christopher Marlowe (recruited to spy for Walsingham while a student at Cambridge; also wrote a play or two), and end with the ludicrous antics (and —fair’s fair — brilliant acting) of the US spy show Homeland.