Gordon Corera - The Art of Betrayal: The Secret History of MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service

THE ART OF BETRAYAL

THE SECRET HISTORY OF MI6

GORDON CORERA

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

INTRODUCTION

A former MI6 officer, one of the few to have risen to become C or Chief of the Service, takes pleasure in recounting a story. Framed by a collection of John le Carrs novels on the bookshelves behind him, he tells it with a boyish smile and a playful twinkle in the eye which suggests a mischievousness not entirely lost to age. The story concerns a young officer making his way to a hut somewhere in Africa. It was the first contact MI6 had made with a local tribal chief whose assistance was required in some escapade whose exact details have long since been lost in the retelling. The officer was unsure of what welcome he would find and how receptive the chief might be to his request. He did not even know whether the chief could speak a word of English. But the officers cautious introduction was met by a wide smile. It turned out the chief knew three words. Hello, Mr Bond, he said, before offering his hand and his help. I doubt if he would have received such a warm welcome if hed been from the Belgian Secret Service, the former spymaster explains with a touch of pride and with no particular disrespect meant to Belgium or its spies.

True or not and as with most stories about spies you have to be careful the tale illustrates how the mythology of the British Secret Service has been spread far and wide and how fact and fiction have commingled to the point where the two have sometimes become indistinguishable in the public mind (and sometimes in that of the practitioner as well). That process has been aided by the cloak of secrecy which has shrouded British intelligence for much of its hundred-year history. The task of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or to use its more popular name MI6 is to steal the secrets of others. But it has fiercely protected its own. For most of its existence, secrecy was so prized that MI6 did not even exist. At least not officially. Those in power were trained never to utter a word about it. In the corridors of Whitehall, the head of the service might be referred to as C in hushed tones and a few might occasionally see a note with his distinctive green ink scrawled on it. But the outside world never knew his name.

That era has passed. The modern world, and the threats posed by it, demands greater transparency and accountability. And so, gingerly, the Secret Service has begun to edge out of the shadows, even inviting an official history of its first forty years from 1909 to 1949. This book offers an unprecedented insight into the following years, from the end of the Second World War to the present, a glimpse beneath the covers into the danger, the drama, the intrigue, the moral ambiguities and the absurdities that sometimes come with working for British intelligence.

The story centres on Britains overseas intelligence service, MI6, but some of the characters find their homes in its sister service, the domestic security agency MI5, its weighty transatlantic cousin, the CIA, and its deadly rival, the KGB. This is emphatically not an authorised or comprehensive history which aspires to tell the complete story of British intelligence over nearly seventy years. Such a work is impossible while access to the files remains closed. It is not the history, rather it is a history an attempt to understand the wider issues surrounding intelligence and the evolution of a particularly British organisation through a narrow lens which focuses on a relatively small number of individuals and episodes. The grand dramas of the Cold War and after the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 11 September 2001 attacks and the Iraq war are the backdrop for the human stories of our selected spies. But some of the individuals featured here, in turn, helped shape the course of those events.

At the heart of this book lie the personal accounts of the men and women who have been associated with intelligence work since 1945 in different ways and in different countries. All memories are faulty and spies, in particular, are trained to deceive, and so while this book is, in part, based on first-hand testimony and the memoirs of participants, those stories have been cross-checked against original documents, archives and secondary sources. Through their eyes, this book traces the triumphs and disasters as MI6 has undergone a dramatic transformation from a gung-ho amateurish service into its modern, at times equally controversial, incarnation.

Through its hundred-year history, the enemies the British Secret Service has fought have come in many guises. But in its essential form the work of a British spy has barely changed. It involves persuading someone to betray secrets, a deeply personal, even intimate act, and one fraught with risks. More often than not this involves betrayal, sometimes of a country, sometimes of a friendship. It involves working with the complexities of human motivation and especially its darker paths and traversing a fine line between right and wrong. It also involves breaking laws. We act within our own law British law, one man who has been chief of MI6 once commented to me. Our relationship with other peoples laws is he paused for a moment before continuing interesting.

Does spying exist not just beyond other peoples laws but also beyond traditional precepts of morality? Some have argued that it does, a few even that it should. Asking someone else to act illegally and, perhaps, unethically by providing secrets also frequently involves asking them to take huge risks, often with their lives. For what purpose? To betray something that needs betraying, as one former MI6 Chief puts it. It is the agent though, not normally the MI6 officer, who faces the greatest risk. For the agent who has been recruited to work for MI6, they are embarking on a dangerous double life, a world of brush contacts, dead-letter drops and clandestine meetings. If they are lucky, there is the possibility of a new life, if not perhaps a bullet in the back of the head. So why spy? This book tries to answer that question by hearing from those who have chosen this path and exploring what drives those involved in espionage.

Ive never found within the service people hung up in any way on literature, John Scarlett, a former C, has claimed. It is more interesting doing the real thing. intelligence officers themselves who, to varying degrees, drew on their own experiences. At one extreme lies the lean, aggressive, morally certain and self-confident Bond with his insistence on doing things. At the other end is the podgy, donnish Smiley with his desire to understand things coupled with a keen awareness of the moral ambiguities of the world he inhabits.

The story of British intelligence since the Second World War can be understood, in part, as the evolving tension between these two poles, between the doers and the thinkers those who sought to change the world and those who sought to understand it, or, to put it another way, between covert action and intelligence gathering. They are not mutually exclusive and to be successful any spy service needs both to jostle alongside each other in a creative tension. But often one or other strand has been dominant, sometimes too dominant with disastrous consequences. As our story begins in the early Cold War, working for His and then Her Majestys Secret Service was not so distant from the fictional life of Flemings Bond. There may not have quite been a formal licence to kill, but stealing, breaking the law, overthrowing unfriendly governments and parachuting agents behind enemy lines was standard fare. But this was also a service which was clubby, amateurish, penetrated by its enemies and prone to mishap. Its secret wars were betrayed by its most painful traitor in the beguiling guise of Kim Philby. Slowly a new professionalism surrounding the business of collecting intelligence emerged, epitomised by one officer, Harold Shergold, and one agent, Oleg Penkovsky. Out of their time together, the Sov Bloc master race was born within MI6, a group who would transform the service.