Charles Cumming on Espionage

When you started out as an author, you weren’t initially planning to write about espionage. So why spies?

When I was 25 I was approached for a job by MI6. The experience that I had – which was brief but extremely interesting – was crying out to be dramatised. I had always wanted to write a novel, but up to that point I didn’t have a subject, I didn’t have a story.

Suddenly I had this thing fall into my lap. The first third of that first book [A Spy By Nature] is more or less an autobiographical account of what happened to me; the last two thirds, which is about industrial espionage in the oil business, is completely fictitious.

You must have had to do a lot of research. The first book you’ve chosen, The Perfect English Spy by Tom Bower, is a rather detailed biography. Was this a starting point?

That was a key part of the research for A Spy by Nature. Bower’s book is a biography of Sir Dick White, who was the head of MI5 between 1953 and 1956 and of SIS [MI6] between 1956 and 1968. In other words, right the way through the trauma of the Cambridge spies: Old Etonians, gentlemen, hoodwinking the Establishment.

What I was really interested in when I was starting A Spy by Nature was this notion of treachery. Do people in my generation still have that sense of loyalty to Queen and Country? Is there still a state to betray, a sense of patriotism in our blood?

The Chapman Pincher book, Their Trade is Treachery, is another nonfiction recommendation.

Chapman Pincher is about 95, still alive, and has been a thorn in the side of the Establishment throughout his long career as a journalist. In the early 1980s, he published Their Trade is Treachery in which he alleged that Sir Roger Hollis, who had been the head of MI5, was a Soviet agent. The book caused a great scandal when it was published. Most of Pincher’s information came from a man called Peter Wright, who wrote Spycatcher. Wright now has something of a reputation as a paranoid fantasist.

The recent official history of MI5, compiled by Professor Christopher Andrew, categorically states that Hollis was not in the pay of the Russians, but I think we’re never likely to know the truth, one way or another. The great problem about writing about spying – and this applies as much to fiction as it does to nonfiction – is that nobody has access to ‘the truth’. It’s a wilderness of mirrors, to use a well-worn phrase.

Why do you think people are so fascinated by spies?

For the same reason that they are interested in TV series about doctors and cops. These are perceived as glamorous, mysterious professions in which dramatic things happen all the time. Most people live pretty mundane lives, work in fairly mundane jobs: they don’t save lives, chase bad guys down the street, run agents behind enemy lines.

The fascination with spying also has something to do with James Bond. People grew up with the James Bond movies, so they think all spies carry gadgets and sleep with beautiful women, fly first class everywhere and eat anchovies on toast for breakfast.

I also believe that people have different masks, different faces that they put on, and there’s something in spy fiction that accesses that private, secret part of ourselves. The world of espionage fiction, with its lies and manipulations, is not so far removed from the lies and manipulations we are all guilty of, to a greater or lesser extent, in our own lives.

You’ve said that spying is not a glamorous career option. Presumably it has plenty of downsides – feelings of paranoia feature heavily in your books.

Did I say that? Somebody who was working for one of the intelligence agencies was helping me with the detail for one of my books and we happened to go to a football game. I tell this story only because it helps to illustrate how a professional intelligence officer thinks. I have a bad back – I’m 6ft 6in. About halfway through the game, I stood up and tilted backwards, to free the tension in my spine. My friend turned to me and said: ‘Are you sending a signal?’ Obviously she was joking, but that’s what jumped into her mind – there is no such thing a normal, ordinary behaviour in the mind of a spy. Everything has a double meaning.

Your next choices are both fiction. You’ve chosen a novel by John le Carré and one from Eric Ambler, real big guns of the spy-fiction world.

Eric Ambler is the grandfather of the serious spy novel.

By which you mean no martinis, no gadgets?

Exactly. Broadly speaking, there are two schools of spy novel: the Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum school, which is purely escapist and highly entertaining, full of guns and gadgets and fast women; and then there’s the more serious, literary strand, which is interested in character and behaviour as much as in story.

Ambler was the same generation as Graham Greene, and he was, like a lot of educated people at that time, a kind of proto-Marxist, a socialist.