Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is the compendious, brilliant, chest-crushing, 1,000-page authorised history of MI5. It’s authorised to the extent that Andrew was allowed access to all 400,000 MI5 files. There then began a debate with MI5 about what he was allowed to write. So it is a partial history; it cannot be the full history. Yet it contains astonishing stories, really remarkable insights into how MI5 was run.
Let’s move on now to Christopher Andrew’s The Defence of the Realm, which is the authorised history of MI5, unlike Masterman’s.
This is the compendious, brilliant, chest-crushing, 1,000-page authorised history. It’s an authorised, not an official, history, which means that it’s authorised to the extent that Andrew was allowed access to all 400,000 MI5 files. There then began a debate with MI5 about what he was allowed to write. So it is a partial history; it cannot be the full history. Yet it contains astonishing stories, really remarkable insights into how MI5 was run.
In this country, we’ve always regarded MI5 as being a slightly dangerous operation that spies on private individuals, and a lot of mythology has grown up around it as a result. What Andrew does brilliantly is to give the lie to a lot of the conspiracy theory, the idea that this is a kind of rogue organisation that is not in control.
It reflects a particularly British sensibility. There’s a great sense of humour, a particular sort of character. There’s a hilarious bit in the book when the Bosch [the Germans] in 1917 are classified into different types of potential spies. There’s the AA which is ‘Absolutely Anglicised’, the BA which is ‘Bosch-Anglo’, and the BB which is ‘Bad Bosch’, which I completely love! It’s a strange world, chummy and clubby and quintessentially English, but the people in it weren’t dangerous, they were definitely doing their best. And there’s an honour to it, which is absolutely fascinating. The book brings that out brilliantly.
There are wonderful eccentrics in there – a man that I particularly like called Maxwell Knight who went on to become a very famous BBC TV nature presenter but had run an extraordinary group of agents between the wars whose job was to penetrate fascist and communist circles. He was wildly eccentric, very homosexual, and he would wander around with his strange pets. He would take his pet bear, Bessie, for walks in Hyde Park. He wrote the definitive work on how to keep a gorilla. But he did a brilliant job of breaking up British fascism, for which he’s largely unknown in this country.
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Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large and Associate Editor on The Times and writes a weekly column on history, espionage, art, politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of seven non-fiction history books, including his latest, Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that changed the course of World War II. Here he tells one of the great unsung stories of WWII: after cracking the Enigma code, the British knew when virtually every single German spy was coming. ‘They were all picked up and offered a pretty stark choice between collaborating or execution. The unlucky 14 chose trial and execution. The rest all agreed to be double agents, and this was a critical part of the war.’
