Kim Philby holding a press conference after being cleared of spying charges by foreign secretary Harold Macmillan in 1955. Contrary to popular belief and most of what you will read, intelligence remains a craft in which the actual work of spying is largely carried out by co-opted volunteers – albeit not so often wearing tweeds these days. It’s both a wonderful novel about North Sea yachting but also captures the ingenuity and improvisation that great spying coups involve. It depicts the sort of upper-class, amateurish japes that set the real-life stage for the early modern secret service. The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (1903)Īnother classic, about a yacht trip to the north German coast that uncovers plans to invade Britain. In Kim, Kipling depicts an Anglo-Indian “child of the world” who mingles with ease across cultures and wanders effortlessly into the enemy’s lair.
I never tire of re-reading the classic novels of human intelligence that inspired generations who felt (as Kipling says of Kim) they were created by God with “a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news”. And these are some I could not do without. Too much of the spy bookshelf is coloured by ex-insiders with an agenda or writers either with little knowledge or who negotiate access and as a price submit to fact-bending censorship.Īfter interviews with people who together have more than 1,000 years’ experience, I hope I have delivered on that promise and explained what it is like, in an era of new technology, to spy on and hunt for traitors among new and ruthless enemies.ĭespite the need to watch out for agendas and omissions, there are of course some fabulous and unmissable books about this world of betrayal, particularly from the cold war era.
It has taken me so long because I wanted to provide something I believe is unique – a dispassionate outsider’s perspective on modern espionage, which at the same time is deeply informed. The New Spymasters, my new book, is the product of nearly 20 years of writing about and meeting spies, ever since they emerged from the shadows of the Berlin Wall.
And, whether in fact or fiction, the literature of espionage continues to fascinate us with the enduring question of whether some kinds of dark, loathsome conduct may be ultimately justified. B etrayal, seduction and subterfuge: these devilish arts are central to the ancient craft of spying.
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