I should put up a disclaimer first: since doing three years of close
research on SIS I have developed an exceptionally low tolerance for
espionage fiction. I find myself twinging, and thinking WRONG WRONG
WRONG too much of the time. Shelving my damaged inner emotional life for
a moment, I have run across a number of interesting things *vis-a-vis*
fiction of the field:
le Carre served with both MI 5 and then SIS; the Circus has a peculiar
tendency of displaying the traits of both when it suits his needs. In
_Spy Who Came In From the Cold_ it is more like SIS (although there has
never been something like Banking Section; agent finances are routed
through the Area Controller -- one officer described approaching the
Controller for funds to me as like 'going to the bookie'), but in the
Karla series it looks more like 5, especially with its operational
specialist units i.e. the Lampighters &c. Note especially the
similarities between le Carre's description of the Scalphunters and SB's
Special Section.
Le Carre's novels have always deeply bothered me because they mis-portray
6 pretty seriously; it may have been like that in the '50s and the '60s
when Cornwell (le Carre) worked there, but his stories are supposed to
have taken place in the early middle 1970s, by which time SIS was a very
different creature. Far more professional for starters, although it is
definitely an OxBridge haven compared with 5 or Cheltenham. I am,
however, hopelessly hooked on le Carre's stuff which I reread over and
over again for the same reason that I am hooked on William Gibson: the
two have a superbly evocative but spare writing style. Three words to
conjure a whole scene....
Deighton was a member of the RAF Special Investigation Branch as a
photographer. In the preface to one of the Silver Anniversary reprints of
his so-called Harry Palmer novels (the name Palmer was the idea of the
director of the film Ipcress File; none of his protagonists/narrators has
a name until Patrick Armstrong in _Spy Story_) _Funeral in Berlin_ (I
think; my copies are in Canada), Deighton states that he writes not
about what he knows, but what he _wants_ to know about. I'm afraid poor
old Len gets almost every detail of tradecraft and procedure deeply wrong,
even subtleties like trying to out-cool the reader in (I think) _Twinkle
Twinkle Little Spy_ by claiming that the paras are taught *never* to double
banana clip submachine guns; I know ex-jungle fighters, special forces
types and if you look at stills of the Iran Embassy seige the MP 40s are,
I believe, double-clipped. First law of disinformation: if one is going
to lie, get the facts straight first.
One writer who can get the machinery of intelligence right, then throws
it for the sake of the story is Clancy. I speak specifically and only
of the intelligence background to _Red October_. I have not yet
encountered Op. Centre.
SB isn't technically realistic; it is what Canadian intelligence scholar
Wesley Wark has called 'pseudo-realistic', heavy on the jargon, downbeat
and low-keyed. The idiom is fairly realistic, although as I've noted in a
couple of earlier posts, Mackintosh has improvised around the facts a
little. I am inclined towards Micky Dupree's hypothesis that he may have
been in the DIS, probably in the Service Intelligence Directorate; this
would not preclude time in DI6's naval section handling MODA/navy's (R3's)
stuff. Even as I type this it just occurred to me that the UK
government's 'Red Book' (Annual Intelligence Requirements Document)
includes a glossary of intelligence titles from which he might have
gleaned a sense of SIS order of battle even if he wasn't on the DI 6 side
of Service Intelligence. And no, don't ask me how I know that.
One former SOE man who writes spy novels is Ted Albeury, but apart from
_Moscow Quadrille_ I find his plots a bit strained and unconvincing; he
also works from the SOE 'singleton' premise, solo special agent, which
really is a rarity these days, (although for the outline of a one-man SIS
agent-running job, check out _Hansard_ for then-Foreign Secretary Douglas
Hurd's statment to the House when tabling the 1994 Intelligence Services
Act for debate last year).
One former fairly SIS officer (ex-DDLA, i.e. Deputy Director Latin America)
turned spy novelist is Kenneth Benton. I haven't read any of his fiction;
has anyone out there? And how is it? BTW, if anyone is interested, his
wartime memoir just appeared in the current _Journal of Contemporary
History_.
Incidentally, a Canadian Security Intelligence Service officer of my
acquaintance once assured me that in his opinion the *most* realistic
spy film ever is _Harry's Game_ with Ray Lonnen. Grievously, tragically,
I have never seen it right through. Anybody on the UK side of this group
got a copy? This was particularly interesting since he made a number of
rather bitter remarks about paramilitary counter-terrorist operations in
Spain and Northern Ireland.
As a general rule of thumb, precisely because of lack of information,
actual operations are enormously careful and extremely *simple*;
contorted manoeuvring may make engaging reading but is unmanageable in
practice. That is one good thing about SB; the plot twists are never
really gratuitous.
Naturally, I have *nothing* to say about Ian Flemming, Robert Ludlum or
any of that lot.
I used to enjoy spy books so much, too....
Phil