A friend of mine who’d just finished helping to edit my latest thriller, Armistice Day, asked me whether I’d had to seek pre-publication clearance from the UK authorities.
It does contain a certain amount of factual information about espionage and the workings of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and I admit to having leveraged my own short-lived association with that organisation in my efforts to attract readers. It hadn’t escaped my attention that other writers - some of whom held senior positions in SIS (known as MI6) as well as the Security Service, or MI5 - made no secret of their previous activities, or at least they eventually emerged from the shadows.
They include the late and great Graham Greene as well as Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth, John le Carre aka David Cornwell, Stella Rimington, the French author and former DGSE officer who writes under the name of Jack Beaumont as well as ex-CIA and NSA officer Alma Katsu, former CIA analyst David McCloskey and many more. I have to say that in my opinion, the spy thrillers of Beaumont and Katsu are among the very best in the spy sub-genre.
There’s also a UK ‘Charles Beaumont’, pseudonym of an author who proudly announces on the cover of his first novel, A Spy Alone, that he served as an SIS intelligence officer. Unusually, his voice was digitally disguised for a recent podcast interview on https://spybrary.com. Clever marketing ploy, I thought, or am I being uncharitably cynical?
Several U.S. authors with a background in intelligence, including Katsu and McCloskey, do send their spy fiction off to a special CIA office that deals with such matters (there’s probably something similar at the NSA and FBI, too), and in their books they state that their work has been through this screening process.
But the answer in my case is no. I don’t believe I was under any obligation, ethical or legal, to do so. And I didn’t.
First of all, my real life experience of espionage occurred during the Cold War, in other words, it’s outdated. It was also the analog era, so the technology of spying and counterintelligence has been revolutionised since then. Third, I was operating in a low tech environment, where a stout pair of hiking boots and the ability to ride a motorcycle and cope without food or sleep for extended periods were far more important than algorithms on an encrypted mobile phone or laptop, had they existed.
Perhaps the most important aspect in all this was that as a ‘contract labourer’ in the form of a so-called head agent, I was at the sharp end - out in the field, recruiting and running sub-agents. That means I wasn’t told anything or exposed to information I didn’t need. Successive case officers of mine working under diplomatic cover no doubt had many other irons in that particular fire of which I knew nothing. I was like a rifleman in a trench who marks out his narrow field of fire. What else was going on on either side of me or behind me didn’t matter, and I wasn’t supposed to know.
Someone like myself was never admitted inside the local SIS Station, usually a secure area inside the chancery of a British embassy. Nor was I invited into SIS headquarters at 85, Albert Embankment in south London. It’s simply good security that way.
There’s an SIS unit known as UKN comprising intelligence field operatives working under natural cover with specific specialisations. They’re trained like intelligence officers at the SIS training centre of Fort Moncton, as I was, and they’re on the SIS staff payroll - but they, too, for security reasons, are classified as agents and are barred from headquarters.
It’s sensible. Who wants scruffy people - armpits with eyeballs as the Selous Scouts were called in what was Rhodesia - who’ve mixed on a daily basis with the opposition to contaminate the clean and secure office environment with their muddy boots and poor personal hygiene?
As my contract drew to a close, I sat down and wrote a 60,000 word guide for diplomats and journalists, the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan, pounding it out in six weeks on my trusty Olivetti portable, the best writing machine ever invented in my humble opinion. I went through my notebooks, using whatever it was I’d jotted down. At no stage was I asked, or told, to include or exclude anything, and no-one from SIS asked to be shown what I’d written. Perhaps they didn’t care, or maybe in their infinite wisdom they were confident that I didn’t know anything I wasn’t supposed to know. The book was published jointly by The South China Morning Post and the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong, with a further edition published by Methuen in the UK.
Crikey. That’s more than 40 years ago. It feels like yesterday.
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