Thrills of espionage

The experience of empire seems to leave a people with at least a taste, if not a particular talent, for conspiracy.

It is certainly true for the British, who transmuted the gifted amateurism of Kipling's “great game'' into the modern world's first recognisable professional intelligence agencies.

In fact, as Gordon Thomas points out in his rollicking, readable history of Britain's famous spy organisations — Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6 — when the future head of Office of Strategic Service (OSS), William Donovan, sought to convince president Franklin D. Roosevelt that the United States required equivalent services, he argued: “These are organisations that helped rule an empire.''

MI6 is Britain's external spy service and reports to the foreign secretary. MI5 is responsible for internal security and reports to the home secretary. Both will mark their 100th anniversaries in August.

It takes nothing away from this book to describe it as a popular history, although the storytelling is such that even specialists will find nuggets of insight.

Thomas takes a novelist's approach: We are told where on Savile Row the head of the MI6 head has his suits tailored and that he sits at a desk once used by Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson and writes with a Parker pen filled with green ink from a Victorian desk well.

(He also has a desk console that links him instantly to the prime minister, the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel's Mossad.)

Thomas builds one fast-paced anecdote upon another, often yielding surprising insights, such as the fact that Allen Dulles, who ran the European operations of the OSS for Donovan out of a base in Switzerland, was, unlike his overwhelmingly Anglophilic Ivy League colleagues in the early CIA, profoundly anti-English.

He had acquired an antipathy for imperialism and the English class system while working as a schoolteacher in India before beginning his career as a Wall Street lawyer.

Interesting account

Thomas's account of Philby's unmasking is quite good, as is his rendering of the class system's role in the failure of MI6 and MI5 to uncover not only their deep penetration by the Soviet Union's KGB but also by atomic spies — Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn and Bruno Pontecorvo — all of whom were vetted into the Manhattan Project by British intelligence.

Thomas is equally strong on American double agents, particularly Aldrich H. Ames, who betrayed for money rather than ideology and did even more damage than Philby, virtually closing down US human intelligence in the Eastern Bloc.

For all its narrative vigour, one of the strengths of Secret Wars is the clarity of its attribution. Anecdotes are studded not only with novelistic details but also with direct quotations.

Thomas provides a lengthy list of his on-the-record sources, who include several former CIA and Mossad directors; the legendary chief of East Germany's Stasi, Marcus Wolff; and a one-time consulting psychiatrist to MI5 and MI6.

Thomas is particularly good at picking anecdotes that demonstrate the cooperative power of the democracies' intelligence agencies — when they chose to employ them.

For example, the Provisional IRA's increasing links to the Eastern Bloc during the 1970s and, through the KGB, to international terrorists such as George Habash and his Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, were developed in Belfast by the Mossad's director of operations, Rafi Eitan.

The first advice to the British government that it could contain, but never defeat, violent Irish nationalism in Ulster — an insight that was the first step on London's journey to the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to the province — was delivered by an MI6 agent on the ground.

Key information on Pakistan's nuclear proliferation racket came early from MI6 and Mossad.

Looking ahead to the struggle with jihadi terrorists — whom Thomas and his sources, more than many American analysts, seem to believe are much more crucially linked to Osama Bin Laden's continued physical well-being — the author misses a point that is well worth making.

Although Thomas believes that Bin Laden presents a threatening case, he does think that Islamist radicalism can be defeated through more openness among democratic intelligence agencies.

The larger challenge, he argues, is for MI5 and MI6 to cooperate with the 25 spy agencies working within the European Union without sacrificing their “special relationship'' with the CIA and the National Security Agency.

“If global terrorism is to be defeated,'' Thomas writes, “then British, European and US intelligence services must be more open-handed in sharing their secrets with services that would never have featured on their distribution list prior to 9/11.''

That will require, he concludes, a concomitant degree of new political transparency.