The pursuit of secrets

Along with being one of the world's most distinguished historians, Sir Alistair Horne has also been a soldier, a spy and The Daily Telegraph's man in Berlin (sacked for offending the boss's wife, more of which later). He has rubbed shoulders with everyone from Lawrence Durrell to General Pinochet to Jackie Kennedy, given face-to-face advice on foreign policy to George W. Bush and written a shelf-full of highly acclaimed works, including biographies of two of the most influential politicians of the 20th century, Harold Macmillan and Henry Kissinger.

And that is just half of it. Both his parents died in road accidents, he himself has endured three bad car crashes, and along with undergoing a triple heart bypass, he has survived an encounter with a 200-kilogram black bear. Now, having lived through all that, he has produced, at the age of 85, the second volume of memoirs.

But What Do You Actually Do? picks up from where A Bundle from Britain left off, as a young boy sent to America to escape the Blitz. In Volume II, he documents his return to these shores to discover that his poor eyesight denies him his dream of piloting a Spitfire. Instead, he is posted to Palestine, where he is put in charge of intelligence-gathering.

Later, back in civilian life, he combines his undercover skills with more legitimate news-gathering activities, as a junior correspondent for the Telegraph, in postwar Berlin — a job he got by claiming, falsely, that he could speak fluent German. "I was recruited while I was in Berlin, in 1953, by Maurice Oldfield, who had been my old boss in Palestine, but had moved to MI6," recalls Sir Alistair, as we sit in his cosy Buckinghamshire barn conversion.

"I said I thought the Telegraph wouldn't be too pleased about me being a spy, but Maurice said they'd have a word with the foreign editor, who'd been a wartime intelligence officer himself, and there wouldn't be a problem.

"I was to run three German agents, all of whom worked in sensitive posts in various Bonn ministries. One of them was very worried about security and would carry a copy of the Times in his overcoat pocket. If it was upside down, that meant he wanted to abort the meeting. My job was to take the secret documents they gave me and transport them to my handlers in a suitcase with a false bottom."

The plan worked like clockwork for a couple of years, as Horne performed his spying and reporting duties at the same time as improving his language skills, with out-of-hours help from Usshi, a willowy young blonde with whom he began an affair. However, it all went badly wrong when the cub reporter made the mistake of offending Lady Pamela Berry, who, along with being married to the Telegraph's chairman, was also the daughter of one of its proprietors.

On being rung by the night editor and told to find out what time the Rheingold Express, carrying two of Lady Berry's au pairs, was due to arrive in London, Horne responded with what he calls "intemperate" language, and the suggestion that the noble lady should contact train inquiries at Victoria Station.

"In my defence, they did ring at midnight," he pleads, half a century too late. "And this was during a period when we were working all hours — on spy stories, on aeroplanes being shot down, on Stalin dying, you name it."

He was ordered back to head office at 135 Fleet Street, where he had worked for six months before his posting to Germany, alongside the future editor Bill Deedes ("not a particularly noteworthy journalist in those days, but he got better"), and the altogether more intimidating deputy editor Malcolm Muggeridge ("a pixie-like face, with the blazing blue eyes of a true fanatic").

Desperate not to be deployed once more in the newsroom, which he describes as "a hell of dense tobacco smoke, clattering typewriters and crumpled copy and carbons", he resigned.

With his journalistic cover now gone, he was required to hand in the tools of his espionage trade too. "I really do regret giving that suitcase back,'' he sighs, as he gives his pet dog George a ruminative scratch.

"It was a beautiful piece of work. In those days, if you were a spy, you went to a little firm in Shepherd Market called The Mayfair Trunk, which had supplied all the SOE agents during the war. It was like going to a bespoke tailor; they'd ask you what size and colour you wanted.

"It was impossible to see where the false bottom began. There were these little rivets that looked like studs, and that you could only undo with pincers which were covered in a bicycle-valve casing at the end, so they didn't leave scratch marks.

"What you have to remember is that in those days the Cold War was a very serious matter," he says. "Each day, the Telegraph led with stories about what was, essentially, the soul of Germany: would it go East, would it go West, would it go neutral? Most important of all, were the neo-Nazis going to make a comeback?

"I was reluctant initially to take up Oldfield's offer, but British diplomats were strictly forbidden to spy on the Germans, who were meant to be our new allies, so as a journalist, I was in a better position to do that kind of work. Also, I suppose, it was a matter of patriotism. And I am pretty sure that what we did created at least the structure for the containing of Soviet espionage, which was, at that stage, very serious.

"Through our activities, and through clever use of disinformation, the Russians were made to believe that Kim Philby [the British spy who defected in 1963] wasn't a double agent working for them, but a triple agent working for us. As a result, when he arrived in the Soviet Union, they never really trusted him, never gave him another job. So he spent the rest of his life in misery, under permanent suspicion, and drank himself to death.

"Which was not undeserved, given that he had been, through his treachery, responsible for the deaths of many people."

While registering his disapproval of phone-hacking under a journalistic flag — "I hope I would resist, though I'm sure it would be hard if one's boss told one to do it" — Sir Alistair is far from apologetic about his undercover work on Her Majesty's behalf.

In fact, he thinks British spies have had a raw deal in recent years. "I rather resent the fact that spying is now considered disreputable," he complains. "That has been the damage inflicted both by Graham Greene and John le Carre; they made it seem that we were just as bad as the other side.

"Yes, we may have done some things we are not proud of, but it is completely wrong to equate MI6 with the KGB in terms of being equally evil outfits.

"Besides, you have only to look at the Iraq war to see how important really good intelligence is. I mean, the Americans and the Brits took the decision to invade based on what they'd been told by a few kebab-sellers in the bazaar."

Which leads one to ask whether he himself was just a messenger boy or whether he looked at the documents that he was smuggling. "Oh, absolutely I looked at them," he beams. "I wasn't a journalist for nothing, you know. And what I saw enabled me to form a judgment that the neo-Nazis were not going to come back, despite the fact that the High Commissioner in Berlin at the time was convinced they were."

"And don't forget," he adds, "that spying and writing history are very closely connected. They both require the painstaking collection of valuable source material."

Indeed, no amassing of material was more exhaustive than that carried out by Horne when writing the biography of the former prime minister Harold Macmillan. First, he uncovered a stack of correspondence between Macmillan and Jackie Kennedy, grieving for her assassinated husband.

"Wonderful, tender, consoling letters, almost like a father to a daughter," he says.

Next, he found out that Macmillan's decision to resign, in 1963, was all a terrible mistake.

"Despite having been wounded five times in the First World War, Macmillan was a hypochondriac and always thought he was sicker than he was," Sir Alistair says.

"So when he had trouble peeing, he rang up his doctor, who was on holiday, and got the locum instead, who said there was a possibility it was cancer, upon which Macmillan persuaded himself it was. So he resigned as PM; it turned out not to be cancer, and he went on for another 23 years. From that point on, he described his existence as ‘life after death'. Which was tragic both for him and for England; if he had stayed on, he'd have probably won the next election and we'd not have had Harold Wilson."

Macmillan also carried to the grave the knowledge that right up until her death in 1966, his wife Dorothy had been carrying on a long-standing affair with the charismatic Tory grandee Bob Boothby, a man described by Sir Alistair as possessing "the charm of the devil".

"Poor old Macmillan hated talking about it, absolutely hated it," he winces. "And I only ever asked him about it once, not out of prurience but because I wanted to find out if it had had any influence on his public career. And I think it did, because when it came to the Profumo affair [John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, was having an affair with Christine Keeler, who was also having an affair with a Russian military attache], it was just the sort of thing Macmillan didn't want to know about, so he never tackled Profumo directly."

Sir Alistair's own life hasn't been without its black moments. His mother, Lady Auriol Horne, died when he was 5, drowned when her car spun off into a Belgian river; 13 years later his father, Sir James, was knocked down and killed by a car in the London blackout.

He has had a number of bad car crashes himself ("three, at least"), and was lucky to escape with his life in Canada, when a black bear ripped a duffel bag full of fish off his back, as he was climbing up the stairs to his chalet.

"I thought it was my wife messing around,'' he says. He narrowly missed being shot in the Cafe de la Paix, in Paris, when a bullet intended for another diner shattered his glass; and, more recently, he has undergone that triple heart-bypass surgery. "Of course, Kissinger has gone one better, he's had quadruple!"

Despite all this, he considers himself to have led something of a charmed life. He has three grown-up daughters from his first marriage (to Renira, an admiral's daughter, in 1953) and now lives with his second wife Sheelin (an artist whom he married in 1987) in the hamlet of Turville, in what he calls "the prettiest house in the prettiest village in what is left of bucolic Britain".

The truth of this can be attested by anyone who has watched The Vicar of Dibley, which was filmed in Turville. "It was disruptive, to say the least, but we all got 60 quid every time they filmed here, which is better than a kick in the a***.''

He believes that if politicians read more history books, they would make fewer mistakes. He is proud, for example, that George W. Bush called him into the Oval Office to talk about his book on the French-Algerian conflict (A Savage War of Peace). He is not, however, convinced that the president took any notice of the lessons it pointed up, in terms of how a superpower should extricate itself from the country it has occupied.

His biggest regrets are not having worked more in television ("I was too grand") and never having got to pilot a fighter jet in the war. That said, on the morning he was due to be awarded his Cambridge doctorate, he did fly in a Spitfire over the roof of King's College, upside-down.

"I always remember what Macmillan told me," he smiles, as he gazes at some of the old political cartoons on his wall. "He said: ‘Things never turn out how you expect, dear boy, but at the same time, you should never miss an opportunity'."

An illustrious career

Sir Alistair Horne was born in London in 1925 and has spent much of his life abroad, including periods at schools in the United States and Switzerland. He served with the RCAF in Canada in 1943 and ended his war service with the rank of Captain in the Coldstream Guards attached to MI5 in the Middle East. He then went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature and played international ice-hockey.

After leaving Cambridge, Alistair Horne concentrated on writing: He spent three years in Germany as correspondent for ‘The Daily Telegraph' and speaks fluent French and German.

His books include ‘Back into Power'; ‘Small Earthquake in Chile'; ‘The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916'; and ‘The Seven Ages of Paris'. ‘A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-62' won both the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize and the Wolfson History Award in 1978, and he is the official biographer of Harold Macmillan. In 1970, he founded a research fellowship for young historians at St Antony's College, Oxford. In 1992 he was awarded the CBE; in 1993 he received the French Légion d'Honneur for his work on French history and a LittD from Cambridge University.

­­-www.panmacmillan.com