Most spies are good people Part One

This writing is designed to help understand how British national security and law enforcement has needed to change and adapt to the actions of self-interested, rich and powerful who in the 1980’s realised that the rapid development of digital technology provided the opportunity through legitimate and illegitimate international financial and business corporations to bypass the controls and sanctions of states and their systems of government, and of political, religious, trade union and other social leaders and their movements opposed to them.

The ambitions of these individuals who regard themselves above the law coincided with the understanding of political and economic  strategists,  and of legitimate international financial and business leaders that future economic  development, and therefore of corporate and individual wealth, was dependent on locating the management and organisation headquarters in states with stable governments and low corporate and personal taxation, and of locating production and manufacturing in stable states with no or restricted trade unions and no or limited anti-capitalist activity. The decision to widen the European Economic community to include former soviet satellite countries was taken because of the need to reduce labour costs and further reduce trade union power and the decision of the German Chancellor to welcome new migrants from outside Europe on the scale of millions was taken for the same reason under the political pretence of humanitarian concern. The present plan to increase the population of greater London by one million is another aspect this economic strategy,

Political and Military as well as economic leaders in China, Russia as well as in the USA, Britain and Germany also understood how digital power could be used in world-wide surveillance and individual monitoring and in Europe the significance step forward occurred in 2004 when the ‘independent’ Eurospace organisation “aggregated” the associations covering aeronautics, space and defence industries into one body, matching the positions in the USA, China and Russia.

Since the so called Arab Spring and the potential collective civilian power through the use of the mobile technology and social media was more fully understood, the emphasis and been on the ability to pull the plug state wise as an offensive weapon as well as taking control in the prevention of local acts of terrorism, together with disrupting and influencing what happens on social media and in Britain the Cameron Tory Lib Dem coalition set up one agency for this purpose followed by Cameron announcing a new special military based special unit  after his 2015 General Election success.

Contrary to the mistaken belief of some because of my past activism and remaining a catholic Christian influenced socialist I have always believed it should be the first duty of government, and it does not matter what form of government, to protect the governed. This is the justification for an armed force to prevent invasion, for a police force to prevent crimes against the person within the state, and for the establishment of intelligence to provide advance knowledge of an assault against the state or of an assault against the individual governed. Intelligence also provides government with assessments of the need for the force required to protect the state and to protect individuals within the state.

The aspect of my position which will surprise, and indeed shock some, is that given this duty I believe it is right that government use whatever means necessary in the prevailing circumstance and to keep aspects of what it does in this respect secret, providing lifetime protection for its agents in undertaking what is considered required. While I believe in the collective power of non-violence and studied Satyagraha, I am not a pacifist and the only restriction I would place on the role of the state to defend and protect its people is on the effectiveness of any measures undertaken. I am also opposed to the use of all forms of offensive capability which involves mass civilian terror extermination, but it remains the duty of government as part of defence to investigate and learn how to counter all such methods. It is for this reason we need to continue with research and surveillance and intelligence on all forms of mass civilian extermination while also attempting to limit their manufacture and reach enforceable international agreements. My early years were spent in an area where more Germany V1 and VII rockets exploded than any other and where together with other conventional bombs 5000 people were killed or severely injured.

The implication of my approach is that it is legitimate for government to exercise authority, limit freedoms and use all methods available, and this may involve secrecy, deception and multiple dealing, and when authorised law breaking and cover up. Mistakes will be made by those authorised, and when established that the mistakes are genuine protectionism is also justified This should not be interpreted as a blank cheque and states will devise their own systems for self-governance and in a democracy, whatever its form, it is the people through the Rule of Law, Parliament and the media that should Guard the Guardians.

The world of fictional book, fictional theatre film, documentary, spying, surveillance, disinformation is blurred and it is impossible for anyone on the outside, or on the inside  who does not have the clearance levels required, to be able to separate truth from propaganda,  from the role of the identified intelligence officer from  those undercover, often appearing to be key figures in organisations and groups under surveillance,  sometimes volunteer informants, sometimes blackmailed, and where every nation uses its diplomatic service, travelling business, financial and journalist people to spy on everyone else including its closest allies for to do otherwise goes against the first duty of government

Clearly if there is a prevailing law which prevents some action considered necessary by the state then the use of an arm’s length agency or a sympathetic other nation is an appropriate option especially if there is no time to change law or it could prove difficult to change the law without giving away to a perceived enemy what is proposed.  The  development of freelance international  security and intelligence corporation was a natural extension of the transfer for political accountability for services provision   health service, energy and transport and from public to private  local authority provision which  commenced to flourish under Margaret Thatcher and was put into full throttle by David Cameron with the help of the Liberal Democrat Party in 2010 and where the new Tory Leader has an impossible task in attempting to change the damage he personally, and George Osborn created  with further public service  austerity measures in 2015

However, less what I say be considered fanciful or worse, disclosure of information endangering the good workings of the state, I am including in this writing information from the published authorized history of MI5- The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew, an academic historian who specialised in International Relations and Intelligence and whose four works on the KGB have a worldwide reputation. The study which covers the creation of the joint service with what is now known as MI6 in 1909 ends in the 1980’s when the cyber warfare and  intelligence changed the way countries engaged with each other, and when significantly in 1984 (Orwell)  I first grasped the nature of the changes  together with the plans for global business and finance , attending  one of the  leading International management courses in the world for Directors contemplating or being considered for the role of Chief Executives.  There is a separate book on the workings of MI6 until just after WW2 (1949)

In part, this writing was provoked by an interest in the actual life and work of Edward Snowden after seeing the film Snowden and the documentary about how it is alleged he obtained temporary asylum in Russia. The extraordinary aspect of Snowden’s former role is that he devised ways to access the digital records and communications of anyone, anywhere, anytime, and that within the past weeks it is this ability which enabled the Russians to hack the digital records of one of the candidates for the USA Presidency and said to have assisted in the unanticipated victory of Donald Trump. British intelligence also appears to have passed to the USA which was then used in a failed attempt to stop the election of Mr Trump and is now being used to damage his credibility as he takes Office.  The source of this development has been revealed by the Sunday Times as a named former senior British intelligence officer previously in charge of the Russia desk who now runs one of the officially separate from government agencies in London but which continues to work closely with the official intelligence bodies at home and abroad. What the Chinese are making of all this remains speculation.

Like Snowdon and other patriots and supporters of good government, understanding the realities, the shortcomings, failures and mistakes inherent in all systems of governments occurs over a period, and usually involves gaining senior positions although presently I don’t know why he choose to become a traitor instead of staying and attempting to change from within, or resigning and finding some legitimate way of bringing about change within a democratic framework.

I am still learning although there were events which culminated in one decision taking day in 1991 when I knew I had to act which was likely to lead to significant change not just for myself but for my family. I had spent the greater part of the day alone, swimming naked in the private pool of a hired villa in the South of France, enjoying glasses of wine with chunks of French bread, salami and olives, looking across the vast plain below the hillside, and there was a moment when I said to myself, “let’s do it.”  However, before taking that decision I systematically went through all the potential implications which also took account of the law of unintended consequences with unpredictable outcomes.

This is something which I wonder if Edward Snowden did or did he just act and run without any notion of how he would spend the rest of his life, perhaps like George Blake in Russia, a traitor in the eyes of his country and most of its population. I will write about Blake, the recent BBC documentary and the book by Michael Randle who had roles with the Direct-Action Committee Against Nuclear War and the Committee of 100 with which I was associated 1960-1962.

I do not  regret the decisions taken in 1961 when I changed academic courses at Ruskin College, in 1984 when I turned  down the offer of a job as local authority Chief Executive, and then in 1991 and later in 1997 and 2002 and 2003 although when I stood on my own at the top of the Rock of Gibraltar in 2004 I saw what my life could have been had my father been almost anyone other than who he was and became, I experienced a great sadness which has been there since,  and which has influenced but not negatively, what I have considered necessary to  do since. I do have regrets about the way I did things and the resultant individual and the overall failure(s).

Traditionally the way to collate intelligence was through the operation of undercover spies and informants and I  am including notes on the excellent biographical work of the undercover agent under the  name of Joe Carter (Undercover Century Press) but from about the mid 1980’s the ability to use digital became evident and this opened the door on mass global surveillance and once everything, everywhere as well as everyone  commenced  to become digital, the ability to use aggressively as well as defensively became evident and in 2003 I commenced an art work project with one aspect that everything we did and  said  could be heard, viewed, recorded and revised by anyone, anywhere, anytime with the technology.

My assumption then was that this ability would be restricted to identified targets and only later to appreciate that improved data collation and analysis techniques would enable comprehensive material acquisition and processing. Without written records, we become dependent on the limitations of contemporary memories.

Those aware of the approach I took early in 2014 to calls for a national inquiry into past child abuse have a copy of my letter to government in which I pressed for the collating and securing of all documentation not already digitalized. In this respect, I was only saying what government had said to me in 1991 in relation to the one matter about which I became known in some circles of interest.  It was also the basis on which truths about the Hillsborough were uncovered following the intervention from Andy Burnham, then a government Minister and the prospective Mayor for the Manchester region. Recently I checked with a firm of Lawyers which led a successful class action for damages where one for those involved at the time explained that all the documentation would have long since been destroyed under the normal scheme which legal firms had used to avoid the accumulation of vaults of paper in situations where documents where the papers were not returned to clients who paid for services or had services paid for them.

Original documentation also has its limitations and what is written in the past may not have been an accurate or comprehensive representation of what happened and recently under Freedom of Information, I acquired via the National Archives what is reported to have been a signed written statement made to the police and presumably submitted to the coroner at the Inquest of what remains the unsolved murder of a friend and alleged Admiralty worker in 1963. In fact, I volunteered an oral statement to the police in Birmingham where I was taking a Home Office arranged and financially sponsored child care course and was read over the phone what was to be passed to the investigating metropolitan police and where the alleged signed statement fails to include information which I then regarded as potentially helpful.

However, I am also wary of the memory when it comes to oral history with one published account of political activism on Tyneside in 1960, relying on a mixture of memories and the limited documentation then available for research but where because of additional contemporary documentation. new research and publications, together with and online information catalogue, a very different understanding of some issues is possible.

Because of my experiences during the period of full time activism 1959-1961 and several subsequent situations and incidents, I believed I had a good understanding of how MI5 worked, alongside the police Special branch and the intelligence units of the armed services, and following my attendance at the International Senior Management Course in 1984, I understood the intelligence operations of global business and finance. However, it was not until 2009 and the publication of the authorised History of MI5- The Defence of the Realm, that there was confirmation of what I had assumed, the placement of undercover operatives in any organisation considered a threat, including a potential threat to the state and where one of the key targets was always access to Membership and supporter lists. There is symmetry about the state using entryism to keep under surveillance the enterists.  In the book, there are some surprisingly detailed accounts of who was targeted and in broad terms why, including the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt then of the National Council for Civil Liberties and Neil Kinnock’s role in combatting the Militant Tendency. I must remind Tom Watson of this.

The decision of the Service to create a secret file on a surviving Prime Minister (Harold Wilson) raises the issue of authorization especially as it is said that Harold was the favourite chief Ministers of all those who accepted the request to form a government from the Head of State. I continue to wonder who briefed Margaret Thatcher that the Keeper of the Royal art, and a distant relation of the Queen Mother, Sir Anthony Blunt, was a double agent who had worked for the Russians. Per her former media secretary Baroness Thatcher decided to use a Prime Minister’s Question from an opposition member of the House of Commons to make public his treachery, and where because the Royal prerogative he had not and could be prosecuted, he retreated to social anonymity, because she did not believe in cover up!

I only recently acquired the reprint of Hammer of the Left by John Golding with an important update of Neil Kinnock’s original forward written before the attempted coup against the official Leader of the Opposition by the majority of his  Parliamentary Party in which it is  evident,  his experience then, governed his belief that history was repeating but in my judgement this lacked appreciation  of  the fundamentally different circumstances and how the USA, China and Russia have been exploiting the digital revolution as a means for aggressive intelligence as well as defensive or that the rise of the left is essential if the new power of the right built up by stealth slowly since the mid 1980’s is to be effectively countered. While my heart is with LoveLikeJo (Cox) my head is firmly with the state although the role of Parliament, organisation and individuals to ensure that the means remains committed to agreed values and standards is also essential, if the individuals or individual in association with other recognises the right of the state to act if the intention is to break or go outside the law, whatever the motivation or justification.

I support in principal the proposed Loyalty oath for all public office holders announced by David Javid although I believe the way he would describe British values and standards is likely to be different from mine (Time’s article 18^th December 2016).

Recently I have viewed three films, two for the first time and one an old favourite which cover the dramatic change that taken place in government intelligence with the digital era-  Allied (WWII), the Ipcress File (the Cold War) and Snowdon.

The first Allied is a curious concoction set in World War II in Casablanca and London. Casablanca is the focus of my favourite film of all time, a French city in North Africa, occupied by the Nazis, a love triangle in which freedom and opposition to tyranny triumphs over individual feelings and relationships (our relationship not worth a hill of beans).

Allied begins in 1942 when a highly trained Canadian (presumably French speaking) operative (Brad Pitt) is sent to Casablanca to assassinate the visiting German Ambassador with the help of a trained French resistance worker who had escaped to the city after the rest of the group she led in Paris had been compromised and killed. The two pose as husband and wife and fall in love and against the odds the plan to assassinate not only works but they escape. Whereas Casablanca emotionally engaged with its great actors and script (Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henried, Claude Raines, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lore, Conrad Veidt, Dooley Wilson - you must remember this - Play it again Sam- and others: such as the night club singer, the bar tender, the young couple) credible storyline and script) what happens in Allied appears absurd. The couple then make their home in London with the wife (Marion Collard) settling down to pregnancy and motherhood homemaking while her husband (a trained pilot former squadron type leader) appears to be desk bound at Special Operations Headquarters until summoned to be told that his wife is an imposter, a German Spy as the Paris resistance worker did not survive. He is told to carry on as normal while confirmation is established in which instance he will kill her. The notion that he would be asked to do this is also absurd. It is believed she is part of a cell and passes on information she gains from what he mentions and from papers he brings home with him. A trap is set and he is told to nothing but he persuades someone at the air base to make a contact on a mission to the resistance in France to get confirmation that his wife is who she says she is. The young man in question loses his life which is rightly placed at the door of the character played by Mr Pitt whose suspicions that his wife is in fact part of a German spy network is such that he then goes to France where unable to substantiate the death he does gain information which enables him to test his wife. A test which she fails but such is his love for her and their child that he deals with the spy network and then plans for them to escape by air, having been warned that if he fails to execute his wife he will be treated as a traitor and hanged.

His wife admits she was placed as an agent in Casablanca posing as the dead resistance worker but went along with the assassination plan rather than expose him in advance because of falling in love. She had hoped to disappear through the marriage and domesticity, but she had been tracked to London and blackmailed. When the escape plan is foiled she commits suicide rather than see their daughter become parentless. Her action saves her husband and the audience is left with the feeling that her treachery and his complicity can be left unpunished, the official record showing that he carried out the execution. The film closes with a scene of daughter, now a young woman with her father with the implication that he devoted himself to her care and remained unmarried another implausibility. It is entertainment and nothing more.

The 1965 film- the Ipcress File was the second major film within three years on brainwashing, in this instance using electronic sounds in addition to a disorientating environment and I could not resist seeing again when it appeared on the electronic programme guide. The first film was the Manchurian Candidate (1962) based on the embedded psychological transformation of a Korean War prisoner which can be triggered subsequent and remade for release in 2004. The two films which interested me more because they dealt with the ability to manipulate and control people is the classic George Orwell 1984, a book, film and radio play and the relatively unknown Control Factor (2003). The Ipcress File is based on the book by Len Deighton with Michael Caine in the role of Harry Palmer, an army soldier blackmailed into becoming a Watcher for the security services after some unauthorised private enterprise when serving in the army of Occupation in Germany. He is transferred to a special ops unit after an alarming number of scientists disappear in circumstances which cannot be attributed to the much talked about “brain drain” at that time. The character of Palmer fits the traditional projection of the British low level operative, single but able to manage a home (he likes to cook with quality ingredients, reprimanding a senior officer who recommended an inexpensive brand of tinned mushrooms compared to the original champignons, and he is well read and an educated musical ear.  Another of my favourites of the genre is Callan with Edward Woodward.

Harry Palmer was intentionally created not to being the same class or league as James Bond although he has a roving eye, is creative in his approach and commands loyalty and help from friendship accumulated along the way.  In this instance, he sees several of his new colleagues murdered and an attempt to frame him for the murder of a CIA officer at his flat.  The action centres on tracing the person likely to be engaged in the trafficking of the abducted scientist. When the scientist is recovered for a ransom payment he is found to have been brain washed and memory cleared. When Palmer begins to suspect one of this two bosses is a traitor he is abducted believes he is solitary confinement in a Soviet state and given the treatment, but managing to retain some self-control and memory by self-injury pain.  He and his audience then face a difficult choice between which of the bosses is the traitor and which to kill. Fortunately, his judgment is correct.  Ipcress stands for An Introduction into Conditioned Reflex Under Stress. This film is also entertainment with low level technology reminding of all those large computer frames with flashing coloured lights to signify brain power processing.

Len Deighton wrote four book on Harry Palmer with Michael Caine starring in the three made into films (Funeral in Berlin and Million Dollar Brain. Harry Palmer is said to appear in two other Deighton Works Spy Story and Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy.    Michael Caine two decades later reappeared as Harry Palmer in two films, not based on the work of Deighton Bullet to Beijing 1995 and Midnight in St Petersburg 1996. I have one Len Deighton novel, a hardback edition of Close on the Film Industry.

It remains my understanding that although much is now known about the workings of the brain there are parts whole role in our lives are still to be understood.  I have the 2008 Britannica guide which covers mind, memory and intelligence, together with the 2009 edition if the guide to Genetics from Mendal to the Human Genome Project, but Charles E Boklage- How New Humans Are made remains challenging. What I continue to suspect that that the computer record disk is more like the brain than presently appreciated and that everything experienced is recorded and can be remembered and re-experienced, and that there is also truth in those who have reported the ability to remember events before their births when under hypnosis or using regression substances.  In our limited human inhabited earth named planet where nothing is yet proven to be impossible I   like to believe that during the rest of this century it will be established that   part of the act of human reproduction is the transfer from one generation to another all the accumulated life experiences of our individual ancestors. The possibility of this has been explored at length in the books and video games of the Assassin Creed and where as I found it is essential to have read up on the story to-date if one is to make sense of the first feature film of the same name which presently heads the box office top ten. It can also be assumed that the science of being able to influence and control minds has been developed since the era of the Ipcress File, the Manchurian Candidate and the Spy who came in from the Cold.

In contrast to the fictional Allied and Ipcress File, Snowden is about a traitor who betrayed his country and his colleagues, breaking his oath of allegiance and playing international politics, attempting to evade justice by taking a transit flight to Moscow.  A harsh judgement which I believe the available information justifies.

Snowdon was born into a family of patriotic Americans who became employees of the state. His father served as a rear admiral in the Coast guard before moving to the CIA and was at the Pentagon at 9/11. His mother and older sister are lawyers holding important positions.  His intelligence Quotient is said to be at genius level but his education was interrupted at senior school, not taking a basic degree. He claims to have worked online for a master degree from the University of Liverpool concerned with computer studies but the University says that although he registered he was not active and did not complete the work. He is supposed to have attended computer training classes at the John Hopkins University but there is no record of this. He did attend a summer session at the University of Maryland.

He is said to have become proficient in understanding Chinese and Japanese and took up martial arts and went against the American grain by stating Buddhism as his religion because there was no provision for saying agnostic on the military recruitment form.  I came across this rigidity in prison so put down Quaker which enabled peaceful breaks with others similarly registered.

He was accepted for basic Special Forces Training and in the film, was given an administrative discharge after breaking both his legs caused by stress fractures.  He had wanted to serve in Iraq.

It is accurate that he joined the CIA where he demonstrated talent in computer technology and was singled out to attend the top-secret training programme which lasted for six months and the film suggests he was the brightest of the students completing an early test in an extraordinary quick time by approaching the task outside the box.  The way he did the test, just as Harry Palmer tracked down the target in the Ipcress File and the hero of Allied risks his life to protect his wife when revealed to be a German wartime agent, is indicative  of the assessment as a Creative, that is, people with the ability to create originality and this assessment is confirmed when it is said he was responsible for ensuring that everything was backed up in such a way so that if an external assault was made to the system it did not go down.

The film also discloses his role in establishing the ability to shut down the systems in other countries alleging this was achieved unintentionally in relation to Syria and that it took time to rectify. The ability to suddenly close digital systems in an emergency has profound implications for things that move at speed on land and in air as well as those dependent on electronic devices such as in hospitals. It is also my understanding that because of the implications of complete switching off with the internet and mobile phones being the main targets, the focus has been on the ability to target shut down and in the recent TV second series of Our Girl, the ability of a terrorist to trigger a bomb via his mobile phone was stopped remotely.

The recent film Eye in the Sky focuses on the controllable Drone combining the pilotless delivery of a lethal weapon with the on the ground control of a camera disguises as an insect capable of entering through a window to check who is inside a building before it is demolished, one of over 40 of films featuring the remotely controlled devices since 2010 and with only half a dozen before although interestingly the earliest is Back to the Future II in 1989.

The film covers something of the assessment required for someone to gain the highest level of state security and this includes a polygraph test with the questions designed to establish his loyalty, honesty and integrity to the state and where later he admits that at one point he faked a response intended to explain to the audience that he could cover up something which helps explain what he came to do. This is nonsense because Creatives especially those at the genius level, have their own sense of right and wrong and will do whatever is necessary or required for what they believe in or have committed themselves including self-sacrifice and deceit. This will have been known and monitored another aspect of Who guards the guardians? The TV series Blindspot, Sky Living, explores many of these issues, the nine episodes of the second series are available on the Sky player.

This brings me to the other issue of how it is alleged Snowden removed a copy of the information on a micro disk from such a top-level establishment. I just do not believe that such an establishment did not explore all the possibilities of how someone might want to remove stored data or that there would have an instant notifying of any copying of data information to a 24/7 monitoring and alert system unless of course they were in the position of responsibility to guard against such action, but which in turn they would have created or been asked to create a fail system to ensure that the Guardian is also guarded. It should be potentially criminally negligent to do otherwise. The film alleges that he removed the data into a Rubik’s cube which he tosses to a gate guard while he goes through the scanner and where the guard then tosses the cube back to him when he has passed through. This is absurd.

The development of digital technology will have changed the whole approach of the British government to security and may have led to the decision to change the way the Home Office is physically structured although my knowledge of the new building comes from a TV news item. In 2015 I gave thought to my experience of visiting the old Home office building arising from the national interest in missing Home office files which were thought to provide important information concerning the cover up and protectionism which took place in relation to crimes against children in the past. Despite the presentation of several reports including an independent investigation and report under all party-political pressure there has never been a satisfactory explanation why over a hundred Home Office Files could not be accounted for, although some information was subsequently traced to National archives and Libraries. 

I thought of my own experience of visiting the former Home Office building in the late 1980’s was instructive when I had been granted a car park pass for attending a   meeting of a national advisory committee and followed someone else who had exited a car through a doorway into the building.  Previously I had arrived from the street at the front reception desk which controlled entry to the two parts of the building with the Ministers and their immediate staff separate from the rest and which included meeting rooms. I found myself in a corridor with individual rooms marked by levels of security required and quickly concluded that I was not sure I should be where I was so I retreated into the car park, through the entrance gate where the written pass has been shown and into the reception area from the street where I was escorted as I had been previously to the meeting room. The point being that I had a brief case with me so that even if my entry and walk within the building was camera monitored the contents of my brief case was not and therefore anyone with a car park permit could remove files/papers from the building without a check.

This was also in the days just before the lap top computer reduced in size sufficiently to be in transported within a brief case although I used the Amstrad floppy disk to record my work at the office to a similar machine at my home.  I have always had problems with my memory and my hand writing is indecipherable me let alone to anyone else so the development of the word processor changed my life in many ways.

I will concede that the jumps in digital storage and communication technology have been such that it will have been a challenge for all government and other bodies to catch up with the security implications, but it is not unreasonable to expect that those responsible for national security would have been at the cutting edge in this respect, so I still do not understand how Snowden got away with it without help.

Nor am I really concerned with why he did it. Motivation may contribute to mitigation of whatever penalty the justice system process may conclude is merited but being well motivated should never be the basis for deciding to break the law and expecting the justice system not to take its course. If you set out to break the law even if the law is a bad one you should expect to face the stated consequences. Throughout recorded history individuals because of patriotism, for a religion, to protect those for whom they have responsibility, for their families and those they love, have broken the law, sometimes hoping not to pay the price for what they do, but always in the expectation that a price may be exacted.  In simple terms two wrongs do not make a right.

There are other aspects of his story which merit scrutiny especially the circumstances which led him to resign from the CIA and move to a security agency employed by the state. In the film and the Wikipedia account, he was sent to the CIA office in Switzerland to maintain computer security, providing him with a diplomatic passport and a four-bedroom apartment near Lake Geneva. He had been assigned to the U.S mission to the United Nations and had been responsible for providing support to the US President when attending a NATO summit in Romania. The film gives the impression that his interest in working as a field agent was taken up by a senior colleague in Geneva who had been tasked with finding a way to persuade a leading banker to become an informant. The film suggests that Snowden was so shocked by the methods used that he resigned in February 2009 without knowing what he will do next.

The film suggests that it is his former training chief who introduces him to a top-level subcontractor agency for the government and where he is based in Japan near Tokyo to advise how to defend system from Chinese hacker.  After two years, which one can assume were successful he returns to the USA and promoted to a more senior position concerned with cyber intelligence and strategy. It is during this period that the film suggests he became concerned  that the programmes he had helped to create, if not create, were being used not just to target the digital communications and records of those under surveillance in accord with nationally agreed procedures, but were tracking  the records of everyone worldwide and film provides figures about the scale of the operation and where what  is said to have triggered  his rebellion is the number on USA citizens being surveyed which was against the law and about which  when challenged the government is said to have lied.

It is alleged that he commenced to copy records. He moved to the firm’s office in Hawaii which concentrated on surveillance of China and North Korea. He also moved between contractors, with a loss of salary, in order, it is said, to continue to acquire documentation he needed.

Snowden is said to have used his position and reputation to persuade between 20 and 25 colleagues to give him their passwords so he could independently monitor their records and copy those which presumably he decided would provide the evidence required from him to substantiate what he had decided to do. This story via Reuters is said to have been rejected by Snowden and that he was responsible for his own for the copying of documents said to have been be between 50000 and 200000. Instead of as suggested in the film passing everything out in on one occasion as mentioned previously with the Rubik cube the possibility of finding a way to transfer documents via the passwords of his colleagues is the more obvious pathway, even if they were aware he was hacking them.

However, there are different accounts of the scale of his treachery.  The Australian government have said he made available to unauthorised parties 15000 of their intelligence files. The British Government put their figure at 50000.   USA figures have put the number of their documents at 1.7 million. The clear majority of these documents were nothing to do with political acts of government but covered military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures. I rest my case against him.

Dr Kermode in his film review argues that despite those going to theatres knowing the basics of the story and his escape from Hong Kong to Russia the documentary about the escape provides a more engaging experience than the film and on this I, disagree. Both are effective in persuading the audience to his perspective and make the USA government the villain. I am surprised that the good Dr did not point this out and that both works are therefore questionable in this respect.

The world of spying in the national interest is well documented on film book and documentary. I have been a great admirer of the work of the writer John Le Carré who until reading his authorised biography by Adam Sisman, (published by Bloomsbury for £25) I was unaware that his birth name was David Cornwall and that his half-sister is the actress Charlotte Cornwall who I first admired in the TV series the Rock Follies.

I have his books - Smiley’s People (also TV DVD and audio book), The Honourable Schoolboy and audio book, Tinker Tailor Solder Spy (also TV DVD & audio book), The Russia House with the film DVD, The Constant Gardener(and film DVD) and The Mission Song; I have the DVD of the TV series- The Perfect Spy together with the rest of the BBC audio books collection - The Secret Pilgrim, Call for Dead, The looking Glass War (with film DVD), The Murder of Quality and The Deadly Affair (with DVD film), together with that of The Tailor of Panama. I also saw the TV series of the Night Porter, and then came A Delicate Truth which begins with a mission to the land of my parents and their families, Gibraltar and which I listened to as a book at bedtime on the BBC. I have seen Our Kind of Traitor and A Most Wanted Man in Theatre and ordered the DVDs because of this writing and which for me is the most haunting of all his works because of the performance of Richard Burton- The Spy Who Came in from the Cold where I have the film DVD and audio book). The BBC has just announced it is to make a new series based on the book. I have seen all the films in theatre and on TV, some several times.

One Sunday Times headline on January 15^th (2017) was The Spy Left out in the Cold.  The article suggests that the Trump dossier is a black ops project of a known but unnamed wealthy Republican who wanted to stop Tump gaining the Presidential nomination for his Political Party.  He used a Washington firm of former investigative journalists which sounds more like Exaro News than Mark Thomas Williams and his Associates, who sub contracted to a former senior MI6 Russia expert, heading the Russia desk at one point, and who had established an arm’s length free enterprise service with another senior colleague. One former CIA chief who has gone through the dossier is on public record of saying a little of the content appears accurate, some does not and the majority is unknown but in total it is the kind of initial raw data based on intercepts, informant’s beliefs, rumours and gossip which then requires rigorous testing. The Sunday Times article argues that the individual. who is named and background reported, has gone into hiding and had worked for the British government in Russia and was head of the Russia desk when Litvinenko was assassinated in London and has since had a vendetta with President Putin which one suspects is long standing given the record of other Cambridge graduates being recruited to the British Service, then working for the Russians and spending chunks of their lives as political refugees. I now fear for the man in question given the likely response of the Trump when he controls the CIA from Friday, although I fear more for Edward Snowden when Trump has his first summit with the Russian former spymaster leader. I still do not understand the way Russia has been painted as our number one enemy when like Trump I believe the long-term threat comes from China, with its economic as well as potentially offensive military power and an unequalled totalitarian system capable of world domination at a time and manner of its choosing. While Trump has British roots, it is at least a decade since the USA wanted out from its European defence involvement and commitments to concentrate on the Pacific rim as any military and geopolitical strategist of international renown will explain if one cares to ask.

It is the issue of fiction mirroring reality, often revealing more significant truths, that has interested me since first becoming the subject of MI5 surveillance in 1960 and where I have always had suspicion that that a female friend whose murder in 1963 has remained unsolved appeared to possess more information about what happened at Holy Loch in 1961 than I would expect an Admiralty secretary, as she claimed, could be expected to know.

The book opens with a quote by Scott Fitzgerald about writers being different people in search of a single identity with one implication that if one has a fully integrated personality one would get on with the business of experiencing life and not sit in a room living through the creations of the mind.  I approached the reading and writing about David Cornwall John Le Carré with the question are spies made or created? I have also considered if the implications of leading one or more lives secretly, and is something which spies have in common with the actor. I have also tried to remember the changing context of work and life over 80 eighty years, with David Cornwall born in 1931 and myself in 1939. A major part of the work deals with the sources for the books and their characters, the impact of becoming an international literary superstar and the interesting people this life has brought him into contact.  There is also the question can the restless spirit, the new and frequently exciting experience junkie ever settle to everyday life, domesticity and the realities of aging?

Adam Sisman is the third attempt to get Le Carré to disclose the story of his life. One attempt was by Graham Lord, Literary editor of the Sunday Express for two decades and whose published work includes the lives of John Mortimer, Joan Collins, David Niven, James Herriot and Arthur Lowe.  Books about writers, politicians, sports and other personalities tend to attract a limited audience, divided between those who respect and admire the individual as a role model and who want to know something of the private person, or hope to gain knowledge to help in achieving a similar ambition and those who enjoy reading about scandal and bad example. The available information suggests that Mr Lord had obtained material which if published would cause upset to those Le Carré cared about and fortunately he was in position to employ lawyers to provide protection. Whatever Lord knew he took to his grave when he died of liver cancer at the age of 73 in 2015, the same year the Sisman biography was published. I wonder if he lived to the read the book?

The writer Robert Harris (Fatherland) obtained a contract to write the story on the understanding it would not be published until Le Carré death and is reported (in the Telegraph in 2011) to have devoted months, creating 30000 words of notes, spending one day with David’s first wife returning letters to the author when she died in 2009

Sisman admits he had a grand time spending several days with David arriving around 11 am, breaking off to eat and drink at a local Inn and then work on until a “fortifying drink” before departing and was provided with an extraordinary long list of people to be contacted which matches that provided by Lady Thatcher coupled with the same promise not to interfere or exert influence on the work.

When enjoying the brilliant BBC TV series production of Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, I became aware that this was based on his early life, his engaging but middle class ‘crook’ of a father whose behaviour drove his mother to abandon her children when they were primary age school boys.  Ronnie Cornwall, a superstar conman, appears to have led one of the most extraordinary lives I have encountered given his life style and contacts, attractive to women and investors he also appears to have done great harm to others about which he appears never to have openly repented and I read with interest to see how his death affected his younger son.

Sisman begins the work with a cautionary note explaining that it was difficult to substantiate some of the Le Carré’s memory and family legend about their childhood experiences, but it is evident that his father’s charm and ability to impress attracted his mother offering a way out from the restricted and boring life led by many daughters of the well-off middle classes who were expected to live chaste lives at home before a suitable marriage could be arranged. The provision of domestic help within the household and the employment of a nanny to take responsibility for the chores of upbringing meant that his mother was not equipped to be a wife and mother expected to undertake all the demanding and tiring tasks herself and it is there is also evidence that she quickly became aware of his wondering eye and the willingness of other women to respond.

Whether she would have accepted her situation if this had remained the position, a common one for many women between the two World Wars, remains speculation as her husband established himself as a leading member of the local community, invited to join the Brotherhood, a member of the Chamber of Commerce and an active Rotarian also becoming the first President of a local Round Table. He enjoyed a fine lifestyle of eating out at good restaurants, drank brandy and whisky by the quart, smoked large cigars, stayed at the best hotels, entertained generously and lavished presents.  The problem was this was based on other people’s money.  When debts accumulated, he commenced to move his family for fresh starts in new communities, but eventually he went to prison and became bankrupt and his wife was forced to return with her sons to her parental home. Eventually the situation became too much and she ran off and remarried leaving the two boys with their father. This devastated them leaving lasting scars.

Sisman also reveals, unsurprisingly it must be said, that the father had a dark side possessive and controlling but also reveals early on in a footnote that sometimes when he returned home drunk he would get into bed with his son and start to play with him as he might with his mother. In a footnote, there is reference to David raising the issue with his half-sister in later life. It is my expectation that the present statutory inquiry covering England and Wales concerned with abuse within and members of national institutions will comment that abuse in a family domestic situations are more common place than generally appreciated, and should also not be confused with sexual awareness and development in childhood, usually involving other children and young people as well as from observing the more open parental behaviour which developed from the early 1960’s.  How any one individual coped with such experiences and whether everyone is affected in a negative way remains to be established but there is also no doubt that tens of thousands in the UK, and millions throughout human world history have been harmed ruining some lives and the cause of a premature ending.

Children whose parents fail to show them love and fail to respect their separate identity often muddle their need to be loved through sexual intimacy with potentially traumatizing experience for them and for their partners There is reference to David developing an emotional attachment to a young beautiful nanny, a refugee from Germany, who he subsequently tried to find when he joined the “Circus” but without success and to an older schoolgirl being attracted to him but then went off with someone else leaving him to write about the experience. 

One outcome of the departure of his mother is that David and his older brother found themselves in a typical authoritarian private bordering school in the era of the forties where headmasters and other staff could physically assault, hurt and harm pupils at will and where I suggest being beaten can have as great a negative impact as being the victim of sexual exploitation by adults and experimentation by peers, sometimes within a family.

Another aspect revealed about his father was also of interest to me his political involvement and attempt to become a Member of Parliament in a wartime by-election, having previously assisted William Douglas Home to win a by-election and whose aristocratic older brother was to become Prime Minister. He withdrew just before the election, under pressure it is suggested by the spokesperson of the Commonwealth Party (independent socialists in the tradition of the syndicalist and cooperative movements). The spokesperson is reported as Peggy Duff who as General Secretary of the CND interviewed me after it was proposed I should become the paid organiser for the London Region after George Clark decided to give up his volunteer role and chief marshal for Aldermaston marches. Peggy had been business Manager at Tribune and on the Aneurin Bevan wing of the Party.

David appears not to have been directly affected by the horror of the war with mention of seeing bombers flying overhead while camping, and having escaped call up his father appears to have viewed the war as a golden opportunity to make money involving his sons when home in some of his enterprises. But the finances of his father remained precarious and having sent his sons to Public schools the fees for him at Sherborne became in arrears. As with many such establishments the emphasis was on becoming leaders with compulsory sessions twice a week in training to become army officers. The regime was one of open windows and cold showers and other character building programmes. A WoW piece of information is that he became friends with one of my political role models, Robin Cook, whose father, an Indian civil servant had died suddenly, and was sent to the school as his mother decided to stay in India. The Labour Minister Roy Jenkins who went on to found the Social Democrats was invited to give a talk to the small Gateshead Fabian Society but only would accept if accommodated in the best Newcastle hotel and provided a meal at the best restaurant.  Robin Cook came based on being given whatever contribution to expenses the group could afford. I had been briefly introduced to Jenkins and future Prime Minister Callaghan at a social event at the Houses of Parliament, I had helped organise with the help of a Member of Parliament to mark the passing of the Children and Young Persons Act 1969.

Financial concerns appeared to end when Ronnie Cornwall moved into the property market owning 4000 houses at one point and having and a stated wealth of £13 million in today’s values but the money was spent as his life style and social status also rose with politicians, aristocrats and senior civil servants counted as associates together with underworld figures and police as was typical for that period. Staggering information was that just before the war he held a party of the visiting West Indian Team and then did so again in 1948 for the Australians with Bradman’s last visit where as a nine-year-old I sat on the grass to witness his last two ball innings at the Oval.  Ration ended just before I left school in 1955, while the boys participating in some of their fathers lavish holidays, including one visit to Paris staying at one of the best hotels.

Sisman discussing the issues with led David to decide to leave Sherborne before his final year, suggesting that there was conflict between the values of school and those of his father’s life. He not only left the school, but home and England and freed from the constraints he became his own man, albeit a young one. He went to Berne in Switzerland and without qualifications registered at the university where he floundered  but persisted and then through a meeting said to have taken place over Christmas he was recruited by a couple  who said they were from the Consular section of the British Embassy and  keen to prove  his patriotism he agreed to attend meetings of left wing student groups and report back especially on the involvement if any British subjects attending and there you have it an example of how the state focussed on the perceived threat from the East, made use of talents of those on extreme right or who had served the Reich, the subject of the excellent BBC  TV drama  Close to the Enemy directed  by Stephen Poliakoff and with Alfred Molina and Lindsay Duncan in important secondary roles alongside the brilliant young actor Freddie Highmore among several others destined for long careers.

The highlight of his year as an infiltrating informant, in addition to becoming fluent in German, was to shake the hand of Thomas Mann. In 1949 with help David went to Germany and West Berlin. One of my uncles served with the army of occupation in Germany at the same time. His wife came back a nervous wreck. I was evacuated to her home during the concentration of VII rockets on the area close to Croydon airport where I lived, staying at their officer’s quarters near Catterick, now the largest military base in Western Europe.  A temporary illness brought Cornwall home and taken to see Marlene Dietrich at the Café Royal. It was another decade before I saw Marlene at the New Theatre Oxford.

In Germany, David had been to Bergen-Belsen and four years after this I had read the official reports on the Belsen and Auschwitz War Crimes Tribunal hearings at the reference Library in Wallington following a recommendation from the Jesuit modern history teacher at the independent Catholic John Fisher School, Purley. While he was to have first-hand experience of the reality of a divided and occupied Germany my experience was in the cinema as I commenced to be taken every Monday and Thursday to see older release as the local cinema within walking distance, going with cousins to see more recent releases over weekends. The film with greatest impact was the Third Man. I have some memory of The Search, the Man Between, Berlin Express and The Heavens above us.

David next important development was Officer training after National Service and directed by the War Office into Intelligence, which he presumed was because of his experience in Switzerland and where at a subsequent visit to St Moritz he had met his future first wife. Sisman draws the reader’s attention that while the future writer was raised at home and school in a male dominating environment his future wife’s experience was one of female control although interestingly her father chased other   women as did Ronnie Cornwall although the similarity ends as Ann’s family had several generations of distinguished service to Britain.

Although lacking basic educational qualification David then set his sights on going to Oxford the end of his National Services. His father is estimated to be spending half a million a year in to-days money and his relationship with Ann progressed with marriage planned. The reference from the Headmaster predicted he would become either the Archbishop or a criminal. The young man had many talents, from poetry to drawing, from fluent German and its culture to a competitive skier and like his father he presented as confident and articulate, patriotic and loyal but also with his own sense of right and wrong and of justice.

I still wonder if I would have been able to have talked myself into reading Philosophy, Psychology and Physiology at an Oxford college as John Beichon, my tutor in Psychology wanted before he took his team at the Institute of Experimental Psychology to the USA. John went on to become Chief Executive at Which, head a London Polytechnic and play an important role in the development of the Open University. My best memory is accepting his invitation to the dining club feast with other university staff who did not belong to a college and where the chief guest a college Master, walked out before the final courses on hearing another guest, a Jazz musician, admit to also running girls in Soho. My contribution was to entertain in the early hours with prison experience stories while he and some of the others played billiards in a room at the top of the Nuffield College tower. I returned to my digs and was very sick from the assortment of wines and other drinks.

It was at Oxford David was asked by the Government if he would pretend to be left wing and spy on his fellow students, as he had done before when a student at the university in Berne. The Official History of MI5 has confirmed the approach of infiltrating left of centre organisations and spying on politicians and trade union activists which was given fresh impetus by the Cold War which developed after armistice 1945. Although the impression given is that he embarked on this with enthusiasm he looked back on doing this with regret.

A very interesting and informative insight into the one aspect of the work of the Infiltration department of the Metropolitan Police is provided in Undercover published by Century a branch of Random House, (a building where I worked on leaving school in 1955 as an office junior in a branch of the Middlesex County Council Finance Department and which is located close the Vauxhall Bridge with at the other end the iconic HQ building of MI6). Undercover provides one perspective on the way British law enforcement attempted to encounter the development of international crime which as previously mentioned matched the development of international finance and general business which commenced to be executed in the 1980’s to bypass the controls and sanctions of individual states and their government whatever their political systems. The book also provides insight into many of the same issues in the  authorized biography of  John Cornwall/John Le Carré so it is an appropriate point to break from his story to first consider the world of Joe Carter, who as a new young recruit to the police in London became bored and jumped at the opportunity to first undertake undercover work in addition to normal duties after recruitment to the Criminal Investigations department, and then became full time, whereas in the instance of John Cornwall he quickly became an international literary superstar, although it is not clear me when he fully  moved from the day to day reality into the world of fiction  or the extent  to which he  ever moved from non-fiction reporting into creative fiction as he used for a time one former service boss to undertake fact checking for his literary works.

There are several ways to view Joe Carter’s book the book which in the first part provides insight into the workings of the police and the ways of policemen and then on the life and implications of spending a year living with an opposite sex undercover officer away from his own family and overall the  book can be regarded as an apology to his family, and also to some of the criminals he befriended and which at times it can be said he enticed into undertaking more specific wrongdoing and which in turn leads to questions of means justifying the ends and   I have I said I  believe is justified in specific circumstances involving national security and crime detection.

The present Prime Minister when Home Secretary established an independent statutory inquiry into undercover policing at the same time and the Inquiry into past crime against children involving national institutions and other  national bodies was converted into a statutory Inquiry because of issues arising from the infiltration of organisations  which might pose a threat to the state but which are not involved in criminal activity  such as a political party, a trade union,  a protest or pressure group, including those challenging aspects of police work.

As a new young recruit, Joe Carter found the assigned duties at the London Chiswick station not what he had hoped for and he found himself under scrutiny because of his failure to meet the expected quota of traffic and other minor offences to keep management content. He was saved by a helping old hand from the Criminal Investigations Department (C.I.D) and jumped at the opportunity of moving out of uniform although he admits he decided not to join Freemasonry which he alleges controlled the CID at that time. He also paints a vivid picture of the drink culture which started from a cabinet in the office and continued across the way at a local public house. One senior officer started at lunch time and was known to regularly consume eight to ten pints.

Joe is also honest that what attracted him to undercover work was the excitement and this included the challenges and the personal risks involved. At first the work was in addition to the day job and one assume overtime rates were paid and having gained promotion, a wife and a child and moving to an area distant from both sets of grandparents, his wife was left alone and in the dark about his double work so that when the opportunity to become full time undercover he lied about family support, such was the attraction of the role for him. He admits to feeling guilt especially when the undercover work involved a week away from day job responsibilities and family.  He admits that the responsibilities of bringing up children as in effect a single parent were demanding and more challenging than his and gives the impression that his wife was or became content with her role.

He then describes the first adventure on the shores of Europe, using the recently opened channel tunnel and filling the car with duty free drink where the focus was on a group of professional criminals responsible for the production and distribution of Ecstasy tablets in Europe. The task involved several trips to Holland and to Spain where those involved were older men with legitimate businesses but who appeared able to spend their day drinking and womanizing. On the visit to Spain they were taken to be entertained at a brothel by very young girls with one allocated to him Asian and very petite. It was one the criminal associates which pressed for a way out and in helping him Joe broke one of the golden rules when working with a colleague, don’t leave that person on their own. The experience reveals something of the challenges facing those who are required to adopt the life style of the professional underworld.

The book then covers his recruitment as a full time officer in days when this appears to have been done by word of  mouth on the  basis of previous contact  and reputation rather than an open competitive and rigorous process over a period of time which is presently being described in a Channel Four documentary series Spies  covering the four weeks of assessment, reminding of the four week residential experience at an International for existing director level candidates seeking to become general managers such as chief executives undertaken in the mid 1980’s and where beforehand there  had been thorough background and personality profiling. 

He also gives a vivid account of the end of the year Christmas social function which used to take place in most work centres where everyone gets drunk over lunch time or from late afternoon into evening and where pent up passions become freed and which can turn into violent and sexual interactions with immediate and longer devastating impact. Before beginning his work as part of the Infiltration Unit he recounts his experience of an activity in Northern Ireland which involved buying a quantity of drugs in a situation where the trade was controlled with guns and paramilitary power. He makes the powerful point that whereas he could function in situations involving professional criminals who used physical violence instinctively as well as calculated the experience in what had become a tribal totalitarian war was on a different level of horror, nastiness and personal insecurity. The reality was made clear when in a bar full of Protestant colleagues in the local force drinking hard at lunch all part of his protection team which included armed protection he was told in the loo that he would in fact be on his own because he was known to be a catholic. The source remains unidentified.

In the same era, I attended a conference on the prevention of drug misuse in Dublin on behalf of an association of chief officers in local government and organised by the British and Irish governments. Such a shadowy figure sat with me at dinner but I listened to what he had to say and listened to what was said at the conference while otherwise keeping a low profile.

At  a social function attended by fellow Directors of Social Services and Councillors, but I cannot remember when,  I was approached in the loo by a colleague who I had never met  before who introduced himself and said you are a left footer (which I had been  as a child  but was no longer) and I then worked in  an area of Tyneside where at one point  leaflets were circulating advising voters to only support Fenian Labour candidates, an area where there used to be an annual Orange march and the Order still shares a building with the Tory Protestant and Unionist Club. Yesterday while on a search for a business I drove past the Mosque in South Shields, when Mohamed Ali had a marriage ceremony in the same month that the Queen visited during her Silver Jubilee year. I noted for the first time in the forty years that I have worked and more recently lived in the town the existence of another Unionist club.

It is, of course, all a matter of degree of threat, and separately I will be writing about published material on the crime families which engaged in a bloody civil war on Tyne and Wearside over control, and where family honour and integrity governed as anywhere. In the first reported assignment, Joe Carter enters the world of Albanian Drug suppliers where he warned that any form of treachery would be dealt with by the family and generationally if necessary. There is then disclosure of the impact of such roles on individuals and the need to have someone independent skilled and in listening, supporting but also the limitations of this and importance of building up survival self-reliance and where I suggest  that while selection and assessment are important, those responsible for recruitment have to put the interests of the state first and that casualties are inevitability, My approach, in the world I inhabited, has always been to ensure that I was always frank about risks  and likely consequences and that if I was asking someone else to go over the top, the individual knew that  I was also leading from the front and taken the main burden of risk. The author the tells how he told his son aged sixteen what he did and his son’s relief as a friend had suggested that his dad was not a detective but had all the appearance of being a drug dealer which is what became for a whole year at one point.

The book then moves onto a subject which has become one of the reasons the independent statutory inquiry into undercover policing has been established- the extent which such individuals are required or develop sexual attachments which lead to the creation of second marriages and families, and in this instance to become the partner of another female undercover officer who worked alone in a challenging environment and where a criminal boyfriend which provide both security and progress the project. It is having this point there is need to introduce a reality warning that clearly anyone writing about such experience will have had the work vetted to ensure ongoing service methods are not compromised and that the anonymity of the actual work and convictions cannot be compromised.

I am reminded of my unsuccessful career as an office equipment salesman for a major international company where working in central London in the city we had to start work calling at offices up to 5 business machines then graduated to those up to 25 and over this a small group attempted to gain contracts with the larger firms. Thus, our undercover officer was involved in the purchase of a kilo or two of cocaine and therefore in the middle of the chain.  However, sums of £25000 in cash were required for trading and the flash lifestyle required involved expenses to purchase the latest fast car, fashionwear, tip doormen £50 or £100 to get space and be looked after and to buy champagne with a little discount for getting ready for drinking half a dozen. In terms of the main operation recounted there was talk of making a million within the year, which understandably could make some question if they were in the wrong job.

Because of his abilities and success, he became a leader of others, a trainer and an internationally appreciated expert. Feeling myself to be different, from early childhood I have always been interested in how others lived whether, teenagers, couples, parents and now other oldies, and for a time considered most people normal until through my work I understood that everyone feels that way at some point and experiences situations and challenges for which they are not equipped and find themselves tested after which lives can be traumatised with long term damage and in some instance destroyed. The most significant aspect of the book comes at the end when having recounted what his life was about and the impact it had on his family, he attends the funeral of a colleague who worked undercover in the attempt to stop and apprehend paedophiles. I have no time for those, especially the politicians who bear down hard on the individuals who cross the line when working for and in the interests of state or make mistakes which adversely affect the bystander, while government, parliament  and other state institutions work with and tolerate those who now make billions exploiting and destroying people in their thousands and tens of thousands and as we daily see in places such as Syria and Aden,  and a few make billions from millions.

The story of Joe Carter is important because I suggest it shows  great insight into the reality of the ordinary men and women who join the police or enlist in the armed services and are recruited to serve their country by doing  unconventional work  behind the scenes working with those only interested in developing their own power and wealth  by any means without disregard for the harm which they do, using  people, destroying the lives of others and this includes their families.  There is no justification for tolerating these people and while it is often true that if you take down one crime boss or crew leader others are only too ready to stem in it is essential the state does focus on stopping a s many as possible while at the same time also looking at ways to prevent individuals being drawn into this cycle of evil.

There are also similarities between Joe Carter, (the Undercover Police officer whose book is separately reviewed) and David Cornwall although the direction in which their lives has taken appears to be very different and where the individual good they did is likely to remain secret and they both must spend the rest of their lives living with the unintended consequences of the roles they performed in the interests of the state.  This is where David Cornwall has been able to work off his occupational life through his fictional writings and to have an authorised version of life which attempts to indicate something of how life and work may have become entwined.

One similarity is restlessness and a resistance to conventional existence and which we know in the instance of David Cornwall-Le Carré this comes from the personality and lifestyle of his father and the devastating impact of his mother walking out on her two children. David left public school early and his expedition to further education in another country with a different language was also short term. There is no suggestion of a military career after national service and that he was able in effect to buy his way into Oxford University although this is no different from the majority whose route is the private school and money. At Oxford, the state came calling and to the surprise of everyone after starting with the good life of the Tory drinking club fine dining Brideshead good life which David Cameron and friends made infamous once more with their rise to power. David Cornwall became an active socialist joining the appropriate university clubs with the purpose of spying on his new comrades.

He was forced to leave because of changes in his father’s financial fortunes, although beforehand on a holiday in Switzerland where it is said he developed a relationship with the priest, historian and rector of Lincoln College, Vivian H H Green who was used to create the fictional character of George Smiley. David Cornwall’s first attempt at earning a living was at a private school in Somerset where the grandfather of his fiancée and future wife was a member of the teaching staff. The couple married in 1954 as I was in my last year at private school, struggling with learning Latin to enter for the sixth form, university and priesthood!  David then was keen to return to Oxford and complete the degree which he did demonstrating the character and determination of a young man with a wife and not having to pretend being what he was not. But was he really cut out to be a school master when he took work again at Eton.  This was not to last long and he was recruited full time to MI5 and then MI6. He was 26 years of age while aged 19 I was coming to end of my spell working in local government in the finance department of Croydon County Borough Council, occasionally playing chess for the social club team and playing a washboard at an annual social. Visits to Cy Laurie and other Soho area Jazz clubs declined and I cannot remember when I first joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.  David was best man for Robin Cook and Robin had been for him and one wonders if he ever spied on him officially.

Interestingly the books author comments that David quickly found that the technical people at MI5 were the creatives which begs the question at what point did the service begin the sophisticated psychological profiling of the 1980’s and at point were tests evolved for use by international finance and business. When he joined, there was no formal training and pay was £1100, still substantial more than the team of ex WW1 and II veterans with whom I had been attached as office junior of Middlesex House one side of the bridge from what is now the purpose-built spy HQ.

In those days those foreign nationals working for the CIA, the Soviets, Mossad who were attached to an embassy were talked of illegals but were also said to have been identified. There was no foreign travel for the masses, and those coming in and out of the British homeland could be monitored, rationing and taking British money out of the country was still controlled. David is said to have disclosed that the man responsible for combatting the soviets arrived at ten popped out for breakfast, returned briefly before a good long lunch with a contact and after a brief repose in the office teatime marked home time. I was also familiar with this kind of behaviour which echoed that of the section head at Middlesex House who also arrived around ten, took long lunches, followed by afternoon naps in his office and left early.

I was also struck by the reported comment of Peter Wright who described the 1950’s as the years of fun. In 1961 when I guess  MI5  opened  a proper file on me after I met a range of  Home Office and Met people at Scotland yard with George Clark to discuss the quarter of million people we hoped would make the last day of the Aldermaston March and I wanted to encourage as many as we could to join us on the first leg of the Direct Action Committee six week march through England before Scotland and direct action  on  and by Holy Loch,  while  I and others  suspected  that Ralph Scheonman who appeared to control Bertrand  Russell  was CIA, planned in secret a demonstration at the American Embassy. He reappeared again during the so called Arab Spring.

David Cornwall is said to have reminded that at the time there was a significant difference between the Home Office led MI5 which was full of middle and some working-class people while the Foreign Office MI6 was middle class to aristocratic.  One also assumes the War Office which carried on until 1964 when the Ministry of Defence first emerged was also more Officers and MI6 than Len Deighton’s hero.  McClean defected in the early 1950’s with Burgess while was not until 1963 and the Keeper of Royal Art was not out until 1979 by Margaret Thatcher soon after she came to power with Harold Wilson using the Royal Prerogative to prevent prosecution and prevent public awareness. 

One of David’s professional interests was the Communist Party of Great Britain where an agent had infiltrated first as a shorthand typist and worked her way to a position of trust which enabled her to pass documents and information to the Service.  The bread and butter work involved vetting those seeking to work directly for government or to or the in-defence industries, referring to a shop steward making application to work for Hawker Siddeley. A postman seen reading the Daily Worker was investigated. It is not clear if David reported his then wife who after seeing the film On the Beach in 1959 immediately joined the CND.

 I cannot now remember if our very small CND group in Wallington, a handful of married couples, plus a teacher who joined without his wife, all parents, also picketed the film when it was shown as the local Odeon although I remember how self-conscious we felt when handing out leaflets standing with a hold a placard in the High Street. By 1960 as his first child, a boy was born, David sat the Foreign Office exam required for joining MI6, while I was in prison at Stafford refusing to enter an oral recognisance not to undertake further Satyagraha civil disobedience enabling with Peter C Brown (Smallcreep’s Day) to plan our opposition to locating Polaris Submarine on the Clyde where a first counter strike would obliterate Glasgow.

David’s new office location was secret to the British Public but a succession of British double agents presumably passed the information to the Kremlin. When recently it is said a Trident carrying submarine on trial before starting another prolonged underwater vigil loss contact with the testing fired unarmed missile understandably sent in the direction east west not to worry the Russia and had to be destroyed, the Government argued could not disclose any details to Parliament  or to the Defence Select Committee of the House of Commons in closed session  because  it was a matter of national security, the White House was confirming the problem had occurred, the details of which would become known if the American Congress or senate set up a  committee of inquiry. The British government decision was in fact political and nothing to do with national security.

As a recruit to the service there does appear to have been the kind of training we have come to now expect from learning to use guns and the ability to kill in unarmed combat with a single blow as well as the skill in recruiting and running agents in other lands together with the ability to live without detection as someone else. This was the sexy spying which evidently David longed for and has been noted did undercover police officer, Joe Carter admits he found his work exciting. David arrived in Germany as I was deciding to either become full time organiser for the London region CND or go to Ruskin College. No sooner had David joined the service that his first novel was published and he was on the first phase of morphing into John Le Carré

David’s role was that of a legitimate Foreign Office representative but interestingly his work was to detect underground Nazi cells at the same time as the British and USA governments were continuing to recruit former Nazis because of their knowledge and skills as well as placing them in positions of power and influence in what was then West Germany. This is the first time I have come across an admission that the secret services were also interested in the activities of the far right as they had been in the left.

This was also a time when the British Prime Minister came to Germany for support for joining the Common Market but our recent allies and defeated foe joined forces to keep us out as they are now wanting to punish when a narrow majority of the population want us to leave. A picture is painted by the biographer of diplomats bemoaning their loss of tribal power and status in the days of the Empress and Emperors with its locked in social life and the winds of sixties change yet to blow but I wonder was there really no drugs, sex and rock and roll? Turning page was the answer as David had to turn to Special branch for suitable addresses when playing host to a group of future German leaders on a visit to London.

David also still had time to write and in 1963 came the Spy who came in out of the cold, the Vassal affair. John Profumo - the Secretary of State for War who brazenly lied to Parliament about his affair with Christine Keeler, her friend, Mandy Rice Davies, aristocratic house party weekends and the death of Stephen Ward. Profumo redeemed what the Establishment considered the great sin of being caught out by withdrawing from public life and working for the Toynbee Hall Settlement in East London just beyond the citadel of capitalism.

Meanwhile I had switched from Politics and Economics at Ruskin to child care social work at Barnett House studying criminology with Nigel Walker then at Nuffield. Ronnie, David’s notorious father turned up at his home out of the still murky blue.  A little while later he left the country and it is suggested perhaps a photo of him and the Krays was a factor.

Th Spy who came who came in from the Cold rocketed David into international writing stardom but his marriage was ending, President Kennedy went to Berlin and committed to American solidarity which continued until the era of President Obama and we shall shortly know the implications of the election of President Trump.  I went on a college study trip to Sweden and the land of Summer with Monika, Wild Strawberries a Scenes of a Marriage. Kim Philby presence in Moscow became public. George Blake was intended to be in the Scrubs for another forty years.

It was at this point in his life that David was under pressure to become Le Carré in more ways than full time when he became teamed up with James Kennaway, the creator of Tunes of Glory and where the film starred Alec Guinness one of Britain’s great screen actors who was subsequently to become George Smiley. Kennaway until his premature death aged 40is portrayed as an indiscriminate a sex addict and as with all addicts the pressure is put on those around to join in. This was the aspect of the book which the Daily Mail featured with the headline emphasis that Le Carré had a relationship Kennaway’s wife and which involved him allegedly telling her that he had only married under instruction of MI5, a means of moving in left wing circles! It can be said that while all power corrupts, the expected lifestyle of those who achieve international success and fame will destroy unless the individual is particularly strong willed and self-disciplined.

Whereas sexual morality remained a subject of strong debate in this period, those with incomes over £15000 faced super tax of around 90% on both sides of the Atlantic were free to find ways to limit their liability and which created the new industry of legitimate tax avoidance. A few years later I attended a social function for a group of Federal, State and County officials from the USA visiting Britain to view the new Social Services of 1971 but their main interest was over the fact that we were dedicated public servants paying our taxation dues whereas they boasted about not paying any tax with one of the best ways to offset the liability by making profit from rented slum housing. One aspects for achieving the same objective was to become in effect stateless, not staying anywhere to pay the required sums with David making his home in Greece for the Summer and Austria in the Winter while he worked out how to cope with being in demand and the money. He became a citizen of the world but a prisoner of the writing celebrity machine with his wife complaining that everyone commanded his time and attention apart from his family.

What interests me in terms of the character of a spy in fact and in fiction is that his attraction to the ‘fast’ life of others continued with his relationship with James Kennaway replaced by a new relationship with the then young conservative politician Alan Clark who was open about his tendency to fornicate with anyone interested irrespective of age and their relationship. Clark is also reported to have been friends with the fascist right. There were others mentioned in the rest of the book whose lifestyle was closer to Ronnie Cornwall than David. I like the way Sisman reveals something of the catalogue of David’s history of infidelities without the kind of prurient and detailed accounting which other contemporaries have compromised under pressure to make their autobiography/biography commercially attractive to the avaricious media.

A constant theme throughout the life story is that of man brought up without the close or in fact any direction from a traditional stereotype mother, housekeeper/wife and yet and a fascination about those who as adults treated women with ruthless disregard with their own gratifications and ambitions predominating.  Le Carré writes an article about Philby who by all accounts was a killer sociopath but needed women to accept and adore as he was. Le Carré is said to have clashed with Graham Green, another spy man writer, over their respective assessment of Philby, the man and his treachery,

While it can be said David, Cornwall had quickly become John Le Carré, the international literary superstar, it is evident he maintained contact with former secret service colleagues mentioning that his former boss Sir Roger Hollis, then under investigation visited his home as a safe house, while another former colleague was used to fact check for several books. While Le Carré also commenced to be courted my other superstars (although Richard Burton’s attempt to introduce the couple to Elizabeth Taylor misfired) of greater interest to me than the invite to join one of the Queen’s get know people in the media eye lunches, is the information that he had contact with the ex-Sherborne school boy who became chairman of the Thatcher think tank. (Centre for Policy studies) whose influence on British economic policy and the balance between public service and private wealth accumulation has been profound.

Le Carré was then entertained to a lunch of 24 by the President of Italy with David having the impression the other guest were members of government and senior people from the intelligences services. I remember once saying to the Director of Social Services of Newcastle after he had been appointed the only non-politician Commissioner to the European Parliament, much to the amazement of local authority associations who had nominated Chief Executives, if he was enjoying eating in Europe’s finest restaurants to which he just said Palaces.

In contrast when Le Carré went to Russia for the first time his suitcase disappeared for two days, his room was searched whenever he was not there. Fortunately, after leaving a visit in the early hours, not knowing where he was or how to get back to the hotel he could wake the surveillance team outside who got him home. In contrast    meeting with post graduates one asked about defining the boundary between individual conscience and social responsibility which is an issue throughout his work and then the students confided they had secretly watched the TV series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  Another event recalled with lasting pleasure was when he had been invited to lunch with the Russian dissident Joseph Brodsky who had been imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital and Siberian hard labour camps just as he was informed he been given a Nobel Prize.

The visit and book about Russia (The Russia House) marked the ending of Russia’s ability to control its empire and like the UK it has taken decades to adjust and seek its new place in a world where China has become the main challenger to the self-appointed world power of the USA.  By the mid 1990’s he was being asked what he could not write about, although as Sisman has pointed out his subject matter while centred on the Cold War had been wider. Interestingly it is reported that David Cornwall had prepared a list of countries where he anticipated there would be issues which would command international attention including Libya, El Salvador, Cambodia and Angola. Not on the list is what has become the main threat to international stability the rise of religious fundamentalism between Muslims and everyone else. This is not to imply he had not considered the subject but he recognised that for a writer to engage with the subject of religious belief arouses deeper passions than political ideologies in terms of the hold on most people who will accept the imposition of a political ideology on the same basis they will accept the power and its abuse by those who able to take and hold power without some ideological pretence.

According to Adam Sisman, David has remained rightly, in my judgement, critical of the decision of Salman Rushdie to first challenge the fundamental beliefs of some Muslims and then to make himself into something of a public martyr, whereas  since those at Charlie Abdo became physical martyrs and as I have suggested at the outset of my  writing on Spies and the world of intelligence gathering the motives and subsequent behaviour of Edward Snowden can be questioned and where his period of stay in Russia has been only recently extended following the election of President Trump.

Just when I reached the point in biography of wondering if there is anything more of interest to me or relevant to my focus Sisman mentions that David consulted his neighbour Anthony Samson whose books on the changing nature of power in Britain I have read since his first work on the subject, Anatomy of Britain, was published and purchased in 1962, with updates in 1965, 1971, 1982, 1992 and 2004.  However, these works now appear parochial in a time of global organisations and global power, especially having just quickly read through the 200 pages on what is presently known on the membership of Le Cercle.

David,  because of having become Le Carré, moved legitimately among circles we describe today as fashionable and of the Establishments of many lands who courted his attention, and the opposite of his father who used other people’s money in an attempt to gain favour, and although I believe the book confirms that his inherited personality dramatically reshaped by the departure of his mother was eminently suitable for the double dealing life of a spy, and although some may claim that in total his books are an indictment of the way states of different political structures and  values use people for the personal ambitions and interests of those currently with the power, at the core I gained the impression  of a thinking patriot, a sincere and important writer and a serious man, a  man who understood people and how the world worked.

David’s claim, however that he had only spent five minutes in the Service during a period when a few of those with whom he worked also worked for the Russians and then spent thirty years using his wits to create books about a service he had only a lay person’s knowledge is at best I suggest questionable. He continued to be in demand for social meetings with former and current spymasters from the Soviets, in the USA and home.

The book also describes his journey from child, to adventuring young man, adventuring adult, international literary superstar, and then the challenges and changes of aging, the funerals of parents, a wife, of friends and associates and of what to do about the accumulation of written records and other material, giving hundreds of boxes to the Oxford Bodleian because Oxford remains his spiritual home.  As I read the book I was struck by the extent of his continuing success and my repeated failures but also some similarities which I suspect most those of us who reach the late seventies face, reconciling an increasing long life with the prospects of oblivion but with still things we would like still to be experience and questions to be answered. I am wrestling how best to relocate the many boxes of records and papers acquired overran approaching right decades.

Another consequence of longevity is meeting people whose impressions are based on a time past time meetings, a past association or relayed gossip or in the instance of David confuse Le Carré with being him. Worse still those who have no idea of what we have experienced or achieved or who suffer from questionable amnesia.

Because of my own visits to Gibraltar in 2003 and 2004 and the years of research about the family homeland I was not surprised by the location of A Delicate Truth and hope David has visited and understood that Gib has become the Berlin of the Mediterranean although I wonder if the plan for the Rock to become the new Hong Kong will be adversely affected by Brexit.

The book concludes with the starling admission that David well into his 80’s is now writing with as great a belief and enthusiasm as he ever has, and long this may be so. I hope he will also put pen to paper about the need for the Labour Party to unite in the face of the rise of the far right in Europe and in the USA, and it was also interesting to read that he gave up on the Party during the Blair years voting again in 2015. I wonder what he makes of the approach and policies of Jeremy Corbyn?