Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

This book is a survey of ten of the most interesting spy cases of the twentieth century. It does not claim to be an exhaustive account of the century’s espionage, and the focus is specifically on those who spied for another country, one to which they were not attached or had no allegiance to by birth, citizenship or employment. The ten cases were chosen to illustrate the full range of motivations for spying, such as financial gain, political ideology, dissatisfaction with society or misplaced loyalty to friends or countries, as well as the circumstances that may coerce someone into committing espionage.

Spying stretches back to ancient civilisations, with various examples from ancient Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire. One of the first major spy networks in more recent times was that organised by Sir Francis Walsingham in Elizabethan England. In the twentieth century, which saw two world wars, the Cold War and numerous other conflicts, the gathering of intelligence against enemies became more sophisticated and ruthless as the political stakes were raised and the technology of espionage developed more rapidly. There was also a massive growth of peacetime spying: knowing what your potential enemy was doing in peacetime became as important as defeating that enemy in a war. By the time that spies were being arrested within the CIA and FBI in the 1990s, the world of espionage was almost unrecognisable from that ninety years prior. The ten spy cases presented here, ranging from Mata Hari at the beginning of the century to Aldrich Ames at the end, illustrate the development of espionage and showcase the most interesting personalities involved.

The celebrity exotic dancer Mata Hari was caught up in the paranoia of World War One, when the fear of spies was suddenly pervasive. Other spies from the first few decades of the century were more defined by political ideology and its impact on political events, mainly the rise of communism and the spread of fascism. Some, such as the Cambridge Five, Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were greatly influenced by political idealism, while others were more focused on their own gain, loyal to themselves and their own intellect more than anything else. As the divide between the West and the East widened, John Vassall experienced the Soviets’ newly developed blackmailing techniques, and those involved in the Profumo Affair were manipulated and played largely due to their own carelessness. For Aldrich Ames, political alliances and loyalty mattered little; money was all.

It should be noted that this book includes the first in-depth analysis of the memoirs of Anthony Blunt, a member of the Cambridge Five ring of spies and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. His memoirs, publicly released in the summer of 2009, give Blunt’s considered view of his espionage, treachery and public disgrace. As a former spy and an intellectual, Blunt is adept at not divulging incriminating details, but in the emotion of old age, in the midst of his own ruin, he gives us more than he perhaps realises, with rare honesty and emotion.

As late as 1999, a tiny elderly woman named Melita Norwood, aged 89, was exposed as a former Soviet spy, with some saying that her work for the Russians was as important as that of Kim Philby or Klaus Fuchs. This is debatable, but the frail, bespectacled lady filmed outside her cottage for the television news was far from the popular image of a spy. Her spying had been mainly done in the 1940s and contributed to the Soviet atomic effort. She was not prosecuted, as she was so old and it was so long after the event, with the Soviet Union then extinct for almost a decade. But it is also possible that any prosecution would have embarrassed the British secret services because of security lapses they allowed to happen decades before.

The importance of public opinion should not be underestimated. The public’s view of its own security is paramount in the minds of elected government officials in democratic countries, although in totalitarian regimes security information is largely kept hidden from the public. It is certainly the case that the anti-German paranoia in France and Britain led to the extreme way in which Mata Hari was dealt with, for example. Likewise, the Cambridge Five changed the way that treachery was viewed in Britain and its secret services forever, and the anti-communist feeling in the United States from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s affected greatly the attitudes of the FBI, CIA and American public opinion in general.

Throughout the twentieth century, the public’s interest in espionage has been reflected in fiction and films about spies, which have been popular ever since such books as Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands and William Le Queux’s novels were written before and during World War One, playing up to the anti-German feeling. Graham Greene’s spy novels, which were informed by Greene’s own experiences as an intelligence agent, would also later have a huge impact, as would the work of John le Carré (David Cornwell, also an intelligence agent) and Len Deighton. But perhaps the greatest influence on the way that espionage grew in the public consciousness in the West were the novels of Ian Fleming, who worked in Naval Intelligence during World War Two, and the resulting James Bond film franchise. More recently, Tom Clancy’s novels have created a blueprint in the minds of the public about the CIA.

This book contains the facts about true spy cases which are often more incredible, thrilling and complex than fiction. The motivations of those who spied or were accused of spying for an enemy power in the twentieth century are often as interesting as the events themselves and key to understanding how a person may become a traitor. Childhood experiences, political and social idealism, hatred of the establishment and a keen need for adventure and thrills are among the main factors in turning to espionage for a foreign power. The promise of financial reward, entrapment by blackmail or simply propitious circumstances may also play a part in certain cases. The reader must make his or her own final judgements when it comes to motivations, with the known facts serving as tools to that end. The survey offered here is an attempt to understand the reasons why these people spied (or if they spied, in one or two cases) against the social and political world in which they lived, as well as hopefully being an interesting read too.