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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
< Few professions comprise such an eclectic mix of personalities as that of intelligence. The characteristics required to thrive as a spy – ideological conviction, ego, the ability to manipulate, deceive and remain cold – have created some of the most compelling and enduring figures in history. In The Intelligent Spy's Handbook, Robin Renwick provides an overview of the biggest names in the world of espionage, with a wonderful eye for the details that bring each of them to life. We hear, for instance, of how Kim Philby, to have fun at the expense of his colleagues, kept a photograph in his office of Mount Ararat – taken from the Soviet side. We see how the audacious, far-fetched ideas of the naval officer Ian Fleming, aside from creating the most famous of all spies, may have actually inspired the real-life Operation Mincemeat. And the darker side of some of our more heroic stories is exposed, from the chemical castration of Alan Turing to the personal sacrifices Oleg Gordievsky made to become Britain's most successful Soviet mole. Whether you're a seasoned veteran or a first-time reader, this book is the perfect primer on the best-known individuals in the history of intelligence.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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v‘We have been fortunate to have enjoyed the services of some very interesting spies.’
Maurice Oldfield, MI6
‘I was brought up on Kim.’
Harold ‘Kim’ Philbyvi
Contents
Introduction
This book begins with the story of the supposedly infamous Francis Walsingham, celebrated by Edmund Spenser in ‘The Faerie Queene’ but with a dire reputation since, and of the genuinely infamous Sir George Downing, creator of Downing Street, described by his deputy, Samuel Pepys, as an utter villain. It is a story of spies turning into writers and of writers and poets, including John Milton, moonlighting as spies and of the relationships between them.
The first of all great spy storytellers, Rudyard Kipling, published Kim in 1900. Erskine Childers wrote his bestseller, the 1903 novel TheRiddleoftheSands, to alert his readers to the danger of a German invasion, only then to turn into a traitor who was executed not by the British but by the Free Irish government. Other notable employees of the intelligence branches of the British government were the poets and playwrights Christopher Marlowe and Andrew Marvell, Cromwell’s other spymaster, John Thurloe, and Wellington’s code breaker, George Scovell. x
Thereafter, you will encounter a leading practitioner of the ‘Great Game’ against the Russians in Central Asia who became The SpyWhoDisappeared, while a Colonel Bailey got himself hired by the Bolshevik secret police to hunt for an anti-Bolshevik Englishman, in fact himself.
There followed T. E. Lawrence, who achieved far more than most but romanticised a lot about it; Compton Mackenzie, who favoured poisoning the pro-German King of Greece; Sidney Reilly, the so called ‘ace of spies’, who came to a sticky end plotting against the Bolsheviks; the code breaker Admiral ‘Blinker’ Hall; Mansfield Cumming, the first ‘C’; Somerset Maugham, William Stephenson, who employed the code name ‘Intrepid’; the very professional Fitzroy Maclean and Ian Fleming; rank amateurs like Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene; and, most courageous of all, Oleg Gordievsky. Was Arthur Ransome a Bolshevik agent? If he wasn’t, his wife Evgenia Shelepina (Trotsky’s secretary) certainly was.
Greene was so obsessed by espionage that four of his novels were about it. But why did he side with Philby? And why did so many of his former colleagues in MI6 dislike the works of John le Carré? And how did Ian Fleming create a hero, based on himself, whose exploits proved capable of attracting seven billion viewings?
Other features of this story are a couple of femmesfatales–Catherine Walston (for Graham Greene) and Ann Rothermere (for Ian Fleming). It is hard to think of a more extraordinary cast of characters.
The intelligent spy will wish to know something about the adventures of his or her illustrious predecessors, factual or fictional, given, as this will show, the frequent crossovers between the two. xiWho can doubt, for instance, that Ian Fleming’s SMERSH is functioning in Putin’s Russia and beyond today?
Any book about our latter day spy/writers must pay homage to their biographers: Norman Sherry for Graham Greene; John Pearson, Andrew Lycett and Nicholas Shakespeare for Ian Fleming; and Adam Sisman for John le Carré; also to the most distinguished historian of Britain’s intelligence services, Christopher Andrew.
Members of the British Foreign Service were and are trained to refer to their colleagues in the intelligence services as ‘Our Friends’. In the course of my diplomatic career, I received a lot of help from them; hence this book in their honour.xii
Chapter I
Walsingham
The first British spy to exercise a hypnotic fascination over the public and writers of his time, as well as on his appalled opponents in Spain and France, was the most ruthless and successful British spymaster of them all.
Francis Walsingham was born in 1532 on the estate near Chislehurst in Kent of a prominent and very well connected family. One uncle was Lieutenant of the Tower of London; another became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He studied law at Cambridge before travelling in Europe then returning to continue his studies at Gray’s Inn. A devout Protestant, he left Britain to join other English Protestant expatriates in Switzerland when the Catholic Queen Mary succeeded her brother, Edward VI, in 1553. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and other Protestant notables accused of treason were burnt at the stake, and Protestants were further horrified when Mary married the future King Philip II of Spain.
Walsingham returned to serve the new Queen as soon as the Protestant Elizabeth succeeded Mary, her half-sister, when she 2died in 1558. He was elected to Parliament in the following year. He became active in gathering support for the Huguenots (Protestants) in France. By 1569, he was working with William Cecil to counter Catholic plots against Elizabeth.
In that year, the ‘Northern Rebellion’ was led by the Catholic Earls of Westmoreland and Northumberland, seeking to depose Elizabeth and replace her with the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been ousted from her monarchy in Scotland and had sought refuge under Elizabeth’s protection (and surveillance) in England. The rebels were defeated north of York. Northumberland was executed; Westmoreland fled abroad.
Walsingham’s first success was in uncovering the Ridolfi plot to organise a ten thousand man invasion of Britain to be led by the Spanish commander in the Netherlands and join forces with Catholic members of the nobility to kill Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. The torture of suspected conspirators was standard operating procedure at the time, questioned by no one in authority in England, France or Spain. Ridolfi, who confessed to being a papal spy, was interrogated at Walsingham’s house. The Duke of Norfolk, implicated in the plot, was executed. The Spanish Ambassador was expelled. Philip II of Spain supported the plot, as did Mary, increasing Elizabeth’s suspicions about her.
In 1570, Walsingham was appointed Ambassador to France to support the Huguenots in their negotiations with King Charles IX. He also was supposed to continue negotiations for a possible marriage between Elizabeth and Charles’s younger brother, the Duke of Anjou. The plan was dropped because of Anjou’s Catholicism. An alternative match was proposed with Charles’s younger brother, 3but Walsingham reported him as being ugly and ‘void of a good humour’. Walsingham was against the whole idea of a French marriage for the Queen and worked instead for a defensive military alliance with France against Spain, which was concluded in the Treaty of Blois in 1572.
Walsingham had formed close friendships with the prominent Huguenot families in Paris at the time. The Huguenots were supporting the revolt of their fellow Protestants in the Spanish controlled Netherlands. On the night of 24–25 August 1572, the regime of King Charles IX and Catherine de’ Medici unleashed the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre against all the leading Huguenots. They were attacked by the Paris mob and subjected to targeted assassinations. Gaspard de Coligny, the military and political leader of the Huguenots, and the other prominent Huguenots were hunted down and killed. Over the next several weeks, the massacre was extended to the countryside and other towns.
Walsingham found himself powerless to save Huguenot friends, who appealed to him for help. The poet and courtier, Sir Philip Sidney, who also opposed a French marriage, was able to seek refuge in his embassy (he later married Walsingham’s daughter). Several Huguenots were killed as they tried to do so. Walsingham never forgot the scenes he witnessed then. The experience embedded in him an enmity to Catholics for the rest of his life and a determination to stop at nothing to protect his Queen from further Catholic plots against her.
Nor were his fears on that score unfounded. For although Elizabeth had sponsored a religious settlement under which Catholics were permitted to worship privately, in February 1570 Pope Pius 4V issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis excommunicating Elizabeth, effectively putting a price on her head and purportedly depriving her of sovereignty over England and Ireland. The Pope and the Spanish government had been outraged by English support for the Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands, of which Walsingham was a strong advocate.
Walsingham returned to London in 1573. He was appointed joint principal secretary, a position that became that of Secretary of State. Walsingham’s close associations were with the new merchant class rather than with the nobility, many of whom were still Catholics. He was a strong supporter of their overseas ventures, including Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe, at the conclusion of which the Queen dined with and knighted him on his ship.
Drake was given a privateer’s commission by the Queen, allowing him and his cousin, John Hawkins, to attack Spanish targets, mainly in the West Indies, as they wished. When the Spanish Ambassador was granted an audience with Elizabeth, he was outraged to see her wearing a necklace looted by Drake or Hawkins from a Spanish treasure ship. The great historian of English exploration worldwide, Richard Hakluyt, dedicated his first work to Walsingham.
Walsingham advocated direct intervention in support of the Protestant revolt in the Netherlands, but his fellow Secretary of State, William Cecil, was more cautious, advocating an attempt at mediation, which Elizabeth supported. William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, was by nature more conciliatory than Walsingham and the founding member of the great Cecil dynasty, members of which held senior positions in successive British governments for the next three centuries. But he agreed with Walsingham about the potentially mortal danger posed to the Queen by Mary, Queen of Scots. 5
When Charles IX died in France and was succeeded by his brother Henry III, the idea was revived of a match between the Queen and the younger brother, the Duke of Anjou, who was portraying himself as a protector of the Protestants and a potential leader for the Dutch.
In 1581, Walsingham was sent to Paris to pursue this and the possibility of an alliance with the French. But the French wanted first a marriage, then an alliance. Walsingham insisted on an alliance first and returned to London without an agreement. He remained as opposed as ever to the marriage, as Anjou was a Catholic and likely heir to the French throne. As Elizabeth was childless, such a marriage could end up with the French monarchy in control.
Walsingham compared the proposed marriage to that between the Protestant Henry of Navarre and the Catholic Margaret of Valois, which had contributed to triggering the St Bartholomew massacre, ‘the most horrible spectacle’ he had ever witnessed. He suggested that similar riots might happen in Britain if it went ahead. Elizabeth did not seem to mind his uncompromising advice, describing him in a letter to him as ‘her Moor [who] cannot change his colour!’
Tensions continued over policy towards France, with Walsingham distrustful of the English Ambassador, Edward Stafford, who he suspected of being in the pay of Spain, as indeed he was, due to his gambling debts. Walsingham accordingly fed disinformation to Stafford for him to pass on to Madrid.
In 1578, the pro-English Regent of Scotland, who Walsingham supported, was overthrown. Walsingham was sent to Scotland on a mission he did not expect to succeed and it didn’t. Mary’s son, James VI, in whose favour she had been obliged to abdicate, told 6Walsingham that he was an ‘absolute King’ in Scotland. Walsingham’s response was that ‘young princes [are] carried into great errors upon an opinion of the absoluteness of their royal authority and do not consider that when they transgress the bounds and limits of the law, they leave to be kings and become tyrants’. A mutual defence pact with Scotland later was agreed in the 1586 Treaty of Berwick.
The fate of the Protestants in France was ever present in Walsingham’s mind. He tracked down proselytising Catholic priests and supposed conspirators by employing informers and intercepting correspondence. His staff included the cryptographer, Thomas Phelippes, who was an expert in forgery and deciphering letters. Another staffer, Arthur Gregory, was an expert at breaking and reconstituting seals without detection. Edmund Campion was among those tortured, found guilty of conspiracy and publicly executed at Tyburn.
In 1582, letters from the Spanish Ambassador to contacts in Scotland were intercepted, revealing further plans for the Catholic powers to invade England and replace Elizabeth by Mary, Queen of Scots. Walsingham installed a spy in the French Embassy in London. Francis Throckmorton confessed under torture to being involved in this conspiracy. He was executed and another Spanish Ambassador was expelled. These activities led to regular hostile mentions of Walsingham in Mary’s decoded messages.
By 1584, England was militarily involved in supporting the Protestant revolt in the Netherlands. The assassination of the Protestant leader, William the Silent, increased fears that a similar attempt might be made to kill Elizabeth. Walsingham and Cecil, by now Lord Burghley, drew up the Bond of Association, committing all 7the signatories to executing anyone who attempted to usurp the throne or to assassinate the Queen. Mary herself was required to sign this document. She was placed in the strict custody of Sir Amias Paulet, a friend of Walsingham, in a moated manor house at Chartley, near Stafford. All her correspondence was to be opened. But Walsingham set a deliberate trap for Mary, who was led to believe that messages sent via a beer keg were secure.
In 1586, Anthony Babington wrote to Mary about a plot to free her and kill Elizabeth. Six noble gentlemen were pledged to kill Elizabeth. When Thomas Phelippes decoded Mary’s reply, he drew on it the portrait of a gallows. For Mary encouraged Babington, when the time was right, to ‘sett the six gentlemen to work’. Babington and his associates were rounded up and executed. Mary was put on trial by thirty-six commissioners, including Walsingham. During the trial, Mary pointed at Walsingham and said, ‘All of this is the work of Monsieur de Walsingham for my destruction.’ He replied that, as Secretary of State, he had done nothing but his duty.
She was found guilty and the warrant for her execution was drafted, but Elizabeth was reluctant to sign it, despite the urgings of Walsingham, who then wrote to Sir Amias Paulet urging him to find ‘some way to shorten the life’ of Mary to relieve the Queen of that burden, to which Paulet sent a splendid reply: ‘God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience, or leave so great a blot to my poor posterity, to shed blood without law or warrant.’
Walsingham pressed ahead with plans to execute Mary. On 1 February 1587, Elizabeth signed the warrant for the execution, entrusting it to the junior Secretary of State, William Davison. 8Davison passed the warrant to Cecil and a Privy Council convened by Cecil without informing the Queen agreed to carry out the sentence as soon as possible. Mary was beheaded shortly afterwards.
On hearing of the execution, Elizabeth claimed not to have sanctioned it and that the warrant should not have been passed on by Davison, who was imprisoned for over a year in the Tower. Walsingham was not at court in the weeks preceding the execution and appeared to suffer no signs of the Queen’s displeasure. In reality, she must by then have been glad to have this threat removed and to have had enough of Mary’s plotting.
King Philip II of Spain was outraged by England’s continuing support to the Protestant revolt against Spanish rule in the Netherlands and the attacks on Spanish settlements and ships in the Caribbean. Spain at the time, with its vast empire, was a far more important power than England, which did not yet have one. The French writer Exquemelin described the British privateers as descending on peaceful Spanish settlements in the Caribbean like wolves, terrorising the population, seizing valuables and looting churches.
From 1586, Walsingham had been receiving numerous reports from his agents in Europe in the merchant communities and foreign governments about Spanish plans for an invasion of England. A key source for him was Anthony Standen, a friend of the Tuscan Ambassador to Madrid, who was in the confidence of the Spanish government. Standen’s despatches to Walsingham were very revealing about Spanish intentions. In response, Walsingham personally supervised the reinforcement of Dover harbour. Through the British Ambassador in Turkey, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the 9Ottoman regime to attack Spain in the Mediterranean. More to the point, he kept in close touch with Spanish naval preparations.
In 1587, the intelligence about these showed the Spaniards concentrating a massive fleet in Cádiz for an attempted invasion of England. Walsingham was part architect of Sir Francis Drake’s attack on the Spanish fleet in its harbour, which Drake described as ‘singeing the King of Spain’s beard’. The attack frustrated Spanish plans until the following year.
The 130 ship Armada for the invasion of Britain, despatched by King Philip II of Spain, sailed from Lisbon at the end of May 1588, commanded by the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who had no previous naval experience. His instructions were to sail through the English Channel to link up with the Spanish forces in the Netherlands and escort an invasion force to overthrow Elizabeth and reinstate Catholicism in England, ending English support for the Dutch Republic and the attacks by English privateers on Spanish interests in the Americas.
Based in Plymouth, Drake had plenty of warning of the approach of the Spanish fleet, though the tale of him insisting on finishing his game of bowls was apocryphal. The Spanish fleet was attacked by faster and more manoeuvrable English ships throughout its passage through the Channel. On reaching Calais, it was attacked by Drake and Hawkins with fireships. In the ensuing battle of Gravelines, off the Dutch coast, it suffered heavy losses, with the surviving vessels obliged to escape into the North Sea and then to try to return to Spain around the north of Scotland and through the Irish Sea.
In her speech to the Earl of Dudley’s anti-invasion troops at Tilbury on 9 August 1588, Elizabeth was reported to have said, ‘We 10have been persuaded by some that are careful of our security [no doubt Cecil and Walsingham] to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery.’ But she did not distrust her loving people. ‘Let tyrants fear … I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King.’
On 18 August, following the dispersal of the Armada, the naval commander Lord Henry Seymour wrote to Walsingham, ‘You have fought more with your pen than many have in our English navy fought with their enemies.’
Walsingham died on 6 April 1590. He had received from his Queen a tablet engraved ‘An Allegory of the Tudor Succession’ inscribed:
The Queen to Walsingham this tablet sent
Mark of her people’s and her own content
Walsingham did not need to become a legend; he was one in his own lifetime. He was revered and celebrated by the leading Protestant writers and poets of his time, including his son in law, Philip Sidney. Edmund Spenser included a sonnet to Walsingham in his epic poem in honour of Elizabeth, ‘The Faerie Queene’. Sir John Davies and Thomas Watson, fellow Protestants, wrote eulogies about him, while the Jesuit Robert Persons denounced his persecution of Catholics as cruel and inhumane.
In his last novel, A Dead Man in Deptford, Anthony Burgess revived conspiracy theories about Walsingham, including his supposed involvement in the death of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who had been a spy but was killed in a tavern brawl 11after Walsingham’s death. The 1998 film Elizabeth, with a brilliant performance as Walsingham by Geoffrey Rush, portrayed him as irreligious, whereas he was a committed Protestant, as sexually ambiguous, for which no evidence exists, and as responsible for the murder of Mary of Guise, which he wasn’t. He featured also in Elizabeth: The Golden Age and in quite recent BBC and Channel Four series, generally as a dark and malevolent figure.
Inevitably, biographers of Mary, Queen of Scots have tended to disregard the evidence that she brought her disasters on herself. It was not Walsingham who got her dethroned in Scotland. Having married the questionable Lord Darnley, who plotted against her, she saw her Private Secretary David Rizzio stabbed to death, by a group including Darnley, in front of her. Darnley then was killed when his lodgings were destroyed by gunpowder; though he appeared to have been strangled, not blown up. The explosion was blamed on her next husband, to whom she may have been married forcibly, the Earl of Bothwell. The ‘casket letters’, attributed to Mary, purported to show an adulterous relationship with Bothwell before Darnley was killed.
Following an uprising by the Scottish nobles against the couple, Mary was forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, James VI. Having sought refuge in England, she was kept under surveillance in a series of castles and large houses but was allowed a substantial retinue, until plots relating to her started to be organised against Elizabeth. She did not have the wit to understand that her chances of survival depended on her discouraging plots against her cousin and captor, rather than encouraging them as, undoubtedly, she proceeded then to do. Walsingham and Cecil had good reason to regard her as a threat to the Queen. 12
Nevertheless, it was extraordinary for the chief spymaster to occupy a position of such power and influence in the state. Spies thereafter in Britain could expect to enjoy only far more humble roles and never really came back into such favour until more modern times.
Unlike his counterpart, William Cecil, Walsingham left no grand house or dynasty behind. Walsingham’s daughter, Frances, married the poet, scholar and soldier Philip Sidney. When Sidney was killed fighting courageously in the Netherlands, Walsingham paid for a funeral so grand that it nearly bankrupted him. He died owing the Crown the same amount of money as the Crown owed him.
Frances then married Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, who was a cousin of Elizabeth. Having been for a while the Queen’s favourite, his conduct became so outrageous that she concluded that he was ‘not of a nature to be ruled’. Having at first enjoyed some military success, after a failed command in Ireland, he attempted to seize power by organising a small rebellion in London that was easily suppressed, following which he was executed.
Chapter II
Cromwell’s Spies
The Stuart monarchs who succeeded Elizabeth, except for Charles II, paid little heed to Walsingham’s warning to the youthful James VI not to imagine that they had absolute power, resulting in the execution of Charles I and the ousting of James II.
Walsingham had no successors worthy of the name. But Cromwell was supported by two spymasters: John Thurloe and George Downing. Assisting them as Secretary of the Department of Foreign Tongues was the ardently republican poet John Milton, a talented linguist who, despite going blind, served in that position throughout the Cromwellian regime. Serving as one of his deputies was another poet, Andrew Marvell.
Milton was not much of a spy, being more of a polemicist. The blood had scarcely dried from the beheading of Charles I when he published a pamphlet justifying the regicide. His appointment as head of the bureau was a reward for Milton acting as the main propagandist for the regime, responding, for instance ‘in defence of the English people’ to a bestselling Royalist account of Charles I’s 14purported thoughts in his last days. He started one of his sonnets with the words ‘Cromwell, our chief of men’.
John Thurloe was a lawyer who had no involvement in the execution of Charles I, declaring that he ‘was altogether stranger to that fact, and to all the counsels about it’. But he was a supporter of Cromwell and was appointed as his Secretary of State in 1652. He became his head of intelligence and ran a network of agents in Europe and at home. He employed the revered mathematician John Wallis, who established a code breaking department. It was said of Wallis that he had no strong convictions; what motivated him was ‘sheer enjoyment in the art and ingenuity’ required to break codes.
Thurloe’s department broke up the ‘Sealed Knot’, a secret society of Royalists, and uncovered various other plots against Cromwell’s Protectorate. He made huge efforts to intercept communications with Charles II in exile and to find or plant an agent in his court there. In 1655, he became Postmaster General, consolidating his ability to intercept correspondence. He exposed Edward Sexby’s 1657 plot to assassinate Cromwell. He failed at first to act against another would be assassin, having received ‘so many advertisements’ of the kind, but he did then arrest Miles Sindercombe and his accomplices in time to forestall another attempt against Cromwell.
He was described as being ‘so much in all Cromwell’s secrets’ that it was very unsafe to attack him. Having ‘turned’ a member of the Sealed Knot, Sir Richard Willis, in concert with Richard Cromwell, Thurloe then devised a plan to decapitate the Royalists by trying to get Willis to lure the future King and his brothers, the Dukes of York and Gloucester, then in exile in Flanders, to attempt a landing in Sussex, supposedly to be greeted by Royalist supporters, when the intention was in fact to shoot them. 15
His deputy, Samuel Morland, by then ready to change sides, warned Charles’s entourage against this. Following the Restoration, in May 1660, Thurloe was charged with high treason but then released. He featured as a character in the play Cromwell by Victor Hugo and captured the imagination of many historical novelists, including Robert Wilton in Traitor’s Field and BBC television producers in their series By the Sword Divided.
Cromwell’s other spymaster, George Downing, was born in Ireland around 1623. He was a nephew of John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts. His father was a barrister and a Puritan. They moved to Salem in Massachusetts for a while in 1638. He graduated from Harvard in the first graduating class there in 1642. He then returned to England, becoming initially a chaplain in the regiment of one of Cromwell’s lieutenants, Colonel John Okey, who, reportedly, had sponsored his education. An ardent republican, he supported the execution in January 1649 of Charles I and then participated in the battles of Dunbar and Worcester. He was appointed Scoutmaster General of Cromwell’s forces in Scotland, in charge of collecting intelligence and managing a network of spies, then as a Teller of the Exchequer. In 1657, he was appointed Ambassador to the Dutch Republic.
As ambassador, he concentrated on intelligence gathering about Dutch intentions and Royalist plots. He kept his post during the political turmoil that followed the downfall of Cromwell’s heir, Richard, in a period in which a wit produced the following epigram:
Treason never Prospers
What’s the Reason?
If it doth Prosper
None dare call it Treason 16
George Downing solved the problem of turning his coat and reconciling with the future Charles II by leaking to him the despatches of his fellow Cromwellian spy, John Thurloe, including his plot to decapitate the Royalists. Downing declared that he had been misled by ideas ‘sucked in’ while he was in New England, of which he now ‘saw the error’. So, on the Restoration of Charles II, he was knighted and confirmed in his post, as well as being granted an area of land near St James’s Park, on which later he proceeded to build the present day Downing Street.
Under the Restoration, he organised spy rings to hunt down many of his former colleagues. He arranged the arrest in Holland of the regicides John Barkstead and Miles Corbet and of his former commander and sponsor, John Okey. Against Dutch protests, they were taken to London and executed. Samuel Pepys, though admitting that his conduct was ‘useful to the King’, described him as ‘a perfidious rogue’, adding that ‘all the world took notice of him for a most ungrateful villain for his pains’.
In March 1665, the increasing mercantile rivalry with the Netherlands and the seizure of Dutch ships precipitated the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The war party in London was led by the future James II. Downing, who kept predicting that the Dutch would give way and even tried to engineer a coup against their leader, Johan de Witt, was expelled from the Netherlands for espionage. He was more successful in advocating the seizure from the Dutch of their colony of New Amsterdam, the present day New York. To this day, two streets in New York are named after him.
The war turned into a disaster. In June 1667, Samuel Pepys, administrator of the Royal Navy, lamented in his diary the lack of intelligence about and preparation against the successful Dutch attack on 17English warships in the Thames and Medway, when many of them were set on fire while still at anchor. This was acknowledged at the time to have been ‘the most serious defeat the Royal Navy has ever had in its home waters’.
On returning to the Netherlands in 1671, Downing was chased out of the country by an enraged mob. Having secured the piece of land he coveted, adjoining St James’s Park, existing houses on the site were pulled down and he employed Sir Christopher Wren to build houses along the north side of the cul-de-sac. To maximise profit, the houses were built with poor foundations on the marshy ground. Winston Churchill wrote of Downing Street that No. 10 and the other houses there were ‘shaky and lightly built by the profiteering contractor whose name they bear’.
King George II presented the Downing Street house and one immediately behind it, overlooking the Horse Guards, to Sir Robert Walpole, who declined it as a gift but asked that it should be made available to him and his successors as First Lords of the Treasury, the title that became that of Prime Minister. Once the two houses had been joined together, Walpole took up residence there in 1735.
The United Kingdom always claims not to have been successfully invaded since 1066. But on 5 November 1688, William of Orange, who had married Mary Stuart, niece of Charles II, landed with a Dutch army at Brixham in Devon. His fleet of 450 ships was far larger than the Spanish Armada and he landed with forty thousand men. He had, it was true, been formally invited to do so in a letter delivered to him in June by the ‘Immortal Seven’ Protestant leaders (six nobles and one Bishop) to save the country from the Catholic James II. The self appointed Seven had written that they had ‘great reason to believe, we shall be every day in a worse condition … 18there are nineteen parts out of twenty of the people throughout the kingdom who are desirous of a change’ and who would willingly contribute to it if they had protection in their rising.
So this change of regime was less of a conspiracy than most, except that, before launching his invasion, William secured an assurance from James’s ablest commander, Lord Churchill of Eyemouth, that he was a Protestant and ‘you have but to command me’. William declared on landing that he had done so to protect Protestantism and the liberties of England, and Churchill encouraged Protestant army officers to defect to him. In camp, still nominally on James’s side, on 24 November Churchill slipped away with four hundred officers and men, effectively ending resistance to William. He wrote to James II that he was ‘actuated by a higher principle’. Churchill was rewarded by being made Earl, later Duke of Marlborough.
Chapter III
The Absence of Organised Intelligence
Throughout the eighteenth century, there was no formal intelligence organisation at the Admiralty. Intelligence was supplied in reports from British diplomatic missions, including that of Sir William Hamilton in Naples, the complaisant husband of Nelson’s mistress, Emma, who served in the post for thirty-six years. Through the Post Office, the authorities could intercept correspondence, including opening diplomatic pouches. Captured code books were another source. But it could take weeks or even months to transfer information to commanders at sea. Nelson’s ships could signal to each other and to shore installations but no further than that. So Nelson had to rely above all on his frigates for information, constantly complaining that he never had enough of them.
A more serious effort to collect intelligence was made from 1782 by the former naval officer and Under Secretary at the Home Office Evan Nepean, who then served at the Admiralty until 1804. He paid for a network of spies to cover French naval activity at Toulon, Brest 20and along the Normandy coast. Nepean’s agents included Richard Etches, who originally spied for Catherine the Great before changing sides, with a detailed knowledge of the North Sea and Baltic countries. In 1798, Etches helped Sir Sidney Smith to escape from the Temple prison in Paris.
But Nelson missed the departure of Napoleon with the French fleet from Toulon and neither he nor the tiny staff at the Admiralty had any clear idea where it was heading – an episode that triggered the first documented inquiry into an intelligence failure. Nelson’s pursuit of it took three months before he finally found and destroyed the fleet in the battle of Aboukir Bay. Before Trafalgar, he chased the French fleet to the West Indies and back without ever making contact with it.
His frigates, however, were able to observe the huge French and Spanish fleet at anchor in Cádiz before it ventured out on 18 October 1805. Though Nelson had fewer ships, Admiral Villeneuve was not keen to risk his fleet, warning Napoleon that Nelson was not a normal adversary and might destroy them all. But with his Grande Armée ready to invade Britain, Napoleon insisted that Villeneuve must sail out to fight and sent another Admiral to replace him if he didn’t.
The exception to the norm throughout this long period of British naval and military commanders operating with no formal or organised intelligence gathering was the Duke of Wellington. In the Peninsula War against the French in Portugal, then Spain, Wellington did have an intelligence organisation and could count on a vast amount of information on French troop movements supplied to him by his Portuguese and then Spanish allies. He deployed his own ‘exploring’ reconnaissance officers and guides, and in Colonel 21(later General) George Scovell, he had an extremely gifted linguist. Scovell assembled a polyglot group of diverse nationalities recruited for their local knowledge and language skills called the Army Guides. They developed a system for intercepting and deciphering French communications.
In 1811, the French began using a code based on 150 numbers known as the Army of Portugal code. Scovell cracked the code within two days. At the end of the year, a new code called the Great Paris Code was sent to all French Army officers. This was based on 1,400 numbers and on an earlier French diplomatic code (the Grand Chiffre). By December 1812, when a letter from his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, installed as King of Spain, to Napoleon was intercepted, Scovell was able to decipher enough of his account of French operations and plans to make a vital contribution to Wellington’s victory in the battle of Vitoria in June 1813.
In 1815, however, Wellington had no foreknowledge of Napoleon’s rapid crossing of the Belgian border to attack him at Waterloo, which he heard of only when attending the Duchess of Richmond’s ball. Nor did he have any rapid means of communicating with his Prussian ally, Marshal Blucher, whose forces only arrived very late in the day at Waterloo. 22
Chapter IV
The Great Game
The Great Game, the subject of an excellent book by Peter Hopkirk, was the espionage cum exploration story of the rivalry between Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia from the mid nineteenth century. The British had no desire to extend their empire into the dirt poor, inaccessible and ungovernable terrain of Afghanistan, but did not want the Russians there either, or dominant elsewhere in the region. To some extent, the British fears were exaggerated, as neither Tsars nor Bolsheviks had the capacity to directly threaten India. But they did seek domination over Central Asia and, if possible, Afghanistan.
The term itself was coined by Captain Arthur Conolly of the Bengal Light Cavalry in the employ of the East India Company. In 1840, he wrote to Henry Rawlinson, who had been appointed as the political agent in Kandahar, about the ‘grand game’ that lay in front of them. Often travelling in disguise, he used ‘Khan Ali’ as his pseudonym. A journey from Moscow to India via Herat in 1830–31 established his reputation as a travel writer. In 1841, to counter 24increasing Russian penetration of Central Asia, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the various khanates to settle their differences. In Bukhara, he was captured on a mission to try to rescue a Colonel Stoddart, who had preceded him there. Both were charged with spying for the British Empire and beheaded in the main square of Bukhara by the Emir, Nasrullah Khan.
For decades thereafter, a series of other outstandingly brave and resourceful young officers were despatched from India, with little support and often in disguises that very rarely can have fooled the locals, to discover what was happening far beyond the North West Frontier with Afghanistan. Favoured roles included travelling as monks or as horse traders. Their key tasks were to discover which of the local khans were friendly or irredeemably hostile and to detect any sign of the Russians coming in the opposite direction, as they engaged in their own version of the Great Game. Apart from serving as the eyes and ears of the empire, it was far from clear what some of these isolated and extremely risky missions were intended to achieve, but Victorian England was proud of the courage of those who undertook them, devouring enthusiastically the accounts they published of their adventures.
The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42) was triggered when the Russians sent an envoy, Count Witkiewicz, to persuade Dost Mohammed Khan, the ruler of Kabul, to form an alliance against the British. This panicked the British Governor General of India, Lord Auckland, into launching an invasion, condemned by the Duke of Wellington as ‘stupid’, as Afghanistan was a land of ‘rocks, sands, deserts, ice and snow’. He forecast that the invaders would easily defeat the tribal forces, only then to find themselves struggling to hold on. 25
The war ended in disaster for the British, as the undersized garrison left behind with numerous camp followers were massacred as they tried to withdraw. Dr William Brydon, galloping into the fort at Jalalabad with Afghans in hot pursuit, was inaccurately described as the only British officer to survive, though most of the others didn’t. In 1842, a punitive expedition was launched to destroy Kabul, whereupon the British withdrew. From 1865, the Russians embarked on a far more determined forward policy in Central Asia, annexing first Tashkent, then Samarkand and Bukhara.
Colonel Fred Burnaby was a massive, twenty stone cavalry and intelligence officer who spoke several languages. In 1875, in a moment of détente with Tsarist Russia, he travelled to Central Asia, initially with the agreement of the Russians, though then encountering difficulties with them. His account of his adventures in A Ride to Khiva was an early bestselling adventure story, for which he was lionised in London society.
Within two years, a Russian proponent of the Great Game, Colonel Grodekov, was planning a road from Tashkent to Herat via Samarkand, which Burnaby saw as a clear threat to India. After more adventures, including crossing the Channel in a balloon, Burnaby was killed in hand to hand fighting against the Dervishes on the Upper Nile.
In 1878, to forestall Russian ambitions in that direction, the British launched a fresh invasion of Afghanistan, defeating the Amir, Sher Ali Khan. A treaty was signed, but a British mission to Kabul then was massacred, triggering a second invasion, led by Lord Roberts, and the installation of a new Amir willing to work with the British, following which Roberts, very sensibly, withdrew.
In 1889, Francis Younghusband, the future British resident in 26
