Accounts of the secret world usually fall into one of two camps, the authoritative or the popular. The authoritative — such as Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5 and Keith Jeffery’s of MI6 — are officially sanctioned, based on the file record and reliable. They are incomplete because, inevitably, there are episodes the authors are not (yet) permitted to publish, and Jeffery’s ends anyway in 1949. The popular accounts, which invariably claim to be complete and uncensored — and never are — tend to be drawn partly from the National Archive, partly from anonymous retired officials and partly from other popular accounts, some by disaffected former employees. Truths, half-truths, speculations and ‘revelations’ are jumbled together and belted out to the tuneful grinding of axes.
This account by the BBC’s Gordon Corera, dealing mainly with MI6 from the start of the Cold War to the present, falls into the popular camp. But popular with a difference — it’s authoritative-popular, characterised by the integrity we have come to expect from Corera’s journalism, by his conscientious attribution of sources, by his authorised access to senior figures and by his own clear judgment. Although Cold War-focused and far from comprehensive, it is the best post-1949 account of British intelligence I have read.
It begins with post-second world war Vienna, dramatised by Graham Greene’s Third Man script and the region where the young national serviceman John le Carré cut his intelligence teeth. This soon leads us to Kim Philby, the spy who betrayed so many of MI6’s early Cold War fumblings (they do read like that) and never repented of the blood on his hands.
Corera quotes Philby’s and Greene’s accounts of their subsequent friendship, which certainly existed, though I’m not sure it’s the whole story.
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