What are spies for? Walter Bell and MI6

Hooray for Jimmy Burns. For the past six or seven decades the history of modern British spying has been a relentless, repetitious chronicle of Kim Philbies, Donald Macleans and minor clerks like John Vassal. Or they are “exposés” of elderly ladies who had a fling with communism in their 20s and maybe dropped a copy of an A-Z map book of London with underlining of key government departments which were left at KGB dead letter boxes. There they were picked up by Soviet agents who could be seen at any TUC conferences getting the comrades as drunk as possible in the hope of learning Britain’s innermost secrets.

These double agents were denounced as traitors and some scarpered to a miserable existence in Moscow exile. Novelists like Ian Fleming and John Le Carré made millions with yarns that had no relation to intelligence gathering reality.

Jimmy Burns, by contrast, is expertly placed to explore the ambiguities of the shadow world of spying in his latest book A Faithful Spy (Chiselbury, £22). It is a finely tuned biography of a top flight British intelligence service agent. Walter Bell (1909-2004) came from a minor public school background, with a clerical father and friendship in the kind of sets Evelyn Waugh made famous in his 1930s novels.

After Oxford, Bell spent the 1930s studying under the left-wing academic Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, travelling to European political hotspots like Vienna and Budapest. This made him a perfect recruit for MI6, which still today has the biggest number of privately educated men and women of any department of state, outside the royal entourage.

Others of similar background and immature far-Left leanings – such as Denis Healey and Philip Toynbee — were recruited at Balliol and other progressive institutions in the late 1930s into the Stalinist but not very serious Communist Party of Great Britain. Some left in horror as Stalin allied with Hitler to dismember Poland. Bell was never tempted and MI6 plodded along, a self-perpetuating state bureaucracy getting most of the major post-war global geo-political developments wrong.

Bell had an enjoyable spy’s war – most of it spent in the United States far from the privations of the Blitz or rationing. He had the Guardian and New Statesman sent out wherever he was abroad to keep in touch with Leftist thinking in London.

Jimmy Burns’ father, a Catholic journalist, spied on Franco for Britain in the Second World War. His Spanish wife was a strong supporter of Franco, so his pillow talk provided all the information needed to learn Franco was an anti-Semitic fascist. Franco crawled to Hitler and then after 1945 switched to Washington, using the Vatican, which has the world’s best intelligence network. Franco managed to keep Spain fascist for decades after Germany and Italy were freed from right-wing nationalism.

The English spy world seems to have attracted more than its share of Catholic Right-wingers obsessed with the red menace. They thought themselves justified by the unmasking of Philby and the Cambridge spy ring. Yet Class and Cambridge mattered more than King and Country.

Equally patriotic was Charles (CP) Snow, a Cambridge physics don who became a Whitehall mandarin in the Second World War. His novel The New Men, published in 1954, summed up the ambivalence of the Cambridge spies.

“The world had split in two, and men like us, who kept any loyalty to their past or their hopes, did not like it. It had seemed to us that the communists had done ill that good might come. We could not change all the shadows of those thoughts in an afternoon.”

In writing about Bell, Burns probes these contradictions. Later Bell goes to Kenya, where he describes “the racist attitudes of some of the White settlers and colonial administrators.” 150,000 Kenyans were detained by the British in the 1950s and 20,000 died in British concentration camps in Kenya.

Today we are not allowed by the political correctors of the Right to criticise British imperialism, but its last late fling in the white supremacist former colonies of southern Africa continued along imperial lines. Bell as the local spymaster in Kenya helped maintain a regime of brutal cruelty on behalf of the City and other profit-takers from late imperialism.

One of the last spies to arrive from London in Kenya in 1968 was the Cambridge-educated (where else?) Richard Dearlove. He rose to become boss of MI6, having presided over the disastrously wrong intelligence given to Tony Blair ahead of his decision to join George W Bush in the Iraq folly. Later, having returned to Cambridge as Master of Pembroke College, Sir Richard became a champion of Brexit – a project supported by Vladimir Putin in his hatred for the European Union because of its role in fomenting democracy, a free media, and the rule of law in the lands of the former Russian Empire. Putin has funded anti-European parties and campaigns all over Europe.

But such is the shadowland of the spy. Jimmy Burns’ hero Walter Bell served his country according to his own lights. Most books on spies are simplistic single tone goodies-versus baddies narratives. Stephen Dorril’s thoroughly researched books on post-war intelligence operations, written 200 miles north of the Traveller’s Club, are a rare exception. Jimmy Burns has written a fine biography about the impossibility of being a spy without living in a world of lies and double standards. The lies seem as unavoidable as they are unenviable.

Denis MacShane is a former Foreign Office minister where he received daily briefings from MI6. He preferred to read the Financial Times or Le Monde to find out what was happening. His new book, Labour Takes Power. The Denis MacShane Diaries 1997-2001, describes his work under Robin Cook in the Foreign Office during the first term of office of the last Labour government.

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