UK's Literary Spies
FEW countries have dominated any industry as Britain has dominated the industry of producing fictional spies.
Britain invented the spy novel with Rudyard Kipling’s dissection of the Great Game in “Kim” and John Buchan’s adventure stories. It consolidated its lead with Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden stories and Graham Greene’s invention of “Greeneland”.
It then produced the world’s two most famous spooks: James Bond, the dashing womaniser, and George Smiley, the cerebral cuckold, who reappears this week in a new book.
What accounts for this success?
One reason is the revolving door between the secret establishment and the literary establishment. Some of the lions of British literature worked as spies.
Maugham was sent to Switzerland to spy for Britain under cover of pursuing his career as a writer. Greene worked for the intelligence services. Both Ian Fleming, the creator of Bond, and John le Carré, the creator of Smiley, earned their living as spies. Dame Stella Rimington, head of MI5 in 1992-96, has taken to writing spy novels in retirement. It is as if the secret services are not so much arms of the state as creative-writing schools.
Economist
:) The spy stories are very appropriate for today, November 30. The anniversary of the 1983 Australian Secret Intelligence Service agents bungle in the Melbourne Sheraton hotel.
On 30 November 1983, ASIS garnered unwanted negative attention when a training operation held at the Sheraton Hotel, now the Mercure, in Melbourne went wrong.
The training operation involved junior officers who had undergone three weeks prior training and who were given considerable leeway in planning and executing the operation. The mock hostage rescue was staged on the 10th floor of the hotel without the permission of the hotel's owner or staff. When ASIS operators were refused entry into a hotel room, they broke down the door with sledgehammers. The hotel manager, Nick Rice, was notified of a disturbance on the 10th floor by a hotel guest. When he went to investigate, he was forced back into the lift by an ASIS operator who rode the lift down to the ground floor and forcibly ejected Rice into the lobby.
Believing a robbery was in progress, Rice called the police. When the lift started returning to the ground floor, ASIS operators emerged wearing masks and openly brandishing 9mm Browning pistols and Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, two of them with silencers. They forced their way through the lobby to the kitchen, where two getaway cars were waiting outside the kitchen door. Police stopped one of the cars and arrested the occupants, two ASIS officers and three ASIS civilian trainees, who refused to produce any form of identification.
Within two days the Minister for Foreign Affairs Bill Hayden announced that an "immediate and full" investigation would be conducted under the auspices of the second Hope Royal Commission on Australian Security and Intelligence Agencies, which was still in progress. A report was prepared and tabled by February 1984. It described the exercise as being 'poorly planned, poorly supervised and poorly run’.
Great story re the Scrabble Man Brocky, very funny. Tombstone of a Scrabble fan.
In 2013, vandals attacked the tombstone and damaged it, upon hearing this a Scrabble charity event was held to raise money for it to be fixed.
Roald Dahl Worked for the BSC (British Security Coordination)
Dahl is best known as a beloved children’s author of books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — hell, he even produced a child-friendly account of his service in World War II as a fighter pilot.
But funny enough, Dahl skipped over the details of what came next.
InThe Irregulars, American journalist Jennet Conant describes Dahl's life after his infamous head injury, when he was sent to Washington to work in the PR department of the British Embassy.
There he met Canadian spymaster William Stevenson and was soon recruited into the BSC, a front for counter-propaganda and espionage in North America. Dahl’s role was to investigate the political leanings of important women in the United States. He used his charm and good looks to these ends, and his friend Antoinette Haskell claims that Dahl “slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that had more than $50,000 a year.” At one point, Dahl supposedly asked to be transferred to another assignment due to fatigue, but was ordered back to work."
i wrote about Sreveson above who recruited Dahl