Book review: The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5

Published on Saturday 14 November 2009 12:42

THE DEFENCE OF THE REALM: THE AUTHORISED HISTORY OF MI5 BY CHRISTOPHER ANDREW Allen Lane, 1,108pp, £30 Review by GEORGE WALDEN

IN BRITAIN, nothing is planned, it accretes, and MI5 is a perfect example. It began, in response to the Germans' more structured espionage efforts before the First World War, with two officers, and grew slowly: by 1938 it had a complement of 26. The agency's means were as slender as its inception was amateur. Though telephone tapping began early, the home secretary's permission was required for each individual intercept, and many a transcriber's record concluded: "Conversation in a foreign language, not understood."

Recruitment was a question of who you knew; hence the traitorous Sir Anthony Blunt, the KGB's most prestigious Stalin devotee. In MI6, Philby and Burgess were for years protected by the old-boy system. Secretaries and registry staff were "gels" from good backgrounds, though some were well-educated women. In 1929 one, Jane Sissmore, graduated from head of registry to be MI5's first woman officer, in charge of Soviet Russia.

The German espionage threat was real but wildly exaggerated. Insofar as anyone listened, MI5's record on warning against the perils of appeasement reads well today, and when war came its phenomenal success in agent-turning and deception meant that by the end of the Second World War we were running the entire German intelligence effort against us. The most imaginative and grisly operation was the floating ashore in fascist Spain of a corpse clutching a briefcase containing plans for a non-existent Allied offensive against Greece. The Germans took the bait.

The Soviet spy offensive, meanwhile, was grossly underrated, with the results that we know. By the Fifties things got so bad the Russians couldn't believe their luck, suspecting that the highly placed British intelligence operatives working for them, notably the Cambridge Five, might be double agents serving up disinformation. There were Reds not just under the bed but in it. Jack Jones, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, we now know was for years a Russian agent, accepting money; and John Stonehouse, a Labour minister, worked for Czech intelligence, ie the KGB.

On controversial issues, such as the opening of an MI5 file on prime minister Harold Wilson, Andrew gives us what we have lacked for so long: balanced, informed and forceful judgment. The truth about the KGB connections of some of Wilson's cronies makes MI5's excess of zeal understandable. Wilson's conduct was at once sordid and silly. A parochial figure at the best of times, he emerges from this book further diminished.

Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed to learn that talk of an MI5-backed coup against the Wilson government was and remains 99 per cent media bull. The lurid claims of the disaffected former officer Peter Wright in his book Spycatcher are, in scholarly fashion, roundly rubbished.

The Islamist threat, and especially the ambition of a British Hindu convert to Islam, Dhiren Barot, to explode a dirty nuclear bomb in Britain, is sobering by contrast. "For the time we do not have the contacts to enable us to purchase such items," Barot wrote before his arrest. That was five years ago. And they say the Islamist threat is exaggerated.

Sobriety is not always a welcome message in a country weaned on sensationalism in security matters. Yet no-one can fail to enjoy, or to learn from, this sensationally good book. This is history as a riveting story, the real-life spooks and spies far more compelling than anything you will see on the screen. Providing you can lift it up (there are a thousand pages) it is genuinely hard to put down. As well as an absorbing tale we get a vista of 20th-century Britain from the novel angle of its security services. History doesn't come more fascinating than this.