Spies are just not the same class of person as they used to be
Published 27 September 1999
Media
I can't be sure of the year and I don't remember his name, but I can still see the puffy, grey face of the East German government man. He liked fish. Dover sole with capers, the way they cooked it at Wheeler's, with plenty of potatoes. He was working, I suppose, in one way or another, for the Stasi. Since they invented names for us, let us call him Wagner.
Wagner rang me in London one day in the mid-1980s when I was writing for the Financial Times about social issues. I had just published a feature on the Greenham Common peace camp, so, with a mighty 1,500 words behind me, I clearly ranked as an expert. Having interviewed Bruce Kent of CND - at the time, it turns out, code-named Pact - I was clearly a man with contacts, a valuable agent of influence.
James Bond it was not. Wagner bought me lunch. When I bought Wagner lunch, that confused him. Did I think that CND would achieve unilateral nuclear disarmament in Britain? No. What did I think of E P Thompson's END movement, which campaigned against nuclear weapons across the eastern bloc? Goodness knows what I replied to that, though, being a journalist, I'm sure I came up with something brazenly authoritative. Journalists never know when to admit they don't have the answer.
This presumably explains why so many journalists are figuring in our Indian summer of spy revelations. Journalists are loud and accessible. Spies are quiet and inaccessible. But both are duplicitous, for their respective causes. I regarded Wagner like any other corporate spokesman: I wanted to see if I could find out what he really thought. Surely the people in charge of our own espionage services could see then what is now obvious to everyone: that when a foreign power starts relying upon information from academics and journalists, their societies are on the point of collapse.
Still, that hasn't staunched the flow of copy in the past fortnight, even though the papers have struggled with tone and sense of proportion. Even the first, breathless Times front page hedged its bets, offsetting its main headline ("Revealed: the quiet woman who betrayed Britain for 40 years") with an ironic sub-head: "The spy who came in from the Co-op."
The Times, with the book serialiser's advantage of prior knowledge, found time to gather a few fragments of on-the-ground reporting, not only snatching an interview with Melita Norwood from under the leaden-footed BBC's nose, but also dispatching a crack team to Keighley, Yorkshire, from where it was reported that the evil retired professor and Scargillite Vic Allen has peacocks and a "1970s reliant Scimitar" (sic) in his garden and an order with the local newsagent, J & H Thorpe, for a regular copy of the Morning Star and the Guardian. With powers of observation like this, the reporter can expect a call from M.
This is the same Vic Allen who came last in a ballot to chair CND in 1985, though that didn't stop the Mail from declaring that "a CND leader was a spy" (which one? Allen or Kent, who seems to be charged with nothing more sinister than travelling in a French car during a trip to East Germany?). All these newly exposed stooges had been "idiotic and wicked and should not be lightly forgiven". Which I suppose is Mail-speak for let it drop.
The trouble is that when it comes to traitors, the high moral tone cuts both ways. What were Mail readers to make of the forced confession of the paper's own turncoat Islington leftie, Leo McKinstry, who recounted his "shameful" days as a CND activist? Or what did Sunday Telegraph readers make of an editorial hectoring against CND, when set alongside a lengthy lecture from the imaginative KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky? The KGB man says we should be proud of our own security services and not ask too many questions about them.
Confusion, however, was by no means confined to the pages of Conservative newspapers. Paul Routledge, who knows a thing or two about hard-left intrigue in 1970s Britain, contributed an entertaining memoir about Vic Allen, reminding Mirror readers that Allen's dubious activities had to be understood in the context of the period when "communism held sway over a third of the globe and seemed destined to take over". Really? So that's what it was all about - backing the winning side. Not just that, says Routledge. At the "cutting edge of this world revolution, it was exciting. It was risky".
In the Independent, Anne McElvoy, revealed that she, too, a former Berlin correspondent, was no stranger to questionable propositions. She recalled that Markus Wolf, the former head of East German intelligence, had spoken of "the erotic appeal of the east", which is not the way Leipzig ever looked to me. McElvoy, however, was one of the few to inquire why the British public was only now being treated to this spate of inconsequential revelations: "These people were the enemies of the British security services in the hard-fought battle for public hearts and minds over nuclear disarmament in the eighties. Now the services are getting their own back."
Dead right. The people they're getting their own back on are not the dinner-jacketed Oxbridge chaps of the Burgess era but, in Stephen Glover's reliably supercilious phrase, "obscure men in red-brick universities". Gordievsky informs us that the Russians and the rest learnt from the Foreign Office that in that period it had become necessary to seek recruits from "the more proletarian universities".
So that was why Wagner never made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I always knew I should have gone to Hull rather than Cambridge.
The writer is professor of journalism at Cardiff University
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