Espionage furnishes writers of fiction and non-fiction alike with a natural milieu for telling a story. An agent must accomplish a mission, but will he or she? Is the agent genuine or working for the other side? Who can be trusted? Lives hang in the balance, the fate of nations is at stake and one little person can change history. Or so it seems. My favorite spy novels are the great classics known to all: Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent; Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male; Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana; Freddy Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal; and Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers. Here are a few novels and histories from the realm of espionage that you might not know, but which you can add to the canon.
Eric Ambler, Cause for Alarm (1938)
Eric Ambler’s pre-war spy novels portrayed ordinary, usually diffident, men drawn—as the world would be in 1939—into a realm of violence and deception. The star of Cause for Alarm, his second novel, is Tamara Prokovna Zaleshoff, “young, almost a girl, and she was beautiful. It was a curious, nearly masculine beauty. The cheek bones were high and drew the flesh smoothly away from the red lips in a way which gave her an oddly impassive expression.” Tamara handles weapons and fast cars with equal aplomb, attracting an innocent Englishman lost in the vortex of Nazi-fascist villain called, a little predictably, “Marlow.” Ambler reprised Tamara and her brother, a fellow NKVD operative, in Uncommon Danger a year later. I wish she’d made at least a cameo appearance in his other books. Ambler wrote a string of exciting spy thrillers before the war, many of them prefiguring the impending cataclysm. If they fell off a little afterwards, that may be because Ian Fleming had taken over the genre.
John le Carré, Call for the Dead (1961)
Le Carré’s first novel, though not his best known, introduced the world to “a bullfrog in a so’wester” named George Smiley. Among the great recurring characters of modern fiction—along with Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe and Jules Maigret—Smiley is the “perfect spy,” inconspicuous, intellectual and ruthless. Call for the Dead pits Smiley against Dieter Frey, the German he recruited during the war to spy on the Nazis, and Frey’s controller in East German intelligence, Hans-Dieter Mundt. The three antagonists pursue one another on London streets only then emerging from the 1950s fog. It begins with Smiley’s investigation of a colleague’s suicide that drives him deeper into the darkness of flawed humanity and betrayal. Le Carré planted the seeds here of the squalid pettiness that characterized the Circus, as he calls British intelligence headquarters, and defined the ambiguous universe of his subsequent novels. It is worth reading for its own sake, but also to shed light on the complex paladin of the Cold War, George Smiley.
Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, 1941-1945 (1998)
Of all the memoirs to emerge from Britain’s wartime subversion agency, Special Operations Executive (SOE), Marks’s is both the best and the funniest. Marks, unlike most other SOE personnel, never left wartime London. He was head of signals, a vital task that enabled agents in the field to communicate with London through encoded dots and dashes that the Germans were on constant watch for with their radio detector vans. Organizers in all Axis-occupied countries relied on Marks’s decoders, most of them young women, to obtain the weapons and money they needed to arm they resistance movements they commanded. Between Silk and Cyanide tells the dramatic tale of the many who gave their lives behind enemy lines. It also records the errors made in London that sacrificed those lives. SOE was proud of its ethos of talented amateurs modeled on Buchan’s Richard Hannay, but amateurism came at a price. “SOE’s security checks were so insecure that I thought the real ones were being withheld from me,” he wrote of his start in the organization of talented amateurs that Churchill created in 1940. His father was the proprietor of Marks and Co. (Co. standing for his partner, Cohen), the antiquarian bookshop made famous in Helen Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road. It was in the shop that eight-year-old Marks learned about secret symbols reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug and deciphering his father’s curious pricing ciphers. It’s the first book to make codes and code breaking comprehensible to an innumerate like me.
Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist and Whore (1986)
If you want a handbook on espionage, this is it. Knightley, an Australian journalist at London’s Sunday Times during its glory days under Harry Evans, does for spying what he did for war correspondents in his best-selling The First Casualty. Beginning with the first tribal spies, like Delilah the “secret agent of the Philistines,” Knightley concentrates on 20th century intelligence agencies during the world wars and afterwards. During the Cold War, spies from Washington to Moscow came dominate strategy to the detriment of diplomacy. We meet a dazzling array of characters, not least Mata Hari but also Kim Philby, the double-agent Knightley interviewed after his defection to Moscow. Intelligence triumphs, like code-breaking in World War II, stand side by side with failures that led to loss of lives and discredit to governments. In 1986, when he wrote, Knightley put annual US intelligence costs at more than $7,500,000,00. It must be double that now. The US is no safer, although the budgets of the CIA, NSA, FBI and other snoopers are.
Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (2014)
Not all spies are as duplicitous as their reputations, Kai Bird reminds us in this masterful biography of CIA agent Robert Clayton Ames. Ames turned the spy’s dark arts against his masters in Washington to demonstrate that good relations with the Palestinians were better for America than obeying Israeli instructions to boycott them. Ames cultivated the Palestine Liberation Organization security chief, Abu Hassan Salameh. Salameh, whom the Israelis assassinated knowing he was valuable to the CIA, provided Ames with information that saved lives. Bird, a Pulitzer-winning biographer who as a child lived next door to the Ames family, tells the story of this steelworker’s son from Philadelphia, who won a basketball scholarship to La Salle University when it won the NCAA championship. While serving in the US Army at a top secret communications station in Eritrea, Ames was converted by the chaplain to Catholicism in 1956. The story proceeds through his CIA recruitment in 1960, his many achievements and doubts, and, finally, his death in Beirut. The author meticulously tracks down the culprits who killed Ames, six other CIA officers and 46 Lebanese civilians in the suicide bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut on 18 April 1983. This book is as thrilling as any thriller.
