CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SECRET AGENT dominates popular conceptions of the intelligence world, how it works and what it yields. The image of the agent is strongly imprinted on the imagination of anyone who in childhood played the war game l’Attaque—a sinister civilian figure parting the grasses to spy on brightly uniformed soldiers honourably and conspicuously engaged in combat—and that image has been reinforced for over a century by the work of successful fiction writers. Joseph Conrad made the agent an enemy of society, Conan Doyle, in “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” a venal creature working for money; but most writers in English represented the agent as romantic and patriotic: Kipling’s Kim a servant of empire in the Great Game, John Buchan’s Richard Hannay bursting with Britishness in pursuit of his country’s enemies, Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond to whom all foreigners were objects of suspicion. Later writers, John le Carré foremost, refined the image, admitting the dubiety of the agent’s role and introducing the idea of the double agent, all too understandably in view of what the public then knew of treason among Britain’s university-educated class.
The idea nevertheless persisted that “intelligence” was principally the “product”—a term popularised by le Carré—of spying. The idea survived the disclosure of the Enigma secret, which revealed that the most valuable intelligence produced by the British intelligence services during the Second World War was derived from the interception and decryption of enciphered enemy signals. That was equally true of British intelligence successes during the First World War and of the American intelligence effort in 1942–45. British and American fiction readers were by then too enamoured of the idea of the “agent in place,” however, to alter their view of the essential nature of the craft. The spy, not the eavesdropper, was established in the popular imagination as the principal source of knowledge of the enemy and his evil intentions.
The popular imagination entirely overlooked the limitations within which real agents laboured. The danger of betrayal was recognised, and that of identification by enemy counter-espionage. What was discounted was the much more oppressive burden of practicality: how to discover anything worth knowing; how, even more critically, to communicate such knowledge to the home base. Memoirs by agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain’s subversive organisation inside German-occupied Europe in 1940–45, and of OSS, the contemporary American Office of Strategic Services, reveal a picture quite at variance with that of the glamour and romance depicted by writers of fiction. SOE and OSS operatives dealt in tiny scraps of information, often of apparently trivial importance—gossip picked up in cafés, numbers of freight cars seen crossing a bridge, shoulder straps of soldiers glimpsed changing station. Such scraps, when collated, had to be recorded in comprehensible form and then sent by radio transmitter, whose operators always knew that they risked being overheard by enemy interceptors with location devices and so of being intercepted and arrested in mid-transmission.
There was little that was romantic about spying in Hitler’s Europe. The business was furtive, nail-biting and burdened by the suspicion of betrayal. Many agents were betrayed. The German counter-espionage service was extremely efficient at identifying networks, breaking their members and inducing those arrested to inform against their fellow conspirators. Women proved better than men at keeping out of German clutches, because of their superior ability to remain inconspicuous and to deflect difficult questions. Many women nevertheless fell victim to the Gestapo. Men in the networks were arrested in large numbers. Their fate, that of women and men alike, was despatch to Hitler’s camps.