Free Art of Betrayal by Gordon Corera Page A

been associated with intelligence work since 1945 in different ways and in different countries. All memories are faulty and spies, in particular, are trained to deceive, and so while this book is, in part, based on first-hand testimony and the memoirs of participants, those stories have been cross-checked against original documents, archives and secondary sources. Through their eyes, this book traces the triumphs and disasters as MI6 has undergone adramatic transformation from a gung-ho amateurish service into its modern, at times equally controversial, incarnation.
    Through its hundred-year history, the enemies the British Secret Service has fought have come in many guises. But in its essential form the work of a British spy has barely changed. It involves persuading someone to betray secrets, a deeply personal, even intimate act, and one fraught with risks. More often than not this involves betrayal, sometimes of a country, sometimes of a friendship. It involves working with the complexities of human motivation and especially its darker paths and traversing a fine line between right and wrong. It also involves breaking laws. ‘We act within our own law – British law,’ one man who has been chief of MI6 once commented to me. ‘Our relationship with other people’s laws is’ – he paused for a moment before continuing – ‘interesting.’
    Does spying exist not just beyond other people’s laws but also beyond traditional precepts of morality? Some have argued that it does, a few even that it should. Asking someone else to act illegally and, perhaps, unethically by providing secrets also frequently involves asking them to take huge risks, often with their lives. For what purpose? To ‘betray something that needs betraying’, as one former MI6 Chief puts it. 1 The art of betrayal is one that many countries, particularly Britain, have long nurtured, but it carries a price. ‘I have been involved in death, yes,’ Daphne Park remarked of her line of work, before adding enigmatically, ‘but I can’t talk about that.’ 2 It is the agent though, not normally the MI6 officer, who faces the greatest risk. For the agent who has been recruited to work for MI6, they are embarking on a dangerous double life, a world of brush contacts, dead-letter drops and clandestine meetings. If they are lucky, there is the possibility of a new life, if not perhaps a bullet in the back of the head. So why spy? This book tries to answer that question by hearing from those who have chosen this path and exploring what drives those involved in espionage.
    â€˜I’ve never found – within the service – people hung up in any way on literature,’ John Scarlett, a former C, has claimed. ‘It is more interesting doing the real thing.’ 3 But as our retired Chief at the start makes clear, even MI6 references itself, in part, by the fictional world, not least because many of the great British spy-thriller writers like Graham Greene, John le Carré and Ian Fleming were formerintelligence officers themselves who, to varying degrees, drew on their own experiences. At one extreme lies the lean, aggressive, morally certain and self-confident Bond with his insistence on doing things. At the other end is the podgy, donnish Smiley with his desire to understand things coupled with a keen awareness of the moral ambiguities of the world he inhabits.
    The story of British intelligence since the Second World War can be understood, in part, as the evolving tension between these two poles, between the doers and the thinkers – those who sought to change the world and those who sought to understand it, or, to put it another way, between covert action and intelligence gathering. They are not mutually exclusive and to be successful any spy service needs both to jostle alongside each other in a creative tension. But often one or other strand has been dominant, sometimes too dominant