Free Art of Betrayal by Gordon Corera Page B

– with disastrous consequences. As our story begins in the early Cold War, working for His and then Her Majesty’s Secret Service was not so distant from the fictional life of Fleming’s Bond. There may not have quite been a formal licence to kill, but stealing, breaking the law, overthrowing unfriendly governments and parachuting agents behind enemy lines was standard fare. But this was also a service which was clubby, amateurish, penetrated by its enemies and prone to mishap. Its secret wars were betrayed by its most painful traitor in the beguiling guise of Kim Philby. Slowly a new professionalism surrounding the business of collecting intelligence emerged, epitomised by one officer, Harold Shergold, and one agent, Oleg Penkovsky. Out of their time together, the ‘Sov Bloc master race’ was born within MI6, a group who would transform the service.
    MI6 has slowly evolved from a self-selecting and self-perpetuating gentlemen’s club for members of the establishment with a naughty streak to something more like a professional, bureaucratic organisation no longer set apart from the rest of government. The early days were marked by a macho culture in which women had their place – normally as secretaries, although even they undertook dangerous tasks on the front line. Only very few women, like Daphne Park – who made her mark in the Congo during one of the great crises of the Cold War – managed to run their own operations. Her story highlights not only the way in which the superpower rivalry intruded into the developing world with deadly effects but also theextent to which MI6 operations in more distant parts of the world offered an alternative tradition of building relationships and influencing events to the spycraft operating within the Soviet bloc.
    Old-fashioned attitudes and rivalries once extended to relations with the domestic Security Service. MI5 thought their foreign counterparts were a bunch of cowboys, while MI6 thought their domestic equivalents were glorified policemen. Now, they work closely together. The relationship with the American ‘cousins’ has also seen a reversal. For many years, some in Britain wanted to see themselves as the smarter, wiser Athens to the CIA’s Rome, educating the new arrivals in the ways of spying. But it did not take long before it was clear where the balance of power really lay, creating a complex relationship of trust and anxiety, intimacy and dependence much like that between the two countries as a whole.
    The work of an intelligence service acting as the clandestine arm of government in pursuit of the national interest throws light not just on policy but also on the way in which a country – and particularly its elite — sees itself and its place in the world. For many years, Britain’s Secret Service was the keeper of the flame, the perpetuator of the illusion of Britain being a ‘great power’. Particularly in the early Cold War, MI6 was seen as a means of preserving influence even as economic and military might dissipated, much in the way James Bond could save the world with only a little help from his American friends. The secret world and its mythology helped sustain and shape the illusions of power. And the more self-aware observers of their own world describe the British Secret Service as characterised by a mixture of outward bravado and inner insecurity, perhaps like Britain itself.
    Thrillers reflect the anxieties and preoccupations of their age and while Bond harks back to a still powerful Britain, the bleaker, more inward-looking world of John le Carré’s Smiley is also rooted in a slice of the truth. British intelligence’s darkest hour came in the 1960s when both MI5 and MI6 discovered that they were riddled with traitors and embarked on painful ‘molehunts’ (a term adopted from fiction) as the services looked inwards and colleagues wondered whether the man sitting next to them