The letters from my bank manager were now becoming a little stiff. To retrench a little, I started filling the flat with subtenants. First, in the two front rooms, came Isabella, the German girlfriend of my American flatmate from the Traunsteinerstrasse. Then came Daniel Johnson, palely handsome, Nietzsche in hand. He would burst through the double doors of a morning, beaming, to tell me he had located another German pessimist. Finally, we took in Mel, a Polish sculptor, and his wife, Dot. They had fled Poland, leaving everything behind, and sought political asylum in Germany. “Poland good, Poland Communist bad!” Dot explained in her pidgin German. I knew exactly what she meant. Drinking brandy for breakfast, and reading the bureaucratic German of the terms for a sculpture competition, Mel suddenly exclaimed, “Luftwaffe London!” The sculpture he submitted for the competition showed a man and a woman clinging together, their backs turned against a frightening new world. Mel and Dot. Down the road, there were still the cafés and the pretty girls, whom Daniel would startle with remarks like “Have you noticed that Steiner uses the word ‘moment’ in the Hegelian sense?”
At the end of 1979 I prepared to move from this cheerful tower of Babel to East Berlin, where I had been offered a place as a research student attached to the Humboldt University, under a new cultural agreement recently signed between Britain and East Germany.
BY THIS TIME, OXFORD AND LONDON SEEMED VERY far away. Occasionally I would fly back to Britain for a few days, visit my parents, lunch at The Spectator, go to the theater, have dinner with friends and struggle, as on so many subsequent returns, to answer the impossible, only half-interested question: “What’s it like … ?” I would take the train to Oxford, talk to my supervisor and buy some books at Blackwell’s, then return to London to sit the Civil Service exams and, on a subsequent visit, to be interviewed for the foreign service.
Now foreign service normally means diplomatic service. But in Britain it can also mean something slightly different: the secret service. Here’s something I had not thought about for years until I set out to investigate the Stasi file. I have to dig deep into my memory, into my diaries, even into a dusty old suitcase stashed away under the eaves of our house, to recover the details and to reconstruct that distant me.
When I was nineteen or twenty years old, and an undergraduate at Oxford, I was quite interested in the subject of spying. I was inspired by the true stories of daring exploits in the Second World War. Thirty years after the end of the war, the whole extraordinary history of British espionage at that time was at last being written, especially by some of the Oxford dons who had been involved in it. I had a growing sense that there was still a kind of war on, against Soviet communism rather than Nazi Germany. I was intrigued by the life stories of the Englishmen who spied for the Soviet Union: Philby, Burgess, Maclean and the still-unidentified “fourth man.” I also loved the novels of Graham Greene—and spying was the main industry of Greeneland.
I used to talk about all this for hours with one particular undergraduate friend, over coffee in my rooms looking onto Broad Street. His father, I later learned, worked for MI5, the British domestic security service. Not that this was an obsessive interest for me, as it clearly was for Graham Greene, but it was one among many, besides theater, modern architecture, literature and politics.
Then I have a picture in my memory of the front quad of Exeter College on a beautiful sunlit morning. I am approached, somewhere on the Chapel side, by the rector of the college, a large, genial, tweedy man. What exactly he said, in his confidential rumble, I cannot remember, but the gist of it must have been that he had heard that I might be interested in this sort of thing and should he perhaps have a word with someone in London….
Today, this seems to me more like the opening scene of a film than anything that actually happened in my own life. “The sunlit quadrangle of an Oxford college, green turf, golden sandstone walls. A tweed-suited don walks around the quad. He stops a fresh-faced undergraduate beneath the Chapel. We hear their parting words … ‘a word with someone in London….’ ‘Thank you, Rector …’ Cut to a bare office in London …”
In a folder buried in a suitcase under the eaves of our house I discover a letter dated June 8, 1976. The letter-head gives the anonymous-sounding title of a section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office not listed in any official publications and an address in central London. “I understand that you would be interested to learn about the possibilities of a career in Departments for which [the section] has a recruiting responsibility.” Encloses a form, suggests “an exploratory talk.” “Should you have to make a special journey to London I will of course refund your second-class rail fare.” Signed with a name: a real name that I find again in the 1995 Diplomatic Service List.
Now I see a bare office, a faintly shabby, balding man, with a scar on his chin. Of the conversation I remember only that he made a great point of impressing upon me that a career in this service would bring no outward status or honors, no titles or gongs. At the time—aged twenty-one—I found this merely funny. I still find it funny, but I can now imagine slightly better what it might feel like to be a middle-aged member of that service, ostensibly a diplomat, watching your perhaps less able contemporaries, the proper diplomats, making their steady progress up the hierarchy—counsellor, minister, ambassador—and up the Order of St. Michael and St. George: CMG, KCMG, GCMG, or, as the old joke has it, Call Me God, Kindly Call Me God, God Calls Me God. I look at my interviewer’s own entry in the 1995 List, and find five successive postings as first secretary. Nobody calls him God.
I was anyway too young for the service, and went back to studying history at Oxford. According to my dusty folder, I reapplied shortly before leaving for Berlin in the summer of 1978. I even have a photocopy of my application forms. Under “Main Interests (political and social activity, principal reading, arts, sciences)” I find “International affairs; the two Germanys; Eastern Europe … Principal reading: Current affairs & contemporary history; modern European literature; English literature and general criticism; press.” I also confess my membership in the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, a mildly fellow-traveling organization that I had joined simply because I was interested in China. (My “little red book” of quotations from Chairman Mao still sits on the shelf.) As character referees, I name the rector, of course, then my great-uncle, Sir Hugh Linstead, a retired MP, and my godfather, a barrister, Queen’s Counsel and soon to be a High Court judge. Eminently respectable, respectably eminent.
When I sat the civil service examinations in autumn 1978 (“‘constructive thinking’ accounts for only 10 percent of the marks,” my diary notes), and then went for the so-called Civil Service Selection Board in early 1979, it was for both the diplomatic and the secret branches of the foreign service that I was applying. These were two of several options I was considering, as many recent graduates do, until life’s die is cast. I then flew back from Berlin for one day, on May 17, 1979, to have an extended interview for the secret service. My diary notes only “2½ hours. The Interview. A great game,” and that I then returned, via an exhibition at the Royal Academy and a telephone call to Melvin Lasky (editor of Encounter and a veteran cold warrior), to Berlin, “disturbed by the Interview.”
Thinking back, I see a room somewhere in Whitehall—deep carpet, red leather, dark wood, some men sitting behind a table. Among them I recognize a senior Oxford history don. All I recall of the actual interview is a passage where I was asked to pretend to be a British “diplomat” meeting a possible contact in a restaurant or bar in Barcelona. The contact was played by one of the men behind the table, and the only thing I distinctly remember of this make-believe conversation is my saying, at frequent intervals, “Have another drink.” This seemed to please the board.
In my folder, however, I find a further scrawled note on this meeting. The note is partly illegible, but besides mention of “the Barcelona spiel,” I find something about Libya and “views on Eurocommunism,” and then the stark entry: “Betraying a Frien
d.” Was I asked the old question about choosing between betraying a friend and betraying your country, or what?
From my diary, it seems that I flew back from Berlin on June 11, 1979, for a medical check and security examination in the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, often known as MI6), then an anonymous office block just south of the river Thames, and for lunch at a restaurant called South of the River. Of this visit I remember little except the reception area and offices that were remarkable because they were so unremarkable. Gray filing cabinets, crowded desks, nondescript men in suits: like the housing department of a borough council.
This time, however, my diary has more. Back in the communal flat in the Traunsteinerstrasse, I wrote down some impressions of “the office, the firm, the service … The jolly secretaries and messengers. The doctor, [looking] like Malcolm Muggeridge … counselling a member on his alcohol problem. Amateurishness. Calculated shabbiness.” “Briefing,” I note, “with the rather absurd—but no doubt sharp—‘Betty.’” It seems Betty, “looking slightly scatty,” asked about my parents and brother: “Are they conscious?”
I register the attractions: “the GG element” (GG for Graham Greene), “the mysteries. The sense of belonging to an élite. The challenge of the game.” But I am also very uneasy. Noting the suave, civilized manner of the officer who gave me lunch, I comment, “Perhaps this is the (certainly less extreme) English version of Goethe Oak” And then, with reference to my proposed journey through the Soviet bloc, his “sinister and alarming phrase (let fall over the excellent Game Pie) … ‘we would rather have you under our control.’” The entry concludes: “Returning on the plane, reading Bonhoeffer, discovering—rediscovering—the intellectual appetite, I am almost decided in my own mind which way to jump.”
However, the last document in my folder is the copy of a letter, datelined Traunsteinerstrasse, June 21, 1979, in which I merely write, “I should like to postpone joining the service until September 1980.” A cautious move, still keeping the options open. But then I set off to drive for two months throughout the Soviet bloc—under no one’s control. The last entry I can find on the subject in my diary is from November 1979, and reads: “‘We want you under our control.’ So no.” I had, therefore, clearly decided against joining before I went to East Berlin.
In Britain, ties with the secret service have long had a slightly risqué glamour. Well-known writers, biographers and historians, have had well-known past connections with the service, from Somerset Maugham to Alistair Horne and Hugh Trevor-Roper. That was part of the attraction to the undergraduate me. But coming to it now through the Stasi file, and after years of immersion in Central Europe, I am slightly less amused. Even though I never joined, I imagine trying to explain to a Czech or Polish friend, for whom “secret service” immediately sounds like “secret police,” how I could even have contemplated it; the difficulty, the near impossibility, of making them truly understand how it all looked then, to an Oxford undergraduate from the strange breeding ground of an English public school. Just as they would find it difficult to explain some things to me, without traveling back far into the half-forgotten realms of childhood.
In the beginning … was it Kipling’s Kim, read as a child? Perish the cliché, but it may be true. The romance of the “great game” on the northwest frontier of India certainly seemed closer to me because my maternal grandfather had served the empire in the Indian Civil Service. When I visited them, my grandparents would enchant me with their own tales from the Raj: the jungle rides on elephants, a tiger jumping over the lane as they walked to the Club.
Then, most certainly, there were my father’s memories of war, his stories of landing with the first wave on the Normandy beaches in 1944, my mother taking me aside—aged what? six? seven?—and showing me the citation for his Military Cross: “… in the bitter and continuous fighting in the Normandy bridgehead his coolness and disregard of danger were quickly apparent…. His conduct, bravery and devotion to duty throughout the whole campaign are worthy of the highest praise….” For all their formulaic stiffness, the words still move me deeply.
There follows the “character-building” experience of being sent away from home at the age of eight to traditional boys-only English boarding schools. The remembrance-day service at St. Edmund’s; the cold steps up to Chapel at Sherborne, with the names of the war dead chiseled into the walls; daily imbrication with the rhetoric of patriotism, service, sacrifice; real-life war heroes coming back for commemoration. Add Kipling, again—“He travels fastest who travels alone;” ripping yarns by John Buchan; even, in a curious way, the adolescent Tolkien phase; and just a little, I suppose, of Ian Fleming’s two-dimensional, cardboard Bond. Add, too, the everyday laws of survival in boarding-school life, which required you to learn, very young, both self-reliance and the habits of secrecy, like Kim.
How to explain any of this to someone who never experienced it?
I can well understand how people came to join. Given the nature of the secret world, only they can say what it was really like in there—and they are not allowed to. Still, even without knowing exactly what I missed, or avoided, I am very relieved that I did not. I would fight against communism, but in my own way, as a writer.
I then had no further contact at all with MI6; or at least, I should more cautiously say, no conscious contact. From time to time, as I traveled around different countries, I casually reflected that the Nigel or Dick or Catherine from the British embassy, who had just so genially offered me lunch or a drink, was perhaps a spy. Doubtless one or two of them were, but they were certainly not telling me—and, anyway, I found it much more interesting to talk to the locals.
Yet such is the myth that surrounds the British secret service that British journalists, writers and scholars working abroad are very often thought to be spies. Those German journalists in West Berlin suspected that James Fenton, of all people, might be a spy, and it was not just the Stasi who suspected me. So, for example, did Polish friends I made in Berlin. Meanwhile James and I sat in a bar idly wondering whether Stephen X. or Kevin Y. did not, perhaps, do a little work on the side for MI6. In many cases, this was probably idle gossip, put about by some hostile agency or malicious rival, or just the product of imaginations stirred by the myth. But in some cases it must have been true. Some “journalists” and “students” were more than they seemed.
So I am not surprised or outraged that the Stasi decided to take a closer look at me. What is shocking is the way they were spying on their own people and getting them to spy on one another: that vast army of surveillance, intimidation and repression, in which my own “Schuldt,” “Smith” and “Michaela” were just a few foot soldiers. But the mere fact of this investigation of me is, in itself, still just about within the range of a “normal” security service’s work. In a lecture delivered in 1994, shortly after I started work on this book, the then head of Britain’s security service (MI5), Mrs. Stella Rimington, observed: “Some governments will try every means—including enrolling their students at British universities—to bypass international agreements to obtain what they want. We are now working closely with others to identify and prevent their efforts.”
Moreover, while I had no secret agenda for the British government, I did have a secret agenda of my own. Using a pseudonym in The Spectator, and obviously not telling the East German authorities what I was up to, I was collecting material about the East German dictatorship. And the more I learned, the more I disliked it. Was I making secret preparations for attempted literary subversion? I certainly was.
To a communist state like East Germany, built on total control of the media, censorship and organized lying, any probing research or critical journalism was subversive. Western journalists were routinely covered by Stasi counterintelligence department II/13. Partly this was because they were looking for spies under journalistic cover, but it was also because, for the Stasi, the distinction between journalist and spy was not clear-cut. For them, a Western journalist and
a Western spy were both agents of Western intelligence-gathering, and both alike threats to the security of the communist system.
Of course, all governments are always tempted to stifle awkward inquiry and to demonize critics as “subversive.” Western governments often erred in this direction during the Cold War. Still, what I was doing in East Germany would never have been considered “subversion” in West Germany, Britain or America. The difference was not, to be sure, between the pure white of a completely free press and the solid black of a wholly unfree one, but between the light gray of the largely free and the dark gray of the largely unfree. In East Germany, that gray was pretty dark.
For me, unlike for the Stasi, there is a very clear line between working secretly as a spy for a government and working (sometimes secretively) as a writer. Yet there are still disconcerting affinities between the two pursuits. The proximity is even indicated in the language. The title of the West German secret service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, translates literally as “federal news service.” Conversely, some of the earliest German newspapers were called Intelligenzblätter, “intelligence sheets,” and the first issue of the nineteenth-century Spectator proclaimed that “the principal object of a newspaper is to convey intelligence.” As the man from Spekta, I was a spy for “intelligence” in that older sense. A spy for the reader.
I was far from alone in this. Many journalists writing about dictatorships do similar things and most journalists do some of them. And not just journalists. Writers of other kinds also find themselves in this territory. In his autobiography, Graham Greene reflects that “every novelist has something in common with a spy: he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyses character, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous.” But how unscrupulous may he be? What means are justified to serve the end of “literature”?
The File Page 5