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Here are eight routes into the author’s world of spies, swindlers, escapes and betrayals
Join The Globe and Mail for an evening with author Ben Macintyre as he discusses his latest book, Redwood, with former Ottawa Bureau Chief Bob Fife, and books editor Judith Pereira, on Oct. 5 in Toronto.
Visit tgam.ca/macintyre for more. Ben Macintyre belongs to a generation of narrative non-fiction writers, among them Patrick Radden Keefe, David Grann and John Vaillant, who’ve made a specialty of harnessing the machinery of thrillers and novels to exhaustively researched true stories. They take the raw materials of non-fiction – archives, interviews, historical records – and alchemize them into compulsive reading.
Macintyre’s subjects of choice are spies, double agents, con men and other masters-of-deception types, most often operating in the shadow worlds of the Second World War and the Cold War. People who put their lives on the line for country, profit or, in the case of his newest book, Redwood , a cure for erectile dysfunction. The stories have proved remarkably adaptable: Three of his books have been turned into films or television dramas, while several others have inspired documentaries.
My own portal into Macintyre’s work was The Spy and the Traitor , his riveting account of Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB officer who became one of Britain’s most valuable Cold War agents. First love being the most indelible, it’s still the book I’d recommend first. Espionage may not run in Macintyre’s family but the British establishment certainly does.
Born in Oxford in 1963 into a well-connected academic family, Macintyre, a long-time columnist and associate editor at the London Times, is the son of an Oxford historian and descended on both sides from minor British aristocracy. In person, however, he is strikingly free of any establishment hauteur: open, affable and unguarded.
For readers coming to Macintyre for the first time – or wondering where to venture next – here are eight routes into his world of spies, swindlers, escapes and betrayals. For Cold War dysfunction Redwood For one Soviet spy, the Cold War proved a little too cold: In Macintyre’s timely, page-turning latest, the fate of nations turns, improbably, on a man’s sex life – or lack thereof.
In 1981, KGB major Vladimir Kuzichkin, stationed in Iran in the turbulent aftermath of the 1979 revolution, approached British intelligence with a proposition: He would trade his country’s secrets for help with one of his own. Kuzichkin was suffering from erectile dysfunction, which he was convinced Western medicine could cure . MI6 gave the 6-foot-4 Russian the codename REDWOOD, after the tree.
MI6 officer Ian McCredie became his handler, and the bond between the two is at the heart of the book. Kuzichkin supplied intelligence about Soviet activities and Iran’s communist Tudeh Party. When the KGB, which had begun to suspect Kuzichkin, summoned him back to Moscow, MI6 was forced to engineer an escape from Iran.
The intel Kuzichkin provided was ultimately handed to the Iranian regime, contributing to a brutal purge of communists and helping strengthen a government the West would come to regard as an enemy. Macintyre is particularly good on that bitter irony: an intelligence triumph whose unintended consequences are still being felt. For an ingenious wartime caper Operation Mincemeat Had Ocean’s Eleven been set in wartime Whitehall, it might have looked something like Operation Mincemeat.
In 1943, with the Allies preparing to invade Sicily, British intelligence devised an audacious plan to convince Hitler that the Allies’ real targets were Greece and Sardinia. The scheme required a corpse, dressed as a fictitious Royal Marine named William Martin and equipped with an entire invented life, including a briefcase containing false military documents. The body was then deposited off the coast of Spain in the hope that the papers would find their way into German hands.
Revelling, as do we, in both the ingenuity and absurdity of the operation, Macintyre introduces an eccentric cast of intelligence officers, scientists, secretaries and others who helped make the imaginary major Martin convincing. Mincemeat has all the pleasures of a great caper: watching an outlandish ruse assembled piece by piece, knowing that thousands of lives may depend on whether the mark takes the bait.
For a strong female lead Agent Sonya Macintyre gravitates to real-life characters who seem too improbable for fiction, and few are more improbable than Ursula Kuczynski. Born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin in 1907, Kuczynski was a committed Communist by her teens.
Her espionage career began in Shanghai – where she was recruited by legendary Soviet spy Richard Sorge – and would take her through China, Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Poland and Switzerland before she finally landed in Britain in 1941. Code-named Sonya, she became a colonel in Soviet military intelligence while raising three children. Her greatest coup took place in an Oxfordshire village, where, under cover as an unassuming housewife and mother, she handled Klaus Fuchs, the German-born British physicist who passed atomic secrets to Moscow. MI5 came close to outing her but was hampered, Macintyre suggests, by an inability to imagine – and really who would? – that a mum baking cakes in the English countryside might also be a formidable Soviet spy.
For the art of escape Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle In 1940, the Nazis began using Colditz Castle – a forbidding, supposedly escape-proof gothic fortress perched above the eastern German town of the same name – to hold Allied officers who’d proved particularly troublesome, or particularly adept at escaping from other prisoner-of-war camps. The castle immediately became a hothouse of ingenuity and sheer bloody-mindedness. Prisoners tunnelled, scaled walls, impersonated German officers and dreamed up increasingly elaborate routes to freedom.
One group of British inmates secretly built a two-man glider in the castle attic. The thrills are in the escapes themselves, of course, but the richer story is arguably what happened when hundreds of men from different nations and classes were locked up together for years.
Macintyre presents Colditz as a society in miniature, with its own hierarchies, rivalries, prejudices, alliances and divisions among prisoners and captors alike – complicating the familiar Great Escape image of plucky officers united against their Nazi captors. For the purest spy thriller The Spy and the Traitor Perhaps no Macintyre book makes the case for non-fiction as thriller quite as forcefully as this one.
Oleg Gordievsky was a rising KGB officer who, increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, began secretly working for MI6 in the 1970s. Over the next decade he supplied the British with a stream of intelligence from inside the KGB, eventually becoming acting head of the KGB’s London station. In 1985, however, Gordievsky was abruptly summoned back to Moscow, where he realized he had been betrayed and was under surveillance.
What follows is the book’s nail-biting set piece: an elaborate MI6 operation to smuggle him across the Soviet border in the trunk of a car. Macintyre reconstructs the escape almost minute by minute, turning border guards, a bag of cheese-and-onion potato chips and a soiled diaper into instruments of almost unbearable suspense.
For a criminal mastermind, Victorian-style The Napoleon of Crime Published in 1997, Macintyre’s second book predates his focus on espionage but shows that many of his other preoccupations were already in place. Adam Worth was a German-born American bank robber, art thief and criminal mastermind who made his name in late 19th-century London, moving fluidly between respectable society and the underworld and becoming a prototype of the gentleman thief.
He amassed a fortune, travelled the Mediterranean on his own yacht and orchestrated crimes across Europe and America, all while cultivating a strict personal code: He abhorred violence, was fiercely loyal to his accomplices and kept his criminal life secret from his family. His most famous exploit was the 1876 theft of Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, originally intended as leverage to free his imprisoned brother.
When his brother was released without it, Worth kept the now virtually unsaleable painting hidden for the next quarter-century, apparently developing a deep attachment to it. Macintyre tells Worth’s story as both a Victorian criminal adventure and a character study, finding in his double life the kind of divided loyalties and carefully constructed identities that would later animate his spy books.
An inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s professor Moriarty, Worth made and lost fortunes over a spectacular criminal career, only to die penniless. For intimate treachery A Spy Among Friends Kim Philby wasn’t merely one of the most damaging Soviet spies ever to penetrate British intelligence, he was also exceptionally good at inspiring trust. A member of the Cambridge spy ring, Philby spent decades passing British and American secrets to Moscow while rising through the ranks of MI6.
Macintyre brings a fresh eye to one of the best-known tales of espionage and betrayal by telling it largely through Philby’s friendship with fellow intelligence officer Nicholas Elliott, a product of the same privileged world of public schools, clubs and old-boy networks. That intimacy gave Philby’s deception its particular sting, while exposing a vulnerability of the British establishment: a system in which class, charm and the connections could make a certain sort of chap seem inherently trustworthy.
When suspicion finally hardened around him, Philby fled to Moscow in 1963. Part of Macintyre’s achievement is making the reader understand not just how he got away with it for so long, but why his friends found it so difficult to believe the truth.
For a charming rogue Agent Zigzag A perfect entry point to Macintyre’s fascination with morally slippery characters, Agent Zigzag tells the story of Eddie Chapman, an English safecracker, conman and inveterate charmer with a taste for fast cars, gambling and other people’s money. Imprisoned on Jersey when the Germans invaded and occupied the Channel Islands in 1940, Chapman, who knew an opportunity when he saw one, volunteered his services to German intelligence.
The Nazis trained him in espionage and parachuted him into Britain with orders to blow up an aircraft factory. Upon landing, he promptly turned himself over to MI5, becoming a double agent codenamed Zigzag. Chapman was brave, reckless, chronically unfaithful and noticeably unburdened by principle, leaving those around him wondering precisely what his motivations were.
That moral elasticity is the engine of Macintyre’s book, and the result is part spy thriller, part picaresque: a story of fake sabotage, imminent danger, a rotating cast of girlfriends and an incorrigible crook who discovered in wartime espionage the one career for which his specific array of talents amounted to a qualification.
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