MI6’s early years: Michael Smith’s version

After decades of secrecy over even their chiefs’ names, MI5 and MI6 in recent decades have started opening up their records and their personnel to authors of espionage and counter-espionage history. Christopher Andrew’s various works played a key role in pioneering the independently written but officially blessed spy histories. Now it is an increasing crowded field with 2010 alone having brought two histories of the early years of what became known as MI6, with Michael Smith’s volume Six, new out in paperback, being one of them.

Written by a former military intelligence officer, with extensive access to official records and good personal contacts, it is a detailed, comprehensive work heavily sourced to official documents and other authoritative sources. Despite this, it is by no means blind to the failings – including often viscous personal infighting and organisational turf wars – of the intelligence pioneers it documents.

There is much of a lively nature to retell – both the bureaucratic infighting and at time eye-watering incompetence of the Secret Service’s early years alongside the dramatic stories such as the involvement of British agents in the murder of Rasputin, the larger than life career of the ‘Ace of Spies’ Riley and even the undercover work carried out by popular children’s author and journalist Arthur Ransome (of Swallows and Amazon fame but, as Smith explains, also deserving to be remembered for his brave service to the country).

On topics such as Riley and Rasputin, Smith sorts out the credible and the known from the exaggerated and the mythical, but these tales and those such as the smuggling of secrets inside boxes of Belgian chocolates are the exception in the book. For it is dominated by a narrative full of names and organisational changes – making the work a detailed, comprehensive narrative rather than a action-packed volume.

Little is offered in the way of analysis. There was an awful lot of bungling by untrained amateurs as the book makes clear, for example, but it does little to explain why there was such heavy use of untrained amateurs in the first place. It took decades for training to become the norm.

Likewise, we get hints of how poorly intelligence (other than that related to planning and assessing the impact of air raids) was used during the First World War. There are several references to important intelligence being gathered prior to the German army’s last gasp 1918 offensive. Yet accounts of that offensive usually do not feature any signs of effective British pre-warning about unit locations and intended tactics. Where did that intelligence go missing? Smith does not tell us. On this and other questions of analysis, the other 2010 volume – by Keith Jeffrey does a better job of analysis, even though the Jeffrey volume is lighter on the early years. The ideal early history would include the strengths of both, so if you have a detailed interest in the subject get both, but if you want just the one volume then either is a good pick.

You can buy Six: The Real James Bonds 1909-1939 by Michael Smith from Amazon here.