Matthew Parris
We humans are obsessed with espionage: always have been, always will be. Never forget this when approaching any spy-related story. The tale may turn out to be important and disturbing; but remember that even if it were not it would still have its audience on the edge of our seats. We are captivated by the world of spooks, and this can lend them the ear of politicians and the media, and the mystique that comes with knowing more than we can ask them to say.
Why such awe? The answer lies as much in human psychology as in the historical record. Treachery fascinates us. For good Darwinian reasons, something within all of us keeps a wary eye out for false friends, for concealed danger, for persons unknown who are trying to compromise us, poison us, steal our secrets or undermine our security. Hence the enduring appeal of spy novels, spy documentaries and spy movies. A splinter of incipient paranoia pierces us all.
Certainly there have been episodes, though usually in war or counterterrorism, when the course of history has been changed by espionage, and these remain rightly vivid in our imagination. I most emphatically do not belong to the “it’s all rubbish” view of spying. We tend to forget, however, the wealth of energetic but unproductive effort to harvest information from which little useful was ever gained. Scandals leap into our thoughts: Profumo, Keeler and Captain Ivanov, Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt: some just dupes, others traitors. Philby betrayed British agents just as Soviets who we “turned” doubtless betrayed Soviet agents, but did you ever learn and, if you did, do you now remember what it was the Soviet Union actually gained from many of these that proved of critical importance? Our enemies and our competitors are often quite stupid.
Which brings me to China. Investigations being current, it’s best to say nothing about Chris Cash: the parliamentary aide and Chinese “spy suspect” who is (as it happens) a friend of friends, though I’ve never spoken to him. I know it’s routine in such cases to say “we must suspend judgment” while nursing suspicion, but this is a case where I really do suspend judgment. MPs have been (correctly) prefacing their remarks about Cash with the word “alleged”, then proceeding directly to expressions of indignation about Chinese interference. The two should not be linked, and it’s unjust to Cash to imply otherwise while we do not yet know the truth of this. We should also keep in mind that there’s another (unnamed) person under investigation who has rather dropped out of the media story.
What does “spying” really mean, and who is, and who is not, a “spy”? I ask, very aware of how in my own life I’ve often hovered around the edge of this world. It started after university with an invitation to join MI6: declined because, being gay, this didn’t feel like a good idea; though I did join the Foreign & Commonwealth Office where homosexuality, if found out, would in those days equally have ended a career.
The next year came a curious incident. At a party in north London given by a fellow-FCO recruit, I met a young and stunningly handsome Bulgarian diplomat. He asked for a lift back into town. As we drove he started leaning ever closer to me. But he had terrible breath. Otherwise the temptation might have been irresistible. And maybe he was just secretly gay too — who knows? — but after dropping him off on the Cromwell Road I later got a postcard from him in Bulgaria. This I handed to the FCO’s security people who told me not to reply. Absent the halitosis and how differently my life could have gone, though I’d never have yielded to blackmail. Was he trying to be a spy, and if I’d slept with him would I have been a spy? I certainly knew nothing that would have been useful to Sofia.
Then I left the FCO and joined the Conservative Research Department, writing a booklet on the communist threat. A lunch invitation from a mid-ranking diplomat in the East German embassy turned into further lunches so I told M16 (I’d become an MP by then) who asked me to continue them and offered to pay for them (I refused). They doubtless wanted to know whether this chap could be “turned”. Having got to know him I advised this was unlikely. Memory fades as to what he asked me about over lunches; and anyway it doesn’t matter because I knew nothing. Was I “spying”? Was he?
At a conference of anti-Soviet communists and socialists in Rome (they paid my expenses), I spoke; and met an adorable young West German called Edgar, from some kind of fringe Marxist grouping. Nothing happened, but after I’d become an MP he too wrote to me, to renew our acquaintance — and I thought the letter best binned. An active friendship might have been professionally useful to either or both of us. “Spying”?
The closer you get both to the word and the idea, the cloudier it seems. I can write about these things now without attracting suspicion because I did always let our own intelligence service know what was happening. Being in the FCO gave me a keener understanding of the possible consequences of networking with the enemy. A more incautious person might have freelanced a bit out of curiosity, sociability or vanity, and in ignorance of what was really going on.
The beginning of wisdom here is to see that there are many greys between black and white; to understand that countries, foe or friend, will always seek advantage by trying to gain access to information not in the public domain; that we do need to be on our guard; but that spying is not an occupation much inhabited by either glamour or infamy, heroes or villains, and neither threatens nor promises as much as we may excitedly suppose. China is certainly dangerous, but there’s no point in shouting at it, and the Chinese Communist Party are self-defeating in their unfocused information-gathering and influencer-seeking. Seldom can a great power have engendered so much international hostility and distrust in so short a time. There are many fools in Beijing, so let’s stay watchful but let’s not big these people up, nor glamorise their unfiltered hoovering up of information. They’d certainly be wasting their time at Westminster, where nobody knows anything.
To my mind a spy is someone who knowingly assists a foreign power, knowingly to the disadvantage of his own country, by providing information either for material reward, or under threat of blackmail, or out of disillusion with his own country or admiration for the foreign power. That’s a high bar; but it’s time we sharpened up our definition before the word loses all meaning.
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