An Encyclopedic Disappointment

Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets

By Richard M. BENNETT, London: Virgin Books, Ltd., 2002 371 pp., bibliography, photos, index. $29.95

Reviewed by CI Centre Professor Nigel West, intelligence historian and author

If it is agreed that an encyclopedia should be a compendium of knowledge available at the time of publication, and the author is someone of experience with a detailed understanding of his field, then such books should not only be an essential reference work, but also provide a contemporaneous snapshot of what was known on particular topics at a specific time. Previous titles include Richard Deacon’s Spyclopaedia (1987); Vincent Buranelli’s SpyCounterSpy (1982); George O’Toole’s Encyclopedia of American Intelligence and Espionage (1988); Thomas Arms’s Encyclopedia of the Cold War (1994); Norman Polmar’s Spy Book (1997); and Jay Robert Nash’s Spies (1997) and all have useful functions. In addition there have been four dictionaries of espionage, fulfilling much the same role, but if one omits these, and Peter Kross’s Encyclopedia of World War II Spies (2001), there has not been an encyclopedia published on the subject for the past five years.

Naturally the espionage business, probably more than most, is an area where there is a handicapping dynamic, and to that extent Espionage is the first post 9-11 book to document the many changes that have been forced upon the international intelligence community. Those events transformed the security environment forever, a quantum development far more significant than the arrest of a Robert Hanssen and the more recent dismantling of the Greek terrorist organization November 17.

Bennett himself has been an intelligence analyst since 1966 and his book is especially noteworthy because it boasts a foreword by James Bamford, author of two studies of the NSA, Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, and a preface by the MI5 renegade David Shayler, and therefore expectations will be high. Bennett has organized Espionage into a glossary of terms used by the intelligence community, definitions of commonly used words and phrases, a relatively limited number of individual cases (including Hanssen, whose name does not appear in a very inadequate index) ranging from Cardinal Richelieu to the Walker family and Aldrich Ames, and fifty-one separate countries. The book’s strength lies in these summaries, listing the organization of a country’s security and intelligence apparatus, with a further account of their special forces. France merits four pages while the US achieves twenty-eight, with a further large entry of five pages under ‘Dirty Tricks’.

As the choice of Bamford and Shayler as contributors suggests, Bennett has strong views on his profession, so Espionage is not a straightforward factual document, but contains plenty of his personal opinions and not a little polemic. For example, his harsh verdict on the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence is that “the CIA does not seem to have an efficient, centralized analytic apparatus, one that can distinguish credible intelligence from fantasy”. Likewise, Bennett takes MI5 former Director-General, Dame Stella Rimington, to task for supervising the monitoring of subversive groups in the UK. MI5 has a clearly defined mission to keep an eye on organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the Parliamentary system, rather than unions exercising their legitimate powers, but Bennett comments that it “is slightly difficult to see how MI5’s ‘clear thinkers’ were able to tell these categories apart until they had all been thoroughly burgled, infiltrated and bugged.” He is equally critical of SIS, insisting, “there still appears to be no effective internal or external political oversight of SIS”.

Bennett is entitled to his comments, but readers will be bound to take them as a gauge of his personal, political standpoint. Certainly it is true that some of the measures introduced since 9-11 have considerable implications for liberty, human rights and freedom under the law in several democracies where these values hitherto have been nurtured and protected, and there is a debate underway about over-reaction and what hard-won rights must be sacrificed in the ostensibly laudable cause of protecting the public from suicide bombers. Do Bennett’s often controversial asides enhance the book’s value or serve to undermine it?

The acid test of whether Espionage stands or falls as a helpful contribution to the literature is accuracy. Whereas there are bound to be differing views on Bennett’s definition or words and phrases, there are two areas of concern about matters of verifiable fact. Firstly, there is the grotesque quality of the editing. Dozens of surnames are mis-spelt, sometimes in several different ways, and the list of such errors is too tedious to enumerate, but I calculate there is at least one every three pages. The poor editing extends beyond the simplest of mistakes (‘the Federal Bureau of Investigations’) to textual contradiction. For example, in the passage dealing with the United States, it is authoratively stated as fact that “as late as July 2001, despite being a hunted man with a US price on his head, Osama bin Laden was able to travel safely to an American hospital in a Gulf State to receive treatment for a serious kidney problem.” However, this identical story had been told earlier, in a passage devoted to “Medical Intelligence’ about bin Laden’s kidneys, describing “rumours, unsubstantiated, that he received treatment in an American hospital in a Gulf State”. In reality, the story surfaced in a French newspaper which subsequently withdrew it when the hospital concerned issued a categoric denial. So is the story fact, unsubstantiated rumour or an invention later refuted? Such dilemmas pervade Espionage.

Let us take, as an illustration, the entry for an individual where almost everything there is to know about the case is in the public domain, such as the GRU defector Igor Gouzenko. According to Bennett, Gouzenko “was given the cover of a cipher clerk” in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, and in the entry for cover defines it as “Protective guise assumed by an individual or activity to conceal its true identity and affiliation”. The problem here is that Gouzenko really was a cipher clerk at the embassy and worked there under his own name. Accordingly, by any standard, he was not operating under any ‘cover’. This is a relatively trivial irritation, but what of the assertion that Gouzenko only “stole a large number of files and documents” after he had made “contact with the RCMP Security Service”. In this short extract there is a chronological and factual problem. Firstly, Gouzenko only came into contact with the RCMP after he had purloined his mealticket of 109 documents, and secondly, in September 1945 there was no RCMP Security Service, which did not come into existence until 1970. Then there are the statistics of those arrested and prosecuted. Bennett says “at least 18 Soviet agents were exposed and nine were prosecuted in Canada alone”. Even giving some latitude for the definition of what amounts to ‘exposure’, and the correct figure should be several times the number cited, the number of people prosecuted in Canada is beyond dispute at eleven, being Fred Rose, Sam Carr, Kathleen Willsher, Edward Mazerall, Israel Halperin, Raymond Boyer, Durnford Smith, David Shugar, Gordon Lunan, Agatha Chapman and Squadron-Leader Poland.

Having correctly pointed out that the arrest of Alan [sic] Nunn May had been brought about by Gouzenko, he goes on to assert that “Nunn May’s and Klaus Fuchs’s related arrest led to the exposure of a number of American communists who were then accused of providing the Soviet Union with atom bomb secrets, including Gold, Greenglass and the Rosenbergs.” Now this is an extraordinary statement that deserves close attention. How was the arrest of Allan Nunn May in 1946 related to the arrest more than three years later of Klaus Fuchs? May was identified from documents provided by Gouzenko, but Fuchs was caught in 1949 as a direct consequence of references to him in VENONA texts. Accordingly, there was absolutely no link between the two cases. Certainly the arrest of Fuchs led eventually to his identification of Harry Gold, and the latter was able to finger Greenglass, who in turn provided evidence against the Rosenbergs. That sequence is well documented, but what has any of this to do with Dr May? In short, Bennett’s claim that the two cases of May and Fuchs were related is completely unfounded.

Bennett then goes on to make a truly astonishing claim: “Gouzenko later condemned British intelligence for not acting sooner on his information in the case of Klaus Fuchs, pointing out that Fuchs’s name was prominent in the documents”. If true, Gouzenko might have had a point, but neither Fuchs’s name nor codename appeared anywhere in Gouzenko’s 109 documents, and furthermore he never complained that “MI5 waited almost five years before finally organizing his arrest.” The fact is that Fuchs was interviewed by MI5 as soon as he was identified as the VENONA spy codenamed CHARLES and REST, and was arrested as soon as he confessed.

There are several other matters one could take issue with in Bennett’s treatment of Gouzenko, but the point is that on verifiable facts his text is replete with error and assertions that are not just doubtful, but plain wrong. It would be unfair to take a single, exceptional problem and exaggerate its significance in the context of a much larger book, but Gouzenko’s entry is symptomatic of the rest. These are not matters of debate or speculation, but completely mistaken accounts of cases where virtually everyone involved, on both sides of the Cold War, have given their version of events.

In the example of George Blake, the author’s sheer determination to peddle fiction borders on the bizarre. Leaving aside the claim that his true first name if ‘Georg’ and the earlier reference (p. 21) to him as ‘a deep penetration GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent”, Blake is said to have been “accepted by SOE” and that “after the war he was accepted into the Foreign Office”. He was the victim of “painstakingly and successfully conducted brainwashing techniques” while a prisoner in Korea and “upon his release, he requested that the FO transfer him permanently to SIS”. He “became an SIS field officer in 1953” and until he was “exposed by a German double agent” he worked for the KGB which, having been alerted to the existence of the Berlin tunnel, “began feeding false information through the system”. Once he had been “finally compromised by German double agent Horst Eitner, was recalled to London, “arrested at Heathrow Airport” and “admitted that he had been a triple agent”. Eventually, after his escape from Wormwood Scrubs, Blake “was eventually given a post with the KGB”.

Virtually every statement purporting to fact in Blake’s entry is incorrect. He served with neither SOE nor the Foreign Office. He was a career SIS officer from the moment he transferred from the Royal Naval Reserve, and later volunteered to spy for the Soviets. No coercion or persuasion was required in Korea, as Blake proudly acknowledges in his autobiography No Other Choice, which also contains the correct details of his arrest at the Surrey home of his SIS interrogator. We now know from documents declassified in both Moscow and Washington DC that the Soviets deliberately avoided using the Berlin tunnel as a conduit for disinformation, and after his escape he was never granted a post in the KGB.

Having got so wrong every detail of Blake’s service with SIS, his recruitment by the Soviets, his arrest and his role as a ‘triple agent’ (defined absurdly elsewhere as “an agent who serves three separate intelligence services simultaneously”) one is bound to wonder what has been the cause of this perversely mistaken version. Has the author relied on hopeless books, or failed to spot a new, authorative publication? The answer is hard to fathom because although the canard concerning Blake’s fictional service with SOE can be traced back to an inaccurate biography, the suggestion that he succumbed to brainwashing is entirely novel, as is Bennett’s account of his arrest in England.

Of course, it is true that few books on the notoriously difficult subject of intelligence operations are ever wholly accurate. Some crucial facts do not emerge for years and other actions are open to interpretation and an individual’s motives are always likely to be the subject of endless speculation. But Espionage is in a wholly different, almost unique category. Take, for instance, Jim Bamford’s perfectly apposite observation in his foreword that ‘even experienced journalists often fail to understand the key difference between an intelligence case officer… and an ‘agent” and then turn to the entry on David Shayler and see that “Shayler’s partner, former MI5 agent Annie Machon” is described not as Shayler’s professional colleague, which she was, but rather as an ‘agent’, thereby establishing the truth of Bamford’s warning. So who’s fault is this? Is Bamford culpable for not spotting the blunder, or Shayler for failing to read the manuscript before he endorsed it as “a wealth of facts about the fields of espionage and counter-terrorism past and present which have never been made available in one publication before” or is Bennett or maybe his editor? Inevitably the author has to carry the can but such incidents, far from isolated in this book, make the reader wonder.

The issue of ‘cover’ is critical to many intelligence operations and careers, and Bennett’s slip over Gouzenko and Machon might suggest he does not completely understand the concept of intelligence professionals adopting journalistic, commercial or diplomatic covers to assist their missions overseas. It is indeed odd, when describing the SIS careers of Dickie Franks and Christopher Curwen he fails to realize that their ostensible foreign service postings were merely cover for their SIS assignments.

If Espionage is, as Shayler claims, a vehicle for new disclosures, can we sure of the veracity of them? Usually a book boasting new revelations will highlight them and give the reader a good opportunity to decide on their significance. The independent observer will also be informed about the long-standing theory that is about to be debunked, or will be warned that the next passage amounts to a stunning revelation, but what are we to make of such claims as:

“much of Andropov’s modern espionage ideas were culled, it was reported, from the British traitor and SIS spy, Kim Philby who worked closely with the Officer training Directorate of the KGB”;
“Angleton was the only senior CIA officer who really took Goltsin [sic] seriously”;
“whether Barnett was detected by accident, good counter-intelligence or ‘blown’ to protect another more important soviet source remains open to question”;
“Ironically, it was the KGB itself that informed MI5 of Bettany’s [sic] treachery”;
“When Blunt was shown the testimony of his American friend, he promptly confessed”;
Guy Burgess “got his old friend [Maclean] drunk and photographed him nude and in a sexual embrace with a young man”;
John Cairncross was “converted to Communism by Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess who turned him over to their NKVD controller Samuel Cahan”;
Wilhelm Canaris “almost certainly quietly co-operated with the British SIS and perhaps the OSS”;
The PHOENIX program in Vietnam resulted in the deaths of “over 20,000 civilians and “the nightmare of this slaughter haunted Colby throughout his intelligence career”;
GARBO was “captured and ‘turned’” as an agent of the “MI5 misinformation department” named “Luis” Calvo”;
Alexander Korda sent “SIS officers as movie cameramen wanting to film sensitive locations” to Germany where “the Nazi party were [sic] only too pleased for a British film company to want to film the beautiful fatherland and extended help on a number of occasions”;
When “one of the Soviet spies admitted to FBI [sic] that he had been passed secret material by a British physicist working at Los Alamos. Fuchs was the immediate suspect but neither the FBI nor MI5 could obtain sufficient hard evidence to arrest him”;
Roger Hollis “worked on the Russian desk” for six years;
Dick “Helms was found guilty of perjury”;
Harry Houghton was caught when his extravagance was spotted by “a naval security officer”;
“Edward lee Howard was “the first CIA agent to sell secrets to the Russians”;
The anti-Nazi plotter Otto John “worked with the British SOE, SIS (MI6) and the US OSS keeping these allied intelligence services [sic] abreast of these group’s [sic] activities when visiting neutral Lisbon and Madrid” prior to his defection in 1944;
Max “Knight’s close friend in NID was Ian Fleming” and Fleming used him “as the model” for ‘M’;
“Warned that the Rosenbergs were about to be arrested by the FBI in 1950, the Cohens hurriedly fled to London’;
Sir Vernon Kell “was sacked by Churchill in May 1941”;
Guy “Liddell was already under investigation” by the time Burgess and Blunt defected and “escaped probable exposure as a major Soviet spy by dying’;
The London Cage was where “MI5 and SIS (MI6) interrogators handled important German prisoners”;
Sir Colin Coote had been “an SIS officer”;
Theodore Maly talent-spotted Philby in Vienna “and encouraged him to return to Britain in May 1934”;
“Menzies and Canaris were in communication on occasions, even after war broke out”;
“Sometimes, Penkovsky would meet Wynne and simply hand him dozens of rolls of film”;
Gordon “Lonsdale had managed to recruit two reasonably low-level agents” inside the Portland naval base;
Morris and Lona Cohen were “long-term deep-cover KGB officers”;
Jack Profumo “achieved cabinet rank”;
Stephen “Ward was prosecuted on trumped-up charges”;
By December 1940 Tar Robertson “had some 12 Nazi spies under his control, including two in Sweden”;
The Russian submarine Kursk was sunk “on 12 August 2001”;
Gordon Welchman and Dillwyn Knox “built a duplicate (Enigma] machine that allowed them to crack the German codes”;
Alan Turing was “threatened with exposure as a homosexual by police officers investigating a complaint about his personal behaviour”;
Dick “Brooman-White” was a Soviet spy suspect;
MI5’s watchers conduct “surveillance on foreign targets within Britain”;
“SMERSH” agents attacked Vladimir Kostov and Georgi Markov in 1978;
“Leslie Howard worked for SIS”;
Anthony Blunt “represented MI5 at meetings of the JIC”;
“as early as 1946, [Dick] White was warning his superiors about the SIS Officer Kim Philby”;
Sir Steward Menzies “admitted to sending a copy of the Zinoviev letter to the Daily Mail”;
“Michael Stewart, the Foreign Secretary, has long been considered to have been an important CIA’asset’”,
etc., etc.

The treatment given to the famous Cambridge Five of Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross is indicative of Espionage’s content. The account of each case is wildly eccentric and far removed from reality:

Did Guy Burgess use “homosexual blackmail to win over and then retain agents”? Quite obviously not, because apart from anything else he was guilty of what was then the same criminal offence.
Was the CIA “suspicious of Maclean long before the penny dropped in Britain? Of course not, for the Anglo-American molehunters working on VENONA collaborated with each other to identify the spy codenamed HOMER.
Was Philby really recruited by John Cornford and did he become “a close colleague of both William J Donovan and Allen Dulles during the war? Certainly not!
“When Blunt was shown the testimony of his American friend [Michael Straight], he promptly confessed”. This is new because Straight never gave any ‘testimony against Blunt or anyone else, and it is well documented that Blunt’s confession in April 1964 followed an offer of immunity from Arthur Martin.
Was John Cairncross confronted in 1964 “with insurmountable evidence of his involvement with the Soviet intelligence services [sic] provided by Blunt? This was a chronological impossibility because the principal interrogation of Cairncross took place in the US months before Blunt’s confession in London. In short, Richard Bennett has reinvented the Cambridge spies.

Some of the single extracts listed above are somewhat mundane or esoteric, but others if true should merit newspaper headlines. Take, as another example, the proposition that Rudolf “Roessler was a witting or unwitting British double-agent and that the Lucy Ring was used by SIS and probably later the OSS to feed ULTRA material through to the Soviet Government in a form they [sic] would accept”. In addition, there was another Swiss network ”run by Captain Thomas [sic] Sedlacek whose information was supplied to the British and US intelligence”. Thus there were two Swiss organizations, headed by Rado and Sedlacek, who were in contact with the British, although in a second version of Roessler’s espionage (for the ‘Switzerland’ entry) Bennett moderates his claims to suggest “he was probably used to pass ULTRA information to the Soviet Union” but that he also “provided good intelligence from within occupied Europe for both the Swiss and the British SIS”. While reducing a previous certainty to a probability, Bennett appears to be extending Roessler’s reach into Germany to the occupied territories, itself an interesting, novel, but unsubstantiated idea.

This is an explanation for the apparently extraordinary sources that kept the Swiss spy Rudolf Roessler so inexplicably well informed during the Second World War. Bennett adds that “Philby, with the approval of his NKVD controller, had put SIS officers in touch with the Soviet network operated by Sandor Rado in Switzerland which resulted in the SIS receiving valuable information on the German military. This must be counted as one of Philby’s major contributions to SIS and the British war effort”. This episode can be dated quite precisely as Bennett explains that “Philby would later join SOE” an event that occurred in September 1940. Thus, according to Bennett, Philby arranged for Rado to help the British with valuable information from Germany, and SIS later reversed the flow to give the Soviets ULTRA. In short, Bennett is not only making an authorative judgment on an old chestnut, that SIS was behind the mystery of how Roessler was accessing such priceless intelligence, but Philby had been personally responsible for opening the channel to Swiss apparat in the first place!

Could Philby really have accomplished such a feat? Alas, no evidence is presented for such an astonishing coup. Nor is any offered for Bennett’s other remarkable claim about Philby (who apparently defected in both 1963 and 1964), that “one of the detailed reports he provided for SIS was the complete background on a NKVD spy named Boris Krotov, who had operated in England for much of the 1930s, thereby chronicling the career of a very senior Soviet officer who had been the control for Philby, Burgess and Maclean, among many others”. Once again, close examination of this claim tends to undermine it. According to MI5’s records, Krotov had arrived in London in August 1941 and had remained until March 1947, under Third Secretary cover at the Consulate. He was a relatively junior newcomer who was quite inexperienced with only a limited grasp of English, evidently a cause for some concern within the local rezidentura, as disclosed by VENONA, if he was to run Anthony Blunt, as Moscow had intended. Like much of his other data, Bennett’s information about the Cambridge five is startlingly new, but cannot be verified easily. In any event, it seems unlikely that Krotov is the man the author is describing, if indeed he ever existed, for no such person appears in any of the other literature. So did Philby really prepare a dossier on Krotov for SIS? The tale is entirely new, so what is its provenance? If he did, what was his motive? And why would Philby, an expert on Spain, be consulted about the credentials of a Soviet intelligence officer? Bennett is silent on the questions.

As a British analyst, allegedly with nearly forty years of experience, one would expect some of the author’s expertise to extend to the British intelligence apparatus in Northern Ireland. Curiously, Bennett is deficient in the province’s troubled history, and its recent past. In terms of what has occurred over the previous thirty years, he alleges that there was a “battle for control between SIS and MI5” for Ulster and, in mentioning Maurice Oldfield, says “MI5 decided to expose his latent homosexuality anonymously to the media”. Both assertions are entirely untrue, as is his statement that “the Continuity IRA” is “Republican Sinn Fien’s military wing”. On the contrary, Sinn Fein is the political branch of the Provisional IRA, in total opposition to Continuity IRA, which is a dissident, break-away group. Similarly, Bennett’s list of loyalist paramilitaries and their affiliations is hopelessly muddled, as is his reference to a single British Army intelligence group, ‘the Field Research Unit (or Forward Reconnaissance Units)” when both names offered for the Force Research Unit are incorrect.

Undoubtedly the terrorist campaign that has ravaged Ireland has had a profound impact on the British security and intelligence units deployed in that benighted country, but there is an added responsibility on non-sectarian commentators to present the facts as accurately as possible. The circumstances surrounding the appointment and subsequent resignation of Sir Maurice Oldfield as the intelligence director are now well-documented, but the idea that MI5 and SIS were locked in combat to control the province is as much a travesty as the assertion that the Special Air Service “has killed around 50 people, including 30 IRA volunteers, since 1969”.

So does Bennett know what he is talking about? One litmus test is to take some samples where cases (such as Blake, Philby and Abel) are well documented and make a comparative analysis. Another is to take a general view of the way particular topics are handled. Clearly the book has considerable shortcomings in respect of the human cases, but what of the technical sources? Two, ULTRA and VENONA give some cause for concern.

Since 1974 much has been written about the cryptographic success achieved at Bletchley Park, and dozens of participants and historians have given their version of what was accomplished. Bennett includes separate short entries for GCCS, GCHQ, Enigma, Bletchley Park and ULTRA, longer ones for Alan Turing, Sir Edward Travis, Alistair [sic] Denniston, and a four page summary under ‘United Kingdom’. Evidently the author rightly considers Britain’s cryptographic effort to be of some significance, yet his very confused account seriously misdefines some common terms, and consistently refers to the Enigma machine in capitals, as though Enigma is itself a codename.

Much the same can be said for Bennett’s treatment of VENONA, which is seriously flawed. Suffice to say that his assertion that the Army Security Agency began work on the Soviet intercepts in 1943 is somewhat wide of the mark, as is much the rest of his account in which the NKVD’s William Weisband is identified as “a GRU agent” variously named Weissman and Weissband.

Some of these endemic slips can be shrugged off as the fault of the publisher, and what non-fiction author can claim to have written a book entirely free of error? However, one does wonder about Bennett’s sources. On whom is he relying when he tells us that Lord Rothschild was a Soviet mole, and that in 1946 the SAS dispatched three-man assassination squads to murder “German Gestapo and SS personnel responsible for the torture and murder of SAS or SOE officers”. The tale about Rothschild comes from Roland Perry’s The Fifth Man, and the SAS myth was created by ‘Captain’ [sic] Peter Mason in Official Assassin. Neither, equally unreliable book is taken seriously by any historian, and Bennett’s reliance on these authors in particular suggests a lack of discrimination.

The challenge of sorting the wheat from the chaff in Espionage is not to be under-estimated as it is hard to distinguish between what material is simply mistaken, and what is the result of poor research. The entry on Colonel Rudolf Abel, the very first of the book, is an object lesson. We have known for some years that the illegal rezident in the US who was arrested in the US using the alias Emil Goldfus, who subsequently identified himself to the US authorities as ‘Colonel Rudolf Abel’, was in fact the British-born William Fisher. Abel was never his true name, nor even a cover-name, but actually that of a friend of Fisher who was unwilling to disclose his true identity to the FBI but did want to alert Moscow to his detention. The problem with Bennett’s account is that the reader is left with the impression that Abel was the spy’s authentic name, for there is absolutely no mention of Fisher at all. Was he really a ‘master-spy’ who supervised “a vast network of Soviet spies” in the US? Not according to the FBI, nor even the KGB’s official history.

In terms of structure, Bennett has been let down by some disappointing editorial supervision. Why is it alleged there is a British intelligence organisation called “Central Intelligence Machinery”? Why are there two entries for a “JIC”, identified as the “Joint Intelligenc Centre” [sic], which gives no explanation of the country in which the JIC operates? Certainly it could not be Britain where ‘JIC’ is an abbreviation for the Joint Intelligence Committee. Embarrassingly, someone has not realized that Central Intelligence Machinery is merely the title of a booklet published in England by the Cabinet Office to explain the structure of the country’s security and intelligence establishment.

Is Espionage a worthwhile addition to the literature? David Shayler avers that he wished such a book had been available to him when he was a journalist on the Sunday Times. Let it be hoped that he did not have an opportunity to read the book before he gave his endorsement as his endorsement reflects poorly on both himself and his former newspaper.