Dan Snow's History Hit - Bond, The Secret Service & Exporting Britain's Influence

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

James Bond is a character that has come to define a certain kind of Britishness but what, if any, role does 007 play in the real world of intelligence? Professor Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5, joins the podcast today and in his opinion, James Bond has been a surprisingly valuable asset to British intelligence over the last five decades. Indeed, the Bond brand has helped our security services to punch above their weight across the globe. Christopher and Dan also discuss the origins of the UK's security services, their ever-evolving role since their inception and whether Bond bears any resemblance to actual spying.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Everyone's talking Bond this week, everyone's talking Bond, but what I want to talk about is, what is the reality of this? Is Bond just some like mad cosplay to overcome British anxiety and embarrassment at retreating from global hegemony? Like what is going on with Bond? Is it taken seriously in the world of intelligence? So I asked, somebody who knows more about the world of intelligence than anyone else on planet Earth, Christopher Andrew. He is the official historian of MI5, British Security Service. He is a professor of modern history, former chair of history at Cambridge University. He has taught many senior spies and academics in the world of security right across the planet. And he's worked

with KGB defectors like Oleg Gorievsky and Vasily Matrokin. He is, in the world of intelligence history, the king of it, the emperor. He is the M. And as you'll hear, he is remarkably complimentary about Bond and what it all means. This is fascinating. If you want to listen to our other podcasts about Bond, please do so wherever you get your pods or go to History Hit TV. It's our subscription service. We have a very small subscription. Very small indeed.

You get to go and access a galaxy of history content. You get all the podcasts, obviously, without the ads. You get all the TV you're ever going to need. 300, I think it is, 300, 400 hours now of history documentaries. More going up all the time you're ever going to need 300 i think it is going to 400 hours now of history documentaries more going up all the time two programs going up every single week in fact very exciting project operation barbara also going up this week which i'll be able to tell you about the next few days but what we think is the most factually accurate history documentary ever created okay bear with me i got evidence so go and check that out on history hit tv go to history hit.tv subscribe get 30 days for free if you do so now but in the meantime here is christopher

andrew on bond enjoy christopher great to have you back on the podcast thanks for coming on again a great pleasure to be here listen as brit as Britain's leading historian of intelligence, you've grown slightly whenever the Bond thing comes up, the Bond mania. I mean, was Bond just a kind of crutch, a little palliative to help Britain come to terms with its decline from global hegemony? Well, the answer is, I think, that whatever it was, it wasn't a crutch. For Britain to have the most popular spy in the history of the world, despite the fact that it never existed, I think any other country had an intelligence service would have regarded that as an advantage. And the idea that the most popular

monarch in the history of the 20th and the 21st century. I refer, of course, to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2012, when she was opening the London Olympics, probably the most successful moment in British history in the 21st century. The idea that she would invite on film Bond, to accompany her to this great event and be filmed. Some people say it was a body double. Parachuting at the age of 87, the first British monarch, not merely the first British monarch, the first monarch in the history of the world, into the Olympic arena. Well, that was quite something. Now, I can add one strictly unclassified secret to all that. Nobody in the Royal Box, including the Duke of Edinburgh, who regularly went to lunch at MI6 and knew an awful lot about MI5, had the slightest idea that was how she was going to

arrive. I mean, what Bond has produced is spy envy in the rest of the world rather than anything else. So in fact, it's a positive story of how Britain gave up hard power but developed to sort of more hazy, but albeit realistic, soft power in the world. Well, you see, we've had this soft power for quite some time. One, as your programs show, that we've been extremely good at is making up stories. I know you don't make them up. Telling stories would have been a better point. So here's what happens.

In the 1580s, under Queen Elizabeth I, who anticipated in her understanding of intelligence, Queen Elizabeth II, in a series of remarkable ways, Britain did something that no power in the world

had ever done until that point. It suddenly became the best at theatre. The name William Shakespeare provides some, but not complete justification for that. Secondly, it was actually also the best in intelligence, not simply in spies, but in code-breaking. So when we were faced in 1588 with the biggest challenge in early modern Britain, the Spanish Armada, run by the most

powerful ruler in Europe, we could cope with it. But that's also the point at which Britain becomes the first power in the world to produce a crossover between having the best spies and having the best playwrights. And the point at which they cross over is Shakespeare's most famous contemporary, who is only less famous than Shakespeare because he was assassinated. That is to say, Christopher Marlowe, who was born for a month within Shakespeare. seriously think that it matters to the security services to have that kind of cultural soft power to have those images of spies that somehow reinforces it gives credibility what's it add yes i mean just imagine i know dan you would resist all these temptations but just imagine yourself in let us say patagonia but you feel free to imagine yourself in any other part of the world and three people come up to you and invite

you to join their secret service. One is somebody from the KGB. The second is somebody from the CIA. And the third is somebody from MI6. Well, a majority of the world's population have seen James Bond films. Whatever the hell they think, they think it's rather fun. Now, as I've said, the rest of the world has Bond envy. They just wish they had somebody who was popular on the big screen and indeed the little screen as he has been. We need to remember, after all, that he is the longest surviving star of any intelligence agency in the world. The American record is J. Edgar Hoover, former head of the FBI. Nobody wants to be connected with him. If you go up to somebody in the rest of the world and say, please work for me,

I come from the organization that used to be headed by J. Edgar Hoover, my bet would be even you would not get very far with that. So he's been an extraordinary asset, but the asset is about to stop. Why? Well, let me refer you to a source that didn't even exist a year ago. The thing about the British Secret Service and all its massive manifestations is that it's been really secret. KGB never denied that it was there. The CIA admitted it was there from the day that it was born. MI6 never admitted it was there. It was born in 1909. But it wasn't until the Queen's speech of 1992 that it was even admitted that it was there. So for Bond to appear, Bond to be the most popular agent in the history of the world, most popular intelligence officer, I think very few people doubt that, was just an extraordinary achievement. So here he is, well over a half century since he appeared in his first film, appearing in a couple of weeks time in the most expensive film yet produced about Bond.

Even J. Edgar Hoover only lasted for 48 years. Bond will go on, I would dare to predict, certainly for the rest of my lifetime. Probably not given how fit you are for the rest of my lifetime probably not given how fit you are for the rest of your lifetime okay but when you're looking at the history of British intelligence during the cold war does it bear I mean it's obviously a stupid question on one level I'm thinking of Moonraker for example but does it bear any any similarity to what was actually going on in British intelligence? Not much, but of course, that is why it's so successful. It was serious fun.

Now, anybody attempting to recruit you from the CIA would not have been able to begin by saying, look, this is serious fun. Anybody attempting to recruit you from the KGB wouldn't have even tried that. But anybody approaching you from MI6 would have known that in all probability, you were part of the majority of the world's population who had actually seen a Bond film. So here's an example, which I got from somebody who was actually chief chief of MI6 in the 1960s. As you realize, this is a discussion I had long ago. His job was to go to meet a tribal chief, as they were called in those days, in Southeast Asia. And he'd never

met this man before, didn't know what to expect. But as he approached this man, and he, by the way, is generally recognized as one of the ablest intelligence officers in modern British history, the tribal chief said to him, hello, Mr. Bond. And he knew that he was okay. KGB, CIA, no chance. British intelligence in the Cold War. You've got the Americans talking about Britain losing their power and yet to find a role. How important was intelligence as an area in which Britain felt it could punch above its weight? It didn't have enough tank divisions in Germany to scare the Soviets, but did Britain feel intelligence was a field in which it could maintain its sort of great power status. Of course.

I mean, just one example. You won't find it difficult to obtain the photograph of Oleg Gordievsky speaking to Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office in 1987. I think it was. Now, I had the extraordinary fortune to meet Gordievsky and to collaborate with him in secret from 1986 onwards until we produced a television program together. And it all came out. What was he doing? So much so that it's very difficult to think of other British agents who've actually been invited to the Oval Office to be congratulated on what they were providing. We did punch above our weight, which we have not done in too many other areas.

So going back to good Queen Elizabeth I, there were two areas that we really, really punched above our weight under Queen Elizabeth I. There were two areas that we really, really punched above our weight under Queen Elizabeth I. One was the entertainment business, in particular theatre. The other was intelligence. Where have we punched above our weight in the late 20th and indeed the 21st century? Exactly the same areas. And those two facts are linked, you think. I mean, and often when you read so much of intelligence operations about so deception and spinning yarns and fantasy and convincing the enemy that something is true and it isn't or vice versa. So actually there is a powerful link between two. It's an obvious point, but the reason that it's not been identified as an obvious point,

I mean, this is such a serious problem that I've had to produce an acronym, as you know, with social scientists. The number who say you can't understand the 20th or the 21st century without understanding the 16th, which is obviously true. But the number that you've talked to who said that, I think, is relatively small. So here's the acronym that I've invented. And I hope you won't be able to do without it from now on. It's HASD, H-A-S-D-D, Historical Attention Span Deficit Disorder. So those wonderful people at Bletchley Park, and at the beginning of my career, there were plenty of them living around me. They were extraordinary. They included some of Britain's best historians, but they hadn't a clue that the last time that we were threatened

with a major invasion by a European power, and others by Napoleon in the early 19th century, was uncommonly useful. The fact that we were decrypting his coded messages, and the people who did that great service to our great country at the beginning of the 19th century, they didn't have a clue that the previous time when we were faced with a really serious invasion. I leave out the glorious revolution of 1689 because after all, William III was invited in, so that doesn't count. But Philip II of Spain was certainly not invited in. How do we know what he was up to? Well, we had the best spies. But actually, and it's all in the public record office, as it used to be called, the National Archives, as I must remember to call it now, we were decrypting his messages

at the same time. So from pandemics to intelligence, there is nothing of importance, and I would obviously include in that global warming, that one can understand without a very minimal perspective is 500 years. But 500 years, I think the pandemic has actually taught us the fact that the perspective is ridiculously short, as 100 years, for example, doesn't get us anywhere. That's true of intelligence as well. doesn't get us anywhere. That's true of intelligence as well. You're listening to Dan Snow's History.

We're talking Bond and what it all means. More coming up. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies

teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week Speaking, though, of the link between theatricality and intelligence, I'm reminded as you're talking of Operation Mincemeat, in which you're inviting the enemy into a sort of drama that then plays itself out. Yes. Well, just one of many examples. And what is it about British intelligence? Are they recruited? Are we good at teaching

drama in theatre? Are we just messy people who love drama in this island of ours? It's impossible to give many examples, but here's one example. The major influence of MI5 on Bond is the role of women. MI5 in the First World War was the first intelligence agency in the world to have really influential women. And by a very crooked path, three steps forward, four steps back, and so on, we get to start at Remington in 1992, the first female head of any of the world's major intelligence agencies. And she is the inspiration, as she herself has acknowledged, for Judi Dench. MI6 has had many successes, and like all the rest of us, many failures, but it's never had a female head. But Judi Dench is the best known, albeit

fictional, female head of any of the world's intelligence services. And as Stella Remington has said, she was just obviously modelled in many ways on her. So again, because of historical attention span deficit disorder, one of the things which is least realised about the history of British intelligence is that we are the world's leaders in the role of women in intelligence as well as men in intelligence. We've been talking so much about MI6 and MI5, and I'm going to ask you the question that you must weep whenever anyone asks you, but MI5 is a domestic service. MI5 is a domestic service, but of course, domestic has changed over the centuries as well. So MI5 used to be responsible for a quarter of the world. In other words, the British Empire.

And it was not concerned, of course, with other parts of the world. And it's only at the end of the 1960s, the beginning of the 1970s, that MI6, as opposed to MI5, starts being responsible for everywhere abroad, including parts that used to be part of the British Empire, which is a quick look at the map at the end of the Second World War will show it's really rather a large part of the World Service. And talk me through M and C, because there isn't actually an M, is there? No, but that was because Ian Fleming, when he talked about C, he gave away lots of secrets, but he thought that he shouldn't give away the secret that the chief of British Foreign Intelligence is called C. So he called him M, which was pretty transparent. Because, of course, when he began writing about all this, C was M in the sense that the chief of the British Foreign Intelligence Service was Mingus, a pronunciation of the Scottish name Menzies, rather than C. of the Scottish name Menzies rather than C.

Richard Moore, who's the current chief of MI6, has said things in public that all his predecessors have never said before. He's called C because of the first chief of MI6 who's called Mansfield Cumming. And in those far-off days, well, only 100 years ago, which is the blinking of an eye in historical time and blinking of an eye in intelligence time, Cumming went to the same theatrical outfitter for his disguises as the West End theatres. So the link is there. Just let me give you one example.

Virginia Woolf, apart from being one of the greatest writers in 20th century British history, was also one of the great practical jokers. But alas, so much of the literature has become extremely solemn. So it's difficult to think, I can't immediately think, of any biography of Virginia Woolf, who explains that she went for her disguises to exactly the same place as Cumming, first head of MI6. So what she did was to establish something which I think has not been widely noticed since. It's far easier to disguise women as men than vice versa. Now, I refer you to one of the greatest practical jokes in modern British history. If it had been about anybody other than Virginia Woolf, it would be very well known. So before

the First World War, she goes on a tour of inspection, helped by other practical jokers, of the flagship of the Royal Navy. And she wears a beard and poses, there's a bit of blackface going on, I'm afraid to say, as an Abyssinian prince. And she completely takes them in. So we are still living in an age, and this is tends to be forgotten by people, that you will meet far more women successfully made up as men in the world of intelligence than you had any chance whatever of meeting men successfully made up as women. Interesting stuff. I've got to ask you the question everyone asks me to ask you, which you must be very bored of answering. What is the most surprising as the official historian of MI5? What is the most surprising thing? Well, of course,

there's so many surprising things, but I have an answer to that. And the answer is this. In 1919, at the end of the war, MI5 is celebrated by a secret review, which was unsurprisingly called the Hush Hush Review. It was extremely well done. A majority of the players, a majority of the writers were women. What was the centerpiece of this celebration of the players, a majority of the writers were women. What was the centerpiece of this celebration of the First World War? It was the fact that in the middle of it, the first head of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell, was exposed as a German spy and he was bound up and taken away. Now, there is no other organisation in British history in the First World War. There is no other intelligence agency anywhere in the world during the First World War

which have dared to do that. But the point to remember is the history of MI5 is deeply surprising. And that's just the first surprise. Later ones get more extraordinary still. And you have to buy the brilliant book by Christopher to learn about those. So do you enjoy James Bond watching the films? Well, I enjoyed it at a number of different levels. But don't forget that Ian Fleming

mocked James Bond, even though people have not noticed it very much, as much as he celebrated. You know, there are a number of episodes in his own career which strongly resemble those of Bond's. Now, it is not true, of course, that Ian Fleming was expelled from Eden College. The only reason that he wasn't expelled from Eden College was that after a sexual misadventure, or as he would have called it, a sexual adventure, his mother agreed to remove him. So in the history of James Bond, the first really memorable thing that happens is his expulsion from Eton College. I should ask, you mentioned that Fleming gives away tradecraft and things like that. In what ways is he naughty in those books? Well, I mean, we'll have to begin at the beginning and go through to the end, and we wouldn't have time to discuss it. But the place to start, in many ways, is the book that he thought was his best book,

and which made the best of the films, based on books that he, as opposed to somebody else, wrote. And that's From Russia With Love. From Russia With Love, he bases on some serious history. And then, because people believed him, he must have been rolling around the floor as he discovered that he got away with this. While he was writing it, KGB was going through really rather a difficult period. Because what had happened is that when they had sent some of their assassins, who were generally really fairly good at things, to assassinate Ukrainian nationalist leaders in

West Germany, why West Germany? Because they had taken refuge there. They failed. And they repeatedly failed. Now, in the book version of From Russia with Love, the whole point of it, from the point of view of the KGB, is to assassinate and humiliate James Bond. And so, in other words, he's to be assassinated in deeply embarrassing circumstances. But what actually happens, of course, is that he's not assassinated. And the evidence, it's curious that Ian Fleming insists that he's talking about Smirsch, a part of the assassination branch of the KGB, which he says still exists. And he gives the name of the man who's still in head of it. It's a practical joke. It begins with G-I-U. In other words, the joke there is,

it begins with the name of Russian foreign intelligence, G-I-U. But it goes on to give a completely made up name, which roughly translated into English means miserable murderers. Now, I mean, just like Virginia Woolf, Ian Fleming was a terrific practical joker. And both of them, I think, are widely misunderstood because they're astonishing gifts, but really unusual, really original practical jokes. He gets to be fully recognized. I would hope that this is, of course, an ambitious hope that in Stars and Spies, I and my co-author are the first people to give full credit to the stupendous ability of Bond and others as practical heroes. I rest my case.

Thank you very much indeed, Christopher, coming on the podcast. Thank you. on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode

of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done and your support,

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