The spy from suburbia
It has to be a hoax. I mean, Richard Dearlove. Who could possibly be called that? A vicar, possibly, or a maker of stuffed toys, or the host of a daytime television gameshow, or . . . well, you get the picture. If you wanted to invent an innocuous-sounding name, that would be it. If you wanted to make the new head of MI6 sound cuddly, approachable, New Labourite, Richard Dearlove’s your man.
Where would “Mr Dearlove” live? Why, Putney of course, that anonymous suburb of south-west London, no doubt in a three-storey semi-detached Edwardian house hidden behind a seven-foot hedge. How old would he be? Fifty-four – born “somewhere in Cornwall” on January 23 1945. How many children would he have? Three – two sons and a daughter. His wife? Strangely anonymous: the neighbours say “they keep themselves to themselves; we thought they were spies”. Ho, ho, ho, who wrote this script? Educated? Monkton Combe, a minor public school near Bath, and Queen’s College, Cambridge, neither of which is willing to talk about its distinguished alumnus. Career? Spying, man and boy, in Nairobi, Prague, Geneva, Paris and Washington.
“Mr Dearlove’s” life is curiously fleshless. The Dearloves have two phone numbers, both ex-directory. An address is said to appear on the internet, but searches have proved fruitless. Photographs are thin on the ground, the best on offer showing him as a cadaverous 19-year-old at Cambridge. So what would prove he exists? A quote from his mother – and the Mail claims to have unearthed her, living “in a picturesque village in the west country”. “I don’t know much about the job myself, but it’s surely no more dangerous than crossing the road every day,” says the delightful “Rhoda”. No picture of Mum, of course.
So “Mr Dearlove” had a classical English education, lives in Acacia Avenue, has an adoring mother and three fine children, and is thought by colleagues to be “very successful and hard-nosed”. Is anyone that boring, let alone someone who has allegedly spent 30 years in the highly charged world of international espionage? The answer surely is that “Mr Dearlove”, who is due to take over from the far more interesting David Spedding in August, is a fictitious character, invented to send us to sleep. Spedding, a key figure in Britain’s covert operations in the Gulf war, has an entry in Who’s Who; “Dearlove” does not, though one will doubtless be concocted for next year. Recreations: hill-walking, listening to Baroque music and stamp-collecting.
The giveaway is that the character of “Dearlove” draws so heavily on the patient, anonymous figure of George Smiley, John Le Carré’s enigmatic spymaster, who was himself based in part on Le Carré’s old tutor at Lincoln College, Oxford, the Rev Vivian Green. (Are you following this?) Le Carré created a master spy who could well have lived a tedious life in Acacia Avenue; now MI6 is trying to persuade us that Smiley is real.
The operation is designed to convince us that MI6’s chief (codenamed “C” and the model for Ian Fleming’s “M”) is OK. QED. A decent chap, one of us, someone we can trust. MI6 has had a rotten press recently: former agents David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson have been alleging all manner of shady dealings, not least an MI6 plot to kill Colonel Gadaffi; Our Man in Prague was outed on Czech TV as gay; it was suggested that Dylan Thomas had acted as an MI6 agent in Iran; and Hollywood is threatening an exposé of the “brutal and bungling” British secret service based on the life of Kim Philby. Only Smiley could put the lid on all that excitement; enter “Richard Dearlove”.
What MI6 hopes to escape with its suburban spymaster is the legacy of that stream of interesting but flawed post-war spies – Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt. Those were the days when being a member of the Cambridge Apostles and an active homosexual, having a working knowledge of Greek, and liking Poussin and Stalin (not necessarily in that order) were the key attributes of the spy. That was the time when someone such as Dylan Thomas – a wholly unreliable poet, drunk and blabbermouth – could be signed up for a sensitive spying mission. None of this drinking halves and living in Putney nonsense; these were spies who knew how to live and wore their astrakhan coats with pride.
In those days, spies took their lead from the original “C”, Captain (later Sir) Mansfield Cumming, the UK’s first head of counter-espionage. Cumming saw spying as part of the great game. As he told the author Compton Mackenzie when trying to persuade him to stay on in MI6: “Here, take this swordstick. I always took it with me on spying expeditions before the war. That’s when this business was really amusing. After the war is over we’ll do some amusing secret service work together. It’s capital sport.”
Cumming considered himself a master of disguise, a claim perhaps undermined by the fact that he wore a gold monocle and only had one leg (he lost the other when he crashed his father’s Rolls-Royce into a tree on the way to Paris). He used to enjoy riding up and down the corridors of Whitehall on a child’s scooter, conducted his correspondence in green ink, and signed all his letters “C”. The codename and the green ink remain, though no one is quite sure what happened to the scooter.
You knew where you were with spymasters like Cumming, who favoured codewords, invisible ink and the use of initials. James Bond would have adored him. What would 007 have made of “Dearlove”? As little as us, I suspect. In any case, we have been here before. When MI5 engaged in a burst of glasnost, it tried to convince us that its chief was “housewife super-spy” Stella Rimington, who was even photographed doing her weekly shop. The modern security services’ obsession with normality is deeply worrying. What are they trying to hide?
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