FOOTMAN, DAVID• 191in which Footman gave a graphic description of an early homosexual
encounter, he also described his political views: ‘‘We were dissidents,
not rebels; but cracks in the old order were already appearing and we
helped to widen them. Whether or not humanity is better for the
change is open to argument.’’
Footman’s entry into theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) took
place in 1935 following 10 years with the Levant Consular Service.
Educated at Marlborough and New College, Oxford, Footman had
served in France with the Royal Berkshire regiment during World
War I and was decorated with the Military Cross in 1916. After work-
ing in consular posts in Yugoslavia, Alexandria, and Port Said, Foot-
man left the service in 1929 to be manager of the Gramophone
Company in Vienna. That job lasted three years, whereupon he
moved to Belgrade to represent the London bank of Glyn Mills. His
wife Joan, whom he had married in 1917 when he was 22, divorced
him in 1936. When he joined SIS, Footman was already a novelist of
some note, having publishedThe Yellow Rock,The Mine in the De-
sert,Balkan Holiday, andPig and Pepper. While working for SIS,
he releasedPembertonand two books of short stories,Half-Way East
andBetter Forgotten.
Footman’s first post in SIS was toSection I, the political branch
created to advise the Chief on developments around the world. In
1944, while heading Section I, Footman publishedRed Prelude,a
biography of Andrei Zhelyabov, and the first of several scholarly
books on Russian revolutionary history. Two years later inThe Prim-
rose Path, he documented the life of Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of
the German Labour Movement and a significant influence on Marx
and Engels.
Footman remained in SIS until 1953, when he took up an academic
appointment at St. Antony’s, Oxford, in charge of modern Russian
studies. A close friend of many leftist intellectuals, the end of Foot-
man’s career in the intelligence field was tainted by his connections
withAnthony BluntandGuy Burgess. Indeed, according toGoron-
wy Rees, when Burgess defected in May 1951, Rees telephoned
Footman to warn him that he believed the diplomat’s disappearance
was no temporary phenomenon but the carefully planned escape of a
traitor. Rees’s assertion that Footman had dismissively brushed the
assertion aside was to prove exceptionally damaging to a brilliant in-