xxviii•INTRODUCTION
recruited for wartime duties. Diplomacy offered Sir Peter Ramsbotham,
Sir Peter Hope, Sir Brooks Richards and his son Sir Francis, Sir Robin
Hooper, Sir Peter Wilkinson, Dame Barbara Salt, Baroness Ramsay,
and Sir Alan Urwick. Among the bankers were Sir Robin Brook, Sir
Charles Hambro, Sir William Wiseman, Harry Sporborg, and Louis
Franck. Hollywood lent David Niven, Christopher Lee, and Sir An-
thony Quayle, and the theatre gave Noel Coward and Paul Dehn. The
world of intelligence drew in the queen’s dressmaker Hardy Amies and
the king’s gamekeepers from Sandringham. Even Britain’s traitors were
exotic, among them Sir Roger Casement, Sir Anthony Blunt, Guy Bur-
gess, Kim Philby, Leo Long, and John Cairncross.
The list from Fleet Street is an equally breathtaking cast: Malcolm
Muggeridge, Derek Verschoyle, Alan Hare, Wilfred Hindle, Stephen
Watts, Derek Tangye, Sir Geoffrey Cox, and dozens of others, not to
mention the role played by Reuter’s, the international news agency ac-
tually bought and run with a secret government subsidy. The Secret In-
telligence Service and Special Operations Executive were interested in
explorers of the caliber of Andrew Croft; travel writers, including Ar-
chie Lyall, Xan Fielding, and Sir Paddy Leigh-Fermor; and experienced
foreign correspondents such as Frederick Voight and Tom Sefton Del-
mer.
The paradox is that few of the historians or journalists, who made
their living from writing, ever revealed the true nature of their clandes-
tine occupations. Accordingly, much of what is in the public domain
concerning British Intelligence comes either from works of fiction or
from the pens of Kim Philby, George Blake, and John Cairncross, all
self-confessed traitors, hostile to the Crown and determined to under-
mine its secret institutions. Even Henry Landau and Leslie Nicholson,
both disappointed SIS professionals who released their memoirs from a
legal refuge from the Official Secrets Act in the United States, could not
be described as fair or unbiased commentators on British Intelligence;
talented though they were, their decisions to write about their experi-
ences, in defiance of a ban almost universally respected by their col-
leagues, were prompted by an ulterior motive of striking back at an
organization they believed had slighted them. The picture that emerges,
therefore, from such tainted sources, is far from balanced, and the equi-
librium can only be restored by taking a broader look at all the various
facets of the British intelligence community.