610 • BIBLIOGRAPHY
mysterious disappearance over the Soviet frontier in 1925, published
Sidney Reilly: Britain’s Master Spy. How much of her tale was really
true? Only a few of thecognoscentiknew, and their lips were sealed.
Similarly, Allan Monkhouse, who had been accused of espionage in
Russia, releasedMoscow, 1911–1933without ever acknowledging that
he had indeed been working in the Soviet capital for years as an SIS
agent.
The second broad group of books published during the interwar years
was, with few exceptions, of a more sensational nature, claiming to de-
scribe covert operations conducted by undercover operators. Into this
category falls Nicholas Everitt’sBritish Secret Service during the Great
War, among several others that fail most tests of reliability.
Rather different wasSecret Serviceby Sir George Aston, which of-
fered a detailed study of intelligence operations conducted during
World War I. Major General Aston’s contribution to the literature was
a milestone, for as a Royal Marines officer he had been a member of
the Admiralty’s Foreign Intelligence Committee in 1883 and later had
served in the Naval Intelligence Division. Far from a work of sensa-
tional disclosure, Aston’s analytical work can properly be considered
as establishing a third category of intelligence publication—that of the
serious, almost academic, approach to a topic that hitherto had been the
preserve of self-publicists and Fleet Street hacks.
World War II gave a further boost to British intelligence literature,
although the emphasis was on missions undertaken by Special Opera-
tions Executive and escapes from prison camps, usually devoid of any
reference to the assistance of MI9. From the end of the war until 1974
and the publication of Fred Winterbotham’sThe Ultra Secret, only two
SIS veterans wrote books about their wartime role: Leslie Nicholson,
calling himself ‘‘John Whitwell,’’ and Kim Philby. Nothing, of course,
had been divulged about GCHQ, although MI5’s postwar director-gen-
eral, Sir Percy Sillitoe, had been given approval by his successor to pro-
duce an autobiography,Cloak without Daggerin 1955, and the Security
Service had authorized Stephens Watts’sMoonlight on a Lake in Bond
Street. Two other books had met resistance: Eddie Chapman’s attempt
to exploit his wartime role as a double agent ended at the Old Bailey in
1945 with an injunction onThe Eddie Chapman Story, which was not
released for another 10 years, and Lily Sergueiev’sSecret Service Ren-
deredwas originally published in Paris in 1966 asSeule Face a`l’Ab-
wehr.