54 • BINGHAM, JOHN
alternative therapy center, and being elected a vice president of the
Bournemouth Conservative Club. He was killed in February 1997 in
a car accident at Stratford-upon-Avon.BINGHAM, JOHN.Best known as a thriller writer, John Bingham,
Lord Clanmorris, led a double life. He was one ofMI5’s star agent
handlers, learning his trade while assistingMax Knight, arguably
the Security Service’s most successful case officer ever. Educated at
Cheltenham and in France and Germany, Bingham was known as
‘‘Black Jack’’ to his colleagues. He once said that he joined MI5 from
the Royal Engineers in 1940, at age 32, having denounced an entirely
innocent German refugee to the authorities, but he had worked pre-
viously part-time as one of Knight’s informants. Before the war he
had been a journalist, first for theHull Daily Mail, and then in Lon-
don as a feature writer and then picture editor for theSunday Dis-
patch. Bingham recruited numerous beautiful women as his
informants and helped run several that he referred to as his ‘‘bogies.’’
After the war and Max Knight’s retirement, Bingham continued to
operate as MI5’s principal agent-runner and acquired an apprentice
inDavid Cornwell, who was later to switch to theSecret Intelli-
gence Service. In Germany Bingham operated under Control Com-
mission cover, based in Hannover, and upon his return to London he
headed MI5’s antisubversion operations unit, based in safe houses
around Knightsbridge. Both his wifeMadeleine Binghamand his
daughterCharlotte Binghamalso worked for MI5 and became au-
thors. Upon the death of his father in 1960, Bingham inherited his
Irish title, the seventh Baron Clanmorris, and a castle in Northern
Ireland that later became Bangor’s town hall.
Throughout his career in MI5, which lasted until 1977, Bingham
was a prolific author, starting with his first spy novel,My Name Is
Michael Sibley(1952), an unusual book in that it consisted almost
entirely of the exchanges between a murder suspect and his interro-
gator. More than a dozen other crime mysteries were to follow, and
FragmentofFearwas made into a movie in 1970. Of them all,
Night’s Black AgentandThe Double Agentwere probably based on
his own experiences, the former being a play on Max Knight’s name
and his own role as his principal assistant. In the foreword to the lat-
ter, he wrote, ‘‘There are currently two schools of thought about our