Wesley Britton’s Books, Interviews, and Media Appearances ~

“Spy fact meets spy fiction”

By Giles Wilson

The discovery of a fake rock in Moscow, allegedly a British surveillance device, seems to be the very definition of cloak and dagger. But if it feels like it should really be in a B-rate movie, that should come as no surprise. The worlds of espionage and entertainment are no strangers.

Spying is fertile ground for authors, TV producers and film-makers. Eavesdropping, surveillance, disguise, deceit, danger and diplomacy all make for good plots and sub-plots – everything from Dick Tracy and Dick Barton, through Mission Impossible and George Smiley, all the way to Spooks.

Not forgetting, of course, the granddaddy of them all, James Bond.

Eyebrows have been raised as to what might be the full story of the Moscow rock. Defector Oleg Gordievsky says it is a KGB stunt, while others wonder what its purpose might have been if it was a British device. Whatever the truth, it would not have been out of place in fiction – gadgets have consistently fired the imagination. But they are not all make-believe.

Bond creator Ian Fleming’s most direct lift from the real world was perhaps the human torpedo that features in the 1965 Bond film Thunderball. Fleming, who worked in naval intelligence during World War II, was said to have been inspired by an Italian plan to destroy British ships in the waters off Gibraltar.

Blend in

The Italians used torpedoes piloted by frogmen, destroying 14 merchant vessels in three years. The two-man devices could be launched from a submarine or a beach, and once the target had been reached, the frogmen would leave the detachable warheads before heading for the Spanish shore. In true Bond-style they would then peel off their wetsuits and blend in with the crowds.

The work of the Italian saboteurs was well known to David Scherr, who headed the British Security Intelligence Department during the war.

When Scherr’s files were declassified last year they revealed a host of other real-life devices that appeared to owe more to the world of make-believe.

“But now we know that during the Cold War, Western diplomats had bugs implanted in the heels of their shoes by Romanian intelligence officers.

Security check

“Don't forget, good shoes were difficult to get hold of in Eastern Bloc countries at the time, so embassy staff would have them sent from home. These were intercepted on the way, and a bug fitted in the heel, before being delivered.”

In the realms of Cold War espionage even the manipulation of children was not beyond the KGB. In 1946, Soviet school children presented a two-foot wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States to America’s man in Moscow, Averell Harriman.

Mr. Harriman hung the seal in his office in Spaso House, the ambassador’s residence, and departed from Moscow shortly afterwards. But there was more to this adornment than met the eye, says Boghardt.

“During George F. Kennan’s ambassadorship in 1952, a routine security check discovered that the seal contained a microphone and a resonant cavity which could be stimulated from an outside radio signal.”

The inventing process still goes on, says military historian Peter Caddick-Adams. There remains a world of largely desk-based intelligence officers sifting through whacky ideas sent in by members of the public or academics. “The job has always been to reject nothing and consider everything,” he says. “A lot never come to anything, but they’re never quite rejected.”

Bright ideas might well be picked up. “There are still battles going on. We now refer not to battlefields but to spaces – one of those battle spaces is the internet.” This means that odd geeky ideas – something like a spell checker which could act as an Islamic faith veracity checker, perhaps – could be taken up. “I have absolutely no doubt about that,” he says.

Sometimes, says author Wesley Britton, an expert on the links between spying fact and fiction, it would become a case of life imitating art. “The CIA would watch Mission: Impossible and then the phone calls would go round saying: ‘Can we do that? Can we do that?’ They actually consulted with Hollywood special effects wizards.”

One of these, he says, was John Chambers, who made the masks for Planet of the Apes, who helped make disguises for spies working in Laos. Indeed, Antonio Mendez, the CIA’s former chief of disguise, was recruited through an advertisement to work as an artist.

And that could work equally for the other side – Gordievsky claimed that the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party instructed him, when KGB chief in London, to secure copies of any new Bond film, and to obtain the devices used.

Where a big difference does open between fact and fiction, Britton says, is in ways to kill people. Despite some notable examples, such as an exploding cigar the US supposedly tried to kill Fidel Castro with, and the poison-tipped umbrella used to kill Georgi Markov in London in 1978, the vast majority of real-life technology was used for eavesdropping and surveillance rather than killing.

Devices

Many things seen on screen are now commercially available. Michael Marks, of London surveillance shop Spymaster, says many of the Bond inventions were based on technology which existed but which had not been perfected. As time goes by, more of the fiction has indeed become fact, he says.

Armoured cars – with Bond’s rear windscreen shield – can be bought as can a range of other devices 007 would be familiar with. “We sell underwater breathing devices, and have done for three or four years now,” he says. “They only give you 50 or so breaths, but they are an emergency device. They have a mouthpiece with a small sylinder each side, each one about the size of a finger.”

Rolex watches with rotating saws, a la Live and Let Die, remain in the world of fiction although the International Spy Museum does have a German wristwatch from 1949 with a miniature camera. Tiny recording devices are now easily available. “We have a pocket device, called a docupen, that you scroll over an entire document which it will store in its memory for downloading later. It can copy up to 100 A4 pages.”

And the process which started with the CIA watching Mission: Impossible continues, even if only for the purposes of selling gadgets. “Nowadays electronics are so sophisticated and capable that it can actually be difficult to think things up to use the technology for,” Mr. Marks says. “The Bond films can actually spark off ideas on how to use them.”

But aside from all the action and gadgets, there is a feature of one writer – John Le Carré – which Britton says has a particular ring for many spies. And that is that it can be very slow work, desk-based, involving lots of talking and reading. “99.9% of the craft is analysis,” he says. “The biggest part of espionage is very dull and dreary. Even in the Bond books, it’s clear that for three-quarters of the year, Bond is very bored.”

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