Inspiring Espionage Novelists
BOOK REVIEW: COUNTERFEIT SPIES: How World War II Intelligence Operations Shaped Cold War Spy Fiction
By: Oliver Buckton/ Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Reviewed by: Bill Harlow
The Reviewer — Bill Harlow served as chief spokesman for the CIA from 1997 to 2004 and was Assistant White House Press Secretary for National Security from 1988 to 1992. A retired Navy captain, Harlow is the co-author of four New York Times bestsellers on intelligence and is the author of Circle William: A Novel.
REVIEW — One might expect the chair of a college English department as Oliver Buckton is at Florida Atlantic University – to be obsessed with great works of British literature. But the focus of Buckton’s eye is not so much on the Bard – as it is on Bond, James Bond – and other British exemplars of espionage novels.
According to his FAU bio, Buckton teaches courses in espionage fiction and “has developed several fully-online courses including one on James Bond and Ian Fleming.” His new book “Counterfeit Spies: How World War II Intelligence Operations Shaped Cold War Spy Fiction” is, his fifth book on the art of espionage in the arts.
Buckton’s “Counterfeit Spies” started out as a research project he undertook for a Fulbright Senior Scholar project at the Universidad de Málaga in Spain in 2021. It morphed into a deeply researched treatise on the impact that World War II espionage operations had on spy fiction following the war. But more than just looking at how writers benefitted from what they learned of covert operations during the war – he amply demonstrates that in some cases some of these writers were the authors of espionage operation plans themselves.
Some of the authors he writes about were established novelists before the start of the war. Graham Greene, Peter Fleming and Dennis Wheatley, for example, were bestselling writers in the 1930s who went to work for intelligence during the war. Others only began to write about Her Majesty’s Secret Service long after their own wartime service ended.
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Buckton writes about several now-famous deception operations such as operations Mincemeat, Goldeneye, and Bodyguard and illustrates how traces of these real-world missions were fictionalized and became key elements in novels by Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, and others.
Post-war, there was a strong bias against those who were privy to the specifics of intelligence operations to writing non-fictional accounts of what transpired. Even decades later – those who dared to do so were severely chastised by former colleagues – even if they could get around the provisions of Britain’s Official Secrets Act. But there was somewhat of a double standard, however, when it came to writing fiction.
Buckton says that perhaps Le Carré (true name David Cornwell) “understood better than most the close relationship between the novelist and the spy. Both are defined by powers of observation and surveillance while both are also required to write about their findings to share their intelligence.”
Professor Buckton practices his own craft of observation noting that several of the subjects of book such as Ian Fleming – although they played important roles in wartime intelligence matters – their missions “were largely bureaucratic and desk-bound in nature” which may explain their later devotion to plots full of action, sex and cliff hangers.
Buckton observes that: “if the novelist is a natural-born spy, the spy may also be a natural novelist. This is because a creative imagination is needed to disguise and elaborate on reality in a more exciting and compelling form.”
Each of the book’s six chapters starts with a scene in which Buckton features “speculative dialogue that represents an imagined version of how a significant documented episode in the life of the subject of the chapter might have unfolded.” In other words, the professor has more than a little spy-novelist in him as well.
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Many of the real-world stories in the book will be familiar to intelligence aficionados. For example, the audacious and successful effort to fool the Germans by leading them to the body of a homeless man who died eating rat poison – and dressed up the corpse to appear to be a Royal Marine carrying secret war plans. Inspiring spy fiction in a negative way was the devastating blow to western intelligence by Kim Philby’s treason and subsequent defection. Each of these stories ended up living many lives in fictional accounts – thinly disguised – sometimes to avoid running afoul of the Official Secrets Act and other times to be altered to settle scores and send signals.
The book notes that some of the post-war espionage writers were underwhelmed with Ian Fleming’s glorification of British intelligence and the exploits of James Bond – and sought to puncture or at least deflate the ego of officialdom. For example, Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana” is about an expatriate British vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba who agrees to work with the British Secret Service and totally invents a network of agents – for his own profit.
Although Buckton’s focus is on British novelists writing in the years shortly after World War II – many of the sentiments expressed by and about them seem spot on to today. For example, he quotes author John Bingham writing in the forward to his 1966 novel “The Double Agent” as saying: “There are currently two schools of thought about our Intelligence Services. One school is convinced they are staffed by murderous, powerful, double-crossing cynics, the other that the taxpayer is supporting a collection of bumbling broken-down layabouts. It is possible to think that both extremes of thought are the result of a mixture of unclear reasoning, ignorance and possibly political or temperamental wishful thinking.”
Counterfeit Spies earns a solid 3 out of 4 trench coats
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