'The pleasure of shaking a tail': Bill Hagchester on memoirs of intelligence

From the Albian Review of Books, May 2023:

To be a historian of espionage is not, by and large, a Romantic endeavour. The fact is that for all the glamour Hollywood treatments lend even the most down-at-heel depictions of tradecraft, the day-to-day business of spying is for the most part a boring affair. So it is not entirely surprising that when something - a scandal, an outrage, a triumph, a glorious catastrophe - happens to impart some excitement to this most staid of disciplines, it sparks a kind of feeding frenzy in the publishing world. Such is the case with the recent spate of books discussing the early years of that most Romanticised of espionage agencies, the legendary Republic Intelligencers of Albia. 

It is a truism in intelligence circles that revolutionary movements start out hating the secret police only to wind up forming their own: in the case of the Albian Revolution this took place surprisingly quickly and, indeed, was one of the main drivers of the new regime's remarkable success in deposing the Windsors and their loyalists. At least one figure who was, we now know, embedded with the RI from remarkably early on has described this as the natural consequence of the forces the Intelligencers came together to fight: in her remarkable new memoir the poet Angel McKenna observes that 

'we were up against the dark side of Old England: the star chambers and Hellfire Clubs of a regime almost uniquely corrupt in human history. It shouldn't have been a surprise that we had to fight dirty to beat them. I first met the Republic Intelligencers with blood on my hands, and they didn't get cleaner. But one look at the evidence we turned up of what the Windsors had got up to was enough to put any thoughts of doing a Lady Macbeth from one's mind. We did hard things, and we became hard people, and we doled out rough justice and made grubby little deals, but if you saw the files, and the photos, and the fucking films those monsters made of what they did, you'd do the same. Of that I have no doubt.'

Perhaps inevitably the poet in Ms McKenna wins out over the historian in such passages, but then for all the historic interest in her work she has remained insistent that this is merely a personal memoir, albeit that of the woman who foiled the infamous Lipstick Plot. Those looking for revelations of Albian perfidy will come up short - though Ms McKenna has said in interviews that this book's publication should be seen as marking her retirement from a life spent defending the realms, she has also been candid about running the MS by RI censors before her editors had sight of it, to ensure that nothing operationally sensitive might be revealed. But what she is very good at is conveying the internal experience of doing such work: the adrenaline of being on an operation, the elation of seeing targets take the bait, the pleasure of shaking a tail. One wonders who will face the challenge of turning her gripping prose into the inevitable film: George Clooney is widely rumoured to be interested, though Ms McKenna says she's holding out for Peter Strickland. We shall see. 

One area where either director will probably have to tread carefully is the role in the Lipstick Plot allegedly played by the recently deceased US cultural attache Charles T. Billings, at least according to Bob Woodward's more sensational Good Luck Chuck: the Life and Death of a Compromised Diplomat. Woodward's contention is that, despite official declarations to the contrary, Billings was intimately involved with the attempt to assassinate the late First Citizen Mercury, and was 'turned' by the Intelligencers in return for a promise not to expose his role. Billings would go on, according to Woodward, to render material assistance to the Albian government in the matter of the removal of US missiles and the ECHELON affair 'and anything from a dozen to a hundred more chiselling acts of betrayal'. 

Readers who detect a hint of personal animosity from Woodward to his subject are correct to do so: one consequence of the ECHELON revelations having been that details of Woodward's ongoing relationship with what the Americans like to refer to as 'Naval Intelligence' became more widely known, presenting his involvement in the Watergate revelations in a somewhat unflattering new light, and it's hard not to read this book as an attempt at settling scores. It's clear that Woodward is himself convinced of Billings' treachery, but the fact remains that, for all that his book is packed with sentences of the 'if/then' variety ('If Billings was working for Republic Intelligence, then it's possible his involvement with the Council of the Realms had sinister motives...'), the evidence he arraigns for the prosecution is circumstantial at best. Pointedly, the US State Department has maintained its silence on the matter. Ms McKenna's memoir discusses her involvement with Mr Billings in terms of the latter's cultural work, but doesn't hint at anything else - though that may, of course, be something she ran by the censors first. 

Perhaps most surprisingly, however, one of the best accounts of the early days of the Intelligencers occurs in a work which is not strictly a history of espionage at all. The latest instalment of the academic Stewart Lee's magisterial Life of Alan Moore has arrived at the period where its subject crosses over with the war in Albia, which includes Moore's (officially) brief career working with the RI during those early days of our more optimistic nation. As with previous volumes in the series, Lee's research, based on investigations of the official Moore Archive at the University of Nottingham, as well as extensive interviews with both the bearded magus himself and many of his contemporaries, is staggering in both its breadth and depth, and has turned up some remarkable revelations about the 'absolute seat-of-the-pants operation' the RI were in their early days, not least among them the extent of Moore's involvement in creating pro-Albian propaganda in the early days of the regime: it was Moore, for example, who insisted that the Lipstick Plot be publicised, against the wishes of more cautious colleagues, and who helped McKenna come up with the original, sanitised 'Albian Tintin' story of how she came to foil it, on the grounds that 'countries need myths, even if they ought to grow beyond them'. Whether the recent rash of revelations about our nations' early struggle represents part of that process of growing beyond, or simply the latest chapter in a fractious history, remains to be determined: as does the question of what role, if any, the Intelligencers will have in this new phase of our existence.