The low business of spying

The secret of Russia's intelligence successes, a KGB officer once explained to me, helpfully, was that they made no distinction between the overt and the covert. Razvedka - intelligence work - means finding out everything, and understanding the links. That is the approach of The Hidden Hand to its subject, and that is why it is a truly brilliant book. Do not let the spooky title mislead you into thinking this is just another cold collation of Cold War yarns. Spy books, like pornography, usually promise more than they deliver, but Richard Aldrich, who understands the links between the overt and the covert, has done the opposite.

From riveting case-histories of individual operations to the furious intrigues of the transatlantic intelligence community, from the unsung role of the low-level agent to the evolution of electronic espionage - everything is here. Best of all, the low business of spying is rooted at every turn in the (sometimes equally low) politics of the era, so that the tale oscillates engagingly between action and analysis.

How the intelligence war grew out of the war against Hitler is especially well done. We learn not just of the growing Western suspicions of Soviet intentions, or how the British distrusted the Americans and vice versa, and everyone distrusted the French, but how the virtuous British as well as the villainous Russians used their operatives to ransack Germany for every piece of military/scientific hardware - or unemployed Nazi scientist they could lay their hands on, with a view to possible future needs.

Aldrich has a gift for conveying a sense of living history, combining colourful detail of this or that episode with the grand strategies that drove the intelligence men. The result is a soberly told story that grabs at the emotions.

Intelligence is not a pretty business, and there is plenty here to cause our not exactly battle-hardened era to recoil. One is the thought of Mountbatten being greeted in Saigon by a detachment of splendid-looking foreign legionaires, most of them secretly recruited former SS men. Another, the tactic of encouraging the Soviet-instigated revolutions in Eastern Europe to devour their own, by planting stories accusing leading communists of being Western spies. Another, the treatment of the German communists (KPD), whose leader was harassed by allied intelligence in the West, then executed by his masters in the East. And of course the infamous Klaus Barbie affair.

As in war, morality was temporarily suspended. Surely Western democracies could never have turned away Soviet defectors for the sake of "good relations" with murderous Uncle Joe? Well, they did. The defection of Victor Kravchenko from the Washington Embassy in 1944 was seen by the American and British governments as a frightful bore, and some half hoped the Russians would solve the embarrassment by bumping him off. Mackenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister, left Igor Gouzenko, a cypher clerk who brought proof of the extent of Soviet espionage in America, specifically on the Manhattan project, wandering the streets of Ottawa with his explosive documents, at the mercy of Russian heavies, rather than disrupt his cherished intimacy with Moscow.

As Aldrich shows, a terrible logic was at work: the truth about Russia was at that time inconvenient, not just for her communist apologists, but for governments too. A few years later the Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had 4,000 copies of Kravchenko's book, I Chose Freedom, circulated unattributably, for the edification of trade union boneheads and the like.

Bevin emerges as Russian caricaturists saw him, a man whose Churchillian attributes were not confined to his figure, a gut anticommunist who remains a one-man refutation of the primitive notion that Reagan and Thatcher were the first to stand up to the Russians. It was he who set up the Information Research Department, a cover for counter-propaganda, one of whose coups was to arrange for Orwell's Animal Farm to be translated into umpteen languages. Yet he was rightly wary of the wilder shores of covert operations, such as the forays into Eastern Europe favoured by American agencies.

Tensions between intelligence services were endemic. More and more, the Americans saw a war with Russia as inevitable, and prising back Eastern Europe by covert means as a necessary preliminary. PUSD, the Foreign Office intelligence clearing house, foresaw the fate of East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia when it warned of the danger of stoking up anti-Soviet sentiment which would then spontaneously combust, leaving us with the choice of intervening, or watching insurrectionaries being put down, and the Soviet grip strengthened. A lovingly described plot to influence Europe towards federalism by covert methods is a gift for our Europhobes - or rather it would be, were it not that it was the CIA doing the plotting.

Over the whole complex and wonderfully narrated story hovers a single fact: the extent to which the British tried and frequently succeeded in using their flair for intelligence to boost their international influence and perpetuate quasiimperial power. A lamentable tale, you may say, but better us than the Russians.

Aldrich is extraordinarily acute on the psychology of it all. At one point he describes how the British contrived to have the Russians believe that their nuclear potential was somewhat larger than it was, the reality being that our planes' limited range meant that the pilot, his atom bombs released, would have to bale out somewhere in the Siberian forest. And when he comments, in relation to our reluctance to adopt positive vetting, on our "curious mixture of obsessive secrecy and a strong aversion to excessive security", he is onto something central. The result at the time was the old-boy syndrome, and Philby, Burgess and Maclean. If the British were masters of deception in espionage, it was partly because they were past masters of self-deception too.