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I drove a car off the top of a freeway onto a train while on fire. Not the car. ‘I’ was on fire. Rick Ford, Spy This is one of the tamer tales Rick Ford (Jason Statham) tells of his exploits as a
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 09/04/2013, SPi 7 Flying and spying: Claud W. Sykes, MI5 and the ‘Primrose League’ In August 1938, at the height of the political crisis over Hitler’s claim to the Sudeten border lands of Czechoslovakia, the British writer and translator Claud Walter Sykes, holidaying in Cassis-sur-mer, in the South of France, wrote a two-page letter to the German writer Karl Otten, living as a refugee in London. Beginning ‘my dear Otten’, Sykes’s letter struck a friendly, even familiar note. It dealt briefly with two literary projects on which they
they carry messages back and forth, want to be fooled. There is, however, a difference in effect. While Feste’s corruption of words offers a meta-comment on the folly of love-sick royalty, Cesario’s ability to enthral both Orsino and Olivia is the result of the cross-dresser Viola’s ability to play to a self-deceiving desire on the part of both of them. We might, thus, surmise that what Shakespeare’s last festive comedy offers is a theatrical rendition of early modern spy work. After all, Viola repeatedly visits Olivia’s court not only to deliver the tokens of love
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 09/04/2013, SPi 5 Nazi spies and the ‘Auslandsorganisation’ Given MI5’s somewhat ambiguous attitude towards Nazism, it is pertinent to ask: at what point after 1933 did policy begin to change and when did Nazi Germany and its agents become a prime focus of counter-intelligence? An internal MI5 memorandum records a meeting taking place at the Home Office on 23 November 1933, at which it was decided: that MI5 should undertake to look after Fascism in the same way as they look after communism, and that the Commissioner of Police and the
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 09/03/2013, SPi 19 The spy who was caught: the case of Klaus Fuchs When the twenty-one-year-old student of mathematics and physics, Klaus Fuchs, first arrived in Britain as a refugee from Nazi Germany, he was already known as a Communist. Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs was the son of the Lutheran pastor Emil Fuchs, who during the 1920s had become a Quaker and had joined the SPD – one of the first protestant pastors to do so. In 1931, he became Professor of Theology at the University of Kiel, a post he held only briefly. His pacifist
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 09/04/2013, SPi 20 The spy who got away: the case of Engelbert Broda The Austrian scientist Engelbert Broda – half-Jewish and a known Communist – arrived in Britain in 1938, having previously suffered imprisonment for his political activities both in Germany and in Austria. Born in 1910, he had originally been a Social Democrat and a student party functionary, but joined the Communist Party in the autumn of 1930. He was a highly intelligent, good-looking, well-connected man who sought refuge in Britain with his wife Hilde, a doctor
2 ‘Heroick Informers’ and London spies: Religion, politeness, and reforming impulses in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London I n 1698, the Flying Post or the Post Master reported the Lord Mayor’s concern regarding disorderly behaviour at that year’s Bartholomew Fair. His fears were echoed by members of voluntary reform groups, who believed fairs encouraged immoral and irreligious behaviour. The Lord Mayor was particularly alarmed by ‘great Swearers and Cursers’ frequenting the fair and ‘issued out Warrants to several Constables to apprehend
3 Keeping informed and spying on Ireland A striking feature concerning the Irish and Northern Irish material uncovered in the BStU archive is that a substantial part of the 6,000 photocopies are press cuttings, overwhelmingly from the West German media. There were about 1,129 articles. The origin of some of them could not be identified. There are also a few cuttings from East German newspapers and magazines like Neues Deutschland and Horizont. All newspapers used were in the German language and the only newspaper from outside the FRG and the GDR was the
5 A spy in the house of love: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949) Nothing cracked my heart until that evening at the stony end of the healing garden when you turned and said, as if remembering a secret known long ago and long forgotten, ‘I love you.’ Brendan Kennelly, The Little Book of Judas, 151 Introduction Even during her own lifetime Elizabeth Bowen was regarded as a writer for whom issues of interpersonal betrayal featured centrally. Her major theme was always (in the words of one of her most evocative titles) ‘the death of the heart’ – the
118 The Cato Street Conspiracy 7 State witnesses and spies in Irish political trials, 1794–1803 Martyn J. Powell This chapter looks at the use of spies and state witnesses in trials of United Irishmen and their Defender allies in Ireland and Britain in the years leading up to the 1798 rebellion, the rebellion itself, and the alleged and planned uprisings of 1802–3. This period saw numerous high-profile trials of figures active in the United Irishmen, the radical reform movement that had pushed towards a republican, separatist agenda by the second half of the