Volume 34, Number 14 · September 24, 1987
Betrayal
By Noel Annan
Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer
by Peter Wright
Viking, 392 pp., $19.95
The Secrets of the Service
by Anthony Glees
Carroll and Graf, 447 pp., $22.95
Early in the Second World War a young, self-taught electronics engineer was taken on by the Admiralty to work on demagnetizing warships, to protect against magnetic mines, and he stayed on to work in the scientific civil service. One day in the early 1950s he was taken aside and told that both the British and American embassies in Moscow were being bugged. The Americans had found a specimen planted microphone but could not see how it worked. Would he help? This he did to the delight of the British counterintelligence officers, who needed something to redeem their credit after the defection of Burgess and Maclean. Sometime later it was put to the young engineer that he might care to leave the Admiralty and, after a six-month break to allay suspicions, join M15—the British counterintelligence bureau. What about his Admiralty pension? he asked. Could he transfer it? My dear fellow, he was told, do you think that we don't know how to look after our friends?
Review, 8594 words
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