Why wouldn’t China try to infiltrate the British security services – and those of other countries? I expect China has to a greater or lesser extent been successful in these enterprises. It’s nothing new.
Fitzroy Maclean was no stranger to spying himself. You will be familiar with some of his nine spies but these essays, published in 1978, invariably add something new. As well as telling their stories he as a coda assesses their motivation in an attempt to understand what makes a spy tick. Of course they are all completely different driven by greed, vanity, stupidity, ideological beliefs, patriotism and recklessness.
At the end he writes about a tenth, bonus spy – “the spy who never was”. Captain Alfred Wahring was real enough to appear in a memoir by Walter Schellenberg, the head of German Intelligence. He was real enough to be used by Alan Dulles (CIA) as an example of careful long-term planning and patience being rewarded when Wahring guided a German submarine into Scapa Flow in 1939 leading to the sinking of HMS Royal Oak. Maclean concludes Wahring was invented by the Abwehr and his story planted in the United States to make the British look foolish soon after America had entered the war.
When, about a year after his execution for spying for America, Alex Penkovski’s collected writings were published in Britain and the US they were repudiated as forgeries by the Soviet Union.
”Doubts as to their authenticity were also freely expressed by a number of well-qualified Western commentators, while others were equally convinced they were genuine. Possibly the aptest comment came from a leader-writer in the London Times: ‘The difficulty about anything connected with espionage,’ he wrote, ‘is that both forgeries and denials are part of its stock in trade.’ As for the Soviet press, they too rose nobly to the occasion, getting their own back by revealing in all seriousness that the Great Train Robbery had in fact been engineered by an impoverished British Secret Service as a means of overcoming its perennial shortage of funds.” (Take Nine Spies, Fitzroy Maclean)
The grim reality of being a spy is revealed in what Alex (his code name) Penkovsky did and the outcome.