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Published Jul 22, 2007
One of the abiding fascinations of the Cold War is the spy story. This was a
conflict fought as much with the cloak and dagger as the gun. There were,
of course, plenty of real spy scandals to feed the popular imagination. In
1951 British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had defected to
the Soviet Union, followed in 1963 by the ‘third man’, Kim Philby. In the
same year the Profumo scandal had humiliated a defence minister sharing
the same call girl as a Russian naval intelligence officer. The names Blake,
Blunt and an elusive ‘fifth man’ provided for decades’ more speculation on
the extent of the rot inside the British Establishment. Fact seemed to have
got ahead of fiction.
James Bond: Playboy of the Western World
It did not take long for thriller writers to start turning these facts into
fiction. The world’s most famous spy, James Bond, first saw the light of day
in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale in 1953. Fleming himself had been a wartime
naval intelligence officer, but realism was perhaps not 007’s strong suit.
Rather than the 38th Parallel or Moscow, Bond was more likely to be found
in the swish watering holes of the new jetset. His initial Soviet arch-enemy,
SMERSH, made way for the criminal masterminds of SPECTRE, a
depoliticising tendency reinforced by the ‘swinging’ Bond films of the 1960s.
Sean Connery’s enemies were monogamy and bureaucracy, not the
Russians. Only towards the very end of the literary Bond’s career did 007
appear in anywhere recognisably Cold War, in the short story The Living
Daylights, set in divided Berlin. By then his mood was much darker, a
washed-up assassin unable to gun down in cold blood his KGB opposite
number.
George Smiley: The West’s Bad Conscience
Even if Fleming’s realism had its limits – the target in his sniperscope was,
after all, still a fabulous blonde! – it was not difficult to see what had
ushered in the move away from escapist fantasy. The Berlin Wall, erected in
1961, provided the backdrop for a wave of grittier, ‘kitchen sink’ spy fiction.
The new stars were Len Deighton and John le Carré, and their on-screen
personae Michael Caine and Richard Burton drank tea, not vodka-martinis,
and grappled with paperwork, not femmes fatales. They were also more
prone to self-doubt. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) the
West was superior only in its ends, not its means, but by the end of the
Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy trilogy, spycatcher George Smiley had in some
ways sunk lower than his arch-enemy, Karla. Indeed, since the end of the
Cold War le Carré has become an outspoken opponent of global capitalism
and the Bush-Blair agenda in his most recent bestseller, Absolute Friends.
In Search of an East German Bond
Reading so much about the East Germans in the British spy thriller, I also
began to wonder if the GDR had produced its own. I already knew that in
1963 East Germany had filmed its own spy who came in from the cold, in
For Eyes Only: Streng geheim! Its ‘true-life’ hero patiently microfilms NATO’
s supposed plans to attack East Germany (thus supporting the official line
that the Berlin Wall was to protect from outside attack). In the 1970s,
another Stasi hero, Achim Detjen, hit East Germany’s television screens,
covertly defending the ‘invisible front’ against imperialist agents behind the
lines in Bonn. Recruits to the Ministry of State Security sometimes cited him
as their inspiration. Repeats of the series nevertheless became impossible
after 1978 when its screen hero, the actor Armin Müller-Stahl, really did
defect from the GDR. And which fiction-writer would dare to have concocted
a plot in which the real ‘Karla’, modelled on Stasi operations chief Markus
Wolf, would join the demonstrators in 1989? But he did.
Berlin’s many secondhand bookshops have also turned up piles of dusty
Cold War pulp, all vetted by the GDR’s Ministry of Culture. My favourite
censorship story concerns one of East Germany’s premier thriller writers,
Wolfgang Schreyer. Schreyer, never a party member, began to make his
name in the 1950s with crime thrillers, often set in West Berlin (a den of
iniquity in Party eyes, but a source of vicarious readership thrills). Later he
specialised in political thrillers set in the Caribbean, exposing the CIA’s
machinations there. He was even given the special privilege after the Wall of
travelling to Cuba to research. Yet, by the 1980s Schreyer was becoming
increasingly disenchanted with communist red tape, taking a calculated risk
by publishing one short story in the West. The story itself was harmless
enough, about a secret device which could detect unattached members of
the opposite sex, but was syndicated without his knowledge to Playboy
magazine under the title The Party likes to watch. When the offending
article was waved under his nose, Schreyer pleaded ignorance, since all of
his free offprints had indeed been confiscated – by the same Stasi who, it
seems, really did like to watch.
One of the abiding fascinations of the Cold War is the spy story. This was a
conflict fought as much with the cloak and dagger as the gun. There were,
of course, plenty of real spy scandals to feed the popular imagination. In
1951 British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had defected to
the Soviet Union, followed in 1963 by the ‘third man’, Kim Philby. In the
same year the Profumo scandal had humiliated a defence minister sharing
the same call girl as a Russian naval intelligence officer. The names Blake,
Blunt and an elusive ‘fifth man’ provided for decades’ more speculation on
the extent of the rot inside the British Establishment. Fact seemed to have
got ahead of fiction.
James Bond: Playboy of the Western World
It did not take long for thriller writers to start turning these facts into
fiction. The world’s most famous spy, James Bond, first saw the light of day
in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale in 1953. Fleming himself had been a wartime
naval intelligence officer, but realism was perhaps not 007’s strong suit.
Rather than the 38th Parallel or Moscow, Bond was more likely to be found
in the swish watering holes of the new jetset. His initial Soviet arch-enemy,
SMERSH, made way for the criminal masterminds of SPECTRE, a
depoliticising tendency reinforced by the ‘swinging’ Bond films of the 1960s.
Sean Connery’s enemies were monogamy and bureaucracy, not the
Russians. Only towards the very end of the literary Bond’s career did 007
appear in anywhere recognisably Cold War, in the short story The Living
Daylights, set in divided Berlin. By then his mood was much darker, a
washed-up assassin unable to gun down in cold blood his KGB opposite
number.
George Smiley: The West’s Bad Conscience
Even if Fleming’s realism had its limits – the target in his sniperscope was,
after all, still a fabulous blonde! – it was not difficult to see what had
ushered in the move away from escapist fantasy. The Berlin Wall, erected in
1961, provided the backdrop for a wave of grittier, ‘kitchen sink’ spy fiction.
The new stars were Len Deighton and John le Carré, and their on-screen
personae Michael Caine and Richard Burton drank tea, not vodka-martinis,
and grappled with paperwork, not femmes fatales. They were also more
prone to self-doubt. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) the
West was superior only in its ends, not its means, but by the end of the
Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy trilogy, spycatcher George Smiley had in some
ways sunk lower than his arch-enemy, Karla. Indeed, since the end of the
Cold War le Carré has become an outspoken opponent of global capitalism
and the Bush-Blair agenda in his most recent bestseller, Absolute Friends.
In Search of an East German Bond
Reading so much about the East Germans in the British spy thriller, I also
began to wonder if the GDR had produced its own. I already knew that in
1963 East Germany had filmed its own spy who came in from the cold, in
For Eyes Only: Streng geheim! Its ‘true-life’ hero patiently microfilms NATO’
s supposed plans to attack East Germany (thus supporting the official line
that the Berlin Wall was to protect from outside attack). In the 1970s,
another Stasi hero, Achim Detjen, hit East Germany’s television screens,
covertly defending the ‘invisible front’ against imperialist agents behind the
lines in Bonn. Recruits to the Ministry of State Security sometimes cited him
as their inspiration. Repeats of the series nevertheless became impossible
after 1978 when its screen hero, the actor Armin Müller-Stahl, really did
defect from the GDR. And which fiction-writer would dare to have concocted
a plot in which the real ‘Karla’, modelled on Stasi operations chief Markus
Wolf, would join the demonstrators in 1989? But he did.
Berlin’s many secondhand bookshops have also turned up piles of dusty
Cold War pulp, all vetted by the GDR’s Ministry of Culture. My favourite
censorship story concerns one of East Germany’s premier thriller writers,
Wolfgang Schreyer. Schreyer, never a party member, began to make his
name in the 1950s with crime thrillers, often set in West Berlin (a den of
iniquity in Party eyes, but a source of vicarious readership thrills). Later he
specialised in political thrillers set in the Caribbean, exposing the CIA’s
machinations there. He was even given the special privilege after the Wall of
travelling to Cuba to research. Yet, by the 1980s Schreyer was becoming
increasingly disenchanted with communist red tape, taking a calculated risk
by publishing one short story in the West. The story itself was harmless
enough, about a secret device which could detect unattached members of
the opposite sex, but was syndicated without his knowledge to Playboy
magazine under the title The Party likes to watch. When the offending
article was waved under his nose, Schreyer pleaded ignorance, since all of
his free offprints had indeed been confiscated – by the same Stasi who, it
seems, really did like to watch.
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