Espionage in The Secret Adversary
By Bill Peschel
From “The Complete, Annotated Secret Adversary”
Copyright 2013 by Bill Peschel
“The Bolshevists are behind the Labour unrest — but this man is behind the Bolshevists. Who is he? We do not know.”
Mr. Carter
In The Secret Adversary, Agatha Christie pulls off the neat trick of combining the serious world of international espionage with the children’s game of let’s pretend. To John Buchan, William Le Queux and Erskine Childers, spying was a deadly business whose heroes saw nothing funny in battling spies of the Kaiser or revolutionary agent provocateurs.
Christie, however, approached the genre in a more light-hearted vein. Tommy and Tuppence, like many men and women of their generation, are set adrift after serving their country. Only a chance encounter leads them into working for the British government as unofficial secret agents. They risk their lives maneuvering among Bolshevists, Germans, Feinian bombers and England’s native criminal class. Yet for most of the book, there is an air of unreality about the enterprise, as if the heroes and villains know they’re performing in a work of fiction.
Christie made her intentions clear when she dedicated Adversary “to all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure.” While it sounds condescending, it’s doubtful that Christie intended to alienate her readers. Many of them, she well knew, had undergone adventures they would rather not relive; the men in the trenches of France, the women at home waiting for news of their fate. She would give them thrills of a different kind, in a fantasy world of villains and heroes, and with a romantic partner to share them with.
Christie proposed telling a story for that generation. She wanted to provide an escape, so she freed her characters from history. Tommy and Tuppence served in the war, but they were not affected by it. Contrast that with Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928). The effects of the war haunt the book from its opening pages. It starts after the annual 11-minute pause to remember the dead on Armistice Day, and a shell-shocked veteran plays a major role in the mystery of the death at the Bellona Club, named for the Roman goddess of war. Lord Peter himself was subject to nightmares caused by being buried in a trench during an artillery attack. In contrast, Tommy served on several major fronts and was wounded, but shows no effect from it. Tuppence worked in a hospital.
Adding to the air of unreality are the numerous references to mystery and thriller stories Christie scatters amid the kidnappings, chases, beatings and threats. Tommy realizes that hiring a taxi to follow the villains was harder than in fiction. Tuppence reads threepenny novels such as Barnaby Williams, the Boy Detective. When questioning Albert the lift boy, she flashes a badge and hisses that she’s from the “American Detective Force.” “Ain’t it just like the pictures,” he sighs. It’s as if Christie is winking to the readers not to take her story seriously.
(She takes this narrative strategy further in the short story collection Partners in Crime. Masquerading as detectives, Tommy and Tuppence come across a stack of mystery novels in the office and decide to investigate each case by mirroring the behavior of a literary detective, including Sherlock Holmes and even Hercule Poirot.)
But a good thriller still has to pose a credible threat for the heroes to defeat. Christie grounds Adversary by assembling a rogue’s gallery of threats to Britain’s security that her readers would recognize. In a rundown Soho house, Tommy spies on the representatives of the factions plotting to bring down the nation: a German, a Russian, a Feinian Irishman and some criminal lowlifes.
The result is a balancing act between credible danger that is not too grim and Tommy and Tuppence’s light-hearted banter. Adversary succeeds as a thriller because it passes between Scylla and Charybdis without crashing.
Fiction and Reality
Like many thrillers of the time, The Secret Adversary played on the fears that foreign agents were fomenting trouble in England, particularly Germans before 1918 and Russians afterwards. How credible were these threats?
In reality, not much. Crossing national borders was easier in those days; gathering secrets and sending it home was much more difficult. Exporting revolution requires men willing to risk their lives and competent leaders, effective planning and money. Up until World War II, governments benefited more by the threat of espionage compared with the damage caused by them. The presence of enemies, real or not, was used to expand government funding and authority. And, as we’ll see, they were not the only institutions that profited from the specter of secret agents.
The Rise of the Kaiser
Since the 17th century, Germany was a collection of kingdoms, principalities, duchies and other small provinces. But when Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck not only managed to unite most of them, but also crush France in a seven-week campaign in 1870, the rest of Europe grew nervous. Bismarck’s attempts to find Germany’s “place in the sun” ─ the notorious phrase that represented the Kaiser’s objectives ─ meant a new and unpredictable player in a game where war was, in Clausewitz’ words, an expression of politics by other means.
Thriller writers quickly took advantage of this new adversary. Eleven days after the French signed an armistice, Germany invaded England in George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871). Chesney’s experiences as a British Army officer gave his account an air of authenticity, making him that era’s Tom Clancy. Dorking not only became a bestseller, it spawned the genre of “invasion literature.” Germany was the primary villain, but as diplomatic maneuvering turned friends into enemies and vice-versa, authors proved just as adept at changing sides, or even, in the case of H.G. Wells, recruiting Martians in The War of the Worlds (1898).
After a decade, the German threat faded and France resumed her traditional role as Britain’s bête noir. In 1891, William Le Queux’s The Great War in England (1897) united Russia and France in an invasion of Britain, with Germany coming to her defense! This book established Le Queux, a journalist of French-English ancestry, as a writer of international intrigue. For the next 40 years, he would publish stories in which Britain was menaced by invasion, spies, saboteurs and fifth-columnists. The public mind became imprinted with the idea that the Empire’s defenses had fallen into a sad state, and that there were hordes of foreigners lying in wait and prepared to topple England.
Despite the fact that Britain hadn’t been successfully invaded since 1066, the fear remained potent. Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903) became a best-seller with its tale of two British yachtsmen who stumble across an invasion fleet off the German coast. The director of naval intelligence dismissed Sands’ warplan as “rubbish.” A government inquiry concluded an invasion would require 200 boats containing 70,000 troops and take 20 hours to cross the English Channel. Time enough for the Royal Navy to interfere, the government said.
Rubbish, cried the opposition newspapers, particularly the Daily Mail under Alfred Harmsworth, the press baron who became the future Viscount Northcliffe. Harmsworth enters the story as a prime mover of British policy. He not only profited from the invasion fears he ginned up ─ he believed Britons “liked a good hate” ─ but helped to establish the intelligence agencies needed to combat the threat.
In 1905-06, a German attempt to free Morocco from French control threatened to spark World War I nearly a decade early. Le Queux responded by writing The Invasion of 1910, in which a German invasion nearly captures London. Northcliffe, who commissioned the book as a serial for the Daily Mail, threw the newspapers resources behind Le Queux’s book. The newspaper ordered Le Queux to plot the paths of German troops through the large cities where the Daily Mail sold most of its papers. The subsequent publicity campaign succeeded in selling more than million copies and the novel was translated into 27 languages. The Kaiser called a special meeting with his advisers to discuss the book, while German publishers pirated the story for home consumption, rewriting the last chapter so that they won.
The Daily Mail wasn’t the only newspaper profiting from spy scares. When the Weekly News prepared to serialize Le Queux’s Spies of the Kaiser (1909), it offered readers prizes for stories about German spies and plots. The details were fed to Le Queux, creating a circular feedback that reinforced people’s fears.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail continued to publish “news” about German spies while advocating for the creation of a Secret Service Bureau to take away the responsibility of investigating spies from Scotland Yard. No story was too far-fetched for the Mail’s readers. They were told that there were thousands of German spies living in England ─ one speaker in the House of Lords claimed no less than 80,000. Not only that, the Daily Mail reported, “every German officer had his own little bit of England marked off,” to study and gather information on for use in an invasion.
Between the stories and support from opposition politicians such as Winston Churchill, the ruling Liberal Party made the political decision that it was better to play along. The Secret Service Bureau was created with a combination of Conservative-leaning officials ─ who believed that German agents posed a threat to Britain ─ and officers from Scotland Yard and the War Office’s Special Section (abbreviated MO5). The bureau would later be split into investigating internal (MI5) and external threats (MI6). During the war, they would be responsible for hunting German agents in England.
So how did it do? A lot less effectively than they claimed. The day after Britain declared war on Germany, the announcement that 21 German spies were arrested sparked a “spy fever” in which thousands of German immigrants were denounced to the police. It wasn’t until decades later, when the files were released, that it was concluded only 9 were low-level spies. Over the next two years, the bureau failed to find a single spy. In all, only 31 enemy agents were captured out of the estimated 120 who were operating in Britain.
Goodbye Kaiser, Hello Commissar
After the war, the threat of a German invasion was replaced with a more insidious threat from Russia. Instead of German boots tramping down England’s high streets, writers imagined anarchist gangs plotting in the shadows to undermine Britain, causing society to collapse in violence and anarchy as it did in Russia.
Introducing Bolshevist revolutionaries refreshed the genre by heightening the paranoia. Armies, after all, are huge and hard to miss. The villains have nationalistic goals that are at least understandable. Swarthy foreigners brimming with Marxist and nihilistic philosophies are more frightening. They can convince your degenerate countrymen and flabby intellectual elites to join their cause. And they can be anywhere, or even invisible, as in the case of Mr. Brown.
To add a frisson of fear, they can also be Jewish. The discovery that many Bolshevist leaders were Jewish fueled the belief that the Russian Revolution was part of a Jewish-led plot to take over the world. The idea grew with the help of the Protocols of Elders of Zion, a document describing the activities and plans of an international Jewish cartel. In reality, the book was a fake, forged by Tsarist agents in 1890 as a satire targeting French emperor Napoleon III. But anti-Semitic groups found it a useful tool, and succeeded in spreading it around the world.
Many thriller writers began incorporating Jewish characters. Christie used the half-Jewish Boris Ivanovich in The Secret Adversary and The Mystery of the Blue Train. In Francis Beeding’s The Five Flamboys (1929), a crooked Jewish moneylender helps the Bolshevists until he informs on them and is killed. H.C. Neile more explicitly popularized the revolution-as-Jewish-conspiracy plot in books such as The Final Count (1926). In John Rhode’s The Double Florin (1924), a Jewish pawnbroker helps a Bolshevist plot to launch a general strike.
Some writers managed to resist stuffing their plots with nefarious Jews. In The Drums of Jeopardy (1920), Bolshevists seek two large emeralds owned by the hero, John Hawksley. Only author Harold MacGrath’s repeated political rants prevent this from becoming an entertaining chase.
Then there’s Hugh Addison’s The Battle of London (1923), the Red Dawn of its time, in which a ruling Labour Party has demoralized England, causing a “fatalism which was as foreign to the temperament of Old England as the pernicious doctrines which, incarnated in the persons of swarthy wild-eyed emissaries from every corner of Eastern and Central Europe, had streamed through its ports like so much evil merchandise.” When an army of 80,000 Reds rise up and take over London, the Liberty League joins loyal elements of the army and navy to become “just as active in killing as the other fellows.” They capture the rebel headquarters and execute the ringleaders and foreigners. Only the English war veterans are given a chance to redeem themselves in battle, because, as one league member concludes, “I can’t get rid of the belief that true Bolshevism can’t exist in the heart of anything like a true Englishman.”
But how real was the Bolshevism threat? As early as 1919, governments around the world saw the hand of Communism behind every strike threat, every protest, every criticism of the capitalist system. For the most part, they were wrong. Talk was in the air, but many workers were more interested in issues that meant something to them personally. An eight-hour work day. More money. A safer workplace. If socialist rhetoric could worry the factory owners into making concessions, so much the better.
Most likely, there was an alliance of interests among workers, unions, and true believers. Many workers, in fact, knew little or nothing about the works of Karl Marx, and attempts to teach them proved ineffectual. In Manchester, a course for workers that taught the first nine chapters of Das Kapital began with 54 enthusiastic students. After a month, one attendee remembered, “only three of us remained, and one was a girl whose father, standing guard at the bar below, insisted on her attendance.”
In the first years after the Bolshevists seized power in Russia, it was too busy trying to stay alive to export its revolutionary fervor. The Cheka, a precursor to the KGB, was busy under its founder Feliks Dzerzhinsky directing terror campaigns against the enemies of the state, such as the bourgeoisie and Western intelligence agencies it believed was fomenting rebellion against them.
In the meantime, the Bolshevist leadership created illusions to make itself appear stronger than it really was. In 1919, socialists from around the world gathered in Moscow to form the Comintern, a group intended to support revolution. In reality, only five of the delegates came from outside Russia. Many delegates had never been to the country they represented. It was a Potemkin congress, but it succeeded in generating fears that a revolutionary tide was about to sweep Europe.
In the chaos after the collapse of Germany, it seemed that way. The same year the Comintern formed, communists tried and failed to seize power in Germany, and Soviet republics were declared in several provinces in Hungary. The head of the Comintern predicted that within a year all Europe would be Communist, and the group established two secret bureaus in Berlin and Amsterdam. Britain saw the founding of the Communist Party within its borders in 1920.
Of these efforts, only the group in Berlin saw any success. The revolts in Germany and Hungary were crushed. The Comintern’s Amsterdam bureau collapsed after a delegate discovered the Dutch police recording their meeting in an adjacent apartment. Everyone was arrested, and later released, but the damage was done.
About the only thing the Bolshevists could do to further their cause beyond Russia’s borders was to smuggle funds to revolutionary groups, mostly by using jewels seized from the Tsar. Transporting them required finding inventive ways to evade searches at national borders. One courier smuggled pearls in a jar of Danish butter. Another inserted pearls and diamonds in a box of chocolate creams, then spent an hour sucking at the chocolates to recover them.
These trips were risky in other ways. One courier traveling by boat to the United States was entrusted with two leather suitcases lined with jewels. Fearful he was being watched, he entrusted them to an Austrian passenger who promised to convey them to Chicago. They never arrived. During the general strike of 1926, the Communist leader of the London dockers was supposed to receive £30,000 from Comintern official Otto Kuusinen. The cash was entrusted to a courier who traveled from Stockholm to London on a forged Swedish passport. Upon his return, he meet with Kuusinen and declared his trip a success. On the boat, he met a stoker who said he knew personally the Communist leaders and agreed to deliver the money. According to a witness, Kuusinen asked for the stoker’s name.
“He told me his name, but I’ve forgotten it.”
Needless to say, the money never got to its destination.
It wasn’t until 1922 that the Bolshevists secured their hold on power, and the first agents entered Great Britain. Their goal was to gather information, and they did this by recruiting Britons inside the government and other agencies. One major source was William Ewer (1885-1976), a Daily Herald reporter with connections inside Scotland Yard. He had at least three sources supplying him with information on Russian émigrés and other targets of Soviet intelligence. Also valuable were two highly placed officials in the Foreign Office, press officer Sir Arthur Willert and Assistant Secretary John D. Gregory. For their information, they were paid £25 to £60 a month.
It was a simple, effective spy system. When Britain sent a special envoy to Canton, China, the Soviets heard about it a month before the announcement. Information on political deals between the prime minister and his party were also funneled to Moscow. Sometimes, more than reports were needed. When the Central Committee of the Communist Party offices were raided in 1925, compromising material vanished from Scotland Yard’s files before an official report could be issued.
But if the Bolshevists didn’t have a Mr. Brown organizing schemes on the scale of those in The Secret Adversary, it wasn’t for lack of trying. In 1920, they tried to negotiate a treaty with the Sinn Fein-backed Republic of Ireland which Feinian officials hoped could result in 50,000 rifles being smuggled into the country. And after the 1926 general strike, in which the head of the miners union visited Moscow and promised to work for the destruction of capitalism, it was claimed that the Soviet Union provided 61 percent of the financing. Against those schemes, a plot to destabilize Britain by encouraging labor troubles doesn’t seem that far-fetched.