Covert convert.
A Faithful Spy
Jimmy Burns
Chiselbury, £22, 390 pages
Anyone who thinks that fake news is a modern invention needs to read this book. From early on in its coverage of the Secret Service career of Walter Bell, it is clear that “intelligence” – like the news that is its progeny – has ever been a commodity to be bought, sold, manipulated and buried according to the needs of governments and their agencies.
At first glance, Walter Bell, the middle-class son of a high-church Anglican clergyman, was an unlikely recruit to the Secret Service. Like the Cambridge spies Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt, Bell had decidedly anti-establishment views. He even sold copies of Socialist Worker outside the LSE, where he was a student. Yet in their quest to be hospitable to all shades of personal opinion, the intelligence services of the day overlooked what they took to be youthful enthusiasm.
