A Spy Novelist by Nature: The Charles Cumming Interview
By Wesley Britton
I first heard the name Charles Cumming when we appeared together on a panel for host Fionn Davenport’s “Culture Shock” news-talk radio show out of Dublin, Ireland in May 2008. While Fionn praised Charles’ spy novels, at the time I was in the dark about them—but I can be forgiven my ignorance. None of his books had yet been published in the states.
That August, Penguin and St. Martins rectified that situation by finally releasing the first three novels that had long been available in the U.K. for American readers. The first, A Spy By Nature (2001), a novel partly based on Cumming’s own experiences with MI6, had introduced the flawed anti-hero, Alec Milius. The sequel, The Spanish Game (2006), had been described by The Times “as one of the six finest spy novels of all time.” Gratefully, Penguin sent me review copies of both Milious books, but didn’t include The Hidden Game, the 2003 novel Charles wrote without his now most famous character.
I admit, my favorite of the batch of books Penguin sent me was Typhoon, a new thriller about a clandestine American plot to destabilize China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics. It highlighted the plight of the Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang, a semi-autonomous region of The People's Republic of China. No one could have predicted it at the time, but in July 2009, fiction met fact when Islamic separatists in that region underwent brutal suppression from the Chinese government, a circumstance still unfolding as of this writing.
On top of all this, in March 2008 Charles Cumming published an interactive online story, The 21 Steps as part of a Penguin “We Tell Stories” project. In this new approach of using text with the possibilities of the internet, readers can follow the protagonist's travels through Google Maps.
No wonder, then, Spywise.net wanted a chance to ask Charles a few questions. I admit it took some time to accomplish this—Mr. Cumming is a hard man to nail down—but finally he sat down and responded to a handful of my queries. So here are some insights into one of the most important spy novelists working today:
----
Q: Much of your education dealt with English literature—how much of your formative reading involved espionage? Are there other literary influences that helped shape your style and perspectives on characters who get involved with shadow worlds, corruption, and the other themes you explore?
I wasn’t really a fan of spy novels growing up. I read most of the Bond books when I was very young, but no Deighton or Ludlum or Ambler. I didn’t get to le Carre until I was at university. I came across a copy of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold on holiday in Egypt and read it in a single sitting on an overnight train from Luxor to Cairo. I was blown away by it – the structure is so intricate and precise, it’s like a symphony. I still think it’s le Carre’s best book. Otherwise, my influences were mostly American: I wrote my university thesis on John Updike’s Rabbit books and I love Philip Roth, particularly the later novels. Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter also had a profound effect on me. Growing up, I was far more of a movie fan than a bookworm. Dozens of films – from Sex, Lies and Videotape to The Godfather– also had an influence on the way that I tell stories. I think Tom Rob Smith has also talked about this in the context of Child 44. He came primarily from a movie background, not a literary mindset.
Q: The first part of A Spy By Nature (2001) deals with the recruitment of Alec Milius, a young and rather naïve would-be agent by the S.I.S. It’s often been noted that this section was influenced by your own experiences with MI-6. Beyond describing the procedures and I presume some of the characters, how much autobiography is in these passages?
There are some very autobiographical passages, in the sense that the recruitment chapters are a precise and accurate account of what happened to me back in 1995. But a lot of Alec’s reactions and observations are his and not mine. Of course, we share certain character traits, but Alec is a lot more ambitious than I ever was, and a lot more paranoid. I dropped out of the MI6 recruitment at a very early stage. All of Alec’s experiences in the oil business and as an industrial spy are products of my imagination.
Q: An important element of ASBN is that it isn’t a duel between opposing agencies in the traditional sense, but rather some one-upmanship between British Intelligence and the CIA. Did this result from the fact the story was set after the Cold War and old conflicts were now out-of-date? It seemed to me, from the phony commercial magazine Alec works for to the spy ring he infiltrates, you’re showing that secret manipulation is all around us on a variety of levels.
It was certainly my intention to try something different to the run-of-the-mill Cold War, Us-Against-Them spy plot. One of the key themes in my books is the so-called Special Relationship between Great Britain and the United States. Of course, this is a very one-sided relationship: broadly speaking, we do what we are told by Washington. So I thought that it would be an interesting idea to explore the possibility that these two great allies spy on one another. There have been instances of this in the past: I believe there was an example of the Brits spying on the Americans during the Balkan conflict, for example. As far as Alec’s job at the magazine goes – yes, that was to create an idea that this is a young man who doesn’t have strong ethical beliefs, who is an opportunist and a liar. And he, in turn, is surrounded by liars. He was also unfaithful to Kate, his girlfriend, with a work colleague. In other words, large parts of his life are fabrications.
Q: The sequel, The Spanish Game (2003), was based in Spain, where you’d relocated. What made you decide to go back to Alec Milius after The Hidden Man (2003)?
The Hidden Man was a story that had been turning around in my mind for several years. I had always assumed that I would write it after completing A Spy By Nature. There was no place for Alec in the story, so I left him out. (I’ve done the same thing with Typhoon, my new novel, which doesn’t feature Alec.) Commercially, this was probably a wrongheaded idea: publishers and readers prefer a series with a repeating character. But I was stubborn and followed my heart rather than my head.
Q: The Spanish Game has been compared with the novels of John Le Carre and Len Deighton. For me, the most obvious connection is the fact Alec Milius is very human, very flawed, rather reminiscent of Bernard Sampson. What parallels do you see between your books and those of your predecessors—if any? Were you directly influenced by any of them?
The influence of le Carre on my books is obvious, I suppose: the idea that you could write a spy thriller without necessarily including a lot of action and derring-do had a great impact on me. With le Carre, it’s all about character and the relationships between those characters; that’s also been the case with me. I’m really not that interested in guns and soldiers and ticking clocks on bombs. However, perhaps I absorbed too much of le Carre’s political cynicism. He can be a bit too quick to ridicule the great and the good. As far as Deighton goes, I am ashamed to admit that I have never read the Bernard Samson novels. People keep recommending them to me and I will one day get around to it. I loved Funeral in Berlin and The Ipcress File, but that’s as far as I got with Deighton. Apparently Horse Under Water is also wonderful. Funnily enough, I have his cookbooks, which are excellent.
Q: For me, Typhoon (2008) was a major departure for you in that the scope widened considerably in setting, time, and characters. How did you come to envelope the Chinese Olympics with the rebellion brewing in the Muslim population in China?
There are a number of reasons. First, I was keen to write about China in some capacity, but I wasn’t sure what angle to take. A story set around the Chinese economic boom seemed to make the most sense, until I realized that a story about a character who’s just trying to get rich isn’t particularly interesting for the reader. Then a journalist in Beijing started talking to me about Xinjiang and all the elements fell into place: ethnic unrest and rioting; the cultural clash between the Han and Turkic Muslim Uighurs; the West’s role in contemporary China. I also wanted to find a way of writing about Neo-Con folly in Iraq without writing directly about Iraq. So a crazy American plan to bankroll Muslim separatists in Xinjiang and to land-grab north-west China fitted that purpose perfectly.
Q: It wasn’t until Typhoon that your books became widely available in the States—what took so long?
It was just a commercial thing. A Spy By Nature wasn’t picked up by an American publisher when it first appeared in the UK in 2001. Then, after Spanish Game came out in 2005, Diane Reverand at St Martin’s Press bought my first three books in a block. My current editor, Keith Kahla, bought Typhoon last year, also for St Martin’s. It’s coming out in late October in the States.
Q: I can’t help but think your online book, The 21 Steps, was an enjoyable project, both for the innovation of the concept and the nod to one of the founding fathers of the spy genre, John Buchan. How did this project come about?
It was a joint production between Penguin, who were keen to expand their online activities, and a company called Six to Start, who are cutting-edge innovators in the realm of computer games and so forth. They invited six Penguin authors to contribute stories. I was given The 39 Steps because of my links to spy fiction. I tried to do a very light, very modern update of Buchan’s story, full of cliffhangers, narrow escapes and absurd coincidences. It was fun to do.
Q: A frequent reviewer for Spywise.net (Mark Hooker) thinks the most prevalent genre in contemporary spy fiction is that of novels coming out from ex-members of the espionage community. Do you agree with this assessment? Are there authors you regard highly in this genre—I’m guessing someone you’ve read would be Dame Stella Remington.
Well, not every so-called ex-member of the espionage community is responsible for the work that goes out under his or her name. Over here in the UK, most of the top-selling military and espionage thrillers are ghost written. They’ve been very successful, so I think you’ll see more and more war reporters, former spies and politicians releasing books of this kind. In fact, in ten or fifteen years time, ninety percent of the novelists writing under their own names today will probably be making a living ghostwriting fiction and non-fiction titles for ‘celebrity’ authors. There will be a handful of marquee novelists – the likes of Lee Child, Robert Harris, JK Rowling and so forth – and then a glut of one-off books by people who have become famous in other walks of life: as cooks, reality show contestants, athletes or gardeners. There has probably never been a worse time to be a debut novelist. If I was starting out now, I may not have had the chance to write The Spanish Game or Typhoon. The market has become completely crazy and ruthless and I wouldn’t have been regarded as a safe enough commercial entity.
Q: Any news on film adaptations of your books? What’s next in the pipeline?
A Spy By Nature and The Spanish Game are under option to Red Rum films, a company based in Hollywood. John Hodges, who wrote Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, has signed on to write the script for A Spy By Nature, which is wonderful news. The rights to Typhoon are still up for grabs!
---
The official Charles Cumming website is—
www.charlescumming.co.uk/
You can read The 21 Steps at—
wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week1/
wetellstories.co.uk/authors/charles-cumming
You can read interviews with other spy novelists like Bill Raetz, T.H.E. Hill, Jeremy Duns, and Tod Goldberg by checking out the “Spies in History and Literature” files at—
www.Spywise.net
By Wesley Britton
I first heard the name Charles Cumming when we appeared together on a panel for host Fionn Davenport’s “Culture Shock” news-talk radio show out of Dublin, Ireland in May 2008. While Fionn praised Charles’ spy novels, at the time I was in the dark about them—but I can be forgiven my ignorance. None of his books had yet been published in the states.
That August, Penguin and St. Martins rectified that situation by finally releasing the first three novels that had long been available in the U.K. for American readers. The first, A Spy By Nature (2001), a novel partly based on Cumming’s own experiences with MI6, had introduced the flawed anti-hero, Alec Milius. The sequel, The Spanish Game (2006), had been described by The Times “as one of the six finest spy novels of all time.” Gratefully, Penguin sent me review copies of both Milious books, but didn’t include The Hidden Game, the 2003 novel Charles wrote without his now most famous character.
I admit, my favorite of the batch of books Penguin sent me was Typhoon, a new thriller about a clandestine American plot to destabilize China on the eve of the Beijing Olympics. It highlighted the plight of the Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang, a semi-autonomous region of The People's Republic of China. No one could have predicted it at the time, but in July 2009, fiction met fact when Islamic separatists in that region underwent brutal suppression from the Chinese government, a circumstance still unfolding as of this writing.
On top of all this, in March 2008 Charles Cumming published an interactive online story, The 21 Steps as part of a Penguin “We Tell Stories” project. In this new approach of using text with the possibilities of the internet, readers can follow the protagonist's travels through Google Maps.
No wonder, then, Spywise.net wanted a chance to ask Charles a few questions. I admit it took some time to accomplish this—Mr. Cumming is a hard man to nail down—but finally he sat down and responded to a handful of my queries. So here are some insights into one of the most important spy novelists working today:
----
Q: Much of your education dealt with English literature—how much of your formative reading involved espionage? Are there other literary influences that helped shape your style and perspectives on characters who get involved with shadow worlds, corruption, and the other themes you explore?
I wasn’t really a fan of spy novels growing up. I read most of the Bond books when I was very young, but no Deighton or Ludlum or Ambler. I didn’t get to le Carre until I was at university. I came across a copy of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold on holiday in Egypt and read it in a single sitting on an overnight train from Luxor to Cairo. I was blown away by it – the structure is so intricate and precise, it’s like a symphony. I still think it’s le Carre’s best book. Otherwise, my influences were mostly American: I wrote my university thesis on John Updike’s Rabbit books and I love Philip Roth, particularly the later novels. Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter also had a profound effect on me. Growing up, I was far more of a movie fan than a bookworm. Dozens of films – from Sex, Lies and Videotape to The Godfather– also had an influence on the way that I tell stories. I think Tom Rob Smith has also talked about this in the context of Child 44. He came primarily from a movie background, not a literary mindset.
Q: The first part of A Spy By Nature (2001) deals with the recruitment of Alec Milius, a young and rather naïve would-be agent by the S.I.S. It’s often been noted that this section was influenced by your own experiences with MI-6. Beyond describing the procedures and I presume some of the characters, how much autobiography is in these passages?
There are some very autobiographical passages, in the sense that the recruitment chapters are a precise and accurate account of what happened to me back in 1995. But a lot of Alec’s reactions and observations are his and not mine. Of course, we share certain character traits, but Alec is a lot more ambitious than I ever was, and a lot more paranoid. I dropped out of the MI6 recruitment at a very early stage. All of Alec’s experiences in the oil business and as an industrial spy are products of my imagination.
Q: An important element of ASBN is that it isn’t a duel between opposing agencies in the traditional sense, but rather some one-upmanship between British Intelligence and the CIA. Did this result from the fact the story was set after the Cold War and old conflicts were now out-of-date? It seemed to me, from the phony commercial magazine Alec works for to the spy ring he infiltrates, you’re showing that secret manipulation is all around us on a variety of levels.
It was certainly my intention to try something different to the run-of-the-mill Cold War, Us-Against-Them spy plot. One of the key themes in my books is the so-called Special Relationship between Great Britain and the United States. Of course, this is a very one-sided relationship: broadly speaking, we do what we are told by Washington. So I thought that it would be an interesting idea to explore the possibility that these two great allies spy on one another. There have been instances of this in the past: I believe there was an example of the Brits spying on the Americans during the Balkan conflict, for example. As far as Alec’s job at the magazine goes – yes, that was to create an idea that this is a young man who doesn’t have strong ethical beliefs, who is an opportunist and a liar. And he, in turn, is surrounded by liars. He was also unfaithful to Kate, his girlfriend, with a work colleague. In other words, large parts of his life are fabrications.
Q: The sequel, The Spanish Game (2003), was based in Spain, where you’d relocated. What made you decide to go back to Alec Milius after The Hidden Man (2003)?
The Hidden Man was a story that had been turning around in my mind for several years. I had always assumed that I would write it after completing A Spy By Nature. There was no place for Alec in the story, so I left him out. (I’ve done the same thing with Typhoon, my new novel, which doesn’t feature Alec.) Commercially, this was probably a wrongheaded idea: publishers and readers prefer a series with a repeating character. But I was stubborn and followed my heart rather than my head.
Q: The Spanish Game has been compared with the novels of John Le Carre and Len Deighton. For me, the most obvious connection is the fact Alec Milius is very human, very flawed, rather reminiscent of Bernard Sampson. What parallels do you see between your books and those of your predecessors—if any? Were you directly influenced by any of them?
The influence of le Carre on my books is obvious, I suppose: the idea that you could write a spy thriller without necessarily including a lot of action and derring-do had a great impact on me. With le Carre, it’s all about character and the relationships between those characters; that’s also been the case with me. I’m really not that interested in guns and soldiers and ticking clocks on bombs. However, perhaps I absorbed too much of le Carre’s political cynicism. He can be a bit too quick to ridicule the great and the good. As far as Deighton goes, I am ashamed to admit that I have never read the Bernard Samson novels. People keep recommending them to me and I will one day get around to it. I loved Funeral in Berlin and The Ipcress File, but that’s as far as I got with Deighton. Apparently Horse Under Water is also wonderful. Funnily enough, I have his cookbooks, which are excellent.
Q: For me, Typhoon (2008) was a major departure for you in that the scope widened considerably in setting, time, and characters. How did you come to envelope the Chinese Olympics with the rebellion brewing in the Muslim population in China?
There are a number of reasons. First, I was keen to write about China in some capacity, but I wasn’t sure what angle to take. A story set around the Chinese economic boom seemed to make the most sense, until I realized that a story about a character who’s just trying to get rich isn’t particularly interesting for the reader. Then a journalist in Beijing started talking to me about Xinjiang and all the elements fell into place: ethnic unrest and rioting; the cultural clash between the Han and Turkic Muslim Uighurs; the West’s role in contemporary China. I also wanted to find a way of writing about Neo-Con folly in Iraq without writing directly about Iraq. So a crazy American plan to bankroll Muslim separatists in Xinjiang and to land-grab north-west China fitted that purpose perfectly.
Q: It wasn’t until Typhoon that your books became widely available in the States—what took so long?
It was just a commercial thing. A Spy By Nature wasn’t picked up by an American publisher when it first appeared in the UK in 2001. Then, after Spanish Game came out in 2005, Diane Reverand at St Martin’s Press bought my first three books in a block. My current editor, Keith Kahla, bought Typhoon last year, also for St Martin’s. It’s coming out in late October in the States.
Q: I can’t help but think your online book, The 21 Steps, was an enjoyable project, both for the innovation of the concept and the nod to one of the founding fathers of the spy genre, John Buchan. How did this project come about?
It was a joint production between Penguin, who were keen to expand their online activities, and a company called Six to Start, who are cutting-edge innovators in the realm of computer games and so forth. They invited six Penguin authors to contribute stories. I was given The 39 Steps because of my links to spy fiction. I tried to do a very light, very modern update of Buchan’s story, full of cliffhangers, narrow escapes and absurd coincidences. It was fun to do.
Q: A frequent reviewer for Spywise.net (Mark Hooker) thinks the most prevalent genre in contemporary spy fiction is that of novels coming out from ex-members of the espionage community. Do you agree with this assessment? Are there authors you regard highly in this genre—I’m guessing someone you’ve read would be Dame Stella Remington.
Well, not every so-called ex-member of the espionage community is responsible for the work that goes out under his or her name. Over here in the UK, most of the top-selling military and espionage thrillers are ghost written. They’ve been very successful, so I think you’ll see more and more war reporters, former spies and politicians releasing books of this kind. In fact, in ten or fifteen years time, ninety percent of the novelists writing under their own names today will probably be making a living ghostwriting fiction and non-fiction titles for ‘celebrity’ authors. There will be a handful of marquee novelists – the likes of Lee Child, Robert Harris, JK Rowling and so forth – and then a glut of one-off books by people who have become famous in other walks of life: as cooks, reality show contestants, athletes or gardeners. There has probably never been a worse time to be a debut novelist. If I was starting out now, I may not have had the chance to write The Spanish Game or Typhoon. The market has become completely crazy and ruthless and I wouldn’t have been regarded as a safe enough commercial entity.
Q: Any news on film adaptations of your books? What’s next in the pipeline?
A Spy By Nature and The Spanish Game are under option to Red Rum films, a company based in Hollywood. John Hodges, who wrote Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, has signed on to write the script for A Spy By Nature, which is wonderful news. The rights to Typhoon are still up for grabs!
---
The official Charles Cumming website is—
www.charlescumming.co.uk/
You can read The 21 Steps at—
wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week1/
wetellstories.co.uk/authors/charles-cumming
You can read interviews with other spy novelists like Bill Raetz, T.H.E. Hill, Jeremy Duns, and Tod Goldberg by checking out the “Spies in History and Literature” files at—
www.Spywise.net
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
From Middletown - via Colony Three - to “The Village”: Five Fingers as Source for The Prisoner?
By Wesley Britton
“To the entertainment world on two continents, I am Victor Sebastian, theatrical agent. These are my offices, but the business I'm about to transact can never appear on the company's books, not if I'm to survive. As it so happens, I'm another kind of agent. Counter-espionage. My employer: The United States government, although sometimes I pose as its enemy. My Code name: Five Fingers.”
(Preamble to Five Fingers, 1959)
The year is 1959, and a double-agent for the U.S. government is on assignment in Rome. His name is Victor Sebastian, and his cover is as a theatrical booking agent looking for musical talent in Europe and the states. Sebastian is posing as a member of a Communist spy ring who, one morning, is ordered by his Commie contact to take a train from Rome to an airport from which he’ll fly to New York. Boarding the train, Sebastian finds it odd he’s the only passenger. Odder still, he falls asleep and wakes up—in a sleepy South Carolina town called Middletown.
Or so he thinks. In Middletown, everyone seems friendly enough, even if Sebastian can’t place a call to his girlfriend’s hotel in New York. How had he got here? The mystery deepens when Sebastian awakens again, finds the people are the same, but they’ve lost their Southern accents. Now, he’s told this Middletown is actually in New England.
Finally, Sebastian is taken to the town’s “mayor” who hopes Sebastian won’t mind the joke that has been pulled on him. The “mayor” reveals that Middletown is actually deep inside the Iron Curtain where everyone is a spy. Children and adults alike are immersed in everything American so they can be smuggled into the states without suspicion. (Later, Sebastian learns Middletown has been in operation for at least 16 years.) The “mayor” tells Sebastian that he has been brought to the town so he can be briefed on his next mission, to go to South Carolina and uncover one of their operatives who was a graduate of Middletown. This operative hasn’t been checking in—so Sebastian must find him and neutralize him.
This story, “The Unknown Town,” broadcast on October 24, 1959 in the U.S., was the fourth episode of the short-lived NBC series, Five Fingers. For 14 episodes (two further episodes were filmed but never aired in the U.S.), American agent Victor Sebastian was played by David Hedison, an actor who’d come to prominence in the 1957 sci-fi classic, The Fly. Later, Hedison would co-star in the television incarnation of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea before appearing as American CIA agent Felix Leiter in two Bond outings, Live and Let Die (1972) and Licence to Kill (1989). His comely co-star for most of the Five Fingers dramas would also have an important role in the 007 canon. Luciana Paluzzzi, later the cold-blooded Fiona Volpe in Thunderball (1965), played a far different part in the character of Simone Genet, a talented singer who follows Sebastian around Europe and the states hoping their romance will become less mysterious, less subject to Sebastian’s unexplained comings and goings. Paul Burke played Robertson, Sebastian’s American contact.
Regarding “The Unknown Town,” fans of the ITV series Danger Man will no doubt have noticed striking parallels between that drama and one Danger Man episode, “Colony Three”—as well as the concept for Patrick McGoohan’s follow-up series, The Prisoner. Written by Donald Jonson, broadcast on October 27, 1964, “Colony Three” had British agent John Drake (Patrick McGoohan) uncovering a similar town behind the Iron Curtain with the same purpose—to serve as a training center for agents who would ultimately penetrate British society after having spent time absorbed in the culture they’re to spy on. As this town is a place where no one has the freedom to come and go at will and no one knows who is a spy and who is an innocent civilian kidnapped to help create the Britishness of the town, many speculate “Colony Three” was an obvious precursor to The Prisoner where “Number Six,” like Victor Sebastian before him, is gassed before waking up in a mysterious “Village.”
But did anyone involved with Danger Man or The Prisoner know about the Five Fingers story? It’s quite possible someone on the Danger Man staff saw “The Unknown Town” as Five Fingers was seen in the U.K. in its entirety beginning in January 1961 just as the first series of Danger Man was about to start production in Britain. Or perhaps Whitfield Cook, the writer for “The unknown Town” and Danger Man script-writer Donald Johnson both drew from another source describing such training towns. It’s clear one book, the 1951 Operation: Cicero, written by L.C. Moyzisch, was not the inspiration for this concept. While his memoir of historical double-dealing was turned into the 1951 film version of Five Fingers, the subject was a World War II operation with nothing to do with the Cold War. The TV incarnation, while crediting Moyzisch as writer, only borrowed the title with nothing else from the book or film beyond one episode, “Final Dream” (broadcast Dec. 5, 1959). In that story, one agent is code-named Cicero who leaks secret documents from his embassy, very like the original World War II account.
Another possible inspiration might have been print articles speculating about the existence of towns for spies. While both producer George Markstein and Patrick McGoohan claimed they read a book dealing with “retirement villages” that helped inspire The Prisoner, they were talking about places where ex-spies could be quietly stowed away, not as part of any training facility. Trying to determine if any source might have mentioned an actual facility with these characteristics, I contacted a historian at the CIA. While he’s an author for intelligence journals, one book, and daily briefings for various presidents, in this circumstance he prefers anonymity. Still, his observations are credible enough when he wrote me there are no records of any such training towns.
“I've always assumed that such things were the product of screenwriters' imagination. The idea that the Soviets, for example, would have a secret town of Germans to train agents in how to live in West Germany, or a secret town of Americans in order to learn how to penetrate America is, frankly, not sustainable. Even in totalitarian dictatorships such a thing would get out. Even in North Korea, the paragon of totalitarianism, what we know is that occasional Western defectors would be required to help train agents and also to make propaganda films, but not to populate a training town. The literature doesn't support it, either. The most fantastic writer on Soviet intelligence is probably Viktor Suvorov, an alleged defector whose works have largely been discredited, and even he doesn't describe such training towns. Unless you count Oleg Kalugin, whose book The First Directorate describes his learning about America while assigned as a student in New York City. Now that's a training town, if you can make it there you can make it anywhere . . . .”
So what inspired “The Unknown Town,” which preceded “Colony THREE” by four years?
As he passed away in 2003, it is impossible now to ask Whitfield Cook where he got the idea for his Five Fingers script. It is worth noting he was a prolific scriptwriter for television shows in the 1950s and 1960s including work for Playhouse 90, Have Gun Will Travel, 77 Sunset Strip, and another short-lived spy series, the 1961 Hong Kong. He is best remembered for writing the adaptation of the novel, Strangers on a Train, that Czenzi Ormonde, Raymond Chandler, and Ben Hecht turned into the screenplay for the 1951 Alfred Hitchcock film. So it would not be unusual for the idea of a training town to be a product of his own fertile imagination, and perhaps Donald Johnson too came up with the concept with no particular source to inspire him.
Oh, how did Victor Sebastian’s mission turn out? After a few twists and turns, he discovers a young man named Davey—played by Michael J. Pollard—was the Middletown-trained spy who’d decided he wanted to be American and hide his origins. Sebastian makes this possible—but this is no place for spoilers. It’s interesting to note another memorable actor, Alan Napier played the character of Wembley. In the 1960s, he played Alfred on the comic-spoof, Batman.
----
Dr. Wesley Britton is the author of four books on espionage, the most recent being The Encyclopedia of TV Spies (Bear Manor Media, 2009). Many of his articles, interviews, and reviews are posted at:
www.Spywise.net
By Wesley Britton
“To the entertainment world on two continents, I am Victor Sebastian, theatrical agent. These are my offices, but the business I'm about to transact can never appear on the company's books, not if I'm to survive. As it so happens, I'm another kind of agent. Counter-espionage. My employer: The United States government, although sometimes I pose as its enemy. My Code name: Five Fingers.”
(Preamble to Five Fingers, 1959)
The year is 1959, and a double-agent for the U.S. government is on assignment in Rome. His name is Victor Sebastian, and his cover is as a theatrical booking agent looking for musical talent in Europe and the states. Sebastian is posing as a member of a Communist spy ring who, one morning, is ordered by his Commie contact to take a train from Rome to an airport from which he’ll fly to New York. Boarding the train, Sebastian finds it odd he’s the only passenger. Odder still, he falls asleep and wakes up—in a sleepy South Carolina town called Middletown.
Or so he thinks. In Middletown, everyone seems friendly enough, even if Sebastian can’t place a call to his girlfriend’s hotel in New York. How had he got here? The mystery deepens when Sebastian awakens again, finds the people are the same, but they’ve lost their Southern accents. Now, he’s told this Middletown is actually in New England.
Finally, Sebastian is taken to the town’s “mayor” who hopes Sebastian won’t mind the joke that has been pulled on him. The “mayor” reveals that Middletown is actually deep inside the Iron Curtain where everyone is a spy. Children and adults alike are immersed in everything American so they can be smuggled into the states without suspicion. (Later, Sebastian learns Middletown has been in operation for at least 16 years.) The “mayor” tells Sebastian that he has been brought to the town so he can be briefed on his next mission, to go to South Carolina and uncover one of their operatives who was a graduate of Middletown. This operative hasn’t been checking in—so Sebastian must find him and neutralize him.
This story, “The Unknown Town,” broadcast on October 24, 1959 in the U.S., was the fourth episode of the short-lived NBC series, Five Fingers. For 14 episodes (two further episodes were filmed but never aired in the U.S.), American agent Victor Sebastian was played by David Hedison, an actor who’d come to prominence in the 1957 sci-fi classic, The Fly. Later, Hedison would co-star in the television incarnation of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea before appearing as American CIA agent Felix Leiter in two Bond outings, Live and Let Die (1972) and Licence to Kill (1989). His comely co-star for most of the Five Fingers dramas would also have an important role in the 007 canon. Luciana Paluzzzi, later the cold-blooded Fiona Volpe in Thunderball (1965), played a far different part in the character of Simone Genet, a talented singer who follows Sebastian around Europe and the states hoping their romance will become less mysterious, less subject to Sebastian’s unexplained comings and goings. Paul Burke played Robertson, Sebastian’s American contact.
Regarding “The Unknown Town,” fans of the ITV series Danger Man will no doubt have noticed striking parallels between that drama and one Danger Man episode, “Colony Three”—as well as the concept for Patrick McGoohan’s follow-up series, The Prisoner. Written by Donald Jonson, broadcast on October 27, 1964, “Colony Three” had British agent John Drake (Patrick McGoohan) uncovering a similar town behind the Iron Curtain with the same purpose—to serve as a training center for agents who would ultimately penetrate British society after having spent time absorbed in the culture they’re to spy on. As this town is a place where no one has the freedom to come and go at will and no one knows who is a spy and who is an innocent civilian kidnapped to help create the Britishness of the town, many speculate “Colony Three” was an obvious precursor to The Prisoner where “Number Six,” like Victor Sebastian before him, is gassed before waking up in a mysterious “Village.”
But did anyone involved with Danger Man or The Prisoner know about the Five Fingers story? It’s quite possible someone on the Danger Man staff saw “The Unknown Town” as Five Fingers was seen in the U.K. in its entirety beginning in January 1961 just as the first series of Danger Man was about to start production in Britain. Or perhaps Whitfield Cook, the writer for “The unknown Town” and Danger Man script-writer Donald Johnson both drew from another source describing such training towns. It’s clear one book, the 1951 Operation: Cicero, written by L.C. Moyzisch, was not the inspiration for this concept. While his memoir of historical double-dealing was turned into the 1951 film version of Five Fingers, the subject was a World War II operation with nothing to do with the Cold War. The TV incarnation, while crediting Moyzisch as writer, only borrowed the title with nothing else from the book or film beyond one episode, “Final Dream” (broadcast Dec. 5, 1959). In that story, one agent is code-named Cicero who leaks secret documents from his embassy, very like the original World War II account.
Another possible inspiration might have been print articles speculating about the existence of towns for spies. While both producer George Markstein and Patrick McGoohan claimed they read a book dealing with “retirement villages” that helped inspire The Prisoner, they were talking about places where ex-spies could be quietly stowed away, not as part of any training facility. Trying to determine if any source might have mentioned an actual facility with these characteristics, I contacted a historian at the CIA. While he’s an author for intelligence journals, one book, and daily briefings for various presidents, in this circumstance he prefers anonymity. Still, his observations are credible enough when he wrote me there are no records of any such training towns.
“I've always assumed that such things were the product of screenwriters' imagination. The idea that the Soviets, for example, would have a secret town of Germans to train agents in how to live in West Germany, or a secret town of Americans in order to learn how to penetrate America is, frankly, not sustainable. Even in totalitarian dictatorships such a thing would get out. Even in North Korea, the paragon of totalitarianism, what we know is that occasional Western defectors would be required to help train agents and also to make propaganda films, but not to populate a training town. The literature doesn't support it, either. The most fantastic writer on Soviet intelligence is probably Viktor Suvorov, an alleged defector whose works have largely been discredited, and even he doesn't describe such training towns. Unless you count Oleg Kalugin, whose book The First Directorate describes his learning about America while assigned as a student in New York City. Now that's a training town, if you can make it there you can make it anywhere . . . .”
So what inspired “The Unknown Town,” which preceded “Colony THREE” by four years?
As he passed away in 2003, it is impossible now to ask Whitfield Cook where he got the idea for his Five Fingers script. It is worth noting he was a prolific scriptwriter for television shows in the 1950s and 1960s including work for Playhouse 90, Have Gun Will Travel, 77 Sunset Strip, and another short-lived spy series, the 1961 Hong Kong. He is best remembered for writing the adaptation of the novel, Strangers on a Train, that Czenzi Ormonde, Raymond Chandler, and Ben Hecht turned into the screenplay for the 1951 Alfred Hitchcock film. So it would not be unusual for the idea of a training town to be a product of his own fertile imagination, and perhaps Donald Johnson too came up with the concept with no particular source to inspire him.
Oh, how did Victor Sebastian’s mission turn out? After a few twists and turns, he discovers a young man named Davey—played by Michael J. Pollard—was the Middletown-trained spy who’d decided he wanted to be American and hide his origins. Sebastian makes this possible—but this is no place for spoilers. It’s interesting to note another memorable actor, Alan Napier played the character of Wembley. In the 1960s, he played Alfred on the comic-spoof, Batman.
----
Dr. Wesley Britton is the author of four books on espionage, the most recent being The Encyclopedia of TV Spies (Bear Manor Media, 2009). Many of his articles, interviews, and reviews are posted at:
www.Spywise.net
Monday, June 15, 2009
Review: William Johnson’s Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer
By Wesley Britton
Johnson, William R., d. Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer.
Foreword by William Hood, p. cm.
Originally published: Bethesda, Md.: Stone Trail Press, 1987.
Re-published by Georgetown University Press, Feb. 2009.
ISBN 978-1-58901-255-4
$21.95
Determining the purpose of and audience for the republication of William Johnson’s 1987 Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer is tricky. Never intended for the general reader, Thwarting Enemies was clearly written as a “Counter-Intelligence 101” textbook for trainees, with researchers and scholars likely finding it a useful resource. Then and now, it’s also a good volume for fiction writers to have on hand if they want to get their particulars correct. But what would make this Cold War overview of interest for audiences, or future counter-intelligence officers, in the post-9/11 world?
I admit, the opening pages didn’t convince me Georgetown University Press was all that certain itself. For one matter, the very brief introductory paragraphs aren’t especially revealing. They claim Johnson’s “seasoned wisdom about the principles and tactics of counterintelligence” teaches “readers how to think about counterintelligence, and these basic principles carry through from era to era. Updates to account for current events and the latest gadgetry would have short-term benefit but would be dated once again within a few years.” Likely so, but then they say “the author passed away before republication was planned, so we elected not to attempt revisions that could not be approved by the author.” If no revisions then, a modern reader might expect some background details in the “Foreword” preparing them for what they might expect in the following pages.
However, in but two pages, William Hood provides a brief biography of Johnson, which does establish the author’s considerable bona fides. According to Hood, Johnson was an active participant in the D-Day invasion, and then joined the CIA in 1948 where he first worked “in the vital European counterintelligence field” before returning to Washington for “a senior assignment managing CIA's Far Eastern counterintelligence operations from 1960 until his transfer to Saigon in 1973.” Hood credits Johnson with helping create the network and structure in a new areana for the CIA as its predecessor, the O.S.S., had not been widely used in the Pacific theatre of WWII. More details are offered in the About the Author” description at the end of the book, such as: “As a young case officer he had several of the best coaches in the business of counterespionage, among them the Americans Jim Angleton, Bill Harvey, and Bill Hood. He was also coached by some British officers who cannot be named . . . He spent the last year of his service with CIA writing a classified counterintelligence training manual for young case officer recruits.” After his retirement in 1977, Johnson “organized and managed a series of seminars and lectures on intelligence as a function of government that was part of the University of Colorado's annual Conference on World Affairs.”
Without question, Johnson was more than qualified to craft this handbook for future counter-espionage agents. But the question remains: while useful before the fall of the Berlin Wall, what gives this book continuing value beyond being supplementary reading for new recruits? More than technology has changed—for example, Johnson’s discussion on wiretaps includes legal advice that was outmoded the day the Patriot Act was signed into law. The publisher apparently thinks, if you pick up this book, you already know what it is. Or they didn’t think it worthy enough for a more detailed introduction where the issues of the changes of the past 20 years could be addressed--while selling the point that basic principles, thought-patterns, strategies, etc. are the same now as they have ever been. In particular, all of Johnson’s accounts deal with the old duels with the KGB and GRU—battling modern terrorists is a different fish completely. Or is it? Some one could and should have addressed this in introductory pages.
None of this, of course, is criticism of Johnson’s own work as he passed in 2005. Undoubtedly, had anyone asked, he’d have opted to at least delete the sections on technological uses of surveillance equipment based on land-lines, concerns no longer relevant in the cell-phone age. Such deletions would have been simple enough as the book is organized in a series of segments on a variety of topics. Many of these segments are indeed still useful and, gratefully, told with wit and assurance. For example, the section on “double agents” reads, in part:
“No term is more misused by amateurs and greenhorns than `"double agent.’ Once in the discussion preceding a routine polygraph test, I told a greenhorn operator that one of my specialties was running double agents and managing double agent cases. So young smartypants stuck a surprise question at the end of the first series, "Are you a double agent?’ The breathing stylus on his machine jumped off the chart, and he had to write `Laugh at the point of my answer. I then explained that the proper question would have been, `"Are you a penetration?’
If you check the dictionary, you will probably find that a double agent is an agent working for two services at the same time. This will produce an image in your mind of somebody like Peter Lorre in the old movies, who spies on everybody and sells his information to the highest bidder. Today we'd call a double agent like that a `freelance,’ if we could find one. The fact is that since about 1945 the spy business has become a major international industry. Freelancers freelance just once. Then they either get gobbled up by professional services or (most often) they instantly go out of business. In other words, double agents, like all agents, are controlled by one service at a time. If control shifts from X to Y, a successful counterintelligence operation has been mounted by Y. To a professional CI officer . . . double agent’ means one of two things: a playback or a provocation. And it means an agent, not a staff officer.” (91-92)
This excerpt is typical of Johnson’s both personal and world-wise tone—he is out to share his experience, and with that experience comes a wealth of opinions. He discusses the problems of field offices having to work with the constraints of bureaucracy, budgets, and especially analysts who don’t properly collate the information in the files. There’s no shortage of advice: “Never neglect overt sources. Read the newspapers. Remember that information in the press is at best only 40 percent accurate, but though it may not give you useful facts, it conveys attitudes. The context in which a person is mentioned often tells you more about her than what is alleged or stated.”(181)
Such observations are the core of the book’s value—the passing along of one lifetime of experience, emphasizing the very human elements of CI operators. What Johnson handles most deftly is explaining and clarifying the many aspects of counter-intelligence, a far more complex profession than merely trying to stop our enemies from stealing our secrets. Johnson opens by asking readers if they have the 5 essential traits of a CI officer, and then discusses the distinctions between this work and other law enforcement agencies (and how to work with them), how to manage physical and technical surveillance, how to get and use doubles, moles, and defectors, the ins and outs of deceiving targets, and all of this recounted in a very compact, succinct style.
In the end, Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer clearly remains indispensible reading for potential CI agents, and we should all be grateful such a volume is available for them. It’s been noted many times that, due to political maneuverings during the Bush administration, the CIA lost many of its experienced hands and a new generation of agents and operatives don’t share the same continuity of mentoring as in the past. Other readers can pick up information that remains topical, as in Johnson’s “Interrogation: How It Really Works” which includes a discussion on “The Myth of Torture.”(page 34). Still, this re-publication is likely to have a limited market beyond those in the “need to know” realm. That is, those curious about a career in CI, those taking their first steps into it, or those studying and keeping an eye on this important aspect of spycraft. One of these readers may, someday, help put out an updated edition retaining the wisdom of Johnson while taking the time to demonstrate why we still need it.
----
For other book reviews, see the “Spies in History and Literature” files at
www.Spywise.net
By Wesley Britton
Johnson, William R., d. Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer.
Foreword by William Hood, p. cm.
Originally published: Bethesda, Md.: Stone Trail Press, 1987.
Re-published by Georgetown University Press, Feb. 2009.
ISBN 978-1-58901-255-4
$21.95
Determining the purpose of and audience for the republication of William Johnson’s 1987 Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer is tricky. Never intended for the general reader, Thwarting Enemies was clearly written as a “Counter-Intelligence 101” textbook for trainees, with researchers and scholars likely finding it a useful resource. Then and now, it’s also a good volume for fiction writers to have on hand if they want to get their particulars correct. But what would make this Cold War overview of interest for audiences, or future counter-intelligence officers, in the post-9/11 world?
I admit, the opening pages didn’t convince me Georgetown University Press was all that certain itself. For one matter, the very brief introductory paragraphs aren’t especially revealing. They claim Johnson’s “seasoned wisdom about the principles and tactics of counterintelligence” teaches “readers how to think about counterintelligence, and these basic principles carry through from era to era. Updates to account for current events and the latest gadgetry would have short-term benefit but would be dated once again within a few years.” Likely so, but then they say “the author passed away before republication was planned, so we elected not to attempt revisions that could not be approved by the author.” If no revisions then, a modern reader might expect some background details in the “Foreword” preparing them for what they might expect in the following pages.
However, in but two pages, William Hood provides a brief biography of Johnson, which does establish the author’s considerable bona fides. According to Hood, Johnson was an active participant in the D-Day invasion, and then joined the CIA in 1948 where he first worked “in the vital European counterintelligence field” before returning to Washington for “a senior assignment managing CIA's Far Eastern counterintelligence operations from 1960 until his transfer to Saigon in 1973.” Hood credits Johnson with helping create the network and structure in a new areana for the CIA as its predecessor, the O.S.S., had not been widely used in the Pacific theatre of WWII. More details are offered in the About the Author” description at the end of the book, such as: “As a young case officer he had several of the best coaches in the business of counterespionage, among them the Americans Jim Angleton, Bill Harvey, and Bill Hood. He was also coached by some British officers who cannot be named . . . He spent the last year of his service with CIA writing a classified counterintelligence training manual for young case officer recruits.” After his retirement in 1977, Johnson “organized and managed a series of seminars and lectures on intelligence as a function of government that was part of the University of Colorado's annual Conference on World Affairs.”
Without question, Johnson was more than qualified to craft this handbook for future counter-espionage agents. But the question remains: while useful before the fall of the Berlin Wall, what gives this book continuing value beyond being supplementary reading for new recruits? More than technology has changed—for example, Johnson’s discussion on wiretaps includes legal advice that was outmoded the day the Patriot Act was signed into law. The publisher apparently thinks, if you pick up this book, you already know what it is. Or they didn’t think it worthy enough for a more detailed introduction where the issues of the changes of the past 20 years could be addressed--while selling the point that basic principles, thought-patterns, strategies, etc. are the same now as they have ever been. In particular, all of Johnson’s accounts deal with the old duels with the KGB and GRU—battling modern terrorists is a different fish completely. Or is it? Some one could and should have addressed this in introductory pages.
None of this, of course, is criticism of Johnson’s own work as he passed in 2005. Undoubtedly, had anyone asked, he’d have opted to at least delete the sections on technological uses of surveillance equipment based on land-lines, concerns no longer relevant in the cell-phone age. Such deletions would have been simple enough as the book is organized in a series of segments on a variety of topics. Many of these segments are indeed still useful and, gratefully, told with wit and assurance. For example, the section on “double agents” reads, in part:
“No term is more misused by amateurs and greenhorns than `"double agent.’ Once in the discussion preceding a routine polygraph test, I told a greenhorn operator that one of my specialties was running double agents and managing double agent cases. So young smartypants stuck a surprise question at the end of the first series, "Are you a double agent?’ The breathing stylus on his machine jumped off the chart, and he had to write `Laugh at the point of my answer. I then explained that the proper question would have been, `"Are you a penetration?’
If you check the dictionary, you will probably find that a double agent is an agent working for two services at the same time. This will produce an image in your mind of somebody like Peter Lorre in the old movies, who spies on everybody and sells his information to the highest bidder. Today we'd call a double agent like that a `freelance,’ if we could find one. The fact is that since about 1945 the spy business has become a major international industry. Freelancers freelance just once. Then they either get gobbled up by professional services or (most often) they instantly go out of business. In other words, double agents, like all agents, are controlled by one service at a time. If control shifts from X to Y, a successful counterintelligence operation has been mounted by Y. To a professional CI officer . . . double agent’ means one of two things: a playback or a provocation. And it means an agent, not a staff officer.” (91-92)
This excerpt is typical of Johnson’s both personal and world-wise tone—he is out to share his experience, and with that experience comes a wealth of opinions. He discusses the problems of field offices having to work with the constraints of bureaucracy, budgets, and especially analysts who don’t properly collate the information in the files. There’s no shortage of advice: “Never neglect overt sources. Read the newspapers. Remember that information in the press is at best only 40 percent accurate, but though it may not give you useful facts, it conveys attitudes. The context in which a person is mentioned often tells you more about her than what is alleged or stated.”(181)
Such observations are the core of the book’s value—the passing along of one lifetime of experience, emphasizing the very human elements of CI operators. What Johnson handles most deftly is explaining and clarifying the many aspects of counter-intelligence, a far more complex profession than merely trying to stop our enemies from stealing our secrets. Johnson opens by asking readers if they have the 5 essential traits of a CI officer, and then discusses the distinctions between this work and other law enforcement agencies (and how to work with them), how to manage physical and technical surveillance, how to get and use doubles, moles, and defectors, the ins and outs of deceiving targets, and all of this recounted in a very compact, succinct style.
In the end, Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counter-Intelligence Officer clearly remains indispensible reading for potential CI agents, and we should all be grateful such a volume is available for them. It’s been noted many times that, due to political maneuverings during the Bush administration, the CIA lost many of its experienced hands and a new generation of agents and operatives don’t share the same continuity of mentoring as in the past. Other readers can pick up information that remains topical, as in Johnson’s “Interrogation: How It Really Works” which includes a discussion on “The Myth of Torture.”(page 34). Still, this re-publication is likely to have a limited market beyond those in the “need to know” realm. That is, those curious about a career in CI, those taking their first steps into it, or those studying and keeping an eye on this important aspect of spycraft. One of these readers may, someday, help put out an updated edition retaining the wisdom of Johnson while taking the time to demonstrate why we still need it.
----
For other book reviews, see the “Spies in History and Literature” files at
www.Spywise.net
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Before Bond, Before Blofeld: The Roots of Spy-Fi
By Wesley Britton
Since 2000, spy collector extraordinaire Danny Biederman has been showing his fascinating collection of “Spy-Fi” artifacts at places ranging from CI headquarters to the International Spy Museum to the Queen Mary. Visitors to such venues have seen the original shoephone from Get Smart, the sleeve gun from The Wild Wild West, and the pen communicator from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Then, in 2004 Biederman published a coffeebook paperback, The Incredible World of Spy-Fi: Wild and Crazy Spy Gadgets, Props and Artifacts, From TV and the Movies (Chronicle Books). This collection of Danny’s photographs demonstrated that after all these years, you don’t have to be a spy fan to fondly remember the then cutting-edge technology of the “Spy Renaissance.”
Certainly, the 1960s is the decade most noted for “Spy-Fi.” After Goldfinger’s laser-cannon cut down the doors of Ft. Knox in 1964, the large and small screens were filled with secret agents both employing and battling the futuristic science dreamed up by script writers. The Avengers took on “diabolical masterminds” that could control the weather, build cybernauts, and shrink John Steed down to size. The men from U.N.C.L.E. took on THRUSH which, if novelist David McDaniel got it right, stood for the “Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjection of Humanity”—emphasis on the technology, whether created or stolen by all those international evildoers. When James Coburn became Our Man Flint in 1965, he battled baddies who weren’t merely out to blackmail the super-powers for ransom; they wanted the world to bow to their utopian designs under threat of weather controlling technology. Two years later, In Like Flint sent the agent into outer space a decade before James Bond took Holly Goodhead around the world one more time in Moonraker (1979). Perhaps “Spy-Fi” reached its 1960s apex in The Prisoner when, each week, Number Six battled technological attempts to break down his stubborn humanity.
Then came the ‘70s, and we saw 007 finally go under the sea and into space, bionic agents saving us from aliens and Bigfoot, and then following decades gave us computer nerds getting zapped with new tech from VR5 to Jake 2.O to Chuck. However, the roots of all this weren’t in the ‘60s. “Spy-Fi” had been there all along, beginning in the earliest of spy novels and silent movies which established the tropes of secret agents vs. technological advancements in warfare:
a. the mad scientist out for world domination, whether for himself or larger entity;
b. the more naïve scientist who finds himself the victim of his own experiments and becomes an unwitting pawn by friends or enemies of his/her country;
c. the attempts by nations or corporations to create powerful weapons to give them the advantage in global or regional conflicts.
Battling the Huns
The origins of “Spy-Fi” were in the first years of the 20th Century when British novelists dramatized the growing fears of the German threat before World War I. There was William Le Queux whose “Duckworth Drew” stories were precursors to later adventures focused on new technology as when he encountered an "electronic eye," an Italian device that detonated mines. Edgar Wallace wrote a
number of serialized stories like Code No. 2 (April 1916) which anticipated future technology including a computer-controlled hidden camera and infrared photography. Not surprisingly, the influential John Buchan also veered into speculation about the future. In Mr. Standfast (1919), the heroic Richard Hannay posed as a pacifist to uncover a German spy planning to destroy the English army by releasing anthrax germs on its mainline of communications.
During this very imaginative and rarely realistic period in spy fiction, secret laboratories churning out new explosives and
chemical weapons were part of the Victorian silent movie melodramas. In short films primarily made for female audiences,
little girls and their older counterparts had to help out their beloved lovers and fathers threatened by evil “Hun” agents
working for the Kaiser and his legions. Occasionally, these efforts bordered on science fiction. For example, In the 15
episode serial, The Black Box (1915), a detective invented a device allowing him to see who is calling him on the
telephone. In The Secret of the Submarine (1916), the hero and heroine cheated the Japanese out of a device that could
extract Oxygen out of water.
Hollywood favorite Marion Davies starred in one of the oddest of such stories, The Dark Star (1919). Davies played a girl
who has memorized secret plans held in a supernatural relic that had fallen from space with mysterious powers. Jennifer
Garner would encounter similar threats almost 90 years later.
One movie ahead of its time was The Eleventh Hour (1923) about a Secret Service agent foiling the plans of a blackmailing
Prince to steal new explosives. Like future masterminds, mad Prince Stefan had a secret submarine, a hidden wireless
cabinet, airplanes, motorboats, deadly lions and one device popular in the period, secret trapdoors. In the main, most stories
featured secret formulas on paper; the “Macguffin” wasn’t usually the device itself, but rather a description hidden in some
private code.
Still, fantasy found its way into unexpected places. Long before The Wild Wild West fused the Western, SF, and espionage, Ghost Patrol (1936) featured a government agent looking for looters who prey on crashed airplanes. Turns out, there's a mysterious ray coming from a radium mine that's taking down the planes. Singing cowboy Gene Autry took a turn at such fare in his first serial, The Phantom Empire (A.K.A. Gene Autry and the Phantom Empire, 1935). In the story, considered one of the first science-fiction serials, Autry discovered an underground civilization 20,000 feet beneath his Radio Ranch. Technologically advanced, these survivors of a lost continent use radium for ray guns and early television.
Nazis and Reds
In the run-up to and during World War II, most spy fiction was in a more realistic mold, with fantastic stories reserved for children’s radio programs. Superman, Tom Mix and The Shadow were among many heroes called on to serve as counter-spies on the home front. One film predecessor to similar movies of the 1950s starred Peter Lorre as a baron in Invisible Agent (1942). In the WWII propaganda picture, Lorre's character was a Japanese agent who's trying to shake down the son of the Invisible Man for his invisibility serum. This set the stage for four TV series with transparent secret agents, although all starred leads on the side of the angels. As described below, more invisible bad guys would return on the large-screen—after all, what better spy gimmick than being unseen?
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two terms were coined to define what followed—the Cold War and the Atomic Age. While the massive destruction of modern warfare in World War I had shocked the planet, the new reality of both nuclear weapons and the power of atomic radiation placed technology in the forefront of espionage fiction. Suddenly, films with plausible scripts included threats of nuclear annihilation from simple uranium hidden in wine bottles in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) to the more fantastic idea of third parties capable of nuclear blackmail as in Thunderball (1965). With no relationship to espionage, films in the mold of Frankenstein (1931) like The Fly (1958) dramatized what can happen if scientists fly too close to the sun. Likewise, giant monsters in B movies with big apes, giant insects, or Godzilla—whatever he was—seemed cautionary parables about larger consequences if science is not kept in check. You didn’t need an atomic bomb to make the point—any unusual device would do in the hands of those with dark agendas.
For example, imaginative “Spy-Fi” of this era included Dick Barton, Special Agent (1948), the first of a movie series starring Don Stannard as the character created for radio. In the first film, a disillusioned scientist planned to poison England's water supply. In Dick Barton Strikes Back (1948), Barton defeated a scientist (Sebastian Cabot) planning to destroy the city of Blackpool with an atomic ray gun. Finally, Dick Barton at Bay (1950) had Barton rescuing a kidnapped scientist and his daughter when spies want his death ray machine. During the 1960s, that synopsis would fit countless Euro-spy flicks starring a host of would-be Sean Connerys.
The Children’s Hour
During the McCarthy Ear, as with WW II, the more fantastic spy stories were designed for children. On radio, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy became Armstrong of the S.B.I.. For one 1950 season, Jack became a counter-spy for the Scientific Bureau of Investigation. On television, both British and American youngsters could see super-spies like Atom Squad, a cheaply produced 15-minute science-fiction TV series aired weekdays at 5:00PM EST. Broadcast live from the studios of WPTZ in Philadelphia, the title referred to a secret government agency dealing with threats to the planet from evil doers and mysterious technology like weather-controlling machines or giant magnets that could disrupt shipping. In the same mold, Captain Midnight was originally a radio serial airing from 1938 to 1949 before becoming a TV program from 1954 to 1956. While the 39 episodes were overtly science-fiction adventures for the young, the stories shared the same tone of anti-Communism as in adult-oriented 1950s Cold War dramas. Over half of the Captain’s escapades dealt with enemy agents, national defense, military technology, and despots planning to rule the world.
More expensive productions included The Invisible Man (1958-1959) with live actors saving England from Communist agents. More known for its novelty than scripts, the show takes its historical place as the first spy show produced by Ralph Smart, the producer who followed with Danger Man two years later. In 1959, The World of Giants was another live-action children’s effort. The most expensively made series of its day, the 30 minute black and white World of Giants was inspired by the success of the 1957 film, The Incredible Shrinking Man, along with a plethora of other tiny people B movies. In this case, it was an American FBI agent scurrying under doors and lifting up heavy telephone receivers.
Dr. Mabuse
But not all “Spy-Fi” was targeted to youngsters in their living rooms. Before Bond, one popular film series began with director Fritz Lang's 1922 Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler). While interesting ploys were used by the mad doctor, hypnotism wasn’t really a SF trope. But Lang directed two sequels, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse [1933] and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse in 1960. The 1960 project interested him as he wanted to use new film techniques and say new things about the times. After the atomic bomb, civilization could be destroyed and, in the rubble, a new realm of crime could be built up.
Thousand Eyes has Dr. Mabuse running his criminal empire from the Hotel Luxor. As with Ernst Stavro Blofeld who’d debut in 1963, His face is unseen as he gives orders leading to the takeover of a corporate empire using murder and blackmail. As with the later Bond films and the sci-flavored technology they inspired in countless imitations, the mechanical devices show the omnipotence of the evil doctor, especially his surveillance gizmos allowing him to watch his prey. He had seemingly overriding power including TV cameras in every room in the hotel, and can thus regulate as well as survey movement. But, as with Bond, this power turned out to be illusory--one good man can overcome a fiend.
New directors took up the series beginning with Return of Dr. Mabuse (1961), and science-fiction had a more prominent role in the scripts. This German-made production had FBI agent (Lex Barker) and Interpol agent (Gert Frobe, Goldfinger himself) after the doctor who’s out for world domination again using invisible assassins. Perhaps the best sequel to illustrate what the new movies were all about is The Invisible Horror (A.K.A. The Invisible Dr. Mabuse, 1962). IN this tale, Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) was after "Operation X," a device so secret it was said to be more important than super-bombs or rocket ships. Turns out, it’s a device that can make him invisible. FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) was also after the secret project a mad professor invented who hid in a lab. After an accident disfigured him, he created the machine so he can be with the unwitting love of his life, an actress (Karin Dor, later to star in You Only Live Twice). For most of the film, Barker tries to convince West German policeman Gert Frobe that Mabuse actually exists while Dor wants someone to believe her, that an invisible man is haunting her theatre dressing-room and giving her invisible kisses. Worse--the mad professor is watching her bathe--it's when he moves a bath towel that Barker finally nabs him. Now, this was humor for adults.
Once more, Peter Van Eyck and Klaus Kinski starred in Scotland Yard vs. Dr. Mabuse (1963) with and Wolfgang Preiss as the evil doctor again using hypnoses to control police and politicians. The run ended with The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964) with Interpol agent Major Bob Anders (Peter Van Weyck) sent to protect the secret death-ray mirror the evil Dr. Mabuse (Claudio Gura) is after. By this time, two James Bond movies had debuted—Dr. No (1962) and From Russia With Love (1963). While the final scenes of Dr. No set the stage for, well, all the fantastic stages of hidden retreats for megalomaniacs, it wasn’t until You Only Live Twice (1967) that the 007 films became overtly “Spy-Fi.” So Dr. Mabuse must be considered a series more precursor to Bond rather than one of many series to come influenced by the world of Sir James.
The Meaning of it All
Admittedly, this short overview might indicate that early “Spy-Fi” was primarily seen in media geared for juveniles and therefore of interest only as historical artifacts in entertainment history. However, a number of issues arise from these sometimes primitive projects that first brought together espionage and science fiction.
One reason such fare is largely forgotten today is that technology marches on—if the adventures are based only on imaginative gimmeikry, which often becomes quickly antiquated, there’s little for future readers or viewers to enjoy. At least, “Saint” creator Leslie Charteris was concerned about this in 1966 when he claimed he worried about issuing new editions of his Saint books. In his “Forward” to the new publication of his 1931 Alias The Saint, Charteris wondered if he should update the old tales. He admitted the archaic telecommunications and transportation technologies in The Saint’s early adventures had changed significantly. In a similar “Foreword” to his 1965 edition of The Saint Overboard (1935), Charteris said his Jules Verne-like machines used by mad scientists were outdated as quickly as the books went to print, making his futuristic aqualungs and bathyspheres commonplace and uninteresting thirty years later. So Charteris said he was reluctant to bring out new editions thinking readers would be better served by new books with new settings and new topical references.
But Charteris learned new readers would indeed be interested in these yarns because They featured a memorable character who, like Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, transcended his times. Good storytelling can be admired long after the “Macguffins” have lost their novelty.
In addition, “Spy-Fi” was often a mirror of public concerns, especially after the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb and put Sputnik into orbit. In my first book, Spy Television (Prager Pub, 2004), I noted:
----
To a large extent, the “Spy-Fi” TV series of the 1960s and later were also extensions of the monster and space alien films of the 1950s, often cautionary fables about technology in the new Atomic Age. Likewise, secret agents contended with mind and body switches, artificial intelligence machines gone amok, genetically enhanced plants or animals, miniaturization rays, and deadly laser beams. Before worries about biological warfare became headlines after the September 11, 2001 attack on America, TV spies had long fought terrorists of every stripe employing artificially enhanced diseases as weapons. Long before The X-Files and the 2001 version of The Invisible Man employed new twists in cryogenic stories, spy shows used the old motif of artificial immortality to resurrect Hitler, transfer scientist’s minds into robots or computers, and seek out real and bogus Fountains of youth. Ironically, after September 11, much of this imaginative speculation seemed prophetic. For example, when news accounts reported powders carrying anthrax germs were found in mailed envelopes in October and November 2001, this author immediately recalled this had been one `Macguffin in a 1969 Avengers story, "You'll Catch Your Death."
In “Spy-Fi,” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was as influential as Ian Fleming, at least in terms of the goals of modern madmen. Super-villains were typically “zealous puritans intent on cleaning up social decadence” and earthly corruption by destroying humanity to have the species progress. Villains in series like The Wild Wild West were often social activists to the extreme, as in one terrorist wishing to use tidal waves to destroy polluters.
Each week, independent, freewheeling secret agents brought down such egomaniacs with Utopian designs for reshaping and controlling the world. Private investigators solved crimes against man; realistic agents solved crimes against society. But secret agents opposing SF masterminds fought crimes against nature. In the 1950s, this allowed writers to portray Communism as a force against nature, particularly human nature. This theme reached its height in The Prisoner when its 17 episodes were designed to be cautionary parables about the rights of free minds in a world seeking conformity and enforced order. Even in the shows created for pure entertainment, themes that warned of the dangers of ill-used technology, chemical, and biological tampering with genetics and the environment took the spy out of the sometimes claustrophobic Cold War atmosphere into wider vistas of adventure. And, as Cawilit and Rosenburg noted, the technological trappings allowed for ambivalent parables about the meaning of new gadgetry. Whatever devices secret agents had were used up before the final confrontations when one man stood alone against machinery that filled volcanoes. If technology was the deciding factor, Blofeld and his imitators would have won. (note 1)
From another perspective, Martin Willis once claimed the new emphasis on overheated technology had much to do with the return of James Bond in the person of Pierce Brosnan. Willis claimed the Bond series had always portrayed a 007 who had an ambivalent relationship with technology. This was shown in the popular "Q scenes" when Bond first demonstrates mastery over the gadgets before famously showing disrespect for them by destroying them in one scene or another. When Daniel Craig took on the mantle, it might seem the Bond people had decided “Spy-Fi” had run its course. No “Q” scenes in the Craig films; the evil “Quantum” wants international power by way of controlling natural resources. So—has “Spy-Fi” really run out of gas? What might we expect in the future?
“Toys vs. Boys”
By the dawn of the Twenty-First Century, a debate over the uses of new technology and espionage was a concern within the actual intelligence community. By 1998, the central debate was whether the emphasis should be “toys vs. boys,” that is, should technology supersede the place of agents in the field? This interest in “toys” in both fact and fiction seemed appropriate on a number of levels. In the post cold war era, the intelligence services of many nations monitored the manufacturing, sales, and purchases of advanced weaponry by countries such as Pakistan, Korea, Iran, and Iraq. At the time, satellite reconnaissance capabilities seemingly made the task easier. As the new millennium approached, drawing from old science-fiction stories, the NSA was working on computers integrating biological entities including bacteria used to build transistors. Such machines were planned to be able to reproduce themselves, combining electronic components with DNA. As Frederick Hitz put it, Will Smith's Enemy of the State (1998) was set in a world of computer hackers where stealing financial information and manipulating data are all taken for granted. In other words, the cutting-edge was now expected, not surprising.
Despite all this, with unintentional irony, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 25, 2001 that the new war on terrorism was being fought with “antique weapons.” On September 11, 2001, counter-terrorist experts like Jeffrey Beatty claimed the teams who destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the pentagon used “Low tech, high concept“techniques which turned commercial planes into bombs. As many later noted, the 19 terrorists might have been primitive technologically, but were well-organized, sophisticated agents who were masters of espionage tradecraft.
What all this means is that a once sub-genre in entertainment is now part of popular culture and the imaginations of real-life “Q”s are now focused not so much on creating new weapons, but rather means to foil those who know terror and devastation don’t require sophisticated high-tech. Surveillance and counter-surveillance are now center stage because countries like North Korea and Iran look to very real, and very old, technology to assert their place in international affairs. It seemed appropriate that on May 28, 2009, viewers of CNN saw “eye-in-the-sky” photographs of North Korean nuclear facilities; the following day, President Obama announced the creation of a new “Computer Czar” to oversee the security of U.S. government computers, especially in response to the ongoing threat of Red Chinese infiltrations.
Perhaps we’ve gone beyond “Spy-Fi.” If Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) on Fringe is any indication, mad scientists may now be more useful than fearsome. With creators like J.J. Abrams merging old formulas with new twists (Alias, Fringe), perhaps a new tradition is just around the corner, something that won’t remind us of invisible cars or weather-controlling machines that pale as opposed to such forces as Global Warming.
----
Notes
1. I freely admit 90% of this article drew from my first three books on fictional espionage. Many of these points and ideas are developed in great detail, especially in Beyond Bond: Spies in Film and Fiction (2005.) These books, by the way, include the citations that might lead readers to my original sources.
2. Another example of “Spy-Fi” that didn’t really fit this overview was the “Stainless Steel Rat” stories that Harry Harrison first began publishing in 1957 in Astounding Science Fiction. My analysis of this series, “Espionage Around the Galaxy: The Spy-Fi of Harry Harrison” is posted at www.LeslieCharteris.com in the “Features” section.
For many more features on fictional and factual espionage, check out the offerings at—
www.Spywise.net
By Wesley Britton
Since 2000, spy collector extraordinaire Danny Biederman has been showing his fascinating collection of “Spy-Fi” artifacts at places ranging from CI headquarters to the International Spy Museum to the Queen Mary. Visitors to such venues have seen the original shoephone from Get Smart, the sleeve gun from The Wild Wild West, and the pen communicator from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Then, in 2004 Biederman published a coffeebook paperback, The Incredible World of Spy-Fi: Wild and Crazy Spy Gadgets, Props and Artifacts, From TV and the Movies (Chronicle Books). This collection of Danny’s photographs demonstrated that after all these years, you don’t have to be a spy fan to fondly remember the then cutting-edge technology of the “Spy Renaissance.”
Certainly, the 1960s is the decade most noted for “Spy-Fi.” After Goldfinger’s laser-cannon cut down the doors of Ft. Knox in 1964, the large and small screens were filled with secret agents both employing and battling the futuristic science dreamed up by script writers. The Avengers took on “diabolical masterminds” that could control the weather, build cybernauts, and shrink John Steed down to size. The men from U.N.C.L.E. took on THRUSH which, if novelist David McDaniel got it right, stood for the “Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjection of Humanity”—emphasis on the technology, whether created or stolen by all those international evildoers. When James Coburn became Our Man Flint in 1965, he battled baddies who weren’t merely out to blackmail the super-powers for ransom; they wanted the world to bow to their utopian designs under threat of weather controlling technology. Two years later, In Like Flint sent the agent into outer space a decade before James Bond took Holly Goodhead around the world one more time in Moonraker (1979). Perhaps “Spy-Fi” reached its 1960s apex in The Prisoner when, each week, Number Six battled technological attempts to break down his stubborn humanity.
Then came the ‘70s, and we saw 007 finally go under the sea and into space, bionic agents saving us from aliens and Bigfoot, and then following decades gave us computer nerds getting zapped with new tech from VR5 to Jake 2.O to Chuck. However, the roots of all this weren’t in the ‘60s. “Spy-Fi” had been there all along, beginning in the earliest of spy novels and silent movies which established the tropes of secret agents vs. technological advancements in warfare:
a. the mad scientist out for world domination, whether for himself or larger entity;
b. the more naïve scientist who finds himself the victim of his own experiments and becomes an unwitting pawn by friends or enemies of his/her country;
c. the attempts by nations or corporations to create powerful weapons to give them the advantage in global or regional conflicts.
Battling the Huns
The origins of “Spy-Fi” were in the first years of the 20th Century when British novelists dramatized the growing fears of the German threat before World War I. There was William Le Queux whose “Duckworth Drew” stories were precursors to later adventures focused on new technology as when he encountered an "electronic eye," an Italian device that detonated mines. Edgar Wallace wrote a
number of serialized stories like Code No. 2 (April 1916) which anticipated future technology including a computer-controlled hidden camera and infrared photography. Not surprisingly, the influential John Buchan also veered into speculation about the future. In Mr. Standfast (1919), the heroic Richard Hannay posed as a pacifist to uncover a German spy planning to destroy the English army by releasing anthrax germs on its mainline of communications.
During this very imaginative and rarely realistic period in spy fiction, secret laboratories churning out new explosives and
chemical weapons were part of the Victorian silent movie melodramas. In short films primarily made for female audiences,
little girls and their older counterparts had to help out their beloved lovers and fathers threatened by evil “Hun” agents
working for the Kaiser and his legions. Occasionally, these efforts bordered on science fiction. For example, In the 15
episode serial, The Black Box (1915), a detective invented a device allowing him to see who is calling him on the
telephone. In The Secret of the Submarine (1916), the hero and heroine cheated the Japanese out of a device that could
extract Oxygen out of water.
Hollywood favorite Marion Davies starred in one of the oddest of such stories, The Dark Star (1919). Davies played a girl
who has memorized secret plans held in a supernatural relic that had fallen from space with mysterious powers. Jennifer
Garner would encounter similar threats almost 90 years later.
One movie ahead of its time was The Eleventh Hour (1923) about a Secret Service agent foiling the plans of a blackmailing
Prince to steal new explosives. Like future masterminds, mad Prince Stefan had a secret submarine, a hidden wireless
cabinet, airplanes, motorboats, deadly lions and one device popular in the period, secret trapdoors. In the main, most stories
featured secret formulas on paper; the “Macguffin” wasn’t usually the device itself, but rather a description hidden in some
private code.
Still, fantasy found its way into unexpected places. Long before The Wild Wild West fused the Western, SF, and espionage, Ghost Patrol (1936) featured a government agent looking for looters who prey on crashed airplanes. Turns out, there's a mysterious ray coming from a radium mine that's taking down the planes. Singing cowboy Gene Autry took a turn at such fare in his first serial, The Phantom Empire (A.K.A. Gene Autry and the Phantom Empire, 1935). In the story, considered one of the first science-fiction serials, Autry discovered an underground civilization 20,000 feet beneath his Radio Ranch. Technologically advanced, these survivors of a lost continent use radium for ray guns and early television.
Nazis and Reds
In the run-up to and during World War II, most spy fiction was in a more realistic mold, with fantastic stories reserved for children’s radio programs. Superman, Tom Mix and The Shadow were among many heroes called on to serve as counter-spies on the home front. One film predecessor to similar movies of the 1950s starred Peter Lorre as a baron in Invisible Agent (1942). In the WWII propaganda picture, Lorre's character was a Japanese agent who's trying to shake down the son of the Invisible Man for his invisibility serum. This set the stage for four TV series with transparent secret agents, although all starred leads on the side of the angels. As described below, more invisible bad guys would return on the large-screen—after all, what better spy gimmick than being unseen?
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two terms were coined to define what followed—the Cold War and the Atomic Age. While the massive destruction of modern warfare in World War I had shocked the planet, the new reality of both nuclear weapons and the power of atomic radiation placed technology in the forefront of espionage fiction. Suddenly, films with plausible scripts included threats of nuclear annihilation from simple uranium hidden in wine bottles in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) to the more fantastic idea of third parties capable of nuclear blackmail as in Thunderball (1965). With no relationship to espionage, films in the mold of Frankenstein (1931) like The Fly (1958) dramatized what can happen if scientists fly too close to the sun. Likewise, giant monsters in B movies with big apes, giant insects, or Godzilla—whatever he was—seemed cautionary parables about larger consequences if science is not kept in check. You didn’t need an atomic bomb to make the point—any unusual device would do in the hands of those with dark agendas.
For example, imaginative “Spy-Fi” of this era included Dick Barton, Special Agent (1948), the first of a movie series starring Don Stannard as the character created for radio. In the first film, a disillusioned scientist planned to poison England's water supply. In Dick Barton Strikes Back (1948), Barton defeated a scientist (Sebastian Cabot) planning to destroy the city of Blackpool with an atomic ray gun. Finally, Dick Barton at Bay (1950) had Barton rescuing a kidnapped scientist and his daughter when spies want his death ray machine. During the 1960s, that synopsis would fit countless Euro-spy flicks starring a host of would-be Sean Connerys.
The Children’s Hour
During the McCarthy Ear, as with WW II, the more fantastic spy stories were designed for children. On radio, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy became Armstrong of the S.B.I.. For one 1950 season, Jack became a counter-spy for the Scientific Bureau of Investigation. On television, both British and American youngsters could see super-spies like Atom Squad, a cheaply produced 15-minute science-fiction TV series aired weekdays at 5:00PM EST. Broadcast live from the studios of WPTZ in Philadelphia, the title referred to a secret government agency dealing with threats to the planet from evil doers and mysterious technology like weather-controlling machines or giant magnets that could disrupt shipping. In the same mold, Captain Midnight was originally a radio serial airing from 1938 to 1949 before becoming a TV program from 1954 to 1956. While the 39 episodes were overtly science-fiction adventures for the young, the stories shared the same tone of anti-Communism as in adult-oriented 1950s Cold War dramas. Over half of the Captain’s escapades dealt with enemy agents, national defense, military technology, and despots planning to rule the world.
More expensive productions included The Invisible Man (1958-1959) with live actors saving England from Communist agents. More known for its novelty than scripts, the show takes its historical place as the first spy show produced by Ralph Smart, the producer who followed with Danger Man two years later. In 1959, The World of Giants was another live-action children’s effort. The most expensively made series of its day, the 30 minute black and white World of Giants was inspired by the success of the 1957 film, The Incredible Shrinking Man, along with a plethora of other tiny people B movies. In this case, it was an American FBI agent scurrying under doors and lifting up heavy telephone receivers.
Dr. Mabuse
But not all “Spy-Fi” was targeted to youngsters in their living rooms. Before Bond, one popular film series began with director Fritz Lang's 1922 Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler). While interesting ploys were used by the mad doctor, hypnotism wasn’t really a SF trope. But Lang directed two sequels, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse [1933] and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse in 1960. The 1960 project interested him as he wanted to use new film techniques and say new things about the times. After the atomic bomb, civilization could be destroyed and, in the rubble, a new realm of crime could be built up.
Thousand Eyes has Dr. Mabuse running his criminal empire from the Hotel Luxor. As with Ernst Stavro Blofeld who’d debut in 1963, His face is unseen as he gives orders leading to the takeover of a corporate empire using murder and blackmail. As with the later Bond films and the sci-flavored technology they inspired in countless imitations, the mechanical devices show the omnipotence of the evil doctor, especially his surveillance gizmos allowing him to watch his prey. He had seemingly overriding power including TV cameras in every room in the hotel, and can thus regulate as well as survey movement. But, as with Bond, this power turned out to be illusory--one good man can overcome a fiend.
New directors took up the series beginning with Return of Dr. Mabuse (1961), and science-fiction had a more prominent role in the scripts. This German-made production had FBI agent (Lex Barker) and Interpol agent (Gert Frobe, Goldfinger himself) after the doctor who’s out for world domination again using invisible assassins. Perhaps the best sequel to illustrate what the new movies were all about is The Invisible Horror (A.K.A. The Invisible Dr. Mabuse, 1962). IN this tale, Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) was after "Operation X," a device so secret it was said to be more important than super-bombs or rocket ships. Turns out, it’s a device that can make him invisible. FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) was also after the secret project a mad professor invented who hid in a lab. After an accident disfigured him, he created the machine so he can be with the unwitting love of his life, an actress (Karin Dor, later to star in You Only Live Twice). For most of the film, Barker tries to convince West German policeman Gert Frobe that Mabuse actually exists while Dor wants someone to believe her, that an invisible man is haunting her theatre dressing-room and giving her invisible kisses. Worse--the mad professor is watching her bathe--it's when he moves a bath towel that Barker finally nabs him. Now, this was humor for adults.
Once more, Peter Van Eyck and Klaus Kinski starred in Scotland Yard vs. Dr. Mabuse (1963) with and Wolfgang Preiss as the evil doctor again using hypnoses to control police and politicians. The run ended with The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964) with Interpol agent Major Bob Anders (Peter Van Weyck) sent to protect the secret death-ray mirror the evil Dr. Mabuse (Claudio Gura) is after. By this time, two James Bond movies had debuted—Dr. No (1962) and From Russia With Love (1963). While the final scenes of Dr. No set the stage for, well, all the fantastic stages of hidden retreats for megalomaniacs, it wasn’t until You Only Live Twice (1967) that the 007 films became overtly “Spy-Fi.” So Dr. Mabuse must be considered a series more precursor to Bond rather than one of many series to come influenced by the world of Sir James.
The Meaning of it All
Admittedly, this short overview might indicate that early “Spy-Fi” was primarily seen in media geared for juveniles and therefore of interest only as historical artifacts in entertainment history. However, a number of issues arise from these sometimes primitive projects that first brought together espionage and science fiction.
One reason such fare is largely forgotten today is that technology marches on—if the adventures are based only on imaginative gimmeikry, which often becomes quickly antiquated, there’s little for future readers or viewers to enjoy. At least, “Saint” creator Leslie Charteris was concerned about this in 1966 when he claimed he worried about issuing new editions of his Saint books. In his “Forward” to the new publication of his 1931 Alias The Saint, Charteris wondered if he should update the old tales. He admitted the archaic telecommunications and transportation technologies in The Saint’s early adventures had changed significantly. In a similar “Foreword” to his 1965 edition of The Saint Overboard (1935), Charteris said his Jules Verne-like machines used by mad scientists were outdated as quickly as the books went to print, making his futuristic aqualungs and bathyspheres commonplace and uninteresting thirty years later. So Charteris said he was reluctant to bring out new editions thinking readers would be better served by new books with new settings and new topical references.
But Charteris learned new readers would indeed be interested in these yarns because They featured a memorable character who, like Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, transcended his times. Good storytelling can be admired long after the “Macguffins” have lost their novelty.
In addition, “Spy-Fi” was often a mirror of public concerns, especially after the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb and put Sputnik into orbit. In my first book, Spy Television (Prager Pub, 2004), I noted:
----
To a large extent, the “Spy-Fi” TV series of the 1960s and later were also extensions of the monster and space alien films of the 1950s, often cautionary fables about technology in the new Atomic Age. Likewise, secret agents contended with mind and body switches, artificial intelligence machines gone amok, genetically enhanced plants or animals, miniaturization rays, and deadly laser beams. Before worries about biological warfare became headlines after the September 11, 2001 attack on America, TV spies had long fought terrorists of every stripe employing artificially enhanced diseases as weapons. Long before The X-Files and the 2001 version of The Invisible Man employed new twists in cryogenic stories, spy shows used the old motif of artificial immortality to resurrect Hitler, transfer scientist’s minds into robots or computers, and seek out real and bogus Fountains of youth. Ironically, after September 11, much of this imaginative speculation seemed prophetic. For example, when news accounts reported powders carrying anthrax germs were found in mailed envelopes in October and November 2001, this author immediately recalled this had been one `Macguffin in a 1969 Avengers story, "You'll Catch Your Death."
In “Spy-Fi,” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was as influential as Ian Fleming, at least in terms of the goals of modern madmen. Super-villains were typically “zealous puritans intent on cleaning up social decadence” and earthly corruption by destroying humanity to have the species progress. Villains in series like The Wild Wild West were often social activists to the extreme, as in one terrorist wishing to use tidal waves to destroy polluters.
Each week, independent, freewheeling secret agents brought down such egomaniacs with Utopian designs for reshaping and controlling the world. Private investigators solved crimes against man; realistic agents solved crimes against society. But secret agents opposing SF masterminds fought crimes against nature. In the 1950s, this allowed writers to portray Communism as a force against nature, particularly human nature. This theme reached its height in The Prisoner when its 17 episodes were designed to be cautionary parables about the rights of free minds in a world seeking conformity and enforced order. Even in the shows created for pure entertainment, themes that warned of the dangers of ill-used technology, chemical, and biological tampering with genetics and the environment took the spy out of the sometimes claustrophobic Cold War atmosphere into wider vistas of adventure. And, as Cawilit and Rosenburg noted, the technological trappings allowed for ambivalent parables about the meaning of new gadgetry. Whatever devices secret agents had were used up before the final confrontations when one man stood alone against machinery that filled volcanoes. If technology was the deciding factor, Blofeld and his imitators would have won. (note 1)
From another perspective, Martin Willis once claimed the new emphasis on overheated technology had much to do with the return of James Bond in the person of Pierce Brosnan. Willis claimed the Bond series had always portrayed a 007 who had an ambivalent relationship with technology. This was shown in the popular "Q scenes" when Bond first demonstrates mastery over the gadgets before famously showing disrespect for them by destroying them in one scene or another. When Daniel Craig took on the mantle, it might seem the Bond people had decided “Spy-Fi” had run its course. No “Q” scenes in the Craig films; the evil “Quantum” wants international power by way of controlling natural resources. So—has “Spy-Fi” really run out of gas? What might we expect in the future?
“Toys vs. Boys”
By the dawn of the Twenty-First Century, a debate over the uses of new technology and espionage was a concern within the actual intelligence community. By 1998, the central debate was whether the emphasis should be “toys vs. boys,” that is, should technology supersede the place of agents in the field? This interest in “toys” in both fact and fiction seemed appropriate on a number of levels. In the post cold war era, the intelligence services of many nations monitored the manufacturing, sales, and purchases of advanced weaponry by countries such as Pakistan, Korea, Iran, and Iraq. At the time, satellite reconnaissance capabilities seemingly made the task easier. As the new millennium approached, drawing from old science-fiction stories, the NSA was working on computers integrating biological entities including bacteria used to build transistors. Such machines were planned to be able to reproduce themselves, combining electronic components with DNA. As Frederick Hitz put it, Will Smith's Enemy of the State (1998) was set in a world of computer hackers where stealing financial information and manipulating data are all taken for granted. In other words, the cutting-edge was now expected, not surprising.
Despite all this, with unintentional irony, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 25, 2001 that the new war on terrorism was being fought with “antique weapons.” On September 11, 2001, counter-terrorist experts like Jeffrey Beatty claimed the teams who destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the pentagon used “Low tech, high concept“techniques which turned commercial planes into bombs. As many later noted, the 19 terrorists might have been primitive technologically, but were well-organized, sophisticated agents who were masters of espionage tradecraft.
What all this means is that a once sub-genre in entertainment is now part of popular culture and the imaginations of real-life “Q”s are now focused not so much on creating new weapons, but rather means to foil those who know terror and devastation don’t require sophisticated high-tech. Surveillance and counter-surveillance are now center stage because countries like North Korea and Iran look to very real, and very old, technology to assert their place in international affairs. It seemed appropriate that on May 28, 2009, viewers of CNN saw “eye-in-the-sky” photographs of North Korean nuclear facilities; the following day, President Obama announced the creation of a new “Computer Czar” to oversee the security of U.S. government computers, especially in response to the ongoing threat of Red Chinese infiltrations.
Perhaps we’ve gone beyond “Spy-Fi.” If Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) on Fringe is any indication, mad scientists may now be more useful than fearsome. With creators like J.J. Abrams merging old formulas with new twists (Alias, Fringe), perhaps a new tradition is just around the corner, something that won’t remind us of invisible cars or weather-controlling machines that pale as opposed to such forces as Global Warming.
----
Notes
1. I freely admit 90% of this article drew from my first three books on fictional espionage. Many of these points and ideas are developed in great detail, especially in Beyond Bond: Spies in Film and Fiction (2005.) These books, by the way, include the citations that might lead readers to my original sources.
2. Another example of “Spy-Fi” that didn’t really fit this overview was the “Stainless Steel Rat” stories that Harry Harrison first began publishing in 1957 in Astounding Science Fiction. My analysis of this series, “Espionage Around the Galaxy: The Spy-Fi of Harry Harrison” is posted at www.LeslieCharteris.com in the “Features” section.
For many more features on fictional and factual espionage, check out the offerings at—
www.Spywise.net
Thursday, May 7, 2009
DVD Review: In A Word--Intelligence
By Wesley Britton
On April 29, 2008, Acorn Media released the first season of Canada’s Intelligence on DVD in the Region 1 format. Finally, those of us south of the border got our first chance to experience one of the finest espionage-oriented television series ever produced. On April 14, 2009, Acorn released season two, and I’m impatiently waiting its arrival in the Netflicks catalogue. At the same time, I’m wondering—why can’t American networks do something on this level of, well, intelligence?
The multi-layered program debuted as a two hour movie in November 2005 and ran as a series from October 10, 2006 to December 10, 2007 on the CBC, roughly Canada’s equivalent of the BBC. Producer and writer Chris Haddock created Intelligence, describing the show as "half gangster, half espionage," and that’s a fair summation. That is, if you can accept mobsters without Italian accents and no desire for bloodletting. The gangster half of the show revolved around Ian Tracy as Jimmy Reardon, a third-generation Vancouver crime boss overseeing his family's legacy in shipping, money laundering, and pot smuggling. The espionage half centered on Klea Scott as Mary Spalding, daughter of an Army intelligence officer and head of Vancouver's Organized Crime Unit. A black woman operating in a male-dominated realm, she wanted to move upstairs to become chief of he Asia Pacific Region of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS). (Scott had earlier portrayed the co-starring role of FBI agent Emma Hollis on the third season of Chris Carter's Millennium).
Throughout the two season run, Spalding and Reardon had parallel storylines, with both their criminal and law enforcement activities complicated by rivalries with their respective competitors, most notably American agencies or gangs seeking control over Canadian interests. In the pilot, Spalding—as savvy, crafty, and strong-willed a spymaster as has ever been seen on either the small or large screen—began building her own independent network of informants by crafting an uneasy alliance with Reardon. She offered him immunity from prosecution in exchange for his becoming an informant on major criminal activity, notably gun smuggling like ships in Panama carrying arms destined for the Congo. At the same time, Spalding planted a dancer in Reardon’s club to spy on him while she established a relationship with the head of an escort service. And, after discovering one of her Chinese translators is a mole, Spalding turned him into her own double-agent.
Meanwhile, the calm and non-violent Reardon works with as much diplomacy as he can muster to avoid gang wars with two rising groups, the “Bikers” and “The Disciples.” In his view, there are drugs he doesn’t want to touch anyway, there is enough territory for everyone to have their own piece of the pie, and he is hoping to be out of the criminal business in five years. He has his own informer inside the Vancouver police department, Rene Desjardins (Michael Eklund). Reardon tries to appease his ambitious but reckless brother Michael (Bernie Coulson) who wants his own place in the sun. On top of all this, Reardon is constantly dogged by his neurotic ex-wife, Francine Reardon (Camille Sullivan) who threatens to bring his empire down. Neither Spalding nor Reardon know it, but American law enforcement is working to get Reardon on U.S. soil so they can bust him while the American DEA is using a heroin smuggler in much the same way as Spalding is working Reardon.
Throughout season one, Spalding also learns her agency—indeed all of Canadian intelligence—is riddled with moles as well as subordinates who’d like to see her go, especially the vicious veteran intelligence agent Ted Altman (Matt Frewer), her scheming second-in-command. (Frewer was once a pop cultural icon in the form of “Max headroom” during the 1980s.) Along the way, Spalding learns just how far the tentacles of the U.S. reach into Canadian intelligence. This is called "deep integration" of U.S and Canadian political and economic systems which included American intelligence agents infiltrating Canadian institutions. In particular, when Spalding began investigating the Blackmire group, a corporation out to steal Canada’s fresh-water resources, she ultimately discovered the organization was a front for the CIA. Oh, lest we forget, the Chinese and Vietnamese have their own plans as well . . .
If all this seems like much too much for any one series to carry, Intelligence was driven by well-crafted scripts by Chris Haddock who carefully blended in new characters and developments from episode to episode. Using a snowballing menu of perspectives, his storylines unfolded in well-balanced shifts from the criminal machinations to the turf wars inside Canadian law enforcement. Better, every character was fully realized, totally believable, and, especially in the case of Spalding, almost jaw-dropping in their abilities to maintain their own balancing acts. All this overlapping of criminal conspiracies and espionage in the plots drew, in part, from Haddock’s notion that drugs are the crucial modern industry. In his view, information--the buying and selling of “intel” on everything from heroin trafficking to international terrorism--is the most addictive and profitable drug of all.
While it was on the air, Intelligence developed a strong fan base, received critical favor, was sold to 143 foreign markets, and earned 11 Gemini nominations. However, at the end of the second year, citing poor ratings, the CBC did not schedule the show for a third season. Haddock publicly claimed the network was responding to pressures from higher-ups who didn’t like dramas of this kind on the network. He backed his point by noting, after initial interest from the company, the CBC was noticeably unsupportive of the series with minimal promotions throughout the two year run. This makes me wonder if Canadians have other infiltrations to worry about—perhaps the very sort of thinking that has doomed many a U.S. classic has moved across the border. Along with our CIA, perhaps they’re getting our breed of network executives. Too bad. It’s not often we get something like Intelligence, but at least we Yanks can now at least appreciate shows we knew nothing about during the original broadcast.
If I haven’t made it clear—don’t miss Intelligence! It is something special for anyone who ever appreciated The Sandbaggers, Danger Man, or, well, few shows are like it. With any luck, more in its mold will be coming—and would be most welcome from any country of origin.
----
I hereby thank David Spencer from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers for calling my attention to Intelligence as part of my research for The Encyclopedia of TV Spies.
More reviews by Dr. Wesley Britton are posted at—
WWW.Spywise.net
By Wesley Britton
On April 29, 2008, Acorn Media released the first season of Canada’s Intelligence on DVD in the Region 1 format. Finally, those of us south of the border got our first chance to experience one of the finest espionage-oriented television series ever produced. On April 14, 2009, Acorn released season two, and I’m impatiently waiting its arrival in the Netflicks catalogue. At the same time, I’m wondering—why can’t American networks do something on this level of, well, intelligence?
The multi-layered program debuted as a two hour movie in November 2005 and ran as a series from October 10, 2006 to December 10, 2007 on the CBC, roughly Canada’s equivalent of the BBC. Producer and writer Chris Haddock created Intelligence, describing the show as "half gangster, half espionage," and that’s a fair summation. That is, if you can accept mobsters without Italian accents and no desire for bloodletting. The gangster half of the show revolved around Ian Tracy as Jimmy Reardon, a third-generation Vancouver crime boss overseeing his family's legacy in shipping, money laundering, and pot smuggling. The espionage half centered on Klea Scott as Mary Spalding, daughter of an Army intelligence officer and head of Vancouver's Organized Crime Unit. A black woman operating in a male-dominated realm, she wanted to move upstairs to become chief of he Asia Pacific Region of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS). (Scott had earlier portrayed the co-starring role of FBI agent Emma Hollis on the third season of Chris Carter's Millennium).
Throughout the two season run, Spalding and Reardon had parallel storylines, with both their criminal and law enforcement activities complicated by rivalries with their respective competitors, most notably American agencies or gangs seeking control over Canadian interests. In the pilot, Spalding—as savvy, crafty, and strong-willed a spymaster as has ever been seen on either the small or large screen—began building her own independent network of informants by crafting an uneasy alliance with Reardon. She offered him immunity from prosecution in exchange for his becoming an informant on major criminal activity, notably gun smuggling like ships in Panama carrying arms destined for the Congo. At the same time, Spalding planted a dancer in Reardon’s club to spy on him while she established a relationship with the head of an escort service. And, after discovering one of her Chinese translators is a mole, Spalding turned him into her own double-agent.
Meanwhile, the calm and non-violent Reardon works with as much diplomacy as he can muster to avoid gang wars with two rising groups, the “Bikers” and “The Disciples.” In his view, there are drugs he doesn’t want to touch anyway, there is enough territory for everyone to have their own piece of the pie, and he is hoping to be out of the criminal business in five years. He has his own informer inside the Vancouver police department, Rene Desjardins (Michael Eklund). Reardon tries to appease his ambitious but reckless brother Michael (Bernie Coulson) who wants his own place in the sun. On top of all this, Reardon is constantly dogged by his neurotic ex-wife, Francine Reardon (Camille Sullivan) who threatens to bring his empire down. Neither Spalding nor Reardon know it, but American law enforcement is working to get Reardon on U.S. soil so they can bust him while the American DEA is using a heroin smuggler in much the same way as Spalding is working Reardon.
Throughout season one, Spalding also learns her agency—indeed all of Canadian intelligence—is riddled with moles as well as subordinates who’d like to see her go, especially the vicious veteran intelligence agent Ted Altman (Matt Frewer), her scheming second-in-command. (Frewer was once a pop cultural icon in the form of “Max headroom” during the 1980s.) Along the way, Spalding learns just how far the tentacles of the U.S. reach into Canadian intelligence. This is called "deep integration" of U.S and Canadian political and economic systems which included American intelligence agents infiltrating Canadian institutions. In particular, when Spalding began investigating the Blackmire group, a corporation out to steal Canada’s fresh-water resources, she ultimately discovered the organization was a front for the CIA. Oh, lest we forget, the Chinese and Vietnamese have their own plans as well . . .
If all this seems like much too much for any one series to carry, Intelligence was driven by well-crafted scripts by Chris Haddock who carefully blended in new characters and developments from episode to episode. Using a snowballing menu of perspectives, his storylines unfolded in well-balanced shifts from the criminal machinations to the turf wars inside Canadian law enforcement. Better, every character was fully realized, totally believable, and, especially in the case of Spalding, almost jaw-dropping in their abilities to maintain their own balancing acts. All this overlapping of criminal conspiracies and espionage in the plots drew, in part, from Haddock’s notion that drugs are the crucial modern industry. In his view, information--the buying and selling of “intel” on everything from heroin trafficking to international terrorism--is the most addictive and profitable drug of all.
While it was on the air, Intelligence developed a strong fan base, received critical favor, was sold to 143 foreign markets, and earned 11 Gemini nominations. However, at the end of the second year, citing poor ratings, the CBC did not schedule the show for a third season. Haddock publicly claimed the network was responding to pressures from higher-ups who didn’t like dramas of this kind on the network. He backed his point by noting, after initial interest from the company, the CBC was noticeably unsupportive of the series with minimal promotions throughout the two year run. This makes me wonder if Canadians have other infiltrations to worry about—perhaps the very sort of thinking that has doomed many a U.S. classic has moved across the border. Along with our CIA, perhaps they’re getting our breed of network executives. Too bad. It’s not often we get something like Intelligence, but at least we Yanks can now at least appreciate shows we knew nothing about during the original broadcast.
If I haven’t made it clear—don’t miss Intelligence! It is something special for anyone who ever appreciated The Sandbaggers, Danger Man, or, well, few shows are like it. With any luck, more in its mold will be coming—and would be most welcome from any country of origin.
----
I hereby thank David Spencer from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers for calling my attention to Intelligence as part of my research for The Encyclopedia of TV Spies.
More reviews by Dr. Wesley Britton are posted at—
WWW.Spywise.net
Sunday, May 3, 2009
OSS 117, 007, and Alfred Hitchcock: A French Secret Agent and the Bond Bonanza
By Ron Payne
FOR MANY YEARS I WAS AWARE OF FRENCH THRILLER WRITER JEAN BRUCE, WHO WROTE THE ADVENTURES OF SECRET AGENT HUBERT BONISSEUR DE LA BATH, better known in France as "0SS 117." Bruce, who created his suave and sophisticated agent, four years before Ian Fleming created BRITISH AGENT 007, earned millions writing about the character---and in the 1960s---at the height of the Worldwide Bond-Craze, Gaumont Studios, the oldest and certainly one of the greatest film studios in the world, started making motion pictures about Monsieur de la Bath 0SS 117.
SINCE 2006, when Parisian actor Jean Dujardin became the French equivalent of a new Sean Connery, with the hit Gaumont Studio production of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, there has been a renewed interest in the French counter-intelligence agent. THE NEW de la Bath adventure, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, also starring the charismatic Dujardin, soon to be released in Europe, promises to be a blockbuster for the great French studio, which only sixteen months ago lost a distribution-contract with Sony Pictures.
Hubert (pronounced U-Bear) Bonisseur de la Bath was created in 1949 to immediate literary success in France. Jean (pronounced like Sean) Bruce wrote like an angel doing Figure-Eights, effortlessly on ice, when he wrote about de la Bath, who has everything going for him that Bond does. He is handsome, cool-in-danger and good with the ladies. Ian Fleming read Jean Bruce, when he travelled in France and Bruce's books were easy to find in London bookstalls.
BUT the enormous popularity of the character has yet to catch on in America, though he has his admirers in this country as well. de la Bath has been portrayed on screen by Sean Flynn, the late son of movie idol-swashbuckler Errol Flynn. (Sean was lost in Vietnam, when captured by the North Vietnamese while riding his motorcycle. He was a photographer and war correspondent, like his father years earlier in the Spanish Civil War [1937] and the younger Flynn was held hostage for a year and executed.)
Frederick Stafford, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s production of Leon Uuris’s Topaz, also starred as de la Bath and gave the character a genuine James Bond-like persona. (It was because of his OSS 117 role that Hitchcock hired Stafford for the Topaz role.) Producer Harry Saltzman remarked at the time of the Topaz release, "If Frederick Stafford had not been French, but English, he might have followed directly in Sean Connery’s footsteps as Bond."
Kerwin Matthews, most famous in the United States as Gulliver in The Three Worlds of Gulliver and "The Sinbad" series (one in which he co-starred opposite Mrs. Bing Crosby) was also successful in the role. BUT FOR THE SAKE of comparisons, it was John Gavin, who later became President Ronald Reagan’s Ambassador to Mexico, who stands out. Gavin, who played the romantic lead in Hitchcock’s Psycho, opposite Vera Miles, was a rising star at Universal Pictures before leaving for France and undertaking the role of Agent OSS 117. At Universal, Gavin felt lost in a relentless attempt by Universal executives to pigeon-hole him in roles better suited for Rock Hudson, who was the studio's top star at the time. If GAVIN was not being proposed for the next "Tammy" picture, he was made to fill out his contract playing "Destry," a character created by James Stewart in Destry Rides Again and who was later played by Audie Murphy. Gavin's Destry television series soon hit the dirt and Gavin picked-up the trail for France and GAUMONT STUDIOS, when his Universal Pictures agreements expired.
FRANCE WAS GOOD for John Gavin and his tenure as "0SS 117" was a successful one, if not the most successful of any other actor who played the role. (See his film, OSS 117: Double Agent at www.sinistercinema.com under Espionage and Spy Films).
IN 1971, after George Lazenby, on bad advice from his Business Manager Ronan O'Rahilly, resigned from the role of James Bond after just one film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli were desperate to find a new Double-0-seven. John Gavin, on the strength of his '0SS 117,' was signed to a contract to be the next James Bond in Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever. Mr. Gavin was given a script and United Aartists went on alert that John Gavin, would, indeed, be starring in the diamond smuggling caper, set to be filmed in Amsterdam, South Africa, London, Las Vegas and UNIVERSAL PICTURES (his old studio) in the spring. Diamonds Are Forever was to be EON Productions’s first Bond film completed in the United States. (Exterior scenes of Miami Beach in Goldfinger were 'Second Unit' sequences, with interiors and Fort Knox filmed at Pinewood Studios outside London.)
John Gavin, an American of Mexican descent, who played a French secret agent as Hubert Connoisseur de la Bath, was now ready to become ENGLAND's MOST FAMOUS EXPORT---James Bond, 'DOUBLE-0-SEVEN,' Ian Fleming’s GENTLEMAN AGENT with THE LICENCE TO KILL.
DOUBLE-0-SEVEN-DOUBLE-TAKE
Albert R. Broccoli liked John Gavin." Harry Saltzman liked John Gavin. Enter David Picker, Executive Vice President of United Artists. "WE WANT CONNERY....!" GET CONNERY BACK, AT ANY PRICE...! became the "War Cry" at United Artists, then a subsidiary of the giant San Francisco insurance firm, Trans-America Corporation.
SUDDENLY, producers Saltzman and Broccoli were faced with a new casting crisis. Broccoli had already turned down Burt Reynolds (because he was not English) and Reynolds claims he turned down Bond earlier (because "No one can play Bond but Sean Connery. ") Either way, John Gavin (who was definitely not English and had no woes about being compared with Connery) was already signed. His name was on the deal. The contract was "in the pocket."
TURN AROUND "007 STYLE."
There are many stories circulating that John Gavin was in a holding pen, contractually, during this period. That, actually, he was the back-up-plan, in the event Sean Connery could not be lured back into the ring to once again put on his gloves as Bond and go for the 'Championship.'
THE ANNOUNCEMENT GOES FORTH: Sean Connery "IS" JAMES BOND in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER." Dennis Selinger, Mr. Connery's agent at International Creative Management in London "inks the deal" that makes the future SIR SEAN, "the highest paid movie star in the world," up until that time. For a then staggering $1.2 million, plus a large percentage of the gross receipts (not to mention the financing of 2 motion pictures of Mr. Connery's choice by United Artists-- He does The Offence, which UA finances and Connery stars and produces in London), the legendary icon returns in the role that made him famous. Jill ST. John is signed as his co-star, and rumors of a romance between the two starts immediately during filming. Lana Wood is signed as 'Plenty O'Toole' and country-western singer-sausage king, Jimmy Dean, becomes Willard Whyte, the Howard Hughes of Diamonds Are Forever overnight.
John Gavin, though he is passed-over for the "superstar-making-role-of-a-lifetime," is paid $100,000 for his participation by the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, as Roger Moore, receives a call at the end of filming telling him "to cut your hair and lose weight. We think you're going to be the next James Bond."
---
For more on Frederick Stafford and how Alfred Hitchcock used him in Topaz, check out:
Killers, Traitors, and 007: The Influences on and Failures of Alfred Hitchcock
Posted in the “Spies on Film” files at
WWW.Spywise.net
There, you’ll learn how this film not only employed a former OSS 117, but a former Bond girl, namely Karen Dor from You Only Live Twice.
By Ron Payne
FOR MANY YEARS I WAS AWARE OF FRENCH THRILLER WRITER JEAN BRUCE, WHO WROTE THE ADVENTURES OF SECRET AGENT HUBERT BONISSEUR DE LA BATH, better known in France as "0SS 117." Bruce, who created his suave and sophisticated agent, four years before Ian Fleming created BRITISH AGENT 007, earned millions writing about the character---and in the 1960s---at the height of the Worldwide Bond-Craze, Gaumont Studios, the oldest and certainly one of the greatest film studios in the world, started making motion pictures about Monsieur de la Bath 0SS 117.
SINCE 2006, when Parisian actor Jean Dujardin became the French equivalent of a new Sean Connery, with the hit Gaumont Studio production of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, there has been a renewed interest in the French counter-intelligence agent. THE NEW de la Bath adventure, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, also starring the charismatic Dujardin, soon to be released in Europe, promises to be a blockbuster for the great French studio, which only sixteen months ago lost a distribution-contract with Sony Pictures.
Hubert (pronounced U-Bear) Bonisseur de la Bath was created in 1949 to immediate literary success in France. Jean (pronounced like Sean) Bruce wrote like an angel doing Figure-Eights, effortlessly on ice, when he wrote about de la Bath, who has everything going for him that Bond does. He is handsome, cool-in-danger and good with the ladies. Ian Fleming read Jean Bruce, when he travelled in France and Bruce's books were easy to find in London bookstalls.
BUT the enormous popularity of the character has yet to catch on in America, though he has his admirers in this country as well. de la Bath has been portrayed on screen by Sean Flynn, the late son of movie idol-swashbuckler Errol Flynn. (Sean was lost in Vietnam, when captured by the North Vietnamese while riding his motorcycle. He was a photographer and war correspondent, like his father years earlier in the Spanish Civil War [1937] and the younger Flynn was held hostage for a year and executed.)
Frederick Stafford, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s production of Leon Uuris’s Topaz, also starred as de la Bath and gave the character a genuine James Bond-like persona. (It was because of his OSS 117 role that Hitchcock hired Stafford for the Topaz role.) Producer Harry Saltzman remarked at the time of the Topaz release, "If Frederick Stafford had not been French, but English, he might have followed directly in Sean Connery’s footsteps as Bond."
Kerwin Matthews, most famous in the United States as Gulliver in The Three Worlds of Gulliver and "The Sinbad" series (one in which he co-starred opposite Mrs. Bing Crosby) was also successful in the role. BUT FOR THE SAKE of comparisons, it was John Gavin, who later became President Ronald Reagan’s Ambassador to Mexico, who stands out. Gavin, who played the romantic lead in Hitchcock’s Psycho, opposite Vera Miles, was a rising star at Universal Pictures before leaving for France and undertaking the role of Agent OSS 117. At Universal, Gavin felt lost in a relentless attempt by Universal executives to pigeon-hole him in roles better suited for Rock Hudson, who was the studio's top star at the time. If GAVIN was not being proposed for the next "Tammy" picture, he was made to fill out his contract playing "Destry," a character created by James Stewart in Destry Rides Again and who was later played by Audie Murphy. Gavin's Destry television series soon hit the dirt and Gavin picked-up the trail for France and GAUMONT STUDIOS, when his Universal Pictures agreements expired.
FRANCE WAS GOOD for John Gavin and his tenure as "0SS 117" was a successful one, if not the most successful of any other actor who played the role. (See his film, OSS 117: Double Agent at www.sinistercinema.com under Espionage and Spy Films).
IN 1971, after George Lazenby, on bad advice from his Business Manager Ronan O'Rahilly, resigned from the role of James Bond after just one film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli were desperate to find a new Double-0-seven. John Gavin, on the strength of his '0SS 117,' was signed to a contract to be the next James Bond in Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever. Mr. Gavin was given a script and United Aartists went on alert that John Gavin, would, indeed, be starring in the diamond smuggling caper, set to be filmed in Amsterdam, South Africa, London, Las Vegas and UNIVERSAL PICTURES (his old studio) in the spring. Diamonds Are Forever was to be EON Productions’s first Bond film completed in the United States. (Exterior scenes of Miami Beach in Goldfinger were 'Second Unit' sequences, with interiors and Fort Knox filmed at Pinewood Studios outside London.)
John Gavin, an American of Mexican descent, who played a French secret agent as Hubert Connoisseur de la Bath, was now ready to become ENGLAND's MOST FAMOUS EXPORT---James Bond, 'DOUBLE-0-SEVEN,' Ian Fleming’s GENTLEMAN AGENT with THE LICENCE TO KILL.
DOUBLE-0-SEVEN-DOUBLE-TAKE
Albert R. Broccoli liked John Gavin." Harry Saltzman liked John Gavin. Enter David Picker, Executive Vice President of United Artists. "WE WANT CONNERY....!" GET CONNERY BACK, AT ANY PRICE...! became the "War Cry" at United Artists, then a subsidiary of the giant San Francisco insurance firm, Trans-America Corporation.
SUDDENLY, producers Saltzman and Broccoli were faced with a new casting crisis. Broccoli had already turned down Burt Reynolds (because he was not English) and Reynolds claims he turned down Bond earlier (because "No one can play Bond but Sean Connery. ") Either way, John Gavin (who was definitely not English and had no woes about being compared with Connery) was already signed. His name was on the deal. The contract was "in the pocket."
TURN AROUND "007 STYLE."
There are many stories circulating that John Gavin was in a holding pen, contractually, during this period. That, actually, he was the back-up-plan, in the event Sean Connery could not be lured back into the ring to once again put on his gloves as Bond and go for the 'Championship.'
THE ANNOUNCEMENT GOES FORTH: Sean Connery "IS" JAMES BOND in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER." Dennis Selinger, Mr. Connery's agent at International Creative Management in London "inks the deal" that makes the future SIR SEAN, "the highest paid movie star in the world," up until that time. For a then staggering $1.2 million, plus a large percentage of the gross receipts (not to mention the financing of 2 motion pictures of Mr. Connery's choice by United Artists-- He does The Offence, which UA finances and Connery stars and produces in London), the legendary icon returns in the role that made him famous. Jill ST. John is signed as his co-star, and rumors of a romance between the two starts immediately during filming. Lana Wood is signed as 'Plenty O'Toole' and country-western singer-sausage king, Jimmy Dean, becomes Willard Whyte, the Howard Hughes of Diamonds Are Forever overnight.
John Gavin, though he is passed-over for the "superstar-making-role-of-a-lifetime," is paid $100,000 for his participation by the producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, as Roger Moore, receives a call at the end of filming telling him "to cut your hair and lose weight. We think you're going to be the next James Bond."
---
For more on Frederick Stafford and how Alfred Hitchcock used him in Topaz, check out:
Killers, Traitors, and 007: The Influences on and Failures of Alfred Hitchcock
Posted in the “Spies on Film” files at
WWW.Spywise.net
There, you’ll learn how this film not only employed a former OSS 117, but a former Bond girl, namely Karen Dor from You Only Live Twice.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Free Agent
Review: Jeremy Duns Goes Dark in Free Agent
By Wesley Britton
Free Agent by Jeremy Duns
Viking Adult (June 25, 2009 in U.S.)
Hardcover: 352 pages
ISBN-10: 0670021016
ISBN-13: 978-0670021017
One tendency in book promotions that’s always driven me a bit nuts is the desire of literary agents, publishers, and reviewers to classify new novels and writers by comparing them to what has come before. I understand why. The point is to tell potential readers that, if you liked the latest by, say, Charles Cumming, you’ll enjoy this new offering by Ramone Unknown or whomever. But, in spy fiction, there’s another element in all this puffery. That is to attempt to anoint new novelists as those worthy of taking on the mantles of the Holy Trinity of Fleming, Le Carre`, or Deighton. Sometimes, the likes of Robert Littell will be mentioned to signal that the reviewer knows there’s been a wealth of spy fiction since the 1960s. Still, the theme often continues to be--what is the new writer doing that carries on the legacies of those who shaped the templates of espionage literature?
I’m as guilty as anyone else in this regard. As I turn the pages of new books, I find myself thinking how this read reminds me of one classic or another—or not. Take Free Agent, the first book from Swedish spy expert Jeremy Duns. Free Agent can’t help but beg comparison with the novels written during the Cold War as it is set in 1969 and the background is filled with reminders of the defections of Kim Philby and the “Cambridge Spy Ring.” Duns tosses out obvious bread crumbs to remind us of his forbearers—the British Secret Service is referred to as “The Circus” and he even briefly invokes the name of the Dreaded SMERSH. One Russian handler has the code name “Sasha,” the same moniker as the mole James Jesus Angleton feared throughout his tenure as head of counter-intelligence for the CIA. In the first pages of Free Agent, we’re reminded of operations during the aftermath of World War II where the lead protagonist, Paul Dark, was first tutored in the then nastiest tasks in undercover missions—taking out alleged ex-Nazis. Like Deighton before him, Duns added “family of spies” elements as it was Dark’s father who mentored his son in the unsanctioned killings of old enemies. Toss in the old lover who was supposedly murdered but wasn’t—which will allow double-agent Paul Dark to eventually investigate a mystery with very personal dimensions. Sound familiar?
The major twist in the story is that this book centers on a mole hunt from the mole’s point of view told in the first person. This means, in very short time, the reader knows Paul Dark is no heroic figure. In the first chapter, he murders the chief of MI6 because Dark’s 26 year cover as a Soviet plant is about to be blown. From that point forward, the main story is how Dark tries to hide his tracks of that murder and his quest to keep his treason secret. In the first 100 pages, I was indeed reminded of a past master, Graham Greene, in particular The Human Factor. Not the style or character development, but Greene’s often obvious sympathies with those on the other side of the Cold War fence. (Duns has admitted one influence was Derek Marlowe's book, A Dandy in Aspic, which also dealt with a traitor but was, admittedly, a very different breed of story.) However, unlike the characters of Greene or even Le Carre`, there’s no ideological or class war involved in Free Agent. We have a despicable narrator on the run with only one mission—to save his own skin.
The early passages, for me, were the most problematic. I was never clear what Paul Dark’s real motivations were for being a traitor to Queen and country. Yes, he was angry over rogue British operations he felt were not any different from the perceived evil of the Soviet bloc. His first contact, Anna, an alleged nurse in a hospital, ran intellectual Marxist circles around his thinly thought out defenses of the British way of life. But, in one scene he rejects her romantic overtures, the next she’s being removed in an ambulance, and then suddenly he wants to be a double-agent. For 26 years, he apparently never rethought his actions. Well, perhaps that’s the point. A simple broken-heart was all it took to keep him going for his entire career in MI6.
This is what makes Paul Dark difficult to empathize with. In the early pages, we see what Dark does but with little depth to tell us why. After his killing of his chief, we hear no words of remorse, no thoughts of the consequences of his actions beyond his drive for self-preservation. He’s able to avoid suspicion for his chief’s murder largely due to his agency’s astonishing lackadaisical response to their superior’s disappearance. With all the worries about moles, you’d think they’d be all over that situation with fine-tooth combs. Instead, Dark maneuvers himself a trip to Lagos in order to track down the one man who can finally expose him and do so in time to allow Dark to come up with reasonable explanations for his disobeying orders. Perhaps he is right—his strange behavior can be explained away. To his superiors at least, if not for we readers. This was a guy I wanted caught. I presumed what we would encounter, sooner or later, was some form of redemption. Well, to a minor degree, that’s what happens.
It’s after Paul Dark arrives in Nigeria during the Biafra War that Free Agent becomes what it was meant to be—a fast-paced “flight and fight” thriller where we forget Dark isn’t a character we should be rooting for. Not to give too much away, he comes to learn of the betrayals that set him up to become a dirty double all those years ago. He finds himself having to stop the assassination of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson who’s come to Nigeria to draft a peace plan. By the last page, we are at last rooting for a traitor and cold-blooded murderer trying to get out of it all—but that won’t happen until, at least, the announced sequel—Free Country.
What all this means is that Free Agent is like those thrillers of old that readers would pick up in airport terminals and lose themselves in while traveling to their probably less than exotic destinations. And then forget about. It’s a book that shows the research that went into it. For example, Duns’s setting of Biafra, far from a typical location for a spy novel of the time, is a welcome change from the usual European cities or Caribbean islands where Bond and his ilk fought most of their duels with super-charged gangsters in proxy Cold Wars. We even get the Flemingesque “sacrificial lamb,” a journalist named Isabel who Dark picks up and becomes an immediate and competent partner in his adventure before her convenient disposal. Too bad—she was the most intriguing supporting character, but yet another whose motivations remain an open question.
I admit being curious about the next two books in the trilogy. Will Dark get out from under the thumb of the Soviets? Will he actually pay a price for his long-standing treason and other crimes? Sure, he saves the day in the end, but he isn’t redeemed in any real sense. Well, stay tuned. Duns is competent enough a storyteller to fill in the holes. So far, we’ve gotten a very readable page-turner if not a new iconic figure to invest ourselves in.
---
For other book reviews by Wesley Britton, see the “Spies in History and Literature” files at—
WWW.Spywise.net
By Wesley Britton
Free Agent by Jeremy Duns
Viking Adult (June 25, 2009 in U.S.)
Hardcover: 352 pages
ISBN-10: 0670021016
ISBN-13: 978-0670021017
One tendency in book promotions that’s always driven me a bit nuts is the desire of literary agents, publishers, and reviewers to classify new novels and writers by comparing them to what has come before. I understand why. The point is to tell potential readers that, if you liked the latest by, say, Charles Cumming, you’ll enjoy this new offering by Ramone Unknown or whomever. But, in spy fiction, there’s another element in all this puffery. That is to attempt to anoint new novelists as those worthy of taking on the mantles of the Holy Trinity of Fleming, Le Carre`, or Deighton. Sometimes, the likes of Robert Littell will be mentioned to signal that the reviewer knows there’s been a wealth of spy fiction since the 1960s. Still, the theme often continues to be--what is the new writer doing that carries on the legacies of those who shaped the templates of espionage literature?
I’m as guilty as anyone else in this regard. As I turn the pages of new books, I find myself thinking how this read reminds me of one classic or another—or not. Take Free Agent, the first book from Swedish spy expert Jeremy Duns. Free Agent can’t help but beg comparison with the novels written during the Cold War as it is set in 1969 and the background is filled with reminders of the defections of Kim Philby and the “Cambridge Spy Ring.” Duns tosses out obvious bread crumbs to remind us of his forbearers—the British Secret Service is referred to as “The Circus” and he even briefly invokes the name of the Dreaded SMERSH. One Russian handler has the code name “Sasha,” the same moniker as the mole James Jesus Angleton feared throughout his tenure as head of counter-intelligence for the CIA. In the first pages of Free Agent, we’re reminded of operations during the aftermath of World War II where the lead protagonist, Paul Dark, was first tutored in the then nastiest tasks in undercover missions—taking out alleged ex-Nazis. Like Deighton before him, Duns added “family of spies” elements as it was Dark’s father who mentored his son in the unsanctioned killings of old enemies. Toss in the old lover who was supposedly murdered but wasn’t—which will allow double-agent Paul Dark to eventually investigate a mystery with very personal dimensions. Sound familiar?
The major twist in the story is that this book centers on a mole hunt from the mole’s point of view told in the first person. This means, in very short time, the reader knows Paul Dark is no heroic figure. In the first chapter, he murders the chief of MI6 because Dark’s 26 year cover as a Soviet plant is about to be blown. From that point forward, the main story is how Dark tries to hide his tracks of that murder and his quest to keep his treason secret. In the first 100 pages, I was indeed reminded of a past master, Graham Greene, in particular The Human Factor. Not the style or character development, but Greene’s often obvious sympathies with those on the other side of the Cold War fence. (Duns has admitted one influence was Derek Marlowe's book, A Dandy in Aspic, which also dealt with a traitor but was, admittedly, a very different breed of story.) However, unlike the characters of Greene or even Le Carre`, there’s no ideological or class war involved in Free Agent. We have a despicable narrator on the run with only one mission—to save his own skin.
The early passages, for me, were the most problematic. I was never clear what Paul Dark’s real motivations were for being a traitor to Queen and country. Yes, he was angry over rogue British operations he felt were not any different from the perceived evil of the Soviet bloc. His first contact, Anna, an alleged nurse in a hospital, ran intellectual Marxist circles around his thinly thought out defenses of the British way of life. But, in one scene he rejects her romantic overtures, the next she’s being removed in an ambulance, and then suddenly he wants to be a double-agent. For 26 years, he apparently never rethought his actions. Well, perhaps that’s the point. A simple broken-heart was all it took to keep him going for his entire career in MI6.
This is what makes Paul Dark difficult to empathize with. In the early pages, we see what Dark does but with little depth to tell us why. After his killing of his chief, we hear no words of remorse, no thoughts of the consequences of his actions beyond his drive for self-preservation. He’s able to avoid suspicion for his chief’s murder largely due to his agency’s astonishing lackadaisical response to their superior’s disappearance. With all the worries about moles, you’d think they’d be all over that situation with fine-tooth combs. Instead, Dark maneuvers himself a trip to Lagos in order to track down the one man who can finally expose him and do so in time to allow Dark to come up with reasonable explanations for his disobeying orders. Perhaps he is right—his strange behavior can be explained away. To his superiors at least, if not for we readers. This was a guy I wanted caught. I presumed what we would encounter, sooner or later, was some form of redemption. Well, to a minor degree, that’s what happens.
It’s after Paul Dark arrives in Nigeria during the Biafra War that Free Agent becomes what it was meant to be—a fast-paced “flight and fight” thriller where we forget Dark isn’t a character we should be rooting for. Not to give too much away, he comes to learn of the betrayals that set him up to become a dirty double all those years ago. He finds himself having to stop the assassination of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson who’s come to Nigeria to draft a peace plan. By the last page, we are at last rooting for a traitor and cold-blooded murderer trying to get out of it all—but that won’t happen until, at least, the announced sequel—Free Country.
What all this means is that Free Agent is like those thrillers of old that readers would pick up in airport terminals and lose themselves in while traveling to their probably less than exotic destinations. And then forget about. It’s a book that shows the research that went into it. For example, Duns’s setting of Biafra, far from a typical location for a spy novel of the time, is a welcome change from the usual European cities or Caribbean islands where Bond and his ilk fought most of their duels with super-charged gangsters in proxy Cold Wars. We even get the Flemingesque “sacrificial lamb,” a journalist named Isabel who Dark picks up and becomes an immediate and competent partner in his adventure before her convenient disposal. Too bad—she was the most intriguing supporting character, but yet another whose motivations remain an open question.
I admit being curious about the next two books in the trilogy. Will Dark get out from under the thumb of the Soviets? Will he actually pay a price for his long-standing treason and other crimes? Sure, he saves the day in the end, but he isn’t redeemed in any real sense. Well, stay tuned. Duns is competent enough a storyteller to fill in the holes. So far, we’ve gotten a very readable page-turner if not a new iconic figure to invest ourselves in.
---
For other book reviews by Wesley Britton, see the “Spies in History and Literature” files at—
WWW.Spywise.net
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