Published in 2006, this is by Stella Rimington. It's a spy story, so the author's credentials are impeccable. She joined MI5 in 1965, and was appointed director-general in 1992. The beginning of her career was informal: "I fell into intelligence by chance. I worked as an archivist before getting married, then my husband was posted to India. I was a diplomat’s wife, holding coffee mornings and the like, when I was tapped on the shoulder and offered a job as a typist in the service. I was grateful for an end to the boredom."

Rimington was the first woman to hold the top post, and the first to have her name publicly announced -- a move she wasn't entirely comfortable with: "It was the prime minister’s decision, there was nothing I could do. When one newspaper published a photo of my house, we had to go into hiding; an IRA member was arrested with newspaper clippings about me."

She retired in 1996, and has since written an autobiography and several novels featuring MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle. Secret Asset is Liz's second in-print outing, and it's as well to know upfront, especially if you've watched the Bourne movies too many times, that a "secret asset" is a mole, not a hitman.



Everything Rimington writes has to be vetted, but she says she is rarely asked to change things. So you're fairly confident that you're not going to be treated to too much juicy spy goss... In fact, at times, you feel as though you might be getting the party line. On A2, for example, which is the section responsible for "bugging and burgling", we're told that the installation of hidden listening devices and cameras is a course of action that is "nowadays done strictly under warrant". Naturally. Only what we would expect... And when there has been a gigantic snafu, we're assured: "Already the various sections were starting their own damage assessments, and would be meeting regularly to share them... 'We need to understand why we didn't pick up that there was something wrong about him.'"

Nevertheless, she insists that the tradecraft employed by Liz and her colleagues is pretty accurate: "For example, liaison with the police, the use of agent runners and investigators, care over the use of mobile phones, and encyphered communications on laptops... Inevitably there is a lot of frustration in intelligence work. You never know the whole picture, and for a lot of the time you are partly in the dark, waiting for the results of investigations, new information to come in, or some lucky breakthrough. Success comes from a combination of good solid investigation work, well-placed human sources, information from the public, and good luck, all coordinated and put together by intelligent assessment and analysis. At the end of the day that's what intelligence work is."

It follows, then, that Liz's life is a little too exciting to be wholly realistic. Rimington regards as misleading the focus on violence and action that is common in media representations of the world she knows: "It's not accurate and I’ve tried to avoid that [in my books]. But you can’t make a good novel out of people sitting around a computer. So I do have to instill possibly more drama than the average person working in the service today might find."

The emotional toll of running an agent is also explored. Partly, I'm sure, this is an attempt to draw a line between the human MI5 of Rimington's depiction and more ruthless versions of the Circus and its equivalents. But essentially this is a paradox-ridden activity. You say you'll protect your agents, and you encourage them to be careful. But at the end of the day, they're taking a risk for you: "Not for the first time, Liz questioned her participation in the subtle psychological game of agent running... The only justification was the harm she was trying to prevent." Liz is devastated when one of her agents is killed: "The death of an agent was the worst nightmare for any intelligence service... They were promised protection. That was the deal. For the Service to break its side of the bargain... was a professional failure of the worst possible kind."


Belfast features a number of times in the book. These photos, taken in 2015, are from just up the coast

I came to this book via a recommendation in The Economist. It claimed to list eight of the best spy novels, and this was up there with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Our Man in Havana. The article notes: "Dame Stella’s tenure at the top of MI5 coincided with a rise in Islamist terrorism... The strengths of [her] books lie in their tight plotting and depictions of how the machinery of government actually reacts to domestic threats. It is often lamented that too few women write -- or read -- spy novels. Dame Stella may have begun to change that."

Promising, I thought. And it certainly helped that Kindle came up with a GBP 0.99 special soon after I'd read the article...

But I should have taken note of the way the list segues to its next recommendation, which is Kate Atkinson's Transcription: "Dame Stella may know more than most novelists about tradecraft, but Kate Atkinson knows better than almost anyone how to write."

Ah, yes, the writing... Because the bottom line is that Secret Asset is a very readable story, and Liz is a likeable protagonist, and you definitely want to know what happens, and yet it ends up being a little disappointing.



Here's the "inside the book" section that precedes the text:

"When Liz learns from one of her agents that suspicious meetings are taking place at an Islamic bookshop, she trusts her instinct that a terrorist cell is at work. Her boss, Charles Wetherby, Director of Counter Terrorism, trusts her as well and immediately puts a surveillance operation into place. An attack seems imminent.

"So Liz is surprised when Wetherby suddenly takes her off the case. And she's shocked to hear the reason why: he has received a tip-off that a mole is at work inside British Intelligence. If true, then the potential damage to the Service itself could be immeasurable. Now, as her colleagues scramble to avert a terrorist strike, Liz must find out who the mole is, and what their intentions are, before it is too late."

This is a very badly written bit of blurb, and luckily, Rimington's prose is rather less cliche-ridden, but the slightly breathless precis does convey the formulaic world we're entering. And, yes, soon enough we're hovering over that bookshop in Haringey, which Sohail, a serious young Muslim employee, unmasks as "a focal point for radical Islamist doctrine -- not at all the version of Islam that Sohail had learned at home and at his local mosque".

I'm always a bit allergic to these dualities: Radical versus moderate. And soon other descriptions were grating on me too. Liz consults "the portfolio of British Asians suspected of some kind of involvement in terrorism". "British Asians" is such a bizarre term... It seems to be widely used in the UK, even though it's artificial and homogenizing. But at one point, we have this sentence: "Looking up at him, the Asian seemed absolutely petrified." The "Asian"...? I can't think of a context where that formulation would sound anything other than weird.

We're also told that Liz likes Sohail because he has principles that are "identical to hers". Yet she feels he is "in so many respects alien, a member of a different culture to hers, from a totally different background". Alien, different, different again... Were people really so walled off from each other in the UK of 2006? Maybe they were... Young Sohail wants to read Law after spending his gap year working at the dodgy bookshop (and for MI5 on the side). On the bus home he reads a tome called English Torts: A Casebook: "The book was almost theoretical in its abstraction, but unlike the Islamic literature he was surrounded by during the day, English law seemed incapable of perversion in the hands of fanatics." Hmmm... I guess the Germans said that before Hitler took over... And the United States -- well, don't start me. Definitely read It Couldn't Happen Here as a counterweight to this confidence.

Aside from this gripe, I found the multiple point-of-view approach a bit exhausting. So many characters, so many mini-biographies, and so much chopping and changing...

And, to me, the ending was more than a little implausible, and the lack of any sense of atmosphere disconcerting.



What's to like, then? Well, contrary to some critics, I liked the juxtaposition of two movements at two different stages (Islamic militancy, and the IRA as it adjusts to a new era). It reminded me a little of Reyes Calderon and Shoot for the Moon, in which a crime takes place after things with ETA have improved, leaving everyone confused.

And the central idea -- that our motivation, while hiding behind one or more of those political-religious drivers, might actually be largely personal (a desire to right old family wrongs, for example) -- is very valid.

The modus operandi stuff that I mentioned at the beginning of the post is interesting:

-- Safe houses: "strictly utilitarian... the kitchen stocked with the essentials for making coffee and tea but never any food".
-- It's busy in Counter-Terrorism in these post-9/11 times: "One of the old hands ... had said the day before that even at the height of the IRA bombings in London, life at Thames House had not been so frantic."
-- Operational names. Liz is Jane Falconer to her contacts. That requirement would rule me out for a start. I'd never learn to answer to anything but Prudence.
-- Tailing (counter-surveillance) operations involve a ton of people. Is this really how it is? Probably. Rimington would have known, after all. Must be terribly expensive...
-- There was also an intriguing observation about cognitive bias: If something proves very difficult to uncover, its importance tends to appear disproportionately greater, so beware...



I also appreciated Rimington's engagement with the issue that still pulls the United Kingdom apart at the seams: Class. In the years since 2006, we've become even more familiar with the entrenched echelons of the rich-and-chummy, and Rimington effectively inserts several skewers into this rotten edifice and its dubious history.

Professor Hilary Watts, for example, whom Liz describes as a "preposterous relic of an earlier age", writes a testimonial for a former student. "The reference, reeking of a past era of old boys' network and public-school prose, had been three lines long, written on the back of a postcard from the Accademia in Venice: Sound chap. Good languages. More than clever enough for the domestic service." The epithet "domestic service", by the way, was once the way MI6 disparagingly viewed MI5 (James Bond was in MI6, as was George Smiley -- but I had to look that up).

At one point, MI6's head of station in Pakistan says of a colleague: "'Intelligent, fluent Arabic speaker, worked very hard -- without getting too intense about it.' 'Intense' -- how typical, thought Liz. The cult of the English amateur -- legacy of a Victorian public-school ethos -- still alive and kicking in the offshore stations of MI6. Work hard but pretend you're not, make the difficult seem easy -- all from an era when gentlemen ran the vestiges of an empire."

There's also a very poignant episode involving one of Liz's colleagues, who once thought he might have a chance at an academic career: "I didn't come from that sort of background. Neither of my parents went to university. Becoming a don was a dream I'd never seriously thought possible." When he upsets his supervisor, he realizes he has blown it: "That effectively ended any chances I had of an academic career -- you need powerful backers to get a university teaching job." And you do, you do... This article in the 1843 Magazine points to "Oxford University's other diversity crisis", and its introduction reads: "Good luck trying to become a professor if you don't have family money."


One of the excellent illustrations, by Ewelina Karpowiak, from that article

So, there were a number of positives, but I'm not sure I'll be returning. On the other hand, that Transcription thing sounds very interesting...