Spotting the spies

Mary Ann Gwinn, of The Seattle Times, asked her readers to nominate the great spy novels written by authors who were actual spies? The floodgates opened.

Whether out of guilt, a compulsion to testify after a lifetime of secrecy or an urge to set the record straight, the numbers of former intelligence workers who have written fictional takes on their profession are legion.

But first, a word from an actual intelligence analyst-turned-author.

Susan Hasler worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for 21 years, including a very unhappy time after 9/11 when she watched with dismay as the Bush administration, drawing on faulty or fabricated intelligence, launched a war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that did not materialise.

A former Soviet specialist, speechwriter to three CIA directors and a counterterrorism analyst, Hasler has written a black comedy, Intelligence, about a clutch of eccentric but dedicated CIA workers trying to outguess a real terrorist as their superiors deluge them with pointless tasks.

In 1983, Hasler had a degree in Russian languages, and the CIA was one of the few employers looking for those qualifications.

Twenty-one years later, after the invasion of Iraq, she left the CIA.

"When I left, the last thing I wanted to do was write," she said in a telephone interview.

"I was very upset about the whole run-up to the Iraq war and 9/11 ... I always had the greatest respect for the people I worked with. The idea that the president would lie to the people was one I really couldn't swallow."

But if you have to write a book, you have to write a book - even if you're an ex-CIA employee and must submit the manuscript to vetting by the agency's publications review board.

Hasler was scrupulous about fabricating details, such as the office lingo she made up.

She says the terrorist threat she writes about (involving use of remote-control model aeroplanes) couldn't actually happen.

In the end, "I pretty much knew what I could say, and not," she said.

"They didn't change a word. They're not allowed to cut something just because it's embarrassing; there are very precise regulations."

Hasler mostly reads literary fiction, but you will find some of her favourite spies-turned-spy-novelists in the following list.

TED ALLBEURY

British newspaper The Independent said of Allbeury when he died in 2005: "For his humanity and depth of characterisation, Allbeury may be considered the spy-story-writer's spy-story writer".

Allbeury worked in army intelligence in Britain during World War 2, according to his obituary in The Independent.

Titles: A Choice of Enemies, The Alpha List and The Other Side of Silence.

MILT BEARDEN

This former CIA officer in charge of the covert war in Afghanistan wrote 2002's The Black Tulip, set in the late 1980s during the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

JOHN BINGHAM

The pen and family name of Baron Clanmorris, Bingham worked with John le Carre in British intelligence and is said to be one of the inspirations for George Smiley.

Bingham, who died in 1988, wrote his own spy and detective novels, including Brock and the Defector.

"Well-written, concise and compelling," said one reader of the author's work.

JOHN BUCHAN

Buchan wrote The 39 Steps, the classic 1915 novel on which the 1935 Hitchcock movie was based.

The 39 Steps vies for contention as the first spy novel with Kim by Rudyard Kipling and Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers.

Buchan worked for British intelligence during World War 1.

ANTHONY BURGESS

The 1966 novel Tremor of Intent by the British author of A Clockwork Orange might be described as a high-concept parody of the James Bond adventures.

Burgess apparently did "cipher work" for British army intelligence in Gibraltar during World War 2, according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

JOHN LE CARRE

My opinion: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People by le Carre are not just the best spy novels ever written, but some of the best novels full stop.

Le Carre (real name David Cornwell) worked for British Intelligence during the Cold War.

JAMES CHURCH

\An author of North Korea-based mysteries, featuring the diligent civil servant/detective Inspector O, Church is a former intelligence operative in east Asia ("James Church" is a pseudonym).

In 2007's Hidden Moon, Inspector O's assignment involves investigating a bank robbery, but no-one is talking, which means the government may not want him to find the answers.

Church's latest Inspector O book is The Man with the Baltic Stare (2010).

RICHARD A. CLARKE

Clarke, White House counterterrorism chief under both Clinton and Bush, has written several nonfiction books and two novels: 2007's Breakpoint and 2005's The Scorpion's Gate, the latter about an ill-advised plan to invade an Islamic republic.

The writing "is nothing special; what is special is Clarke's passionate and deftly detailed version of the present, albeit one told in terms of its consequences", said Publishers Weekly.

CHARLES CUMMING

Cumming's book, A Spy by Nature, published in Britain in 2001 and the US in 2007, is "loosely based on the author's real-life experience of having been recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1995", said Publishers Weekly.

It's about a British marketing consultant who lives to regret a job assignment which turns into industrial espionage.

LAWRENCE DURRELL

Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet, worked as a press attache in Britain's foreign office in Yugoslavia.

It's not clear whether he worked in intelligence, but his 1957 book White Eagles Over Serbia is about a British secret agent sent to Serbia to investigate the assassination of one of his colleagues.

White Eagles is "fun, quite an adventure story", said Anna Dewart, a professor of English.

IAN FLEMING

The creator of James Bond worked in British naval intelligence in World War 2, and several Bond characters are based on real British spies.

"Q", the head of the research division that supplies Bond with fantastic gadgets, is based on the work of Charles Fraser-Smith, a real person who supplied British agents with "miniature cameras, invisible ink, hidden weaponry and concealed compasses", according to Ben Macintyre's book, Operation Mincemeat.

E. HOWARD HUNT

The notorious intelligence operative of the Nixon era wrote more than 80 books, many of them spy novels (The Berlin Ending), under his own name and many using pseudonyms.

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

According to the new biography The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Maugham worked for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service in Switzerland in 1915-16 (and later during World War 2).

His first boss told him: "If you do well you'll get no thanks ... and if you get into trouble you'll get no help."

Maugham's six-story collection Ashenden: or The British Agent was nominated by several readers, and Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 movie Secret Agent is based partly on this book.

CHARLES MCCARRY

A reader favourite, McCarry was a clandestine officer for the CIA in several countries during the Cold War era of the 1950s and '60s.

Of McCarry's The Tears of Autumn, published in 1974, one reader said "the novel reads as fresh and timely as if it was written yesterday, plus, it offers a credible explanation for who assassinated John Kennedy and why".

STELLA RIMINGTON

Dame Stella, appointed director-general of MI5 in 1992, was the first woman to hold the post and the first director-general whose name was publicly announced on appointment.

She has written several novels, the latest of which is Dead Line.

DAVID STONE

A pseudonym for a former intelligence officer and military man, Stone has written The Echelon Vendetta, The Orpheus Deception, The Venetian Judgment and The Skorpion Directive, about "cleaner" Micah Dalton, a guy who cleans up CIA operations after things fall apart.