I read the first Alec Milius novel, A Spy by Nature. I decided to go for the second novel of Milius because the first was very good. Well, the second is equally as compelling. Alec Milius is living in Madrid and it is five years after his traumatic brush with espionage, working for the British Secret Service. He has gone to ground and has been using his espionage training to stay off of the radar. Especially the American CIA, who he has caused problems for.
He has a well-paid job for a British company based in Madrid and is having an affair with a beautiful Married Spanish lady. He is a little paranoid and is always careful to cover his tracks from the British and American secret service organisations. It is second nature to him.
His company send him North on some important ground laying work for his company to do a business venture in the Basque region of Spain. While here, he meets with an ex-ETA man who Alec rather likes as a person. I can’t say much more without spoiling the story. All this leads to Alec opening up a Pandora’s Box. He can’t get the unwelcome Genie back into the bottle.
There are plans within plans. Diabolical scheming with the Spanish government and Alec finds himself as a free-lance pawn caught up in all of this. The whole saga is mind blowing right up until the end. The surprises come fast and furious. If you love a good spy thriller then I would strongly recommend this second Alec Milius novel. An absolute peach of a read.
I read another Charles Cumming story that I enjoyed. That was a Thomas Kell novel. This one, (A Spy by Nature) is about a character called Alec Milius. It is in the first person singular. As much as I enjoyed the other story with Thomas Kell, I found this one to be even more enjoyable. It got down to the nitty gritty more and gave an insight into recruitment and the depths that a spy might go to in order to infiltrate other organisations. This story was clever and involved industrial espionage at a corporate level. I liked the Alec Milius character. He is flawed in many ways but he is also creative and a very good liar. The entire plot is cleverly contrived as Milius presents himself as a disillusioned young man who is bitter and resentful at being unrecognised for his talents. He is bait for foreign CIA operatives - he is prey secretly hunting the hunters. It is not overly complex for the reader. Yet it is wonderfully devious as we see the groundwork laid out. It is also strange because the competitors are the Americans who are our allies in many areas of security. I will definitely read the second Alec Milius story after this one. If you like a good espionage story or John le Carre, then I would highly recommend this spy novel - splendid stuff.
Another very exciting read from John le Carre. I read all the Cold War stories and was apprehensive about the post Smiley era tales. This along with 'A Delicate Truth' means my reluctance was unjustified. From the first page, I was hooked. In this story, an entrepreneurial businessman named Tiger Single leads his company on a big business venture with the new Eastern European nations from the post-Soviet Union era. Opportunities from Georgia. The seasoned British businessmen of Single and Single's various enterprises think everything will be a walk in the park. It all turns out to be a little bit more demanding than a park stroll. Dynamic story and I recommend it to any espionage/thriller fan.
In 1961 a British Spy was
imprisoned in the UK for 42 years. His name was George Blake. The British agent
was found guilty of being a Soviet mole and had been giving away secrets since
the Korean War.
George Blake was born in the
Netherlands in 1922. His mother was Dutch and his father was an Egyptian Jew.
His real name was George Behars, but he changed the surname to Blake upon
arrival in Britain when World War II was beginning.
The Netherlands was
occupied and George Blake (AKA George Behars) was part of an anti-Nazi group.
He had been interned once but fled before a second arrest could be made.
George Blake (AKA Behars) was
already installed with some elementary communist values because he had been
sent to an English school in Egypt in 1936. In Cairo he associated with his
cousin Henri Curiel. His cousin was 10 years his senior and heavily involved
with the Communist Party of Egypt.
The British Secret IntelligenceService recruited him into MI6 and George Blake became his new name. He became
deeper embroiled in the British Secret Service as the war progressed. He was
translating captured German Documents and after D-Day helped to interrogate
German prisoners. He also interrogated German U-boat captains at the end of the
war.
In 1948, George Blake was sent to
Cambridge University where he was taught to speak Russian. He picked the
language up quickly and the course he took was believed to have been very
intense. He was then sent to Seoul in South Korea with instructions to set up a
spy network of informers into North Korea. It was here that things took a bad
turn for the British secret service that employed him. Seoul, the South Korean
capital, was overrun by North Korean troops as the Korean War began. George
Blake was captured by the communist where he had been staying at the British
Embassy.
While in captivity, George Blake
changed sides and became a committed communist. He would later talk of air raids
by the American Air Force upon a small town in the North of Korea. He stated
that this continuous act of bombing a small town of peasants and technically
inferior people made him ashamed of the western powers he represented. This
coupled with his youth in Egypt alongside Cousin Henri Curiel, plus brain
washing by the strict communist North Korean system helped make up his mind
that communism was the way forward for all peoples. He would became a Soviet
agent.
Blake was released from communist
captivity in 1955 and sent back into the British Secret Service, where he was
regarded as a hero. He went to Berlin where he was instructed to try and recruit
Soviet agents and help the western powers during the Cold War struggle. Instead
Blake allowed the Soviets to know his intentions and he was a KGB operative giving
plans to the Soviets in exchange for neatly packaged pretend Soviet defectors. Blake
handed over so much information to the Soviets that he could not remember
everything he did for them.
With the Cambridge Spies still
operating at this time, the British Secret Service was well and truly compromised
on many fronts. It could be said that it was rotten to the core. Blake was not
one of the Cambridge spies, he was a freelancer that worked alone and independent
of Kim Philby and Co.
As a sole double agent betraying
MI6 and her American allies, Blake was responsible for the betrayal of up to 40
MI6 agents to the Soviets and all of British Intelligence’s Eastern EuropeanNetwork collapsed during the late 1950s period. He was also privy to
information that was gold dust to the American CIA. They had a Russian mole
acting for them inside the Soviet GRU. (Soviet Foreign Intelligence Agency)
This man was P.S. Popov. Blake blew the man to the KGB.
P.S. Popov was executed in 1960
by the Soviet Union as a National traitor. However, by this time, George Blake
was exposed by another CIA Mole working in Polish Intelligence. The Polish
defector named Michael Goleniewski exposed George Blake as a Soviet mole. The
information was passed on by the Americans to the British Secret Service.
Blake, who was in the Lebanon in 1961 taking part in Arabic studies, was
summoned to London on a minor matter. With little suspicion, George Blake
returned and was arrested at the airport upon arrival back in the UK.
George Blake was found guilty of
espionage against the UK, for a foreign power, and the maximum sentence for
such betrayal was 14 years. However George Blake was convicted on 3 accounts
with the sentences running concurrently. This amounted to 42 years and was the
longest sentence to be handed out at the time. It is said he was given a year
for every MI6 operative he betrayed to die.
George Blake’s story did not end
here. In autumn of 1966 after a little over 5 years of his sentence, he managed a daring escape from Wormwood Scrubs with an inmate he befriended and two anti-nuclear
campaigners. He moved from several safe houses while a nationwide search was
made for him, but he managed to escape to the Soviet Union as a hero.
There are many who think the
escape was stage managed by the British Secret Service, but no explanation has
ever come to light. Just speculation at what seemed a rather cosy escape with
garnished trimmings for conspiracy theory enthusiasts.
Whatever – by design, or stage
managed; George Blake got away with it and lives to this day, (6th July 2014)
aged 91 in the Soviet Union on a KGB pension plus many honours, including one
from President Putin in 2008.
He had a book of his exploits
published, which understandably caused much controversy in the UK. George Blake
said he did regret the deaths of the MI6 agents but did not feel he betrayed
the British because he never felt part of them. His Dutch and Egyptian birth
right making him unacceptable to being loyal to Imperial Britain. Others say he was brainwashed during his capture by North Korean troops. The communist powers may have certainly played on this none British nationality of birth. Then maybe George Blake was a committed communist that turned after his capture in the Korean War. Who knows for sure.
Australia’s Secret Intelligence Service has had it computers
hacked by Chinese espionage mercenaries. This is before the new data records
are opened. The report was made by an investigation body and it has caused
considerable embarrassment for the Australian Government and China; Australia’s
largest trading partner.
This is causing growing concern about Chinese hacking programs
and the aggressive way information is being stolen by servers running from
China.
Australia no longer regards China as a military threat, but
this may be because China is the world’s second biggest economy and perhaps the
Australian government refuses to see the wood for the trees.
John Stonehouse was a British politician who caused great controversy during the early 1970s. He was born in Southampton in 1925 and died of a fourth heart attack in 1988 at the age of sixty two. His life was one of great intrigue because people believed that this Member of Parliament committed suicide in Miami USA when his clothes were found on a beach. This was in the year of 1974. What the public did not know, at the time, was what really surrounded John Stonehouse’s life.
There is a novel called ‘The Perfect Spy.’ in which there is a British character that I think is a little like John Stonehouse – very loosely of course, and I wonder if some of Mister Stonehouse’s antics might have been viewed by writer John Le Carre in shaping this very fine spy story.
It later transpired that John Stonehouse had been under increasing financial pressure because of failed business ventures and his cooking of business accounts. He was under investigation by UK fraud organisations so he transferred large sums of money and faked his suicide and assumed a new identity. With this new identity, he fled to Australia to start a new life with his secretary, Sheila Buckley.
It is believed that during the late sixties British and American Secret Services became suspicious that John Stonehouse was recruited by the StB (Czechoslovakia Secret Service)
In other words, John Stonehouse was suspected of being a Communist field agent for the Iron Curtain. He was brought before a commission but was able to successfully defend himself. In this time there was great concern that the Labour government had been infiltrated by KGB and some people of MI5 suspected Prime Minister Harold Wilson of being KGB. I’m sure this is laughable now, but there seems to have been some inroads made by Communist secret services into the British establishment and John Stonehouse with the Czech StB seems to have been believed later – long after his death and the dust had settled among the British public.
In 1980, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was believed to have agreed to a cover up concerning John Stonehouse’s espionage activity for the Czech secret Service who had recruited him by 1960.
If John Stonehouse had been questioned in 1969 and he had been able to evade conviction; he must have realised the wolves were closing in and it was time to flee. On Christmas Eve 1974, Australian police arrest Clive Mildoon (AKA - John Stonehouse,) believing he might have been Lord Lucan, another famous British fugitive that was never found. Instead they discovered that it was, the presumed dead British MP, John Stonehouse.
He was extradited back to the UK – still a Member of Parliament to face trial. His shocked wife and three children must have been very traumatised by all of this. He was not put on trial for being a Czech agent, but for fraud, theft and forgery and conspiracy to defraud. He was convicted and given seven years in prison. His health deteriorated during this time and he suffered three heart attacks and had to undergo open heart surgery. He was released in 1979 and worked for an East London charity. In 1981, he married his Mistress Sheila Buckley. His wife had divorced him while in prison.
John Stonehouse and Sheila Buckley after prison sentance
After his release, he had television appearances and gave interviews concerning his faked suicide, but revelations about his espionage past did not become public until 2010, twenty two years after he had died of a fourth heart attack in 1988.
