Foreign Exchange

In the bad old days of the Cold War the Russians spied on the British, the Chinese spied on the Russians, the British spied on both of them, and the Americans spied on everybody. It was, as Kipling foresaw, a great game, and thoroughly enjoyed by all the players.

As in all games there were a few champions, a scattering of good players, and a host of also-rans Some of them were so inept that they couldn't have found sand in the Simpson Desert. Of these, the two least able were Lin Sin Loo of China and Godfrey Granted of England's MI6.

The spies still had their occasional triumphs but this was expected only of their upper echelons. Most lower-level spies were infiltrated into enemy territory simply with a view to getting caught. This may sound improbable but was, in fact, a matter of economic survival.

Consider. In the movies spies were parachuted into occupied France where, in a picturesque chateau on the Rhone, they could expect to find vital military information locked away in a safe whose combination was set to Hitler's birthday. Then it was a simple matter to escape to a waiting submarine while eluding the entire German army (or defeating it, if the film was made in America) therefore helping THE ALLIES to win the war.

But in real life? No chateaux, no vital information, and no exciting chase. The reality is that military secrets are closely guarded and spies can slink around corners and peep into windows from now to Watergate without coming within sight of a decent scandal, let alone the blueprint of a super weapon.

The intelligence agencies could quite reasonably disband without leaving their respective homelands any less secure, but that would have one, and only one, effect. It would render the spies, and their public service masters, both unemployed and unemployable – a prospect they could not be expected to accept with equanimity.

So they mount operations in each others' countries, exchanging lower level information quite freely and, once in a while, arranging for one of their less capable minions to be caught. They would then feature in a much-publicised spy trial. The resultant publicity wins public sympathy for the patriotic spy and ensures the renewal of the agencies' substantial budgets.

Into such a category of expendables fell Godfrey Granted and Lin Sin Loo.

Of course, it would have been unjust to have sent such pawns before a firing squad or to allow them to rot away in Wormwood Scrubs or a Siberian Gulag, so a multi-national joint intelligence committee was set up under the chairmanship of Britain's Sir Charles David to oversee the show trials and the subsequent exchange of agents.

It had always been intended to give a patina of realism to the trials by using a different set of players, but Godfrey Granted and Lin Sin Loo were such poor spies that they found themselves repeatedly arrested. The local police were, of course, unaware of the conspiracy being conducted at the more esoteric level of international espionage.

Sir Charles David was furious when his carefully rehearsed trials were made to look ridiculous by the repeated arrests, imprisonment, and exchange of Lin and Granted. Finally, his patience exhausted, he decided that if they were caught just one more time they could rot in prison; there would be no exchange.

He could not make such a ruling in isolation, however, and called a meeting of the joint committee to tell them of his decision.

There, David said he wouldn't take Lin for Granted any more.

I wrote this at a time when the kids and I were giving Lynne less help and less recognition than she deserved. It was a cumbersome way to apologise, but at least it made her laugh.