Hugendubel.info - Die B2B Online-Buchhandlung 

Merkliste
Die Merkliste ist leer.
Bitte warten - die Druckansicht der Seite wird vorbereitet.
Der Druckdialog öffnet sich, sobald die Seite vollständig geladen wurde.
Sollte die Druckvorschau unvollständig sein, bitte schliessen und "Erneut drucken" wählen.

The Spy Who Came in from the Circus

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
384 Seiten
Englisch
Biteback Publishingerschienen am18.04.2024
For almost half a century, Bertram Mills Circus was a household name throughout Britain among both children and adults and it's Director, Cyril Bertram Mills, was one of the best-known and most influential names in the country's entertainment business. But for forty years, Cyril Mills had also enjoyed a top-secret and wide-ranging career in British intelligence: obtaining the best aerial intelligence on Nazi rearmament for MI6 before the Second World War; becoming the first case officer to monitor the best double agent (Garbo) of the war after joining MI5; and working part-time during the Cold War 'for MI5 or 6 or both without being paid a penny'. Remarkably, no word of Mills's secret career appeared in public until he was over eighty. Nobody suspected that the glamorous world of pre-war circus entertainment had been an extraordinarily fitting rehearsal for the lethal arena of deception and surveillance. In this remarkable true story, Christopher Andrew, best-selling official biographer of MI5, brings to life one of the most surprising and fascinating tales of espionage ever told.

Christopher Andrew is Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and former Chair of the Faculty of History at Cambridge University. Founder of the renowned Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, he is also Chair of the British Intelligence Study Group and Founding Co-Editor of Intelligence and National Security. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Toronto and the Australian National universities, and President of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His sixteen books include The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, which was an international bestseller. He lives in Cambridge.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
BuchGebunden
EUR32,00
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR23,99

Produkt

KlappentextFor almost half a century, Bertram Mills Circus was a household name throughout Britain among both children and adults and it's Director, Cyril Bertram Mills, was one of the best-known and most influential names in the country's entertainment business. But for forty years, Cyril Mills had also enjoyed a top-secret and wide-ranging career in British intelligence: obtaining the best aerial intelligence on Nazi rearmament for MI6 before the Second World War; becoming the first case officer to monitor the best double agent (Garbo) of the war after joining MI5; and working part-time during the Cold War 'for MI5 or 6 or both without being paid a penny'. Remarkably, no word of Mills's secret career appeared in public until he was over eighty. Nobody suspected that the glamorous world of pre-war circus entertainment had been an extraordinarily fitting rehearsal for the lethal arena of deception and surveillance. In this remarkable true story, Christopher Andrew, best-selling official biographer of MI5, brings to life one of the most surprising and fascinating tales of espionage ever told.

Christopher Andrew is Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and former Chair of the Faculty of History at Cambridge University. Founder of the renowned Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, he is also Chair of the British Intelligence Study Group and Founding Co-Editor of Intelligence and National Security. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Toronto and the Australian National universities, and President of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His sixteen books include The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, which was an international bestseller. He lives in Cambridge.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781785908866
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum18.04.2024
Seiten384 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse5970 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14443251
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe




Introduction
The Two Lives of Cyril Bertram Mills: Circus and Espionage


For almost half a century, Bertram Mills Circus, founded by Bertram Wagstaff Mills in 1920, was a household name throughout Britain, popular with both children and adults. Bertram´s elder son, Cyril Bertram Mills, who became joint (in practice senior) director of the circus with his younger brother Bernard on their father´s death in 1938, was one of the best-known and most influential figures in the British entertainment business.

For forty years, Cyril Mills also had a wide-ranging, top-secret career in British intelligence: obtaining the best aerial intelligence on Nazi rearmament for MI6 (Britain´s foreign intelligence agency) before the Second World War, recruiting and becoming first case officer for the most successful wartime double agent, codenamed GARBO, after joining the Security Service MI5, and working part-time during the Cold War for MI5 or 6 or both without being paid a penny´. For fifteen years, in the middle of the Cold War, at the request of MI5´s Director-General, Sir Roger Hollis, the Mills family lived in a mansion opposite the Soviet embassy so that MI5 could keep it under surveillance. Hollis and Sir Dick White, Chief of MI6, became such close family friends that the Mills children called them Uncle Roger´ and Uncle Dick´.

Remarkably, not a word of Mills´s secret career leaked out in public until he was over eighty.1 Among the many taken aback by the belated revelation of some of his intelligence exploits was his friend, the Duke of Edinburgh.2 Though, like Queen Elizabeth II, an enthusiastic patron of the Bertram Mills Circus and fascinated by British intelligence operations, Prince Philip wrote to Mills in 1985: ...I must admit that I would not have expected your involvement. I cannot imagine a better cover [than the circus]!´3

Mills framed the letter.

During Prince Philip´s lifetime, his close contacts with both MI5 and MI6 were mostly kept secret. After Philip´s death in 2021 at the age of ninety-nine, however, the Chief of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, revealed that he had made numerous visits´ to its London HQ at Vauxhall Cross, often for lunchtime discussions: HRH called it as he saw it with directness and wit. Visits were never dull.´4 Prince Philip had his own intelligence book collection and read the authorised centenary history of MI5 with great attention.5 His discussions about that too - with its author, among others - were also never dull´.6

Prince Philip´s surprise at discovering Cyril Mills´s use of the circus as a cover for his intelligence work for both MI5 and MI6 reflected the lack of awareness during the Cold War of the historical links between British intelligence and the entertainment business.7 Probably the earliest example of these links involved Queen Elizabeth II´s oldest-known royal ancestor, King Alfred the Great (the only English monarch ever given this title). The most celebrated act of espionage in Anglo-Saxon England was King Alfred´s alleged eavesdropping during his wars against Danish invaders led by Guthrum the Old. In 878, with the Danes seemingly on the brink of victory, Alfred entered Guthrum´s camp disguised as a wandering minstrel. According to the great medieval historian, William of Malmesbury: Taking a harp in his hand, [Alfred] proceeded to the king´s tent. Singing before the entrance, and at times touching the trembling strings in harmonious cadence, he was readily admitted.´8 The intelligence Alfred obtained while posing as a minstrel is said to have enabled him to win the decisive Battle of Ethandun (now Edington) against the Danes - a turning point in English history.9

Though the comparison between King Alfred´s impersonation of a minstrel to deceive the Danes and his own use of the circus to deceive the Gestapo in Nazi Germany did not occur to Cyril Mills until after he began working for MI6, he grew up knowing the story of King Alfred as a spy in the Danish camp. As well as featuring in many Victorian and Edwardian children´s history books, the story also inspired a series of widely reproduced nineteenth-century portraits of Alfred the Great holding the harp which helped save England from the Danish invaders.10


***


No leading member of the modern British entertainment industry has played such a varied and influential role as Mills in intelligence operations in both war and peace for so many years. Very little was known to Mills and his contemporaries, however, about the intermittent links between intelligence operations and the entertainment business during the millennium since Alfred the Great. Mills was entirely unaware, for example, that the leading French playwright at the end of the ancien régime, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, used his cover as the author of the internationally famous Figaro plays to mastermind, against Britain, probably the most successful cloak-and-dagger operation of the eighteenth century. Without the arms that Beaumarchais secretly supplied to the American rebels at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the Americans´ victory over the British at Saratoga in 1777 - a turning point in that conflict - might have proved impossible.11

When Mills began his circus career in the early 1920s, he knew almost nothing about British intelligence services past or present. None of the books he read or classes he attended at Harrow School and Cambridge University made any mention of them. Well-educated Victorians and Edwardians knew far more about intelligence operations recorded in the Bible than they did about the role of intelligence at any moment in British history. According to the Old Testament, the first major figure to emphasise the importance of good intelligence was God. Like Mills, most Victorian and Edwardian schoolchildren were taught how, at God´s command, both Moses and Joshua (originally one of Moses´s spies) had sent agents to spy out´ the Promised Land; how Joseph, having become the Egyptian Pharaoh´s vizier, pretended not to recognise his errant older brothers and accused them of being spies trying to identify weak points in Egypt´s defences; and how Judas Iscariot, a paid agent of the high priests, betrayed Jesus days before his crucifixion.12 But they could not have named any British spy more recent than Alfred the Great.

What many Edwardians knew, or thought they knew, about contemporary intelligence operations largely came from sensational spy novels, inspired by wildly exaggerated fears of German spy rings preparing an invasion of Britain. The most successful spy novelist, William Le Queux, was so popular that, at his peak, publishers paid him the same rate per thousand words as Thomas Hardy. Le Queux earned more than Hardy because he wrote more.13 It is unlikely, however, that any of his novels were among Cyril´s childhood reading.

The creation of the twentieth-century British intelligence community was concealed not only from the public, but also from most MPs. The founding, in 1909, by H. H. Asquith´s Liberal government of the Secret Service Bureau, whose home and foreign departments became today´s domestic security service MI5 and foreign intelligence agency MI6 (officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service), was one of the best-kept secrets in British peacetime history - revealed only to a small group of senior Whitehall officials and ministers who never mentioned it to the uninitiated. Throughout Mills´s lifetime, biographers of Asquith and his ministers, despite their growing access to once classified government files, remained unaware of its creation. Even the official nine-volume biography of Mills´s fellow Old Harrovian and political hero, Winston Churchill, the main supporter of the Secret Service Bureau in the Asquith Cabinet, as well as the leading intelligence enthusiast in every government in which he served, makes no mention of it. Nor do any of the nine volumes mention Mills.

The first Chief of what became MI6 was a charismatic former naval officer, Sir Mansfield Cumming, in honour of whom all his successors, including the current Chief, Sir Richard Moore, have been known as C´. Moore still follows Cumming´s practice of writing in green ink: so anyone getting a note in green ink knows it comes from me.´14 The qualities Cumming looked for in his recruits strongly suggest he would have been happy to enlist Mills. The British spy, he wrote in his secret journal, should be a gentleman ... absolutely honest with considerable tact and, at the same time, force of character ... In the long run, it is only the honest man who can defeat the ruffian.´15 Mills was a powerful personality with strong principles who had the remarkable tact required to recruit, in his two parallel careers, temperamental star performers for the circus and double agents for British intelligence.

Cumming would also have been impressed by...

mehr

Autor

Christopher Andrew is Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and former Chair of the Faculty of History at Cambridge University. Founder of the renowned Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, he is also Chair of the British Intelligence Study Group and Founding Co-Editor of Intelligence and National Security. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Toronto and the Australian National universities, and President of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His sixteen books include The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, which was an international bestseller. He lives in Cambridge.