Edward Wilson’s series of novels about William Catesby takes a fresh turn with his latest book, Portrait of the Spy as a Young Man, which goes back to Catesby’s participation in the Second World War. As part of the blog tour for the book’s release, Wilson chatted with Paul Simpson.

 

Having written a non-fiction book about spying from 1945-2011, I was really intrigued by the character of Catesby and the way you’ve approached the period. What inspired you to write about a British spy and a British intelligence network?

I’ve lived in this country for nearly 50 years and I thought I should try adopting a British persona because my second work had an American persona – that was The Envoy. That was the first in the Catesby series; although Catesby isn’t in the book by name, we find out in the next one, that he was operating in the background. Catesby, I find he’s a comfortable character.

Like myself, his father was a merchant seaman and his mother was a bar girl. My father died when I was seven months old and Catesby’s father had died at sea, so we were both brought up in lower middle class, working class docklands area. The bar that I was born in was built in the early 18th century and was on the docks at Fells Point.

Catesby was an Englishman but half Belgian. I felt comfortable in his skin, even though he was born twenty-four years before me.

Why go for the intelligence background?

My first degree was in international relations and had I stayed in America I would have either gone into the State Department or maybe the CIA. That would have fitted in because after I did my university degree in three years instead of four, I went into US Special Forces. It would have been quite a good leap, going into further government service. But I turned against America when I was in Vietnam. I decided never ever to go back but that was just one of those turning points.

In a way, it’s cannibalising my own life and I just wanted to do 40 years of British history through the eyes of an insider/outsider.

Up until the most recent book, you’ve gone chronologically. Have there been times when you’ve written Catesby in a certain way that’s precluded you from doing something with him in a later book?

I think that’s one of the things that an author has to be aware of. I killed off Kit Fournier – well, not killed but I made it so I couldn’t use him again and I sort of regret that.

But with Catesby? No. I think the thing that killed him off, which made me have to write a prequel was South Atlantic Requiem, the one before the latest, in which Catesby resigns and takes early retirement at the age of sixty in disgust at what he saw the government doing. Basically in that book, even though he’s very high up – he’s number three in MI6 – he was sent as a behind the scenes envoy to South America, to Peru to help broker a peace deal during the Falklands War. He brokered it and everything was fine, the Argentines were ready to essentially surrender, then he comes back to the UK and wakes up one morning to the headlines saying the Belgrano has been sunk. He’s finally had enough and carries on for a few more months then takes early retirement.

So, after that I need to do a prequel and now if I do any more Catesby books they’ll have to be between the one I’ve just written and 1983 when he resigns.

With his knowledge and the experience that he has, would MI6 not have a way of calling him back in if they needed him? Say, for the sake of argument, for Lockerbie four years later? Somebody with his experience and his knowledge could potentially be a consultant, even if he doesn’t want to be.

Well, it’s interesting you mention Lockerbie because I came very near to being blown up over Lockerbie. Since leaving the States in the early 70s, I’ve only been back once to see my elderly mother.

What happened was, I was booking a flight and would have been on the Pan Am flight but I was teaching in further education at the time and this Argentinian woman who taught Spanish refused to take my classes. I’d asked her to stand in for me and she refused to do it, so I had to take the flight the next day. My mother rang up that night thinking I’d been on that flight and was in a panic and very glad to hear my voice.

You research your books in close detail. Have there been things that you have researched, such as with the Falklands or Hungary or Harold Wilson, that has changed the way that you looked at and the way that you told the story?

There are things that I’ve covered in most of the books. My wife’s favourite book is The Midnight Swimmer; I think that revealed the covering up of the facts.

There’s two facts about the Cuban Missile Crisis that have never really got out. One was the Russians didn’t take the nuclear weapons away – they took the intermediate range missiles away that could reach the United States but they left tactical nuclear weapons there that had the range. This is open, everyone knows this. That gave Castro the confidence, knowing that the Americans could never invade because they’d be blown up.

The other thing involving the British was interesting and this was once again Catesby being a back channel diplomat: everyone thought it was a trade-off. The Americans were pulling the Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, which were obsolete and ready for the bin anyway, and in exchange Khrushchev would move the intermediate range missiles out of Cuba – but no one looked at what happened to the Thor missiles in Britain. There were 60 Thor joint key US missile batteries in the UK, largely around where I live in East Anglia.

They had just been deployed in 1961, the year before the missile crisis and had a life of about nine years before they became obsolete, so they should have been here until 1969 and 1970. The first Thor missile battery was removed from Britain and sent back to the States three weeks after the missile crisis and every single other Thor battery disappeared before August 1963. Six or seven years before they were due to be changed. I can’t believe that was a coincidence.

Macmillan is probably one of the few prime ministers that could bluff it so well and he said, ‘No, it’s just a coincidence, this has been planned’ and obviously it was a pack of lies. Governments are masters of misinformation and disinformation, being two different things really.

Oh yes and it’s also sleight of hand. In Portrait of the Spy as a Young Man, you’ve gone back. It’s a prequel and Catesby’s much younger, the rough edges are still on him. What was the biggest challenge for you in writing such a younger, more impressionable, version of the character?

I wanted to create a character who’s a chameleon, who’s a shapeshifter. What happens when a lot of working class people go to Oxbridge, they play up their working class background in ways which are a protest.

I have a theory that Harold Wilson sounded far more Yorkshire at Oxford than he ever did at grammar school. I think he became even more Yorkshire when he became prime minister and I have heard that in private he didn’t talk that way.

Catesby plays a different game. When he goes to Cambridge, he’s actually rather taken in by the glamour and meeting people from old wealthy families. When he goes to their homes and sees the priceless works of art lying around, he actually decides that rather than play up being a wharf rat from Lowestoft, he begins to adopt their way of speaking and their manners. Which of course, makes him an ideal person for the special intelligence service.

My view is if you want to train people to be spies, you shouldn’t train them at unarmed combat or how to shoot weapons, you should send them to acting school, to drama school. This is what Catesby is doing: he always knows he’ll be an outsider, but to a certain extent he wants to adopt the manners and voice of the ruling class to infiltrate it.

The Cambridge 5

And then of course the other wonderful thing, when he’s asked when he applies for SOE [the Special Operations Executive] if he’s ever a member of the communist party at the Cambridge University and he says, ‘No, they wouldn’t have me, I was too working class’ (Laughs). ‘They were Bollinger Bolsheviks, I’m a prosecco proletariat’.

I did the research – for the Cambridge Five, it was almost like it was their equivalent of the Bullingdon Club.

They were still in the idea that it was a follow on from Rudyard Kipling and The Great Game. Bond is almost the last of the great game heroes before you get to Smiley and perhaps Alec Leamas [the eponymous Spy Who Came In From the Cold in the John Le Carré novel] is the classic. Catesby to an extent feels to me to have something of Smiley but something of Alec Leamas as well. That world weary, there’s nothing that can make it better approach.

Yes. But of course Catesby, he can speak Nederlandse; remember Alec Leamas was a fluent Dutch speaker. Like Catesby being half Belgian, Leamas I believe was half Dutch. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold I think, is the greatest spy novel ever written, personally.

Leamas is based on George Blake who’s nearly 100, in Moscow still. I write about his escape in A Very British Ending. I think the authorities turned a blind eye to Blake; the government let him escape because the escape was so amateurish.

He was an embarrassment and he was too high profile to just be gently got out of the way with the wrong flavour cup of tea. If he had gone I think Moscow Centre would have made more of it.

And his sentence was totally out of proportion for what he did. He was sentenced for longer than Klaus Fuchs.

Yes but the number of people he betrayed… I think that they gave him the sentence that the others would have had as well.

Yes.

If Donald Maclean had been caught he would have had a similar sentence.

Yes. But then again [Maclean, Burgess and Philby] got away very easily.

So, what’s next? Are you working on another story for Catesby?

I’ve already begun it.

The next one, which I really want to get going, continues from this one and it’s set around 1950 in Marseilles, which I found an absolutely fascinating city. I’ve been researching it by reading the books by Jean-Claude Izzo, his Marseilles trilogy. I read one in translation and I didn’t like the translation so I’m trying to get through them in French, which is difficult. My French is OK but the patois of the Marseilles docks I find difficult.

So this carries on the beginning of Catesby’s career and a lot of the characters that we meet in Portrait of the Spy as a Young Man carry on into this book, which is provisionally titled Farewell Dinner for a Secret Agent.

So this will presumably pick up on the way that the French dealt with people after the war as collaborators got back into positions of power.

Yes. The most successful leader, which I write about in the book, was Georges Guingouin. He was arrested on a trumped up charge of murder and beaten up by prison wardens because former collaborators wanted to get their own back. And the communist party beat him up as well because he was too Bolshy to be a Bolshevik and didn’t carry out party policy. So Guingouin was attacked from both sides and that’s one of the themes of the book.

 

Thanks to Sophie Ransom for assistance in arranging this interview

Portrait of a Spy as a Young Man is out now from Arcadia Books