Double agents

Two spies meet in a white-tiled bathroom in Tehran. One large chap is perched on a creaking laundry basket, while his host, seated on the toilet, pours good-quality vodka into a pair of glasses. Water gushing from the taps and the radio playing prevents any officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard who might have bugged the place from overhearing their conversation. It is 1981, two years after the Iranian revolution, when ‘the world’s oldest empire folded and plummeted like a kite in a hurricane’, Macintyre tells us in true Bond-baddie style. Then comes an astounding confession, words that Bond has never uttered, and ‘by the time it took to run a bath, the KGB spy had become a double agent’.

If it takes one to know one, this may explain why spy fiction is enjoying such a renaissance, since among the best new titles are those written by former intelligence operatives. I.S. Berry and David McCloskey are both former CIA officers who happily acknowledge how much their novels rely on their past careers. Equally impressive is the work of ex-MI6 officer James Wolff, whose use of a pseudonym puts him at a comparative disadvantage when it comes to promoting his books, but whose Spies and Other Gods (Baskerville, £20) places him in the top tier of today’s spy writers. A young ex-academic, Aphra McQueen, is sent by a parliamentary oversight committee to investigate a whistleblower’s complaint about MI6.