Idiots' Delight
SPIES and secret agents are, necessarily, an odd lot. Spying is an odd thing to want to do, given that living in the clear has generally, down the ages, been thought the highest good. Per- flaps spies are, in the fundamental dictionary sense, 'idiots'—'private people,' for whom volun- tary alienation from their fellows, in a good cause, is a necessity.
'John Whitwell' is a pseudonym for a success- ful and still active member of our Intelligence Service. His story is well worth reading, partly because much of it is about a period—the 'thirties—when hitherto unguessed-at horrors were happening to recognisable people in real places now steamrollered into near-anonymity: Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Riga, Warsaw; partly because the author seems to be an efficient, reasonable, humorous person. John Whitwell makes many things clear about the work of his valuable (and often, by governments, crassly disregarded) service, in the days before transis- torised-everything and cyanide pens, when per- sonality still counted for more than gadgets. He indicates, without spleen, the handicaps of money shortage (due to an excessive care for 'Public Funds'), of misunderstanding in high places, and of seldom knowing the real effect of the information he so painfully gathered. He makes the good point that, if your 'cover story' saA you are a fish importer, you actually have fo import fish, and, therefore, work twice (at least) as hard as most men do. John Whitwell is, perhaps, one of those rare beings, the regular soldier invited to do secret work who is balanced enough to do the job well, as a job, without letting it interfere too much with the living of his own life.
Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, under her 'given' name of Cynthia, did signal service spying for Britain throughout the last war. Cynthia, born of well-placed American parents, was a child of some beauty and much originality. At eleven she wrote a novel. At fourteen she had a grande passion. Married young, and (to her parents' ideas at least) suitably, Cynthia followed her frosty English diplomat husband to Chile, to Spain, to Poland. In Spain she found enormous excitement in love with a noble Spaniard, in braving bullets, angry British officials, and even the great Indalecio Prieto himself to try to spring her lover from a Republican jail. It was in Warsaw, in, 1938, that Cynthia's career as a British agent began. In 1940 the Secret Service put her to work in Washington. It was in Washington that, by the nicely-calculated use of her femininity, she was able to get hold of the French naval ciphers, and other things besides. Mr H. Montgomery Hyde tells Cynthia's story with humour and an evident admiration for his subject. Without going deep he gives us many views of a complex character. Cynthia, was never sentimental; Mr Hyde sometimes is. But he has written a most readable book about someone who deserves to be remembered as a woman even more than as a spy.
Mr Frank J. Wilson was Chief of the United States Secret Service for ten years from 1936, and a Special Agent of the Treasury for many years before that. He had, therefore, the job of guarding two Presidents, and of maintaining and greatly improving the security arrangements de- creed by Congress in 1902, as a result of the assassination of McKinley. Special Agent is not going to win prizes for style, but its plain facts about extraordinary events and people—Al Capone, Huey Long, FDR—are telling in their own way. Mr Wilson's remarks on the difficulty of guarding Presidents, particularly in a coun- try devoted to glad-handing and 'informality,' should be taken to heart by all Americans,
would-be Presidents included. .
WILLIAM BUCHAN
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