Spooks are currently hitting the big and small screens. The Coen brothers' latest black comedy Burn After Reading threw an ex-CIA analyst, a retired Secret Service officer, and gym workers into a Potomac of confusion. Sir Harry and co return this evening in Spooks and in the latest James Bond film premieres on Wednesday in Leicester Square (which clashes with the Eccles Centre debate on the US Presidential elections).
The careers section of the website of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Bond's purported employers, suggests that life is not all DB5s and baccarat: on offer is a 'virtual administrator', which allows hopeful Moneypennies the chance to "find out more about being an Administrator in SIS and test [their] skills". The mundane side of spying - the collating, processing and assessing of data - is ever more important. Eavesdropping activities, such as those that take place via GCHQ can hoover up a vast amount of electronic chatter, placing huge demands on the technical ability to separate the intelligence wheat from the coincidental chaff. And, currently, there is a debate about the safeguards, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, that can be placed on such activities and how they may be expanded in the light of encryption, secure email, online chatrooms, pay-as-you go phones, and internet telephony. The interactive in the Taking Liberties exhibition touches on these issues.
All this may make one wish for a bygone age of espionage. However, things weren't always simple then, either. A snippet of this is on display in the exhibition's section on 'Freedom of speech and belief'. In 1932 Sir Compton Mackenzie, warmly remembered not least for Whisky Galore, revealed the existence of the SIS for the first time. This was done in his memoirs of his time in the Aegean intelligence service, Greek Memories, at the start of the Great War. Although Mackenzie was correcting another account, and most of the people named were either retired or deceased, he was found guilty under the Official Secrets Act. The book was withdrawn until 1940. Mackenzie was a keen Scottish nationalist, and there is an interesting link with the writer John Saunders Lewis, who authored one of the early Welsh nationalist pamphlets on display in the 'United Kingdom?' section: in 1919, he served under Mackenzie at Athens. Someone should make a film about it all...
