Historical Note

This is a novel. Not fact—not even faction—but fiction. Here and there I’ve bent history a bit, usually because it did not suit the exigencies of the plot I wanted.

First, in putting invented figures into an historical context, real people are displaced. Most obviously Commander Cockerell displaces the real Frogman Spy Commander Lionel Crabb. The plot of Crabb’s mission was (still is?) too drawn out for my purposes. The body was not found until 1957, and has never been positively identified as Crabb. I didn’t want to be bound by the facts of the matter, even though they were the starting point for the idea that became this book. Rod Troy, my fictional Shadow Foreign Secretary, displaces the real one, Alf Robens—sorry, Alf, but if anyone forty years on remembers you were ever Shadow Foreign Secretary I’d be amazed.

Second, I’ve stolen time from Khrushchev’s meeting with the NEC (National Executive Committee) of the Labour Party. He ranted, and he stormed out, but nearer 11 p.m. than the 9.30 p.m. I give. I had other uses for the time. What George Brown, the only one of these historical players I ever met, said on that occasion is taken from his own account. What Khrushchev said has never been made public—the press were not present—but exists in fragments in the memoirs of the Labour bigwigs.

Suez. The revelation I put into the mouth of Rod Troy, at the end of August/early September, on the Anglo-French conspiracy to invade, is—again for purposes of plot—deliberately out of synch, though hardly against the spirit of the times. The French, the British and the Israelis did not actually sign an agreement until 24 October. The British copy was given to Eden and has never been seen since. To say he burnt it is not provable, but not fanciful either. The text of the Israeli copy appeared in English in the memoirs of General Dayan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), the original surfaced in the archive of David Ben-Gurion and was made public some ten years ago. The notion that the CIA got a look at the Israeli copy is fanciful, but I doubt impossible. That said, what the US knew about Suez before and during owed more to the U2 plane than to spies on the ground. It’s stated by several historians of Suez that the CIA made much use of the U2 over Egypt and Israel at this time, and also that the CIA monitoring station at Rome, NY, probably broke the codes used by the British, the French or the Israelis or any combination thereof, and quite possibly all three. If anything in my exercise of invention might be deemed fanciful, it’s the idea that what the CIA knew was dutifully passed on to Ike.

As to Tom Driberg being asked to spy for the KGB, the published source for this is obviously Chapman Pincher’s Their Trade Is Treachery. In the introduction to his excellent life of Driberg, Francis Wheen is dismissive of Pincher’s allegations. Instinctively, I share his scepticism. However, about two years after Driberg’s death, and, if memory serves, two or three before Pincher’s book, rumours were flying fast and wild about Tom spying for one side or the other or both. I asked Peter Cook, so often, in his capacity as proprietor of Private Eye, Tom’s employer, if he thought Tom had been a spy.

‘Yes,’ he said, in a voice not unlike E. L. Wisty’s. And a very bad one. He’d tell anyone who’d listen. The first time I met him he came up to me in a lavatory, stood at the next urinal, cock in hand, and said, “I’m a spy for the KGB, y’know.”’

I cannot hold up this anecdote as proof or anything resembling proof— after all, the constant danger in asking Peter any question was that he would use the answer to take the piss—only as seductive, just about plausible, and dovetailing very neatly into the story I wanted to tell. The Tom Driberg to whom I ascribe a fictional encounter with my hero is not the vile beast of Pincher’s books, but the engaging couldn’t-give-a-piss artist of Peter Cook’s memory.