Fictional MI5

Along with the Stella Rimington book ("At risk"), I've also been watching the BBC series "Spooks". The program is more action orientated than I would have liked, which made sense when I realised that the program is about the counter-terrorism section. Similarly, Liz Carlyle (LC) belongs to the counter-terrorism section.

I ordered an received the second LC book, "Secret asset", and read it greedily over Thursday night/Friday morning. This is more cerebral/less action orientated than its predecessor and thus found more favour in these quarters. Whilst the prose is nothing to write home about, it tells an interesting story and I'm sure that a second and more sedate reading would be rewarding.

The book begins in a very similar manner to its predecessor, so much so that I'm sure a page was lifted (the description of the recruitment of the agent whose cover name escapes me). But the agent is shortly discovered and killed; here the resemblance between the novels ends. Ostensibly, the book is about the leads thrown up by this agent and a task force assembles to follow them up. But on the side, LC is given a separate task: find an unactivated mole within the ranks of MI5.

The reader, from his privileged position, is able to see how the two strands intertwine. Having two separate strands in a story is much more rewarding than one, and their combination and resolution lead to a much more satisfying finish. So author Rimington is showing welcome signs of sophistication.

But! In the terrorism strand of the book, much is made of the mistakes in tradecraft that the terrorists make (as an aside, it is inferred that MI5 can tap any phone at will, including mobile phones; I have my doubts about this). But there is no comment about the poor tradecraft of the mole, who blows an operation then has the agent killed. After a third and similar lapse, one of LC's colleagues becomes suspicious and begins suspecting a mole himself; this conclusion is made whilst being unaware of LC's activities.

The mole, in retrospect, has several damaging conversations and disseminates information which later turns out to be disinformation. Maybe he was counting on the obscurity of that information and the low possibility of his lying being caught, but it was a dangerous thing to do and led to his downfall.

The mole is not a patch on Bill Haydon ("Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy") and should be ashamed of his poor performance in this role. Real moles are much harder to catch, and the fact that he had never been activated should have made it impossible to have caught him.

There is no real reason for MI5 to have heard about this 'unactivated mole' in the first place, although this mole's actions quite likely would have led to his being discovered anyway. The person who told MI5 had no reason to do this, and this strand of the story invokes several characters who are peripheral - if not totally irrelevant - to the story. Was the author trying to confuse the reader?

So: I enjoyed this book more than its predecessor, but it's clear that author Rimington has a long way to go before she even catches up with the shadow of 'Tinker tailor'. A film version of the latter, incidentally, has recently been made and I look forward to seeing it. It will be interesting to see how well it manages to translate the story and whether it too suffers from the same problem as the famous TV adaption which often has George Smiley (as played by Sir Alec Guiness) sitting and staring into space (or polishing his glasses on his tie).