Who would win if you pitted an average spy and a typical writer in a no-holds-barred cage match? As a humble writer myself, I yield. I imagine secret agent types have a considerably lower BMI than us mortal, partially pickled writers. (No offense if you’re the lucky outlier.)
This begs the question: who makes the best spies? They are the people you’d never give a second glance. They’re not even espionage adjacent. They travel, do copious amounts of research, stick their noses where they don’t belong, and poke their fingers in all of the forbidden pies. They enjoy being puppet masters controlling events from behind the curtain. They live in the shadows and are virtually invisible.
Almost sounds like a writer, doesn’t it? Maybe even one you know?
Enter the writer. Emotional spickets, most of them. Procrastinators all. Anxiety-ridden and prone to late night, espresso-fueled, writing jags. They do everything solo.
Stretching a writer into a spy is simply a matter of tuning up their people skills. They’ll also need to be practiced liars with above-average language, intellectual, and storytelling skills. Those can be tweaked to perfection. Train them until they think fast on their feet and maybe possess a dizzying array of martial arts moves. Though only a small percentage of espionage agents are active is martial arts. Intelligence agents collect intelligence.
Real life spies and fiction authors were practically interchangeable during the Cold War. Their novels (and movies) pull content straight from the classified files of the CIA and MI6 to deliver authentic fiction so real it had to have some truth behind it.
What happens when the spy game ends? Many vanish. Loads turn to writing for pleasure and posterity. Unlike us common writers, the spy slash author arrived on the scene spring loaded with stories so compelling they keep millions of us on the edge of our seats. Nevertheless, at least I won’t have to live the rest of my life as a pawn on the 3D chess board, always expecting the incoming call that reactivated me for a mission. The unspoken truth was that you didn’t retire from the CIA. They retired you.
Let’s do the tally before we get to the reality. Physical face off winner: spy. Thousands, if not more in royalties (winner): tie between writers and spies dabbling in the craft. Number of overhand pullups: probably the spy.
Meet the men and women who’ve been both spy and author. Some you may know already, others you would never suspect.
Beyond the first few names, the remainder of the spy slash authors listed here were never made notorious by virtue of their espionage street cred. No PR campaigns for their side gig, thank you very much. Nevertheless, they all made a classified impact on history.
Flemming, Ian Flemming
Ian Flemming tops the list as the most well-known spy who came out of the cold (apologies, Mr. le Carre) and into a toasty office with a fireplace to create James Bond – and all his subsequent iterations and imitations. In fact, Flemming did work for British naval intelligence during World War II and based multiple Bond characters on real British spies.[1] Numerous sources report that James Bond was based on the British MI6 and SOE spy master William Stephenson. That begs the questions: where did his villains come from? Who or what was his bête noire?
Julie Child[2]
I know, I know. She didn’t write espionage thrillers. But her story should be blasted anyway. In an era when women weren’t seen, let alone trusted with foreign service, Julia Child still managed to have things her way.
Her career in espionage took her to Ceylon and then China, where she worked for the Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA. She held the top civilian post and frequently managed classified documents. During World War II, she met and married Paul Child, a fellow OSS officer. (Per Mr. & Mrs. Smith, spies like to keep things in the family.) In 1948, when Paul was transferred to France, Julie joined him and attended Le Cordon Bleu. The rest is cooking history – nearly twenty books and eight television shows worth of history.
Still, not a spy thriller to her name.
Frederick Forsythe[3]
Or whatever his real name was, penned Day of the Jackal and most of his other novels while actively spying for the British Secret Intelligence Service. From 1968 to 1988, he undertook numerous covert missions to help the West win the Cold War. For his troubles, Forsythe went entirely uncompensated by the British government…unless you counted being appointed to the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by the Queen[4] as remuneration. It’s a good thing his writing career was so lucrative!
John le Carre
The spy author’s spy author. In my humble opinion le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley’s People are not just the best spy novels ever written, but some of the best novels ever written, period. This epic trilogy is the story of George Smiley, an aging spy who is re-activated as an agent to ferret out a traitor in the British Secret Service. You’ve never experienced tension the way le Carre writes it.
Everyone “knows: he worked for British Intelligence during the Cold War.”[5] The detail and paranoia that can only come from reality…looked only slightly different for le Carre on paper. His preferred name – there is no way to legitimately source the name he was given at birth – was David John Moore Cornwell. His resume remains mostly redacted other than to say, “He taught at Eton from 1956 to 1958 and was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, serving first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn, and subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg.[6]
The prolific spook ultimately penned 26 spy novels.
J.R.R. Tolkien[7]
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a man of any talents – and color me shocked to learn that espionage was one of them. According to a new restricted exhibit at Britain’s Intelligence-Agency Government Communications Headquarters, the acclaimed author trained at the top-secret Government Code and Cypher School before World War II.
Tolkien spent early 1939 at GCCS’ code-breaking bunker in Bletchley Park. Six months before Hitler invaded Poland, he decided against joining the cadre of patriotic brainiacs. This same group would go on to famously decipher Hitler’s Enigma decoding machines.
Perhaps he would have enlisted if Hitler had more in common with Sauron.
James Fenimore Cooper[8]
Famed colonial-era American author of Last of the Mohicans, The Pioneer, The Deerslayer, The Spy, and The Prairie among many other timeless stories of the American Revolution. While you were enjoying his books in middle school, did you ever imagine Cooper could be his generation’s James Bond? Beyond his life as a yarn spinner, Cooper was also a member of the U.S Navy and part of the Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Lafayette, Mathew Carey Society of Cincinnati, a military intelligence organization of American Revolutionary war officers, which gathered covert intelligence from the British in the War of 1812 and in U.S. foreign diplomacy and espionage into the early 19th Century.[9] All of which makes me wonder: was Magua real or a imagined?
Roald Dahl
Hailed as “one of the greatest storytellers for children in the twentieth century,”[10] there was much more to Dahl than met the eye. Between the still-beloved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and his other novels, Dahl sold 300 million books worldwide. Prior to settling down as a writer, he was recruited by Canadian spymaster William Stephenson (the real James Bond) to help convince America to join the war. Another of his missions was to discover the political bent of influential women… which he did by sleeping with them.[11] When the war turned hot, Dahl served as a fighter pilot, distinguishing himself as an ace (shooting down 5 German planes minimum).
William F. Buckley[12]
For those too young to remember, William F. Buckley was a famously conservative television pundit and author of many an editorial. Editor of The National Review, Buckley filmed countless interviews on his television shows.
Buckley published 18 spy novels in his lifetime.[13] Presumably, he relied heavily on his field experience in the CIA, including one year in Mexico City working on political action for E. Howard Hunt, who was later imprisoned for his role in the Watergate scandal. These books are forever overshadowed by his persona as an ill-natured political animal with a chip the size of Plymouth Rock on his shoulders.
In a November 1, 2005, column for National Review, Buckley announced to the world that he worked for the CIA. However, he equivocated, the only CIA employee he knew was Hunt, his immediate boss later imprisoned for his role in Watergate.
Earnest Hemmingway[14]
Who would even suggest that one of the most prolific and publicity-thirsty writers of the twentieth century also found time to be a double agent? Potentially, a triple agent!
Author Nicholas Reynolds chronicled Hemmingway’s suspected espionage work for both Soviet and U.S. intelligence agencies before and during the cold war.[15] He found evidence suggesting that Hemingway had, in fact, been involved in work for the OSS as well as other U.S. agencies, including the FBI, State Department, and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
In a twist his novels would never accommodate, Reynolds also found evidence that beginning in late 1940, Hemingway spied for the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the predecessor of the terror-inducing Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB.[16]
Say it isn’t so, Papa!
Anthony Burgess[17]
Viddy this, my milquetoast mates. Conceive of an author so twisted his most famous novel was about brainwashing, ultra-violence, and weird colloquial expressions. To this very day A Clockwork Orange tops the list of books to burn in schools and churches worldwide. The film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick was twice as controversial for portraying rape and gang violence. The author of this madness simply had to have a hand in the spy game. Perhaps, as an inquisitor? An interrogator-type who preferred advanced interrogated techniques to fingernail yanking.
A hint arrived in 1966 when his novel Tremor of Intent debuted. Of his thirty plus novels, this high-concept parody of James Bond was his only book about espionage.
Burgess did “cipher work” for British Army intelligence in Gibraltar during World War II, as confirmed by the Dictionary of Literary Biography.[18]
Not exactly Octopussy, is it?
W. Somerset Maugham
One of Britain’s most prolific literary and cultural assets of World War II and the Cold War era famously spied for King and country because he was a writer. Apparently,
writers make great spies since we travel well, are skilled at first person investigations and interrogations, and can add layers to a story on-the-fly to keep their cover. The list goes on.
The timeline of Maugham’s literary career spans decades during which he authored 20 novels, 25 plays, and 189 articles. Thankyou Wikipedia. Of the all, only Ashenden, a collection of semi-autographical short stories, was inspired by his experience in espionage. Winston Churchill was said to be so incensed at Maugham’s breach of the Official Secrets Act that he demanded several of the stories be destroyed to prevent publication.[19]
Perhaps, they hit too close to home?
Valerie Plame[20]
Speaking of closer to home…remember Valerie Plame? She was outed as a covert agent for the CIA in a 2003 Washington Post column by Robert Novak, which effectively neutered her ability to work undercover.
Plame first barked back with a tell-all about her experiences in the agency: Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government. Then, she set her sites on writing thrillers.
In 2013, Plame partnered with mystery writer Sarah Lovett to write the first in a series of spy novels starring Vanessa Pierson — a fictional alter ego for Plame. The first book, Blowback, centered on the Iranian nuclear project, which Plame had once investigated for the CIA.[21]
Unsung Heroes Find Praise Between Pages
The history of foreign service was written by the brave and sneaky individuals who had the courage to fight and put pen to paper. Whether they authored cookbooks or thriller or scripted romantic comedies for theater, it is very likely the public will ever know the full extent of their sacrifices, let alone their creative ouput. Maybe, someday, if their records are declassified un-redacted (dacted?), we’ll know the whole story.
Here are a few more spy slash authors who went the extra mile to tell their stories:
E. Howard Hunt. The most notorious intelligence operative of the Nixon era wrote more than 80 books, many of them spy novels (“The Berlin Ending”), under his own name and under different pseudonyms. I wondered if he was inspiration for Tom Cruise’s character in the Mission Impossible series?[22] Real-life Howard Hunt went on to be imprisoned during the Watergate Scandal. (Can you believe that still passes for a scandal today?!)
Graham Greene
According to Wikipedia, Greene joined MI6 during WWII and answered to Kim Philby (the Benedict Arnold of his time) in Sierra Leone during the cold war.[23] Philby made a name for himself after being exposed as a double agent (some say a triple agent), spying for the Soviet Union. Later, Greene claimed that his only CIA contact was Hunt. The Power and The Glory is considered to be his magnum opus.
Peter Matthiessen[24]
Serving in the U.S. Navy from 1945-47, he attended Yale University and the Sorbonne in Paris – later moving to the city where he briefly worked for the C.I.A. and founded the literary journal The Paris Review (reportedly, as a cover for his espionage) with childhood friend George Plimpton. There, Matthiessen spent time with other expatriate American writers such as William Styron, James Baldwin, and Irwin Shaw.[25]
Charles Cumming
Cumming’s book, A Spy by Nature is “loosely based on the author’s real-life experience of having been recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1995,” said Publishers Weekly. It’s about a British marketing consultant who lives to regret a job assignment which turns into industrial espionage.[26] Who did he have to schmooze to keep that upper lip stiff.
Brad Meltzer [27]
The Department of Homeland Security was recruiting for their Red Cell program, comprised of a group of innovative thinkers that help brainstorm possible terrorist plots, when they came across Meltzer. His last novel debuted at #1 on the New York Times Book Review. Thanks, Pentagon!
Stella Rimington
Dame Stella, appointed director general of MI5 in 1992, was the first woman to hold the post and the first director general whose name was publicly announced on appointment. She has written several novels, the latest of which is Dead Line (2010) and frequently highlights the conflict between MI-5 and MI-6 (the British equivalents of the FBI and the CIA).[28]
Jason Matthews
The author of Red Sparrow worked at the CIA for 33 years…and for all we know still does. Or is that a clone sitting at his desk?
And a few other documented sleuths: Thomas Diggs, John Bingham, John Steinbeck, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Joseph Alsop, Walter Lippman, Thomas Watson, Christopher Marlowe, Lord Byron, Jeremy Bentham, Alexander Dumas, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, and more.
- https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/spy-novels-by-real-spies-anthony-burgess-john-le-carr-and-others/#:~:text=Former%20spies%20can%20make%20great,John%20le%20Carr%C3%A9%20and%20more. ↑
- https://www.bookbub.com/blog/authors-who-were-spies ↑
- https://crimereads.com/the-long-strange-history-of-novelists-who-became-spies/ ↑
- https://www.bookbub.com/blog/authors-who-were-spies ↑
- https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/spy-novels-by-real-spies-anthony-burgess-john-le-carr-and-others/#:~:text=Former%20spies%20can%20make%20great,John%20le%20Carr%C3%A9%20and%20more. ↑
- https://johnlecarre.com/biography/ ↑
- https://www.wired.com/2009/09/tolkiens-spy-past-inspires-hunt-for-hobbit-rings-spooks/ ↑
- Per Bruce Wood, editor-in-chief, Aoide Magazine ↑
- https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2007/eirv34n42-20071026/62-71_742.pdf ↑
- https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-man-who-liked-to-make-up-stories-2158052.html ↑
- https://www.bookbub.com/blog/authors-who-were-spies ↑
- https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/09/08/bcst-books-thread-spy-novels ↑
- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D4GQ5C6?binding=paperback&qid=1740406444&sr=8-2&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tpbk ↑
- https://www.bookbub.com/blog/authors-who-were-spies ↑
- Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures, 1935-1961,” ↑
- https://www.history.com/news/was-ernest-hemingway-a-spy ↑
- https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/spy-novels-by-real-spies-anthony-burgess-john-le-carr-and-others/#:~:text=Former%20spies%20can%20make%20great,John%20le%20Carr%C3%A9%20and%20more. ↑
- https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/spy-novels-by-real-spies-anthony-burgess-john-le-carr-and-others/#:~:text=Former%20spies%20can%20make%20great,John%20le%20Carr%C3%A9%20and%20more. ↑
- https://crimereads.com/the-long-strange-history-of-novelists-who-became-spies/ ↑
- https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/09/08/bcst-books-thread-spy-novels ↑
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair#:~:text=I%20didn’t%20put%20any,Department%20memorandum%22%20which%20purportedly%20refers ↑
- https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/spy-novels-by-real-spies-anthony-burgess-john-le-carr-and-others/#:~:text=Former%20spies%20can%20make%20great,John%20le%20Carr%C3%A9%20and%20more. ↑
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Greene#:~:text=and%20John%20Buchan.-,Travel%20and%20espionage,during%20the%20Second%20World%20War. ↑
- https://www.bookbub.com/blog/authors-who-were-spies ↑
- https://www.matthiessencenter.org/about-peter ↑
- https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/spy-novels-by-real-spies-anthony-burgess-john-le-carr-and-others/#:~:text=Former%20spies%20can%20make%20great,John%20le%20Carr%C3%A9%20and%20more. ↑
- https://murder-mayhem.com/8-spies-who-wrote-about-spies ↑
- https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/spy-novels-by-real-spies-anthony-burgess-john-le-carr-and-others/#:~:text=Former%20spies%20can%20make%20great,John%20le%20Carr%C3%A9%20and%20more. ↑
