Stella Rimington is the former director-general of MI5 — Britain's military intelligence service — and an author, publishing "Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5" in 2001. Her most recent book, espionage thriller "Illegal Action," has just been published by Knopf.
The 73-year-old writes about her five favorite books about spies in the United Kingdom:
1. "Shot in the Tower" by Leonard Sellars (Leo Cooper, 1997)
This humane and touching book describes the fate of 10 men who came to England to spy for Germany before World War I. They discovered little of value before they were caught, tried and shot in the Tower of London, that grim symbol of the determination of the British state to destroy its enemies.
We read about the spies' lives, from their recruitment and brief espionage careers in London and the naval ports to their trial and execution. Unfortunately for these men, who lie in largely forgotten English graves, German espionage tradecraft at the time was primitive; several of the spies had similar cover stories and codes, making detection by British authorities relatively easy.
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2. "Codebreakers," edited by F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (Oxford, 1993)
A Victorian mansion in southern England surrounded by drafty huts, Bletchley Park today is hard to envision as the secret weapon that won World War II, as Winston Churchill once called it. "Codebreakers" tells the story —in the words of the men and women who worked there — of the wartime effort that finally broke the Nazis' vaunted Enigma cipher.
The book describes the quiet recruitment of staff (in one case, a tap on the shoulder of a bright Oxford student by a professor of ancient history), the technology employed (the world's first electronic computer was invented Bletchley Park) and the exhausting, around-the-clock task of codebreaking itself.
3. "Anthony Blunt" by Miranda Carter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001)
In the mid-1930s, a number of young men at Cambridge University were recruited to spy for the Soviet Union. Five of them became known as the Cambridge Spies. Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby eventually fled to the Soviet Union; John Cairncross was exiled from Britain; the only one who stayed behind, undetected until the 1960s, was Anthony Blunt, the subject of Miranda Carter's absorbing biography.
During World War II, Blunt worked for MI5, the British counterintelligence service, slipping secret documents to the Soviets. In the postwar years, he became an eminent art historian and Keeper of the Queen's Pictures. He was knighted in 1956. After his betrayal was discovered and Blunt agreed to give a full confession, his role in the spy ring remained an official secret until it was revealed in 1979 and confirmed by the government.
Carter's book benefits from research in the KGB archives and interviews with Blunt's contemporaries. It explores -—but does not try to explain -—the paradox of a man who betrayed his country and yet accepted its honors.
4. "Elizabeth's Spymaster" by Robert Hutchinson (St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne, 2007)
In 1570, when Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth for refusing to return England to the Roman Catholic fold, conditions ripe for intrigue soon developed. Elizabeth's Catholic subjects felt conflicted loyalties; the pope's action had made attacks on England by Catholic countries more likely, and some co-religionists of Elizabeth's Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, were conspiring to put her on the throne.
As Robert Hutchinson relates in "Elizabeth's Spymaster," the English queen countered with Francis Walsingham, who for two decades operated what was effectively England's first counterintelligence service, with tentacles stretching across Europe and agents throughout England. He ensnared Mary and forced her execution, and later provided intelligence that helped defeat the Spanish Armada. Walsingham was deadly effective as a spymaster — smashing several conspiracies.
5. "Agent Zigzag" by Ben Macintyre (Harmony, 2007)
On a December night in 1942, a Nazi agent parachutes into England with a mission: to sabotage an aircraft factory. MI5 is waiting for him, though, because the Bletchley Park codebreakers have been reading Germany's secret messages.
The captured spy is Eddie Chapman, a British petty crook who had been recruited by the Germans after they occupied the Channel Islands and found him in prison there. Now he will be converted by MI5 into a double-agent named Zigzag.
As Ben Macintyre ably chronicles, Chapman would go on to deceive the Nazis about the Allies' war plans, including the date and place of the D-Day landings.
