From Maria Zakharova: On British and other Spies

We’ve long said that the writers and moviemakers of the west write and make movies as part of an anti-Russian campaign and this has been so for a long time.

Some of these will surprise you:

Over to Maria:

When the US State Department says again that Evan Gershkovich is a journalist and not a spy, think about The Summing Up, the literary memoir of British writer Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, Theatre, and The Painted Veil). He was quite outspoken in it about his secret missions:

“I returned to America and shortly afterwards was sent on a mission to Petrograd. I was diffident of accepting the post, which seemed to demand capacities that I did not think I possessed; but there seemed to be no one more competent available at the moment and my being a writer was very good ‘cover’ for what I was asked to do… But I could not miss the opportunity of spending certainly a considerable time in the country of Tolstoi, Dostoievski and Chekov; I had a notion that in the intervals of the work I was being sent to do I could get something for myself that would be of value; so, I set my foot hard on the loud pedal of patriotism and persuaded the physician I consulted that under the tragic circumstances of the moment I was taking no undue risk.

I set off in high spirits with unlimited money at my disposal and four devoted Czechs to act as liaison officers between me and Professor Masaryk who had under his control in various parts of Russia something like sixty thousand of his compatriots. I was exhilarated by the responsibility of my position. I went as a private agent, who could be disavowed if necessary, with instructions to get in touch with parties hostile to the government and devise a scheme that would keep Russia in the war and prevent the Bolsheviks, supported by the Central Powers, from seizing power. It is not necessary for me to inform the reader that in this I failed lamentably and I do not ask him to believe me when I state that it seems to me at least possible that if I had been sent six months before I might quite well have succeeded. Three months after my arrival in Petrograd the crash came and put an end to all my plans.

I returned to England. I had had some interesting experiences and had got to know fairly well one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met. This was Boris Savinkov, the terrorist who had assassinated Trepov and the Grand Duke Sergius…”

Maugham wrote openly that he was a British agent sent to Russia to interfere in its internal affairs and to influence the Russian government. It was in 1917, when Russia was amid revolutionary turmoil, and Maugham was sent there as a correspondent of The Daily Telegraph.

He is not the only Anglo-Saxon who worked for British secret services under the guise of a journalist or a writer. Here are some of the others:

– Christopher Marlowe (Doctor Faustus) – an informer and a secret agent for Sir Francis Walsingham, who created Britain’s professional secret service.
– Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) – a pro-Union spy in Scotland.
– A. A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh) – a propaganda writer for MI7, an office of the Directorate of Military Intelligence with responsibilities for press liaison and propaganda, in 1916-1918.
– Graham Greene (The Quiet American) – from 1941 to 1944, he worked for MI6 as a member of the Foreign Office in Sierra Leone and Portugal. After WWII, he was a correspondent of the magazine The New Republic in Indochina.
– Ian Fleming (James Bond) – an officer in the Royal Navy’s Naval Intelligence Department during WWII.
– John le Carré (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) – in 1959, he was transferred to MI6 and spent the next five years working under diplomatic cover in West Germany, first as Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn and later as a political consul in Hamburg.
– Stella Rimington (Dead Line) – Director General of MI5 from 1992 to 1996.

The others who worked at or for Britain’s War Propaganda Bureau, commonly known as Wellington House, in 1914-1918 are H. G. Wells (The War of the Worlds), Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), and Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book), as well as many newspaper editors.