Was Mackintosh a Spy?
Might have been, reports Dr. Philip
H.J. Davies.
One of the most persistent spheres of speculation in the Sandbaggers
fan community is whether or not Sandbaggers creator and author
Ian Mackintosh was ever a member of the British Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS). Actor Ray Lonnen recalls that the cast used to
chase Mackintosh with this question. The most he would ever say
was things like ‘might have been’
Most fans probably lean towards the conviction that Mackintosh
had served with SIS, or at least somewhere in the UK intelligence
community (IC). This is hard sentiment to avoid, especially as
The Sandbaggers was perhaps the only televised or cinematic version
of intelligence to get anywhere near the actual way in which the
IC operates.
The programme has an authentic, downbeat and understated quality
to it that reflects both the office-bound world of what David
Cornwell (ex-SIS and MI 5) writing as John le Care has called
‘senior espiocrats’, and the ninety-nine percent boredom
and one percent panic quality of life that characterises life
in the defence and intelligence communities the world over. More
importantly, and more compellingly, Mackintosh displays an eerily
accurate sense of how intelligence operational planning and execution
happen in the British government, and an apparently comprehensive
grasp of how the UK IC is structured and operates.
This sense of inside knowledge is made more visibly noticeable
dialogue of his stories is written in fluent ‘spookspeak’,
intelligence jargon, and the peculiar blend of personal informality
and bureaucratic alphabet-soup argot of the British Civil Service.
A subtler sense of authenticity comes from the series’ complete
freedom of any of the usual romantic conventions of spy-storytelling
from John Buchan to Ian Flemming, and even the almost suicidally
downbeat narrative style of le Carré. One might almost
say the stories were written against those conventions, but the
intricacy and internal consistency of the detail suggests that
Mackintosh was thinking almost independently of the literary conventions,
and only occasionally referring to James Bond ironically to highlight
the gap between those literary and cinematic conventions and his
more pointedly realistic tales.
To those who make a knowledge of the ‘real’ world
of intelligence their business, especially their professional
business, as do I, the Sandbaggers is a fascinating combination
of accuracy and inaccuracy, in which the latter is often harder
to explain than the former. There are essentially two explanations
for how Mackintosh managed to achieve his high degree of authenticity:
firstly, that he was, at least at some point involved in the intelligence
world, and secondly that he simply did some very good research,
and combined that with an intuition for gritty, realist narrative
to create a semblance of reality.
Are You Digging, Willie?
In Sandbaggers jargon, the kind of research necessary to drive
a narrative like the series might almost be considered a form
of digging operation. Indeed, the natural assumption of most viewers
is that one would have to be an insider to have a shred of understanding
of how the British system operated anytime before the 1993 ‘Open
Government’ initiative of the Major administration (or at
least the 1983 Franks Report on the Falkland Islands War). However,
during my own doctoral research on the organisation and management
of the SIS (forthcoming as a book from Frank Cass Ltd later this
year or early next) I was astonished to learn how much information
was already in the public domain about intelligence for those
with eyes to see as far back as the 1960s and 1970s , certainly
before ‘intelligence studies’ took off as an academic
discipline in the mid-1980s.
Mackintosh’s
writing shows a strong command of the available intelligence literature.
For example, Sir Geoffrey Wellingham’s account of reading
‘all twenty six volumes’ of the US Warren Commission
report into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy--let
alone his list of 210 ‘inconsistencies’ in It Couldn’t
Happen Here. In the same episode, Burnside refers to embarrassing
and unauthorised CIA ‘tell all’ memoirs, almost certainly
an oblique reference to disaffected CIA officer Philip Agee’s
controversial ‘CIA Diary: Inside the Company’ (Penguin,
1975). There are various sidelong allusions to new procedures
for political oversight and control that were being installed
at the time as a consequence of the Church and Pike enquiries
of the mid-1970s, and the on-again-off-again President’s
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (more an intelligence consultative
think tank than the ‘watchdog committee’ Geoff Ross
describes it as in the same episode).
Also, C’s references to Congressional testimony by Czech
defectors Ladislav Bittman and Frantisek August are similarly
accurate, and both officers wrote IC backed memoirs of their service,
defection, and allegations of Soviet penetration and disinformation.
Battle Order Mackintosh’s SIS order of battle conforms more
closely to that of the CIA than the SIS, with directorates for
Operations (DO in CIA usage), Intelligence (DI) and Administrative
Services (DAS). Information on the CIA had been in broad circulation
for nearly a decade by the time Mackintosh was writing.
The
Warren Commission delved far and wide, often well beyond its Kennedy
assassination brief, to include the CIA in its scrutiny. In the
wake of the Warren Commission, journalists David Wise and Thomas
B. Ross published their ‘Espionage Establishment’
(published in the UK by Jonathan Cape, 1968). This book includes
a detailed picture of the US system, particularly the CIA. Their
account of the UK system is both mainly historical and opaque
at that. It is in Wise and Ross’ account that we find the
use of the older CIA designation of Plans Division used rather
than Operations Directorate for the CIA’s operational side.
Harvard political scientist Harry Howe Ransom published a 1970
book responding to Wise and Ross and trying to inject a measure
of sobriety and realism into the discussion of intelligence. Ransom’s
‘The Intelligence Establishment’ even telegraphs it
moderate and relatively bias-neutral political stance by echoing
Wise and Ross’ title but substituting ‘Intelligence’
for ‘Espionage’. The former being preferred by IC
professionals, the latter being the kind of pejorative language
preferred by journalists and political activists. This book is
rich in the kind of detail which features in the Sandbaggers.
Ransom provides a thorough discussion of CIA order of battle as
well as key concepts in ‘intelligence theory’. Ransom’s
account of the UK IC is one of the earliest to provide a high
level of detail dealing with SIS, MI 5 (the Security Service),
the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Intelligence Staff, possibly
the first reference to Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ), as well as the Joint Intelligence Committee in the Cabinet
Office. Ransom’s account of the UK IC is worth looking at
in detail for its parallels apparently almost verbatim inclusions
in Mackintosh’s universe.
More significantly, explains that ‘Like the CIA, the British
Secret Service is organised into functional compartments. For
example, one major section is devoted to the collection, evaluation,
and analysis of intelligence information. Another major, if smaller,
section is devoted to special operations, which may include dangerous
espionage or underground foreign political action’ (page
187).
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