One summer day in 1958 John Bryan Wood announced to his wife, who was sitting in the garden with their new baby, that he was nipping out for a loaf of bread. But instead of walking into nearby Woking in search of supplies, Wood drove to Southampton and boarded the RMS Homeric, bound for Canada. With him he took his wife’s passport (so she couldn’t follow) and their three-year-old son, Jonathan. What was doubly odd was that, far from being a devoted dad, Wood spent most of his life disowning his many offspring, passing them off as nephews, nieces or step-children. In another way, though, this reckless behaviour was entirely typical of “JBW”, as he was always known. It wasn’t just the string of wives and confused children he left in his wake who thought so, but also his bosses at the Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6.
In this fabulous romp of a book, part John le Carré and part Ealing comedy, Alistair Wood, the baby left behind with his mother on that sunny day, sets out to uncover the truth about his father — or as much truth as is possible, given that many of the files remain closed and the people he wants to interview have all signed the Official Secrets Act.
To say that JBW was a slippery character is to understate the obvious. A man of many aliases, five passports and an incredible 17 languages, he managed to wiggle his way into all the great trouble spots of the mid 20th century. During the war he was in Argentina, tracking the many agents of Nazi Germany. By 1947 it was the Russians who were the enemy, so JBW popped up in Berlin, helping to build a tunnel under the Soviet quarter to intercept KGB communications. It was here too that he met Margaret Miller, an SIS secretary. She would be the second of his four, possibly five, wives and mother to Jonathan and Alistair.
Operation Gold — the name given to the Berlin tunnel — had elements of high farce. It was begun under a Harris tweed shop that had been set up to provide cover. The business proved so popular with locals that it ended up financing much of the operation. On another occasion Margaret, disguised as a German woman in a bad blonde wig, was sent into enemy territory to take soil samples, which she did while pretending to tie her shoelace. It all came crashing down in 1956 when the Soviets “discovered” the tunnel. They had clearly been tipped off by a mole and suspicion immediately fell on JBW. He’d been at Cambridge with Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt and had always shown a marked reluctance to follow the rules. The clincher, though, had been a recent sighting of him going into the KGB office in Helsinki on who-knows-what business.
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JBW was summarily dismissed or, strictly speaking, allowed to resign. But although he was persona non grata at SIS, that didn’t stop him carrying on his career as an international man of mystery. With a doctored CV and change of passport he was taken on by the United Nations and posted in quick succession to Vietnam, Bolivia and Malawi. Ostensibly he was helping with peacekeeping, education and soil drainage. Sharp-sighted observers, though, noticed that he retained a reluctance to be photographed and would insist on sitting with his back to the wall, as if anticipating a bullet from behind.
While JBW remains an enigma at the heart of this compulsively readable book, it is Margaret who emerges as its gloriously vivid heroine. With her SIS training, she was no one’s idea of a pushover. Within hours of Jonathan’s abduction she had armed herself with a replacement passport and sailed for Quebec. Upon landing she identified her son’s nursery school, then followed him and his nanny (who was in fact JBW’s next wife and already pregnant) home, broke in and snatched the sleeping child. Reunited, mother and toddler then headed home to Woking, although not before stopping off for a few days on the ski slopes (one of the great draws of the SIS for Margaret had been the sporting opportunities).
After her divorce from JBW, Margaret rejoined SIS, taking a job at its training camp on the south coast, which came with accommodation. With the Cold War now entering its final phase, “the Fort” was winding down and Wood gives a brilliant account of growing up in an enclosed community of ageing spies who didn’t have quite enough to do. Known mostly by their initials, they pottered about, occasionally practising on the shooting range, but mostly sorting through a mountainous catalogue of records, leads, reports and personnel files. The high point of the week came on Monday evening when everyone piled into the communal TV room to watch Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and tried to remember whether they had crossed paths with le Carré.
So was JBW a double agent? He certainly wasn’t the mole who gave away Operation Gold — that turned out to be another spy, George Blake, who was sentenced to 42 years’ imprisonment. And other things don’t quite fit. At Cambridge JBW was more interested in Sufism than Marxism. Immersed in the mystical side of Islam, he was often spotted meditating under a tree. Decades later, while being interrogated about his unscheduled visit to the KGB office in Helsinki, he maintained that he had been acting on “voices from God”. Reluctantly MI6 decided that it didn’t have a case against him — or God.
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Above all JBW was a passionate pacifist who believed that the point of espionage was to prevent war rather than accelerate it. For decades he passed himself off to wives and colleagues as Norwegian, since it was a neutral country, even spelling his name Jøn. His post-UN career (he was sacked from that job too when more double-dealing came to light) was dedicated to humanitarian work and it was this that took him to Bosnia in his eighties. He died out there, in a car driven by his much younger wife, whom he had met in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War. Despite his spectacular lack of loyalty to the women, children, friends and colleagues in his life, it is just possible that, far from being a traitor, John Bryan Wood was one of the good guys.
My Family and Other Spies by Alistair Wood (Michael Joseph £22 pp384). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members