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I am endlessly fascinated by what makes a person betray their country.
Growing up I was fascinated by…
The Tudors. I had a charismatic history teacher who taught me a lot about the Tudor and medieval times – so not the period I’m writing about now. I also enjoyed reading the novels of Eleanor Alice Burford, who fictionalised the Tudor period under the pen name Jean Plaidy. I used to love that kind of thing.
My favourite period or conflict…
I’m interested in the broad 20th century, from World War I to the Cold War – because we’re still discovering so much. When I learnt history at school, we thought we had a picture of everything there was to know about the period. But now, as a historian working on declassified files, I realise there is so much we didn’t know, particularly about espionage and secret operations.
The figure I most admire…
I think it has to be Edith Cavell (1865-1915), the British nurse who treated wounded soldiers from both sides in the First World War, and was later shot by the Germans. I didn’t really find her interesting until I wrote Women in Intelligence. I knew she had to be in there – to answer whether she was a spy or not. But we have an awful lot more to learn about what she did in Belgium during that time.
My dream dinner party…
I would be fascinated to have Thomas Kendrick (1881-1972), who worked for 40 years in what we today call MI6, and whom I wrote about in my book Spymaster. He was one of the most significant spymasters of the first half of the 20th century – but he also threw lots of cocktail parties while working undercover in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s, and shared with his fellow spies a love of pink gin. I’d also like to get a couple of the Cold War traitors around the table to try to suss out what made them tick. So George Blake, who worked for Kendrick during the Second World War. And of course Kim Philby. I remain endlessly fascinated by what makes a person betray their country. It can’t be as simple as ideology.
My favourite war film…
When I was growing up, I saw a film on TV about Raoul Wallenberg (1912-1945), the Swedish diplomat who saved Hungarian Jews during WWII. The Holocaust wasn’t on the school curriculum back then. I particularly remember a scene towards the end where he goes for a meeting, steps into a car, the door slams – and then he’s gone. It’s believed he was taken into Russia by Soviet agents and probably died there in 1945. It was the first I learned about the death camps and what was happening to the Jews during the war.
A museum to get lost in…
The Imperial War Museum in London is one of my favourites. Then there’s Bletchley Park, which has a very special sense of place because of its history. Finally, there’s the Military Intelligence Museum at Chicksands, in Bedfordshire, which has got incredible artefacts, including items taken from Nazi war criminals. It’s a real gem.
My next project…
I’m bringing out a book later this year called The White Lady. It’s about the MI6 network behind enemy lines in Belgium during World Wars I and II. It’s a subject that’s received very little attention, partly because the files are still being declassified. MHM
Dr Helen Fry is a historian and author who specialises in the history of 20th-century espionage. Her many books include The Walls Have Ears, about the bugging of German prisoners’ cells during World War II; Why I Became an X Troop Commando, a biography of Colin Anson, the German refugee who became an elite British soldier; and Women in Intelligence, which won the silver prize in the MHM Book of the Year Awards 2024. Her next book, The White Lady, will be published in September.
Photo: www.helen-fry.com/Wikimedia Commons
