When inspiration is stranger than fiction

Bettmann

One of the greatest joys of writing fiction that delves into the past is all the weird and wonderful things you discover in your research. This is particularly true with the Cold War, a period of fascinating and often downright bizarre plots and schemes. And sometimes, just when you think a real-life story couldn’t get any stranger, it does.

The Portland Spy Ring is famous among Cold War aficionados. It has everything: a philandering civil servant, Americans secretly working for the Soviet Union, and a KGB handler who masqueraded as a jukebox salesman. And now, thanks to freshly released files from the National Archives, this tale has developed another astonishing twist. 

It turns out that the spy ring could have been broken years before it finally was in 1961, if only MI5 had taken one woman seriously.

Harry Houghton was the civil service clerk who was stealing secrets from the Navy’s Underwater Weapons Establishment in Portland, Dorset. He was also having an affair. So, when his wife voiced her concerns about his loyalty – concerns based on his sudden possession of envelopes full of cash, a tiny camera hidden under their hall stairs, and his attempt to push her off a cliff – she was dismissed by MI5 as simply being jealous of the love he was lavishing on his mistress.

This seems like an incredible oversight by the Security Service, and it was. But then, so much of what happened in the Cold War came down to missed clues, un-pulled threads, and lucky escapes. After all, that’s how double agents like Burgess and Philby could survive so long, and how the Mitrokhin Archive, one of the largest intelligence treasure troves ever created, could be smuggled out of Russia in a carrier bag under some sausages. 

Stories like the Portland Spy Ring that bring the past to life so vividly and compellingly are impossible for authors to resist. I couldn’t, and used it as the inspiration for the Calder Hall network of Soviet sympathisers in RED CORONA. But I don’t have a spurned wife in my version, and my KGB handler doesn’t travel up and down the country selling jukeboxes – because I had to make my fiction more believable than the truth!