Shock Therapy: the first novel by Angus Blair, a spy recruited while at Cambridge

We all know how spy recruitment is supposed to happen around these parts – a tap on the shoulder while a student at Oxford or Cambridge leading to a life spent serving King and Country in the intelligence services.

Well that’s pretty much how author and former spy Angus Blair, who has recently published his first novel, ended up working for MI6.

An alumnus of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the well-travelled and very successful businessman, who writes under a pseudonym, was approached to join MI6 while studying at the university in the early 1980s.

He subsequently travelled widely behind the Iron Curtain and served in the British Army.

An obsessive wanderer, Angus has visited around 117 countries and now divides his time between London, Lisbon and Cornwall.

His debut novel is a spy thriller titled Shock Therapy, and around 50 per cent of it is based on personal experience.

“During lockdown I went on the Faber novel writing course, which I found very useful,” explains the man of many talents, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his home in Greenwich.

“I think what I wanted to get down on paper is 40 years of just having known people in the intelligence field, having had a little exposure myself; I wanted to get down some vignettes and some characters that I found interesting.

“I like reading spy fiction and most spy fiction is written with the main characters being these kind of steely professional intelligence officers, and I’ve seen a world of intelligence where I’ve seen a lot more bumbling and mistakes and people who are not particularly trained in intelligence being dragged into things – and I wanted to actually more reflect that.”

Recalling how he was first recruited into the service, the Bradford-born author says: “As far as I can go into it, my own experience was back in the early 80s as an undergraduate studying history in Cambridge.

“I was lucky enough to be tutored by Christopher Andrew, who’s one of the foremost professional historians of intelligence.

“I worked on research for him into real-world spying, and [author and columnist] Ben Macintyre was one of my contemporaries, so I got interested at that stage.

“I was in the Officer Training Corps and got time on a big exercise in Germany where I was asked to play by the Intelligence Corps a defecting Soviet Air Force major that went into an interrogation centre, so I had some real experience then.

“In my final year I had the classic approach from one of my history tutors to actually go through recruitment for the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, so I got a sort of taste for that world early on.

“And although I went off and had a business career, I stayed in touch with people from that world and latterly I’ve ended up being on the board of something called the Cambridge Security Initiative, which is a think tank that takes Cambridge University expertise in various fields – geopolitics, etc – to the business world.

“It’s chaired by Sir Richard Dearlove, who was previously chief of MI6, and it’s got two former heads of GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters] on the board as well.

“So I still know that world, and the novel is really about trying to bring it to life in a perspective that I’ve seen it.

“I think a lot of the scenes and the characters certainly have more than a grain of truth to them.”

Despite much of the novel being based in reality, Shock Therapy probably has more violence in it than a spy might encounter in the real world.

“I think so,” says Angus, who was actually in Moscow just before the Soviet Union collapsed (“I was there when it was in that ‘Wild East’ time of transition from Soviet Union to the sort of state we’re in now”), adding: “There seems to be two sorts of spy novels, if you look at them.

“There’s the kind of psychological slow-burn, character-rich John le Carré and Graham Greene, and then you’ve got the sort of shoot ’em up, Kalashnikov-wielding, more the Ian Fleming type – and I think I just didn’t know which way I was going to go with the novel.

“It’s more of a psychological novel, trying to get into the minds of people who get sucked into the world of spying.

“But I think I did put a bit more violence and drama into it to keep the pace going. I’ve not really come across anything like that in the real world.”

Elaborating on this last part, Angus says that in real life spying is more about staying in the shadows: “Anybody who’s from that world of MI6, whenever you talk to them about James Bond, they say he wasn’t a spy, in any sense we’d recognise, he was an assassin, he was a hitman – he’s not a spy.

“He uses his real name and he’s flash, so the real world is more like that [being discreet].

“But one thing I would say is for MI6 operations, all the ones that I’ve had sight of, they do like to go to the nicest restaurants in London and stay in the nice hotels, so there’s still an element of glamour to it.”

Angus, who has also lived in Japan and the US, notes that there is an “interesting difference” between how the various intelligence services conduct themselves.

“There’s three intelligence services in the UK: GCHQ, MI5 and MI6,” he explains.

“GCHQ don’t recruit heavily from Cambridge, for instance, it’s very much people who like to sit on their own facing a computer.

“MI5 are people who do really want to be in the shadows, MI6 I think recruits quite a different breed of people who tend to like the high living and who are motivated quite differently and probably would like the life of James Bond, but just can’t afford it and it wouldn’t work professionally.”

Is a ‘tap on the shoulder’ still the way it’s done at the UK’s two most prestigious universities?

“My understanding is that for a period it went from a tap on the shoulder to more open recruitment,” replies Angus, “and what I’m told is it didn’t work out as planned...

“I think tap on the shoulder still definitely happens, but obviously you can go online and tap in MI6, SIS, and use it to see adverts for recruitment, so I think they’ve gone to a more hybrid model.

“One of the issues they’ve got is they’ve got some very strict nationality rules, in terms of your parentage and your grand parentage, which I think, frustratingly, limits the choice of candidates, but the tap on the shoulder still happens.

“Having said that, the tap on the shoulder process, if you think back to the Cambridge Five, failed disastrously, so I think they keep experimenting with the right way to do it.”

Shock Therapy, which took Angus a year to write, is available now, published by Troubador Publishing (troubador.co.uk), priced £9.99.

Its protagonist Henry Bradbury is set to return in a second novel, The Beijing Book Club, which Angus hopes will be released “in the middle of next year”. For more on Angus Blair, visit angusblair.co.uk.