Three Spymasters and Downing Street

How is George Downing known to history?

10 Downing Street is the most famous address in British politics – the residence of the British Prime Minister. Less famous is the man who built it: George Downing. He lived from about 1623 to 1684 so his life spanned the execution of Charles I, the English Civil Wars and the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II.

Before he built Downing Street, Downing was a spy. He served under Oliver Cromwell as the Commonwealth’s resident diplomat at the Hague, one of the most important intelligence postings in Europe. This was the center of Dutch wealth, Dutch naval power and a large, restless community of English Royalist exiles. Working under Cromwell’s spymaster, John Thurloe, Downing ran networks of informants, intercepted correspondence, and kept Thurloe supplied with detailed reporting on Royalist plotting and European diplomatic maneuvering. He excelled at his work.

What happened on the death of Cromwell?

Then Cromwell died, the Republic collapsed, and the man Downing had spent years spying against returned to England in triumph as King Charles II. He returned to England in 1660 after nine years of exile. England had been through two decades of civil war and had lost around 190,000 people with proportionately even greater losses in Scotland and Ireland. However, the wars had established that Parliament, not the king, controlled the finances and the Divine Right absolutism of his executed father was dead. But Charles still had to make it clear: killing a king was a crime, not an act of state, and had to be punished.

How did Charles II exact retribution on his father’s executioners?

With this in mind, Charles II offered a general pardon to all men except those who had signed the death warrant of his father, Charles I. This was the 1660 Declaration of Breda. Of those still in England, ten were hanged, drawn and quartered. Many fled the country in the hope that they could find refuge from the king’s justice.

Downing should have been finished. He had spied for the regime that had killed Charles’ father. Instead, Charles recruited him and kept him in his post in the Hague. He kept him on in order to demonstrate that you cannot kill a king, no matter how far you run.

Downing’s usefulness was inseparable from his willingness to hunt down his own former comrades. He used his old Hague contacts and his diplomatic position to hunt down three of the fugitive regicides: John Barkstead, John Okey and Miles Corbet. He worked with Dutch authorities to have them arrested and extradited to England, where they were executed. There were even rumors that he led them to believe that they would be pardoned.

This left a bad taste in his contemporaries’ mouths since Downing and Okey had served together in Cromwell’s New Model Army and had been friends. Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, who knew Downing personally, wrote that he was a ‘perfidious rogue’.

How well was Downing Street constructed?

Downing’s perfidy paid off. He was made a baronet a year later and granted land next to Whitehall. Between 1682 and 1684 he built terraced townhouses there, whose design is traditionally attributed to Sir Christopher Wren who was also the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral. They were aimed at wealthy tenants who wanted park views and fashionable address. The construction, it turned out, was about as solid as the man behind it. The foundations were shallow and sunk into marshy ground. Mortar lines were painted onto the brick to make it look finer. Centuries later, Churchill who lived and worked there is said to have complained that the houses were ‘shaky and lightly built by the profiteering contractor whose name the street bears’. One of those houses is now Number 10 Downing Street.

Cheap construction behind a good-looking façade eventually gets found out, just as an organization, product or reputation built on shaky or deceptive foundations gets found out, and then your reputation is ruined for a long time – Downing’s was bad even hundreds of years later.

Downing was a snake in the grass. He was an untrustworthy friend and an untrustworthy property developer but he excelled at human intelligence. He was excellent at tradecraft and completely lacking in morals. Maybe loyalty is a dispensable luxury, to be discarded when your old masters lose their place in the sun. He was willing to switch sides once he saw which way the wind was blowing even at the expense of old friends. Perhaps the next spymaster on this trail was lucky in that he did not need to betray any personal friends.

How did Reinhard Gehlen and his network survive denazification?

At the end of the Second World War, Reinhard Gehlen was a Wehrmacht major general who ran Nazi Germany’s military intelligence on the Eastern Front. He was responsible for assessing Soviet capabilities and intentions throughout the war. As Germany’s defeat became obvious in 1944–45, Gehlen made a decision: he had his staff microfilm the entire archive of intelligence on the Soviet Union, buried the film in the Bavarian Alps, and deliberately surrendered to American forces rather than Soviet ones, offering up his intelligence apparatus and Soviet expertise as leverage.

The American occupation forces established an organization just for Gehlen. It employed a significant number of former SS and Wehrmacht officers who had been actual Nazi security-state operatives, not just conventional soldiers, to do intelligence work for what would become the West German state. Not just Gehlen, but also many of his staff switched loyalty to the winning side. Gehlen appears to have been a cold, methodical operator who understood the value of tradecraft and expertise to the victors in the war. Nobody, neither the Americans or Germans, cared to look too closely at his past. If the Americans ever had any doubts about his ideological sympathies, they never probed. As long as Gehlen kept a low profile, all was well. He left this earth at the ripe age of 77 in 1979.

How well did Hossein Fardoust survive the Islamic Revolution?

In the year that Gehlen passed, a similar transition to the one that he underwent took place in Iran. In 1979, the Islamic Revolution ousted the Shah of Iran. However, just as Gehlen’s organization stayed intact, the Shah’s hated secret police force SAVAK was not actually dismantled. Hossein Fardoust, the SAVAK deputy director, crossed over to the other side, just as Downing and Gehlen had. This was very much a betrayal of his loyalty to the Shah.

Fardoust’s bond with the future Shah had begun early: he was permitted to attend the private palace school set up to educate the sons of court favorites, where he became friends with the young crown prince, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He then accompanied the crown prince and other elite classmates to the prestigious Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland for further schooling.

After disowning the Shah, Fardoust went on to lead SAVAK’s direct successor. The successor agency drew heavily on SAVAK’s methods and infrastructure. Many former SAVAK agents received amnesty as the regime needed them for the Iran-Iraq War, which began in 1980. Survival and career progress took priority over any loyalty to the old regime.

However, only the most skilled and knowledgeable stayed in their posts. The regime probably made the determination: are we retaining somebody for a genuinely durable skill or for something that will stop being useful once the crisis (the transition period, the Iraq-Iran war or something else) ends?

Those who were not useful to the new masters were not so lucky. Many of the lower-level operatives were killed by the revolutionary courts. We can probably never know if Fardoust made any effort to protect them. There is no evidence that he did.

It seems he was imprisoned and denounced on television before dying in custody in 1987. The new regime did not reward loyalty from him. After decades of expertly switching allegiances and surviving multiple regimes, it appears he still ended up imprisoned and denounced by the very regime he had cooperated with; an ironic closing note to a life built on political survival.

What can we learn from the stories of these three spymasters?

Looking at the lives of these three spymasters, maybe we can conclude this even though it is a small sample: if you are a skilled, effective human intelligence operator, victors in a conflict are willing to overlook your affiliation with the losing side in exchange for the use of your talents. You, in turn, must be willing to trade your loyalties from the losing to the winning side. More than this, you must be willing to betray friendships and confidences that you had when you were still on the losing side in order to prove your loyalty to the winners. Some can do this and some cannot.

Of those willing to turn, we can probably never know how much it cost them as human beings and souls. And if you are disloyal to old masters, whether in war or peace, do not assume loyalty from your new ones. The price of treachery is paid in trust you’ll never get back from either side, as Fardoust found out. Usefulness is a conditional, expiring currency, not a bond of trust.