Stars and Spies by Christopher Andrew & Julius Green

Author:Christopher Andrew & Julius Green [Andrew, Christopher & Green, Julius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473558281
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2021-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Noël Coward was convinced that he also had a unique talent for intelligence collection:

I was to go as an entertainer with an accompanist and sing my songs and on the side doing something rather hush-hush … [Stephenson] saw where my celebrity value would be useful and he seemed to think I ought to be as flamboyant as possible, which was very smart of him. My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot … a merry playboy. It was very disarming. Very clever of him.32

Hidden in plain sight like a traditional court jester, Coward believed ‘My celebrity value was wonderful cover.’ ‘I could have made a career in espionage’, he claimed, ‘… My life’s been full enough of intrigue as it is.’ Coward’s understanding of espionage, however, was based more on fictional stereotypes than on actual intelligence collection. ‘So many career intelligence officers’, he wrote, ‘went around looking terribly mysterious – long black boots and sinister smiles.’33 The long black boots and sinister smiles, however, derived from Coward’s vivid imagination rather than the reality of SIS operations. When intelligence became dull, he lost interest in it. Copies of confidential reports to BSC, which survive in the Noël Coward archive, of his meetings with leading American industrial and political figures show that his patience was severely tested by, among others, Roosevelt’s Republican predecessor as President, Herbert Hoover, who remained active in politics and international relations: ‘I am not very favourably impressed by Mr Hoover … he must have been the hell of a dull President.’34

Coward found intelligence collection in Latin America and further afield less tedious:

I was never terribly good at wearing a jewel in my navel like Mata Hari … I was the perfect silly ass. Nobody in South America or among other neutrals considered I had a sensible thought in my head, and they would say all kinds of things I would pass along to Bill [Stephenson].35

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