Tamam Shud, And You Really Wouldn't Know It...

 The Spy File: Six Realities That Shatter the Movie Myth

Time and again, we ‘assume’ we know what a spy looks like. It’s an image that spy fiction has given us: a suave, hyper-competent operative, armed with exotic gadgets and tailored suits, navigating a world of glamour and high-stakes action. They are brilliant, ruthless, and almost always successful. This is the myth.

But, sadly, that rarely, if ever, works out.

As part of the process of writing the book about the Somerton Man case, my research, looking at declassified files and reading personal accounts, shows that in reality, the truth is far stranger. It turns out that the life of a spy is more mundane, often more terrifying, and nothing is ever as it seems.

Real-world espionage isn't about outwitting a villain playing cards in a casino; it’s about trying to get a faulty radio to work in an old, damp kitchen. I've found it's a world plagued by bureaucratic incompetence, amateurish plans, and profound human error, where the greatest threat to an operative could well be found in their own chain of command.

The history of espionage isn't about sinister men with foreign accents; it’s about the little tobacconists or the man in the High Street bookshop, driven by motives far more complex than simple patriotism.

The story about real spies is a deeply human one; it’s messy, counterintuitive, and it’s one that the movies won't tell you about.

The Book Store Assistant Was a More Likely Spy 

Than the Man With a Foreign Accent...

Contrary to the flamboyant characters of fiction, my research shows real spies are masters of the unremarkable. Their greatest asset wasn't a weaponized car, but their own profound banality. I’ve examined the case files of one effective Russian network in Switzerland. What did I find? Not assassins or seductresses, but "a respectable publisher, a well-known military commentator, and an embusque Englishman", people designed to operate in plain sight. That was their legend, their cover story.

As for recruitment, that didn't happen in a shadowy rendezvous with smooth jazz playing in the background. It was a scene of suffocating middle-class respectability.

There is a story about one agent who was inducted into Red Army Intelligence in a London flat defined by its chintz armchairs and suburban lace curtains, a world where you are more likely to be offered a cup of tea and a biscuit than a cyanide pill.

The operational lesson here is that ‘incongruity’ was the point. The ability to blend in, to be utterly forgettable, was the most critical skill. While ‘thrillers’ train us to look for the outlier, the real world of espionage relies on the person you would never suspect. The "grey man" or "grey woman", the trainee nurse, the Australian Army motor mechanic, or the used car salesman. Ringing any bells?

If your only 'manual' or knowledge is spy fiction, you would never recognise a real spy. You could be talking with them, socialising with them, or even hiring a car from them, and you wouldn't know, such is their immersion in the 'legend' or cover story they have had created for them

It would be possible to parade the whole of that Swiss network referred to earlier, and you wouldn’t give them a second glance. Nowadays, the businessman from Canada, the old guy with a London or Adelaide corner bookshop, or the boisterous car salesman on the 8.15 into town are far more likely to be spies than any 'femme fatale' blond or well-heeled business executive.

Many Idealists Fought and Died for a Lie

In the 1930s, thousands of volunteers flooded into Spain to join the fight against Fascism. For many, like one agent who departed for France on a cold night in 1936, the cause was built on "clear-cut ideals" of stopping tyranny. They endured hand-to-hand fighting in its worst form, were always ill-equipped, and watched their comrades fall into unmarked graves, all in the firm belief that they were fighting for freedom.

Sad to tell, the truth was almost always something else entirely. The shocking fact, which this agent only learned years later in Moscow, was a cold lesson in geopolitical cynicism. When you handed in your passport at the recruiting station, you would have had no idea that the man behind the desk collecting those documents knew full well that many of them would be used to provide false documentation to others when you didn't return.

Soviet policy was deliberately not for the Spanish Republicans to win the war. Instead, the Kremlin provided just enough arms to prolong the conflict, bogging down Germany and Italy in a costly stalemate. So no, the goal wasn't to save Spain; it was to serve a calculated Russian strategy. Feel the chill?

Had he been told this while in Spain, our agent later reflected, "I would have rejected it as so many Fascist lies." He wrote: "It was not till many years later that I was told in Moscow that it had not been in the interests of the Soviet Union for the Republicans to win... My comrades fell believing that they were fighting for freedom. In some ways, their lot was enviable."

Deviousness, deceit, and cynical manipulation of idealists on the battlefield was mirrored by an equally deadly, if less intentional, betrayal from within the intelligence services bureaucracy itself: sheer, catastrophic incompetence.

Spy Agencies Were Often Dangerously Incompetent

You would think, given the high stakes, that WWII intelligence agencies were infallible, 'working like clockwork' organizations. But not so. The research shows they were frequently plagued by an almost suicidal level of negligence. For many agents, the greatest existential threat came not from the Gestapo but from their own side's blunders. This level of deep stupidity wasn't confined to the Soviets. Leo Marks, in his book, Between Silk and Cyanide, describes more than one instance of almost criminal behaviour on behalf of some of the so-called 'leaders';

Let's look at the most glaring example I found when researching Moscow Centre's handling of its own network in Berlin. In a stunning breach of operational security, Moscow sent a coded radio message to its Brussels network that contained the actual names and addresses of contacts in Berlin. The Germans intercepted this message. A single decryption was all it took to unravel the entire Rote Kapelle network operating in the heart of the Third Reich. Doesn't sound possible, does it?

And sadly, once again, this wasn't an isolated case. Elsewhere, Resident Director Rado compromised his entire Swiss network by foolishly leaving his financial records, copies of sent telegrams, and even his code book in another agent's apartment, where they were promptly seized by the police.

Day-to-day work was defined by clumsiness. One agent recalled the "exceedingly difficult and rather humiliating" experience of having to dig in a flower bed for a transmitter hidden in a biscuit tin just before a transmission. These weren't isolated incidents; they were part of a pattern of operational sloppiness that put countless lives at risk. How some of them survived is beyond me.

As the Brussels network's leader, Trepper, exclaimed when he heard the news from Moscow: “It's not possible. They have gone crazy!”

Real-World Assassination Plots Could Be Incredibly Superficial and Naive 

Let’s talk about the issue of assassinations. While today's average movie spies deploy laser-sighted rifles, the real agents I've researched relied on incredibly amateur plans, almost comical in their desperation.

Consider one plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler at his favorite Munich restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria. The scheme was, in the words of an agent involved, "incredibly jejune." An operative was to station himself at a table. As Hitler passed, the agent would rapidly and furtively put his hand into his pocket. The goal wasn't even to attack, but simply to have a second agent across the room watch the reactions of the Gestapo guards to see if they would flinch.

The plan's climax? An anticlimax. The agent pulled out a cigarette case, and absolutely nothing happened.

Another proposed act of sabotage involved destroying a Zeppelin using a homemade incendiary bomb compounded from chemicals that could be bought openly, including sugar and aluminum powder. The agent tasked with the job, however, was not at all convinced the device would be powerful enough to set a leather seat cushion on fire, let alone destroy an entire airship.

And there we have it, the fundamental disconnect between the cinematic fantasy and the often crude reality.

Your Own Boss Was Often Your Deadliest Enemy

The research shows that operational sloppiness claimed countless lives; the deliberate, paranoid self-sabotage from the very top was the most devastating. For Soviet agents operating inside Nazi Germany, the Gestapo was only one of two mortal threats. The other was their own master, who went by the name of Josef Stalin.

Before the war even began, Stalin's Great Purge had gutted his own intelligence apparatus. Hundreds of experienced German communists who could have formed a resistance backbone were executed. In the Berlin embassy alone, I learned that five of the eight intelligence officers were recalled to Moscow and shot.

But the most catastrophic failure was Stalin's outright denial of the coming invasion. His own agents—including high-level sources like Harro Schulze-Boysen in the Air Ministry and Arvid Harnack in the Economics Ministry provided numerous, detailed, and accurate warnings about the date and plans for Operation Barbarossa. Richard Sorge had confirmed as much in his messages from Japan. Sorge was to eventually pay the ultimate price at the end of a hangman's noose in Sugamo Prison, Tokyo, with his famous last words being, "The Red Army! The International Communist Party! The Soviet Communist Party!" And Stalin let him die.

Stalin dismissed Sorge's and every single report as a "German double-cross" or an enemy provocation.

Then came the ultimate betrayal. After the invasion proved the intelligence correct, Stalin's first move was to eliminate the witnesses to his monumental error. On October 28, 1941, fourteen of the most competent officers in the Soviet armed forces who had futilely alerted him were executed without trial, used as scapegoats for their leader's madness.

The Betrayal Continued After the War

For those who risked everything to fight Nazism from within, the end of the war did not bring justice or recognition. Instead, many found themselves abandoned or persecuted in the cynical political climate of the Cold War.

The Gestapo had successfully branded the German resistance network known as the Rote Kapelle as a purely "Soviet conspiracy." After the war, I found that this false narrative was conveniently exploited by the Americans, the Soviets, and even former Nazis. In West Germany, members of the anti-Nazi resistance were often still regarded as traitors who had stabbed their country in the back. As late as the 1960s, the widows of executed resistance fighters were denied state pensions.

There's the case of Greta Kuckhoff, a survivor of the Rote Kapelle, who was horrified to find herself being investigated by American occupation forces. The man they were using as their key intelligence source on her activities was Manfred Roeder, the same Nazi prosecutor who had sent her husband and friends to their deaths.

It is a little difficult to understand. In the new calculus of the Cold War, an unrepentant Nazi was a more reliable asset than a proven anti-fascist. As the future Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, noted: "Before the war, the West did not take too seriously the pleas of those anti-Nazi Germans who tried to enlighten it. … After Hitler went to war and Western eyes were finally opened to what Hitlerism meant, no one would have anything to do with the German opposition."

Beyond the Caricature

In closing, the reality of WWII and early Cold War espionage is a chain of human folly. It's about mundane shopkeepers sent to die for a geopolitical lie, betrayed not by the enemy's brilliance, but by their own side's staggering incompetence. It's about amateurish planning, all while being actively sabotaged by a paranoid leader whose successors would abandon their memory after the war.

This is the unsettling story of flawed, frightened, brave, and sometimes foolish human beings navigating a world of moral ambiguity and betrayal born of ignorance and a liberal dose of narcissism.

Yet still the myth endures, the 'superspy' is, in itself, nothing more than a psychological operation we perform on ourselves. The falsehood papers over the messy, terrifying truths about the cynical nature of power, the fallibility of institutions, and the tragic waste of human idealism. When we strip away the myths, we see that the history of espionage is a raw reflection of our own complicated and uncertain humanity.

So what does it say about us?  Do you still prefer the fantasy? Do you still think that the body on the beach at Somerton was of a man who had reached the end of his tether?

This last image is one I couldn't resist; it is a mobile bookstore in London in the early 1930s.