Dame Stella Rimington was the Director General of MI5, appointed in 1992, the first woman to hold that post. After retiring in 1996, she wrote a memoir, Open Secret, which was published in 2001. Authorship apparently appealed, as she launched a mystery series with the first called At Risk, published in 2004.
Up until now, I have found that eminent people who turn to fiction don't do it very well, but I picked up The Hidden Hand hoping that the well-informed background of the writer would make it interesting. And I was proved right. While the writing is more reminiscent of Mary Stewart than say, Simon Kernick, the inside details of the world of espionage are both convincing and fascinating.
An inside term that stood out for me is "useful idiot." I've come across a few of those over the years, but not in the spying arena. The character given this appellation is particularly well drawn within a cast of surprisingly well-cast characters. He is Professor Arthur Cole, who over a teaching and diplomatic career based in Hong Kong, developed a passion for ancient Chinese ceramics. This led to many explorations of the interior of China, while he amassed a huge collection (of mostly insigificant stuff, but with a few fine examples), and which drew the interest of the government of the People's Republic.
When he was offered a Fellowship at St. Felix's College in Oxford, Chinese officialdom privately encouraged him to take it up. Even more importantly, they gave him permission to take his cherished collection back to England. Thus, when little requests were made to encourage Chinese students to attend, he readily agreed. And so, over time, he became that useful idiot.
When the good professor floated the idea of establishing a Chinese institute within the college, an endowment miraculously arrived. And so did the students, many fully financed by their government. Spies and enforcers came with them, unconvincingly disguised as mere students. Professor Cole should have realized that he was getting in too deep, but when one of the students complains that someone was snooping through his apartment and his research notes, the "useful idiot" merely reports the student to his handlers. And when the student vanishes, banished to the nether regions of his homeland, Cole does not turn a hair.
Then a particularly interesting student arrives. Her name is Li Min. Her brilliance in the field of Artificial Intelligence is outstanding, particularly in the creation of deep fake videos.
This made the background of the novel even more intriguing. And worrying, too. In deepfakery, a film can be made with previously recorded images and dialogue that is so convincing that it is impossible to believe it is fake. It would be possible to stage a kidnapping, for instance, with a ransom note that demands to be paid. Or a victim could be featured in a video that seems to prove that he or she is committing a major crime like treason.
And this is what is intended for the American daughter of a senior scientist in the Department of Defence, who is a major player in the management of the current confrontation between China and the West in the South China Sea. Shown a video that seems to prove that his daughter is spying for the Chinese, he could be coerced into giving up secrets that would help the Chinese side.
Li Min is the unknowing patsy in this scheme. Yanked from her happy research at Harvard to the much less welcoming institute in Oxford, she mentions her dissatisfaction to a woman who happens to be a friend of Manon Tyler, an operative with the CIA. Intrigued by what she is told, and suspecting Chinese infiltration into the college, Manon goes to Oxford, and joins the college by pretending to be an archivist. (The background to this is excellent, too, as Remington was once an archivist herself.) And so the story evolves, with spies, enforcers, confrontations, a kidnapping, and that very troubling deepfakery.
Altogether, a most interesting read. Recommended.
