Sometimes journalists suggest to their editor that one of their colleagues - or one of their competitors - is a spy.
The cause could be the kind of stories that the suspected individual writes, the kind of places that he or she wants to go, some sort of intuition, instinct or prejudice.
In my TLS review of Harold Evans's autobiography I referred to an 'earlier age' in which this charge was more often - and probably more jusifiably - laid. My Paper Chase includes a vivid acount of an editor's doubts when his distinguished Middle East corrrespondent was found dead beside a Cairo road.
What did I mean by this 'earlier age'?
There are many cases but, since this is a TLS blog, let us take the great poet and sometime Times Persian correspondent, Basil Bunting.
Bunting of The Times? It does not, I know, sound very likely.
His name does not appear in the official history and The Times is a paper which, from Thackeray to Graham Greene, has much prized its literary sons. Bunting was a very great poet. His most famous piece, Briggflatts, was "the finest long poem to have been produced in England since Four Quartets", according to that other passing figure in Harold Evans's memoir, Cyril Connolly.
If Bunting had been a spy, that would have been just one more addition to his skills. Classical students, even in the 1970s, were encouraged to read his translations ("overdrafts" he called them) from Horace and Lucretius. He was a genius at adapting Latin sense to English rhythms. He was also of refreshingly independent mind. His version of one of Catullus's miniature epics ended, after only 22 bad-tempered lines, with the assertion "and why Catullus bothered to write pages and pages of this drivel mystifies me".
There was also his critical campaigning for the music of Monteverdi, his scholastic love affair with the Lindisfarne gospel illustrations, his writings on Japan and old Persia, and The Spoils, a justly celebrated war poem which wanders from the desert to the dockyards of Rosyth by many strange and magnificent ways.
We cannot be certain who was his main employer in Tehran. His archive file is slim. His first salary was Pounds 350 a year. He had ended the second world war war as a British vice-consul in Isfahan and wrote with an easy subversive authority about the threat from Mohammad Mosaddeq who in 1952 threw him out of the country. Like all correspondents of those days, the reports which he sent back to senior editors were better than the articles those editors chose to publish. There is a fine dry sketch of the Persian Queen Mother who "has always had an itch to interfere in politics". It would be hard to detect either a literary genius at work or a master of espionage.
The most graphic cable concerns his departure. "Bunting arrived Baghdad postexpulsion expersia accompanied wife ettwo yearold daughter. Made difficult journey parcar viaheaviest rainstorm... wife grilled, repeat grilled parpolice attempt force her upgive british nationality but she refused despite threat treat infant daughter as persian national prevent child leaving country cumparent".
This sad story did not have the impact that its author intended. The news editor of The Times had a crisp way with words himself: "we sympathise and regret no other vacancy abroad stop" came the reply from Printing House Square three days later. The expenses department, after a certain amount of carefully minuted discussion, did allow him to keep his office Ford Mercury. And that was the Times career of B. Bunting.
An elegant leading article was penned to protest at the expulsion of our man. But, as the poet wrote in a letter to the Editor after a similar leader on journalists and dictators in 1955: "Sir, you expressed as much indignation three and a half years ago, when your own correspondent was expelled from Tehran, but showed the depths of your concern for the freedom of the press by leaving him to starve."
On his return to Northumbria Bunting did, indeed, have a child Persian bride to support and no means of maintaining his correspondent's pasha style of life. Whether because of hunger, anger or because he was forced to earn his living thereafter as a sub-editor on The Newcastle Daily Journal, he maintained no great love of journalism or The Times. In the third part of Briggflatts he paints a picture of pathetic scavengers wallowing in warm ordure, eating each other's trash and pretending to understand the world. Although the setting is among the soldiers of Alexander, the target is clear.
One of the parasites is named Hastor, a man who stares at the stink around him beneath "dung thickened lashes". According to a new biography of Bunting, this is a joke against Colonel John Astor, the proprietor of The Times. The more likely butt of Bunting's bitter wit is Astor's son Hugh, a fellow foreign correspondent whose paychecks were more secure than the poet's own. According to the archive file, Bunting was still in correspondence with H.Astor in 1953, offering pungent advice on Persian affairs. But by 1965, the successful year of Briggflatts and an almost miraculous rebirth for the Beatles decade, Bunting could repay old slights with impunity.
Why did Bunting join The Times? And why was he forced to leave? He claimed a wartime career in spying for Britain, saying that with his antique literary Persian he could communicate with Bakhtiari tribesmen and keep them from the Nazi embrace. In wartime the journalist spy was more acceptable.
He had a lifelong passion for underage girls and, once he had done the decent thing by marrying one of them, he may have found even the stuffy Fifties Times more tolerant than the Foreign Office. Perhaps he used his journalism to continue his spying or perhaps, as wartime rules were replaced by rules of peace, The Times thought he did and took appropriate evasive action. This secret life became the subject of a biography by the writer, Keith Alldritt, but it mostly remains a secret even now.
