Читать книгу Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire - Calder Walton - Страница 28

In the post-war years MI5 did not have a specific department dedicated to counter-terrorism, but dealt with it under the rubric of ‘counter-subversion’, the concern of F-Division. The F-Division officers most concerned with Zionist activities were Alex Kellar and his assistant James Robertson. Kellar was a flamboyant Scot who held law degrees from Edinburgh and Columbia Universities, and was probably the inspiration for the ‘man in cream cuffs’ depicted by John le Carré in his first novel Call for the Dead (1961), played in the 1966 film (retitled The Deadly Affair) by Max Adrian wearing a dragon-patterned silk dressing gown with a purple handkerchief and a rose in his buttonhole. During the war Kellar had served as head of SIME, travelling frequently between London and the various stations MI5 maintained in the Middle East. Later, while stationed in the Far East, Kellar would memorably put in expense requests to MI5 HQ for tropical kit, including ‘two Palm Beach and one Saigon linen suitings, white shirts, drill, sharkskin dinner jackets’. Kellar’s homosexuality was widely known within MI5, a remarkable fact given that at the time homosexual practices were still illegal in Britain, and as such were regarded within Whitehall vetting circles as a potential source for blackmail. Vetters also apparently overlooked the homosexuality of the Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt. Despite his sometimes unserious appearance – he had a penchant for wearing purple socks – in the course of his thirty-five-year career in MI5 Kellar served in the front line during the last days of the British empire and the Cold War, acting as a roaming troubleshooter in successive Emergencies that broke out in Britain’s holdings across the globe.²⁵