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FiveBooks Interviews
Simon Conway was born in California in 1967, educated in Britain and studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh. He served in the British army with the Black Watch and the Queen’s Own Highlanders. After leaving the military he worked for the HALO trust, clearing land mines and unexploded ordnance in Cambodia, Kosovo, Abkhazia, Eritrea and Sri Lanka. As Director of Landmine Action he ran projects in Western Sahara, Liberia and Guinea Bissau as well as successfully campaigning for an international treaty to ban cluster bombs. He has been following the Taliban since the mid-90s and exploring the extent to which the Taliban and al Qaeda are creations of the Pakistani Intelligence Services backed by Saudi money. In his latest book, A Loyal Spy, there are uncanny parallels between the plot and real life.
Mary Habeck is Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, strategic and security issues and American defence policy. Habeck has held appointments at the National Security Council, served as Associate Professor of History at Yale University, coordinated the Yale Russian Archive Project to facilitate access to documents in the former Soviet archives and is the recipient of the 2001-02 Morse Fellowship. She has a PhD in history from Yale. She has contributed to The Journal of Military History, The International History Review, The Journal of Modern History and others. She says the US contributed to insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan by failing to peel off those with local grievances and treating all insurgents as al Qaeda-linked terrorists.
Pete Winner, codenamed Soldier ‘I’, spent 18 years in the SAS and survived the savage battle of Mirbat, parachuted into the icy depths of the South Atlantic at the height of the Falklands War, and stormed the Iranian Embassy in London during the hostage crisis 30 years ago. He says MI6 is for the public school boys, and the SAS is for men with an ordinary education who have the strength and determination to seek adventure, survive and come back smiling. He describes his work as involving no publicity, no media. ‘We move in silently, do our job, and melt away into the background.’
Audrey Cronin is Professor at the US National War College and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University in the Changing Character of War Programme. The views she expresses in the following article are her own and not the official policy of the US government. Her view on al-Qaeda is that they may implode: ‘By which I mean succumb to internal weaknesses, in-fighting, ideological bickering, loss of operational control, targeting mistakes and loss of popular support – some of the dynamics that we have already seen. Or they are going to transition into a more conventional kind of violence, meaning insurgency or even conventional war.’
Dr Michael S Goodman is a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He has published widely in the field of intelligence history and scientific intelligence, including Spying on the Nuclear Bear: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2008), and, more recently, Spinning Intelligence: Why Intelligence Needs the Media, Why the Media Needs Intelligence (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2009). He is currently on secondment to the Cabinet Office where he is the official historian of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He chooses books on the real pioneers of British and American espionage – flawed men who saved lives and made a difference.
Cassie Knight is a consultant for Catholic Relief Services and has been involved in aid work for the last ten years. She has worked for the Reuters Foundation, for Merlin in Albania and London and she then moved to the Republic of Congo after joining Catholic Relief Services. Cassie subsequently spent two years in India as a regional emergency technical advisor and later served as country manager in Bangladesh. She talks to FiveBooks about aid work.
Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large and Associate Editor on The Times and writes a weekly column on history, espionage, art, politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of seven non-fiction history books, including his latest, Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that changed the course of World War II. Here he tells one of the great unsung stories of WWII: after cracking the Enigma code, the British knew when virtually every single German spy was coming. ‘They were all picked up and offered a pretty stark choice between collaborating or execution. The unlucky 14 chose trial and execution. The rest all agreed to be double agents, and this was a critical part of the war.’
The influential blogger and co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy says that today the US backs Israel no matter what it does, even when it is acting in ways that are contrary to US interests and values. The key to understanding this ‘special relationship’ is the operation of various groups in the Israel lobby. It is not good for the US or Israel.
In the summer of 1995 Charles Cumming was approached for recruitment by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). A year later he moved to Montreal where he began working on a novel based on his experiences with MI6. His first book, A Spy By Nature, was published in the UK in 2001. His latest novel, Typhoon, centring on the Uighur struggle for independence, was chosen by The New York Times as one of the Top 100 Books of 2009. He is currently working on The Trinity Six, a thriller about the Cambridge spies. Most people, he says, live pretty mundane lives, work in fairly mundane jobs; they don’t save lives, chase bad guys down the street, run agents behind enemy lines.
Steve Darlow is the grandson of a bomber command pilot and the author of nine books on military aviation. During 12 years of research, he has interviewed more than a hundred RAF aircrew. He talks to FiveBooks about his recent book Flight Path to Murder, plus five of his favourite books about pilots during the Second World War.