Somerset Maugham was one of the most popular British writers
of his time. He was born in the British Embassy in Paris in
1874 and grew up bilingual in English and French. He also
spoke German. His father and grandfather had been prominent
litigators in England and France, and though Maugham seemed
destined to follow in their footsteps, he had a severe
stutter and would never have been able to argue in a
courtroom.
Maugham pursued a career in medicine and wrote fiction in
his spare time. During World War I he worked for the Red
Cross in France as an interpreter and medical assistant. In
1915, Maugham met an intelligence official, who recruited
him to join the SIS, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service.
His first novel,
Of Human Bondage, had just been published. The
official suggested to Maugham that his language skills would
benefit the intelligence service and that he could use his
writing as a cover for his spying activities.
As an agent in the SIS, Maugham's first assignment was in
Geneva, where he installed himself as a French playwright
and succeeded in acting as an intermediary between other
agents in the field and top intelligence authorities in
Britain. Maugham sent coded messages, often embedded in a
manuscript, which passed out of the country and back in
without drawing the attention of the Swiss police. He worked
for the SIS without pay as a patriotic gesture.
In 1917 Maugham thought his duties with the SIS were over,
but when the Russian revolution broke out, Sir William
Weisman, chief of British intelligence in the U.S.,
convinced him to go to St. Petersburg on another mission.
Maugham was asked to gather intelligence on the German spy
network developing in the Russian capital and to support the
Mensheviks by countering Bolshevik plans to pull Russia out
of the war. Posing as a writer for U.S. publications,
Maugham met with Alexandr Kerenski, the socialist leader.
Kerenski sent Maugham to London with a desperate request to
the Allies to raise an anti-Bolshevik army. Maugham sent
back significant information to London and developed a plan
for the SIS to maintain a group of agents in Russia to
combat German influence on the Provisional Government
through propaganda and spying.
Maugham wrote a number of stories about his experiences in
espionage. Warned prior to publication that some of the
stories violated Britain's Official Secrets Act, he burned
most of them. The surviving stories, including an account of
his mission to Russia, were published in his 1928 book
Ashenden. He gave a character in the book the name
Somerville, the cover name he used during his real-life
espionage activities in St. Petersburg.
Somerset Maugham is believed to be the first author of spy
books who actually was a spy. Though his spy life provided
ample fodder for his writing, he never had much enthusiasm
for the work. In his foreword to Ashenden he wrote,
"The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on
the whole monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless."
Intro |
Maugham
| Hari |
Smedley
| Berg |
Hiss |
Bentley
|
Fleming
|
Philby |
Ames |
Pollard
Photo credits
Read Venona Intercepts
|
Family of Spies
20th-Century Deceptions
|
Decipher a Coded Message
Resources
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Transcript
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Teacher's Guide
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Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies Home
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| Updated January 2002
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