Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer OBE has had a varied, eventful, and sometimes controversial career.
During his 20 years in the British Army, Tim served all over the world – from Cyprus and Germany to the Falklands and the Balkans.
After leaving the armed forces, he founded Sandline International, a private military firm that was involved in the notorious 1996 ‘Sandline Affair’. Tim recounted these experiences in his 1999 memoir: An Unorthodox Soldier. Next, he established the private security company Aegis Defence Services, which was active in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While he still does some consulting on the side, nowadays, Tim is a full-time author whose books unearth previously untold stories from the military and intelligence services.
Following his first foray into historical non-fiction, A Dangerous Enterprise (2021) – the story of a covert Royal Navy Unit in the Second World War – Tim joins us to speak about his new book: A Suspicion of Spies.
A Suspicion of Spies is the first full biography of Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, a razor-sharp intelligence agent whose career spanned the Russian Revolution to the Cold War. His larger-than-life adventures provided his lifelong friend, Ian Fleming, with some of the inspiration behind 007.
Below, Tim tells us more about Biffy’s clandestine career and how he discovered his story while giving us a glimpse into his own life as an author.
You wrote your first book, a memoir, over 20 years ago whilst still in the thick of your career. What made you decide to become an author?
“Well, I didn’t consciously make the decision myself, but people said, ‘Look, you’ve done a lot of interesting things, you ought to write this down,’ and I was persuaded.
“Although I think it’s slightly premature to write a biography when you’re still in the middle of your main career, I did it and wrote up to a certain point in time. But I’ve done quite a lot since, so it may well be revisited at some point.”
There’s a 22-year gap between your first and second books. They’re also completely different genres – one being a memoir and the other being historical non-fiction. What inspired you to tell the story of the 15th Motor Gunboat Flotilla?
“Again, it was sort of by accident. I was visiting the Dartmouth Museum in Devon, and it so happened that I vaguely knew the person in charge. He had been in the Royal Navy and our paths had crossed. But he said, ‘Look, there’s a really interesting story here,’ and he introduced me to the 15th Motor Gunboat Flotilla, which had been stationed in Dartmouth during the Second World War, ostensibly to go out into the channel and shoot out German boats. But, in fact, it wasn’t anything like that at all.
“They were forbidden from any form of offensive action. Their job was to drop agents on the French coast – a very clandestine mission. I was interested, so I eventually asked him if anyone had ever written this down, and he said no. After a bit more research, I found that it was an absolutely fascinating story, and decided to write the book, which was quite an adventure.
“All the characters involved [are no longer with us], but their families were around. So I got in touch with David Birkin’s family. He was the Chief Navigating Officer of the flotilla. It was his job to get them, undetected, to a pinpoint on the French coast and back again. And I discovered that his daughter was Jane Birkin, the actress and singer, who sadly died last year. But she and her brother were incredibly helpful and had all of their father’s papers. That was a big breakthrough.
“That led to other interesting people, one of whom was Guy Hamilton, who became a very famous film director, including directing four James Bond films. And [Hamilton] drew from his own experiences, so some of the things you saw in his films actually took place.
“This includes a rather famous scene with Sean Connery as James Bond swimming ashore in a sort of scuba outfit, peeling off his drysuit, and revealing that he’s wearing a dinner jacket underneath. That actually happened off the Dutch coast. They put an agent in a dry bag and he went ashore, unzipped it, went into a casino, and met his contacts in the resistance.
“So that’s how it all started and the current book led on from that one because one of the ‘customers’ of the flotilla was this fellow Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale.”
What was it about Biffy Dunderdale that made you want to write a book about him?
“You can’t resist a name like Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale. It’s straight out of Tintin or John Buchan. I started researching him and found that he kept being mentioned in other books but nobody had written a book about him. I think that was partly by design because he was quite clever at keeping his secret career a secret.
“But when I got into it, I found that it was just as exciting as James Bond, George Smiley, or any of our other popular espionage heroes, if not more exciting because it was real.”
What’s your research process like? How do you unearth your facts?
“Well, you start by scanning the internet. That’s a fantastic research tool but not always to be believed. What it does is give you some pointers. Then there are archives. For the first book, and again for the second, it was the National Archives in Kew. And for the second, I also used the French Military Archives in Vincennes a lot.
“But the real treasure trove is when you find a relation, friend, or associate who’s got a trunk full of documents, souvenirs, photographs, artefacts, etc. That really does open it up. In Biffy Dunderdale’s case, I was very lucky that the first person I met was his nephew who had a whole lot of stuff at home. Eventually, I found all his living relatives and the relatives of three of his closest associates.”
Considering he was one of the 20th century’s most consequential spies, why do you think no one has written a full biography about him yet?
“I don’t know why nobody’s thought of it before. Although, funnily enough, when I started and got the agreement of these private sources to work with me, a couple of people came out of the woodwork and said, ‘Damn, I wish I had got there quicker because I was thinking about writing about him.’
“I think he just slipped through the net. And whilst he’s extremely well known in the intelligence world, he kept a low profile. In the Second World War, he contributed significantly to the Allied victory – with other people, not single-handedly. Some of the stuff he got up to was incredible. So I just don’t know why. I think I was lucky that nobody picked him.”
Why do you think you’re the right person to write Biffy’s biography?
“I suspect others could’ve done as good a job. But I have a feeling, having got to know him – two-dimensionally, I never met him, but I know him through his friends and relations – that we have a similar attitude towards things, and I think that helped. If you’re writing about someone you have sympathy with, it’s easier because you like them. I couldn’t write a book about somebody I didn’t like, respect, or have time for.
“I could understand how he functioned – particularly his time in Paris where he rather cleverly hid behind a smokescreen of being a playboy; having lots of money and what might look like a superficial existence. But, in fact, he was doing some really good work.
“His primary job in Paris was to liaise with the French intelligence service: the Deuxième Bureau. And because he was a multiculturalist and a multilinguist, the French loved him. They understood him and he understood them. Although he was a Brit, he was born in Odesa [a city in modern-day Ukraine] and had a much more cosmopolitan outlook than perhaps his British contemporaries had.
“Actually, you find that some of his contemporaries in the Secret Intelligence Service, the successful ones, had also been born overseas in ex-patriot communities and had experience living in Russia and elsewhere – and they did a really good job between them. Although they were adventurous in the way they approached intelligence operations, later, after the war, the intelligence service lost its appetite for the more adventurous side of this clandestine work. Happily, for Biffy and others, this coincided with the end of their careers. Biffy retired in 1959.”
You mentioned that your and Biffy’s attitudes are similar. How so?
“I think ‘unconventional’ might be a good way of describing it. Whilst one works in a traditional or conventional service, it’s more of an adventurous or buccaneering approach. That’s how he conducted his business and I rather subscribe to that.”
How does life as an author compare to your previous careers? What’s the transition to this different rhythm of life been like?
“It is different, you’re absolutely right. As you can imagine, running around doing military things or running a private security company in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s a full-time job. You have to be very responsible, the buck stops with you. It’s dangerous, it’s all-consuming. And I spent a long time living with my cell phone under the pillow, as it were, because anything could happen.
“But there comes a time – and I don’t really subscribe to retirement, worrying about getting old, or anything like that – but you can’t function as effectively as you get older. Therefore, it’s time to move on and do something less physically demanding while, at the same time, keeping your brain working.
“So, it is totally different but I enjoy it very much. I think you have to recognise – rather like if you’re a sportsman – there comes a time when you aren’t going to run so fast, so you find something else to do that’s constructive, worthwhile, and interesting.”
We hear you have another book in the pipeline. Could you tell us a little bit about your next project?
“In the same way that Biffy emerged from [writing and researching A Dangerous Enterprise], the next book is going to be a biography of a chap called Charles Gossage Grey who features in [A Suspicion of Spies].
“He was a very interesting man who started life as a newspaper reporter. He was a fanatical flyer of aeroplanes and volunteered for the LaFayette Squadron, which was a fighter squadron made up of American volunteers who fought for the French Airforce in the First World War.
“He was highly decorated and decided in 1918, when it finished, to live in Paris. He became a banker and met Biffy socially. He said to Biffy, ‘Look, if you ever need me to help, I’m here.’ Recruitment processes in those days were less formal than they are now, and basically, he joined Biffy’s secret intelligence service station in the 1930s, using his aeroplane to support them.
“In researching the Biffy book, I came across his family and all their papers and thought it was such an interesting story – again, never been written about. So, I have agreed with the family that Charlie Grey is next. It’ll be another biographical book with the span of the First World War to the late 60s.”
If you’re interested in unearthing more of Biffy Dunderdale’s story, you can order your copy of A Suspicion of Spies here. And for more chats with authors, including our recent interview with Kate Mosse, why not head over to our books and literature section?
Are you planning to read A Suspicion of Spies? Or have you done so already? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
