Thursday 13 October 2022

Philby, Krays - Comments



MI6 said...

Intrerested in Gangland Britain, organised crime and MI6 then this book is a must devour!

Beyond Enkription (intentionally misspelt) is a must read for espionage cognoscenti and the first stand-alone spy thriller in The Burlington Files autobiographical series by Bill Fairclough (MI6 codename JJ, aka Edward Burlington). It’s a raw and noir matter of fact pacy novel that Len Deighton and Mick Herron could be forgiven for thinking they co-wrote it. Coincidentally, a few critics have nicknamed its protagonist “a posh Harry Palmer.”

This elusive and enigmatic novel is a true story about a maverick accountant (Edward Burlington in Porter Williams International aka Bill Fairclough in Coopers & Lybrand in real life). In 1974 in London he began infiltrating organised crime gangs, unwittingly working for MI6. After some frenetic attempts on his life he was relocated to the Caribbean where, “eyes wide open” he's recruited by the CIA and is soon headed for shark infested waters off Haiti.

If you’re an espionage cognoscente you’ll love this monumental book but just because you think you know it all don’t surf through the prologue: you may miss some disinformation. If you felt squeamish when watching Jaws, you may find the savagery of the opening chapter upsetting, but it soon passes.

This epic is so real it made us wonder why bother reading espionage fiction when facts are so much more exhilarating. Atmospherically it's reminiscent of Ted Lewis' Get Carter of Michael Caine fame. If anyone ever makes a film based on Beyond Enkription they'll only have themselves to blame if it doesn't go down in history as a classic thriller … it’s the stuff memorable films are made of.

Whether you’re a le Carré connoisseur, a Deighton disciple, a Fleming fanatic, a Herron hireling or a Macintyre marauder, odds on once you are immersed in it you’ll read this titanic production twice.

For more detailed reviews visit the Reviews page on TheBurlingtonFiles.org website or see other independent reviews on your local Amazon website and check out Bill Fairclough's background at Everipedia.org.

Do look up the authors or books mentioned on Amazon, Google The Burlington Files or visit https://theburlingtonfiles.org and https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/bill-fairclough and read Beyond Enkription.

At 13 October 2022 at 06:52 Blogger MI6 said...

The secret world of MI6 can be a small one as portrayed by Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce in A spy Amongst Friends about Kim Philby and if you haven’t read it yet, Ben Macintyre will be disappointed!

As all espionage cognoscenti know, Kim Philby was a member of the infamous Cambridge Five along with Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross. Philby knew John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) and ended le Carré's career in MI6 by treacherously informing on all his East European secret agents. Philby (and maybe other Famous Five members) also knew Colonel Alan Brooke Pemberton CVO MBE in the fifties when Pemberton was ADC to Field Marshall Sir Gerald Walter Robert Templer and fought in the guerrilla war known as the Malayan Emergency. Philby was sniffing around for information to help the communist Malayan insurgents backed inter alia by the USSR but got little useful data from Templer’s camp and the insurgents (the Malayan National Liberation Army) were eventually defeated by the British.

In the early seventies Alan Pemberton recruited one Bill Fairclough for MI6 (codename JJ). They worked together on and off for the next twenty years or so. Before 2014 Fairclough’s links with various intelligence agencies became public knowledge and to quash any fake narratives Fairclough set about publishing a series of factual autobiographical novels known as The Burlington Files, only one of which (Beyond Enkription) has been published to date. Given Alan Pemberton (Fairclough's original MI6 handler knew Kim Philby) it is unsurprising that John le Carré turned down Bill Fairclough's offer in 2014 to collaborate on the action packed factual Burlington Files series. David Cornwell responded along the lines of "Why should I? I've got by so far without collaboration so why bother now?" An expected but realistic response from a famous expert in passive fiction who refused to visit theburlingtonfiles.org in case his photo was snatched while on line!


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