Lifting the curtain on state secrecy - new book

Geoffrey, who lives in Chichester, explained: “My work as a TV producer brought me into contact with various closed worlds – of secret intelligence agencies, special military units etc. I’ve been able to see behind the curtains such outfits draw around themselves, albeit only briefly but long enough to observe how human weakness, ambition and political expediency can align in the shadows. People are intrigued by spooks and that which they cannot see and most likely, don’t understand. My novel draws from personal knowledge and experiences and in many ways illustrates how the Law of Unexpected Consequences comes to bear even in the best run conspiracy.

“Death in a Time of Conspiracy is not a car-chase-bang-bang-you’re-dead airport thriller. It has depth and nuance, strong female characters and an emphasis on the human cost of when agents go rogue. It was partly inspired by a man who’d worked undercover for the British authorities and wanted me to write a book about his life. As I was rather fond of my own, I declined. He wasn’t short of murderous enemies who’d get to him through me. In the end, he understood my reasoning. He’s dead now…but from natural causes. With regard to writing; the process is not unlike pain…it’s rather pleasant when it stops.

“This is my fourth political thriller. The first, A Place of Strangers, relates to the Holocaust and was inspired by information given to me by a European diplomat who’d worked covertly for the Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service. My last effort, The Boy From Zion Street, uses my dysfunctional postwar childhood as a backdrop for a tale of vengeance, blackmail and conspiracy engulfing a judge before the 2015 general election here.”

Geoffrey says he started writing “after people running television got younger every week”: “A brilliant actor friend, Patrick Malahide, urged me to fictionalise some of my experiences in bumpy places like Northern Ireland, southern Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America where I produced Tom Mangold’s BBC Panorama investigation into cocaine smuggling. Not everything heard on the road makes it to the screen and neither do the stories of the brave, fascinating, crazy people one meets either. I’d also had my fair share of grief with the British authorities, not least MI5 and their arms and legs in the Special Branch. Using witnesses from within MI5 who, like me, were risking two years jail, I produced the most authoritative account of that organisation’s domestic spying on trades unionists, peace campaigners and other alleged subversives. For making this programme for Channel 4, my contributors and I were investigated under the Official Secrets Act. But contrary to all the legal warnings we and Channel 4 had received, no prosecutions ensued. In my opinion, our evidence couldn’t be challenged and whoever makes the decision to charge journalists doing their job blinked before putting us in the dock. During a subsequent project for a TV drama about a would-be Soviet spy within MI5, I was locked up under the Prevention of Terrorism Act while my notebook was taken away and no doubt copied. It’s my belief – without any third part corroboration – that I was set up by a retired MI5 officer whom I’d visited a few weeks earlier. Later, I produced three BBC Panorama investigations into the British state’s active involvement in directing Loyalist terrorism in Northern Ireland.”