John Bingham (Lord Clanmorris)

John Bingham, Lord Clanmorris, (1908-1988) also known as Michael Ward, was a British novelist and intelligence officer, reputed to be the inspiration for the character George Smiley, created by his former colleague David Cornwell (John Le Carré).

Bingham was the son of Maurice Bingham, Sixth Lord Clanmorris and Leila Cloete, a descendant of one of the earliest Dutch settlers in South Africa. A great-grandfather on his father's side founded the first Orange Lodge.

He was educated at Cheltenham College.

Through a family contact with Lord Rothermere, Bingham found a job on the Hull Daily Mail in 1930. He moved to the Sunday Dispatch in 1933.

He was briefly a member of the British Democratic Party in the 1930s, a move which led to criticism from his uncle, the MP for Belfast East, Herbert Dixon.

MI5 B Division

It was through Dixon's contacts that Bingham gained an entrée to MI5, using suspicions about what he later decided was an innocent German acquaintance. He was subsequently interviewed by Maxwell Knight, who introduced himself as Captain King.

After Knight was authorised to recruit five new officers by the head of MI5 B Division, Guy Liddell, on 18 June 1940, Bingham was one of the first approached. For much of World War Two, he worked as Maxwell Knight's deputy in B5(b) section at 308 Hood House, Dolphin Square.

However, among his first tasks, carried out directly for Liddell, was the creation of an MI5 press section, which would eventually be run by Derek Tangye. He subsequently became heavily involved in MI5's Double Cross deception operations against German intelligence. He interrogated potential agents among aliens being processed at the Royal Patriotic Schools. He also posed as an Abwehr officer to trap British nationals attempting spy for the Germans, notably Irma Stapleton, arrested on 19 November 1941.

In 1942, he conducted security investigations on General Charles De Gaulle, along with Bill Younger, and on Lady Diana Cooper. Using the name 'John Bentley', he also investigated the Portuguese diplomat Rogeiro Menezes.

In the summer of 1944, Bingham was ordered to continue associating with right-wing pro-German groups, despite the imminence of German defeat. With B Division work winding down, Bingham was seconded to the Allied Control Council in Germany in 1945, on the initiative of Guy Liddell. Based in Gehrden, Hanover, Bingham spent much of his time interviewing refugees and attempting to weed out Soviet agents.

Return to Fleet Street

He returned to London in June 1948. He rejoined the staff of the Sunday Dispatch under editor Charles Eade, a former PR advisor to Lord Mountbatten. One of his first article was a detailed attack on the career of Aneurin Bevan, prompted by Bevan's attack on conservative voters as 'lower than vermin'.

MI5 F4

In the summer of 1950, Bingam was invited by Maxwell Knight to rejoin his MI5 section, now known as F4. Concurrently with his return to MI5, Bingham embarked on a career as a novelist, with My Name is Michael Sibley about an innocent man accused of murder.

Among the agents recruited by Bingham was a family friend, Louis Denaro, assistant managing director of International Nickel. he later recruited Denaro's Czech contact, Emil Smidak.

In 1952, he recruited Julie Pirie, the former secretary of the Duchess of Atholl to infiltrate the Communist Party of Great Britain. This led to Operation Tie Pin and Operation Party Piece, on the latter of which Bingham worked with Arthur Spencer of MI6.

According to Mike Hughes, Bingham became head of MI5's F4 agent-running section after Knight's retirement in the mid-1950s. However, Michael Jago claims that, despite Knight's wish for Bingham to succeed him, he was content to remain a senior agent-runner within the section. He worked closely with David Cornwell (John Le Carré) who joined MI5 in 1958. Their friendship would later deteriorate as Le Carré's character George Smiley, partly based on Bingham, appeared in a series of books that gave a more morally ambiguous picture of the intelligence services, and which eclipsed Bingham's own literary achievements. Bingham is reported to have claimed before his death, that Le Carré worked for Maxwell Knight while a student at Oxford.

Bingham inherited the title of Lord Clanmorris in 1960.

In response to the satire boom of the early 1960s, Bingham created a new subsection of F4, entitled F4/ARTS (colloquially 'FARTS').

According to biographer Michael Jago, Bingham may have interrogated Anatoli Golitsyn alongside Arthur Martin in 1963. Bingham was commissioned to research Golitsyn's biography as a result of the controversy about his far-reaching claims, which included allegations casting suspicion on Harold Wilson.

Bingham's planned retirement in 1968, was delayed by the onset of the Troubles in Northern Ireland:

He had family and contacts there and, although his attempts at an Ulster accent were notoriously dreadful, he was the obvious officer to gather intelligence on the spot.

He made several visits to Northern Ireland over the next six years, where despite his family connections, he regarded unionists as intransigent. By the early 1970s, 'using a network of contacts supplied by a relation, he gathered a mass of useful background information about Ulster'.

MI5's increased emphasis on domestic counter-subversion under Michael Hanley increased Bingham's prestige within the service during this period.

According to Michael Jago, Bingham distrusted Harold Wilson but was nevertheless involved in infiltrating a 1974 right-wing anti-Wilson plot which included his distant relative Lord Lucan.

Bingham's last official task at MI5, was dealing with the fallout from the 1979 exposure of Anthony Blunt, as liaison with Fleet Street.

He retired from MI5 in 1979. he nevertheless continued to carry out occasional assignments for a further three years. In 1982, he confirmed that Betty Gordon had been an MI5 agent in the Communist Party.