April 2023

His name was Fergus Andrew Mactavish and he was a farmer in a remote part of Argyll. He went to his grave, unexposed, in 2003. At that simple ceremony of farewell, conducted under a West Highland sky filled with sharp, April light, only two of those present were aware of any claim that Fergus might have to be listed in the company of some of the centuries best-known spies. And those two would never speak about it. Never.

Mactavish – as he was generally known – had a farm not far from Ardgour, a village on the shores of Loch Linnhe, a long sea loch that led up to Fort William and the Great Glen beyond. Argour did not consist of very much – a hotel, well-placed at the top of the ferry slipway, a general shop, and a post office. But that was all that most people needed. For any other purpose there was Fort William a brief ferry ride and drive away, or Oban about an hour or so further south. Above the village there were great sweeps of mountainsides down which, after heavy rain, thin waterfalls felt like white threads. It was dramatic scenery by any standards, but taken for granted, as such things always are, by those who lived there. The mountains, though beautiful, supported very few sheep; the waterfalls and locks were all very well but they led to the general damp that brought the midges in their summer swarms; and the sea loch cut one off from places that would otherwise have been more easily reached. Yet it was clearly far better than Glasgow, where people went off in search of work, only to find they yearned for everything they had left behind, and from which they often returned, determined not to leave again.

Mactavish’s farm was barely two hundred acres, but was large enough to support a small herd of beef cattle and a flock of Blackface sheep. He was a good farmer, and made the most of things, as had his wife, who had died when their daughter, Kirsty, was seventeen. Kirsty remained at home, not entirely out of a sense of duty, but because she saw no reason to go anywhere else. This suited Mactavish, as she was a good housekeeper, but he occasionally wondered what would happen if she were to marry. He hoped that she would do so, of course, as he wanted her to be happy, and he belonged to a generation where to be single was seen as a failure significantly reducing one’s changes of happiness. But she showed no signs of looking for a husband, smiling enigmatically whenever he tactfully mentioned the possibility. ‘You never know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. And there aren’t all that many decent men around here, if you ask me. So maybe I won’t.’

In 1980, when Mactavish was fifty-four and Kirsty was twenty-seven, there was a major crisis in their household. This concerned land and came about when the local council declared its intention of clicing off a portion of Mactavish’s best field in order to build a new road.

‘Nobody needs a new road,’ Mactavish pointed out in a long and outraged letter to his councillor.

‘Probably not,’ replied the councillor. ‘I certainly voted against it, but it’s the committee, you see. They’re the ones who look after roads and things like that. They said we do need a road, and that’s that. You’ll get your compensation, remember.’

That, thought Mactavish, was not the point. He wanted land, not money, and he vigorously protested his case to this effect, even engaging a solicitor in Inverness to write on his behalf to the council. His efforts were to no avail, though, and he concluded that the British state, as represented by its road-making authorities in the Western Highlands, was rotten to the core.

Tossing and turning in his bed one night, filled with resentment at the imminent arrival of the council’s bulldozers, it occurred to him that if the authorities could treat a law-abiding farmer in such a way then they had sacrificed any claim they might have to his loyalty. And it was at that point, just as he was about to get up and attend to the livestock, that he decided he would work for the Soviet Union. That would teach them, he thought. That would teach them in Edinburgh and London. They would only have themselves to blame.

This extract is from The Private Life of Spies, which is available in hardback here.