Historical journalism is how he sees his books
Ben Macintyre is that rare natural storyteller with an uncanny ability to uncover stories long buried and forgotten.
The best-selling British author of 15 non-fiction books, he is just as engaging in person when he meets us on the last morning of the Galle Literary Festival 2025 fresh from a session where he has held the audience at the Maritime Hall captive with inside stories of the Iranian embassy siege in London in 1980 that had Britain transfixed for six suspense-filled days until a crack SAS (Special Air Service) unit stormed the building and rescued the 26 hostages. That was the subject of his latest book ‘The Seige’.
Ben Macintyre Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
For The Seige, he had to obtain special permission from the UK’s Ministry of Defence for the SAS officers to talk about the military operation. “But once we got that then they were very happy to talk. Everyone likes telling their stories. Human beings like to share the narrative of their lives.”
A veteran journalist (a longtime columnist and Associate Editor of The Times, UK), Ben’s success as an author has somewhat overtaken his profession in recent years, but the two remain closely entwined and complementary in his world.
“I’ve always loved writing, I love reporting. A lot of my books, I’m reporting on historical events – I suppose I like the short hit of journalism and the longer spread of books,” he says.
The stories he has zeroed in on have been nothing short of incredible. His first book ‘Forgotten Fatherland’, tracing how philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth (“an appalling Fascist –she hijacked her brother’s writings”) had set up a colony of German settlers in the forests of Paraguay in the late 19th century was written when he was just 23. And he can look back on it with some amusement. “It was a young man’s book…the story had six legs and two heads – it didn’t know what it was – travelogue, memoir or biography.”
A few books later, came the espionage thrillers like ‘Agent ZigZag’ (2007) – about a British criminal turned double agent during World War II, ‘Operation Mincemeat’ (2010) – another World War II tale of deception hatched over the Allied invasion of Sicily, ‘A Spy Among Friends’(2014) – the story of the infamous Kim Philby told through his friend and colleague Nicholas Elliott, ‘The Spy and The Traitor’ (2018) – the secret life of a KGB double agent and ‘Agent Sonya’ (2020) – the portrait of an intrepid Soviet spy in Britain. There were other subjects too – the military history of the SAS (Rogue Heroes) and a love story set in WW1(Forgotten Fatherland) among others.
His war books are not about tactics and military strategies but about people for what fascinates him is what ordinary people do in complicated moral situations. This interest in human fallibility is something he shared with that great spy novelist John le Carre, Ben’s erstwhile friend and supporter. “He (le Carre) was fascinated by how the hidden chambers of the human mind work …why good people do the wrong things and why bad people sometimes end up doing extraordinarily heroic things.”
Espionage, he believes, is more important than it has ever been. “The spies are in the ascendant. There’s more espionage operations going on around the world than ever before.
“It’s one of those hidden parts of government that we think we know about but we don’t really know about. Espionage is interesting because when it works, it is incredibly powerful; when it doesn’t work it can be very destructive. The Gulf War was based on faulty intelligence but politicians have a tendency to believe secret intelligence because it’s secret but it doesn’t mean it’s true and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s better than open sourced intelligence.
And he returns to the complicated moral question. “If you are in MI6, you are persuading citizens of foreign countries to break the law of their own countries, to reveal things they should not be passing on but they might do it for a variety of motives, sometimes honourable, sometimes not. Sometimes it’s all about money – a lot of the time, it’s just about money.”
If he hadn’t chosen to be a writer, Ben could well have been a historian; his father Angus Macintyre was a respected history Professor at Oxford and Ben, his brother and sister, all went to Cambridge to study history.
Interestingly, as a young student at Cambridge, he was approached by a tutor – to have a talk with MI6. Nothing came of it and he is adamant that that shadowy world of espionage would not have been for him. “I like revealing secrets, I don’t like telling them.”
In some ways, he sees his books as historical journalism, historical stories that he hopes will illustrate something about the world. To them all, he brings his ingrained journalistic discipline of extensive, exhaustive research … “assessing and assembling as much evidence as you can and creating a compelling narrative that will encourage readers to turn the page. That’s a kind of journalism too.”
And in this era of pervasive fake news, good journalism is vital, he feels. It’s the same with history. Unscrupulous people manipulate history all the time, he says, alluding to the Trumps and Putins of our time. “They take the past and they frame it in a way that suits their political ends… History has a role to play in stopping that, ensuring that they can’t just hijack history and make it into whatever they want. Historians have as much of a duty as journalists to describe the world in an honest and truthful way, without political bias, in an objective way.
That his writing has all the pace and dramatic elements of fiction comes from his skill in drawing from multiple sources, archival records and eyewitness accounts. “Half the talent is to work out from the multiplicity of narratives, where the reality lies, but after a while, as a journalist, you can,” he says, talking of that finely honed sensibility to know who the reliable witnesses are and who are not. Mind you, the written sources may deliberately tell you something that’s not true and you can’t interrogate them, he notes.
“For me the gold dust is something that’s written at the time. A combination of written material and living witnesses; for me that’s the perfect combination.”
Getting as complete a picture as possible also comes crucially from asking seemingly random questions – what did the room smell like, what is the colour of her hair – which allows him to detail the reality.
“I think in narrative non-fiction you have to be absolutely rigorous,” he says, emphatic that he never, ever, makes things up.
In recent years, Ben has had the satisfaction of seeing his best-selling books reach an even wider audience through TV and cinema. With some he’s collaborated closely as in the film of ‘Operation Mincemeat’, starring Colin Firth though he had nothing to do with the hit musical that followed. With others like ‘SAS – Rogue Heroes’ now heading for Season 3, he’s been happy to give complete control to Stephen Knight, the mastermind behind ‘Peaky Blinders’ and see his work take on a whole different dimension.
He leaves us with just a brief tantalizing outline of his next book that will come out in September 2026 after two and a half years of research and a year of writing. Set in post-revolutionary Iran of 1981, it is about a Russian spy recruited by Western intelligence and has a great escape at its heart. And, “his story completely unknown, does materially change the world……………..”
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