BEING a spy does not involve any special skills. Being a writer helps; being an artist is useful. What matters most is loyalty — to your own country, and sometimes to another above your own.
The history of British espionage is crowded with spies with dual loyalties. For example, the Cambridge Five, a group of university undergraduates, were recruited by the Soviet NKVD in the 1930s and remained active until the 1950s. In 1951, two of them — Donald Maclean (codename Homer) and Guy Burgess — fled to the Soviet Union, followed in 1963 by a third, Kim Philby.
A year later, a fourth, Sir Anthony Blunt (then Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures), admitted to being a Soviet spy. Queen Elizabeth II was informed but advised to retain him, perhaps because years earlier, her father King George VI in 1945 had used Blunt (a former MI5 agent) in a secret mission in postwar Germany. Blunt was sent to retrieve the correspondence between Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter, the German empress Victoria, in case they fell into unscrupulous hands.
Other unexpected spies included T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), the novelist Graham Greene, Roald Dahl (a writer of children’s books), and the travellers Jan (formerly James) Morris and Nick Danziger. Both Danziger and Morris embellished their writings with sketches of the places they visited. Morris’ account of her stay in Pakistan is staid compared to the piquancy of Danziger’s Travels: Beyond Forbidden Frontiers (1987). In 1982, Danziger, after receiving a Winston Churchill fellowship of £1,000, journeyed overland through Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China. He spent 18 months, journeying mainly “on foot, camel, horse and donkey”.
Danziger had help from various agencies. In Paris, he contacted a Monsieur LeClerc — “a mine of information” — who provided him with crucial details about Afghan government strongholds, of Soviet bases, units of Afghan resistance, and the names of possible contacts. LeClerc scribbled these on a napkin which he folded and slipped into his own pocket. Much later, Danziger encountered him again in Peshawar where LeClerc was preparing to return to Afghanistan, on another “fishing expedition”.
There’s a thin line between espionage, art and exploration.
Danziger traversed Iran (then under Imam Khomeini), a volatile Iraq, dodged officialdom everywhere, and then aided by the Afghan mujahideen, he entered Pakistan via Chaman. En route, he took photos of locals and earned their goodwill (and money) by making “pretty poor” sketches which he sold. One is reminded of 19th-century itinerants like G.T. Vigne and August Schoefft who gained access to the Sikh court of Lahore by drawing flattering portraits of notables. Danziger lost his precious diary and cameras near the Afghan border. These were miraculously returned to him six weeks later.
Danziger wanted to retrace the ancient Silk Route. By late 1984, he reached Khunjerab. Passing through scenery “so awesome and so forbidding”, he marvelled “at the magnificent arrogance of the engineers” who created a highway through it. After the Khyber, he felt disappointed to find the Khunjerab Pass “not a pass, but a wide open plain”.
Those who have visited Khunjerab since Danziger might enjoy his description of that high-altitude border crossing: “Two pylons were separated by a frontier stone. The Pakistani pylon was smart, new and metal. The Chinese one was a cumbersome wooden pole.” Across the invisible border, he could see hundreds of yaks, guarded by Tajik shepherds on brown Bactrian camels.
The Chinese immigration officers who examined Danziger’s passport couldn’t have been “friendlier”. They offered him first a chair, then an armchair, and finally a sofa. “Do you know,” they told an unsurprised Danziger, “that you are the very first foreigner to cross Khunjerab Pass?”
Danziger’s subsequent journey through China tested his intrepidness. He defied prohibition by visiting ancient sites, stopped in Xian to admire phalanxes of terracotta warriors, made a foray into the inhospitable Taklamakan desert, and managed to secrete himself into Tibet and Bhutan.
At the end of his arduous journey, Danziger, on re-entering the modern world, was made aware how escalation had overtaken him. Shopping in a village near Hong Kong, Danziger discovered that “the price of a paperback would have paid for one week’s board in China; the money for a cauliflower would have bought three meals in Peshawar”. Yet, when he returned to London, the frugal Danziger had some change left over from the £1,000 given to him by his Churchill Trust sponsors.
On the second day after his return, Danziger, walking in London still wearing Afghan clothes, passed a van driver who shouted: “Nig-nog.” Throughout Asia, he had been welcomed as an inquisitive ‘white’ foreigner; at home, he found himself abused as a bearded immigrant.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, August 26th, 2026
