Why the collapsed China spy case is hardly James Bond

The information in question included whether Jeremy Hunt would pull out of the Tory leadership race, and James Cleverley's position on tariffs.

Perhaps it's a little childish, but it's hard not to feel a bit disappointed in the state of modern spying scandals - it's hardly James Bond, is it?

The fictional Scotsman spent his time shooting, snooping and sleeping his way around the world, stopping only briefly for the odd vodka martini.

Far-fetched? Perhaps, but there have been plenty of real-life spying incidents which provided a lot more entertainment than whether China knew Tom Tugendhat would get a job in Rishi Sunak's cabinet.

Read More:

• The Scots killed fighting the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war
• How Scotland helped the Czech resistance in World War II
• Scotland's Hong Kong community thriving despite China fears

One famous case was that of Jessie Jordan, a hairdresser born in Glasgow who married a German, Frederick Jordan, who was killed in the First World War and later his cousin, Baur Bamgarten.

She had returned from Germany in 1937, ostensibly to acquire proof of her daughter, Marga's, Aryan descent as "the name Jordan had in Germany a Jewish significance".

She bought a salon in Kinloch Street in Dundee through which Abwehr agents would send parcels and letters to be sent to spies elsewhere.

In 1938 Mary Curran, a cleaner employed at the salon, found maps of Scotland and Northern England marked with the locations of key military sites and Jordan was sentenced to four years in a penal colony.

As John Curran told the Daily Record of their first meeting: "She told us she had been staying in Germany and by the end of our conversation she was very pleasant, and seemed to be a very nice, genuine woman. As she seemed to be a stranger to Dundee, I took her to the train for Perth.

"When I came back home Mrs Curran remarked, 'she could have been a German spy for all you knew'."

Sean Connery as James Bond(Image: © Bettmann/CORBIS)

Probably thanks to Bond, when most people think of spies it's the Cold War that comes to mind - but a Scots spook was at work in Russia long before then.

Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart had been posted to Moscow in January 1912 and served as acting British Consul-General from 1914 to 1917, leaving shortly before the October Revolution.

It wouldn't be until 1924 that the British government would formally recognise the Bolshevik government, but in 1918 it despatched Lockhart as an envoy... with a case full of diamonds to create a network of agents within Russia.

Mystery still surrounds his role, or lack thereof, in the attempt to assassinate Vladimir Lenin on August 30, 1918.

While on his way to give a speech to workers in Moscow, the Bolshevik leader was shot twice at close range by a woman named Fanny Kaplan.

Hours later Lockhart was arrested and taken to the Kremlin for questioning where, according to the Cheka, he confessed to being part of a plot proposed by Whitehall to kill Lenin and overthrow the government.

He was released in a prisoner exchange but later tried in absentia and "proclaimed outlawed and condemned to be shot if found on Bolshevik territory".

The British government has always denied trying to assassinate Lenin, on the basis it wouldn't possibly get involved in that kind of caper - but many of the files remain secret.

The Soviets, of course, were famous for their espionage - that's what kept Bond so busy.

Klaus Fuchs was a German-born theoretical physicist who fled Nazi Germany when it began persecuting communists, attaining a PhD from the University of Bristol and a DSc from the University of Edinburgh before joining the British nuclear programme in 1941.

Klaus Fuchs(Image: )

He promptly began passing information to the USSR, who probably couldn't believe their luck when he was transferred to work on the Manhattan Project.

How much his information aided the Soviets is debated, but Western intelligence didn't expect them to attain nuclear capabilities until around 1953 - instead 'First Lightning' was detonated in Kazakhstan in 1949.

While one might expect that kind of duplicity from a physicist, it's not something you'd ever associate with the morally upstanding profession of journalism.

That, presumably, is why it took so long to rumble Kim Philby.

Recruited from The Times by MI6 in 1941, he had been a secret Soviet asset since 1934.

In September 1945 an NKVD agent stationed in Turkey approached the British Consulate in Istanbul promising to name three high-ranking double agents working in London in exchange for political asylum.

Unfortunately for him Philby was the head of the Russian section of MI6 and an internal memo, declassified in 2015, instructed staff "I would be grateful if all telegraphic traffic bearing on the Volkov affair should be sent through Philby".

Aware his cover was about to be blown he stalled a planned meeting for three weeks, allowing the Soviets time to reach Istanbul.

Another MI6 memo noted that the would-be defector and his wife had been taken on a private plane to Moscow and that it was "extremely unlikely that we shall ever hear from Volkov again". In that, at least, they were correct.

Read More:

• National Archives secrets revealed: From Kim Philby to what Bush said about Israel
• How humble beginnings in Lesmahagow produced Britain’s first atomic spy
• Letter discovered in Scotland with 'last words' of Czechoslovak president is opened

In 1949 Philby was appointed first secretary to the British Embassy in Washington from where he passed intelligence to Moscow, notably the plot to overthrow the government of Albania.

He was almost rumbled in 1951 when the 'Cambridge Five' spy ring was exposed but was publicly exonerated by the foreign secretary, Harold Macmillan.

It took a further 11 years before he was exposed by KGB defector Antoliy Golitsyn and fled to Moscow.

The Cold War espionage was not one-sided, of course, and in 1960 the United States suffered a major faux pas.

The CIA had begun sending U-2 spy flights over the USSR from Pakistan, assumed to be safe because Soviet jets and missiles couldn't reach the required altitude to do anything about it.

On May 1 pilot Francis Gary Powers was flying over Russia when his plane was shot down.

Assuming he had either been killed in the strike or activated the suicide capsule he carried on him, the Americans issued a detailed press release stating that a NASA weather plane had gone off track after the pilot encountered difficulties with his oxygen supply.

A photo was released the following day of a U-2 plane painted in NASA colours with a fictitious serial number, and all aircraft were grounded to check their oxygen supply.

Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev allowed this to go on until May 7, at which point he revealed that Powers had been captured alive and they had the pictures from his camera.

"Now just look how many silly things the Americans have said," he declared with what must have been glee.

This would remain the most embarrassing incident involving U2 until 2014 when Bono put that album on everyone's iPhone without asking.

A joint CIA and MI6 operation to bug the Soviet Army headquarters in East Berlin was 'discovered' in 1956, though they'd actually known about it from the start thanks to double agent George Blake - they delayed the 'discovery' until a year after MI6 had transferred him elsewhere.

Bond may have been a bit more centred on vodka martinis and swift trysts than the reality of espionage but it wasn't all far-fetched: the Bulgarian secret service assassinated dissident Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge with a poison-tipped umbrella; while the CIA attempted to take out Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar and, on another occasion, an infected scuba suit.

British intelligence has been accused of arranging the abduction and killing of Congo's first democratically elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba - but of course they'd never get involved in that kind of caper.

One thing MI6 definitely did do was spy on Russia using fake rocks to hide electronic equipment. Russia made the accusation publicly in 2006 and six years later Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's former chief of staff, had to admit "they had us bang to rights".

Not that spying is always bad - indeed, it may well have ended the Cold War.

In November 1983 NATO carried out Able Archer 83, its most realistic exercise yet, which featured radio silences, new coded communications and the participation of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Unfortunately it was a little too realistic and when the NATO forces simulated moving to DEFCON 1 the Soviets began readying their nuclear arsenal.

It was only after receiving CIA briefings based on the testimony of double agents that US President Ronald Reagan realised the USSR wasn't sabre-rattling - they genuinely feared the West.

He wrote in his memoirs: "Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did... many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them."

This realisation led to a conscious effort to de-escalate, eventually leading to the INF Treaty between the two countries.

With that and the subsequent collapse of the USSR, Mr Bond had to turn his attentions to terrorists and warlords rather than KGB agents. If he ever gets round to chasing Mr Cash and Mr Berry through London we'll know they're really running out of ideas.