Despite being an enthusiastic consumer of spy films and novels, I’ve never much fancied being an actual spy. Physical cowardice is part of the reason – I don’t like the sound of all the piranha tanks, gun fights, torture by sleep deprivation or polonium-laced sushi (depending on genre) – but that’s not the main deterrent. After all, popular culture makes it clear there are plenty of espionage jobs that don’t involve anything more challenging than ducking under some police tape in a cashmere overcoat. That’s the sort of spy I’d dream of being, if I dreamed of being a spy which I’m surprised to find I don’t. The suit-and-tie, office-with-a-rooftop-view, “How can we stop them realising we’ve realised that they’ve realised we realise?” kind.

Which isn’t to say I don’t want to be George Smiley: I absolutely do want to be George Smiley. I just don’t want to be any of the people he’s based on. I’d be thrilled to pretend to be a spy, with lots of people watching and applause at the end. What I’m not tempted by is the long career, wrestling with terrible secrets, mind-bending complications and soul-crushing compromises, while not being able to get credit when it went well, sympathy when it went horribly or a huge pile of money if I happened to be good at it.

Maybe this time it was a belt shampoo bomb? A mace made out of plastic cutlery embedded in a Frederick Forsyth novel?

Call me a showbiz wanker (if you’re reading online, there’s a whole section below entirely designed for that purpose) but, to me, that job sounds crap – though recruitment must have been enormously helped by the efforts the film, publishing and TV industries have made to glamorise it. The occasional poolside page-turner or pacey mini-series on the subject of social workers would probably do wonders for the prospects of thousands of drug addicts’ toddlers.

Not that anyone’s taking on more welfare providers at the moment. Under Theresa May, public spending is all about restraint – that is, the state’s ability to restrain people. So it’s security personnel they’re recruiting, according to reports last week, with MI6 looking to hire nearly 1,000 new spies over the next four years, increasing its payroll by almost 40%. This is part of a widely circulated government plan to increase the staff of all three covert security agencies (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ) by a total of about 1,900.

This all has a very different vibe from the cold war when Britain’s secret services were still secret. Or officially secret anyway, which is not quite the same thing. But that’s no longer politically viable. In this era of austerity, the public would be more offended by the notion that thousands of government employees were doing nothing than that they were, say, invading the privacy of millions, testing the limits of international law and abetting our allies in systematically committing war crimes. “I don’t mind if they’re organising rendition flights, as long as they’re not just sitting on their arses!”

Since 1986, when the existence of a secret intelligence service was first grudgingly acknowledged, all three institutions have been flirting with the limelight. As the Soviet Union collapsed, they all shyly took a bow and, at some point between the publications of Spycatcher and Stella Rimington’s autobiography, possibly when the location manager for a Bond film first rang up to inquire about filming outside MI6, they abandoned the shadows for ever.

In some ways, this process was quite fun – almost like a revelation that wizards or dragons really existed. “So there are spies, after all! And they do hang out in huge central London buildings, trying to steal secrets from each other. How magical!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

But there’s something rum about this openness. To start with, it’s not meaningful openness. We know who the heads of these organisations are – we know, for example, that MI6’s current “C” is really called Alex Younger, thus reducing the code name to the same trivial ceremonial level as Black Rod and the Stig. But we don’t know what they’re actually doing.

The openness about their existence and leadership, but not about the activities of their thousands of staff, is rather rubbing the public’s nose in the fact that there are things we are forbidden to know, and forbidden to know about people whose salaries we pay. In contrast, the previous policy of keeping the organisations as well as their activities secret shows a certain delicacy, even a fitting shame that such a recourse should be necessary in an ostensibly free country.

This shame is understandable in the context of the cold war, when the Soviet bloc countries over which the west, with considerable justification, asserted its moral superiority, kept so much secret from their own peoples. In the free world, secrecy smacked of tyranny. It alarmed people so, ironically, the scale of it was best kept under wraps.

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Nowadays, however, our security services want us to be alarmed. They want it because it will make us feel we need them, and this is the bigger problem with the current openness. The Soviet Union gave spies an indisputable raison d’être. Since its fall, they’ve felt the need to justify their existence. Obviously, before you can justify your existence, you have to admit it – but that was just the first step. The government proudly letting it be known, at a time of considerable national austerity, that thousands more security officers are to be employed shows how successful that self-justification has been.

The language of it is familiar. We hear of “security threats”, “foiled attacks”, of the prime minister “chairing an emergency Cobra meeting”. At airports we see policemen with guns, while seemingly random prohibitions from our hand luggage are clues from which we attempt to work out the nature of the latest maniacal assault on our way of life. Maybe this time it was something with liquids and shoes? A belt shampoo bomb? A mace made out of plastic cutlery embedded in a Frederick Forsyth novel?

I’m not saying this fear of terrorism is unjustified, and I’m not saying it’s justified. I’m saying we don’t know, and that it’s unwise to leave unquestioned the estimation of the problem provided by the people we’re paying to solve it.

The widely reported terrorist threat, the stories of “near misses” and “heightened terror alerts”, and the announcement of more investment to “keep us safe” create, from the security services’ point of view, a virtuous circle of increasing funding. Modern espionage is about what they’re seen to do, when it used to be the opposite. It’s become my sort of job after all.