What a perfect cover for British intelligence. As was her own highly public status in a curious sort of way.
From 1930 until her death, Agatha Christie pointed to certain suspicions as to the hidden puppetmasters of the world's disasters, and the identity of implacable enemies of Western civilisation.
Years before anything at all was known publicly she had this to say in her novel They Came To Baghdad, written in 1949 to 1950 and published in 1951:
"The machinery had broken down! Once more he was on his own, in hostile country. And he was disagreeably aware of the significance of what has just happened.
It was not only the enemies on his trail he had to fear. Nor was it the enemies guarding the approaches to civilisation. There were enemies to fear within the system. For the passwords had been known, the responses had come pat and correct. The attack had been time for exactly the moment when he had been lulled into security. Not surprising, perhaps, that there was treachery from within. It must always have been the aim of the enemy to introduce one or more of their number into the system. Or, perhaps to buy the man that they needed. Buying a man was easier than one might think --one could buy with other things than money."
That is, years ahead of the game, a neat and succinct- and hellishly accurate summary of the ruinous British traitors Philbu, Burgess and the rest- egomaniacs, corrupt scum, queers, money hungry monsters or some unholy combination thereof.
Some reviewers to this day make fun of Agatha Christie for fearing the coming Labour governments in the 1920s, and for continuing her hatred of bolshevism- which is all the Labour / Labor movement is anywhere, it is an alien creed dedicated to the destruction of all that is good in Western man- and yet has she not been proven right? Every socialist regime anywhere has replicated at least a faint echo of the totalitarianism, brutalism and reign of terror of the original pattern to the exact degree the monsters have not been restrained.
As for her precience in 1949, I am firmly of the belief she had inside knowledge, functioned as a spy for Britain herself (as did Noel Coward, and if he is the unlikeliest agent, mutatis mutandis she is scarcely less so) and that she did her best in her "fiction" to sound the alarm literally to her dying day.
