The setting is worthy of a spy novel: the narrow, softly lit Mediterranean joint down a cobblestone Soho street, the bright-coloured curtains draping rough plaster walls, the somewhat gauche posters of West End plays and Renaissance art. I imagine hushed conversations, an agent meeting a source, or luring a recruit, over a kebab and a glass of wine. My guest, Sir Richard Moore, until recently Britain’s spy chief, will not share whether the unimaginatively named Mediterranean Cafe has featured in his clandestine career: “I couldn’t possibly say.” But he is a regular at the haunt, knows Ali, the owner, and is familiar with the Turkish menu.
We are meeting a month after the 62-year-old Moore stepped down as head of the Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6, closing a 38-year career that started at the tail-end of the cold war and included a four-year stint as the British ambassador to Turkey, a country for which he holds particular attachment. He first served there as an intelligence officer early in his career, after learning the language by accident; he had made the mistake of declining to take up first Chinese and then Arabic. “Someone in HR turned up and looked me in the eye and said, ‘When you’re asked a third time, you will say yes, I would like to learn Turkish.’”
A few weeks before our lunch, he marked the end of his MI6 career with a speech in Istanbul, in which he referred to Turkey as his second home. “If you learn a foreign language properly, part of you gets invested in that country and culture,” he tells me. “I swear that I’m a slightly different character in terms of who I am . . . more Mediterranean, more expressive.”