Spies Like Us: A Conversation With John le Carré and Ben MacIntyre

-by Valley Girl

I lived in England for 10 years, a good while back-- 1975- 1986. I was in Cambridge as an academic. And, I lived with a Welshman, a Cambridge don. He was the first person ever from his small town in Wales, Merthyr Tydfil to be accepted to the University of Cambridge. Many Americans I knew, but not in my department, managed to live in Cambridge within the American bubble. Mostly those Americans were a ways up the road at the MRC, Cambridge. We (my Welshman and I) met once a week with some of them for dinner at the Curry Queen for many years. Two of them went on to become Nobel Prize winners-- both worked in Sidney Brenner’s lab at the MRC. One was a kind man, totally dedicated to his science, and not much interested in politics. The other was and still is a total jerk.

I did not live within the American bubble. As the sole American in my department, I was regularly assailed by all and sundry to account for all of the horrible deeds perpetrated by the US of A. Since forever. Tea time and coffee time, every day in the departmental common room were especially tough. Never mind that I mostly agreed with them. And, this was lovely-- I met my Welshman’s one time thesis supervisor the first day I arrived in Cambridge. I walked into the lab of my post-doc supervisor and this man was there. They were discussing the recent suicide of the department chairman. My post-doc supervisor introduced me to his conversant. These were his first words, after he looked me up and down: “Well, with a name like yours, I was expecting a Black Jew.”

My private sanity while living in Cambridge was reading detective and thriller and espionage novels. It’s what I’ve always done to keep sane. I’m sure I put the scare into my interviewer for the private college in California I ended up attending. He asked me what books I had been reading lately. I said- oh I read a lot of Perry Mason books by Erle Stanley Gardner.

And, back to Cambridge. I read John le Carré and Graham Green, and so many others. And, of course, I got to know about Cambridge University and the recruitment of spies like Kim Philby. And, I got to know a lot about the public school system in the UK. I knew one victim of the Brit public school system personally, who remains a dear friend, and was a conversational victim of many who carried their public school ways as a badge of honor. One of their main games was to see how far they could go in insulting me without my twigging to it. Oh, I absolutely knew what they were about.

This above paragraph provides my own knowledge related to the interview I will highlight later.

So, for the moment, fast forward. I regularly read Emptywheel. She’s had several posts discussing the “Steele Dossier.” (Google that.) Oh, and the whole of the dossier is here. In one of Emptywheel’s most recent posts certain names of interest to me are mentioned--  Michael Cohen, Felix Sater-- and also the Trump Tower in Russia deal.

Reading through the EW comments, I read this comment “LeCarre and Ben MacIntyre more or less made the same general observations about the Trump-Russia affair and the factual contents of the Steele Dossier in an interview in the NYT Book Review week before last.”

So, on to the NYT Book Review. The whole of it is fascinating, and prompted a lot of the personal recollections I began with. Do please read the whole thing. And, note that John le Carré, as David Cornwell, was MI6. Steele apparently was MI6. (Note that somewhere in the part not quoted it says he was MI5. Obviously a typo.) But this is the most relevant to Trump and such:

S.L. (author of article and interviewer) Is there something about the British psyche that makes spying, or at least duplicity, an enticing prospect?

B.M. (Ben Macintyre) We Brits are particularly susceptible to the double life, aren’t we? Is it because we are a sort of theatrical, and sort of unfaithful, culture?

J.L.C. (John le Carré) I think it’s because hypocrisy is the national sport. For our class in my era, public school was a deliberately brutalizing process that separated you from your parents, and your parents were parties to that. They integrated you with imperial ambitions and then let you loose into the world with a sense of elitism-- but with your heart frozen.

B.M.  There is no deceiver more effective than a public-school-educated Brit. He could be standing next to you in the bus queue, having a Force 12 nervous breakdown, and you’d never be any the wiser.

J.L.C. When you’ve become that frozen child, but you’re an outwardly functioning, charming chap, there is a lot of wasteland inside you that is waiting to be cultivated.

S.L. David, you’ve spoken about your childhood, your outrageously criminal father, how you were sent to boarding school when you were 5, the lies that permeated everything. How did all this come to play when you were recruited by MI5?

J.L.C. The truth, in my childhood, didn’t really exist. That is to say, we shared the lies. To run the household with no money required a lot of serious lying to the local garage man, the local butcher, the local everybody. And then there was the extra element of class. All my grandparents and all my aunts and uncles were entirely working class-- laborers, builders, that sort of thing. One of them worked up telegraph poles. And so out of that to invent, as my father did, this socially adept, well-spoken, charming chap-- that was an operation of great complicity. And I had to lie about my parental situation while I was at boarding school. I only mention these things because they’re the extremes of what can warp an Englishman.

B.M. What you’ve just described-- is it the root of your fiction? Your ability to think yourself into someone else?



J.L.C. Absolutely. I mean childhood, at my age, is no excuse for anything. But it is a fact that my childhood was aberrant and peculiar and nomadic and absolutely unpredictable. So if I was in boarding school, I didn’t know where I would be spending the holidays. If my father said he was going to come and take me out, it was as likely as not that he wouldn’t show up. I would say to the other boys, I had a wonderful day out, when I had really been sitting in a field somewhere.

The mixture of solitude and uncertainty fertilized the situation enormously. To which you must add the amazing cast of crooked characters who passed through my father’s life. Inevitably I was making up stories to myself, retreating into myself. And then there was the genetic inheritance I got from my father. This was a man who, while still being pursued by the police, or bankrupt, or Christ knows what, who had done prison time, then boldly stands as a parliamentary candidate. He had a huge capacity for invention. He had absolutely no relationship to the truth. He would come talk to me in the morning and I would challenge him, and in the evening he would say, “That’s not what I said to you.”

S.L. Do you see parallels with President Trump’s view of the truth?

J.L.C. Exactly that. He is the most recent model. Before that it was Robert Maxwell. The parallels are extraordinary. My sister, too, we absolutely recognize the same syndrome. There is not a grain of truth there.

S.L. Do you think the Russians really have something on Trump?

B.M. I can tell you what the veterans of the S.I.S. [the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6] think, which is yes, kompromat was done on him. Of course, kompromat is done on everyone. So they end up, the theory goes, with this compromising bit of material and then they begin to release parts of it. They set up an ex-MI6 guy, Chris Steele, who is a patsy, effectively, and they feed him some stuff that’s true, and some stuff that isn’t true, and some stuff that is demonstrably wrong. Which means that Trump can then stand up and deny it, while knowing that the essence of it is true. And then he has a stone in his shoe for the rest of his administration.

It’s important to remember that Putin is a K.G.B.-trained officer, and he thinks in the traditional K.G.B. way.

J.L.C. The mentality that is operating in Russia now is absolutely, as far as Putin is concerned, no different to the mentality that drove the most exotic conspiracies during the Cold War. It worked then, it works now. As far as Trump, I would suspect they have it, because they’ve denied it. If they have it and they’ve set Trump up, they’d say, “Oh no, we haven’t got anything.” But to Trump they’re saying, “Aren’t we being kind to you?”

B.M. And today you get this wonderful Russian lawyer woman [Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was in the pre-election meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr.] who is straight out of one of our books, a character that is possibly connected to the Russian state. Who knows? They exist somewhere in that foggy, deniable hinterland. It’s called maskirovka-- little masquerade-- where you create so much confusion and uncertainty and mystery that no one knows what the truth is.

J.L.C. For Putin, it’s a kind of little piece of background music to keep things going. The smoking gun might or might not be the documents exchanged about the Trump Tower in Moscow [which Trump is said to have been planning to build]. Then there’s the really seedy stuff in the Caucasus. There are bits of scandal which, if added up, might suggest he went to Russia for money. And that would then fit in with the fact that he isn’t half as, a tenth as rich as he pretends to be.

As for the le Carré comment “Then there’s the really seedy stuff in the Caucasus,” read here at DWT.

Over and out, VG.

The splendid piece on John le Carré is part of an embarrassment of riches in the new NYRB

The new NYRB has a terrific review-essay by Neal Ascherson on John le Carré, described by his new biographer, Adam Sisman, as "one of the most important English writers of the post-war period." To me this kind of understates le Carré's importance as a writer, but hey, that's me.

by Ken

The new (October 13) issue of The New York Review of Books was in the mailbox yesterday, and such free time as I've had since then has been heavily absorbed by an issue overflowing with "must read"s. There are half a dozen or more pieces that we should probably talk about, and may yet, but for now let me rattle off some of the high points on the contents page --

In the leadoff position:

• an eye-opening piece by Freeman Dyson (but then, doesn't Freeman Dyson usually open eyes?) on the theoretical, cultural, and economic differences -- and their practical consequences -- in the divide on space exploration, which has existed as long as there's been space exploration, between "Big Space" (as practiced by NASA, running a program that is legitimately "too big to fail") and "Little Space" ("The Green Universe: A Vision," reviewing books by Julian Guthrie, Charles Wohlforth and Amanda R. Hendrix, and Jon Willis)

On the political front:

• Michael Tomasky with some striking thoughts on the question increasingly in a lot of our heads now, "Can the Unthinkable Happen?"

• Nicholas Lemann on what appears to be some sort of right-to-leftward movement in U.S. politics for the first time since well before the left-ro-right shift that set in in the mid-'60s and changed the political landscape (reviewing books by Daniel Oppenheimer, Steve Fraser, and Thomas Frank in "Can We Have a 'Party of the People'?," free to subscribers only)

• Geoffrey Wheatcraft on "Tony Blair's Eternal Shame: The Report" (reviewing the Chilcot Report itself and books by Peter Oborne and Tom Bower, free to subscribers only)

On the scientific front, in addition to Freeman Dyson's space odyssey:

• Laurence C. Smith on "Greenhouse Warming: Prepare for the Worst" (reviewing Tim Flannery's Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis, free to subscribers only)

On the pop-cultural front:

• novelist-translator-essayist Tim Parks on "The Pleasures of Reading Stephen King" (free to subscribers only)

• Nathaniel Rich on "The George Plimpton Story" (free to subscribers only), reviewing the serial-form reissue, with added commentaries, of Plimpton's books of what he dubbed, probably intentionally misleadingly, "participatory journalism"

And on and on and on . . .

. . . including Orlando Figes on 2015 Nobel Literature Prize-winner Svetlana Alexeivich's Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Nicolas Pelham's "In Saudi Arabia: Can It Really Change?," David Miliband on "The Best Ways to Deal with the Refugee Crisis," Rana Foroohar on "How the Financing of Colleges May Lead to Disaster!," and pieces on art, architecture, and poetry, and actual poetry.


OF COURSE (AT LEAST FOR READERS FAMILIAR WITH
MY PREDILECTIONS) THE FIRST PIECE I WENT TO WAS:

• Neal Ascherson's "Which le Carré Do You Want?" (free to subscribers only), reviewing Adam Sisman's exhaustive biograhy of John le Carré, written with four years' worth of cooperation from the subject, and the subject's own new memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

-- drawing by David Levine

Clearly, given the amount of cooperation le Carré had given Adam Sisman over the years the biographer was working on his biography, the subject was aware that the book was in the works. At some point during that time, the biographee decided to produce a memoir of his own -- not "as some sort of angry riposte," Ascherson assures us ("[Sisman's] book seems very fair and often close to affectionate"), but more likely for "professional" reasons, as "the pang of a writer who lends out his or her best anecdotes to be written up by somebody else."

Ascherson likes both books, but thinks the autobiographer has been shrewder than the biographer in one key area: keeping their shared subject's father, Ronnie Cornwell ("an exuberant con man whose excesses and betrayals shaped the characters and lives of his children"; in his son David's writing, he's most conspicuously present in A Perfect Spy) mostly confined to one section of the book. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Sisman that he needed to be kept under tight control:

Ronnie, although he died in 1975, keeps stealing the scene in this biography that is supposed to be about his son. Readers and critics have long ago grasped the idea that the le Carré novels—and not just the early “spy” fiction—can be understood as a mordant allegory of British decline; or, more accurately, of the British elite’s persistent refusal to recognize that decline. Sisman handles that element deftly. But the fact is that Ronnie’s real life is an even more lurid allegory of the same thing.

Ascherson recounts getting to know David Cornwell in 1963 when Ascherson was a Bonn-based journalist and Cornwell a functionary in the British embassy in Bonn (cover, of course, for his activities as a secret intelligence officer). The journalist, knowing nothing about his new friend's "real trade," or about his gathering-toward-explosion personal woes, found him "restless, irreverent, and very funny."

During Cornwell's time with MI6 he had published his second novel, Call for the Dead, which is loaded with spies, including one George Smiley (who had in fact appeared in the earlier book, A Murder of Quality), and which MI6 had cleared for publication -- as it did, perhaps surprisingly, with his next book, the game-changing Spy Who Came in from the Cold (whose central character is strangely referred to here as "Alan" rather than Alec Leamas). Ascherson has vivid memories of its publication.

One autumn day in 1963, David and I sat on a bench outside Hamburg’s main station, waiting for the Sunday papers to arrive from London with reviews of books we had written. The ecstatic reception of The Spy changed his life forever. Its triumph in Britain and America made him instantly wealthy; his pseudonym was penetrated within a few months; his days were overrun by importunate agents, publishers, film directors, and tax accountants. He described the impact as “like being in a car crash.”

Ascherson adds parenthetically: "Ronnie, delighted, was to be found in Berlin posing as David’s agent and selling imaginary movie rights to film studios."

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