Whenever I hear a spook talk, Brennan, Clapper, Dearlove, Steele, any of them, I am reminded of the John le Carré line:
“What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”
— Alec Leamas, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, 1963
They lie for a living. They're professional liars, the very nature of their business is lies and trafficking in lies.
[note: le Carré worked for both MI5 and MI6, he knew these people]
December 10, 2020 By Dwyer Murphy
John le Carré and the Most Interesting Author Interview You Will Ever See
In 1965, John le Carré was a breakout author with a semi-secretive past and some really complex thoughts about espionage.
If you’re as passionate about espionage fiction as I am, you don’t need a reason to watch the interview below, a 1965 appearance by John le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell) on the BBC talk show, Intimations. But just in case, here’s the first reason I’ll push on you: it’s just so strange. Strange, deceptive, insightful and utterly fascinating.
Intimations was a BBC talk show that ran for eleven episodes between 1965 and 1966. It was hosted by Malcolm Muggeridge, an interesting figure in his own right, a longtime British satirist and contrarian who was at one time a prominent communist, until he became a prominent anti-communist, then later a foe of sexual liberation, Monty Python, and a slew of other cultural touchstones. Muggeridge was also a former British spy who served during World War II in East Africa and Paris.
Le Carré, just thirty-four years old at the time of his appearance, was already one of Britain’s most prominent novelists, coming off the success of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. (That novel earned him a staggeringly large advance from his American publisher, Coward McCann.) Le Carré was less than a year removed from MI-6, and his service was so fresh the program dutifully goes out of its way to dispel the idea that he was a spy: “Contrary to public imagination,” the disclaimer reads at the outset, “the nearest he’s been to real life espionage was a brief stint with intelligence in Vienna.”
So let’s just get all that straight. This is a conversation between two spies-turned-writers, both of them professing to have little experience in espionage while also drawing one another, time and again, back into a profound and illuminating conversation about the nature of espionage, a conversation which lays quite bare the fact that both men had extensive, life-altering experience as spies. It is, as I mentioned before, an exceedingly strange and nuanced conversation, and very much worth the watch....
....MUCH MORE (including the interview)
