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]
—our introduction to "Upon the Death of John le Carré, A Flashback To the Most Interesting Author Interview You Will Ever See"
From The Baffler:
The Father of All Secrets
In an equivocal recommendation letter to the dons at Oxford, R.S. Thompson, a housemaster at Sherborne School, Dorset, wrote that his former pupil David Cornwell “strikes me as the sort who might become either Archbishop of Canterbury or a first-rate criminal!”
This prophecy struck at the heart of twenty-year-old David’s torments. His father, Ronnie, was a seductive West Country conman and thief who frequently prevailed upon his sensitive, artistic son to collaborate in his deceits. His mother, Olive, had disappeared from the home when David was five (in flight from Ronnie’s infidelity and violence). Ronnie sent his sons off to posh preparatory and public schools in the hopes of turning them into English gents; ideally, barristers. But for David, boarding school was an escape into another form of captivity. At Sherborne, Ronnie’s licentious rule was replaced by another, no less oppressive, sovereignty: this one didactic, high Anglican, and enforced by blows from the prefect’s cane.
To the extent these ministrations left an impression, they only increased David’s anguish. The felonious fog of his homelife ever intruded upon the greener pastures of his potential salvation. Ronnie, perennially in debt, rarely paid tuition except in promises, fibs, and in-kind goods of dubious provenance—dried figs, bananas, and cases of “unobtainable gin.” And on holiday, David and his older brother, Tony, were once again conscripted into Ronnie’s latest scams. “At school, David was being trained to run an empire,” Cornwell’s biographer Adam Sisman wrote in 2015, “at home, he was helping diddle widows out of their pensions.” The conflict between these two irreconcilable lives nearly drove him mad.
It was to the benefit of millions of readers that David Cornwell became neither crook nor priest but something in between: first a spy, then a novelist. Under the pen name John le Carré, he revolutionized the twentieth-century espionage thriller. His breakout book, 1963’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, written while he was still working for the British Secret Service, laid bare the convoluted moral logics, futility, and inhuman waste of the Cold War. Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley’s People (1979)—a trilogy in which the portly, past-his-prime spymaster George Smiley battles, and eventually bests his Soviet rival, Karla—solidified le Carré as master of the form. Smiley, as many critics have noted, is the antithesis of James Bond. Where Ian Fleming’s rakish hero is flashy, Smiley is drab; where Bond is charming, Smiley is taciturn; where Bond uses guns and gadgetry, Smiley relies on perception and guile; and where Bond is a womanizer who exudes masculine potency, Smiley is a cuckold: sexless and monk-like in his devotion to Ann, his unfaithful wife....
....MUCH MORE
