As noted in the intro to 2018's "Coming in from the Cold: On Spy Fiction":
It's all fiction. Spies lie.
It's what they do.
And from Literary Hub, October 30, 2023:
Adam Sisman on the True Identity and Backstory of the Pseudonymous Spy Novelist
“People believe what they want to believe,” wrote David Cornwell to one of his lovers. “ALWAYS.” He was referring to the “revelation” that Graham Greene had continued working for British intelligence into his seventies. “No good me telling them that GG was far too drunk to remember anything, & that his residual connections with the Brit spooks were romantic fantasy.”
When he wrote that people believed what they wanted to believe about Greene, he might just as well have been writing about himself. People were willing to believe almost anything about him, even if he denied it (especially if he denied it)—for example, that he had once been earmarked as a possible future head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, more popularly known as MI6). According to David, the Chief himself, Sir Dick White, had told him in a farewell interview that he was highly thought of within the Service; and that, had he remained, he might have been a candidate for the “top job” in due course. This is a suggestion that one former MI6 officer, with a long and distinguished career behind him, described to me as “ridiculous.” Even without the benefit of inside intelligence, the idea that anyone with less than four years’ experience in any organization could be considered as a candidate to run it in due course is, to say the least, unlikely. Yet this is what David wanted us to believe. Perhaps he believed it himself.
The secret history of David’s career in the intelligence services is that it was uneventful. “The trouble with David,” observed one MI6 contemporary who served with him, “is that he was never involved in a successful operation.”
Working in the intelligence services often involves pretending to be something other than what you really are.Following his induction into MI6, and after undergoing training at Fort Monckton near Portsmouth, David was posted to Bonn, capital of what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, where he would serve out his short career, until the worldwide success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold enabled him to retire and write full time. (For his last few months with the Service he relocated to the consulate at Hamburg, in an attempt to avoid the limelight.) According to a colleague who worked alongside him, there was not much for him to do in Bonn. He was working under diplomatic cover, notionally as a Second Secretary: attending press conferences and receptions with other diplomats, politicians and journalists, and escorting German politicians on visits to Britain and British politicians on visits to Germany.
David’s covert role had originated in British concerns about a possible neo-Nazi revival. His perfect German allowed him to pass as a native, and he was tasked with detecting and investigating potential Nazi cells or organizations, and with recruiting German sleepers who would join such groupings in order to provide information on them. This had to be kept “ultra secret,” particularly from their German hosts, because British officials could not be seen to be interfering in German politics. But in reality there was little to do, since the feared neo-Nazi revival never materialized. Parties of the far right failed to gain mass support, and at their rallies neo-Nazis were often outnumbered by the police. David attended a few gatherings of former U-boat crews in bierkellers, but these were more sentimental than sinister. “I think David was absolutely bored stiff,” wrote his Bonn colleague. The most valuable outcome of his three years in Bonn was the material it provided for his novel A Small Town in Germany (1968), which imagined such an extreme right-wing revival occurring in the near future.
He seems to have had more fun in his earlier career with MI5. Intelligence officers in the security service were permitted to carry out acts normally regarded as criminal: breaking and entering, burgling and bugging; as well as clandestine surveillance and “tailing.” This appealed to David’s boyish instincts. “Hell, Jack, we’re licensed crooks, that’s all I’m saying,” admits one of his characters, a CIA agent, in A Perfect Spy.
David had been an undergraduate at Oxford when he was recruited by MI5 as an asset by Vivian Green, the chaplain of his college and eventually one of the models for his most celebrated character, George Smiley. David was asked to befriend left-wing students and report on what they did. This involved an uncomfortable degree of pretense, getting close to likely undergraduates in order to win their confidence. On at least one occasion he searched a friend’s rooms while he was out. He also attended meetings of left-wing societies and travelled down to London to join the sparse audiences at showings of worthy films screened at the Soviet Embassy. He was trailing his coat, hoping to attract the attention of a Soviet talent-spotter; and for a while he was courted by a “Cultural Secretary” who then suddenly dropped him, perhaps smelling a rat....
....MUCH MORE
Not to put too fine a point on it, December 13, 2020:
Upon the Death of John le Carré, A Flashback To the Most Interesting Author Interview You Will Ever See
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]
