THE SPY WHO WENT BACK INTO THE COLD
The Red Menace is back, and so is George Smiley Richard Warnica
Not long after Donald Trump took the oath of office as President of the United States – a moment marked by small crowds, dark words and an overwhelming (and still enduring) sense that this couldn’t possibly be real – New York Magazine published a profile of the Wall Street titans who took a chance on Trump back when everybody else saw him as a bad joke headed facefirst toward a brick wall.
The gist of the story wasn’t that those billionaires saw something in Trump that others didn’t: not anything presidential or reassuring, at least. It’s that they viewed him as a cheap bet. Donald Trump, through much of 2016, was a distressed asset. He probably wouldn’t win, the thinking went. But he was available for scraps.
“For the amount of money that a heavy-hitting donor might spend for a couple of lunches with Hillary Clinton and 50 other people,” Jessica Pressler wrote in the piece, “a Trump supporter could have a ringside seat.” In other words, the investors didn’t have much to lose. If Trump failed, so what? They hadn’t spent anything that mattered. But on the off chance he won, the return could be incredible.
One has to think that Vladimir Putin felt much the same way. It’s hard to imagine that Putin really thought Trump would win, even if the direst theories about Russian meddling prove true. But the payoff for Russia if he did win were potentially enormous: a destabilized America, democracy tarnished, Hillary Clinton shut out. When weighed against that reward, the cost of a little interference must have seemed pretty scant.
Trump, of course, did win. And the stories about Russian meddling have flourished ever since, with Putin emerging as a new Red Menace for the post- Cold War world. For John le Carré, the greatest spy novelist of the 20th century, the timing could not have been better. Just as the old Cold War tensions are ramping up again, le Carré has brought back his most iconic Cold War character.
His new book, A Legacy of Spies, is the first to feature George Smiley, his owlish, overweight British spymaster, in 25 years. It takes place in what can’t quite be the present day, given the ages of the characters involved, but something close to it. The novel is told from the perspective of Peter Guillam, Smiley’s fiercely loyal, sometimes clueless lieutenant, and acts as a direct, if distant, sequel to the two greatest Smiley novels: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
Smiley books, for some readers – this one included – are treasures almost without peer. The best ones balance the line between genre thrill and moral depth like very little else. There are the big villains, the Soviet Union, the Stasi, a traitorous mole. But the real wars are often fought internally, against venality, ass-covering, incompetence, pride and bureaucracy.
In A Legacy of Spies, Guillam, long retired to his native northern France, is forced back to England, where he’s made to relive the bungled operation at the heart of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. The impetus for this unwelcome remembrance is a lawsuit, filed by the illegitimate son of Alec Leamus, an agent killed on that job.
The story unspools on two tracks. In the present day, Guillam tries, through selective memory and calculated disclosure, to manipulate the narrative of the operation for the agents debriefing him. In the past, he relives the plot honestly, explaining what led Smiley and the mysterious “Control” to slip Leamus into East Germany as a double agent in the first place.
A lesser writer might have written this as a cautionary tale about judging the deeds of the past by present-day standards. And there is an element of that here. The Circus, as le Carré dubbed his spy agency, is more concerned, as ever, with reputation and liability than it is with any larger moral point. But there’s more, too. There’s a murky depth, a refusal of easy sympathies or simple lines of accountability.
Guillam does struggle with what he did for his country and why, present- day standards or no. He betrayed people and lied to them, and saw many die. He wonders, as anyone would, what it was all for. The book builds toward a climax on that point that refuses to ever truly resolve. The reader is left without good answers because, as is so often the case, there simply are no good answers to be had.
The two great villains of the previous Smiley books are Karla, the Russian intelligence chief, and Bill Haydon, a double agent who infiltrated the Circus. Both men hover behind the action of A Legacy of Spies. In the earlier books, Karla and Haydon succeeded by exploiting the weaknesses they found already in place. Karla spun off endless plots from a single meeting with Smiley. Haydon climbed in the Circus by playing off rival factions, boosting the careers of wellconnected incompetents and even sleeping with Smiley’s wife.
That’s part of the genius of le Carré. He never whitewashed the evils of the Soviet Union, East Germany or their totemic spies. But he never shied away from the oftencrippling flaws of his own side, either. We have real enemies, he seemed to say, but if we lose it will be as much our own fault as theirs.
There is a similar story to be told about Vladimir Putin and the election of 2016. It seems undeniable at this point that Russia ran a disinformation operation, and there is significant evidence to suggest Russian actors were involved in the email leaks that crippled the Clinton campaign. That is all extremely troubling and worthy of investigation.
But the problem with fixating on the Russian plot is that it risks exonerating everyone and everything else responsible for the election of Donald Trump. At most, the Russians, with all their efforts, may have a managed a thumb on the American scale. They weren’t the ones that lifted Trump, a venal huckster shilling dark fantasies and impossible lies, into a place where the presidency was even possible. They didn’t give him his platform. They didn’t create an American world where his conspiracies and flim-flam could ever be believed, let alone promoted and adopted as real.
As did Bill Haydon, the Russians worked with what they had. You have to believe, even now, that even they were a little shocked that it actually paid off.
THE GENIUS OF LE CARRÉ IS HE NEVER WHITEWASHED THE EVILS OF EAST GERMANY’S TOTEMIC SPIES.