The le Carre fixation
Author’s ‘corrosive’ eye on betrayal not fair to agents, real spymaster says
He has written some of the world’s best-loved espionage novels, filled with Cold War double agents inspired by real people he met while spying for the British government in West Germany.
John le Carre, the pen name of David Cornwell, left MI6 in 1963 and built a new career on secret plots of a fictional kind.
But now a real spymaster has accused the novelist of being “obsessed” with his secret service career, despite having served for only three years, and writing “corrosive” books that undermine the U.K.’s intelligence services.
Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, said le Carre’s novels are “exclusively about betrayal” and trade on the author’s limited experience as an intelligence officer to make spying seem immoral.
Speaking recently to an audience at Cliveden Literary Festival west of London, Dearlove said MI6 spies were angry with le Carre, now 87, for portraying them as duplicitous and untrustworthy in such novels as The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, The Russia House, The Little Drummer Girl, Smiley’s People and others.
Maybe the most famous of le Carre’s novels — Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — follows aging spymaster George Smiley as he hunts for a mole in The Circus, the author’s fictional spy HQ.
But in contrast to the glamorous Bond novels of Ian Fleming, le Carre’s books portray the intelligence services as corrupt organizations filled with traitors, Dearlove said.
“We’ve all enjoyed enormously reading the Smiley books ... and he does capture some of the essence of what it was like in the Cold War,” the spymaster said.
“However, he is so corrosive in his view of MI6 that most professional SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) officers are pretty angry with him. Intelligence organizations are based on trust between colleagues. That’s how they operate. His books are exclusively about betrayal. He writes in the tradition of the counter-intelligence nihilists.”
Dearlove was “C,” the head of MI6, between 1999 and 2004, and oversaw the intelligence agency’s response to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.
He said le Carre had become “obsessed” with his career as a spy, which began after he passed information to MI5 about leftwing groups at Oxford University in the 1950s.
“He was only in the service for three years, and something must have happened to him while he was there to breed this cynicism,” Dearlove said in separate remarks.
“I rather resent the fact that he is trading on his knowledge and his reputation, and yet the feeling I get is that he intensely dislikes the service and what it represents.”
After leaving Oxford and teaching at Eton, le Carre worked undercover in West Germany, running agents in the war of information against the Soviet Union. He waited more than 30 years before revealing his past career in MI6, believing he would endanger agents he had known in the 1960s.
His cover was finally blown by Kim Philby, the infamous double agent and member of the Cambridge spy ring. Since then, the author says, his former colleagues have been furious with him for portraying them as “heartless incompetents” when they cannot answer back in public.
Denis Healey, the former Labour defence secretary, once called him a “communist spy” and high-ranking officers believe he has profited from an exaggerated account of the MI6 he saw during the Cold War. Dearlove said le Carre was not the only former spy to have rankled bosses by writing books about life in espionage, but he was one of the key “mythmakers.”
MI6 officers are now required to sign over the copyright to any future books before they join the service to prevent former employees from making money out of the U.K.’s intelligence secrets, he said.