Fixation with betrayal ‘not fair on agents’
Novelist accused of obsession with his brief career in the intelligence service
He has written some of Britain’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, whose real name is David Cornwell, left MI6 in 1963 and built a new career on secret plots of a fictional kind.
But the novelist has been accused by a real spymaster of being “obsessed” with his secret service career, despite serving for only three years, and writing “corrosive” books that undermine Britain’s intelligence services.
Sir 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 to an audience at Cliveden Literary Festival, Dearlove said MI6 spies were angry with Le Carre, now 87, for portraying them as duplicitous and untrustworthy. The most famous of his novels,
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, follows ageing 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 organisations 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.
“However, he is so corrosive in his view of MI6 that most professional SIS [Secret Intelligence Service] officers are pretty angry with him.
“Intelligence organisations 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 in the 1950s after he passed information to MI5 about leftwing groups at Oxford University.
“He was only in the service for three years, and something must have happened to him while he was there to breed this cynicism.
“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 MI6 career, believing he’d endanger agents he had known in the 1960s.
His cover was blown by infamous double agent and Cambridge spy ring member Kim Philby.
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.
Former Labour Defence Secretary Denis Healey once called him a “communist spy” at a drinks party, and high-ranking officers believe he has profited from an exaggerated account of the MI6 in the Cold War.
Dearlove said Le Carre was not the only former spy to have written books about life in espionage, but he was one of the key “mythmakers”.
New MI6 officers now have to sign over the copyright to any future books before they join the service, to prevent them making money out of the job.