George Smiley won’t incite us to become a spy – we want to be Bond
The British spy, according to Alex Younger, the head of MI6, is someone who is representative of the British public. He or she believes in our fundamental values – motherhood, apple crumble, parliamentary sovereignty, and so on – and is prepared to do all sorts of desperately dangerous things in an attempt to keep us all safe in our beds. Well, we could all agree with that.
Yet Younger has a problem with James Bond. He doesn’t want us to think of his spies as resembling the debonair agent who for generations has breathed life into the popular imagination of espionage (and probably inspired a fair few recruits to join up): the man with eyes as cold as the gin he drinks, whose lips twist cruelly as he embarks on the ruthless pursuit of his prey. The true prototype, he says, is dear old George Smiley, the dull, bespectacled spymaster of John le Carré’s brilliant creation, moving unseen through the crowd in his anonymous raincoat.
What a shame. I refer not to Younger’s professional judgment, of course – though if it is indeed “creativity, innovation and sheer guile that give us the edge”, as he says, surely he is describing exactly what 007 has been about since he first sprang from the pages of Ian Fleming’s books in the Fifties? The main problem with his remarks is the probable popular reaction: crushing disappointment on two fronts.
First, MI6 wants to demystify the job of your common-or-garden spy. They want diversity. They want spies with “emotional intelligence” (which even Bond has been showing a little of recently), who can move around unnoticed in their natural environment, rather than exploding into every scene with the unforgettable charisma of a man like Bond.
This obviously makes operational sense. Daphne Park, one of the great spies of her generation (who would never have blown her own cover had she not been obliged to do so when the government took the extraordinary step of acknowledging the existence of MI6), once told me how she was lined up to be shot in an awkward confrontation when crossing some African border. “I said: ‘Why don’t you shoot me on the way back? It would be much more convenient for all of us, don’t you think?’ And, do you know, they agreed.” They never saw her again, and no doubt they forgot her. The African border guards would never have forgotten Bond.
But surely a little less unvarnished honesty about the fact that the life of many agents is not as exciting as all that is in order, if only to keep up the recruitment numbers.
More importantly, if our spies are representative of the British public, and they’re all meant to be as grey and unassuming as good old Smiley, what does Younger think about us? Do we really want the image of Britain today to be that of a blinking owl in a beige cardigan? As Bond says in Goldfinger, having settled a nasty argument by means of electrocution: “Shocking. Positively shocking.”