ONCE A SPY, ALWAYS A SPY?
IF ASPIRING SPIES TOOK UP THE LARGER PART OF MY FAN MAIL IN THOSE DAYS, VICTIMS OF PERSECUTION BY SECRET FORCES RAN A CLOSE SECOND. — LE CARRÉ
You would not, I i magine, if y ou were on the lookout for the inside story of Grand Prix racing, choose for your source a j unior mechanic with a hyperactive i magination and zero experience of the race track. Yet that is a fair analogy of what it felt like to be appointed, overnight and solely on the strength of my fictions, to the status of guru on all matters of secret intelligence.
When t he mantle was first thrust on me, I resisted it on the very real grounds that I was f orbidden by the Official Secrets Act to admit that I had so much as scented the wind of intelligence work. The fear that my former Service, already regretting that it had passed my books for publication, might in its disgruntlement decide to make an example of me was never far from my thoughts, though Heaven knows I had little enough in the way of secret knowledge to reveal. But more important to me, I suspect, even if I didn’t admit it to myself, was my writer’s amour- propre. I wanted my stories to be read not as the disguised revelations of a literary defector but as works of imagination that owed only a nod to the reality that had spawned them.
Meanwhile, my claims never to have set foot inside the secret world rang more hollow by the day, thanks not least to my former colleagues who had no such reservations about blowing my cover. And when the truth overtook me, and I feebly protested that I was a writer who had once happened to be a spy rather than a spy who had turned to writing, the broad message I got back was, forget it: once a spy, always a spy, and if I didn’t believe my own fictions, other people did, so live with it.
And live with it I did, like it or not. For years on end as it seems to me now — for my golden years, if you like — barely a week went by but a reader wrote asking how he or she could become a spy, to which I would primly answer: write to your MP or to the Foreign Office or, if you are still at school, consult your careers adviser.
But the reality was, in t hose days you couldn’ t apply, and you weren’ t meant t o. You couldn’ t just Google MI5 or MI6 or GCHQ, Britain’s once ultrasecret codebreaking agency, but you can now. There were no advertisements on the front page of The Guardian telling you that if you are able to talk three people in a room into doing what you want them to do, then maybe spying is for you. You had to be spotted. If you applied, you could be enemy, whereas if you were spotted, you couldn’t possibly be. And we all know how well that worked.
And to be spotted you had to be born lucky. You had to have gone to a good school, preferably a private one, and to a university, preferably Oxbridge. Ideally, there should already be spies in your family background, or at least a soldier or two. Failing that, at some point unknown to you, you had to catch the eye of a headmaster, tutor or dean who, having judged you a suitable candidate for recruitment, summoned you to his rooms, closed the door and offered you a glass of sherry and an opportunity to meet interesting friends in London.
And if you said yes, you were interested in these interesting friends, then a letter to you might arrive in an eye- catching double- sealed pale- blue envelope with an embossed official crest, inviting you to present your- self at an address Somewhere in Whitehall, and your life as a spy might or might not have begun. In my day the invitation included lunch in a cavernous Pall Mall club with an intimidating admiral who asked me whether I was an indoor man or an outdoor man. I am still wondering how to reply.
If aspiring spies took up the larger part of my fan mail in those days, victims of persecution by secret forces ran a close second. The desperate appeals had a certain uniformity. My writers were being shadowed, their phones were being tapped, their cars and houses bugged, neighbours suborned. Their letters were arriving a day late, their husbands, wives and lovers were reporting on them, they couldn’t park their cars without getting a ticket. The taxman was after them and there were men who didn’t look at all like real workmen doing something to the drains outside the house, they’d been loitering there all week and achieved nothing. It would have served no useful purpose to tell my correspondents that j ust possibly they were right on every count.
But t here were other times when my spurious i dentity as a master spy came home to roost with a vengeance, such as when, in 1982, a bunch of youthful Polish dissidents described as “members of a Polish insurgent home army” took charge of their country’s Embassy in Bern, where I happened to have studied, and settled themselves in for what turned out to be a three-day siege.
It was the middle of the night when my phone rang in London. The caller was an illustrious gentleman of the Swiss political hierarchy with whom I had struck up a chance acquaintance. He needed my advice promptly in strict confidence, he said. As did his colleagues. He sounded unusually sonorous, but perhaps I was a bit slow waking up. He held no brief for communists, he said. In fact he loathed the ground they walked on. He assumed I did. Nevertheless, the Polish government, communist or not, was legitimate and its Embassy in Bern was entitled to the full protection of its host country.
Was I with him so far? I was. Good. Because a group of young Polish men had j ust taken over Poland’s Embassy in Bern at pistol point, mercifully without thus far firing a single shot. Was I still listening? I was. And these young men were anti- communists, and in any other circumstance to be cheered on. But this was no time to indulge one’s personal preferences, was it, David? No. It wasn’t. So the boys had to be disarmed, didn’t they? They had to be got out of the Embassy and out of the country as fast and discreetly as possible. And since I knew all about these things, would I please come and get them out?
In a voice that must have sounded near- hysterical, I vowed to my caller that I had no earthly expertise in such matters, knew not a word of Polish, knew nothi ng of Polish resistance movements, and less than nothing about the arts of sweet- talking hostage- takers, Polish, communist, noncommunist or other. Having thus pleaded my unsuitability any way I could, I think I suggested that he and his colleagues find themselves a Polish- speaking priest. If that failed, haul the British Ambassador in Bern out of bed and formally request the assistance of our Special Forces.
Whether he and his colleagues followed my advice is also something I shall never know. My illustrious friend never told me how the story had ended, though press reports indicate that Swiss police stormed the Embassy, seized the four rebels and freed the hostages. When I bumped into him half a year later on the ski slopes and taxed him about the matter, he replied airily that it had all been a harmless joke: which I took to mean that, whatever deal had been s t ruck by t he Swiss authorities, it was not to be shared with a mere foreigner.