Tinker, tailor, soldier... spite! Le Carre hits back at attack by ex-MI6 boss
IT’S a tangled web of intrigue, wicked whispers and counterclaims that would not seem out of place in one of John le Carre’s multi-million selling spy novels. Now the author has fired back after the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, claimed his books had infuriated the secret service by portraying them in a negative light.
Sir Richard had said le Carre was ‘so corrosive’ in his depiction of MI6 that senior staff were ‘pretty angry with him’. Le Carre last night suggested Sir Richard was still bitter about being wrong over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War.
He said: ‘When the Iraq War came along, I expressed my disgust in an article that was given prominence in The Times. I didn’t know – but who did? – that raw, singlesource, unchecked MI6 intelligence was being passed to Tony Blair, and presumably to George Bush as well, on a regular basis. And that Sir Richard was instrumental in causing this to happen.
‘To this day, I am told, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, he continues to maintain that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were the real McCoy. Maybe some distant memory of my article sticks in his craw.’
Le Carre, 87, worked for both MI5 and MI6 before finding fame with books such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, featuring unassuming intelligence officer George Smiley.
A 2016 BBC adaptation of The Night Manager, starring Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Debicki, was a huge ratings and critical hit.
The spat began when former ‘C’ Sir Richard, 74, told the Cliveden Literary Festival at the weekend: ‘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 Secret Intelligence Service officers are pretty angry with him.’
Sir Richard said trust between intelligence officers was key, yet le Carre’s books were ‘exclusively about betrayal’. He added: ‘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 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.’
Responding to Sir Richard, le Carre insisted he was ‘not sound on the details of my career’.
Far from intelligence officers being angry with him, he said that soon after Sir Richard’s retirement in 2004, his successor Sir John Scarlett had invited him to dine with some of his senior staff.
Le Carre declined the invitation as he ‘felt queasy about what I had read of the service’s alleged role in the run-up to the Iraq War’.
He also said another former chief of the service, David Spedding, believed that ‘ due in part to my novels, MI6 had assumed a sensible place in the public awareness – human, fallible, aspirational, contentious, and part of real life’.
The author said he received an email from ‘ a respected senior former member of MI6’ who also disputed Sir Richard’s claim. Le Carre said: ‘My guess is they were more angry with [Sir Richard] for presiding over the flow of dicey intelligence into Mr Blair’s office.’
Le Carre is the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, who published his first novel Call For The Dead in 1961.
The author admitted Sir Richard’s criticism was good publicity. With his new novel Agent Running In The Field on sale this month, le Carre said he ‘ would have paid good money’ for him to ‘loose off a full-frontal on me and my work’.
‘Sticks in his craw’