Le Carré the MI6 spy who came in from the Cold War
How a botched mission and contempt for his handlers led the reluctant secret agent to create George Smiley
OVER the past two weeks, our gripping extracts from the new biography of John le Carré have exposed the spy writer’s appetite for love affairs, and how he lived in the shadow of his father, a philandering conman, society figure – and drunken child abuser. Now our fascinating final instalment reveals how he mined his experiences with MI5 and MI6 to transform himself from secret agent David Cornwell to bestselling author John le Carré...
AS AN intelligence officer, David Cornwell was not allowed to publish novels under his own name, so he chose the pseudonym ‘John le Carre’ for reasons that he has now forgotten. He once claimed to have spotted the name on a shopfront as he passed by in a bus, but later admitted this was untrue.
The success of le Carré’s third novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, in 1963 sparked speculation about the author’s identity. Graham Greene wrote to publisher Victor Gollancz: ‘I suppose it’s asking too much to tell me what his real name is? My only guess is that Blake [the recently jailed double agent George Blake] has taken to writing novels!’
In fact John le Carré was a spy working in Germany for the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – after a stint with MI5 in London. The intelligence world in which he worked would inspire the atmosphere of his novels. MI6 was based in Broadway Buildings, opposite St James’s Park Tube station. Outside a plaque read ‘Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company’, inside was a warren of back staircases, dingy corridors and pokey rooms.
A secret passage ran to the Passport Office in Queen Anne’s Gate while a bridge led to the flat of the ‘Chief’, Sir Dick White, whose office was on the fourth floor at the end of a spidery corridor. Approaching visitors saw themselves distorted in a fish-eye mirror, in the eyeline of the women in the outer office. Then they waited for a green light over the door to indicate ‘C’ was ready.
New entrants were trained in London and at SIS’s field operations training centre. Trainees were told to go to a street in Gosport, Hampshire, where a minibus would take them to their destination.
This turned out to be Fort Monkton, an 18th Century battery designed to guard Portsmouth harbour. Trainees would arrive on Monday morning and rush back to London on Friday lunchtime to maintain the fiction to friends and family that they had been in town all week. The Fort was connected to a London telephone number for the same reason.
At Fort Monkton, they studied techniques of running agents and the necessary tradecraft: safe houses, dead letter-boxes, surveillance, ciphers and clandestine radio communication. They shot 9mm automatic pistols and were taught knife-fighting by an ex-Shanghai police instructor. ‘Always keep the knife moving, sir, in a figure of eight movement,’ he advised. ‘Keeps them guessing.’
They learned how to kill with a single blow and detonated explosives.
In London, trainees pondered the psychology of traitors, double agents and defectors, and how to control them. They were shown how to forge papers, make skeleton keys, pick locks and operate secret electronic equipment. They practised taking photographs with concealed cameras and developing film.
As it turned out, Cornwell would never again handle, let alone use, a 9mm automatic pistol. But the skills he had acquired would provide a valuable source for his fiction.
Cornwell’s contact with British intelligence had begun after a chance encounter with an English couple in 1948, when he was 17 and a student in Bern. A lady in tweeds who introduced herself as ‘Wendy Gillbanks’, and her friend who called himself ‘Sandy’ invited him to the British Embassy and asked about his beliefs. They asked Cornwell to attend meetings of Left-wing student groups, reporting the names of Britons he identified.
He was also sent to Geneva, to sit on a park bench with a volume of Goethe’s poems, until a passing stranger asked whether he had seen his lost dog. When he answered with the prearranged reply, he was given a package to take back to Bern.
At the beginning of his National Service the following year, Cornwell was directed to the Intelligence Corps, presumably because of his SIS work in Bern, and sent to Austria, then divided into occupied zones.
Cornwell arrived at a base near Graz in March 1951 where telephone intercepts were transcribed. As a field security officer, he inherited a string of informants and interviewed illegal frontier-crossers, assessing their identity and whether they had useful intelligence.
Cornwell’s only clandestine operation was a fiasco, as he would later concede. He was recruited for a top-secret mission by a man called Joe Kraemer, a mysterious figure who, it was hinted, was a member of MI6. They were to meet a highranking officer in the Czech air force, apparently willing to supply intelligence for cash.
Kraemer collected him in a civilian Volkswagen Beetle. On the back seat lay a brown briefcase containing, he told Cornwell, 10,000 US dollars. Cornwell could think of nothing but the heavy 9mm Browning automatic jammed down his waistband.
The rendezvous was a bar near the frontier, where regulars stared at them through tobacco smoke.
Kraemer ordered two beers and gestured towards a billiards table. As Cornwell stooped to play, he was startled by the clang of his pistol on the tiled floor. The bar emptied and Kraemer ordered: ‘Abort,’ pausing to finish his beer. Afterwards Cornwell concluded Kraemer might have been a fantastist some time after he received a visit from a ‘Major Smith’, who said he represented the Secret Service. ‘We are thinking of you,’ the Major told him. But first Cornwell would need to obtain a degree. AT OXFORD UNIVERSITY, Cornwell was sounded out by a fellow undergraduate who said: ‘I’d like you to meet a friend of mine.’ Cornwell realised he was being recruited once more.
The rendezvous was lunch with George Leggett, an MI5 man ten years Cornwell’s senior, who asked Cornwell to adopt a Left-wing persona, infiltrate Communist groups and report back. He was also to attend meetings addressed by visitors to the university from the Eastern Bloc who might be seeking Soviet agents.
Cornwell joined the University Communist Club and met the Soviet Cultural Attache at the Anglo-Soviet Friendship Society, who invited him to a party at the Russian Embassy in London, one of several visits.
Cornwell identified some of his col-
He could pick locks – and kill a man with a single blow
Unmasked, he had to lose his cover as a diplomat
lege friends as possible Communists, defending his actions years later: ‘I don’t know that it’s such a disgraceful thing to have done. It could often be quite disgusting in that you had to penetrate a settled organisation of people who trusted each other.
‘But somebody has to clean the drains. I did things that, although they were in some way morally repugnant, I felt at the time – and still feel – to have been necessary.’
After leaving Oxford with a firstclass degree, Cornwell began teaching at Eton, but he soon became restless, and wrote to his MI5 contact to say he wanted to ‘come inside’.
The interview took place at the agency’s HQ in a Mayfair office building, Leconfield House, which had a large basement and a windowless ground floor. The interior was shabby, the windows were grimy and internal partitioning had left many rooms an awkward shape and ludicrously overcrowded.
At the heart of MI5 was the Registry. Its busy central hall on the ground floor housed the filing system and was staffed entirely by women, the ‘Registry Queens’ recruited from upperclass families. ‘They were stunners,’ Cornwell recalled. The top-floor can- teen was ‘a showpiece for some of the best-looking women, all the prettier because we men were so dowdy’.
The first woman to reach assistant director was Milicent Bagot, an expert on Communism. Bagot had been one of the first to raise doubts about Kim Philby. She was a stickler for procedure and a difficult colleague with robust opinions. Her memory for facts was so extraordinary as to have passed into Service folklore.
Bagot has been named as the basis for Connie Sachs, the obsessive, eccentric spinster of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People. But Cornwell insists his inspiration was Diana Mumford, a member of the English ladies’ bridge team who had worked at Bletchley Park. Cornwell was 26 when he joined MI5 in 1958. Entrants had no formal training: just a ten-day immersion in ‘staff duties’ – above all, how to call up files from the Registry using its card index. But MI5 was not an impressive organisation.
‘For a while you wondered whether the fools were really pretending to be fools, as some kind of deception,’ Cornwell wrote later. ‘But alas, the reality was mediocrity. Ex-colonial policemen mingling with failed academics, failed lawyers, failed missionaries and failed debutantes. Everyone seemed to smell of failure.’
Cornwell shared a small back room with John Bingham, a short, tubby, bespectacled man who wrote spy novels in his spare time and encouraged David to do the same. Some of his traits were certainly borrowed for le Carre’s most important character, George Smiley.
The director-general, Roger Hollis, was a kindly man who dressed like an undertaker in black jacket and striped trousers. He was having a long-term affair with his secretary.
Cornwell spent a fair amount of time with Hollis, who was forced to deal with the fallout from a series of spy scandals. The effect on MI5 was one of paranoia and paralysis, ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, in which nothing could be taken on trust. Even Hollis was summoned back after retirement to face a grilling. Cornwell would recall ‘it was witch-hunt time’, when MI5 was ‘riven with suspicion and rumour’. He was too junior to know the detail: ‘I just smelt it, like death before you find the corpse.’
His initial duties were aimed at Chinese Singaporeans and Malays suspected of trying to procure commercial secrets for Beijing. At F Branch, he monitored the Communist Party of Great Britain and carried out ‘positive vetting’ of suspected Reds, such as asking whether a shop steward who had subscribed to Soviet Weekly should be allowed to work for a firm that manufactured military aircraft. He wrote: ‘There was a voyeuristic character to this, snooping on other people’s lives... and the imaginative bridges I built to my paper suspects earned me a reputation for, of all things, perspicuity.
‘Nothing could have been further from the truth. All I was doing was inventing people out of the meagre clay of telephone taps, purloined mail and investigators’ reports. What else I gave to the subjects came from myself. It wasn’t good intelligence work, but in that mediocre world it could easily pass for such. And it turned out to be excellent training for the career I had not yet consciously embarked upon: that of the novelist.’ Cornwell had come to believe that MI5 was ‘a dead-end sort of place’. MI6 seemed smarter and more glamorous – and in June 1960 he joined them. The assistant chief George Kennedy Young was seen as a ‘firebreather’ who advocated aggressive covert action, the model for Tinker Tailor’s Percy Alleline. As the stridently Right-wing head of MI6’s Middle Eastern Operations, Young had played a part in the Iranian coup of 1953, and had been implicated in an unsuccessful plan to assassinate Egypt’s President Nasser in 1956. New entrants to SIS were treated to a hairraising lecture from him about ruthlessness. Cornwell’s duties took him to Berlin, the front line of the Cold War and the world capital of espionage.
In 1961, le Carré’s first novel, Call For The Dead, was published, but it was the success of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in 1963 that made his identity a hot subject for the press. Early in 1964, Cornwell received a call from a journalist at his desk in the Consulate in Hamburg and was forced into a half-truth: he readily admitted to being John Le Carré, but protested he was no spy while conceding his diplomatic work had given him ‘great knowledge of the political situation in Germany’.
The interview only heightened speculation that the book was based on reality, and Cornwell was told by the Chief in London that he could no longer continue as a diplomat, but might carry on with a new cover such as a journalist or academic.
Cornwell later insisted his leaving SIS was prompted by his accountant, who had been instructed to send him a telegram when his book earnings reached £20,000.
When the cable arrived, he handed in his resignation.
A culture of paranoia and paralysis. Nothing could be taken on trust