Absolute Friends

by John le Carré

  Signing himself ARNOLD—whether as a surname, first name or cover name was not vouchsafed, though the use of capitals suggested the last—the writer identified “a shadowy former operative of the CIA” as the creator of the deception, and sasha and mundy as his sacrificial victims. the accused man, referred to by ARNOLD with the letter J and described as a “latter-day born-again Christian of Irish-American descent,” was regarded by the orthodox intelligence community as a dangerous maverick.

  J’s unholy accomplice in the “Second Burning” was an equally unsavory Georgian-Russian known only as DIMITRI, a professional agent provocateur and intelligence peddler with pretensions as a poet and failed actor. Having worked—sometimes concurrently—for the KGB, the CIA and the Deuxième Bureau, he was presently living in Montana under the Witness Protection Act as a reward for providing details of a bomb attack on an American air force base which he himself had inspired.

  The same ARNOLD further claimed that while Downing Street officials had refused to be party to advance details of the “Second Burning,” they had made clear in off-the-record conversations with their Washington partners that they would welcome any initiative that silenced once and for all Franco-German carping at America’s conduct of the War Against Terrorism, not to mention Britain’s.

  As evidence of this he pointed to the so-called Heidelberg-Sorbonne Axis of Evil so beloved of the British right-wing press, and the witch hunt mounted by those who wished to name and shame the “freethinking” French and German intellectuals featured in Sasha’s now notorious lists of “mind poisoners” (Daily Telegraph) who had willingly signed up (according to the same newspaper) to “indoctrinate impressionable minds in the three R’s of pseudo-liberalism: Radicalism, Revolution and Revenge.”

  ARNOLD’s fulminations became wilder as his article ran on. Ted Mundy may have looked like an ex-British Council deadbeat, he wrote, but he was an unsung hero of the Cold War, and his friend Sasha was another. Together, the two men had over a number of years supplied the Western Alliance with priceless intelligence on the Communist threat. ARNOLD even maintained that Mundy was the holder of a secretly awarded British gallantry medal, a claim promptly denied by palace sources.

  And as a bonne bouche, ARNOLD alleged that J, by means of a sophisticated smokescreen of proxies, was the sole shareholder of a security company specializing in bulletproof cars, personal protection and survival counseling for prominent Americans in the corporate and entertainment fields who were contemplating a trip to terrorist-stricken Europe. The same company owned the copyright in the only piece of video footage of the siege ever to appear. This showed a posse of unidentifiable heroes in full antiterror rig storming through clouds of Hollywood smoke across the roof of the school building. In the background, just distinguishable between the chimney pots, lies the body of the Euro-terrorist Sasha, shot dead in the very act of flight. Medics are running over the cobbles towards him; a battered briefcase lies beside him. The clip, run and rerun on every television station in the world, had earned millions of dollars for its owner.

  Downing Street’s reaction to the ARNOLD piece was appropriately contemptuous. If ARNOLD exists, let him come forward and his allegations will be looked into. More likely, the offending article was the work of rogue elements of British Intelligence whose evident aim was to discredit New Labor and undermine Britain’s Special Relationship with the United States. The Downing Street spokesman urged his audience to address larger issues such as real world outcomes, step-changes and effectuality indicators. The Daily Mail carried a searing attack on the “latest whistle-blower to emerge from the shadows of the secret world” and pondered darkly on the hidden agenda of “closet saboteurs of our nation’s good name, masquerading as its protectors.”

  Summing up the whole tawdry affair, a well-placed and reliable senior official with access to the highest levels of government was reported as saying that some people these days were getting a bit too George Orwell for their own health. He was referring, of course, not to Downing Street or Washington, but to the spies.

  The political consequences of the siege were not slow to manifest themselves. Sasha’s prediction that an Islamist-inspired Euro-anarchist outrage on German soil would have its citizens rushing to the shelter of their American Big Brother was no exaggeration. At first, the Social Democratic German chancellor evinced a churlish reluctance to take the point. An early statement actually contested the tendentious and premature conclusions of the German right, which since the night of the siege had assumed a substantial lead in the polls. Realizing that he was running counter to popular opinion, he was, however, forced to change tack, first by announcing an independent investigation by German agencies, then by lamenting that his country, having played unwitting host to several of the perpetrators of 9/11, should apparently have been selected as the showplace for further senseless acts of violence against our American friends.

  For his conservative critics the statement was insufficiently abject. Why wait a full week before speaking out? they demanded to know. Why bother with an independent investigation when the evidence is there for every idiot to see? And what’s this weaselly apparently that has crept into the text? Go down on your knees, Mr. Chancellor! Grovel! Have you looked at Germany’s bank statements recently? Don’t you know that America will only do business with its friends? Don’t you realize they still hate us for siding with the French and Russians over Iraq? And now this, for God’s sake!

  But in the end, all was well. The chancellor did everything short of sending Washington his head on a charger. The Bundestag’s opposition parties joined the chorus. The dire fiscal punishments threatened by the U.S. administration were deferred on the understanding that the federal government would adopt a more helpful attitude in “the next stage of the war on terror,” by which was clearly meant Iran. A further understanding—implicit if not stated—was that the federal government, God willing, would by that time be a conservative one.

  Sasha was right too about the Frankfurt stock exchange, which after a period in the doldrums recovered its spirits. A gleeful columnist of Germany’s powerful right-wing press boasted that Günter Grass was more prescient than he knew when he declared that we are all Americans now.

  Only France, truculent as ever, refused to be moved by her neighbor’s display of self-flagellation. An unnamed spokesman for French Intelligence pronounced the list of French left-wing academics supposedly linked to “the Heidelberg school of Euro-terror” to be “an Anglo-Saxon phantasm.” The integrity of France’s fabled thinkers and academics would remain unscathed. A statement by a French presidential spokeswoman to the effect that “the entire episode reeked of news manipulation of the most amateurish kind” was dismissed as particularly arrogant. More bottles of French wine were poured down American drains, french fries became freedom fries, and the Tricolor was ceremoniously burned in the streets of Washington.

  Ingenious Russia, though worn down by economic cares, achieved a double benefit: the silencing of the last remaining voices of “antisocial” opposition to the government, whether in the media or parliament, on the grounds that irresponsible protest was the basis of all terror; and Washington’s unstinted encouragement to pursue, with even greater vigor than hitherto, its murderous war on the people of Chechnya.

  A final postscript was provided by the two dead terrorists themselves. Both men, it transpired, had made a will. Perhaps all terrorists do that. Both had expressed a wish to be buried alongside their respective mothers: Sasha the German in Neubrandenburg, and Mundy the Englishman on a sunbaked hillside in Pakistan. An intrepid journalist tracked down Mundy’s final resting place. The mist, she reported, never quite lifts, but the broken Christian masonry makes it a popular place for children to stage their mock battles.

  Cornwall, June 9, 2003

  Acknowledgments

  MY SINCERE THANKS to Sandy Lean, Ann Martin, Tony McClenaghan and Raleigh Trevelyan for their British India and Pakistan, to Imama Halima Krausen for her generou
s instruction in Islamic practices, to Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy.net and Judith Herrin for their radical Britain in the sixties and seventies, to Timothy Garton Ash, Gunnar Schweer and Stephan Strobel for historical and editorial advice far beyond the call of friendship, to Konrad Paul for his Weimar and Lothar Menne for his Berlin and much more, to Michael Buselmeier for his Heidelberg and John Pilger for his words of wisdom over dinner. I must also confess my indebtedness to the superb Plain Tales from the Raj by Charles Allen.

  My apologies to the peerless administrators of King Ludwig’s Linderhof, who in real life employ none but the best-informed guides, have no plant room in their basement, and whose only visitors are of the highest discernment and sobriety.