John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  Looking back at his career with MI5 more than thirty years afterwards David would write that ‘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’.19 In another piece written around the same time David provided an account of the atmosphere in which he worked: ‘Our senior officers hated each other for reasons we were not allowed to know. They hated our sister service even more. They hated politicians, Communists, and quite a lot of journalists. And, as we now know, they hated Harold Wilson and his kitchen Cabinet.’20

  Perhaps David’s memories should be treated with caution. Harold Wilson was not elected Prime Minister until long after David had left the Service; he was not even leader of the Labour Party at the time. David was remembering MI5 with the benefit of hindsight, with an insider’s knowledge of the havoc to come. He had relived this havoc in his imagination, while writing his novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which would evoke the paranoia prevalent within MI5 during the 1960s. There are reasons for doubting that the atmosphere was quite so noxious while David was serving there in the late 1950s, however. It was true that Peter Wright, then known as an expert on bugging, could be seen patrolling the corridors of Leconfield House while David was at MI5. But Wright himself has said that he did not begin to suspect the presence of a traitor within the Service until 1961, by which time David had left. Most of the security failures which were to arouse Wright’s suspicions lay in the future, and the defectors who would hint at Soviet sources within the highest ranks of British intelligence had yet to defect. And though Philby’s treachery was suspected, it would not be confirmed until January 1963, when he made a partial confession just before fleeing to the Soviet Union.

  The distinction between MI5 and its sister service MI6 is not universally understood. MI5 is more formally known as the Security Service, while MI6 is the Secret Service, or Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). The function of MI5, as set out in a 1952 Directive from the Home Secretary that became regarded as its charter, is ‘the Defence of the Realm as a whole, from external and internal dangers arising from attempts of espionage and sabotage, or from the actions of persons and organizations, whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged to be subversive of the state’.21 MI5 operates on home territory, which in those days included the colonies of the British Empire. The function of MI6, on the other hand, is to collect secret intelligence and mount covert operations overseas. Another way of looking at the difference between the two organisations is that MI5 is essentially defensive, whereas MI6 is offensive. MI5 is answerable to the Home Secretary, MI6 to the Foreign Secretary. In practice there has always been some overlap between the two intelligence services, for example in investigating the possible penetration of the services themselves by agents of a foreign power.

  Another difference between the two services, which lingers today though it was then more pronounced, was cultural. Philby’s most recent biographer has distinguished them thus: MI6 was White’s, MI5 the Rotary Club. MI6 was upper-middle class (and sometimes aristocratic), while MI5 was middle class (and sometimes working class). ‘MI5 looked up at MI6 with resentment; MI6 looked down with a small but ill-hidden sneer.’22 The ethics of the two services reflected this class difference. MI5 was technocratic, whereas MI6 still cultivated the ideal of the brilliant amateur, effortlessly outwitting Johnny Foreigner without making a fuss about it. MI6 officers tended to despise their Security Service colleagues as a bunch of civil service derelicts and plodding policemen.

  Unsurprisingly, there has been a tradition of rivalry and mistrust between the two, at times bordering on hostility. ‘It was natural that we should affect to hate our sister service,’ David has written, ‘because Six was trying to do to other countries what the Reds were trying to do to us: subvert, seduce and penetrate. Quite soon, a custodian’s indignation infected my approach to SIS and, without knowing anything about them, I shared the common view that they were an untrustworthy, godless crowd.’ He learned to refer to MI6 as Those Sods Across the Park – a reference to its headquarters on the far side of St James’s Park.23

  Like MI5, the Secret Service was still living on past glories – only more so. ‘It stank of wartime nostalgia,’ David would write later. ‘People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance.’24 After the end of the war SOE (Special Operations Executive) had been dissolved and its remnants absorbed into MI6, thus preserving a tradition of derring-do that would look increasingly dated as its wartime heroes aged. Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb had made a name for himself as a frogman during the war, but by the time he disappeared during an MI6 operation in 1956, drinking and smoking had taken a toll on his health. Crabb had been asked to carry out a covert underwater reconnaissance of the hull of a Soviet warship berthed at Portsmouth Dockyard – the cruiser Ordzhonikidze, which had brought the Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin on a diplomatic mission to Britain. A headless and handless body found fourteen months later was assumed to be his. The furore resulting from his disappearance was said to have embarrassed the British government, which distanced itself from the operation, and led the Prime Minister to decide that the Secret Service needed new leadership. Peter Wright wrote contemptuously that MI6 ‘never settled for a disaster if a calamity could be found instead’, and deplored the ‘senseless bravado about the way they behaved which I felt often risked the security of the operations’.25

  One source of tension between the two services was the widespread belief within MI6 that Kim Philby had been unfairly treated. Several of his former colleagues vigorously protested his innocence; they felt that the career of an outstanding officer had been gravely damaged by smears. Soon after his denunciation he was working for MI6 again as an agent. Within MI5, however, his guilt was largely accepted.

  At the outset David’s MI5 work was aimed at the most humble of targets, Commonwealth students in London. In the late 1950s the Chinese were avidly collecting industrial intelligence, using such students for low-level industrial espionage. Chinese Singaporeans and Malays were thought to be susceptible to inducements to spy for their mother country. David was dismayed to find that MI5’s Chinese ‘experts’ were elderly retired missionaries, with an imperfect command of the language.

  After cutting his teeth with the Commonwealth students David was promoted to F Branch, responsible for keeping a close watch on the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). One of the most obvious sources of information about the CPGB’s activities was the Daily Worker, the Party’s newspaper (renamed the Morning Star in 1966). A vast number of copies were delivered to Leconfield House every morning. Indeed, after the Soviet Embassy, which subsidised it by bulk orders, MI5 was probably its best customer. The Daily Worker struggled to keep up its circulation; Party members were constantly being exhorted to spend time selling the paper on street corners, thus conveniently drawing attention to themselves.26

  David worked in F2, the section responsible for ‘positive vetting’ of former Communists. MI5’s responsibility for vetting civil servants, scientists and others who might have access to government secrets had originated in the early years of the Cold War. In March 1948, amid mounting anxiety about Communists betraying atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, the Prime Minister had announced the ‘Purge Procedure’, designed to exclude Communists and Fascists from work ‘vital to the Security of the State’. The Procedure meant a significant expansion in MI5’s responsibilities. Initially it involved only ‘negative vetting’, checking of those engaged in secret work against MI5 records, especially its increasingly complete lists of Communist Party members. But further security lapses had increased pressure to make the process more rigorous. Effective vetting required much more detailed and thorough examination, not least because real traitors were unlikely to advertise themselves by membership of the Party.27 To assess the potential risk po
sed by such individuals meant careful scrutiny of confidential references solicited from present and former colleagues, employers, tutors and indeed anyone whose opinion was considered to carry weight, as well as a sifting of information obtained by other means.

  A typical vetting enquiry might ask whether a trade union shop steward who had subscribed to Soviet Weekly for six months should be allowed to work for Hawker Siddeley, a firm that manufactured military aircraft and guided missiles for the armed services. The remit of one young desk officer, the lawyer Michael Overton-Fox, was to investigate Communists in the Post Office, for example by interviewing a postman who had been seen reading a copy of the Daily Worker. It was hard to take this kind of work very seriously. Special Branch reports were often unintentionally comic: ‘I am informed that he is a voracious reader of westerns and keeps a parrot.’ For a while Overton-Fox shared an office with David, together with several others; he portrays David as the funniest man he ever worked with, and recalls how he had the others ‘in fits of laughter’ every morning. Maggie Foster-Moore, who worked as David’s secretary for a while, remembers him coming into the room where she and the other secretaries worked and regaling them with stories about their colleagues, exhibiting a gift for mimicry that seemed to her ‘marvellous’.

  As David much later recalled, this was ‘a paper world’. He became practised in stripping intelligence of its source indicators, so that it was impossible to tell where it came from. Before being distributed outside MI5, his vetting reports were sent up the hierarchy as far as the Director-General, annotated with comments at each stage.

  A security service marches on its files, and I was one of the infantry. Like Bob Cratchit in his Tank, I toiled from morning and often till late into the evening at the dossiers of people I would never meet: should we trust him? Or her? Should their employers trust them? Might he be traitor, spy, lonely decider, a suitable case for blackmail by the unscrupulous opposition? Thus I, who seemed to have no adult understanding of myself, was being asked to sit in judgment on the lives and loves of others …

  There was a voyeuristic character to this work, snooping on other people’s lives. Indeed there was a sense in which the snoop was inhabiting the lives of others rather than living himself.

  The only tools I possessed were the possibilities of my own nature. These were of many sorts in those days, 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: namely that of the novelist.28

  But sometimes the paper suspects became creatures of flesh and blood. One of David’s tasks was to interview people with a known or suspected Communist past who were being considered for higher positions within the civil service or government scientific establishments. The head of F Branch, David Haldane Porter, spotting that he was good at this sort of work, ensured that he was awarded the juiciest cases. The interviews would take place in rooms set aside for the purpose in every government department. David would begin by advising those whom he was interviewing that they were under investigation and that their telephones might be tapped. ‘We know more than you think we know,’ he would suggest, and would then recommend them to make a full disclosure. ‘If we find that you have been lying, it’s going to be bad for you: much better to tell me everything now.’

  If an interviewee admitted to having been a member of the Communist Party in the past, David would ask him why he had joined, and who his friends had been; and try to ascertain whether he might be still secretly in the Party.

  Such interviews could easily backfire if handled insensitively. A Labour MP would commit suicide after being interviewed by Peter Wright. In the late 1950s there were plenty of Britons working for the government who had been members of the Communist Party, or who had felt sympathetic to the Soviet Union, not least for its principal role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. This did not necessarily make them security risks. Often David encountered hostility from senior civil servants. Positive vetting was alien to the work culture of Whitehall. To interrogate a man’s colleagues and friends about his background and to question his integrity was regarded as ‘un-British’.29

  One case involved a scientist who had written public letters supporting Communist positions. MI5 had evidence that he was, or had been, a secret member of the Party, though David could not reveal this. ‘Can’t you at least tell me something?’ he asked, but the scientist stolidly denied all. David duly reported that he could not be cleared, and was surprised when his recommendation was ignored. He told Thistlethwaite that he thought this a case worth examining further. Years later, he discovered that the interviewee had been a British agent, who had feigned Communist sympathies in order to win the confidence of his comrades. The vetting process had been part of his cover story.

  From time to time David took his turn as duty officer, tending the shop overnight or at weekends. In general there was not much to do; he had been briefed what to say if the Director-General’s wife telephoned. For most of the time, as duty officer, ‘the building was yours’. Once everybody else had left he was able to go down to the Registry and browse. David amused himself by looking up the file on Compton Mackenzie, who had served in British intelligence during the First World War: in it he found a letter from the head of the Secret Service, signed ‘C’ in green ink, fulminating that Mackenzie’s Greek Memories (1932) had employed symbols of the Service, ‘some of which are still in use!’ – the symbol ‘C’ being one of these. Mackenzie had been convicted under the Official Secrets Act, and fined a token amount, while the book itself was suppressed.

  It was always possible that a crisis might erupt, as happened when a Commonwealth leader from an African country contacted the newspapers, following a crude approach by an MI6 officer in a park. David denounced this to Ann as ‘one of the biggest fiascos the office has had to cope with since the great defection’. He wrote to her that he had been on duty non-stop from ten in the morning on Saturday until midday on Sunday, without any sleep. ‘Managed to raise the DG at 1 a.m. on Sunday and we opened up the office with all frills by 4 a.m.,’ he told her. ‘Nearly had to go to Chequers to find the Col. Office rep!’30

  After a while David transferred to F4, the section responsible for agent-running. The term ‘agent’ is confusing, because it has different meanings in British and American parlance. In America, an ‘agent’ is used to mean an intelligence officer, as in ‘FBI agent’; but in Britain, it means an individual who is paid or persuaded by an intelligence officer to provide information about the Communist Party, or any other organisation deemed to be subversive. David himself had been such an agent while an undergraduate at Oxford. Agent-running is the management (or ‘controlling’) of such individuals. It involves regular meetings between the agent and the case officer, sometimes after dark. Occasionally David would bring along his superior to meet one of his agents, just as George Leggett had brought Dick Thistlethwaite to meet David; but generally he was left to run them alone.

  The most famous of all MI5’s agent-runners was Maxwell Knight, by then retired, though he continued to run a handful of agents recruited long before and would appear at Leconfield House from time to time to hand in his expenses claims. Max Knight was considered unbalanced, partly because of his lingering conviction (which turned out to be correct) that the Soviets had penetrated MI5 during the war. Since his retirement in 1956, he had concentrated on writing and broadcasting on natural history. The British public, to whom the genial ‘Uncle Max’ was a familiar figure in the late 1950s and early 1960s, knew nothing of his earlier career as a spymaster within MI5. David was always on the lookout for ways to supplement his salary, so he
seized the opportunity to illustrate a book of Knight’s.* He spent some time in the pet department of Harrods, drawing parrots from the live models in the cages.

  David shared a small back room at the end of a long corridor on the first floor of Leconfield House with Knight’s former deputy John Bingham, a short, tubby, bespectacled man then almost fifty years old, the heir to an Irish peerage† and known as ‘the Hon. John’ as a result. His uncomplicated patriotism and vigorous right-wing opinions were tempered by his humanity, sweetness of character and sense of humour. He and David worked in harmony together and became close friends, socialising together outside working hours. ‘Jack liked him very much,’ Bingham’s wife Madeleine would write in an unpublished memoir. She described David as ‘a good-looking fair young man … intelligent and very funny’. With his excellent French and German, ‘he seemed a very promising recruit to the Office, and well set to rise in the profession’.31

  Like Maxwell Knight, John Bingham wrote thrillers, stealing time to work on them during his lunch hours. His wife Madeleine was also a published writer, the author of a string of novels that she cheerfully categorised in her memoir as ‘bodice rippers’. Bingham encouraged David to start writing again. Perhaps too the experience of correcting Ann’s work stimulated him into thinking he could do better himself. ‘I began writing because I was going mad with boredom,’ he would declare later: ‘not the apathetic, listless kind of boredom that doesn’t want to get out of bed in the morning, but the screaming, frenetic sort that races round in circles looking for real work and finding none.’ He wrote in penny notebooks, whenever he could find a spare moment: on the train to and from Great Missenden, in lunch hours, in the grey morning hours before going off to work, or when stuck for the night in London on some operational wild-goose chase.32 Instead of resuming the story set in a public school which he had started writing at Eton, he began to write about the work he had until recently been doing for MI5. The initiating incident for his new novel would be the death of Samuel Fennan, a civil servant with a Communist past who has access to sensitive information. Fennan has apparently committed suicide following a vetting interview. George Smiley, who conducted the interview and knew that it had been innocuous, is asked to investigate; after intercepting a telephone call he comes to suspect that Fennan has been murdered. As the plot unfolds it becomes clear that Fennan has been the unwitting tool of an East German intelligence operation led by Dieter Frey, a former associate of Smiley’s who had worked with him behind the lines during the war.