by Adam Sisman
One aspect of the book, which would become a characteristic of David’s writing, is the use of intelligence terminology – the term ‘tradecraft’, for example, to mean skill in espionage or intelligence work. Though this was standard usage in the intelligence world, David is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary as having introduced it to a wider public.33 Such jargon accentuates the sense of verisimilitude, giving the reader the impression that he or she is being admitted into a select society, with its own private lexicon.
In the office canteen one lunchtime during 1958 David bumped into MI5’s lawyer, Bernard Hill. On the Formica table in front of him was a mint copy of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. When David expressed interest in reading the novel, the lawyer sighed. The fellow Greene, he said eventually, would have to be prosecuted. As an ex-MI6 officer, he had accurately portrayed the relationship between a head of station in a British embassy and his agent in the field. It just wouldn’t do.
‘And it’s a good book,’ he complained, poking at the offending work. ‘It’s a damned good book. That’s the whole trouble.’
The Service decided not to prosecute Greene, perhaps concluding that it was better to laugh than cry.34 Some time later David was able to read Our Man in Havana himself, in a book-club edition. He was greatly entertained by the notion that the grandees of British intelligence could be taken in by bogus reports and a fictitious network of agents concocted by a humble vacuum-cleaner retailer, though he remembers feeling shocked that Greene had depicted a torturer (the chief of police, Captain Segura) as a comic character.
Bingham had determinedly resisted promotion, preferring to remain an active agent-runner rather than move into a managerial role. He was an experienced interrogator and field officer, who had served in Germany in the post-war period, interrogating refugees fleeing from the East, just as David had done in Austria; moreover he was extremely agile and sure-handed in the management of clandestine break-ins, surveillance and other tricks of the trade. But his greatest talent lay in running his women agents, some of whom he met several times weekly. One in particular lived under great stress at the heart of a target organisation and required debriefing every night after she came home from a day with the comrades. For her, and for his other agents, Bingham showed a pastoral concern that went far beyond the norm. ‘The Service will be with you,’ Bingham told them. ‘We’ll be walking at your side even when you can’t see us.’35 David, who often acted as his deputy, formed the opinion that Bingham’s agents loved him, and worked for him rather than for their country or for any abstract ideal.36
Perhaps the most important of Bingham’s agents within the Communist Party was Julia Pirie, a small woman whose unassuming demeanour masked a sharp intellect. She had infiltrated the Communist Party as a typist in the early 1950s and had worked her way into a position of trust, eventually becoming personal assistant to the Party’s General Secretary. She was therefore in a position to provide regular reports and copies of documents to MI5, which she would pass to Bingham, during matches at the Oval in the cricket season. It seems probable that Pirie pinpointed the location of the membership files stored at the north London home of a wealthy Party member. The house was put under round-the-clock surveillance; when a wiretap revealed that the owner’s wife had telephoned her husband to say that she was going out for an hour and would leave the key under the doormat, an MI5 officer grabbed the opportunity to take an impression. Armed with a copy of the key, the watchers waited until the occupants went away for a weekend in the Lake District, then let themselves in and copied the secret files. This was Operation Party Piece, one of a number of operations against the Communist Party that led Hollis to tell the Home Secretary that ‘we had the British Communist party pretty well buttoned up’. Indeed, by the time David joined MI5, the Service no longer saw the CPGB as a major subversive threat. If it had ever been involved in espionage, it was not now. Henceforth the threat from the CPGB was seen as industrial rather than political.37
Pirie was also the most likely source for information that led to the successful bugging of the Communist Party’s headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden. This had proved difficult because the Party leadership, suspicious of just such a possibility, had constantly changed the location of key meetings. An agent inside the building, probably Pirie, reported that meetings had been moved to a windowless basement room, apparently secure, but which could be reached by an old coal chute leading down from the pavement outside. The response was another MI5 coup, known as Operation Tie Pin, which took place on a Saturday night when no one was likely to be in the Party headquarters. The entire staff of MI5’s A Branch surveillance team, known as ‘the Watchers’, was carefully choreographed to play the part of drunken revellers walking past the building in different directions, to disguise the noise made by an MI5 technician as he surreptitiously placed a false door containing a bugging device over the chute to allow continued monitoring of the meetings.38
At eleven o’clock one morning David was warned that an important woman agent he was running was in peril: a telephone tap had revealed that she had been blown. The priority now was to act swiftly to limit the fallout. David consulted Bingham, and within an hour they had devised a plan to suggest that she had been supplying information to a newspaper rather than to MI5. In the guise of an investigative journalist, David wrote a string of letters to his agent, thanking her for the information received so far and imploring her to reveal more details of her work. He and Bingham then had the forgery section provide stamped and postmarked envelopes, extending back in time over a period of weeks. They fed the letters into the envelopes, sealed them and slit them open again. All this was done in a single morning. Meanwhile David had sent a covert message to his agent, instructing her to tell her employers that she had toothache needing urgent treatment. At ‘the dentist’ she was handed the letters to place in her handbag and told to leave it on her desk when she next left the office, in the knowledge that it would be searched while she was out. Telephone checks confirmed that her employers had taken the bait. Though she was compromised the immediate danger had been averted, and she was gradually withdrawn.39
One of David’s agents, John Miller, would become a lifelong friend. It was unusual for an agent and his case officer to become close, but Miller was an exceptional person. Over the years David developed an enormous respect for his personal qualities: his compassion, his unselfishness, his tolerance of the foibles of others, his common-sense wisdom, his sense of humour and his lack of sentimentality. David would come to rely on his judgement, always asking him to read his books before they were submitted to the publishers. Miller was a man of many parts: actor, restaurateur, soldier, architect, antique dealer and eventually artist. As a soldier on special operations he had suffered a terrible beating that had left him scarred but not embittered. His obvious spiritual qualities led to an invitation to become a lay canon of Truro Cathedral. Like David, Miller had spent time in retreat with the Franciscan community at Cerne Abbas; indeed he had a Franciscan approach to life, in his feeling for Nature and contentment with simplicity. At the Roman Catholic retreat of Walsingham he had met a confused and parentless young man, then being passed from monk to monk for sexual favours: this was Michael Truscott, who became his partner.
From time to time Miller would travel up to London from his home in West Cornwall to assist David on operations. He also joined the local Communist Party so that he could report back to David on its activities.
Another of David’s agents was ‘Harry’, whom David would eulogise long after he left the Service as an ‘unknown soldier of the Cold War’. Like Miller, Harry had joined the Communist Party in order to spy on it from the inside. ‘All his energies from late childhood onwards had been directed at frustrating his country’s enemies by becoming one of them,’ wrote David. Harry had absorbed the Party’s dogma until it was second nature to him; ‘he had bent his mind until he scarcely knew its old shape any more’. With help from his MI5 agent-runners he
had schooled himself to think and react as one of its faithful. Yet somehow he always managed to come up smiling for his furtive weekly debriefings.
Harry had volunteered for all the jobs that other comrades were only too glad to be relieved of, in the evenings and at weekends. He had spent countless hours on street corners trying to sell copies of the Daily Worker. He had acted as runner and talent-spotter for visiting Soviet cultural attachés and third secretaries, and had supplied them with harmless or inaccurate technical tittle-tattle about the industries in his area. Gradually, through diligence and apparent devotion to the cause, Harry had risen to become an influential and valued comrade, entrusted with semi-conspiratorial errands which seldom amounted to anything of substance.
Yet this lack of visible success did not matter, David would assure Harry during their weekly debriefings. ‘If you didn’t hear anything, Harry,’ he had been taught to say, ‘that means we can all sleep easier in our beds at night.’ From time to time, perhaps to bolster Harry’s morale, the two of them would rehearse together the plans for ‘stay behind’, after the putative Soviet occupation of Britain. Harry would retrieve his radio transmitter from its hiding-place in the attic, they would blow the dust off it, and then he would practise sending dummy messages to an imaginary resistance headquarters and receiving dummy orders in return.
David often pondered the motives of Harry and others like him. It seemed to him that Harry took no pleasure in duplicity, but bore it as a necessary result of his calling. MI5 paid him a pittance. ‘If we’d paid him more, he’d have been embarrassed,’ wrote David; ‘besides, he could never have enjoyed his money. So we paid him a tiny private income and a tiny pension, and called it his alimony, and we threw in all the respect and friendship that security allowed.’40
David was becoming restless again. While away from home on operations he often stayed the night with his colleague Peter de Wesselow, a former RAF squadron leader who had a flat in Drayton Gardens.* As the officer with the day-to-day responsibility for handling the ‘Venona’ decrypts of Soviet telegrams, he had written a paper identifying Philby as the most likely candidate to be the Soviet spy code-named ‘Stanley’.41 But the ‘Venona’ material was handled with the utmost secrecy, and David knew nothing of it. A wealthy bachelor who seemed to be always between women, de Wesselow was an entertaining companion. Several letters to Ann relate enjoyable evenings with him. David was excited by such glimpses of a more sophisticated life. ‘When I do all these things and see how many fascinating and stimulating places and people there are to be seen I long to bring you to London to live here – take a tiny unfurnished flat and a new lease of youthful energy,’ he wrote to Ann. ‘I feel you’ve nursed me through a period of stagnation, hopelessness and moribundity … I want to go with you to all the newest & loopiest theatres, go to beastly little night-clubs, listen to the speakers in Hyde Park.’42
In the summer of 1959 the Cornwells sold Orchid Cottage and moved to London. They rented a mansion flat on the first floor of a block on Prince of Wales Drive, which they found through a friend in the Office. David decorated the nursery with scenes from fairy tales, including elves that Ann considered too frightening for small children. A succession of lodgers helped them meet the rent of £8 per week, the first being a Nigerian called Richard, who was offended by the offhand manner in which his hosts spoke to him until he realised that they were treating him just as they would an Englishman; after that they got on very well together. Before leaving Richard offered to cook a traditional African dinner for the Cornwells and invited his glamorous Nigerian girlfriend. Ann returned home one afternoon to find a live chicken in the bathroom, feeding off corn on the floor. The next morning Richard peeled off his shirt, grabbed the chicken and slaughtered it with a carving knife at the kitchen window.
One evening David and Ann went to see the film On the Beach, adapted from Nevil Shute’s novel about the last days of humanity following an all-out nuclear exchange. Ann was so affected that, when she noticed representatives from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the street outside the cinema, she joined on the spot.
According to Madeleine Bingham, Ann adored David. ‘She used to look at him as if he were some amazing piece of good luck which she had never thought would come her way.’ There was something childlike about their relationship; in private they communicated in baby talk. Thus spies were referred to as ‘pies’ in their letters. But David often teased Ann, to a point where she would become upset. One letter written at this time suggests discontent within his marriage. ‘You are an AWFUL pot,’ he told her; ‘please don’t any more or I will go loopy.’ He pleaded with her to ‘knock over the barriers, and be happy and laugh’. Something was evidently amiss, because he begged her, ‘Oh please don’t bleed me anymore.’43
Ann was already pregnant when they moved to Battersea. In March 1960 their second child was born, another boy whom they named Stephen – ‘an agreeable youth with a large nose and no conversation’, as David depicted him in a letter to his old friend Kaspar von Almen.44 John Miller agreed to act as his godfather. Ann had chosen to have the baby at home, attended by her mother and a midwife. David stayed away from her throughout her labour. He suffered increasingly from disabling migraines. Ann feared that married life was beginning to pall for him, and that the responsibility of being a father of two children was more than he wanted. He would say later that, for him, writing was a way of breaking free. ‘It was the gradual sense of hopelessness about marriage, of utter solitude, which first drove me to write.’
David would acknowledge his debt to Bingham by borrowing some of his traits for his most important character, George Smiley – his habit of polishing his spectacles on the end of his tie, for example, which became one of Smiley’s trademarks.45 Bingham had an inconspicuous, unassuming quality, which David appropriated for Smiley; his agent Peter Watt used to say of Bingham that he could ‘lose himself in a crowd’. His skill as an intelligence officer was overlain by an endearing helplessness in everyday matters. Women liked to fuss over him, as they did over Smiley. Like Smiley, Bingham was squat and pudgy, almost toadlike in appearance.
Yet anyone familiar with Bingham could recognise that he was different from Smiley in significant ways. Unlike Smiley, Bingham was no scholar; his German was not fluent, and he had no love for German literature. Nor was Bingham a cuckold, like Smiley; on the contrary, Bingham was a lady-killer, one reason why he was so adept at managing women agents. Bingham was the heir to a peerage; Smiley was socially anonymous, ‘without school, family, regiment or trade’. Nor did Smiley appear to share Bingham’s robust right-wing views. Madeleine Bingham would come to believe that her husband was the model for Smiley, but she was mistaken; he was no more than a component. To David, Bingham was in some ways reminiscent of another and deeper influence, Vivian Green; the character of George Smiley drew on them both, but was not limited by their limitations. ‘All fictional characters are amalgams,’ wrote David, in a passage about his sources for Smiley. ‘All spring from much deeper wells than their apparent counterparts in life. All in the end, like the poor suspects in my files, are remoulded in the writer’s imagination until they are probably closer to his own nature than to anyone else’s.’46
Smiley, the central figure in David’s first novel Call for the Dead, would be one of several characters in the book to reappear in later books, including Smiley’s wife Ann, his protégé Peter Guillam, the policeman Mendel and the villain Mundt. This was a deliberate ploy, picked up from reading Balzac, whom David had first read as a prescribed author on the French literature syllabus at Oxford. David would outline the strategy he had adopted in a letter to his accountant, written several years later. ‘At an early stage I formed the notion of writing two novels, perhaps more, which would form a saga in which minor characters in the one would reappear in the second and assume greater importance.’
This ‘second’ novel would in fact turn out to be his third, The Spy who Came in from the Cold. ‘I had begun as
early February 1960 to sketch out on paper substantial scenes and situations which belonged to the second novel,’ he continued. ‘This is of course an inevitable practice if the two books together are to provide a single entity.’ He drew attention to the fact that Mundt mysteriously disappears at the end of Call for the Dead, ‘solely so that he may reappear in the sequel’. Mundt’s reappearance and the role that he played in The Spy who Came in from the Cold were devised and written in the summer of 1960.47
David’s secretary Maggie Foster-Moore typed the manuscript of Call for the Dead, which he had provisionally entitled ‘A Clear Case of Suicide’. Bingham read the novel and introduced David to his literary agent, Peter Watt, the great-grandson of the founder of the firm of A. P. Watt which claimed to be the oldest literary agency in the world. Watt was a stylish dresser and an amusing man-about-town, whom David would come to know very well over the next few years. He submitted the book, under David’s original title and the pseudonym ‘Jean Sanglas’, to Collins, then one of Britain’s leading crime publishers.