John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  * Smiley first appears in Call for the Dead. In 1928 he is due to reply to an offer from All Souls (a college open only to graduate students) when his tutor Jebedee persuades him to attend an interview with a board from the ‘Overseas Committee for Academic Research’, which recruits him into the Circus. The fact that he had completed his undergraduate studies by 1928 suggests that by the time of the exchange with Guinness he would be into his seventies.

  * There is some doubt about this. David remembers one of those present saying to Guinness, ‘Were you to do this …’ and receiving the reply, ‘I thought that was understood.’ Elsewhere it has been suggested that only subsequently was Guinness persuaded by John Irvin to take the part.

  † Long-established spectacle makers, since bought by Boots. Curry & Paxton also supplied the spectacles worn by Michael Caine for his role as Harry Palmer in the films of Len Deighton’s thrillers.

  * Elizabeth Spriggs and Peggy Ashcroft were both considered for the part.

  † Also attributed to the poet Thomas Campbell. It is a variation of the Gospel of John 18: 40, ‘Now Barabbas was a robber.’

  * David slightly muddied the waters when he claimed, in a letter to The Times, to have ‘never heard of Sir Maurice, either by name or in any other way, until long after the name and character of George Smiley were in print’ (‘Unlicensed to quote’, 17 March 1981). This was true, though Oldfield had been an unidentified member of the selection board that had interviewed him when he applied to join MI6. David had written Call for the Dead by then, though it was not in print and had not yet been accepted by a publisher.

  * Marc Jaffe, the long-serving editorial director of Bantam.

  * In fact the New Statesman article (‘The endless quest for Supermole’, 21 September 1979) by its editor, Bruce Page, had concentrated on the authenticity of the series, and was otherwise uncritical. The magazine’s cover showed three partly masked men: Philby, Bond and Smiley.

  † Sic. Oldfield had been head of MI6, not MI5.

  * The Cornish village closest to Tregiffian.

  † In his Daily Mail review of the television series, Trevor-Roper described le Carré as ‘a sensitive and thoughtful writer … Inevitably his mole, Gerald, recalls to me my old friend Kim Philby.’

  ‡ Smiley recorded in his memoirs that he had cried only once during the war, in 1940, when he had to have his terrier put down after being posted overseas. In a poignant passage of A Perfect Spy, Jack Brotherhood takes his ailing dog outside and shoots it.

  * Both his sons were too young to have been at Eton when David was teaching there.

  † It was said that Ian Fleming took the names of Bond’s enemies Blofeld and Scaramanga from his contemporaries at Eton.

  * Orders taken in advance of publication.

  * From the opening paragraph of chapter 2 of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

  * From internal evidence I deduce that this conversation took place around 1980.

  * These remarks were quoted in a letter to the Telegraph from the Conservative peer Lord Lexden on 3 March 2014. David responded the next day.

  † This was Guy Maurice Bratt, who served under diplomatic cover in the British Embassy in Washington in the late 1970s.

  * It has been suggested that her feelings stemmed from her attraction to David, or from his towards her. He strongly denies any such feelings on his part.

  * They met on at least one other occasion, when David called on Greene at his Paris flat.

  19

  ‘The Love Thief’

  By the time that the long-drawn-out arrangements had been concluded for the BBC to make Smiley’s People, neither Irvin nor Hopcraft was available. Jonathan Powell brought in John Mackenzie, director of The Long Good Friday, but he proved unacceptable to Guinness, and was replaced by Simon Langton. John Hopkins, writer of the innovative quartet of television plays Talking to a Stranger (1966), produced a script which was thought much too long and wrong in various other ways. By this time the cast had been assembled and the BBC was ready to start shooting, so David was obliged to rewrite the scripts himself, very quickly, with help from Jane and input from Guinness. Once again, the BBC assembled a strong cast, including Eileen Atkins* as Ostrakova, Curd Jürgens as Vladimir, and Michael Lonsdale as Grigoriev. Several of the actors from the Tinker, Tailor series were available to play the same roles, including Bernard Hepton and Beryl Reid, but sadly not Michael Jayston, who had played Guillam. Once again, the series was made almost entirely on location, except for the final scene at the Berlin Wall, which was shot at Nottingham’s Lady Bay Bridge. Smiley’s People was broadcast in six parts on BBC 2 on Monday evenings at 8.00 p.m., starting on 22 September 1982, and on PBS a month later. Like its predecessor, it was greeted with general acclaim. ‘It has just opened in the States to a triumphant reception,’ David wrote to Vivian Green in October.1 In America the series was nominated for three Emmys; in Britain, it was nominated for ten BAFTAs, and won four, including Best Actor for Alec Guinness (again) and Best Actress for Beryl Reid.

  As John Irvin remarked, Guinness had made Smiley his own. In a sense he had stolen the character from David. Henceforth it would be an effort for David to think about George without picturing Alec. ‘Guinness had taken over the part, and his voice was in my ear,’ David would tell an interviewer in 1989. ‘I was writing Guinness cadences, and giving him Guinness mannerisms.’ When he tried to imagine his character, ‘it wasn’t my Smiley, it was his Smiley’.2 It was time to leave Smiley behind. He was getting too old, anyway; there were only so many times that he could be brought out of retirement.

  David had re-established contact with a friend from his Bonn days, David Goodall. In 1979 Goodall had been posted back to Bonn, this time as Minister. David visited him there in October of that year, after passing the proofs of Smiley’s People, and would go back to stay with him at least once more in the next couple of years. During a walk along the Rhine, David outlined his thoughts about what he might tackle next. He was nerving himself to write something ‘agonising’ and ‘completely different’: he wanted to break away from the espionage genre and write ‘something really good’.

  Within a few months, however, he had gone back to planning another spy story. He already had a character in mind, based on his sister Charlotte, whose early experiences had made her an angry young woman. Passionate by nature, with a strong social conscience, she was drawn to radical causes. Though David thought her politics naïve, he was never dismissive. ‘Oh Sis, calm down,’ he would say. This was a period when the far-left Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) attracted a disproportionate number of actors, including the Redgrave siblings Vanessa and Corin. When Charlotte had been at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, she had heard Vanessa Redgrave proselytise. David came to believe that Charlotte had joined the WRP and been sent to a radicalising school for ‘training’, though in fact she never joined this or any other political party.

  One evening, while staying down in Cornwall on his own, David went to a local sports centre to see Charlotte play Beatrice in a touring Royal Shakespeare Company production of Much Ado about Nothing. Watching the cast shouting their lines in order to be heard above the din of rain drumming down on the metal roof, David was suddenly inspired. Afterwards he invited his sister and two other cast members back to Tregiffian, where they chatted beside a blazing open fire while drinking warm red wine. David’s close involvement with the two television series, and with Guinness in particular, had caused him to reflect on the parallels between acting and spying. He now saw a possibility to combine the two in a single story. Charlie, a beautiful young actress with a radical background, would be recruited by the Circus to penetrate a terrorist organisation, after a British minister has been killed by a bomb. She would be offered a role in the ‘theatre of the real’: to become a double agent, playing the part of a young woman only slightly different from herself. Charlie would be ‘taken all the way through’, just as it was once suggested that David should have been. The suspense would
come from the difficulty of maintaining her cover, and the risk of exposure, which would put her in peril; the psychological tension would derive from her own confused loyalties. The book would be told in the first person by Charlie’s case officer.

  ‘I’m writing a novel about an actress,’ David told Charlotte. ‘Would you be an advisor on that?’ He did not elucidate the plot. Charlotte agreed, and talked at length about her experiences of radical politics. He supplemented what he learned from his sister by talking to others with similar experiences and by visiting radical bookshops in Islington. With John Miller he travelled to Mykonos, the setting where Charlie would be recruited at the beginning of the novel. Charlie’s back-story, as envisaged by David, was comparable if not identical to Charlotte’s own. Her father goes bankrupt and is imprisoned for fraud; she has to leave boarding school because of unpaid fees; she comes home to chaos, with a furniture van being loaded up in the drive; her beloved pony has been taken away. When her father comes back from prison, he waits humbly for doors to be opened before passing through, just as Ronnie did.

  After a while David changed direction: instead of being recruited by the British, Charlie would be recruited by the Israelis to penetrate a Palestinian terrorist cell. Rather than a British minister, it would be an Israeli diplomat whose Bonn residence is blown up by terrorists at the beginning, one of a succession of attacks mounted by Khalil, a terrorist mastermind. Charlie’s mission would be to locate Khalil, so that the Israelis could assassinate him. This aspect of the plot was reminiscent of real operations mounted by Mossad, which had a policy of seeking out those responsible for terrorist atrocities against Israeli citizens and eliminating them.

  It was difficult to explain Charlie’s motive for risking her life in the service of a cause about which she felt ambiguous, to say the least. Then as now, the default position for radical leftists was pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist; indeed, this was how Charlotte felt. But David perceived in her, and in other idealists like her, a longing for ‘a direction, a purpose, a mission’; he had felt the same way himself. ‘Although she’s rejecting,’ he told an interviewer who quizzed him about Charlie’s motivation, ‘she really wants to join.’3

  With this change of direction David introduced another human element into the story: Charlie’s relationship with her Svengali-like controller ‘Joseph’, who becomes her lover. Joseph’s unease about what Israel has become (‘an ugly little Spartan state’) grows as Charlie surrenders to his manipulation.

  David shuttled back and forth to the Middle East, using Cyprus as a staging post. He began with the Israelis, because he found them much more open and accessible. In the foreword to his book he would pay special tribute to General Shlomo Gazit, former head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, a man who personified for David ‘the enlightened Israeli soldier and scholar of his generation’. The Israelis allowed him to see anyone he wanted to see, without conditions, including members of special forces and people who had served in secret units. He was also given the opportunity to meet a captured terrorist: someone who really was what Charlie would only pretend to be. Like Charlie, the German terrorist Brigitte Schulz was in her mid-twenties; she had been arrested by agents of Mossad in the process of trying to shoot down an El Al airliner as it came in to land at Nairobi’s Kenyatta Airport. Because the plot had been detected, the plane had been empty of passengers; it had returned smartly to Israel with only Brigitte on board. In Israel she had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. David visited her in a secret prison set in a fold of the Negev desert, known colloquially as the ‘Villa Brigitte’: a cluster of low green military huts surrounded by barbed wire, with a watchtower at each corner. He was driven there in a jeep by a helpful young colonel in Shin Bet, the Israeli equivalent of MI5. Inside the compound the colonel led David up an outdoor staircase, rapped on a door and called out a greeting. They were received by the prison governor, a sturdy woman in late middle age with bright brown eyes and a pained but kindly smile, who addressed David in English.

  A few moments later Brigitte was led in. She was a striking young woman: tall, clear-eyed and beautiful. David introduced himself in German and they sat facing each other across a table, while the prison governor seated herself in the corner of the room, patiently prompting her ward from time to time in English. In his questioning, David tried to elicit how a young woman from a good family in one of the richest countries in the world could have reached the point of being willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of innocent Jewish passengers. She told him that she was a resister and a liberator. The Federal Republic was a Nazi country run by state fascists of the Nazi generation. She was opposed to armed capitalism, the remilitarisation of Germany and American colonialism. The foundation of Israel was a trick to force innocent Arabs to pay the price for Nazi atrocities.

  David sympathised with much of what she said. He too had been disgusted by the ubiquity of former Nazis in positions of power in West Germany; by the refusal of the older generation to discuss what had happened in the Nazi period; and by the willingness of the occupying Western powers to overlook Nazi crimes in return for German subservience. He too had come to believe that the Palestinians had been forced to pay the price for Western crimes against the Jews. Nevertheless he found her espousal of terrorism inexcusable and repellent. And though he said none of this to Brigitte, it was clear to him that in her eyes he was just another lackey of the bourgeoisie, a voyeur, a terror tourist. Even as he admired the beauty and the boldness of this young woman, he sensed her cool assessment of him as an inadequate.

  She terminated the interview. After Brigitte had gone, David remained seated for a moment, confused by his reaction. The prison governor asked him whether he had got what he had come for. He replied lamely that it had been very interesting. Then it struck him that she had spoken to him in German. Seeing his surprise, she answered his unasked question. ‘I speak only English with her,’ the woman said. ‘I cannot allow her to know. When she speaks German, I cannot trust myself. I know the voice too well.’

  Then she added, by way of explanation: ‘You see, I was in Dachau.’4

  David found the Israelis both friendly and approachable, almost disarmingly willing to talk. It was much more difficult to get to know the other side. He had begun by making an appointment to see the PLO’s London representative, only to be stood up when he arrived at the appointed time. This was the first of many frustrations. David put out a number of feelers to the PLO without making contact. Eventually, however, he was granted an interview with Salah Ta’amari, one of the most dashing of their military commanders, a tall, handsome man who spoke ardently. They met over a late lunch in Odin’s restaurant in Devonshire Street. ‘I had my first taste of Salah’s passionate oratory over a Dover sole and Perrier water,’ David would write later; ‘the people at the surrounding tables were spellbound.’5

  The lunch was a success: one meeting led to another. David tried to make it clear to those whom he met that he wished to be entrusted with no secrets; he wished only to hear the arguments and meet the people. Nevertheless it became obvious to him that he was taken for more than he claimed. His protestations to be a mere novelist looking for a story were listened to with knowing politeness; he was assumed to be a conduit to the British Foreign Office.

  Most of all David wanted to meet the PLO’s charismatic chairman, Yasser Arafat, head of the comparatively moderate faction known as Fatah. This was not easy to arrange: Arafat lived in fear of assassination, by agents either of the Israelis or of a rival Palestinian faction. David endured infuriatingly long waits in the anteroom of the Fatah offices in the wrecked city of Beirut. A group of boys with machine-guns lounged nervously outside. A ring of cement-filled barrels shielded the entrance; most of the street had been wrecked by a car bomb, which the Palestinians claimed was Israeli.

  ‘You will be contacted at your hotel,’ David was told. ‘Remain in your hotel, please, and wait.’ Day after day passed. David spent long hours in the hotel bar,
where the sound of incoming and outgoing gunfire was so common that the resident parrot had learned to imitate it. From his unlit bedroom window David would listen to the evening fusillades and watch the long, slow flashes behind the hilltops. At night he ate jumbo spring rolls in the empty Chinese restaurant. It was there that a maimed waiter limped towards him through the empty tables, his young eyes shining with excitement. ‘Our chairman will see you now,’ he announced, in a conspiratorial murmur. ‘Now, please.’ The summons was so sudden, and from such an unexpected source, that David took him to mean the chairman of the board of the hotel. He followed the boy across the lobby, wondering if he might have stayed too long without paying his bill, or whether he might be asked to sign one of his books. It was not until he saw the small group of fighters at the front door, with their coats worn like capes over their shoulders, and their hands out of sight in the folds, that it dawned on him that he was being taken to see the chairman of the PLO.

  David was led outside to a sand-coloured Volvo with a whip aerial and sandwiched between machine-gun-bearing guards. This was the first stage of a hectic journey through the Beirut night, driving at speeds of up to ninety miles an hour, hurriedly switching cars in little courtyards, passing through checkpoints manned by armed men crouched around braziers, and at one stage bumping across the central reservation of a dual carriageway before continuing in the wrong direction down the opposing side with lights flashing. Their destination was a half-bombed, half-restored high-rise apartment building, the staircase lined with armed men, all smoking. As they reached the tenth or twelfth floor, and the fighters came forward to frisk David for the umpteenth time, he lost his temper and announced that he was sick of being searched. Smiling apologetically, they drew back and bowed him into Arafat’s presence.