The opinion is becoming more and more prevalent that the real purpose of the prison is not to guard the freedom of the prisoners but to guard banking secrecy … the alleged founding of the prison seven hundred years ago, even though at that time the prison was not a prison but a widely feared robber’s nest.28
Dürrenmatt in 1990 is prescient about how western democracy will get into bed with big business and consumer capitalism. His essay points to Switzerland as a bellwether for the rest of Europe:
Only their way of manipulating people is infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods of the post-totalitarian system. … this omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, of production, of advertising, of commerce, of consumer culture, this endless flood of information.29
Dürrenmatt has been proved right in the quarter century since the fall of Communism. His invective is an attack not just on Swiss smugness, but on the whole free world enterprise:
In our country, too, politics has retreated from ideology into economics. … Our streets are battlefields, our atmosphere is exposed to poisonous gases, our oceans are oil spills, our fields are polluted with pesticides, the third world has been plundered, worse than the orient was by the crusaders – no wonder the Middle East is extorting us now. … The free market economy is an industrial battlefield, driven by competition, a war for markets.30
Dürrenmatt appropriated Glauser’s metaphor of Switzerland as a sanatorium confining the wealthy mad, run by a conspiracy of psychoanalysis hand in glove with militaristic authority. Swiss private clinics and Switzerland itself became a poultice, a panacea. Bring me your mad, bad and rich and I will offer a gilded cage and room service at a price. This view of Swiss wealth as a source of illness resurfaces in Fritz Zorn’s Mars (1977), where the rich-boy narrator conflates the golden coast of Zürich with his own cancer.
In a recent novel by Jonas Lüscher, Barbarian Spring (2014), the motif surfaces again. A Swiss industrialist is recovering in a clinic from his traumatic experience of Tunisia in the early days of the Arab Spring and the financial crisis. Swiss business plays its familiar, profitable part in these two recent events. Preising, the aptly named businessman, heads Prixxing, a communications company. Prixxing is the new face of the Swiss economy, just as the arms dealer Oerlikon-Bührle was the old. Preising is in Tunisia on a junket, guest of an exclusive resort owned by business partner Slim Malouch. The paradise on earth begins to show its true colours. Prixxing turns out to rely on child labour. The tale turns sleazy. Preising escapes, with the help of the Swiss embassy, and lives to savour once again the Zürcher Geschnetzeltes mit Rösti at the Restaurant Kronenhalle in Zürich, a nod to Dürrenmatt’s detectives who retreat to the same high-end cosy restaurant.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1991, Eastern Europeans swelled the glitzy cities of the West. I remember Czech, Hungarian and East German coaches parked at dawn on the Place Pigalle in Paris. They had travelled all night to see the bright lights. The American cartoonist Gary Trudeau quipped: ‘They came, they saw, they did a little shopping.’
I started this chapter on Dürrenmatt in the Maison du Prussien in Neuchâtel and ended it in Bangkok under military dictatorship, the umpteenth one of Thailand’s history. In this context Dürrenmatt doesn’t have too much to complain about. His critique of Switzerland speaks of the freedom to speak. His sharp, clockwork crimes are curiously tame, like luxury items – a fine Mont Blanc pen or a gold watch assembled high in the Jura where he lived, in a house overlooking the lake. Viewed from this street stall by Siriraj Hospital where the king of Thailand lies ailing – a king who began his long life in the lap of Swiss luxury and ends it in intensive care – Dürrenmatt’s morality dramas and detective stories seem lovely, bejewelled comments on how the rich get by, on how Switzerland made it.
Switzerland’s neutrality during the Second World War had a powerful effect on the country’s prosperity and on how belligerent nations viewed the little federation. Our next writer cut his spying teeth in Switzerland and knows the dark side of allegiance. Money talks and spies listen. Dürrenmatt kept his ear to the ground, but it was John le Carré who developed Cold War themes on a global stage. Wealth, arms dealing, betrayal, Big Pharma, crime, money laundering, tax avoidance and banking collusion are all, like the poor, still with us. No one has explored them more variously than the spy who came in from the cold.
12
HARD BOILED IN BERN
Le Carré’s bolthole
1638 map of Bern
The Bellevue Palace Hotel, an enormous sumptuous place of mellowed Edwardian quiet, which on clear days looks across the foothills to the glistening Alps, but that evening was shrouded in a cloying winter fog.
John le Carré
Private schools used to have mottoes – a scrap of high-flown Latin below a crest with a predator rampant. Now they have mission statements. Schools are in thrall to corporate life; from dorm to boardroom is really only a growth spurt and a change of uniform. On chalk hills, down darkling lanes, England’s private schools must be chokker with Chinese and Arabs in Church brogues paying full whack – with a supplement for intensive English.
Sherborne’s colours are royal blue and gold. The motto is Dieu et mon droit, the same as the reigning monarch’s; no arguing there. It has a roster of old boys going back to Alfred the Great. Scratching around among the staff of the post-war years, we see it has had its fair share of spymasters. The very word gives pause.
The father of computer science, Alan Turing, who worked at Bletchley Park, and two former heads of the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6 – were Old Shirburnians. David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, admits that his spymaster George Smiley was part based on Chaplain and Assistant Master, Reverend Vivian Green.
The Guardian obituary for Rev. Green makes him seem far from Smiley’s English reticence:
He had a wonderfully secure sense of who he was, something that allowed him, even as chaplain, to be seen either in leather trousers or, at the very least, in discordant tie and shirt; and he was happy, in later years, to admit to a great admiration for Miss Piggy from the Muppet Show.1
It sounds as though evensong got off to a rollicking start. Cornwell was enrolled at Sherborne from 1945 to 1948. His con-man father, Ronnie, had trouble paying the fees. Cornwell disliked the school and feigned a nervous breakdown to escape, but he has returned to its playing fields time and again as to an old nightmare that is forever England:
We were still being taught that the best career would take us to Rhodesia or Kenya, or that we should go and rule India; and I think that even as a child I was overwhelmed by the arrogance of these assumptions.2
Vivian Green, in loud checks, one of the models for George Smiley
What the blacking factory did to Dickens, this encounter with England’s plutocracy did to le Carré. He is the heir to Dickens in other respects too: the larger-than-life comic muse, his vivid, sometimes one-trick characters and class-defining dialogue. Le Carré wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) – the most successful espionage novel ever – in six weeks, in Königswinter on the Rhine near Bonn. Locales and types recur: posh schools, Swiss grand hotels, innocents embroiled in international wheeling and dealing. But each new novel of late has tackled a different Goliath. Walls, entire countries, empires have fallen by the wayside, while le Carré has scripted post-war unease on the side of the spy in the works.
He persuaded his father to send him to the University of Bern, where he turned up in 1948 when he was sixteen and lied about his age. He’d begun learning German at Sherborne. ‘It was love at first sight,’ he declared some seventy years later. ‘It was the German language that provided me with my bolt hole.’ He went on to study Modern Languages at Oxford and taught German at Eton; ‘Germans, like Brits, are branded on the tongue.’3 The language gave le Carré another culture, like a second passport. ‘He needed to be able to close the door on his Englishness, love it as he might, and carve a new name somewhere fresh,’ he writes
of Magnus Pym, his alter ego in A Perfect Spy.4 Le Carré’s most long-lived creation, George Smiley, has a German childhood:
Germany was his second nature, even his second soul. In his youth, her literature had been his passion and his discipline. He could put on her language like a uniform and speak with its boldness.5
‘Somewhere fresh’ was Bern. Interviewed by Jon Snow, le Carré is clear and forthcoming: ‘I was recruited informally when I was a young student in Switzerland. It was the element somehow that I felt born into.’6 Bern in 1948 was a diplomatic crossroads. Le Carré has described it as ‘the spiritual home of natural spies’.7 In common with zoned Berlin and Tangiers, his Bern has an atmosphere of intrigue and treachery behind the chocolate-box exterior.
Ben Macintyre describes the Swiss spy theatre when Nicholas Elliott was MI6 head of station and the Cold War was hotting up:
But beneath a placid, neutral surface, the place was riddled with spies. Swiss efforts to discourage espionage during the war failed utterly: Allied, Axis and freelance agents had converged on the country as a base from which to launch intelligence operations into enemy territory. The Soviets had run at least two linked spy networks based in Switzerland, the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) and the Lucy Ring, extracting top-secret information from Nazi Germany and funnelling it to Moscow … Switzerland became a magnet for defectors, resisters and rats leaving the sinking Nazi ship, all clutching their secrets. During the war, the Soviets ran their own networks, and the British and Americans ran theirs, in wary cooperation. But with the coming of peace, Soviet and Western intelligence forces would turn on each other.8
Jean Ziegler, Swiss parliamentarian, bête noire and author of The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead, cites Friedrich Dürrenmatt on their native country: Switzerland is like a girl who works in a brothel but wants to remain a virgin. According to Ziegler, the Swiss live with a self-concocted myth about themselves, which their mountain fastness has a way of echoing back at them: ‘The bank vaults of Zürich, Basel, Bern and Lugano have become a sewage system into which flow streams of filthy lucre from all over the world.’9 Switzerland was already established as a launderette at the conclusion of the First World War. Conrad, Glauser, Maugham and Dürrenmatt had developed their views of Swiss neutrality long before le Carré came on the scene:
Switzerland’s financial sharps in Zürich, Basel, and Berne fenced and laundered the gold stolen from the central banks of Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Albania, Norway, Italy and elsewhere. It was they who financed Hitler’s wars of conquest.10
Philip Roth has called le Carré’s A Perfect Spy (1985) ‘the best English novel since the war’. Rick Pym is a charm merchant exploiting British wartime shortages – ‘chocolates, nylons, dried fruit and petrol’. Magnus Pym has inherited his father’s talent for double-dealing. Le Carré’s father had died in 1975 and A Perfect Spy is a coming to terms with the world of 1930s fences and confidence men. Rick and Magnus Pym take two pre-war trips to Switzerland, setting the template for later visits:
those pre-war winters in Switzerland become fused in my memory as one place. Even today I have only to sniff the leather interior of a grand car and I am wafted willingly away to the great hotel drawing-rooms of St. Moritz in the wake of Rick’s riotous love of festival. The Kulm, the Suvretta House, the Grand – Pym knew them as a single gigantic palace with different sets of servants but always the same court: Rick’s private household of jesters, tumblers, counsellors, and jockeys.11
Pym’s memory of the ‘single gigantic palace’ that is Switzerland recurs throughout le Carré’s writing. Rick the playboy spiv turns up in different disguise in a score of novels. In A Perfect Spy le Carré joins the dots between a 1930s world of seaside crooks first outlined by Graham Greene (another paid-up member of MI6), wartime racketeering and Cold War sleuthing.
Pym, like le Carré, finds himself in post-war Bern, ‘that lovely candlelit city with its clocks and wells and cobbles and arcades’.12 He has fallen for his own game – a confidence trickster masquerading as the Duchesse Rothschild, ‘the last of the great Czech line’. She tells a tall tale of family art, Swiss bank accounts and border smuggling. Pym is in Bern as chargé d’affaires for his father in order to fleece her. She ends up fleecing him.
During the war Switzerland had been a lucrative market for loot of all colours and provenance. Stolen art, antiquities, jewels, much of it Jewish in origin, made its way across the borders from countries under Nazi occupation, where Jewish property had been commandeered. In Amsterdam it was rough diamonds. In France it was art masterpieces. Later it was rings and gold teeth extracted from concentration camp victims.
Allen Dulles, CIA Director under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, was stationed in Bern during both world wars. During the First World War he handled political intelligence in Bern and in 1919 was a member of the American delegation to the Versailles peace conference. During the Second World War, as head of OSS Switzerland (forerunner of the CIA), Dulles operated from his Bern office at Dufourstrasse and from home at Herrengasse 23. Arranging for the streetlights at the rear of the splendid building to be removed, he received his shifty informants. ‘With the exception of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park,’ Thomas Powers estimates, ‘no intelligence operation of the Second World War achieved more than did Dulles’ tiny office in Bern, staffed with a miscellany of Americans stranded in Switzerland by the war. What Dulles did he did largely by himself.’13
One of my most important German sources during my days in Switzerland in World War II almost had a serious mishap because his initials were in his hat. One evening he was dining alone with me in my house in Berne. My cook detected that we were speaking German. While we were enjoying her excellent food – she was a better cook than a spy – she slipped out of the kitchen, examined the source’s hat and took down his initials. The next day, she reported to her Nazi contact …
My source was the representative in Zürich of Admiral Canaris, head of German military intelligence. He frequently visited the German legation in Berne.14
During the late 1940s Soviet mole Kim Philby was in and out of Bern, meeting with SIS Head of Station Nicholas Elliott at the British embassy from 1945 to 1953. Philby’s wife Aileen was a self-harmer, suffering from Münchausen’s syndrome, and receiving treatment in a clinic in Switzerland. Elliott was one of the last people to meet Philby and extract his confession, before he defected to Moscow in 1963. Ben Macintyre’s A Spy among Friends, with an afterword by le Carré, uncovers the lethal mix of friendship and betrayal of the post-war years. When the first two Cambridge moles, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, defected in May 1951, the Soviet embassy in Bern provided fake passports and onward passage to Zürich and eventually Moscow.
Le Carré made use of these events in his Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and always claimed it was Philby who blew his cover to the Soviets. Elliott was on the selection board when le Carré was first interviewed for the Service:
When I became a new entrant, he was a fifth-floor grandee whose most celebrated espionage coup – the wartime recruitment of a highly placed member of the German Abwehr in Istanbul, smuggling him and his wife to Britain – was held up to trainees as the ultimate example of what a resourceful field officer could achieve.15
Sixteen-year-old Magnus Pym is resourceful: working ‘black’ at the zoo, staying at the Salvation Army hostel and enrolling at Bern University under false pretences: ‘He lied first about his qualifications and then about his age, for the one could not have been earned without the adjustment to the other.’16 Pym frequents the English church in Elfenau, ‘the diplomatic fairyland’ with its ‘weekly shot of the English banality’.17 At night he haunts the station:
In the immediate post-war years it was still an ill-lit Edwardian staging post, with stuffed stags in the concourse and murals of freed peasants waving flags, and a scent of Bockwurst and fried onion that never went away. The first-class buffet was full of gentlemen in black suits with napkins ro
und their necks, but the third class was shadowy and beery, with a whiff of Balkan lawlessness and drunks who sang out of tune.18
Pym makes friends with Axel, a German from Carlsbad with a chequered war. Like the gold making its way through Swiss vaults at the time, his true provenance is hard to tell. Together they wander the streets of the capital and knock on Thomas Mann’s dressing room door. Fact and fiction, as always with le Carré, play footsie:
Thomas Mann peered at Pym, then at Axel so pale and ethereal from his fever. Thomas Mann frowned at the palm of his own right hand as if asking himself whether it could take the strain of an aristocratic embrace. He held out his hand and Pym shook it, waiting to feel Mann’s genius flow into him like one of those electric shocks you used to be able to buy at railway stations – hold this knob and let my energy revive you.19
Pym meets his contact at the English church, ‘where the flag of Saint George fluttered victorious in the neutral Swiss breeze’. Jack and Felicity Brotherhood are Secret Service brave and squaw. The pass occurs over mince pies after a walk in the woods. Pym is willing. His test mission is to translate armaments catalogues for twenty francs – ‘funny little Swissie firms that are manufacturing things we don’t much like’. As Dürrenmatt intimated, Swiss Cold War arms deals were much sought after by both sides. Pym graduates to providing names of students at the Cosmo Club, a left-of-centre hangout at the university. It’s only one small step to shopping his new friend Axel.
There were the stories Axel had told him when he was delirious and spilling his drinking water with both hands. There were the stories he had told him in Davos when they went to visit Thomas Mann’s sanatorium. There were the crumbs he had gleaned for himself on his occasional precautionary inspections of Axel’s room. And there was Brotherhood’s clever prompting that dragged things out of him he hadn’t realised he knew.20
The Gilded Chalet Page 22