The Swiss deport Axel as an illegal alien. Pym leaves for Oxford. Winners and losers. ‘By the time he reached Basel he knew that Bern had sunk with all hands.’
Cornwell’s activities on behalf of Her Majesty’s government stood him in good stead. In due course he was formally recruited by MI5 and spied on Leftist groups, as he describes Magnus Pym doing during his time at Oxford. Cornwell put his German to good use in Bonn and Hamburg at the height of the Cold War. Kim Philby had blown his cover long before. By 1964 it was time to go anyway. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had made le Carré famous. Divided loyalties – spying or writing? – played their part. Writing won.
George Smiley is back at the hardboard chicane of the Circus towards the end of Smiley’s People (1979). Dutch elm disease is ravaging England. The bloody unions are on a rampage. Ireland is playing up and the Commies are entering the Great Game’s last set with two sets all. George to serve, blinded by the sunset. His long career in espionage comes to a showdown with his nemesis Karla. The place of assignation is Bern.
Smiley checks into le Carré’s base of operations when he’s in town:
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. He had considered smaller places; he had considered using one of Toby’s safe flats. But Toby had persuaded him that the Bellevue was best. It had several exits, it was central, and it was the first place in Berne where anyone would think to find him, and therefore the last where Karla, if he was looking out for him, would expect him to be. Entering the enormous hall, Smiley had the feeling of stepping onto an empty liner far out at sea.21
Le Carré’s writing has been able to conjure the sights and smells of Bern for over half a century. His choice of detail is always emblematic of the broader picture: ‘The streets were cobbled; the freezing air smelt of roast chestnuts and cigars.’ His Bern is nostalgic, opulent, suffused with the past: ‘So many nights, he thought. So many streets still here. He thought of Hesse: strange to wander in the fog … no tree knows another. The frozen mist curled low over the racing water; the weir burned creamy yellow.’22
The Elfenau diplomatic district, with its CD plates and patrolling police cars, is a well-trodden beat for le Carré. ‘They descended a gentle hill, passing the British Ambassador’s residence on their right, and his Rolls-Royce parked in the sweep.’ Bern’s Soviet Embassy gives us a feel for lost empire, the 1970s balance of power, typists and Tass:
Twenty-four diplomats, fifty other ranks – ciphers, clerks, typists, and some very lousy drivers, all home-based. The trade delegation’s in another building, Schanzeneckstrasse 17. Grigoriev visits there a lot. In Berne we also got Tass and Novosti, mostly mainstream hoods. The parent residency is Geneva, U.N. cover, about two hundred strong. This place is a sideshow: twelve, fifteen altogether, growing but only slow. The Consulate is tacked onto the back of the Embassy. You go into it through a door in the fence, like it was an opium den or a cat house. They got a closed-circuit television camera on the path and scanners in the waiting-room.23
Grigoriev is embassy counsellor. Smiley’s team tail him on the promenade fronting Bern’s Cathedral while he watches chess being played with giant pieces. The team muscles him into a car. Smiley himself is waiting in an apartment behind the university. ‘Grigoriev was a hooked fish.’ Under pressure from a few dirty photos, he spills what he knows of the Karla Directorate in Moscow.
Le Carré returned to a Swiss theatre of operations with ‘The Unbearable Peace’, a non-fiction piece in Granta in spring 1991. Its subject is Swiss General Jean-Louis Jeanmaire, convicted of passing military secrets to a Russian diplomat in Bern in the early 1960s and sentenced to twelve years’ solitary confinement. Le Carré’s assignment is an interview with that rare bird, an eighty-year-old Swiss traitor and ex-con.
Swiss General Jean-Louis Jeanmaire: Cold War traitor or patsy?
The writer’s dissection of General Jeanmaire’s character and motivation seems to be of the Swiss psyche itself:
For those who know Switzerland only for its slopes and valleys, Swiss militarism, if they are aware of it at all, is a harmless joke. They make nothing of the circular steel plates in the winding mountain roads, from which explosive charges will be detonated to seal off the valleys from the aggressor; of the great iron gateways that lead into secret mountain fortresses, some for storing military arsenals, others for sitting out the nuclear holocaust; of the self-regarding young men in officer’s uniform who strut the pavements and parade themselves in teashops at the weekend. They are unaware of the vast annual expenditure on American tanks and fighter aircraft, early-warning systems, civil defence, deep shelters and (with 625,000 troops from a population of 6,000,000) after Israel the largest proportionate standing army in the world, costing the Swiss taxpayer eighteen per cent of his gross national budget.24
This is the Cold War arms world alluded to in Dürrenmatt’s fiction, but viewed from le Carré’s post–Cold War vantage point. The old spy writer’s subject matter has suddenly shifted, and a new game is in town. There’s nothing like a traitor in the ranks and a witch-hunt, le Carré suggests, to bring about an increase in the military budget. The Americans in 1975 were itchy about the Soviets finding out about their Florida early-warning system and state-of-the-art US technology fitted to Swiss tanks. Le Carré’s analysis of arms and money signals a new phase in his work when glasnost was in the air. He turned his attention to global capitalism hand in glove with the military-industrial complex. No better place to start than Switzerland.
General Jeanmaire’s contact was the Soviet military attaché Colonel Vassily Denissenko. Deni was a charming hero of Stalingrad and had bedded Jeanmaire’s wife, Marie-Louise. She was Russian born, her father a Swiss professor of languages, exiled in Switzerland after the Bolshevik coup. The first meeting between Jeanmaire and Deni was in 1959 at a routine military exercise. Jeanmaire and Marie-Louise met dashing Deni again at the Schweizerhof Hotel in Bern. Thus the 1960s got underway, a ten-year cocktail party in and around Bern – the Hotel Kreuz, the Tabaris nightclub, sundry railway-station buffets and apartments. Jeanmaire at one point handed over classified documents: the Swiss ‘organisation plan of staff and troops at corps and division levels’, the Mobilization Handbook and other top-secret papers. It wasn’t until 1975 that authorities became aware of General Jeanmaire’s relationship with successive Soviet attachés. Why so late? And who tipped them off?
And if the tip-off did indeed come from the CIA, who tipped off the CIA? Was the source reliable? Was it a plant? Was it Russian? British? French? West German? Swiss? In the grimy market-places where so-called friendly intelligence services do their trading, tip-offs, like money, are laundered in all sorts of ways. They can be slanted, doctored and invented.25
What the facts lack is plausible motive. By even the tamest Swiss standards, the General was not a fellow traveller. He was no fondue Socialist. Whatever gifts Denissenko gave – a television, trinkets – were trifling. The quality of intelligence, too, was negligible: ‘All he ever gave the Russians was peanuts, not least because peanuts were all he had.’26 Le Carré smells other possibilities: was Jeanmaire thrown to the lions to ‘silence American apprehensions and re-establish Switzerland’s self image as a responsible and efficient military (and neutral) power’?27 Was Jeanmaire just a patsy?
Official records of the trial in June 1977 have not been released and Swiss secrecy, as is often the case, is the soft cosh of peace. The Swiss press painted Jeanmaire as traitor of the century. His case fed the self-image of a country beleaguered by hostile foreigners: they change uniform and colour with the passing of the seasons, but are always at the gates. Sentenced to eighteen years for treachery, he served twelve.
Zürich’s Dolder Grand Hotel, and the model for le Carré’s ‘Meister Tower’ on the right
It had made a big spy out of a small one. Such a hug
e sentence must betoken a huge betrayal. The witch was burned, a great leak had been stopped and America need no longer equate Switzerland with a communist country.28
Le Carré followed his reportage on General Jeanmaire with The Night Manager (1993), his first novel wholly completed after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In the interim the Soviet Union had come apart like a tin toy. Humpty-Dumpty couldn’t be put back together again. Or could he? Le Carré knew that great powers play a long game.
The novel opens magnanimously in the Hotel Meister Palace, modelled on Zürich’s Dolder Grand. The Salvation Army hostel in Bern is long gone, and the lobbies and salons of Switzerland’s luxury hotels are heretofore where deals get done. Jonathan Pine, the eponymous manager, is a study in close observation, in keeping your eyes peeled:
The doors swung open again, disgorging everyone at once, so that suddenly an entire leftover delegation of the English affluent society was ranged under the chandelier, each of its members so sleekly groomed, so sun-rich, that together they seemed to share a corporate morality.29
Our party occupies the Meister Tower, a three-bedroom palace tacked onto the Edwardian hotel, ‘a pastel experience in what Jonathan confidingly calls Swiss Franc Quatorze’. Fifteen thousand francs a night, continental breakfast included. The first Gulf War is underway and our baddie is British arms and drugs dealer, Richard Onslow Roper.
The opening chapter sketches the Lear jets and room service world of people with money to burn. The novel quickly moves from sedate Switzerland to a James Bond props cupboard of gun-toting men and alluring women, fast cars and luxury island hideaways. The Night Manager presents Switzerland as luxury brand – discreet, napped by snow, exclusive. Behind the new wealth are the new television wars, and le Carré is expert at delineating the fuzzy borders between terrorism, government skulduggery and the carpet bagging of resurgent capitalism. His moguls and bling kings haunt the playgrounds of the rich – Davos, Klosters, St Moritz. The resort names seem like brand names. ‘What is black money, when is it grey, when does it go white?’30 While the old moralist highlights the complicity of the British state in financial shenanigans – ‘we’d go anywhere for money’ – his pointing the finger at Switzerland is equally devastating. Like le Carré, Jean Ziegler pulls no punches: ‘Switzerland remains one of the most efficient international laundries for billions in drug money and the profits of organised crime.’31
Le Carré’s fine-tuned ear for dialogue comes to the fore. Jed, a kept beauty, consults the hotel menu and wonders about the Swiss national dish.
‘What’s roasty, anyway?’ says Jed.
‘I think you’re looking at rösti,’ Jonathan replies in a tone laced with superior knowledge. ‘It’s a Swiss potato delicacy. Sort of bubble and squeak without the squeak, made with lots of butter and fried. If one’s ravenous, perfectly delicious. And they do it awfully well.’
‘How do they grab you?’ Roper demands. ‘Likee? No likee? Don’t be lukewarm – no good to anyone. … Hash browns, darling; had ’em in Miami. … What do you say, Mr. Pine?’32
Mockney meets the jetsetter, the parlance of New Labour. We are a long way from the laments about cockney tourists in Switzerland by travellers such as William Brockenden in 1833: ‘I had no idea that the gentilities of Wapping had ever extended so far from the Thames.’33 Le Carré’s grip on the way different social classes play snakes and ladders is unerring. Their talk sparkles.
The night manager is one of those deracinated Englishmen le Carré specialises in. Pine becomes a ‘plant’ behind enemy lines. Allen Dulles explains: ‘The only way to disguise a man today so that he will be acceptable in hostile circles for any length of time is to make him over entirely. This involves years of training and a thorough concealing and burying of the past under layers of fictitious personal history which have to be “backstopped.”’34 Dulles was writing in the early 1960s. ‘Backstopping’ a plant these days would involve a thorough scrubbing of the electronic trail we all leave behind us, and the fabrication of a new electronic identity. The selfies need to match.
Set for the most part in Kenya (le Carré still pronounces it ‘Keen-ya’), The Constant Gardener (2001) has a number of key scenes in Switzerland’s Engadin and Basel. His target this time is globalism, that fin-de-siècle buzzword already tarnished. Le Carré has described globalism as ‘a board room fantasy’ where ‘the shareholder is the excuse for everything’.35 His particular target is the way Big Pharma plays dangerously with lives in the developing world in order to pump up shareholder value. The benign public face of the drug dealers peels away to reveal business as usual underneath. This theme comes under renewed scrutiny now that globalism has fallen flat on its face. In a 2013 documentary Fire in the Blood, Dylan Mohan Gray depicts the devastating policies that pharmaceutical companies pursue in order to protect, by hook or by crook, their monopoly on AIDS drugs.36 Recent investigations by the Cochrane Collaboration show how Roche withheld vital information on clinical trials for its drug Tamiflu, now shown to be ineffective.37 Techniques of obfuscation, delay, selective evidence and confidentiality agreements, used in response to the scandal of unclaimed wartime assets, hamper the search for truth in these cases too. There seems to be little appetite for truth; merely greed. It pays to keep mum.
In The Constant Gardener, British High Commission man Justin and his activist wife Tessa, who is murdered, stumble on the truth about treatment trials. ‘I try to get two innocent people into a Hitchcockian muddle and fight their way out’38 is how le Carré describes his working method. The aptly named Justin journeys to Basel. Home to such Fortune 500 companies as Novartis, Ciba-Geigy, Roche and Bayer, Basel is a Big Pharma town. During the war, proximity to Germany led to lucrative deals. The first Nazi gold deliveries were credited to the Bank of International Settlements based in Basel. Its airport gives you a choice of exits – Swiss or French. A hop across the Rhine and you’re in the Black Forest. This three-corner business park is a goose that lays the golden egg. Basel’s large international school caters to the sons and daughters of well-travelled, well-heeled research chemists, company executives and bankers.
Le Carré develops a Jack and the Beanstalk metaphor to convey his theme of the small man speaking truth to power. Before confronting the giant, Justin recuperates in the mountains from an earlier fight:
Switzerland was a childhood dream. Forty years ago his parents had taken him on a walking holiday in the Engadin and they had stayed in a grand hotel on a spit of forest between two lakes. Nothing had changed. Not the polished parquet or the stained glass or the stern-faced châtelaine who showed him to his room. Reclining on the daybed on his balcony, Justin watched the same lakes glistening in the evening sun, and the same fisherman huddled in his rowing boat in the mist.39
This seems to be the Waldhaus in Sils-Maria, with views of Lake Silvaplana and Lake Sils, another of le Carré’s opulent palaces. He captures ‘that fabled valley of the upper Rhine where pharma-giants have their castles’:
First up a cobbled hill to the medieval city with its bell towers, merchant houses, statues to free thinkers and martyrs of oppression. And when he had duly reminded himself of this inheritance, as it seemed to him, he retraced his steps to the river’s edge, and from a children’s playground gazed upwards in near-disbelief at the ever-spreading concrete kingdom of the pharma-billionaires … And at their feet lay whole railways, marshalling yards, lorry parks and wharfs, each protected by its very own Berlin Wall capped with razor wire and daubed with graffiti.40
Justin is on the trail of KVH, a company based in Basel, manufacturers of Dypraxa, a fictitious tuberculosis drug. Despite flawed clinical trials and deaths in Africa, Dypraxa has been rushed to market. Le Carré states in an afterword: ‘as my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard’.41
Two of Basel’s giant pharmaceutical companies, Novartis and Roche, refused to comment on the novel. A spok
esman admitted: ‘I don’t think anybody from management has had the time to read through the over 500 pages yet.’42 The dearth of management reading has a lot to answer for. Le Carré researched his novel undercover:
In The Constant Gardener in particular, it was quite extraordinary to go to Basel, to get among the young pharmaceutical executives in a private way, promise them that I would never divulge their names, and listen to them pouring out their rage against the work they were doing, the people who were making them do it. But they were still taking the penny, and they were still doing what they were doing. They were still contributing to the invention of diseases, they were fiddling with compounds to turn them into new patents when they actually had no greater effect than the previous patent, they were joining the lie that every new compound put on the market costs six or eight hundred million dollars.43
Justin crosses the Rhine to an immigrant no-man’s land by the border. The description splices the St Johann district of Basel with Grenzacherstrasse, where Roche has its headquarters. St Johann is home to a Novartis Campus straddling the French–Swiss border, in an area since tarted up. It’s Pharma Central:
Justin crossed the bridge and, as in a dream, wandered a dismal wasteland of rundown housing estates, secondhand clothes shops and hollow-eyed immigrant labourers on bicycles. And gradually, by some accident of magnetic attraction, he found himself standing in what at first appeared to be a pleasant tree-lined avenue at the far end of which stood an ecologically-friendly gateway so densely overgrown with creeper that at first you barely spotted the oak doors inside, with their polished brass bell to press, and their brass letter box for mail. It was only when Justin looked up, and further up, and then right up into the sky above his head, that he woke to the immensity of a triptych of white tower blocks linked by flying corridors. The stonework was hospital clean, the windows were of coppered glass. And from somewhere behind each monstrous block rose a white chimney, sharp as a pencil jammed into the sky. And from each chimney the letters KVH, done in gold and mounted vertically down its length, winked at him like old friends.44
The Gilded Chalet Page 23