A Conversation with John le Carré

some writers live in fear and dread of their books being turned into films how did you enjoy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tinker Tailor is pretty much the exception I loved it if I were going to keep one film version of my work this would be it that's partly because it was a masterclass to work with Guinness and partly I think we caught a wave in history which was very interesting for the audience and we were particularly helped in Britain because we had a strike in independent television so the BBC quite against his expectation was receiving these huge audiences so the thing became Tinker Tailor became at that time the kind of iconic production and radio was full of whether anybody understood it and that kind of thing but this came as near I feel as near to my imagining as any film has come when Flo bear the French writer was asked whether he wanted Madame Bovary Illustrated he replied in horror no because he didn't want to interfere with the imaginative process of the audience that everybody would have their own Bovary for as long as there were no illustration and I think I felt much the same the the genius of Guinness it seems to me in both the series was to leave the character of smiley intact for the individual imagination he suggested the possibilities of smiley as well as the reality and in that sense it was an almost mystical performance I think and how did the other characters and portray themselves to you were they very much as you imagined the other minor characters to be yes I think I wanted I wanted the English social comedy to be encapsulated in that secret service organization and I wanted the gradations of English class to be explicit the gents and the non gents the the upstarts and so on as we awful Brits see people or used to in those days all of that was was wonderfully wonderfully reflected I thought and once we had Alek once we had guinnesses yes to the part then we could empty the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company so there wasn't a single lazy piece of casting in the whole production um I read that Alec Guinness I didn't want to accept the role until he'd met you how did you persuade him to take the part look Alec was by then quite an old gent and with an enormous record behind him he'd never done television before I think he wanted to make sure that he was in with a sincere production that wasn't going to vulgarize his reputation I think he reserved him himself also in those days quite simply the right to work with people he could get on with he wasn't going to take the kind of dictatorial Mayhem that he associated with Hollywood quite often although he was sufficiently nimble to get round it so yes he wanted to meet me and he wanted to read meet the the producer Jonathan Powell and he particularly wanted to know that he got to get along with Jonathan and he was very nervous he was nervous and he has this wonderful your voice that you hear in there and well I really don't know whether I can do this at all and one had one got this in the middle of the night he'd ring out may I speak to mr. David Cornwall please that's my real name and I'd say hello Alec how did you know it was me and and on me I wasn't there I was there very little at the shooting but on the first day of photography he completely froze and Jonathan told me that he just at the end of the days and I maps is perfectly clear I'm just absolutely no no good for this given to anybody who like I'll give the money back and Alyssa and then the next day after I think Jonathan talked him for a long time he came into the studio and gave the lens a kiss and away we went were you able to give him a lot of advice from your own previous experience no I don't think I gave him any advice I think that I was Anna anger turn for him when alec wanted to watch people and imagine how to how to communicate their actions and their facial expressions he'd go to the zoo and watch an orangutan and an orangutan for him went through all the motions and many of the facial expressions that he wanted to catch it so he he pinched a whole lot of things from me I was conscious he was doing and if I make these kind of gestures I could see Alex hairy eyeball tracking me and then he rang up one day this was just before we were going to shoot or and I'd never met a real spy can you imagine who could have possibly put me in touch with it so I didn't quite know what you meant by this but I think he wanted a fuss made of him and he wanted to look at some more some more zoology reassure reassurance so I rang a man called sir Maurice Oldfield who'd been head of the Secret Service the British Secret Service and was living I didn't know it under a frightful cloud because of his own private behaviour of anyway he'd been a most distinguished intelligence officer in his time and we all had lunch together in Chelsea and when lunch was over Alec said tell me something and he seized a water glass and he said he held the water glass in his hand and he said going around the rim with his finger now he said I've seen people doing that when they're pensive and I've seen people doing that when they're pensive but I've never seen people doing that before he said do you think he's looking for the dregs of poison and I think that Alec like all great artists was able to keep the child in himself alive the Wonder in him was always open and ready to receive so that evening we shot pretty much in sequence and then the last night I think it was the very last night we were down by the canal and in the canal house there is the scene where alak with a gun in his hand is waiting in the dark to see which bad guy steps out from behind the curtain and then we'll know who the mole is and my wife and I went and just wished him luck on the last night of shooting down at the canal we had everything cherry pickers it looked like a great big movie being made and there was a leak in his under clothes busy making tactile relationship with with the pistol that he was holding because it's a prop that he had to he and it had to get to know each other and he was ruminating I wonder who it will be do you think it'll be do you think it'll be and then he ran through the cast I think he could look around well it could be and then oh dear and I hope it isn't that that rather nasty bill Hayden and he was it's the control schizophrenia of acting and it's so close to the writing process that it was just completely fascinating and to wake him from that self induced coma would have been a great crime so heaven knows what would have happened as a galley for God's sake you know the script better than everybody else does you know everybody else's lines you know who did it but that would have been saying that father Christmas didn't exist anymore Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was very much about deceit and betrayal what is it about those themes that the viewer the reader finds so attractive do you think well it was the time of great betrayal the Cold War was was really a game of loyalty and it was a question always the question I tried to stretch in the story between personal and collective loyalty what you owed to Caesar what you add to your country and what you owed to your own sense of ethics and morality and the Cold War was fought under constant mystery how much can we do in defense of a free and decent society and remain a free and decent society that is worth defending so there was always a very great unease particularly in the secret world about the methods with which we protected our virtue as we saw it this put strains on people's loyalty and very many of the people from those days had experienced the very real rise of communism as an alternative system social system in the 30s was an issue then put aside rather during 39:45 war when Russia was our allies and there were many people who came out of the 3945 war thinking that peace really could break out in the world and we would have some kind of universal socialism which would be at home in Soviet Russia and fan out from there and so there was great suspicion everywhere once the defectors and the spies came to light in our country the burgesses and MacLaine's in in in America for instance Alger Hiss if he was a spy but also they're being spies and then there was McCarthyism and the great witch-hunt and then inside the CIA there emerged the absolutely extraordinary figure I think probably the mad figure of James Jesus Angleton as he was called who was the high priest of the of the belief conviction that every foreign secret service in most foreign governments that were theoretically on our side were penetrated by gumminess spies and this vast conspiracy theory for a while dominated the Pentagon and the White House and and Capitol Hill and everything was perceived as an intelligence victory through the eyes of Angleton was perceived perceived as a tremendously clever piece of chicken feeder deception and the real victory was theirs and we just didn't know it and this paranoid doctrine was disseminated by the traveling missionaries of the CIA who were Angleton's people and by angleton himself and part of the effect of that was that Secret Service's hunted among themselves for their own big traitors and all sorts of the material came in to the Americans particularly which encouraged them in this idea when you've got a preconception you can always decorate it with with slightly bent intelligence but some of it was true and in my early days in the secret world the thing you noticed quite definitely was the atmosphere of mutual suspicion and as I know now I didn't know at the time because I was a very junior worm there was a suspicion that Sir Roger Hollis who was the head of the security service our mi5 was a Russian agent utter nonsense the Graham Mitchell his number two who was a world chess champion was also a Russian agent he had his turn one person after another came under the investigative spotlight in a sense in the hope that we could toss his head to the Americans to say now we found him are you happy when can we trade on the intelligence market again one really has to see intelligence particularly at this period in history that we're now describing in Tinker Tailor as a vast submerged international commerce where size doesn't matter you can be a small country like Israel or Britain with a big source and you'll be at the high table you've broken a great code we've got a great human source somewhere and that that's your ticket of entry to power and there was a huge amount of intelligence trading and a huge amount of assessing the person with whom you were trading or trading partner in order to establish whether he or she was fit to receive the intelligence you had so expensively gathered and what you would gain by giving that person the intelligence and there was a period when foreign services and our embassies seemed for those who were involved like a vast cover a shell for the real Cold War that was going on underneath is that something of the eerie camaraderie you talked you have talked about before between different secret services yes I think in taking of each other's they're joined by a lot of things the spies very often by their own insufficiency as human beings people who take refuge in the clandestine world tend to be unanchored or very shy they want to work in private they share some sense of specialness that when they go out and catch tube they can set themselves they go down the escalator well I know a few things you don't they they are they're a masonry a fraternity in the sense they all share the same kind of inside out thinking but is the nucleus of operational intrigue they share also if there are real intelligence officers they share the perception that there is no end to what they are doing they make no arrests they don't want to make arrests if you're running a secret Network here enhanced it that's great if I know about it I can listen to your telephone I can watch who comes and goes in out of your house I can open your mail so I know what you're doing I've diagnosed you and I know the operation to wrap you all up as if you were criminals arrest you I'd simply present myself with a new problem the same sort much better therefore always to look for the advantage that's the big difference between a policeman an intelligence officer so the masonry has that in common they understand that they're involved in expediency and once you're involved in expediency without any justice the other end you slip quickly into an anarchic world which you can share the other thing is I think that people who take refuge in secrecy are terrified of having it violated it may be pretty bad if the Russians find out about it but it's terrible if the press finds are diverted I don't think many spies expect not to have their names in the files of the opposition but the idea of having their faces in the newspaper that's something they wake up and sweat about in the middle of the night because there are somehow their identity and their security of being taken away from one of your characters in Tinker Tailor says the secret services are the only real expression of a nation's character do you believe that's true I think I think that when I was saying that probably when I said it I meant subconscious a nation's subconscious rather than character it's the eighty percent of a nation that is below the the waterline and because people gather there particularly in our society my British society and later on in imitation in American society also people were drawn from a very specific ruling class so that's an incorrect term it's perfectly real in Britain because of Empire because of the imperial history because the necessity of keeping trade routes open over a vast distance we learned to divide princelings against each other to have to inspire muslim to fight Hindu we we were wicked in terms of colonial manipulation because we had to fight proxy wars and we did this through the collecting and the distribution of a really fine quantity of intelligence I mean the British were up for better or worse on the Northwest Frontier all through the 19th century they've been there in one form or another ever since you you you get your know-how from that you also form your intelligence service from the elite of your society from the military elite from the social elite it becomes the great game in the United States when they were building up their intelligence service with Donovan first OSS and then CIA and taking a lot of advice from the Brits which they wouldn't do anymore they too started recruiting from Yale and Harvard and and they developed the common room atmosphere of the super spy people in the image of Allen Dulles and so on its its spies adore their self-image and they're terrified of having it attacked and to be sitting with a lot of Tweedy pipe smoking people back in those days in the Harvard club or whatever it would have been would give you the feeling the John Buchan feeling that we're all terribly polite here but we do terrible things elsewhere but quite often the terrible things weren't really done it was a kind of looking glass wars the title of another book I wrote where people were first of all setting up virtual images of themselves and then believing in um Graham Greene said that childhood is the bank balance of the writer and total extent is your interest in espionage based on your particular childhood well I was practically born as a spy my my mother disappeared when I was five defected as we'd say in the secret world exfiltrated herself with a lover and I didn't see her again till I was 21 my father was a crook was in and out of prison conman I just wrote about him recently in the New York and his great ambition was that my brother and I should be projected into decent society we came from working-class stock all my stock my aunts and uncles spoke with solid regional accents and went to state schools and worked at Sainsbury's across the counter net but for us nothing was too good and we were to be gents we were going to be turned into gentlemen through the private education system so we did what spies do we we acquired the clothes we acquired the mannerisms we acquired the voice we learned the hostilities and the the code of the the target that we were penetrating and we pretended that we came we didn't do all this with great calculation but it was the consequence of the way we were launched into society we pretended that we came from a stable two-parent family and went to some fine house and the holidays whereas we were quite often on the run from creditors and hopping from house to house or only ever with my father and so the the duplicity was was almost instilled in us and the the disproportion between the reality and the pretense was made perfect when we were very young and then as luck would have it I became a linguist and I did enter the secret world when I arrived there I just felt I'd come home it was it was that feeling that I could put my inherited larceny at the feet of my country and serve I suppose in a sense that's why you became a writer isn't it because yes beyond that I you were yeah I was no good as a spy I'm just talking about my my comfort level now and of course as children of Venice in the intelligence world you develop a corrosive eye you look at things you remember things but the the mentality of a fantasies is also admitted in the secret world when you start talking cover legend you start building out some building somebody who doesn't exist and equipping them with with papers and if you're dealing with human sources and as it were putting them across the border then that's a creative work it's it's an artistic job he has to have you to work it out to you penny we had dysfunctional mother they broke up you know one was in dressed and the other was in Berlin and then and and so you're making character even as you recruit and develop agents and in any operational situation you're dealing with the possibilities of those characters rather than the reality and so it is very close to a creative act when it's good or when it's so fantastic it's completely idiotic but the difference in the intelligence world between between very clever and very stupid is often very small it's the same in writing do you think I'm talking about the intelligence world that it's got a bit too sophisticated these days I think it's probably become absolutely absurd we we used to have a saying that in the Cold War that the CIA would never use one spy what we're 12 would do when they were they were so over finance and overstaffed through our perception at least that they were falling over themselves they were obtaining a piece of information that was then corroborated by other sources theoretically but probably all those sources emanated from the same one I think that happened very much in in Vietnam that they were actually duplicating their own observations and and making completely false military assessments but when you combine the huge boom in electronic intelligence with a corresponding loss of human intelligence then you reach constipation point where you're ingesting huge amounts of unrefined intelligence and you are not properly synthesizing it you are not selecting who will give it to you are not selecting the priority with which you will give it to that person so so many times we read retrospectively that all the information was there when they looked and they never used it and that's because they have too much but and and so the irony is that in our super technological age we find I believe we find such a glut of electronic intelligence and so little human intelligence there's now a rush back to get human sources because your your individual source you have let us say Saddam's private secretary he or she will select evaluate to a point what he or she has heard you will you will get information that has already gone through an enormous selection process now to be listening to all his blasted signals but you you have no focus you don't know where you're where you're working i i'm extremely ignorant about the stuff technically but i'm i'm convinced that there is such a thing as too much knowledge or let's say too much information and too little knowledge not enough intuition what are natural is even intuition I think it's focus but to pull out the particular strand that you are looking for from a mass of information requires a very clear sense of priority and I expect I expect that the ground will now be repaired but the horror story of 9/11 and the failure of intelligence I think does present us with a very real example of what can go wrong when you have too much detail insufficient intelligent evaluation I mean that's just good brainpower good people maybe when you proliferate case officers on one target you run the risk of getting a dispersed vision of something rather than the single story and that's where a human agent on the spot can actually save you a huge amount of industry and focus and focus your your priorities I remember being told in Israel back in the 70s that to keep a bank of computers that was capable of breaking as they perceived them enemy codes was as expensive as an independent nuclear deterrent so that gives you some idea of the intensity of labor that's involved in this stuff as well as the hardware most well practically all your books have been about the world of espionage is there something completely different that you'd like to write well it's called a genre writing about this stuff my definition of the Jean is something that that limits me that circumscribes me I've never found that constraint in writing on the subject partly because it was the water I swam in for a while and partly because I can think of no better stage on which to act out the world's comedy we all of us reach for accuracy and deceit to protect ourselves we all of us offer one another partial versions of ourselves in order to coexist at all we keep our thoughts to ourselves and so on so all of us in a sense are conscious of the secret condition and that's how really how we meet and associate in all sorts of ways often to spare one another's feelings and yes I have from never written actually quite a few books that that do not touch on espionage others that have perhaps stretched the possibilities of espionage in order to accommodate quite other themes but generally it's what I do best it's it's where I swear most naturally and and I'm completely content with whatever not to admire it but I don't feel that I've I've been constrained by the limitations of what is called the John John Locke array thank you very much thank you

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Length: 27min 30sec (1650 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2013