British Secret Service? The Spy John le Carré | Full Documentary

[Music] last year I had a client called magomat we'd been tortured by the Russians nothing personal nothing very scientific just a lot of beatings [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] if I look back I did search I came to fairly gloomy conclusion about Mankind but more than that I can't say I always convince myself that the next book will solve me [Music] The Cliffs of Cornwall adopted home of the writer John le Carrie in his novel the night manager an agent Jonathan Pine comes to this mystical place to seek Refuge from the shadows of his past it's a futile attempt as the novel shows [Music] as he gazed at the apocalyptic landscape he smiled to himself like a man who has found the Palace of his dreams I'm on my way he thought to complete myself he thought to discover the missing parts of my life for the days that remained [Music] and took possession of his heart and he rejoiced in every fresh example of the Cliff's perfection last hour this urge to be assumed soon into the landscape him almost unbearable and yet haunted by his memories Pine is unable to find inner peace here the church towers Chimes bang in your ear like a boxing gong everything is single everything a separate smell or sound or piece of remembering a footstep in the lane snaps like a broken neck I love to revisit those writers that I really enjoy and respect people who can handle story move you from here to there to there produce subtext so that you're looking up there that you're wondering what's happening down there Alfred Hitchcock was asked Mr Hitchcock how long can you hold a kiss on the screen and Hitchcock said 20 25 minutes so somebody said that's a hell of a long kiss yes said Hitchcock but first of all I'd put a bomb under the bed it's the bomb under the bed that is so much to do with structure and so I I love to visit writers who know about subtext the bomb under the bed the book The World could not lay down now stands with the great Motion Pictures of all time John lacare's magnificent best-selling novel The Spy Who Came in from the cold let me start by asking you any music [Music] a man who has seen the dirt as well as the desert the sex used and abused by Nations blame us the spy who started it all the suspense and the excitement sheer naked Unforgettable [Applause] August 1961 tanks on the streets of Berlin the Border has been closed a wall has been built for some it's a socialist protective barrier for others it's a crime overnight families are torn apart the victims are in a State of Shock [Music] soon enough after the paralysis wears off it becomes a kind of normality What's Happening Here it's time for a story the American handed lemus another cup of coffee and said we can ring you if he shows up Lima said nothing just stared through the window of the checkpoint along the empty Street you can't wait forever sir maybe he'll come some other time we can have the policy contact the agency you can be back here in 20 minutes no siblings it's nearly dark now but you can't wait forever he's nine hours over schedule if you want to go go you've been very good lemus added I'll tell Kramer you've been damn good but how long will you wait until he comes we must walk to the observation window and stored between the two motionless policemen their binoculars were trained on the Eastern checkpoint he's waiting for the dog he must muttered I know he is this morning you see the new cities for the Workman they must turned on him agents onto airplanes they don't have schedules [Music] The Spy Who Came in from the cult no other title has summed up an entire area as powerful as this one in his novel The Cold War is given a signature a distinctive face jungle the Camellia story in a new way he takes us beneath the surface of events that took place after the war was built he permanently influenced the whole genre spy fiction truly overnight John le Carey then an official of the British Embassy in Bonn Ed a theme of his life [Music] it was there in koenig's Winter that I began writing this bio came in from the cold I'd been to Berlin at the beginning of the erection of the wall the very first moves the the barbed wire across the friedrichstrasse and I'd seen the American of the Russian tanks facing each other and waving their barrels of each other I think I I really suffered if there's such a thing in politics a really serious sense of trauma of the the barricades of the new war the new Cold War being built in the ashes of the old war and I came back to Born Into koenigs winter in an extremely high state of internal excitement and I began writing the book I think I wrote the book over five weeks and going back and forth even on the ferry in little notebooks at any Spa are in the embassy at lunchtime and then coming back on the ferry I I couldn't stop writing I couldn't stop telling the story so at the end of five weeks or whatever it was with this after this few I've had the feeling that this happens once in your life foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I had seen a man at London Airport in a raincoat a beat-up face a man of about 40 who looked as though he had lived all the wars on Earth and he went to the bar and ordered himself a big glass of whiskey and he put the money on the table and there were about six different kinds of change small of Clan gated on the on the bar and it was to me that was that was my my leading character in the next novel I began fantasizing about it put him straight into the book and gave him the name of lemus and that was the part that Richard Burton then played in the movie How big does a cause have to be before you kill your friends [Music] my mother used to read a lot of spy fiction when I was a child and I think she probably passed me cold and I must have read it when I was quite young and been very gripped by that kind of dark forbidding realism of it which was a wonderful contrast to the um the kind of lurid escapism of the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming a small town in the south west of England Sherman is dominated by its Abbey there has been a school here since the 8th Century the young David Cornwell later to take the pen name of John le Carrie was educated the turban's elite boys boarding school The Experience affected his whole life here at the school for the last three years of the 3945 War I arrived here when I was 13 which is normal as I reached adolescence and arrived in this place I also became extremely rebellious and greatly resented the impositions of discipline and what in those days was the considerable brutality of the place boys were allowed to beat boys the promoted buyers could be the unpromoted wise physical punishment extended almost to the level of torture there were different different types of beating for different imaginary offenses the effect of all that upon me was to incite my revolutionary instincts I also greatly resented the religious ethic of the place in those days you could even be beaten for not having the Bible at the top of the pile of books that you were carrying [Music] say that my imprisonment here also encouraged me to write because it drove me even further into my own fantasy Picasso when he was painting was interrupted by his mistress and she brought him a telegram and it said can we get Daniel and sinevsky and Ginsburg who be on who are on trial in in Petersburg Leningrad in those days can we get up a petition to get them out of prison to which Picasso took a fine paintbrush and wrote they will write better in prison rebelling at 16. David Cornwell left Sherman and made for the Swiss Capital bam he studied German language and literature at University just after World War II that must have seemed rather provocative to his fellow countrymen but Dan would be important to John le carre for another reason it was here that the service approached the Young [Music] at least that's what former Soviets spy Mikhail lubemov believes [Music] it's all there yesterday his novel Smiley's people is set in power the carrier used his adolescent experiences to shape a dramatic narrative a diplomat employed by the Soviet Secret Service is kidnapped during a game of chess in front of Toby's dark eyes lifted to the cathedral close the getaway cars were in position with a flourish one of the bearded players lifted his Queen and pretending it was the most appalling wait reeled with it a couple of steps and dumped it with a groan Gregorius face darkened into a frown as he considered this unexpected move on and off from Toby scordano and desilski Drew one to either side of him Toby's Watchers began sauntering into the crowd forming a second Echelon behind the silsky in scordano Toby waited no longer where am I I am I'm a senior Soviet diplomat I don't want to speak to my Ambassador immediately you want to Ransom you are terrorists but if you are terrorist why don't you buy my eyes you let me see your faces I demand you are counselor gregoria for the Soviet Embassy in Bern IE I am Gregory yes well done I'm gregorith and who are you please Al Capone who are you [Music] after his year in Bell General Carey returned to England and finished his degree at Oxford he went on to teach at Eaton the educational capital of the British political Elite that might seem rather paradoxical after all his attempts to break free but maybe the explanation could be continuing employment by the British secret service I went on to Oxford I rejoined the establishment of the band I was then offered a teaching post at Eaton which fascinated me I had no idea what I wanted to become except that I was constantly restless and I was writing a bit in my spare time illustrating books and that kind of thing but yes I rejoined The Establishment and this appetite that was created in me to find father figures and to find an Institutional home did not leave me and I think that I don't want to be my own critic but I think that what imparts tension to my work is that divided soul [Music] Oxford and later Cambridge were the setting for further novels these were places where ideologies thrived Kim philby who became a double agent and worked for the Soviets for two decades learned his ideology in Cambridge [Music] philby was recruited we now know as an as a student at Cambridge in the 30s and could actually have risen to the position of the head of the British secret service he was working all the time that he was employed by the British he was working as a Soviet agent he was protected really by the English class system he was a gentleman and he came from Cambridge and his father though an erratic man was a distinguished arabist and a big name in the world he was very well connected and there was a kind of perception that gentlemen of his class could not be traitors there was something about philby which I felt was very close to my own nature that philby I think somewhere in his late adolescence reached some kind of internal Revolution Against The Establishment as we call it and against his own father and at that point you hit a Crossroads but there was a third man were you in fact the third man no I was not do you think there was one no comment I shadowed philby and philby seemed to Shadow me but it was one of his habits I understand when a name came up of somebody who was a candidate for selection for the British secret service then established members were asked whether they knew of that person and philby just took the piece of paper and put it in his briefcase so that anybody entering the service would have been compromised by philby before they joined so I could imagine myself in some bad dangerous place um in retrospect uh thinking I was there by kind kind permission of the KGB his own history was proving to be a problem for her Security Services 200 years of colonialism had become embedded in the minds of British counter-espionage by the time Winston Churchill died 20 years after World War II it was the end of an era the British Empire was drawing to a close yet even today crucial conclusions have not been drawn from past experience [Music] when you travel the world a bit you discover very quickly that victims have a terribly long memory what I'm trying to say is that we have left in our Trail our Colonial Trail our ex our trail of exploitation so much hatred behind and so much memory which we don't even know about it seems we don't uh anybody looking at the way Iraq was assembled out of the pieces of the Middle East after 1918. would have some understanding of what was likely to happen but the extraordinary thing is that the most intelligent the most gifted country in the world producing them as brilliant academics and scientists managers contrives to lead itself without the information of the past foreign 1945 when Clement Atley was elected I remember thinking that all the things I found fishy about England would go the class system The Divided educational system the monarchy all of those things would surely dissipate in the post-imperial period of Britain I don't understand how we return as it were to our superstitions when we're faced with the future but that's what we do I think the the Espionage world the series depicted it is a world within a world and its population is quite highly selected in the sense that there are kind of public school boys recruited from Oxbridge and there are ex-soldiers to do the rough work and there is a sense of social hierarchy Cambridge circus in London the center of the world for the British secret service from here the shadowy game of intelligence Intrigue and deceit was played is where top agent George Smiley had his office he's one of La Carrey's most unusual characters he sets the mood and tone of many of his novels Smiley himself was one of those solitaries who seemed to have come into the world fully educated at the age of 18. obscurity was his nature as well as his profession the byways of Espionage are not populated by the Brash and colorful adventurers of fiction a man like Smiley learns only one prayer that he may never never be noticed assimilation Is His Highest aim he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance clings to them for his anonymity and his safety his fear makes him servile he could embrace the Shoppers who jostle him in their impatience and force him from the pavement but this fear this is developed in Smiley a perception for the color of human beings Swift feminine sensitivity to their characters and motives who mankind as a huntsman knows his cover as a fox the wood for a spy must hunt while he is hunted and the crowd is his estate Smiley was a figure for me of perfect anonymity which was something I wish to be I felt socially confused and alienated parentally alienated and I I invented for myself this proxy father figure if you like who became my companion in writing my My Secret Mentor almost and what he stood for for me was a kind of dying decency in life which For Better or Worse we believed was the property of the English gentleman Moscow during the Cold War the headquarters of the opposition the KGB [Music] British secret service the KGB was The Matrix that needed to be puzzled out Behind These Walls was the man Smiley hunted down for two decades Carla the coldly calculating KGB strategies finally Smiley forces him to surrender to the west by exploiting his love for his sick daughter then when I put him up against the absolutist who was Carla who was his opposite number in the KGB Moscow Center whatever you want to call it um I finished their duel with this paradox that in order to seduce Carla and persuade him to come to the West Smiley had abandoned his own Humanity and what he had done was put pressure upon the latent Humanity in Kala so in a sense as Carla crossed the bridge into the West he was abandoning his absolutism and coming towards Humanity in my perception foreign foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] for an old friend it's bedtime [Music] George you won did I yes yes I suppose I did [Applause] [Music] [Music] John le Carey spends half his year in London and half in Cornwall over there is the town of Penzance there you see the skyline of Penzance and I suppose I I remember the Theodore storm called husum managerstadt a mere and I think this is my garage pretty girl for most of the year I can tell you it's what we would call Payne's grave pain was a 19th century English watercolorist and it's a deep warm blue almost the the color of a warm slate and then when the sky forms over the sea and breaks up you get these wonderful shafts of sunlight that make little Islands on the sea there are a lot of Legends about that the Lost land that lies out there but it's of course it's Legend but I love that I find it very beautiful [Music] [Applause] [Music] I love the actual physical process of writing it it's like a kind of drawing I feel a tactile relationship pen to paper if I may quote for a moment as a mouse may look at a king Curtis said that he felt the power of writing flowing through his body into the onto the page that's the Habit that I've had from from childhood and I've never changed it and it served the whole of literature throughout centuries I wrote the first chapter perhaps over a period of of three months the first page probably over a period of a month and then gradually as the book advances it gets quicker and I certainly wrote the last hundred pages of this novel in about 10 days so then if woof it really goes [Applause] foreign foreign I have like a movie maker I have in my head a final frame of what's going to happen it may be something as literal as in The Constant Gardener I know that Justin is going to go and seek his own death at the end because that is the way we will rejoin him with his wife and he will have completed his wife's work it's a very romantic notion you want me to come home [Music] Mr Quail [Music] Tess [Music] I really do believe that the Spy story was born with me so to speak into my childhood I had no idea who my mother was she disappeared without explanation when I was five and one if one asked she was Ill or you asked somebody else so she'll be back soon darling somebody else said I think she may be dead [Music] my father was a brilliant and often very compassionate man but he was also this hushed upper this confidence trickster who who it created amazing fictions criminal fictions so that he would be saying you know there's a was a fantastic house down the road I happen to know the people who own it they're in terrible financial difficulties we can get it for very very little money as long as we do it privately okay so if you put five thousand in and I put five thousand if we can get it you put your five thousand in and he walks away with it um but when he was saying that story he really believed in the house that's the important thing and in in the making of a clandestine operation in Espionage you entertain exactly the same possibilities I mean supposing we turn this place into a hospital for a night until David was sent to boarding school in Sherburne his father brought the boy up almost by himself that too left a lasting impression and his fancy that he was being followed What of that what if the shadow he never saw only felt to his back seemed to tingle with the intensity of his Watcher's gaze he saw nothing hurt nothing only felt he was too old not to heed the warning the creek of a stair that had not creaked before the face on the Underground that you know you have seen somewhere before the years at a time these were signs he had lived by any one of them was reason enough to move change Downs identities for in that profession there's no such thing as coincidence these were the insecurities of my childhood nothing was true and and the search for truth began very early but above all a great distrust of whatever one was told there must be a subtext to this there must be some other reason why I'm being told this the remains of the old French Embassy in Bonn you'd think it had only just been abandoned through George Smiley Le carre expressed a view of the world which bouts of skepticism aside remained true to the values of Western democracy until the 1980s when the onset of Gorbachev's perestroika led to a Thor between east and west this is the Old Government bunker of the German cabinet in the Rolling Hills near Bonn an anachronism of bygone days Le cares George Smiley has premonitions of change the world is starting to become more confusing the era of the cold Warriors is coming to an end [Music] it's over said smiley and so am I am I over time you ran down the curtain on yesterday's cold warrior he was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice wasn't weaponry technology or armies or campaigns it was just man and ideologies do end when they've had their day because they have no heart of Their Own they're the and angels of our striving selves one day [Music] it's very hard to look at the world today and not be a pessimist and if you did invest your belief in the Cold War as I did for a while and you see it end and there is then a moment just the blink of a star in history when we could have redesigned the world we really could that was one of the rare rare moments in history where we could have said stop the clock we will now pause and decide what kind of world we can build uh instead of that we retreated into our own selves at the end of the Cold War yeah Lucario's principal subject matter now is globalization the world is becoming a village but the situation is becoming diffuse the Shadows are getting darker the front lines less clear after 1989 the author of The Spy Who Came in from the cold was forced to explore new material many had expected Le Carrie to retire with the end of the Cold War he had placed so firmly on the literary map they were wrong he now found his subjects where globalization had raised hopes but failed to fulfill them political interests having reached a battle of cultures and above all where new Unholy alliances have been forged where business and politics operate together Unshackled if you're asking me do I think globalization is good for the world the answer is no I think it's creating misery on a terrible scale in the name of progress a concept that I don't altogether subscribe to I think it is uh it is tremendously difficult to to see the end product of what we're doing politically at the moment in his novel The Constant Gardener the game of treachery and Sinister interconnections moves in a New Direction a party conversation triggers a threatening and ultimately deadly sequence of events good evening Dr Loom and I have met yes it was at the opening for the clinic that didn't have the sterilizing equipment we never met Dr Garber but I know your work do you know secennis curses chief executive of Three B's yes also by reputation good evening the most successful company here in Kenya we're very proud of it which of the bees are you you were going to show us the Garden Room I think Porter there is just one thing that I'd like to thank Dr Enga before the free navarapin he's sad way to manufacturers who donated HIV positive mothers it's a wonderful thing so the problem is it isn't actually reaching them we've been wondering is that a standard cock-up Dr nangarbao or were the pills converted into the limo that you arrived in I think that's probably enough if you come through here in This Global game the speculators profiteers and political lobbyists become more and more faceless while the third world provides the economic resources an endless supply of victims in the Constant Gardener Africans are used as guinea pigs for an untested medicine and when Justin a naive idealist protests this inhuman practice the man from the ministry counters with pure cynicism the drug was still at the trial stage still is theoretically if it poisons a few people who are going to die anyway what's the Big D drugs have got to be trying on somebody haven't they I mean who do you choose for Christ's sake Harvard Business School and in Jesus foreign office isn't in the business of passing judgment on the safety of non-indigenous drugs is it supposed to be greasing the wheels of British industry not going around telling everybody that a British company in Africa is poisoning its customers how actually can you work in a big pharmaceutical company knowing perhaps that the staff you're selling has not been properly clinically tested that it's been even faked a little teased a little but it's hugely overpriced that the propaganda you're putting out about it is inaccurate insufficient that the stories that are being told about the cost of its development are inaccurate because actually you're picking up taxpayers money because the stuff has been originally developed in a state laboratory um it doesn't matter to me very much where I apply my mind I'm still looking for the same Injustice the same uh probably the same atavistic relationship between man and the institutions and and the forces that he creates [Applause] 9 11. John McCary took his time to react to an event many Saw as a turning point in world history in his 2008 novel The Most Wanted Man he gives the assault on ground zero an unusual epilogue he doesn't a Muslim from chechnya comes to Germany at first he's absorbed into the Exile community but he soon attracts the attention of the counter-espionage services the setting is Hamburg where 9 11 terrorist Muhammad Atta studied in my book I portray Hamburg as a city that was naturally attractive to Muhammad Atta and the other plotters I think that anybody living in Exile from a strongly held belief and a strongly held community either moves away from it or moves spiritually emphatically fundamentally back to it and I think utter took the second decision but I've always tried to write about people who are caught between two worlds I remember particularly the case of a very thin boy who lived in this Exile group to be with them you had to carry a pistol they were victims on the street already at those days purely by their appearance they were victims and this boy was caught between the two cultures he had a Russian father and he had a Chichen mother he had moved towards the Chichen in adolescence and to OLS Islam and this boy had stuck in my mind I wanted to find a shall Plaza's a setting for this boy and I wanted to examine the the problems of a good-hearted fellow seeking a new identity as ones I had sought one myself and Hamburg seemed a natural place novel has all the familiar motifs John le Carrie uses to make up the subtext of his world of espionage Issa falls into the clutches of rival Western intelligence services and becomes the bait for a much larger prey those close to him are drawn into the Maelstrom especially his lawyer who works for a refugee organization and has been helping him find his way Le Carrie did his research on the spot contacting the Hamburg Refugee organization flukepunt Refuge which often deals with similar situations before finishing the novel Le carre discusses the finer points of his storyline with the staff of the organization it's typical of his thorough preparation but as a reader we cannot assume that he was in contact in the time he was locked out that he went somewhere to meet someone we can't assume but I think you could do something like this as you would with a child this is the key yeah but how far was John le carre himself entwined in the Espionage Network what I actually did as an intelligence officer for two reasons I can never describe the first is that it's bread in me to shut up about it quite simply to keep quiet if you employ an agent for example if somebody agrees to become a traitor on your behalf in his own country his children and his grandchildren his nephews and nieces and his friends are all in a sense vulnerable if that were ever to be discovered they would suffer terribly so the promise one makes is that it will never never be known and that's a promise I keep to the other reason is that whatever I say that I did or didn't do nobody believes you you bring so much baggage to the business that if you are a bloody fool and many people are bloody fools in that business they still think he's only pretending to be a bloody fool which is very funny now today the larger world is the secret world we've reached a point of self-deception in the dissemination of truth that is almost unbelievable I don't know who is deceiving whom the notion somehow that the glut of information that is now available to us yields knowledge is completely crazy we have a circuit of information but we we draw no moral conclusions from it we draw no realistic conclusions from it any fool could have looked at the map and looked at the history of Iraq and looked at The Tinderbox that we were entering at that point and said this is chaotic don't go into something that you can't get out of it's the beginning of wisdom in life whether you're making love or whatever you're doing is after I stopped working in the intelligence I met many other members of Security Services [Music] he's English in a way that lots of English people wouldn't really recognize I mean you know he belongs he seems to be long or his imagination if I should put it that way his imagination seems to belong to a rather closed off class of English persons of relative privilege and high education and a sense of public obligation they're small in numbers but their influence as well has always been considerable so he is very English in that sense as a kind of small L English liberal Patriot [Music] we have talked from time to time about my father and in a perfect spy I describe a moment which to me in retrospect exactly depicts the relationship between us we were driving down to a Seaside town in his beloved Bentley and he was extremely drunk and he stopped the car and we lay on the roof for a while in the Moonlight sleep I remember it just the once we were driving to Torquay for a nice weekend's rest of the Imperial where Rick had set up an illegal game of charmand Affair in a suite overlooking the sea and it must have been one of those times when Mr cuddle of the chauffeur had resigned for suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of a moonlit cornfield but Rick smelling strongly of the cares of office had mistaken for the open road stretched side by side on the Bentley roof Father and Son let the hot Moon Scorch their faces father said pin stopped what is it son you can tell your old man it's just that well if you can't pay the first terms boarding fees in advance it's all right I mean I'll go to Day School I just think I ought to go somewhere is that all you've got to say to me son well it doesn't matter really you've been reading my correspondence haven't you no no of course not have you ever wanted for anything in your whole life never well then said Rick and nearly broke pym's neck with an arm lock embrace [Music] thank you

Channel: criminals and crime fighters

Views: 175,070

Keywords: john le carre, john le carre documentary, documentary, documentary history, king of spies, british secret service, british secret service documentary, great britain, spy, spy novels, day in life of spy, author, spy thriller, spy movie, Intrigue, moral dilemma, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, tinker tailor soldier spy, the night manager, agents, british writer, Intelligence Officer

Id: Jx9Jc32xZfc

Length: 51min 57sec (3117 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2023