>> John Haskell: Good
morning, everybody. I'm going to try to
start right on time. I'm John Haskell from
the Library of Congress. We welcome you to the 18th
annual National Book Festival. It is because of
contributors like Wells Fargo, David Rubenstein,
and many others that this is now officially the
best free event in Washington. [ Applause ] We're -- I'm going to turn
it over to Carlos Lozada and the program in a second. I do want to remind you
to turn off electronic -- you know, silence your
electronic gadgets. We're on TV so, you know,
it won't be appropriate. I'm going to say one
thing about Carlos and then turn it over to him. As probably most of you know, at an event like this Carlos
is the nonfiction book editor at the Washington Post. He was also at one time
the economics editor there and national security editor
and the Outlook section editor. He was, just this year, a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and, in
2015, was the winner of the National Book
Critics Circle citation for excellence in reviewing. Carlos, welcome. [ Applause ] >> Carlos Lozada: Good
morning and welcome to the National Book Festival. It's my favorite event
in Washington bar none. So we're here to talk about
spies and intelligence and maybe hacking, who knows? But it is quite an honor to
introduce this morning's panel. Our moderator is Kai Bird,
the author of "The Good Spy: The Life and Death
of Robert Ames." He's also the co-author
of the Pulitzer-winning "American Prometheus" on the
life of Robert Oppenheimer, which I must confesses is one of the greatest biographies
I've ever read. No surprise, Kai is also
director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City
University of New York. Our panelists are
Washington Post columnist and novelist David
Ignatius, author of 10 novels, most recently "Quantum Spy,"
spy novelist Joseph Kanon, author most recently of
"Defectors," and Adam Sisman, whose latest book is a
biography and he has explained to me the proper
way to pronounce it. It is not le Carre it's
le Carre [pronouncing]. We can have a debate
about this later. In addition to being
part of the panel, they'll be signing
books at 1:00. With that, I'm thrilled to
handed over to Kai Bird. [ Applause ] >> Kai Bird: Good morning. So I assume we're all here because we love a
good spy story. But we don't really
often admire spies but we love a good spy story. So that's what we're
sort of here to discuss. And we have on stage here,
excluding myself, really three of the world's foremost experts
on the world of intelligence. And I'm really delighted
to be here. My name is Kai Bird and I
want to first make a plug for my little biography
center at City University. It's called the Leon Levy
Center for Biography, funded by Shelby White
for the last 11 years. And it's a very special thing. It promotes the art
and craft biography in a very specific way. We hand out four
$72,000 fellowships -- four of them every year and the
deadline is in early January. So if there any budding
first-time biographers in the audience, think
about this fellowship. I want to begin by talking a
little bit about Robert Ames. When I was 13 years old, my next-door neighbor
was Robert Ames, a spy. I had no idea he was a spy. And then years later, he was
tragically killed in Beirut in 1983 and I read a novel
by David Ignatius called "Agents of Innocence." And David is not only the
Washington Post's reporter on the intelligence beat but
he -- this was his first novel, "Agents of Innocence," and
he's now written, I think 10. And that book got me
interested in trying to figure out who my next-door
neighbor was. And David encouraged
me to do this book and gave me many sources. And the only reason "The
Good Spy" happened is because of David. I first met Joseph
Kanon in Los Alamos and his first spy novel was
called "Los Alamos" and he had in it a lovely, just moving
portrait of Robert Oppenheimer, whom I later wrote
a biography on. And I had to tell Joe that
his little portrait of Robert "Oppie," as he was called, was
the best I'd seen and better than my 800 pages, which
tells you, you know, the power of the novel. Finally we have, all the way
from London, Adam Sisman, who is a biographer's
biographer. Literally, he wrote a
biography of the biographer -- i.e. "Boswell's Presumptuous
Task." And now, two years ago I
guess -- three years ago, he came out with this massive
biography of John le Carre, otherwise really known
as David Cornwell. And he rips off the mask
from this very enigmatic man that you all know
as John le Carre. Anyway, we're going to
begin with le Carre. And as some of you may already
know, le Carre was himself a spy for about 5 1/2 years. And many of his novels
draw upon that life. But Adam, you explained,
while he cooperated with you, he refused to talk about
his five years as a spy and specifically what
he was doing in Germany. You found out a great deal about
what he was doing with Germany, but why the reticence even,
you know, so many years later? >> Adam Sisman: Well,
there's his answer and there's my answer. I mean, a bit of background. He, when he left Oxford, where
he had in fact been reporting on his fellow students, including a fellow
American student who -- to MI5, but he'd not come
in from the cold as it were. He was a schoolmaster
at Eaton for a bit but then he joined MI5. And he worked for MI5 for
two years before going over to the dark
side and joining MI6, where he was posted to Germany. He says that he made a
commitment back then not to talk about his secret work and
he wants to keep to it. He is -- I mean, le Carre
for a long time pretended that he wasn't involved
in secret work. He used to say, I'm just
a simple civil servant, that's all. And he has gradually come
out of the closet as it were. But he's very much in control
of that part of his story but I found out from other
sources what he was doing. And essentially, in the British
Embassy in Bonn as it then was, in what was then West Germany,
he was what's called undeclared. That means he was posing
as an ordinary diplomat, a second secretary, but
he was in fact reporting to and working for MI6. And his job really
was to keep -- it wasn't running agents across
the border into East Germany or into the Soviet
block, but keeping an eye on political developments
on both the extreme left and the extreme right
in Germany. And one of his lesser-known
books in fact, "A Small Town in Germany," which is,
I think, unrecognized -- I think it's much better
than people realize -- is very much a portrait of
what he was really doing. >> Kai Bird: Joseph Kanon,
turning to you, Joe you seem, along with John le Carre,
to have had an obsession with Kim Philby in your work. In your latest book, one of
your characters, Frank Weeks, is clearly modeled after Philby. Explain your obsession. >> Joseph Kanon:
I think he's one of the most interesting
characters who (or real-life characters)
that anybody has run across. And we had the great
good fortune that, A, he wrote memoirs, which
are highly questionable and self-serving. But we also had the great good
fortune he had four wives, two of whom wrote memoirs
about his time in Moscow. So if you're an espionage
novelist who is not himself a spy. Every time I come
to DC, by the way, on book tour there
will be question from the audience about,
you know, the craft that's in your books and it's always a
coded, loaded question saying, how long have been
an espionage agent? And I always say to them, I have absolutely no idea
really what it's like. I just get it from other books. I've never been approached. I've never been recruited. And someone said, well, of course you would
say that [laughter]. So it's a total no-win
situation. The serious answer to
the Philby question -- and yes, the character is very
much a kind of American Philby. And in large part, that's
because the number of details about daily life there come
from what we know about Philby because there's more
documentation about him. But I think he's an exemplar of
why I think we're all interested in spies, which is one of
the great questions in all of literatures is who are we? Who is that other person? How knowable can
anyone be to us? And when you encounter
a spy, it's someone who is deliberately
pretending to be someone else. This is a crime if you're
an undercover agent. It doesn't have a narrative arc like an armed robbery
or something. You're committing a crime 24/7,
all the time, your whole life. You're lying to your colleagues. You're lying often
to your spouse. You are living a lie. What could be more interesting
to a novelist than to write about someone who not
only are we trying to peel back the layers
of that onion to know him but he's resisting
at the same time. I think it's a push-pull that
any fiction writer is drawn to -- and readers I hope. >> Kai Bird: So that reminds
me, le Carre himself once wrote that writers -- like a spy, his
real work is done alone and, like a spy, writers
need secrecy. Isn't there a sort of similarity
between what we all do and the world of spies? >> Adam Sisman: I think you
can convince yourself of that. When I started working
with David, I started to imagine
myself as an agent and think of assignations and be checking
out of the window whether that person across the street
wasn't there five minutes ago and that sort of thing. It is very seductive. David himself -- David
Cornwell, that's the real name for John le Carre
-- he plays a kind of teasing game, as
readers will know. He wrote an autobiographical
novel called "A Perfect Spy," which depicts someone whose
early life is identical to David's own early life and whose father is a
portrait of his own father. And when his first wife --
his divorced first wife -- read the manuscript of "A
Perfect Spy," she said, I always wondered whether
David was a double agent. And I found myself
wondering that too. I don't think he was, actually,
but he plays that tease with his readers and
carries on doing so. >> Kai Bird: So David
Ignatius, your 10 spy novels of course draw on
your own experience as a foreign correspondent. And I've always suspected that the typical
foreign correspondent -- you were stationed in
Beirut at one point -- often has better sources
than the average CIA officer. Wouldn't you agree
that that's true? [laughter]. >> David Ignatius: I think
one technique that I used as a journalist for
many years was to think about who the CIA likely
would've recruited in a place and then take a run at those
same people on the theory that they'd begun to start
talking and they'd, you know, once the cake is cut,
what's another slice? I think that, in the time that
I got started as a journalist, which overseas was 1980, the
United States had the wind at its back and people all over
the world were eager to work for the United States, work
secretly through the CIA, work openly in other ways
because it was good for them. They'd get business,
they'd make friends. That was the way
the world was going. I think we're now heading into
the wind rather than having it at our back, and
maybe it is easier for journalists to
approach people. I'm just going to say briefly
in response to the earlier theme of the way in which being
an intelligence officer is like being a journalist --
and that's just obviously true on one level, you know? We're trying to pull
people's stories from them. We're trying to establish
rapport. We're trying to get
people to say things that they might not
otherwise say. But there's one huge
difference that you just have to underline right now, which is that journalists (if they're
doing their job) don't lie, you know? We're about telling the truth
and we work for our readers. [ Applause ] And you know, it's obvious
that we're in a moment where that role,
that understanding that that's what we do and
that we're not in the business of lying is being challenged. So I get a little nervous
when I hear people say, well, it's just like being an
intelligence officer. It's a little bit
like it but, ideally, there's that fundamental split
that makes it very different. >> Joseph Kanon: There's
also a dark side to this, the le Carre statement. Yes, it's like being a spy
but it's also a question of are you betraying
people as you're doing this, as a spy inevitably does. There was a famous journalist
who once said that, ultimately, we're always selling
somebody out, which means that you're drawing
material for them and using them as copy or the basis for
whatever you're writing without really going
to them for the source. You know, one tries
to do that as little as possible but it does happen. >> Adam Sisman: May I -- I mean, I completely applaud
what David said. I mean, that's absolutely
right and principled. But novelists, as
opposed to journalists, they are making things up. And often they are betraying
in the sense of using people that they know, people
close to them as models or using the experiences
that they've had with people, maybe very intimate experiences, to construct the
plots of their novels. So I don't think the distinction
is completely clear-cut in that sense. I think that David Cornwell's
parallel between spying and writing novels
holds in that sense. And there is an -- I mean,
Cornwell's novels are full of betrayal and they're not
just spies betraying each other, they're people betraying
each other in their personal relationships. And of course Philby did
this himself with his wives and many other people but he
wasn't just betraying people for intelligence reasons. He was betraying people --
he was an extraordinary, duplicitous character,
wasn't he? >> Kai Bird: Well, but
you know, as a biographer, I find I'm constantly
trying to seduce my sources in the same way sometimes
that a spy does, I guess, to cultivate a source. You're trying to -- it's not -- you're not lying but you're
trying to get people to talk. And you had to do
this with, I'm sure, many of Cornwell's friends and. >> Adam Sisman: I tried
to do this with David. I tried to -- I'd often
think, oh, I know. I know a way to get through,
you know, his defenses. And I'd arrive and
start talking to him and I'd put the killer
question and then I'd realized that he'd anticipated the
question and prepared an answer. He's a very, very skillful
and very clever man, and I often felt that
he was playing me rather than me playing him [laughter]. >> Kai Bird: So,
in a larger sense, I've always wondered whether
spies are a little overrated, you know? They -- and that is
actually one of the themes in some sense of
le Carre's novels. They are either failures or, if
they actually uncover, you know, valuable, actionable
intelligence -- and David Ignatius, maybe you
can speak to this in your work as a reporter covering
the intelligence world -- even when a good spy comes along and offers valuable
intelligence, no one in positions of
power wants to hear it. It doesn't fit with the
conventional wisdom. It's awkward. It's -- so in history,
I see examples again and again of this happening. So again, I'm wondering while
we all love a good spy story, aren't they a little overrated? >> David Ignatius: Well, if you mean they
overrate the importance of the intelligence that's
obtained in the flow of history, I think that's probably right. You know, I think of the story,
Kai, that you and I spent so much time thinking about. For me, it began on a morning
in February of 1983 when I want to the US Embassy in Beirut
and about 12:30 I leave, seeing the military attache, and at 1:05 this enormous
car bomb detonates, kills Robert Ames, one of the great intelligence
officers the United States has produced, kills everybody in the CIA station who's
in Beirut that day. A kind of searing memory
for me is running back and seeing the ruins
of the embassy, the dead bodies everywhere. And there was subsequently a
CIA officer who was determined to find out how that bomb
got there that morning. He just made it a passion at a
time when it was very dangerous for Americans even
to be in Beirut. But he went person to person. Who recruited the Shia
Hezbollah officer in the south? Who met the one in Beirut who
rented the car, you know, etc.? And he gathered all
this intelligence, thinking people must know. All these people died. All these American heroes
died -- got to find out. And guess what? He finished that reporting
and, so far as I know, nobody ever did a
damn thing about it. So, you know, there's an example
where, you know, the truth -- you shall seek the truth and
the truth doesn't set you free. It doesn't -- it's not
really all that efficacious. So I -- he's a fascinating
character. I wish he was here
to join our panel because he'd be pretty
angry about that question. >> Kai Bird: And you
can't reveal his name? >> David Ignatius: Well,
another time [laughter]. >> Kai Bird: No, that's
a story, you know, that is still a mystery. Who organized and executed
this car bomb attack on the first US Embassy? And it's a story that I try
to dig into in "The Good Spy," but it remains a mystery. And as you say, no, the US government really
didn't take any action to try to figure it out. >> Adam Sisman: But
taking your larger point, I think there is room
for a lot of skepticism about the value of intelligence. I mean, if you think of many
of the most important episodes in recent history, from Pearl
Harbor through the attack on the Twin Towers
through to the failure -- the concocted story that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction, etc., etc., again and again
these are intelligence failures. And they may be failures
of CIA or MI6. I mean, I think we should
regard intelligence skeptically. And often, the intelligence
is there but it just hasn't been
recognized or properly analyzed. That's really, I think,
as far as I understand it, the root of the problem is -- I mean, the CIA obviously has
much greater -- and the NSA -- much greater resources than any
other intelligence agencies. And in a sense, they gather
too much intelligence. There's so much that you can't
see the wood for the trees. There's just a vast
mass of material and not clear what the shape is. >> Kai Bird: Ah, Adam,
that reminds me of a story. When I was doing my biography
of McGeorge and William Bundy, the two Bundy Brothers, William
Bundy had worked in the CIA for a long time in the 1950s, working under a man
named William Langer, who was a Harvard professor
who had been recruited to become head of the Office of
National Intelligence in 1952. And when he was recruited,
he told Allen Dulles, well, I can't possibly do the
job if you give me more -- more than 25 analysts
[laughter]. He wanted it small and lean and he recruited Bill
Bundy as one of those 25. But of course today, we have
an intelligence bureaucracy that numbers -- David, how many? >> David Ingatius: Oh, my gosh. It's -- you'd need to
count all of the agencies. It's many, many tens of
thousands, it's crazy. We're not getting
our money's worth. >> Adam Sisman: I mean, a
good example of the failure of British intelligence
came in 1940 where British and French intelligence
failed to predict where the Germans
were going to attack. And they cut through the Allied
armies and caused the fall of France, caused the
British to withdraw, ignominiously leaving all their
equipment behind at Dunkirk. It was a disaster. And afterwards, when the
intelligence was analyzed, it was shown that
there were indications of where the Germans
were going to attack. They should have known. They should -- if it had
been properly analyzed, they would have -- they
should have known that. But they just -- there weren't
the mechanisms in place. >> Joseph Kanon: And
Stalin famously was told that Hitler was going to invade. >> Adam Sisman: Yes, yes. >> Joseph Kanon: And
decided to ignore it. >> Adam Sisman: Again
and again -- by us. >> Kai Bird: So maybe
our fascination with spy stories
comes from the fact that these stories are
metaphors for human failure. We're all human, we all
fail, we all make mistakes. And spy stories are a
particularly vivid vehicle for showing how this happens. >> Joseph Kanon:
I think it's fair to say the better
spy stories do that but most spy stories are
triumphant, you know? They're about derring-do
and people who succeed at whatever task
they're succeeding. You know, when people say that
we're all working in the shadow of le Carre, A, I
think that's true, I think he invented the modern
espionage novel as we know it. But one of the great innovations
and what makes it a vehicle for exploring character is that
essentially he took it away from those lampposts
and trench coats and he brought it
into the office. I think all of his
novels, one way or another, are about office life. This particularly true of
"A Small Town in Germany." And if you notice, there's
very little violence. There are very little
actual secrets. What the plot usually involves
is an intelligence agency discovering each other
and who's betraying whom? And in a sense, this is very
accurate because he was looking to be at the apogee
of the Cold War which, from a fiction writing
point of view, was a wonderful source
material, a great subject. Because what you had was a war in which the ground troops
were the intelligence agencies. You know, combat troops did
engage time to time but, all during the Cold War, it
was the intelligence agencies who were really on
the front line. And so he had, you know,
a wonderful subject, all of which we could relate to. Very few of us are ever going
to live like James Bond but all of us have worked in an office where there's an impossible
person controlling the files and, you know, a boss
who turns up late and never answers you and,
you know, all of those things. If you remember in "Spy
Who Came in from the Cold," what presumably precipitates
his disaffection is a quarrel over the pension
payment, you know, it's all very bureaucratic. >> Adam Sisman: In "Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy," there is a scene in which
Peter Guillam steals a file from the Circus archive
and he's carefully -- has manufactured a dummy
file to put in its place. And it's described to me as one of the most exciting scenes ever
set in an archive [laughter]. And it is in fact extraordinary
tense and very dramatic and -- but it is really just a man
going into a room of files, taking one file out and
putting another in its place. That's what happens. >> David Ignatius: You
know the thing, I think, that makes John le Carre's
novels unforgettable that marks all of us
in some sense marked and limited him later in
his career was the creation of the character, George Smiley. George Smiley embodies the
sense of the ambiguity, the moral uncertainty, the kind
of, you know, routine nature of intelligence work
at its best. And just getting ready
for our discussion, I went back in my
library and went back to the very first John le Carre
novel, which was published in 1962 called "Call
for the Dead" and the first chapter is called "A Brief History
of George Smiley." And it opens with a description
of exactly the character that we then lived
with in so many novels. This is his very first book
and he already sees Smiley, describes him as
breathtakingly ordinary. And in the first paragraph of
that book, his wife, Lady Ann, runs off with a Cuban
race car driver. You know, Lady Ann in the
books is always betraying him with somebody, famously Bill
Haydon in "Tinker Tailor." But that's, to me, the
genius of le Carre. He lived a lot of real life. He has all this real-life
espionage to draw on, but he had the brilliance
to see this character. He said that it was drawn from
a rector of Lincoln College at Oxford and his
first boss at MI5. So it's drawn from real people
but there's George Smiley. There's his wife. There's this sense of betrayal. Peter Guillam is
in that first book, the Special Branch
Inspector Mendel, if you know these
books, they're all there. And then he just -- he has that
deck of cards from the start and then he just keeps playing
them through his career, right down to "Legacy of
Spies," the most recent book, which I loved, which has
Guillam and has Mendel, all these same people who were
in the first book -- amazing. >> Adam Sisman: I'd
like to echo that. I mean, I think that the
thing about George Smiley is that he is a complete
contrast with James Bond. James Bond never questions
what he's doing is right. James Bond is an action man
and he has no real inner life. Smiley is all the time troubled, anxious that the human
damage being caused to all these little people,
ordinary individuals, is worth the game -- he's
troubled all the time. And he's even worried about
this archenemy, Karla. At the conclusion of "Smiley's
People," Karla comes across and Peter Guillam says
to him, George, you won. He's not sure that he did
win and he's sort of hoping that Karla will actually go back
because he feels sorry for him. So Smiley is a man
with a conscience. He's not -- he's
full of ambiguity. He's not an out-and-out
Cold War warrior. >> Kai Bird: So Adam,
that brings back to your biography which, as
I said earlier, you know, you sort of rip the
mask off this guy. He is an enigma and you
get very close to him. You tell very intimate
stories about his love affairs, mistresses, wives, his
betrayals of his wives, his troubled childhood,
his crazy con man father. It's very revealing. And so I wonder, how did he --
and you had his cooperation. How did he react to the book and why did he publish
his own memoir, "The Pigeon Tunnel," in 2016? I guess he must have
been working on that when you were working
on your biography, no? >> Adam Sisman: Well, to answer
the first part of your question. >> Kai Bird: How did he react? >> Adam Sisman: How
did he react -- he reacted with a
22-page email [laughter] with 200-and-something
numbered points. And as you can imagine,
when I received this, this is when I'd sent him -- I had an agreement that he
would be the first person to read the manuscript before
my editor, before anybody else. And so I sent it to him
and, a few days later, this email came thudding
into my inbox. And my first reaction was
dismay but when I started to go through it, in fact, the points
were generally points of fact, constructive, thoughtful. And we only really locked horns
over perhaps a dozen of them. And he gave way on half a dozen
and I gave way on half a dozen, so it wasn't really a
problem in that sense. On the other hand, I won't
pretend that he's entirely happy about my book and he seems to
have gotten more grumpy about it as time has gone past. But you know, I feel if
he had been entirely happy with it then perhaps it
wouldn't have been -- I wouldn't have done
my job properly. I had to not be too friendly -- and he recognized
that too, I think. I mean, he's a very
thoughtful man about biography as well as everything else. I mean, his editor at Knopf,
long-term editor, Bob Gottlieb, who's dealt with a
great many fine authors and very clever people
said to me that David is the
cleverest man I ever met. >> Kai Bird: Whoa! >> Adam Sisman: Bar none. And I would put him
up there too. >> Kai Bird: So did your
work inspire his memoir? >> Adam Sisman: No -- well, he'd
-- it's described as a memoir. In fact, it's a collection
of pieces, most of which have been
published before and, indeed, the longest piece
appeared in the New Yorker in two parts back in, I
think it was 2000 and 2001. So it's really not quite
a memoir in that sense. There are only, I think, two
or three chapters that are new. He told me that he wanted
to publish this quite early on in the process and told me
to hurry up because he said, I'm not getting any younger. And that's fine. I mean, you know, I
don't own his life. It's his life and he can -- I mean, if he wanted to
write a full autobiography, that would be fine with me
and I'd be the first person to be queuing up to read it. >> Kai Bird: So le Carre's
books, as Joe just explained, are all about the human
side, the ordinariness, the little human foibles
about human intelligence. But David Ignatius, your
last spy novel is called "The Quantum Spy" and it's
about quantum computers and it's a look into
this high-tech world that we're living with all
today in the age of social media and such -- very timely. And yet, even in this story, the role of human
intelligence is central to understanding the plot. So can talk a little
bit about your book and your thinking about. >> David Ignatius: I
think one challenge for spy novelists is
that, increasingly, spying is about computers
and the Internet. I mean, covert action is, as
we've seen with the Russians, the planting, amplifying
of information through computer networks, the
classic penetration stories, mole stories that John
le Carre wrote about, these days involve electronic
means of contact, compromise. And so the last five or
six years, I've been trying to figure out as a novelist
how you can be faithful. I like to write realistic
spy novels. You can be faithful to
the reality that it's about the intersection
of computers, machines, and human beings and also write
something that doesn't feel like the extra credit problem
that nobody wants to answer. And believe me, if you -- writing about quantum computing
was right on the borderline, it's really complicated. But it is, you know, it's sort
of like the Manhattan Project. This is a machine that, if
they can build it, will be able to decrypt anything that's
ever been encrypted -- that's the theory -- and
lay open every secret that anybody has. So it's of enormous value. It's sort of like the
Manhattan Project. If you get it first, you
have a huge advantage for a long time -- for a while. And it's a race between
us and China. The Chinese know how
important it is and have said, we're going to capture
this technology. So it's -- you want
to write about it. How do you make it real? And I'll just say, the challenge in this book was inventing
interesting Chinese intelligence officers. I think, for me, in all
of my books, you know, the things that I'm proud are
the Jordanian intelligence officer in "Body of Lies"
who dominates that book, the Pakistani head of ISI who
is interesting in "Bloodmoney." And in this book, there's a
character named Li Zian who is, I think, an interesting
subtle person. it's hard to make American
intelligence officers as subtle as you want. It just sort of goes
against our grain, you know? So I have fun often with
the foreign characters in these books. >> Joseph Kanon:
Another way to deal with this issue is
just to go to the past. You know, someone said to me, why do you write
historical novels? And I said, well, I think
of it as the recent past and it's just pre-digital. I find it so much more
interesting to meet somebody on a park bench and, you know,
pass some newspaper than -- whenever anybody says to me, upload onto your
server, I go [laughter]. Whatever that means, you know. So I think it's very hard. >> Kai Bird: So Joe and
David, the two novelists on the panel here, why
have you never been tempted to do biography? >> Joseph Kanon:
It takes too long and there's too much
work [laughter]. >> Kai Bird: Well, that's true. It takes longer to
write a biography than a novel most of the time. >> Joseph Kanon: But I think
there are many similarities between the forms. And look, you know, we've been
talking a lot about le Carre and the legacy, etc. and I think
that the most profound legacy, aside from just adding good
writing to the genre, has been, you know, to me one of the great
things that literature can do is to operate as an agent for
moral inquiry and I think that le Carre did that. What he was exploring was
not simply the character of these people but how they
were going to deal with morality of the actions that they
were asked to participate in. You know, it's -- the fundamental question should
always be, how do we live and how should we live? I don't mean that writing
should be prescriptive and no novel can actually answer
that, but I think novels need to ask it or otherwise they
really are just James Bond, which are perfectly fun and
it's nothing against that and God knows we'd all like
his success and his money. But I think that, you know, what le Carre did was
open this whole field up to moral questions,
and I think ultimately that makes for literature. >> Kai Bird: So, Adam,
coming back to le Carre -- oops, I'm sorry, David? >> David Ignatius: No, no,
I just -- I was going to -- my answer would be
just like Joe's. It's too hard to write
nonfiction, too many footnotes. And I have to -- I live in the
world of fact twice a week. I have to write -- I
get to write columns for the Washington
Post [laughter]. I want to say you have read them but then you don't have
to read them either. So, you know, I'm immersed
in the world the fact. And to be able to escape
it for this big canvas where you don't have
to at the end say, this is precisely
what you should think. This is precisely
how it turned out. You can let all the ambiguities
exist in the characters. I mean, I'll write
one nonfiction book and that'll be my memoirs but,
until then, I don't think so. >> Kai Bird: Okay. We look forward to the memoirs. So Adam, finally, many of
le Carre's novels are -- the early ones are rather
critical of the Cold War -- that's a sort of message
you get from them. And his later novels
become increasingly, I think some critics have
said bitter and anti-American. Can you explain his politics? >> Adam Sisman: I'm actually
giving a talk on this subject on Wednesday at the
Woodrow Wilson Center. I mean, his -- most
people in general, and I think this is
a generalization, become more conservative as they
get older, but David has gone in the opposite direction,
he's become more radical and more angry and
I personally think to the detriment of his fiction. I think his best work was in
the period when he was writing about George Smiley when he
deals with the ambiguities of the Cold War and the fact that neither side
was completely right and neither side was
completely wrong. Now his novels appear to me to
be much more black-and-white. They are goodies and baddies. In fact, they're more like
the "James Bond" books. And I'm afraid all too often
the baddies are American, although some pretty
nasty Brits too. And I think there's a
certain strain in David of -- well, actually, I think it's a
slightly old-fashioned chippy attitude that some Englishmen
of an older generation feel about America, resentment
of America taking over from our role,
our predominant role, which was not only
exemplified in the events of the Second World
War and the aftermath but also was very much
there in the minds of the intelligence
officers, I think, at the time that David
went into MI5 and MI6. I think that was very much in
the culture and also a feeling of bemusement by the fact that
they'd been betrayed by Burgess, Maclean, Philby,
etc. So yes, I agree. His politics have become
more one-dimensional and I think less
interesting, myself. >> Kai Bird: So I think we have
time for five or six minutes of questions, if there are
any, from the audience. Aviva -- there's one
right behind you, I think. >> Aviva Kempner: So I'm making
a documentary on a spy named "Moe Berg: American Spy,
OSS, baseball player." I've already filmed
David and, hopefully, I will be filming Kai. What I'm realizing is Hollywood,
which I'm not a part of, I think has contributed to the
glamorization and the violence of what a spy's life is like. And it's more the more detailed
work, the intelligence work, certainly someone like Moe
Berg did, especially in terms of getting Italian
scientists out. And they really did him
injustice in the feature film that Hollywood just made
with all these shootouts that had nothing to
do with his career. So I'm just asking
you, do you agree -- two questions, that
Hollywood I think has, especially the "James Bond" --
I like the early "James Bond" -- has contributed to taking away
really the hard work a spy does. And second of all, I think
we need the OSS back in terms of the cybersecurity -- I
wonder what David thinks because this -- we don't
need military parades. We don't need to go to the Moon. We've got to figure this out. [applause]. >> David Ignatius: Well,
we need the OSS back. We need, you know, the
sorts of presidents who chartered the OSS -- that
would be nice too [applause]. So Aviva, you know, I think -- I can't wait for your
documentary on Moe Berg. Because we're talking about
John le Carre, you'd have to say that Hollywood has been
faithful to the essence of what those books are about. They didn't screw 'em up. They didn't put a gun in
Smiley's hand or even really in Peter Guillam's, although
his job was, you know, the scalphunter,
the tough guy stuff. The movie that was made of one
of my novels, "Body of Lies," was faithful to the
texture of it. They didn't -- so I
think Hollywood gets that the more realistic
accounts of espionage are things that people want to see. >> Joseph Kanon:
The movie they made out of my novel was just
terrible and, actually, if they would've added
some gunplay it might've helped [laughter]. >> Audience Question:
Good morning and thank you for the discussion today. One of the motivating factors
of spy novels, as I've seen it, is the clash of civilizations. How do -- how will the
novel genre emerge over time with a change in
clash of civilizations from between the US and
the Soviet Union to the US and China, to other venues of
conflict and how is that going to change how spy novels are
both written and understood? >> Joseph Kanon: I think that's
a really interesting question. And at the moment, we
are in a state of hiatus. I think that, obviously,
the interesting clash of the century we're now
in is going to be Chinese. There's a great question of how
much do fiction writers know about Chinese culture? How much do they know and
can access Muslim culture or Middle Eastern culture? It's more difficult because
it's, I think, a rarer knowledge on our part, whereas Russia is
definitely the devil we know and the devil we've been
writing about for decades. And to be -- I suppose
how frivolous, one of the things they've
done is to give all of fiction writers a
kind breathing space because they're insisting on
being center stage yet again. I mean, just when you thought
that Russia was going to have to withdraw from this
role, there they are. They just will not be shunted
aside, at least in espionage. This is, you know, the great
advantage they've always had. So I think, for a while,
we're going to continue to have post-Cold War Cold War
kind of fiction being written. But ultimately, people are going
to have to adjust and have -- because what's really important
is what -- is going to be China. >> Kai Bird: Okay, we
have two minutes left. >> Arnold Zeitlin:
Quick question. My name is Arnold Zeitlin
and I've reported abroad for Associated Press and United
Press International and this is for Mr. Ignatius, whose columns
indicate you have access -- considerable access to the
intelligence community. Now we have a situation
where the president of the United States is
very antagonistic toward the intelligence community
and I'm wondering if you see any pushback from
the intelligence community, a situation that could
be quite dangerous. >> David Ignatius: You
know, there is this argument on the right that
the Deep State, the intelligence agencies
is doing just that, it's pushing back. I don't see that. You know, I have
limited visibility. I always need to say, most of
the stuff about how much I know about the intelligence agencies
is nonsense -- I wish I did. But from what little I know,
it's mostly what I think of as the Richard
Helms philosophy, let's get on with it,
let's do our jobs. And I think, both in terms
of recruiting sources, in terms of liaison
relationships, in terms of all of the humdrum activities
around the world, people just keep doing them. They have, at the top of the
pyramid, a White House that, as we all know, is
kind of unpredictable. But my sense is that the
pushback you're thinking about, that I've thought about,
every time I ask, I'm told, not really happening --
and not just by Americans, but by people overseas. >> Arnold Zeitlin: Thank you. >> Kai Bird: Okay, the
last question here. >> Audience Question:
There's a recent novel written by Daniel Silva called "The
Other Woman" in which he talks about Kim Philby quite
a bit in the novel. In that, he talks about the
tension between espionage and politics and
basically damns Britain because they allowed
politics to get involved in the Philby situation. Can you address the
tension between politics and espionage [laughter]? >> Joseph Kanon: Except to
say that it always exists, in Philby's case, look, I think
what obviously he's referring to is the fact that the
establishment circled the wagons and decided to protect him. There is the theory that they
were having conversations that, in code, said to him, for
God's sakes, defect and get out of here so that we
don't have to have a trial and expose everything
to the public, which would be embarrassing,
much in the same way that Anthony Blunt
was protected, etc. I don't know
that for a fact. I mean, I think it's one
of those wonderful tropes that everybody uses in writing
novels about that period. How can you separate
them though? I mean, the espionage is
a function of the politics and we are, you know,
it may be true that it's the world's
second oldest occupation, as everybody likes to say,
but the kind of espionage that we're talking about, which is a vast government
bureaucratic enterprise, is a relatively recent
phenomenon. I mean, in America we didn't
have the Central Intelligence Agency until '47. That's, you know,
within our lifetimes. That's really short. And what we're now facing is, how do you marshal these
vast bureaucracies? How do you control them? Are they going to
be self-operating? Are they going to be responsive
to government directives? Who knows? These are, you know, really
interesting questions. >> Adam Sisman: And
one other word. I mean, the Cold War was
about politics, wasn't it? I mean, it was a political
argument between West and East, between communism
and the free will. I mean that, in essence, was what it was supposed
to be about. So I don't see how you
can separate the two. >> Kai Bird: Okay, one final
anecdote I can't resist. In 1964, -- in the 1990s, I
interviewed a CIA analyst who, in 1964, wrote the World
Intelligence Report. And very controversially,
he predicted that the Soviet Union was
facing economic collapse and internal ethnic tensions
and he predicted that, sometime in the 1980s,
it would collapse. He was allowed to put
this into the report, but no one believed it, no one
acted upon it, and no one wanted to believe that the major
adversary was actually a weak paper tiger. And that, I think, says
something about the world of intelligence,
the ambiguity -- which le Carre wrote about
all throughout his novels. Anyway, thank you very
much for coming [applause].
