John le Carré: The spy who was my dear friend (original) (raw)

I am sitting with John le Carré in his Hampstead sitting room, a bottle of whisky on the table between us, shadows edging in from the garden, and we are talking about spies. That, at least, is the frame of the conversation, but in reality we are talking about much more: betrayal, politics, sex, deception, fathers, conflict, love. And writing.

“Jeopardy. On every page. We have to know what is at stake,” he says, in the rich, confident, upper-class English accent that was, like the fictional world created by Britain’s greatest living novelist, quite deceptive. The year is 2010.

Le Carré recalls the bar inside MI6 where, as a young officer in the 1960s, David Cornwell would go drinking with the spooks clinging to secret power at the end of empire, men with tired moustaches and sad wives: “So very thick, most of them.” We talk of Kim Philby (“unreasonably charming; the perfect liar”), and Le Carré’s falling-out with Graham Greene, another spy-turned-novelist, over Philby’s legacy: Le Carré called Britain’s most infamous double agent “vain, spiteful and murderous”; Greene, who had earlier hailed The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as “the best spy story I have ever read”, violently disagreed, seeing Philby as a martyr to ideological conviction.

He explained that he was writing another book, but chapter by chapter this time, and sending each off to his agent one at a time — I wonder if these will ever be published

He explained that he was writing another book, but chapter by chapter this time, and sending each off to his agent one at a time — I wonder if these will ever be published

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The room is growing darker, and the bottle emptier.

Le Carré remembers the time MI6 had to “import hookers into St Ermine’s hotel for Oleg Penkovsky”, a Soviet double agent (“He demanded to meet the Queen. That was tricky.”). He reminisces about Milicent Bagot, the MI5 counter-intelligence expert and model for Connie Sachs in his fiction, who “always wore a hat indoors and never missed a rehearsal of the Bach Choir”. He is a superb mimic, perfectly capturing the strangulated Whitehall drawl of the 1960s. But he is also angry: about the mendacious politicians, the moral corruption, and the Iraq war in which Britain is still embroiled in a hopeless quest for lost imperial greatness.

Espionage is the backdrop, but in truth he is talking about the human condition, the warped and knotted timber of character, flawed people struggling to make sense of a dishonoured, deceitful world. It is almost dark now in this sitting room, with its sagging sofas, the ice settling in the bowl, and I have the strange sensation of not just reading a Le Carré novel, but living in one.

I first met Le Carré/Cornwell at Ascot 20 years ago, in a hospitality box he had hired for the day. I was about to embark on my first nonfiction book about spying, and his editor, an old friend of mine, had squeezed me on to the invitation.

As we settled into our seats, Le Carré turned to me and said: “I used to come here as a boy, when my father was banned from the course for various dodgy deals, to place bets and run messages on his behalf. One bookie said to me, ‘You’re Ronnie’s boy, aren’t you? Tell your old man if I see him again . . .” (He later bought the legs or hindquarters of various racehorses, an ironic tribute to his father.)

There followed a string of reminiscences about Ronnie Cornwell, the charming conman, bankrupt and jailbird whose feckless fathering, pathological lying and double lives informed so much of his son’s fiction. “People who have had unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves,” Cornwell once wrote, about himself.

We drove back to London in his Mercedes, which had a new-fangled sat-nav installed, with a female voice. “I have fallen in love with her,” Le Carré said, eyes twinkling under enormous eyebrows that grew ever more rococo with age. “Especially when she’s angry. Sometimes I take a deliberate wrong turning, just to annoy her.”

A year later I sent him the manuscript of my book, thinking he would have forgotten me. But Le Carré was a spy. He forgot nothing, and something about the book’s main character, a crook-turned-spy named Eddie Chapman, roguish, irresistible and wholly dishonest, struck a paternal chord. Two days later he replied on cream notepaper with an astonishingly generous blurb and a note in parenthesis: “John le (lower case) Carré (acute).” Here was benediction, but also precision.

We met frequently in the years that followed. Dinners, usually at Sheekey’s fish restaurant in Covent Garden, a favourite spy hangout: a glass of champagne, two Dover sole off the bone, spinach and a bottle of muscadet; we sat at the corner table, side by side, facing into the room, as spies are trained to do.

Elizabeth Debicki and Tom Hiddleston in the 2016 BBC adaptation of The Night Manager

Elizabeth Debicki and Tom Hiddleston in the 2016 BBC adaptation of The Night Manager

Writing is a lonely business, and in Le Carré I found an ally of the pen like no other. We had both been approached by the intelligence services after leaving university: he was recruited; I merely had a couple of meetings in a building off Whitehall with a certain “Major Halliday”, who, depressingly, wore sandals with socks. I went along because I had read a lot of John le Carré.

We shared a fascination with the murky, complex world of espionage: he from the vantage point of fiction and lived experience, whereas I stuck to historical fact and research. But from either side of that divide we revelled in many of the same things, the great sprawling canvas of the secret world, a strange, cracked mirror to British class, character, humour and hypocrisy.

He once described George Smiley thus: “He’s steadied me through my writing life. He’s been a kindly hand and a wonderful writing companion.” That is how I came to feel about Le Carré.

We would take long walks on Hampstead Heath. During one of these he pointed to a building on Parliament Hill and said: “When I was 28, I burgled that house. The police sealed off the road at both ends pretending there was a gas leak when the owners were at the theatre, and we went to work . . .”

On another long ramble, between books and stuck for a new subject, I asked him what he thought was the best untold spy story of the Cold War. “That is easy,” he said. “It is the relationship between Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott,” the MI6 officer who worked alongside the KGB spy for two decades and was comprehensively betrayed by him. That led to another book, ostensibly about the greatest spy scandal of the century, but also an exploration of male friendship, the bonds of education, class and secrecy, and the most intimate duplicity. Le Carré wrote the afterword, refusing payment.

Every two years he threw a launch dinner as the books marched out, one after the other. Few people can play at the top of their game for 60 years. He wrote with prodigious energy, rigour and regularity, but also out of sheer, shared enjoyment. At his last launch lunch, for Legacy of Spies, he gave a vintage performance: part celebration, part defiant political diatribe, vigorously vital and engaged at 86. I thought he was as immortal as his characters.

It is a cliché to say that writers live to write, but I think he truly survived on writing, the looming deadline holding off mortality. He had been ill with prostate cancer from before we met, but that was a subject we hardly discussed, reminding me of Smiley’s description of the privately educated Englishman who “can have a Force 12 nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue and you may be his best friend but you’ll never be the wiser”. Whenever things went wrong in my life, his advice was simple: write more, write better.

By unspoken agreement, I never reviewed his books, requested an interview for the newspaper, or solicited another blurb (although he provided one, unasked). I once asked if I could write his biography. He looked at me hard for several moments: “I am not sure our friendship would survive that.” As Adam Sisman, his excellent biographer, eventually discovered, Le Carré was a man of secrets, determined to keep parts of his life hidden, or at least control their telling. When I once suggested I might write a novel, he snorted: “Why muddle it up by making it up? You don’t need to.”

Gary Oldman and John Hurt in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Gary Oldman and John Hurt in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

ALAMY/FACE TO FACE/ENTERTAINMENT PICTURES

We only disagreed on one aspect of the secret world. Le Carré saw an equivalence, in behaviour and methods if not morality, between the opposing sides of the Cold War, with KGB spymaster Karla as Smiley’s counterpart and equal. I did not share that view. The KGB was a vast criminal organisation, serving a murderous totalitarian regime and a corrupted ideology. MI6 made mistakes aplenty, but at its core it was on the side of righteousness. There is a moral gulf, it seems to me, between a Philby, who knowingly supported the crimes of Stalinism, and someone like Oleg Gordievsky, the MI6 spy within the KGB, who fought them at the risk of his own life. To Le Carré, most spies, with honourable exceptions, were in the same brutal, hypocritical, self-serving game.

Like many others, I felt embraced by his family, his sons and Jane, his beloved wife and selfless helpmate, although the wide Le Carré circle could sometimes resemble a royal court, or a business. With a back catalogue worth millions and numerous television and film projects under way or completed, he took huge pleasure in the global reach of his writing, and offered me sage advice on the subject of film and TV rights: “It is important that you make a lot of money.”

We corresponded irregularly. I have kept every note on cream notepaper with his spidery handwriting at 20 degrees to the horizontal: snippets of gossip, the cricket, books he was reading and recommended, the odd political explosion, and gentle corrections to errors in my books, principally to the German words I tend to misspell. He adored Germany and the German language, having joined the Intelligence Corps on national service in that country in 1950, interviewing defectors from the East.

He sent me a typically cheerful note during lockdown, although he was now gravely ill: “I got myself nuked last week as part of a brand new treatment, and had to sleep in the spare room for five nights because I was radioactive. I am now sprung. We see ourselves as permanently settled in Cornwall, except for these occasional toots. Am reading the new Graham Greene biography, more out of duty than pleasure. I knew him only slightly, but he still spooks me.”

We met for the last time in October, on one of those medical toots, in the Hampstead house. A single table lamp dimly illuminated the old sitting room, unchanged over the years. Having read my latest book, he had sent an enthusiastic note and a suggestion we meet: “You made us over time love and admire Sonya herself, and pity her final disillusionment, which in some ways mirrors our own. What guts, and what nerve. And the men wimps or misfits beside her.”

We drank a bottle of very cold champagne at a social distance. He explained that he was writing another book, but chapter by chapter this time, and sending each off to his agent, Jonny Geller, one at a time. He said he was tying up some loose ends, “such as what happened to Karla’s daughter” and others of Smiley’s people. I wonder if these will ever be published.

He was as entertaining and as funny as ever, but there was a hint of valediction in the room as the shadows crept across the parquet. He spoke of “the time I have left”. He may have been referring to his next deadline; in a way perhaps he was, an author in complete control of his own narrative.

We talked of old spies, the government’s mishandling of the virus, the monstrosity of Trumpism. He told me a secret: that Roger Hollis, the former head of MI5 long suspected of being a Soviet mole, had kept a mistress. “Hollis was boring, mediocre and so perversely bad at the job that you still have to wonder. And living his own little secret life with his PA, Val Hammond, so a walking character defect in his own right.”

He waved me off at the door. “We will see you in Cornwall when this madness is over.” He knew that wasn’t true; a last thoughtful deception.

When I looked back from the street, the house was already dark.