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Le Carré: modern intelligence is being ‘politically driven’, he says |
Outraged by the modern spy game
Novelist (and former spook) John Le Carré tells Matthew Lewin why he finds the vindictive paranoia of the ‘war on terror’ so obscene
A MOST WANTED MAN
By John Le Carre
Hodder & Stoughton £18.99.
HE’S NEARLY 77, but John Le Carré is still full of fire and passion, and his 21st novel, which burst into the bookshops this week, peppers the so-called “war on terror” with angry buckshot.
In earlier spy books Le Carré, a former spook himself, displayed respect for the secret world, and even a good deal of affection for spymasters like George Smiley.
But it is clear from the new book, A Most Wanted Man, that he has little but criticism and a lot of contempt for the modern intelligence community.
“I may be wrong, but my only experience of the secret world, which is not very large, is that we who were appointed to collect information had an almost sacred duty to the state. We had to speak truth to those in power, whatever it cost,” he told me at his home in Gainsborough Gardens, Hampstead.
But he has been greatly disillusioned by recent Joint Intelligence Committee and MI6 bosses, particularly in relation to their roles in the decision to invade Iraq.
“I think their intelligence is being politically driven, and that has brought me to a point of great disenchantment,” he said.
“If it is really so that senior figures in our espionage organisations are leaning with the political winds, something has radically changed since my day. At that point they become part of the problem.”
Le Carré’s novel deals with a case of “extraordinary rendition”, and I asked him how he thinks the world might look back on that phenomenon in 20 years time.
“If anybody had suggested at the turn of this century that the US was going to introduce medieval systems of torture, we would have said, ‘You’re off your head’,” he said. “I hope very much that we will look back on this as an absolutely disgraceful period. The US, after 9/11, entered a period of not simply paranoia but vindictive paranoia, where the rules for torture were settled, in secret, even before they had somebody to torture. In 20 years’ time I think it will look obscene.”
The main character in the book is a physically and psychologically damaged refugee, a half-Russian, half-Chechen devout Muslim called Issa, who arrives in Hamburg to claim an inheritance held by a rather seedy British bank in the city called Brue Frères.
But he has entered the country illegally and as soon as his presence is noticed, the spies of no fewer than three countries assume he is a major terrorist. “Issa is an example of the way we are blurring the distinctions of terrorism,” he said.
“He is a Chechen, and until 9/11 we were warmly encouraging the Chechens to separate from the Russian Federation. But after 9/11, anyone who was a fighting Muslim was almost by definition a terrorist. So while Issa is innocent of anything he is being accused of, he remains a kind of foggy middle into which everyone invests their paranoia.”
Poor Issa is befriended by a young human rights lawyer, Annabel, and also by bank boss Tommy Brue, but the intelligence sharks are circling already and sensing blood in the water. (The Brue character is very loosely based on a “slightly bent” Scottish banker Le Carré once knew in Vienna.)
Le Carré set the book in Hamburg, a city he knows very well since it was there that he was hastily posted as British Consul in the 1960s when his spy bosses discovered that it was he who had written the novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
But why Hamburg? “Hamburg is a character for me, and it is a far more exotic place than it lets on,” he explained. “It was occupied by Napoleon, taken over by Communists in 1920 and then by the Nazis in 1933 and then, during one week of the war, the Brits and Americans killed more people by bombing than were killed in Nagasaki – 45,000 people. You can’t get all that into a novel, but at least you know why you are there.”
Like all John Le Carré’s books, it is impeccably researched. When he describes a meeting at a particular table in a hotel, you can be sure that that precise table exists, giving a good view of the door, exactly as in the novel.
He spent time talking to journalists, to German Turks and investigating the asylum-seeking apparatus in Germany. He spoke to former Guantanamo detainee Murat Kurnaz who was hideously tortured by his American captors in Kandahar – and was later acknowledged by all sides to have been completely innocent.
Le Carré has allowed his disgust to permeate the book. “I had this anger, and the intention of trying to portray a massive over reaction to a fairly humble and slightly deranged boy,” he said.
“Think about our own situation, how much stuff we endured from the IRA without getting into this kind of panic legislation and reaction we are seeing now. The IRA damn nearly blew up our Prime Minister and carried out all kinds of things around Britain with infinitely more refinement than these tragic Muslim boys in England who are trying to blow us up have ever exercised.
“I think that if we directed a tenth of what we devote to military and territorial aggression – against the wrong people very often – to building bridges to Islam, we would be far better off.
“The cost of one single Tomahawk missile delivered to Afghanistan would pay for 20 new schools.
“But war is so much more attractive to politicians. The threat of war is what they love. It enables them, exactly as has happened here and in the US, to allocate themselves all sorts of secret powers, to create an inner secretive group of power sharers to which others are not admitted.”
Did the Cold War ever end? “That’s a very good question,” he replied, and then with tongue firmly in cheek he continued: “You know, Smiley in a lecture to new entrants to the secret service asked himself that question, and he said that we shan’t know for many years.
“But if it were to turn out that the former Soviet Union became a half-way decent democracy, and the Western world died of its own greed, then we could reasonably say that they won and we lost.” |
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