John le Carré: the spies who lost it

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The writer John le Carré believes fantasy is endemic in the spying game, whether it's a paper-pusher with a persecution complex or the deranged head of the CIA. Here he recounts his early experiences of 'espionage madness' as a young intelligence officer

I carried my first 9mm automatic Browning when I was 21 years old. I was a National Service second lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps in Austria. It was my first clandestine mission and I was in heaven. The year, I think, was 1952 and I was stationed in Graz, the hub of the British Occupied Zone in the early Cold War years. The gun was loaded. On the advice of the Air Intelligence Officer (AIO) in charge of the operation, I wore it jammed into my waistband against my left hip with the butt foremost, allowing for an easy draw across the body.

Over it I wore a green Loden coat, borrowed under a pretext from one of our Field Security drivers, and for additional cover a fetching green Tyrolean hat bought at personal expense. Such was my disguise of choice for our top-secret night trip through sparsely populated countryside to Austria's border with Communist Czechoslovakia.

The AIO, however, had opted for the more traditional spy's attire: fawn raincoat and trilby, which together with his military moustache gave him, to my callow eye, a rather too British look. But he knew best. The AIO was a veteran of the business, as we National Service fledglings had often been reminded sotto voce by our seasoned superiors in the bar of the Wiesler hotel for British officers, where the AIO could be observed of an early evening, always seated in the same corner and half-hidden by his Austrian newspaper, with a mahogany whisky at his side and a crisp white handkerchief jammed into the cuff of his officer-class sports jacket. The AIO, they said, had done his share of this and that - as ever with the clear implication that we hadn't.

As became a man of mystery, the AIO was a solitary. His office, which we never entered, was situated in the attic of our elegant villa on the edge of town. Spy ethic dictates that the higher up the building you go, the more secret it gets, which explains why we mere Field Security types were confined to the ground floor. But I knew his window. It was a dormer, thick with grimy net curtains. He had no known rank, and no known staff. He made no use of our mail room.

We assumed, but were never told, that he relied on his own communications system. Just occasionally a standard tin box of papers would arrive for him by way of the Army Field Post Office, and although it looked exactly like the sort of junk we ourselves were handling he would immediately hasten downstairs and, with an air of immense gravity, return with it to his eyrie. He was said to be much decorated, but we never saw him in uniform. In short, he was the real McCoy. His work might look as boring as ours, but in reality he was an undercover Friend, meaning a member of MI6, the highest form of Intelligence life known to man.

Why me, sir? I asked him, when he suggested we take a quiet stroll along the river.

'Because you've got what it takes,' he replied, in the bitten-off style of a man who would prefer not to be speaking at all.

How do you know I have, sir? I asked.

'Been watching you.'

Our car was an innocent black Volkswagen Beetle with civilian plates. The AIO explained that he had got it from Int Org Vienna, which as far as I was concerned was the summit of Olympus. Should we by chance be stopped by the Austrian police, he said, we were two businessmen from Graz interested in purchasing farm land for cash. This would explain the US$10,000 in the brown briefcase lying on the back seat of the Beetle. The dollars also came from Int Org. Only when all else failed, he said, should we flash our cards and declare ourselves to be British military personnel engaged on secret duties.

At first as we drove I could think of nothing but the Browning nudging at my hip. But as the night grew dark and my body eased and the Browning grew warmer, we became a pair, which was what the AIO said we would do. 'Think of it as part of you,' he advised. So I did, even if from time to time I discreetly fingered the safety catch to make sure it was still on.

In what sort of situation might I be using it, sir? I asked.

'Contingency. If the Czech goons come after him, we give him covering fire. Not till I tell you, mind.' And as an afterthought: 'Don't go for the legs. Aim for the mark.'

The mark?

'Shoulders to groin and all points between.'

My thoughts turned to the brave man we had come to meet: a high-ranking serving officer in the Czech air force, risking death and worse to bring precious information to the West. At this very moment, said the AIO, our man was creeping over the border with the aid of sympathetic frontier guards.

How about dogs? I asked.

'Drugged.'

Once across, said the AIO, who was a stickler for need-

to-know, our man would proceed to a certain frontier village just inside Austria, and this was the village we were heading for. Its name remained secret right up to the moment when the signpost blew it.

Is he defecting, sir?

The AIO looked grim and shook his head. 'Man's got a wife and kids, for God's sake. It's a one-time sell.'

And then he'll go back?

'If he can.'

And if he can't?

The AIO's silence was more eloquent than words.

A tiny inn stood at the empty roadside. Light burned yellow in the windows. The only sound was of male voices, which stopped dead as soon as we walked in. The AIO went ahead in case there was trouble. I followed with the briefcase. In a single low-ceilinged room, a score of peasants in working clothes stared at us in mute amazement through the tobacco smoke.

The centre of the room was occupied by a billiards table. Nobody was playing. An unoccupied bench stood next to the bar. The AIO sat on it. With the briefcase at my feet I sat beside him, observed by the peasants. The AIO ordered two beers in snappish, swallowed-up German. Today I wonder whether 'two beers' was the only German he knew. The landlord set them in front of us, and the echo as they hit the table seemed to go on for ever.

'Fancy a game of billiards?' the AIO muttered in English out of the corner of his mouth.

Love one, I muttered back.

The gun was indeed part of me: so much so that I had ceased to notice its presence on my hip. Stooping to address the ball, I was startled by the clang of a heavy metal object striking the tiled floor, and looked round to identify the source. Finally I saw the Browning lying at my feet, but by then the inn had emptied itself of customers and landlord. I retrieved it, returned it to my waistband, and picked up the briefcase.

'Abort,' the AIO ordered, pausing only to finish his beer.

His composure astonished me. Not a word of rebuke. We returned to the car, sat in it and waited. Who for? The Austrian police? Or our intrepid defector? The AIO seemed at ease with either possibility, but neither appeared. He had a flask of Scotch and we took pulls from it. The dawn came and somehow the purpose of our great mission evaporated. With a philosophical sigh the AIO started the engine and set course for Graz.

As with all great intelligence operations, ours had no known outcome - or none to me. Did the brave airman come another day? I had no chance to ask. A couple of days later the AIO had vanished, leaving no forwarding address. Did he give back the $10,000, or keep it for another day? With the ripening of years, I think I have hit on an answer to the questions that have troubled me for so long. There was no defector crossing the border that night.

The briefcase did not contain $10,000, but at best an old pair of pyjamas and a reserve bottle of Scotch. The AIO was not the favoured son of Int Org, he was not an undercover officer of MI6, his work was just as tedious and useless as ours. He was one of those forgotten souls that military bureaucracies dump on distant shores, and forget about for years on end.

He was in addition - if discreetly - mad, and living in a secret bubble all his own, a condition that in the spook world, rather like a superbug in a hospital, is endemic, hard to detect, and harder still to eradicate.

I can also hazard a guess as to the nature of his madness, since from time to time I have experienced similar symptoms. The AIO, like the rest of us, dreamed the Great Spy's Dream. He imagined himself at the Spies' Big Table, playing the world's game. Gradually the gap between the dream and the reality became too much for him to bear, and one day he decided to fill it. He needed a believer, so I got the job. I was well cast. Years later, for a short time, I did actually become an insider in the world that the AIO pretended to inhabit, but it wasn't long before I too was fantasising about a real British secret service somewhere else that did everything right that we either did wrong or didn't do at all.

My solution was to invent a spook world better suited to my needs, just as the AIO had done. It was only our methods that were a little different.

My agreeable middle-aged room-mate Arthur in MI5 was, I think, afflicted by a similar strain of the disease, although the symptoms in his case were different. But that is the nature of the disease.

I am speaking of the period of the Great Paranoia Epidemic that ran from the 1950s into the late 1970s, when practically everyone in MI5 above a certain rank, starting with Sir Roger Hollis, its Director General, and descending by way of his deputy, was suspected of being a Russian spy. The virus infected swaths of Whitehall and Westminster, but it was the spies who were worst hit, and they did it to themselves, on the strident insistence of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The bacillus had begun its life in America, before sweeping eastward. First had come the Joe McCarthy era. McCarthy died in 1957 but his torch was quickly retrieved by a deranged CIA in-patient of vast persuasive powers named James Jesus Angleton, who preached that the whole of the Western spook world was being controlled by superheads in the Kremlin. In human terms Angleton's disturbing vision was forgivable.

He had received his education in the black arts of doublecross at the knee of one Kim Philby, a longstanding double agent in the service of the Kremlin and, as head of the MI6 station in Washington, Britain's appointed cup-bearer to the CIA. If any spy ever had an excuse for going off his head, it was James Jesus Angleton - fabled poker player, master of the spook universe, who woke up one morning to be told that his revered mentor, confessor and fellow boozer, Philby, was a Russian spy.

But that doesn't excuse the CIA, who made a folk hero of their mad doctor, and looked on while he poisoned the family. Not only did Angleton single-handedly wreck his own agency. He then, with his masters' blessing, performed the same service to its closest allies, to the ribald laughter of the KGB. Was Angleton ever invited to address the only logical conclusion to his thesis, before alcohol and a last overdose of madness got the better of him - namely to close down the entire Western intelligence apparatus before the Russians led us over the cliff? I doubt it. And MI5, assailed by the Angleton theory, rose superbly to the challenge.

Not content with spying on its own members, a cabal of its middle and senior officers also found time to spy on Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister, an episode in its history that was documented in a dubious memoir put out by one of the conspirators. The author, you may remember, was Peter Wright, another poker pal of Angleton's. Strenuous efforts by the British government to suppress the book, Spycatcher, assured it a wide readership.

The atmosphere in the corridors of Leconfield House in Curzon Street - the headquarters of MI5 at the time - was therefore very much as I portrayed it in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and it was the atmosphere that prevailed in the corridor that led to the little room that Arthur and I shared. In my memory it is hushed, with furtive footsteps going past. It was my first in-house appointment.

Arthur was an MI5 paper-pusher of the old school: a meticulous, unadventurous, nine-to-six loyalist, with no ambitions to become what he was not. He had something of the donnish librarian about him, with bubbly grey hair overflowing at the sides, rimless spectacles, and an air of huge diligence and bustle. Sometimes he would humph, sometimes tut-tut, but he was always busy and never took a lunch hour: which was one good reason why the overworked internal security staff decided that he was a Russian spy.

The lunch hour, they concluded, was when Arthur photographed his secret files for his Russian paymaster. The only problem was, what had he done with them? Fifty and more secret and top-secret files containing thousands of pages had been marked out to him by Registry over the past two months. None, it transpired, had been returned.

Had Arthur borrowed the files, hoping to get them back into the system before anyone spotted they were missing? The sheer hard work of clandestine document photography is daunting, even these days. How many frames can you shoot off in a single lunch hour, even with a motordrive? A file could run to a dozen volumes or more. Each could contain a couple of hundred pages. Or was he taking them out of the building? On Fridays and Mondays, a good few of MI5's staffers brought suitcases into work for their weekends out of London. Was Arthur smuggling out files in his weekend suitcase? And was his overburdened KGB paymaster perhaps behindhand with his photographing?

Several times in the past weeks Arthur had been hauled up to the fifth floor and invited to explain himself. His answers had never varied: yes, he had worked on the missing files. Having worked on them, he had returned them to Registry. If they were missing, it was either Registry's fault or the fault of the janitors who pushed the trolleys. It was not Arthur's.

Soon his denials were rebounding on me. If Arthur wasn't a spy, then I must be. I had pinched the files from his in-tray. Head of Personnel sent for me. How was I enjoying my first months in harness? Did I have money troubles? Was my marriage all right? How much was I drinking? He was willing to be a father to me. Like Arthur, I denied failing to return any files.

Desk officers in MI5 had individual steel cupboards in their rooms. If you left your room during working hours, you locked your papers in your steel cupboard and kept the key. One mid-morning, two men in artisans' brown coats, the essential uniform of our internal security team, strode into our room and demanded that Arthur hand over the key to his steel cupboard.

Without lifting his head, he put a hand in the pocket of his librarian's shiny grey jacket, passed them the key and resumed his work. Shelf after shelf of his steel cupboard was stuffed with missing files. But Arthur paid no attention, either to the files or to the men in brown coats who stood staring at them with their mouths open. He remained bowed over the file on his desk, studiously turning the pages.

Arthur and I were Vetters, Arthur the old hand, myself the trainee. As Vetters, our job was to comb through the records of people who were in line to acquire access to secret information and make a first call about whether they should be allowed to have it, be investigated, or shifted to less sensitive employment. Like the AIO, Arthur was a loner, with no home life I knew of. Little by little, all the same, I persuaded him to share the odd Friday evening pint with me in a nearby pub in Shepherd Market. And it was on one such evening that Arthur told me a disturbing story.

A month or so before I joined his section, he had been dispatched to New York on a liaison visit to the FBI. And in New York, according to Arthur, the FBI had shaken him out. Not once, but every day, systematically, for three weeks on the trot. He likened the ordeal to sustained psychological torture, and he wasn't sure that he had survived it unscathed.

Every evening when he returned to his Manhattan hotel after a day's liaison, he discovered that he had been moved to a different floor. Nobody in the hotel acknowledged this, he said. When he asked at the desk - politely - for his room key, the concierge would laugh and shake his head and tell him he'd got the number wrong, but here was the right key anyway, sir. So instead of being on the fifth floor, where he'd slept the previous night, he found himself on the eighth, or the 18th, or the 28th, always the same-sized room, he said, and always the same space, the same curtains, cupboards and bedspreads. But always a different floor. Night after night after night.

And there were no outward signs, Arthur insisted, peering into his tankard. The floor had changed, but the room hadn't. Each time round, his suits, shirts, socks and underpants were laid out precisely as he had laid them out in the previous room. In the bathroom, it was the same story: razor, shaving brush, toothpaste, you name it. He was a methodical man, he said. Known for it. The smallest deviation would have caught his eye, and there wasn't one. Only the FBI could have pulled off a job like that.

I asked Arthur whether he had fathomed the FBI's motive for taking all this trouble, and he said he had given the question a great deal of consideration. His conclusion was that the Bureau was putting him under strain, then waiting to see how he responded and who he got in touch with. 'They were trying to flush me out,' he explained to his tankard.

Why would they want to do that? I asked.

Because of the vetting cases he'd handled, he said: file-holders who'd been small-time Communist sympathisers in their student days, but Arthur had given them the benefit of the doubt. He wondered in retrospect whether he might have crossed the line. Gone with them, even.

What line? I asked. Gone with them where?

'Clearing chaps I shouldn't have cleared,' he said. 'If I was soft on ex-Coms, perhaps I was a Com myself, and not necessarily ex.' And then he added: 'And for all I know, they're right.'

Are you telling me you could be a Communist sympathiser without even knowing it?

'Other chaps are,' Arthur said. 'If other chaps are, why shouldn't I be?'

In the 1950s it took a lot to advise a friend to put his problems to a shrink, all the more so if he was twice your age and you were a probationer sharing an office with him five days a week. And there was a standing order that, if a staff member felt the need to unburden himself to a shrink, he had first to get the name of a shrink the Service approved of: which in effect meant telling MI5's Head of Personnel you had a mental problem.

I hoped Arthur's delusions would pass, but they didn't. Where the AIO, in the monotony of his neglected existence, had re-cast himself as a hero of derring-do, Arthur had re-cast himself as a victim of his own witch-hunt. In a world that was almost as paranoid as ours is now, the security risk assessor had become a security risk to himself. And having decided this, he took the only logical step available to him: he ceased to put his name to anything any more. He locked everything away where even the FBI couldn't see it. Then he was safe.

The superbug of espionage madness is not confined to individual cases. It flourishes in its collective form. It is a home-grown product of the industry as a whole. Is a cure at hand? I doubt it. The most down-to-earth citizens from the real world, appointed to oversee the spooks' activities, turn to clay in their hands. Faith in spies is mystical, fuelled by fantasy and halfway to religion. They're a protected species in our national psychology. Our banks and financial services may collapse, our economy may be going through the floor, our road and rail system may be a catastrophe, the cost of fuel, energy and water rising by the week, but our spies are immune from all of it. Never mind how many times they trip over their cloaks and leave their daggers on the train to Tonbridge, the spies can do no wrong.

It's the men who are mostly to blame. Were wise women present at the compilation of Britain's notorious and acutely embarrassing 'dodgy dossier', the 2003 briefing document that was supposed to justify Britain's involvement in Iraq? If they were, they were outgunned by the men of madness who didn't merely plagiarise a four-month-old article dredged from an obscure academic journal but seriously believed, in their hubris and ignorance of the real world, that they could get away with it. It is slender comfort, but entirely in keeping with the code of reward and punishment dear to our present government, that the dossier's principal architect, John Scarlett, should have been promoted to chief of our secret service.

All of which is a tough thing to convey in fiction, or it was for me. I tried it long ago in The Looking Glass War and my readers hated me for it. I tried it again in The Tailor of Panama, this time as comedy, and I was more or less forgiven. The trouble is that the reader, like the public to which he belongs, and in spite of all the evidence that tells him that he shouldn't, wants to believe in his spies: which, come to think of it, is how we went to war in Iraq.

  • In a rare public appearance, hosted by the Telegraph, John le Carré will be talking about his new book, 'A Most Wanted Man', at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on October 1. For details and tickets, see telegraph.co.uk/lecarre. To order a copy of the book, published by Hodder & Stoughton, for £15.99 plus £1.25 p&p, call Telegraph Books on 0870-428 4112; books.telegraph.co.uk