The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was such a hit that le Carré had to resign from the secret service. In the decades since, as his new biographer writes, his politics have become more overt, and more leftwing

It is a truism that, as they get older, angry young radicals tend to relax into complacent conservatism. The fire of youth fades to a dull glow, or flickers out altogether; the injustice that once seemed so offensive becomes more bearable, perhaps ameliorated by the trappings of success. John le Carré has travelled in the opposite direction. As he has aged, he has become more angry, not less. Far from dimming in his ninth decade, the flame of his rage burns hot and strong. This change is manifest in his books. While ambivalence was the dominant mood of le Carré’s cold war novels, his more recent books are unabashedly partisan.

George Smiley, le Carré’s most famous character, present in most of his books until the collapse of communism, is no cold war warrior. Far from relishing the struggle against the east, he is repeatedly troubled by doubt, agonising about whether the anticommunist cause justifies the concomitant human suffering. In his moment of triumph, when his arch-enemy, the Soviet spymaster Karla, is on the brink of surrender, Smiley feels pity for him. What distinguishes Smiley from Karla is not ideology, but moderation: in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley tells his lieutenant Peter Guillam that Karla’s fanaticism will prove his downfall. Yet in fact it is human weakness, his love for his daughter, that is his eventual undoing. And this goes to the moral heart of Le Carré’s fiction. The tension within them is not between left and right, but between the individual and the cause, between people and patriotism.

When he began writing fiction in the late 1950s, le Carré, whose real name is David Cornwell, was working for the security service. MI5’s principal function in those days was to resist communist penetration and subversion of the British state. His work for MI5 was reflected in his first novel, Call for the Dead, published under a pseudonym to protect his identity. One of Cornwell’s tasks was to “vet” individuals to ensure that they posed no security risk. At the beginning of Call for the Dead, Smiley is introduced as a senior intelligence officer who has just been vetting a civil servant with access to sensitive information. In America, a witch-hunt had meant that those with a communist background were banned from working in Hollywood, let alone in government. But Smiley is shown as untroubled about his interviewee’s communist past. “Half the cabinet were in the party in the 1930s.”

By the time the novel was published, Cornwell had transferred to the Secret Intelligence Service, more popularly known as MI6, and was serving under cover in Bonn, then the capital of the Federal Republic of West Germany. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, made him famous around the world: it occupied the top of the US bestseller list for 35 weeks, becoming the bestselling novel of 1964. The intense press interest led to his cover being blown and his resignation from the secret service.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alec Guinness as George Smiley in John le Carré’s spy drama Smiley’s People (1982).

One reason why The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made such an enormous impact was its seeming authenticity. This, apparently, was the real world of spying: one in which there were no heroes, and the line between right and wrong was at best blurred. The protagonist, Alec Leamas, is not a glamorous figure: he is a tired, middle-aged man on the edge of burnout. Leamas’s outburst at the end of the book is a fervent protest against the bad things he has been asked to do in the service of his country. “What the hell do you think spies are?” he asks his distressed girlfriend: “Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not! They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and indians to brighten their rotten little lives.” This was a very different depiction of spying from the one presented in Ian Fleming’s novels. The moral ambiguities of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold are in marked contrast to the unquestioning certainties of the James Bond books. To readers in the early 1960s, accustomed to the messy compromises of the cold war, they seemed far more truthful. Similarly, le Carré’s squalid settings seemed more realistic than the five-star hotels and high-rolling casinos frequented by Bond.

As it turns out, Leamas has been deceived by his own masters: in reality, he is a mere instrument in what he eventually realises is a “filthy, lousy operation” to divert attention away from Mundt, a highly placed British agent in the East German security apparatus, at the expense of his rival Fiedler, a much more sympathetic character – “to save him”, as Leamas bitterly explains, “from a clever little Jew in his own department who had begun to suspect the truth”. Two innocent people are sacrificed to protect Mundt’s cover; the fact that both of them are Jews and Mundt a former Nazi makes an ugly operation hideous.

Leamas’s boss, the subtle spymaster “Control”, head of the organisation known simply as “the Circus”, is unabashed in admitting that the methods used by both sides in the cold war have become much the same. “I mean,” he muses aloud to Leamas, “you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?” The Spy Who Came in from the Cold presents British intelligence as no better than the enemy, and in some ways worse. There is good and bad on both sides: Leamas and Fiedler alike are flawed individuals struggling to preserve their humanity, in a conflict without honour or principle.

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It was often said that le Carré lost his subject when the cold war ended. Friends stopped him in the street to commiserate. “Whatever are you going to write now?” they would ask. No matter how often or how emphatically he rejected the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall meant the death of the spy novel, the impression persisted. In 1994 a cartoon by Jeff Danziger in the Christian Science Monitor showed Cornwell bowing his head in grateful thanks at the revelation that Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer, had been supplying secrets to the Russians.

To some extent Cornwell was a victim of his own success. For most people, the name John le Carré was synonymous with the cold war; more than any other writer of his generation, he had shaped the public perception of the struggle between east and west. “I saw the Berlin Wall go up when I was 30 and I saw it come down when I was 60,” he told an interviewer. “I was chronicling my time, from a position of knowledge and sympathy. I lived the passion of my time. And if people tell me that I am a genre writer, I can only reply that spying was the genre of the cold war.”

He resented the notion that he was finished, and pointed out that at least three of his novels (A Murder of Quality, The Naive and Sentimental Lover and The Little Drummer Girl) had nothing whatever to do with the cold war, and a fourth (A Small Town in Germany) not much. Communism might have been vanquished, but other enemies remained. There was still plenty of territory left for him to explore in the future. In 1989 he identified Angola, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Burma, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Chad and Libya as just some of the places where “spooks, arms dealers and phoney humanitarians” were active. His next novel, The Night Manager, would describe an undercover operation by a branch of British intelligence against one such arms dealer, a man contemptuously indifferent to the victims of his trade.

And as he pointed out, the collapse of communism did not mean the end of the Russian threat. “The Russian Bear is sick, the Bear is bankrupt, the Bear is frightened of his past, his present and his future,” he said in a speech delivered in the summer of 1990, as the Soviet Union was already beginning to break up into its constituent parts. “But the Bear is still armed to the teeth and very, very proud.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes in the film adaptation of The Constant Gardener (2005). Photograph: Allstar/Focus/Sportsphoto Ltd

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Le Carré’s novels after the end of the cold war were, if anything, even more relevant to fast-changing political developments around the world. When he delivered his next book, Our Game (1995), one of his publishers asked whether Chechnya was a made-up place; only months later the obscure Russian republic was dominating the international news. The Tailor of Panama (1996), a homage to Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, dealt with big-power manipulation of small states, a perennial topic. The theme of Single & Single (1999) was money laundering by Russian criminals. The Constant Gardener (2001) exposed the unscrupulous behaviour of big pharma. It seemed that there was still plenty left for le Carré to write about.

When le Carré delivered Our Game in 1995, his publisher asked if Chechnya was a made-up place

In the foreword to a paperback edition of The Tailor of Panama, published in April 2001, he took the opportunity to attack current American foreign policy: especially the failure to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change. “The new American realism, which is nothing other than gross corporate power cloaked in demagogy, means one thing only: that America will put America first in everything,” he wrote. “Quite simply and emphatically, I do not believe that the United States is fit to run the post-cold war world, and I think the sooner Britain and Europe wake up to that fact, the better.” Cornwell expressed contempt for the newly elected president: “I happen also to believe that George W Bush is not fit to run America, or for that matter a single-decker bus, but that’s America’s business. Unfortunately, he has been given charge of the world’s only superpower.”

Cornwell was scarcely less contemptuous of Tony Blair. He had been “thrilled” by Labour’s victory in the 1997 general election, which seemed to offer fresh hope after almost 20 years of Conservative rule; but by the time of the next election in June 2001, disillusion had replaced his excitement. In an interview with David Hare, Cornwell said that he would like to see Blair “punished” in the coming poll, then only three weeks away. Not only had he failed to instigate much-needed reform, he had continued the Thatcherite legacy – “he would have privatised air if he could”. Worst of all, Blair had kowtowed to the Americans. “We don’t have a single member of the Blair administration lifting a public finger against the ecological ruin that George W is promising in the United States,” he said. He deplored “the whimpering echo” from Blair when the president supported the drug companies in their legal action against the South African government. “I thought Blair was lying when he denied he was a socialist,” Cornwell told Hare. “The worst thing I can say about him is that he was telling the truth.”

In conversation with Hare, Cornwell cited the German term alterszorn – “the rage of age”. He recognised the danger that he might lose readers if his books became too polemical. “Story and character must come first,” he said. “But I am now so angry that I have to exercise a good deal of restraint in order to produce a readable book.”

***

At the core of his next book, Absolute Friends, would be a man whose radical past has caught up with him in middle age. Cornwell envisaged a naive young Englishman isolated in Berlin at the end of the 1960s, who drifts into revolutionary anarchism; 30 years on, he is living quietly in Munich when he is contacted by his old comrade Sasha, whom he suspects of planning an act of terrorism. While writing The Constant Gardener, Cornwell had attended meetings of anticorporate groups: he had seen for himself the frustration of the young at what they perceived as the exploitation of the developing world, the wrecking of the lives of the powerless. His experiences led him to speculate that this anger might be breeding a new generation of young terrorists – rather as an earlier generation of terrorists had emerged from the radical left in the 1960s and 1970s. Cornwell himself had witnessed the violent student demonstrations in Paris in the late 1960s. Investigating what had become of the 1960s firebrands, he found that many of them were now orthodox citizens: a paediatrician neighbour of his in Hampstead, for example; or Lothar Menne, once a comrade of Angela Davis and Tariq Ali, now one of the lodestars of his German publishers, Ullstein. Some were still active, such as the campaigning journalist John Pilger. Timothy Garton Ash put Cornwell in touch with Anthony Barnett, a former member of the committee of New Left Review, who had spent some time in the late 1960s living in a Berlin commune.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gary Oldman in the film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). Photograph: Focus/Everett/REX Shutterstock

In constructing his central character for Absolute Friends, Ted Mundy, Cornwell awarded him elements of his own past. Like Cornwell, Mundy has a loving father and an absent mother; like Cornwell, he has attended a boarding school in the West Country; and like Cornwell, he has become involved in spying, so that now “he no longer knows which parts of him are pretending”.

The novel opens with a reunion between Mundy and Sasha, whom he has known since 1969, when they shared a squalid room in Berlin. Sasha, by this time an officer in the Stasi, offers to become a double agent. Though not a professional, Mundy becomes his case officer. Their loyalty to each other overrides their loyalty to family, or country. Their friendship transcends the division between east and west, between England and Germany. It is reminiscent of the central relationship between Magnus and Axel in A Perfect Spy: Sasha is a version of Axel, and of his progenitor Alexander Heussler, with the same limp and quick wit. The contradictions involved in running a double agent allow Cornwell to explore notions of duality, as he had done in A Perfect Spy. “Let’s all pretend to be someone else,” Mundy reflects as he is being followed in Prague, “and then perhaps we’ll find out who we are.”

By 11 September 2001 Cornwell had written the first two chapters. That day he and his wife Jane were in Hamburg: they had spent the morning watching archive footage of Rudi Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and other 1960s radicals, and were back at their hotel, relaxing in the bar, when they received an urgent message from Cornwell’s secretary to find a television. They rushed up to their room and switched on the set, in time to see the second plane fly into the twin towers. Like so many other people around the world, he felt “an enormous, inexpressible sympathy for the victims, for America” at that moment. As for his book, le Carré’s immediate reaction was that it was “dead in the water”: even to be contemplating a novel about a terrorist plot at such a time seemed unacceptable.

His perspective soon changed, however. After President Bush declared a worldwide “war on terror”, he began to feel that his book had a renewed validity. He was horrified when the American government set up a detention camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, where prisoners could be held indefinitely without trial, outside US jurisdiction and the protection of the Geneva conventions. He deplored the use of “extraordinary rendition” – the abduction and transfer of a person from one country to another without legal process. Indeed, as the months passed, his mounting outrage at what was being said and done by the leaders of the west added urgency to the novel. He had reluctantly supported the invasion of Afghanistan, and favoured attempts to eliminate the leadership of al-Qaida, but was bitterly opposed to the moves to take action against Iraq, and appalled that so many Americans had been gulled into believing that Saddam Hussein was implicated in the attacks on America. “The lies that have been distributed are so many and so persistent,” he said, “that arguably fiction is the only way to tell the truth.”

In September 2002 the Cornwells joined an anti-war rally in central London. Days earlier Blair had released a document presenting the case for going to war with Iraq. The marchers, whose numbers were estimated to be between 150,000 and 400,000, were “kettled” by the police. It seemed to Cornwell that the police were much more hostile to the peace demonstrators than they had been to the marchers from the Countryside Alliance, who had held their own march the week before. He marched again the following February, as part of a worldwide protest against plans to invade Iraq, in the demonstration described as the largest protest march in British history. When the march was brought to a halt in Whitehall, a huge roar rose from the packed crowd – Cornwell imagined Blair sitting in Downing Street, listening to that sound.

Campaigner Anthony Barnett (left) marches alongside David Cornwell to protest against President Bush’s UK visit following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Photograph: Judith Herrin/Bloomsbury

In January 2003, he published an article in the Times entitled “The United States of America Has Gone Mad”. By this time war was imminent: coalition armies were massing on the Iraqi border, and air strikes against military targets had begun. “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember,” he wrote: “worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war.”

The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press …



How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear.



The invasion of Iraq in 2003 fed directly into Cornwell’s writing. Several of the reviewers of Absolute Friends would remark on an abrupt change of tone in chapter 11, the chapter he was writing as the war began. In this chapter Mundy is reborn (“Mundy redux”) as Cornwell’s spokesman – he marches in protest against the Iraq invasion, “with a conviction he never felt before because convictions were essentially what he borrowed from other people”:

It is the old man’s impatience coming on early. It’s anger at seeing the show come round again one too many times …



It’s the discovery in his sixth decade, that half a century after the death of empire, the dismally ill-managed country he’d done a little of this and that for is being marched off to quell the natives on the strength of a bunch of lies, in order to please a renegade hyperpower that thinks it can treat the rest of the world as its allotment.



Cornwell modified his original plot, to make it so that Mundy and Sasha, though innocent, are blackened as terrorists; and, though unarmed, are gunned down by American special forces. Some reviewers would criticise this apocalyptic finale as implausible. The British edition was scheduled to appear in December 2003. In the runup to publication a succession of journalists made the journey down to his home in West Cornwall to interview him. One was the young novelist Lev Grossman: “His anger burns cold and clear,” wrote Grossman: “Absolute Friends is a work of fist-shaking, Orwellian outrage.” The anger crackling in the novel dominated the review coverage. Most reviewers agreed with the view expressed by Stephen Amidon in the Sunday Times, who wrote that “Le Carré’s anger comes across as a bit too raw to work as fiction, its rhetoric more in line with a Harold Pinter column than a Graham Greene novel.” In a letter to his old friend and mentor Vivian Green, Cornwell dismissed the negative coverage as “an onslaught from the rightwing press”.

Since Absolute Friends, le Carré’s novels have continued this trend. “It’s possible to find some of his later novels a bit preachy without denying that they’re classily assembled or failing to appreciate the leftish indignation behind them,” wrote Christopher Tayler, reviewing Our Kind of Traitor, a book that dealt with the corrupting effect of Russian laundered money on British institutions.

The theme of the most recent le Carré, A Delicate Truth (2013), is the outsourcing of intelligence requirements to commercial contractors, which Cornwell sees as part of a larger picture of the “corporatisation” of Britain. In 2005 he suggested that Britain might be sliding towards fascism. “Mussolini’s definition of fascism was that when you can’t distinguish corporate power from governmental power, you are on the way to a fascist state. If you throw in God power and media power, that’s where we are now,” he told an interviewer. When asked if he was saying that Britain had become a fascist state, he replied: “Does it strike you as democratic?”

“I’ve become more radical in old age than I’ve ever been,” Cornwell said a few years ago. Now, aged 84, the angry old man shows little sign of calming down.

• John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman (Bloomsbury Publishing, £25). To order a copy for £17.50, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.