The Secret Pilgrim

by John le Carré

  So what do you say? You say what others have said before you. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And what they teach is what they can’t do any more, because either the body or the spirit or both have lost their singleness of purpose; because they have seen too much and suppressed too much and compromised too much, and in the end tasted too little. So they take to rekindling their old dreams in new minds, and warming themselves against the fires of the young.

  And that brings me back to the opening bars of Smiley’s speech that night, for suddenly his words were reaching out and grasping me. I had invited him because he was a legend of the past. Yet to the delight of all of us, he was turning out to be the iconoclastic prophet of the future.

  I’ll not bother you with the finer points of Smiley’s introductory tour of the globe. He gave them the Middle East, which was obviously on his mind, and he explored the limits of colonial power in supposedly post-colonialist times. He gave them the Third World and the Fourth World and posited a Fifth World, and pondered aloud whether human despair and poverty were the serious concern of any wealthy nation. He seemed pretty confident they weren’t. He scoffed at the idea that spying was a dying profession now that the Cold War had ended: with each new nation that came out of the ice, he said, with each new alignment, each rediscovery of old identities and passions, with each erosion of the old status quo, the spies would be working round the clock. He spoke, I discovered afterwards, for twice the customary length, but I didn’t hear a chair creak or a glass clink—not even when they dragged him to the library and sat him in the throne of honour before the fire for more of the same, more heresy, more subversion. My children, hardened cases all of them, in love with George! I didn’t hear a sound beyond the confident flow of Smiley’s voice and the eager burst of laughter at some unexpected self-irony or confession of failure. You’re only old once, I thought, as I listened with them, sharing their excitement.

  He gave them case histories I had never heard, and which I was certain nobody in Head Office had cleared in advance—certainly not our Legal Adviser Palfrey, who in response to the openness of our former enemies had been battening down and double-locking every useless secret he could lay his obedient hands on.

  He dwelt on their future role as agent-runners and, applying it to the altered world, vested in it the traditional Service image of mentor, shepherd, parent and befriender, as prop and marriage counsellor, as pardoner, entertainer and protector; as the man or woman who has the gift of treating the outrageous premise as an everyday affair, and so becomes his agent’s partner in illusion. None of that had changed, he said. None of it ever would. He paraphrased Burns: “A spy’s a spy for all that.”

  But no sooner had he lulled them with this sweet notion than he warned them of the death of their own natures that could result from the manipulation of their fellow men, and the truncation of their natural feeling.

  “By being all things to all spies, one does rather run the risk of becoming nothing to oneself,” he confessed sadly. “Please don’t ever imagine you’ll be unscathed by the methods you use. The end may justify the means—if it wasn’t supposed to, I dare say you wouldn’t be here. But there’s a price to pay, and the price does tend to be oneself. Easy to sell one’s soul at your age. Harder later.”

  He mixed the deadly serious with the deadly frivolous and made the difference small. Betweenwhiles he seemed to be asking the questions I had been asking of myself for most of my working life, but had never managed to express, such as: “Did it do any good?” And “What did it do to me?” And “What will become of us now?” Sometimes his questions were answers: George, we used to say, never asked unless he knew.

  He made us laugh, he made us feel and, by means of his inordinate deference, he shocked us with his contrasts. Better still, he put our prejudices at risk. He got rid of the acceptance in me and revived the slumbering rebel that my exile to Sarratt had silenced. George Smiley, out of a clear sky, had renewed my search and confused me wonderfully.

  Frightened people never learn, I have read. If that is so, they certainly have no right to teach. I’m not a frightened man—or no more frightened than any other man who has looked at death and knows it is for him. All the same, experience and a little pain had made me a mite too wary of the truth, even towards myself. George Smiley put that right. George was more than a mentor to me, more than a friend. Though not always present, he presided over my life. There were times when I thought of him as some kind of father to replace the one I never knew. George’s visit to Sarratt gave back the dangerous edge to my memory. And now that I have the leisure to remember, that’s what I mean to do for you, so that you can share my voyage and ask yourself the same questions.

  2

  “There are some people,” Smiley declared comfortably, favouring with his merry smile the pretty girl from Trinity Oxford whom I had thoughtfully placed across the table from him, “who, when their past is threatened, get frightened of losing everything they thought they had, and perhaps everything they thought they were as well. Now I don’t feel that one bit. The purpose of my life was to end the time I lived in. So if my past were still around today, you could say I’d faded. But it’s not around. We won. Not that the victory matters a damn. And perhaps we didn’t win anyway. Perhaps they just lost. Or perhaps, without the bonds of ideological conflict to restrain us any more, our troubles are just beginning. Never mind. What matters is that a long war is over. What matters is the hope.”

  Removing his spectacles from his ears, he fumbled distractedly with his shirt front, looking for I could not imagine what, until I realised that it was the fat end of the necktie on which he was accustomed to polish his lenses. But an awkwardly assembled black bow tie provides no such conveniences, so he used the silk handkerchief from his pocket instead.

  “If I regret anything at all, it’s the way we wasted our time and skills. All the false alleys, and bogus friends, the misapplication of our energies. All the delusions we had about who we were.” He replaced his spectacles and, as I fancied, turned his smile upon myself. And suddenly I felt like one of my own students. It was the sixties again. I was a fledgling spy, and George Smiley—tolerant, patient, clever George—was observing my first attempts at flight.

  We were fine fellows in those days, and the days seemed longer. Probably no finer than my students today, but our patriotic vision was less clouded. By the end of my new-entry course I was ready to save the world if I had to spy on it from end to end. We were ten in my intake and after a couple of years of training—at the Sarratt Nursery, in the glens of Argyll and battle camps of Wiltshire—we waited for our first operational postings like thoroughbreds pining for the chase.

  We too in our way had come to maturity at a great moment in history, even if it was the reverse of this one. Stagnation and hostility stared at us from every corner of the globe. The Red Peril was everywhere, not least on our own sacred hearth. The Berlin Wall had been up two years and by the looks of it would stay up for another two hundred. The Middle East was a volcano, just as it is now, except that in those days Nasser was our chosen British hate object, not least because he was giving Arabs back their dignity and playing hookey with the Russians into the bargain. In Cyprus, Africa and South East Asia the lesser breeds without the law were rising against their old colonial masters. And if we few brave British occasionally felt our power diminished by this— well, there was always Cousin America to cut us back into the world’s game.

  As secret heroes in the making, therefore, we had everything we needed: a righteous cause, an evil enemy, an indulgent ally, a seething world, women to cheer us, but only from the touchline, and best of all the Great Tradition to inherit, for the Circus in those days was still basking in its wartime glory. Almost all our leading men had earned their spurs by spying on the Germans. All of them, when questioned at our earnest, off-the-record seminars, agreed that when it came to protecting mankind against its own excesses, World Communism was an even darker menace than the Hun.


  “You gentlemen have inherited a dangerous planet,” Jack Arthur Lumley, our fabled Head of Training, liked to tell us. “And if you want my personal opinion, you’re bloody lucky.”

  Oh, we wanted his opinion all right! Jack Arthur was a derringdo man. He had spent three years dropping in and out of Nazioccupied Europe as if he were a regular houseguest. He had blown up bridges single-handed. He had been caught and escaped and caught again, no one knew how many times. He had killed men with his bare fingers, losing a couple in the fray, and when the Cold War came along to replace the hot one, Jack hardly noticed the difference. At the age of fifty-five he could still shoot you a grin on a man-sized target with a 9-millimetre Browning at twenty paces, pick your door lock with a paper clip, booby-trap a lavatory chain in thirty seconds or pin you helpless to the gym-mat in one throw. Jack Arthur had despatched us by parachute from Stirling bombers and landed us in rubber boats on Cornish beaches and drunk us under the table on mess nights. If Jack Arthur said it was a dangerous planet, we believed him to the hilt!

  But it made the waiting all the harder. If I hadn’t had Ben Arno Cavendish to share it with, it would have been harder still. There are only so many attachments you can serve around Head Office before your enthusiasm turns to gall.

  Ben and I had been born under the same star. We were the same age, the same schooling, the same build, and within an inch of the same height. Trust the Circus to throw us together—we told each other excitedly; they probably knew it all along! We both had foreign mothers, though his was dead—the Arno came from his German side—and were both, perhaps by way of compensation, determinedly of the English extrovert classes—athletic, hedonistic, public-school, male, born to administer if not to rule. Though, as I look at the group photographs of our year, I see that Ben made a rather better job of the part than I did, for he possessed an air of maturity that in those days eluded me—he had the widow’s peak and the confirmed jaw, a man superior to his youthfulness.

  Which, for all I knew, was why Ben got the coveted Berlin job instead of me, running flesh-and-blood agents inside East Germany, while I was once more put on standby.

  We’re lending you to the watchers for a couple of weeks, young Ned,” said Personnel, with an avuncular complacency I was beginning to resent “Be good experience for you, and they can do with a spare pair of hands. Plenty of cloak-and-dagger stuff. You like that.”

  Anything for a change, I thought, putting a brave face on it. For the past month I had bent my ingenuity to sabotaging the World Peace Conference in—let’s say—Belgrade, from a dark desk on the Third Floor. Under the instruction of a slow-spoken superior who lunched for hours on end in the Senior Officers’ Bar, I had enthusiastically re-routed delegates’ trains, blocked their hotel plumbing and made anonymous bomb threats to their conference ball. For the month before that, I had crouched bravely in a stinking cellar next to the Egyptian Embassy at six every morning, waiting for a venal charlady to bring me, in exchange for a five-pound note, the contents of the Ambassadorial wastepaper basket from the previous day. By such modest standards, a couple of weeks riding around with the world’s best watchers sounded like a free holiday.

  “They’re assigning you to Operation Fat Boy,” Personnel said, and gave me the address of a safe house off Green Street in the West End. I heard the sound of ping-pong as I walked in, and a cracked gramophone record playing Gracie Fields. My heart sank, and once again I sent a prayer of envy to Ben Cavendish and his heroic agents in Berlin, the spy’s eternal city. Monty Arbuck, our section leader, briefed us the same evening.

  Let me apologise for myself in advance. I knew very little of other ranks in those days. I was of the officer caste—literally for I had served with the Royal Navy—and found it perfectly natural that I had been born into the upper end of the social system. The Circus is nothing if not a little mirror of the England it protects, so it seemed equally right to me that our watchers and allied trades, such as burglars and eaves-droppers, should be drawn from the artisan community. You cannot follow a man for long in a bowler hat. A honed BBC voice is no passport to unobtrusiveness once you are outside London’s golden mile, least of all if you are posing as a street hawker or a window cleaner or a post-office engineer. So you should see me, at best, as a callow young midshipman seated among his more experienced and less privileged shipmates. And you should see Monty not as he was, but as I saw him that evening, as a taut-minded gamekeeper with a chip on his shoulder We were ten, including Monty: three teams of three, therefore, with a woman to each so that we could cover ladies’ lavatories. That was the principle. And Monty our controller

  “Good evening, College,” he said, placing himself before a blackboard and talking straight to me. “Always nice to have a touch of quality to raise the tone, I say.”

  Laughter all round, loudest from myself, a good sport to his men.

  “Target for tomorrow, College, is His Right Royal Sovereign Highness Fat Boy, otherwise known as—”

  Turning to the blackboard, Monty helped himself to a piece of chalk and laboriously scratched up a long Arab name.

  “And the nature of our mission, College, is PR,” he resumed “I trust you know what PR is, do you? I have no doubt they teach you that at the spies’ Eton?”

  “Public Relations,” I said, surprised to occasion so much merriment. For alas it turned out that in the watchers’ vernacular the initials stood for Protect and Report, and that our task for tomorrow, and for as long as our royal visitor chose to remain our charge, was to ensure that no harm came to him, and to report to Head Office on his activities, whether social or commercial.

  “College, you’re with Paul and Nancy,” Monty told me, when he had provided us with the rest of our operational intelligence. “You’ll be number three in the section, College, and you’ll kindly do exactly as you are told, irregardless.”

  But here I prefer to give you the background to Fat Boy’s case not in Monty’s words but in my own, and with the benefit of twenty-five years of hindsight. Even today, I can blush to think who I thought I was, and how I must have appeared to the likes of Monty, Paul and Nancy.

  Understand first that licensed arms dealers in Britain regard themselves as some kind of rough-edged élite—did then, do now—and that they enjoy quite disproportionate privileges at the hands of the police, the bureaucracy and the intelligence services. For reasons I have never understood, their grisly trade puts them in a relationship of confidence with these bodies. Perhaps it’s the illusion of reality they impart, of guns as the earthy truth of life and death. Perhaps, in the tethered minds of our officials, their wares suggest the same authority that is exerted by those who use them. I don’t know. But I’ve seen enough of the street side of life in the years between to know that more men are in love with war than ever get a chance to fight one, and that more guns are bought to satisfy this love than for a pardonable purpose.

  Understand also that Fat Boy was a most valued customer of this industry. And that our task of Protecting and Reporting was only one small part of a far larger undertaking namely, the care and cultivation of a so-called friendly Arab state. By which was meant, and is meant to this day, currying favour, suborning and flattering its princelings with our English ways, wheedling favourable concessions in order to satisfy our oil addiction—and, along the way, selling enough British weaponry to keep the Satanic mills of Birmingham tuning day and night. Which may have accounted for Monty’s rooted distaste for our task. I like to think so anyway. Old watchers are famous for their moralising—and with reason. First they watch, later they think. Monty had reached the thinking stage.

  As to Fat Boy, his credentials for this treatment were impeccable. He was the wastrel brother of the ruler of an oil-rich sheikdom. He was capricious, and prone to forget what he had bought before. And he arrived as billed, in the ruler’s Boeing jet, at a military airport near London specially cleared for him, to have himself a little fun and do a little shopping—which we understood would include suc
h fripperies as a couple of armoured Rolls-Royces for himself, half the trinkets at Cartier’s for his women friends around the globe, a hundred or so of our not quite latest ground-to-air missile launchers, and a squadron or two of our not quite latest combat fighters for his royal brother. Not forgetting a succulent British government contract for spares, services and training which would keep the Royal Air Force and the arms manufacturers in clover for years to come.—Oh, and oil. We would have oil to burn. Naturally.

  His retinue, apart from private secretaries, astrologers, flatterers, nannies, children and two tutors, comprised a personal doctor and three bodyguards.

  Lastly there was Fat Boy’s wife, and her codename is irrelevant because from Day One Monty’s watchers dubbed her “the Panda” on account of the dark circles round her eyes when she was unveiled, and her wistful and solitary deportment, which gave the air of an endangered species. Fat Boy had a string of wives, but the Panda, though the oldest, was the most favoured, and perhaps the most tolerant of her husband’s pleasures around town, for he liked nightclubs and he liked to gamble—tastes for which my fellow watchers cordially loathed him before he arrived, since it was known of him that he seldom went to bed before six in the morning, and never without losing about twenty times their combined annual salaries.

  The party had rooms at a grand West End hotel, on two floors linked by a specially installed lift. Fat Boy, like many forty-year-old voluptuaries, was worried about his heart. He was also worried about microphones, and liked to use the lift as his safe room. So the Circus listeners had thoughtfully provided a microphone in the lift for him as well, which was where they reckoned to pick up their tidbits about the latest palace intrigues, or any unforeseen threat to Fat Boy’s military shopping list.