The Pigeon Tunnel

by John le Carré

  So is that all of it, I wonder, surveying these two uncomfortable faces? Are these two flawed men the only role models from its past that the BND has to offer to its shiny-eyed new entrants? Think of the treats that await our British new entrants to the secret world! Every spy service mythologizes itself, but the Brits are a class apart. Forget our dismal showing in the Cold War, when the KGB outwitted and out-penetrated us at almost every turn. Hark back instead to the Second World War, which to believe our television and tabloid press is where our national pride is most safely invested. Look at our brilliant Bletchley Park codebreakers! Look at our ingenious Double-Cross System, and the great deceptions of the D-Day landings, at our intrepid SOE radio operators and saboteurs dropped behind enemy lines! With such heroes as these marching before them, how can our new recruits fail to be inspired by their Service’s past?

  Above all: we won, so we get to write the history.

  But the poor old BND has no such heart-warming tradition, however mythologized, to offer its recruits. It can’t crow, for instance, about the Abwehr’s Operation North Pole, otherwise known as the England Game, a deception that over three years fooled SOE into dispatching fifty brave Dutch agents to certain death and worse in occupied Holland. German achievements in the field of decryption were also impressive – but to what end? It can’t celebrate the undoubted counter-intelligence skills of Klaus Barbie, former Gestapo chief in Lyon, recruited to the BND’s ranks as an informant in 1966. Barbie, it emerged only after a prolonged Allied cover-up, had personally tortured scores of members of the French Resistance. Sentenced to life, he died in the prison where he had perpetrated his worst atrocities. But not before he had apparently been recruited by the CIA to hunt down Che Guevara.

  As I write this, Dr Hanning, now in private practice as a lawyer, stands in the crossfire of a German parliamentary committee charged with investigating the activities of foreign intelligence services in Germany, and the possible collusion or cooperation of German spy agencies. Like all inquiries held behind closed doors, this one is very public. Accusations, innuendo and unsourced media briefings abound. The most sensational charge is, on the face of it, scarcely credible: that the BND and its signals intelligence wing, deliberately or by bureaucratic negligence, has since 2002 helped the US National Security Agency to spy on Germany’s own citizens and institutions.

  On the evidence so far, this cannot be the case. In 2002 an agreement was struck between the BND and the NSA which stated categorically that German targets were a no-go area. Filters were put in place to make the agreement stick. So did the filters fail? And if they did, was their failure due to human or technical error – or merely the consequence of laxity over time? And did the NSA, having spotted the failure, perhaps decide there was no need to trouble their German allies with it?

  The most likely outcome of the Committee’s deliberations, in the view of Bundestag watchers better informed than myself, is that the Chancellor’s Office will be found to have failed in its statutory duty to oversee the BND; the BND to have failed to oversee itself; and that, while there was cooperation with American intelligence, there was no collusion. And probably by the time you read this, yet more complexities will have emerged, and fresh ambiguities, and nobody will be held to blame except history.

  And perhaps in the end history is indeed the only culprit. When American signals intelligence first cast its web over the young West Germany in the early post-war years, Adenauer’s fledgling government did whatever it was told, and it was told very little. Over time that relationship may have changed, but only cosmetically. The NSA continued to spy at will without BND supervision, and it’s hard to imagine that this habit didn’t include, from day one, spying on anything that moved in the host country. Spies spy because they can.

  To imagine that the BND at any time exercised effective control over the NSA strikes me as unreal: least of all, when it came to the NSA’s selection of German and European targets. Today the NSA’s message is loud and clear: if you want us to tell you about the terror threat in your own country, shut up and knuckle down.

  In the wake of the Snowden revelations, Britain of course has held comparable inquiries of its own, and reached the same sort of botched conclusion. They too touched upon such ticklish matters as the extent to which our signals intelligence arm was doing for America what America was legally forbidden to do for itself. But the British public, for all the furore, is weaned on secrecy and encouraged by spoon-fed media to be docile about violations of its privacy. Where laws have been broken, they have been hastily rehashed to accommodate the breach. Where protest rumbles on, the right-wing press scotches it. If loyalty to the United States is undermined, it is reasoned, who shall we be then?

  Germany, on the other hand, having known fascism and communism in a single lifetime, does not take lightly to state spies who pry into the affairs of its honest citizens; least of all when they do so at the bidding and to the benefit of a foreign superpower and supposed ally. What in Britain is called the Special Relationship, in Germany is called treason. Nevertheless, my guess is that, in these turbulent times, no clear verdict will have emerged by the time this book goes to press. The German parliament will have had its say, the greater cause of counter-terror will have been invoked, and Germany’s worried citizens will have been advised not to bite the hand that protects them, even if it has wandered now and then.

  But if against all odds the worst case were proved, what would there be left to say in mitigation? Only perhaps that, like anybody else who is confused about his upbringing, the BND didn’t know quite who to be. Two-way trading with an over-mighty intelligence agency is never going to be an easy ride at the best of times, least of all when you’re trading with the country that put you on earth, changed your first nappies, gave you your pocket money, checked your homework and pointed you where to go. And it’s harder still when that parent country has delegated swathes of its own foreign policy to its spies, a thing the United States has done rather too frequently in recent years.

  9

  The innocence of Murat Kurnaz

  I am sitting in an upstairs hotel bedroom in Bremen, north Germany, overlooking a school athletics track. The year is 2006. Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish-German, born, brought up and educated in Bremen, has just been released after five years of incarceration in Guantánamo. Before Guantánamo, he was arrested in Pakistan, sold to the Americans for three thousand dollars, held for two months in a US torture centre in Kandahar, electrocuted, beaten senseless, waterboarded and hung from a hook until, for all his great physical strength, he nearly died. However, by the time he had been held in Guantánamo for a year, both his American and German interrogators – two from the BND and one from Germany’s domestic security service – had concluded that he was harmless, naive and no risk to German, American or Israeli interests.

  Yet here is a paradox that I cannot begin to reconcile, explain, let alone judge. At the time that I made Kurnaz’s acquaintance, I had no idea that Dr Hanning, my fellow guest at the Ambassador’s table in Bonn, and my host at Pullach, had played any part in Kurnaz’s destiny, let alone a significant one. Now I was hearing that, only weeks previously at a meeting of Germany’s top civil servants and heads of intelligence, Hanning, as Präsident of the BND, had voted, in apparent defiance of the advice given by members of his own Service, against Kurnaz’s return. If Kurnaz should go anywhere, then back to Turkey where he belonged. And more tortuously: that Kurnaz could not be trusted not to have been a terrorist in the past, or not to become one in the future: thus, apparently, Hanning.

  In 2004, while Kurnaz was still imprisoned in Guantánamo, the police and security services of the state of Bremen announced that since Kurnaz had failed to renew his permit of residence, which in the meantime had expired – a pardonable omission, you might suppose, given the shortage of pen, ink, postage stamps and writing paper in the cages of Guantánamo – he was henceforth banished from his mother’s home.r />
  Although a court of law briskly overturned Bremen’s edict, Hanning has not to this day publicly altered his position.

  But if I think myself back sixty-odd years to the Cold War days when, from a much humbler position, I too was invited to pass judgement on people who for better or worse fell into certain categories – former communist sympathizers, suspected fellow-travellers, secret Party card holders and the rest – I find myself caught in the same impossible bind. Superficially, the young Kurnaz on paper ticked a lot of boxes. In Bremen he had attended a mosque known to propagate radicalism. Before setting out for Pakistan he had sprouted a beard and urged greater Koranic observance on his parents. When he did set out, he did so secretly, without telling his parents – not a good start. His mother was so alarmed that she took herself to the police, protesting that her son had been radicalized in the Abu Bakr mosque, was reading jihadist literature and intended to fight jihad in Chechnya or Pakistan. Other Bremen Turks, for whatever motives, came forward with similar tales. As well they might. Suspicion, despair and mutual recrimination were tearing their community apart. Had not the entire plot against the Twin Towers been hatched by fellow Muslims just up the road in Hamburg? For his part, Kurnaz has consistently maintained that his only purpose in travelling to Pakistan was to advance his Muslim education. That none of the ticked boxes produced a terrorist is a matter of history. Kurnaz committed no crime, and suffered unspeakably for his innocence. But take me back to those days, confront me with the same ticked boxes and a similar climate of fear, and I cannot imagine myself rushing to Kurnaz’s defence.

  Seated comfortably in the hotel room in Bremen, sipping coffee, I ask Kurnaz how he managed to communicate with his fellow inmates in adjoining punishment cells, despite the fact that all such communication was forbidden on pain of summary beatings and deprivals, to which Kurnaz was particularly prone on account of both his dogged disposition and huge bulk, which must have fitted poorly into a cage where he could neither sit nor stand for twenty-three hours of each day.

  You had to be careful, he says, after the pause for thought that I am getting used to. Not just of the guards, but of other prisoners. You never asked anyone why they were there. You never asked them whether they were Al Qaeda. But when you’re squatting night and day a couple of feet away from another prisoner, it was only natural that sooner or later you try to make contact.

  There was first the minuscule hand basin, but that was for the more general sort of contact. At an agreed hour – he was not willing to say how the hour was agreed, since many of his fellow enemy combatants were still incarcerated* – they would refrain from using their hand basins and whisper down the plug hole. You couldn’t hear actual words, but the collective rumble that came back gave a sense of belonging.

  Then there was the polystyrene soup cup that was put in your food-trap with a chunk of old bread beside it. You drank the soup, then you broke a thumbnail-sized piece off the lip of the cup and hoped the guard wouldn’t make anything of it. Then with your fingernail, which you had let grow for the purpose, you made an indentation in Arabic from the Koran. You kept back a bit of your bread, chewed it into a pellet and let it harden. You pulled a thread out of your jump suit, bound one end of the thread round the pellet of bread, and the other round the piece of polystyrene. Using the pellet as a weight, you tossed it through the bars to your neighbour, who then drew the cotton thread and the piece of polystyrene into his cage.

  And, in due course, you’d get a letter back.

  For an innocent man who even by the elusive legal standards of Guantánamo is held to have been wrongfully imprisoned for five years and is now at last to be sent home, it was only right and proper that Kurnaz should be awarded his own dedicated aeroplane to transport him from Guantánamo to Ramstein Air Base in Germany on his release. For the journey, he was provided with clean underclothes, a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt. For his further comfort, ten US soldiers were detailed to watch over him on the flight, and when he was handed over to the German reception party, the American officer in command offered his German opposite number a less weighty, more convenient pair of handcuffs for Kurnaz’s onward journey, to which the German officer, to his eternal glory, replied:

  ‘He has committed no crime. Here in Germany he is a free man.’

  This was not, however, August Hanning’s view.

  In 2002, Hanning had denounced Kurnaz as a menace to German security. Since then, his reasons for overriding the German and American interrogators had not to my knowledge been explained. Nevertheless, five years later, in 2007, speaking now in his capacity as intelligence supremo in the Ministry of the Interior, Hanning not only repeated his opposition to Kurnaz’s residence in Germany – an active issue, given that Kurnaz was by now back on German soil – but castigated the BND interrogators, who had formerly been under his direct command and had declared Kurnaz harmless, for exceeding their competence.

  And when I myself emerged, if belatedly, as a supporter of Kurnaz’s cause, Hanning, whom I continue to hold in high regard, gave me a friendly warning that my sympathy was misplaced, but offered no reason. And since no such reason has ever come to public light, or to the knowledge of Kurnaz’s respected lawyer, I felt unable to follow his advice. So was there perhaps a higher cause? I almost want to believe so. Was the demonization of Kurnaz a political necessity of some sort? Was Hanning, whom I know as an honourable man, falling on his sword?

  Not long ago, Kurnaz came to England to promote the book he had written about his experiences.* It had been well received in Germany and translated into a number of languages. I had given it an enthusiastic endorsement. Before beginning his tour, he spent time with us in Hampstead, where at the suggestion of Philippe Sands QC, the human rights lawyer, he was invited without notice to speak to the pupils of University College School. He accepted, and spoke as he always speaks: simply and carefully, in the fluent English he taught himself in Guantánamo, not least at the hands of his inquisitors. To a packed audience of mixed students of different beliefs or none, he said that his Muslim faith alone had enabled him to survive. He refused to blame his guards or his torturers. As usual, he made no mention of Hanning or any other German official or politician who had militated against his return. He explained how, on his release, he had given his jailers his home address in Germany for the day when the burden of what they had done became too heavy for them. Only when he is describing his obligation to the fellow prisoners he has left behind does he betray emotion. He will never be silent, he says, for as long as there is one man left in Guantánamo. When he had finished, there was such a rush to shake his hand that an orderly queue had to be formed.

  In my novel A Most Wanted Man there is a German-born Turkish man of Murat’s age, religion and background. He is called Melik, and he pays a similar price for sins he did not commit. In his bulk, speech and manner he bears a strong resemblance to Murat Kurnaz.

  10

  Going out into the field

  My writing desk in Cornwall is built into the attic of a granite barn built on a cliff edge. Looking ahead of me on a sunny July morning, I see only the Atlantic painted a ridiculously perfect Mediterranean blue. A regatta of spindly sailing boats leans against a leisurely eastern breeze. Friends who come to visit us think we are either mad or blessed depending on the weather, and today we are blessed. On this end-point of land, it can round on you any time it feels the urge. Days and nights of storm-force wind, then truce and sudden silence. Any time of year, a fat cloud of fog can park itself on our headland, and no amount of rain can persuade it to remove itself.

  A couple of hundred yards inland, in a tumbledown cottage attached to an old farmstead with the beautiful name of Boscawen Rose, lives a family of barn owls. I have seen them together only once: two adults and a row of four chicks lined up on a broken windowsill for the family photograph I had no time to take. Since then I have maintained a relationship with one adult only – or so I have
arbitrarily decided, though for all I know it could be any one of the extended family, because the chicks are long ago full-grown. This father owl, as I am determined to imagine him, is my secret sharer who, long before he skims past my west window, transmits by means unknown to me an early warning of his arrival. I am scribbling away, head down and lost, as I hope, to the real world; but I am never too late to spot his golden-white shadow skimming low over the ground beneath my window. He has no predators I know of. Neither the cliff ravens nor the peregrine falcons are inclined to tangle with him.

  This barn owl is also surveillance-conscious to a degree that we human spies would consider psychic. Steep grazing land tips down to the sea. He can be hovering over it, eighteen inches above the long grass as he shapes to swoop on an unsuspecting vole. But if I so much as think of raising my head, he aborts the operation and ducks over the cliff. Come evening if I am lucky he will have forgotten me, and there he is again, with only the tips of his milk-and-honey wings trembling. And this time I have promised myself not to lift my head.

  On a sunny spring day in 1974, I arrived in Hong Kong to discover that somebody had built a tunnel under the sea between the island of Hong Kong and mainland Kowloon without my knowledge. I had just turned in the corrected proofs of my novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Any moment, finished copies would be rolling off the presses. Among the book’s supposed pleasures was a pursuit by Star Ferry across the straits between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. To my everlasting shame I had dared to write the passage here in Cornwall with the help of an outdated guidebook. Now I was paying the price.