John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  On the afternoon that his son Stephen was born, David confided to Ann that he had applied for a transfer to MI6. He told Michael Overton-Fox that MI5 was ‘a dead-end sort of place’. By contrast MI6 seemed smarter, more larcenous and more glamorous. The people were funnier, naughtier and raunchier than their counterparts in MI5.

  David sat the Foreign Office examinations, successfully, and was interviewed by a selection board. He was appointed to start at MI6 on 27 June 1960, and promptly became involved in a wrangle with the pay office, about whether in assessing his rate of pay he should be considered as a new entrant to the service, or whether his work in Bern should be counted too. His claim was rejected.

  * In 1958 the average male manual worker in the UK earned under £700 a year.

  * The phrase comes from T. S. Eliot’s poem Gerontion. It was adopted by Angleton to refer to the labyrinthine world of espionage into which one is ‘lured deeper and deeper … pursuing the traces of Soviet plots, both real and imagined, each step taking [one] farther into a bewildering world of intrigue’.

  * Maxwell Knight, Talking Birds (1961). David also illustrated a subsequent book of Knight’s, Animals and Ourselves (1962).

  † In June 1960 Bingham became Lord Clanmorris on the death of his father, who had sold the family estate during the war.

  * Peter de Wesselow was later accused of being part of the alleged MI5 plot to spy on Harold Wilson when he was Prime Minister.

  11

  A small town in Germany

  The Secret Intelligence Service that David knew occupied Broadway Buildings, opposite St James’s Park Underground station: ‘conveniently located’, as the official historian of the Service dryly records, between the headquarters of the London Missionary Society and the Old Star & Crown pub.1 SIS had been there since 1926, and remained there throughout the war, though its subsidiary, the Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS) had moved out of London to the comparative safety of Bletchley Park. Inside was a warren of confusing back staircases and dingy up-and-down corridors giving on to pokey little rooms. A fake plaque outside read ‘Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company’. Here one was not required to show a pass to enter; the janitors would merely nod and say, ‘Good morning’. Security was lax: at lunchtime David would go out to shop, bring parcels back, keep them beside his desk and take them out in the evening, without their contents being inspected. Kim Philby had exploited this trust by arriving on a Friday morning with a suitcase, as did many of his colleagues who were off to the country for the weekend – but while their suitcases contained nothing more sensitive than dinner jackets when they left on a Friday evening, Philby’s was stuffed with secret documents, which he took home and photographed with his Soviet controller, returning with his suitcase on the Monday as if he had been in the country like the others.

  Broadway Buildings backed on to the elegant eighteenth-century houses of Queen Anne’s Gate; a secret internal passage ran to one of these, occupied by the Passport Office, while a bridge led to a flat occupied by the ‘Chief’ himself – Sir Dick White in David’s day. The Chief’s office could be found on the fourth floor, at the end of a creepy, spidery corridor and then up a small staircase. As the visitor approached, he saw himself distorted in a great fisheye mirror, in the eye-line of the beady women who protected their master.2 Once admitted to the outer office, the visitor waited until a green light over the door was illuminated to indicate that ‘C’ was ready to receive him.

  White was a skilful communicator, liked and admired throughout the intelligence world at home and abroad. Peter Wright likened him to David Niven: ‘the same perfect English manners, easy charm, and immaculate dress sense’.3 Incisive and persuasive on paper and in person, White understood how to work Whitehall. Appointed Director-General of MI5 in the disorder following the defections of Burgess and Maclean, he had restored calm. He had nurtured good relations with Commonwealth intelligence services, and earned both the respect of the Americans and the confidence of ministers. He had therefore been a natural choice to take the helm of SIS following the Commander Crabb fiasco. But, as he was the first to admit, he was an outsider, with no personal experience of running agents in the field. His appointment was greeted with hostility from some within the Service, particularly from those supporters of Philby who thought of White as one of his persecutors. Once he had imposed a necessary reorganisation, White concentrated on the Service’s external relations and allowed his subordinates to get on with their jobs, a style which contributed to a perception among some field officers that he was aloof and out of touch.4

  One of his fiercest critics was George Kennedy Young, Assistant Chief of MI6 since 1958: a very tall, red-headed, squash-playing Scotsman, seen as leader of the ‘firebreathers’. (Young would be the model for the character of Percy Alleline in David’s 1974 novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.) As head of MI6’s Middle Eastern Operations, Young had played a part in the Iranian coup of 1953, and had been implicated in an unsuccessful plan to assassinate Egypt’s President Nasser in 1956. His advocacy of aggressive covert action and his increasingly strident right-wing views contrasted with White’s quiet moderation. New entrants to SIS were treated to a hair-raising lecture from him about the need for ruthlessness.

  Another of the senior SIS officers who lectured on the new entrants’ training course was Nicholas Elliott, whom David recognised as a member of the board that had interviewed him. In fact Elliott had been head of station in Bern when David had been recruited by ‘Sandy’ and ‘Wendy’, though he had been too senior to have concerned himself with such an insignificant agent. He had also been the officer most responsible for the Commander Crabb fiasco. He was now in charge of ‘London Station’, based at Londonderry House in Park Lane, which screened travellers to Soviet bloc countries for potential recruits.

  At the start of the course David had arrived, as instructed, at a nondescript house in Palace Street, Westminster (now demolished). There he met the five other new entrants, a disparate bunch ranging in age from early twenties to late thirties.5 The youngest, Barrie Gane, had come straight from Cambridge; he would remain within SIS until he took early retirement, having risen to director level and having been earmarked at one stage as a possible ‘C’. One of the eldest was Rod Wells, a tough Australian who had been incarcerated by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. In the notorious prisoner-of-war camp of Sandakan, Wells had constructed a working radio set out of scraps. When it was discovered he had been tortured and condemned to death, escaping execution only because of a clerical error. He had endured confinement in a tiny cell in which he could not even stand, while a naked light bulb shone down on him twenty-four hours a day. By the time he was liberated in 1945 he was blind from malnutrition; but within six months he was back at Sydney University studying for a science degree (his second).

  Another of the more experienced entrants was Geoff Douglas, a former army officer and a Richard Hannay-like figure, member of an expedition to the Himalayas to look for ‘Yeti’, possibly as a cover for secret electronic interception. The officer in charge of the course was Gordon Philo, a kind, self-effacing man fluent in both French and Russian – an impressive individual, who had taken part in the Normandy campaign as a parachutist and been awarded the Military Cross, and who had afterwards taught modern history at Oxford before being recruited into MI6. Coincidentally he had just completed his first novel, a crime thriller set in Istanbul entitled Diplomatic Death.

  ‘A Clear Case of Suicide’ had been rejected by Collins. The obvious next step was to offer it to Bingham’s publisher, Victor Gollancz. The firm was still dominated by the man who had founded it in 1927, and who had given it his name. ‘VG’ was an innovative and vigorous publisher, whose books in their distinctive yellow jackets with bold black type were instantly recognisable. He was also a public figure, active in CND and the campaign to abolish capital punishment. His commitment to the progressive cause was both good and bad for his business: though his Left Book Club had been a phenomenon of
the 1930s, he had rejected Animal Farm because he was unwilling to publish a work critical of the Soviet Union. Like many of those who had founded their own business, Gollancz ran a tight ship. For him parsimoniousness was instinctive, indeed virtuous.

  Peter Watt sold plenty of run-of-the-mill thrillers to Gollancz, who published them almost by rote. Yet perhaps this was the very reason for his hesitation. It was not until he had happened to bump into one of the firm’s directors on the Underground, Gollancz’s enterprising nephew Hilary Rubinstein, that Watt mentioned a novel ‘by a friend of John Bingham’s’.6 Rubinstein combined good taste with commercial nous; in 1954 he had spotted Kingsley Amis’s first novel Lucky Jim and had helped make it a bestseller. He expressed interest in seeing David’s typescript, so Watt sent it over to him. The novel now had a new title, Call for the Dead.

  David had also settled on a new pseudonym, John le Carré. The origin of this name remains obscure. For years he would claim to have spotted it on a London shopfront as he rode past in a bus, but more recently he has admitted that this was a fabrication. Carré means ‘square’ in French, and Madeleine Bingham would later interpret the name as a kind of backhanded tribute to her husband, who might have been styled ‘a square’ in 1960s parlance. But she had become jealous of David’s success, to such an extent that her judgement on this subject was unreliable. There had been a Carré at Sherborne before the war; just possibly David had noticed this unusual name, perhaps displayed on a roll of honour, and had retrieved it from his memory; but since David himself has forgotten its genesis, one can only speculate. In 1980 he explained his choice thus: ‘I thought that to break up a name and give it a slightly foreign look would have the effect of printing it on people’s memories.’7

  The new entrants’ course was run partly in London and partly at SIS’s field operations training centre on the south coast. As an exercise in basic tradecraft trainees were not told where they were going, but merely instructed to make their way to Portsmouth, catch the Gosport ferry and walk a few hundred yards down a particular street, where they would find a minibus waiting to take them to their destination. This turned out to be Fort Monkton, a battery constructed in the late eighteenth century to guard the approaches to Portsmouth harbour.

  For the next few months the SIS trainees would undertake much of their training at ‘the Fort’ or in the surrounding area. Typically they would arrive on a Monday morning and stay at the Fort until Friday lunchtime, when they would rush back to London to maintain the fiction that they had been there all week. The Fort was connected to a London telephone number for the same reason. Another of the new entrants, slightly older than David, was John Margetson, who would make a distinguished career in the Diplomatic Service after completing five years in SIS. Margetson had a smart flat near Eaton Square and a convertible sports car; most weeks he would drive down to Portsmouth on the Monday morning, stopping in Prince of Wales Drive to collect David on the way. The two men formed a close and lasting friendship.

  At the Fort David received a telephone call from Peter Watt, who assumed he was calling an office in Whitehall. There was exciting news: Gollancz wanted to publish the novel. Their chief reader, Jon Evans, had written an enthusiastic report, summarising the book as ‘a Secret Service thriller of the first rank – by a born novelist’. Evans thought the characterization ‘brilliant: & Smiley’s immensely exciting duel with Elsa Fennan is something more than the stuff of which even the best thrillers are made. Le Carré is not merely the author of an outstanding “first”: his will be a name to remember.’8 There was an endorsement too from John Bingham: ‘Mr le Carré is a gifted new crime novelist with a rare ability to arouse excitement, interest and compassion.’ Bingham added a private aside to Rubinstein: ‘I think that you are wise to take him on. I am sure he will write even better books in the future.’9

  By the terms of an agreement made on 11 November 1960, Victor Gollancz agreed to pay an advance against royalties of £100, with an option to publish David’s next two novels. This was a modest sum, not much more than a month’s salary for David, but nevertheless it was a start, and he was delighted.

  At Fort Monkton David and his fellow new entrants studied techniques of agent-running in enemy territory, and the tradecraft necessary to do so undetected: safe houses, dead letter-boxes, surveillance techniques, ciphers (coding and decoding) and clandestine wireless communication. They shot with 9mm automatic pistols at life-size pop-up targets. They were taught knife-fighting by an instructor who had been in the Shanghai police in the pre-war days of the Shanghai concession. ‘Always keep the knife moving, sir, in a figure of eight movement,’ he advised: ‘keeps them guessing.’ In lessons on unarmed combat they learned about target areas of the body, pressure points and how to kill a man with a single blow. They climbed telegraph poles, and detonated explosives in the wide moat of the Fort. At night they were taken by Royal Navy motor torpedo boats to practise landing agents on and evacuating them from a hostile coastline – in this case a small bay on the Isle of Wight, part of the Osborne estate formerly owned by the royal family, where Queen Victoria and her children had swum from bathing machines. Another outdoor exercise required each entrant to find his way across a stretch of the New Forest at night, before climbing under a wire fence protected by searchlights and foot patrols.

  As it turned out, David would never be at personal risk in his secret work – nor, to his knowledge, would the others in the intake, except one.10 He would never again handle, let alone use, a 9mm automatic pistol. He would have little or no opportunity to use the skills he had acquired during his training – though they would provide a valuable source for his fiction.

  The trainees undertook their tasks with youthful exuberance. In such a high-spirited environment the most trivial incidents took on a hilarious character. The point of one exercise was to kidnap an MI6 officer disguised as a passing cyclist and subject him to mock torture; unfortunately they chose the wrong cyclist, an innocent schoolmaster. As the climax to a map-reading exercise, a low-flying RAF aircraft was supposed to drop a wireless set by parachute. The young men below waited in eager anticipation as the parcel drifted to earth; but when they retrieved and unwrapped it, they were disappointed to find that their masters had not risked a precious piece of equipment on a mere training exercise. ‘It’s full of fucking stones!’ exclaimed Rod Wells. On another exercise each of the trainees had to retrieve a cache of arms buried somewhere in the New Forest. David found a large car occupied by a pair of dozing tourists parked over the site where his cache had been buried. It required considerable charm to persuade them to move on so that he could begin digging.

  Perhaps the most demanding exercise required each of the new entrants to go to a different town or city and live under a cover identity while performing various tasks that might be expected of an agent. David’s cover was that of a German tourist in Brighton. By chance he bumped into Ann’s aunt Kay, who was very tickled to be told that she must pretend not to know him, as he might be under surveillance. On his last day the local police arrested him and subjected him to an intense interrogation, after a cooling-off period in the cells. All this was done at the behest of SIS, to test whether the trainee could maintain his cover under pressure. Apparently David spoke in a convincing German accent throughout.

  In London the trainees pondered at length the psychology of traitors, double agents and defectors, and how to obtain, motivate and control them. They were shown how to forge papers, make skeleton keys, pick locks and operate secret electronic equipment. They practised taking photographs from cameras concealed in special briefcases. They learned how to develop films, including how to measure the precise mixture of chemicals and to calculate the exact time required for the process to work. One evening, however, when David and John Margetson wanted to leave promptly to go the theatre, they estimated the amount of chemicals by eye and halved the time supposed to be necessary to develop the film. The result was just as good.

  At the conclusion of t
heir training the six new entrants were entertained to drinks by ‘C’ himself. White showed a keen interest in them, and solicited their thoughts about the training course just finished.

  This agreeable occasion was followed by a shock. On the day of their initiation, they were summoned by a grim-faced Robin Hooper, head of Training, who told them that he must say something he never thought he would have to say: they had a traitor in their ranks, and his name was George Blake. Then he wept, and sent them home while it was determined whether they had been blown, or whether they were still employable under cover.11

  Blake’s unmasking came as a stunning blow to SIS. He had been a trusted officer, who had served in Berlin, perhaps the most sensitive of all SIS stations. It emerged that he had supplied his KGB controllers with the names of scores of agents operating behind the Iron Curtain, most if not all of whom had been arrested and executed. SIS’s networks in Eastern Europe were in ruins. ‘I don’t know what I handed over because it was so much,’ Blake later admitted. It was suspected that he had been responsible for the unmasking of a CIA mole within Soviet military intelligence, Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, who was arrested and executed in 1960. Blake’s treachery appeared to confirm American suspicions that the British could not be trusted with important secrets. Another embarrassing discovery was that Blake had forwarded to the Soviet Union everything that George Leggett had reported back to London of his interrogation of the KGB defector Vladimir Petrov in Australia. Blake was put on trial, convicted of treason and sentenced to forty-two years’ imprisonment.

  David had been warned that he could not publish his book without the consent of his employers, because of the danger that he might expose something that should remain secret, without meaning to do so. He sent the typescript to Bernard Hill, who replied a couple of days later in a note saying how much he had enjoyed reading it. He asked for only one change, not for security reasons, but because he felt that the description of Maston, the Minister’s adviser on intelligence, resembled his real equivalent too closely.*