by Adam Sisman
Hornstein introduced David to her landlord Helmuth Landwehr, a retired private banker whom he would thank for ‘initiating me into the ways of his less scrupulous erstwhile colleagues’. But for the character of the older man, David reached back to the period when he was living in Vienna in the mid-1960s: he remembered a bibulous Scottish banker who was forever trying to persuade him to open a numbered bank account. ‘It wasn’t my money he wanted, it was my companionship,’ recalled David. ‘He was just a lonely expat with a failing marriage, and money was just an excuse to attach himself to people he liked.’
These individuals inspired the characters that David created. But as he would often say, ‘to turn real people into fictional characters, we have to supplement our limited understanding of them by injecting bits of ourselves’.4 Like David, both men would have troubled relations with their late fathers: Issa Karpov chooses to repudiate his inheritance; Tommy Brue, sole surviving partner in the private, family-owned bank that bears his name, struggles to understand how his father could have allowed Russians to launder money through the bank. Though jaded and cautious, he longs to make things right again.
Hunting Issa is Günther Bachmann, a middle-aged, burned-out spook with a turbulent past, a maverick in the European ‘espiocracy’, a German equivalent of Alec Leamas, an honest and decent man made weary by failure and compromise. ‘I’ve known several Bachmanns in my time,’ David said in an interview. Bachmann tries to keep Issa out of the clutches of his Russian and American counterparts. It seems everyone is looking for him: hence the title, A Most Wanted Man.
David was grateful when Anthony Barnett reacted enthusiastically on reading a typescript of the novel. ‘As all we scribblers know, this is the time when encouragement most helps,’ he wrote.
I think I am pleased with the book, which isn’t always by any means the case … Sometimes the journey doesn’t quite take me to the expected destination, but this time it seems to have done. I had such luck with my researches: everywhere I looked, I seemed to hear the right things at the right time. As if, like Bachmann, I was making the weather … When an ex-Guantanamo inmate casually remarked that it was a rule among the prisoners always to let a man sleep after he had been tortured, I knew I was blessed.5
David befriended Murat Kurnaz, and provided a quote for his memoir, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo (2007).* He invited Kurnaz to lunch when he came to London for the launch of the British edition. Some years earlier, in his local pub, David had met Philippe Sands, a professor of international law who lived near by, and had begun a series of discussions about the Iraq War, on which they were largely in agreement. Sands had written books arguing that the war had been illegal and condemning the use of torture in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. ‘Come over and meet Murat,’ David said to Sands, who took his children with him to David’s house in Gainsborough Gardens. A few days later the former Guantánamo detainee, accompanied by David, came to speak at the north London school attended by Sands’s son. ‘Children, it turns out, are willing to ask the questions that adults are too polite to ask,’ wrote Sands afterwards: ‘seeking details about the food and toilet facilities, and asking him to re-enact various acts of torture.’6
David’s youngest son Nick and his wife Clare Algar had been present at the lunch with Murat Kurnaz. Clare was another source for the character of Annabel Richter; indeed traces of his daughter-in-law can be detected in characters in David’s novels from Single & Single onwards. After leaving university in 1997 she had gone to New Orleans to work for Clive Stafford Smith, then running a non-profit law office representing poor people in death-penalty cases. In 1999 he had founded Reprieve, an international human rights organisation that supported prisoners accused of the most extreme crimes, such as acts of murder or terrorism. Nine years later Algar became Reprieve’s executive director.
Stafford Smith was deeply involved with the prisoners detained at Guantánamo: he had been one of the first lawyers to sue for access to the prison camp and had acted for far more of them than any other lawyer. David, who had met him at Nick and Clare’s wedding in 2006, sought his advice while writing A Most Wanted Man and would acknowledge his help in the book.
Nick’s first novel, The Gone-Away World, was published in June 2008. To avoid any suggestion that he might be trading on his father’s success he wrote under a pseudonym, Nick Harkaway – like his father.
Kaspar von Almen died towards the end of 2007. David travelled out to Lauterbrunnen for the funeral. Despite von Almen’s occasional explosions of temper, he and David had remained friends for sixty years. Though largely self-taught, von Almen had been a cultivated man and a superb athlete, who had been a fine skier and had scaled some extraordinary peaks into old age. He always loathed leaving the valley, so it was very satisfying to David and Jane when they were able to lure Kaspar and his wife Erica to Tregiffian for a short stay. Von Almen had been president of the council in the community of Lauterbrunnen, and his funeral was attended by an array of Swiss bankers and other bigwigs who had been guests at his hotel. It was very much a ‘valley’ funeral in dialect, with many local references. He was buried in style in the Lauterbrunnen churchyard, in the valley that he loved.
‘Just back from burying a friend in Switzerland,’ David wrote to Roland Philipps on his return. ‘Knew him sixty years. O Mother. But at least he won’t be around to make a speech at my funeral, which cheers me.’7
By late 2007 A Most Wanted Man was ready to be shown to publishers. Bruce Hunter negotiated a deal with Tim Hely Hutchinson in the usual way; as had happened in the past, the initial offer from Hodder was rejected as insufficient, but a subsequent, higher one proved acceptable. David and his agent were back on cordial terms after their sharp exchanges in the first few months of 2005. In September 2007 Hunter gave a dinner to celebrate the millionth-copy sale of The Constant Gardener. Afterwards David wrote thanking him for ‘a memorable, magnificent evening’. Jane wrote a separate letter of thanks. ‘Apart from the huge effort Hodder’s sales people have evidently made for the book, there was in my mind the fact that you and Ania (and everybody at Higham’s) have contributed enormously to the general expansion and awareness of David’s books around the world,’ she wrote. ‘We thank you for that, and look forward to enhancing our collaboration wherever we can in the years to come.’8
David had indicated that he was willing in principle for Hunter to resume handling the American rights, as he had done until The Mission Song. By the end of the year Hunter had done a considerable amount of preparatory work towards the sale of the book in the USA and Canada. It became clear, however, that David and his agent had different perceptions of the book’s potential. David wanted Hunter to ‘play a long game’, letting publishers pursue them for the book rather than actively trying to sell it. Hunter thought this unrealistic: sales of The Mission Song had been disappointing, and le Carré was no longer the hot property in New York that he once had been. Moreover there was a timing problem. If the American sale was delayed, enabling Hodder to publish the book a season or more ahead of the Americans, and thus scooping the open market, American publishers were likely to offer substantially less. Nor would they like it if the book were sold first in Canada. After an exchange of views, David asked Hunter to handle the American sale on a reduced commission. This Hunter declined to do, so David entrusted the task to his lawyer Michael Rudell, who sold A Most Wanted Man to Scribner’s, the publishers of Single & Single and The Constant Gardener.
At a point when the discussions had become fraught, Hunter had mentioned that he had it in mind to retire soon, and suggested that a younger agent in the firm might take over from him, while he was still around to supervise and ease him in. David was not receptive to this suggestion. Instead he chose to move to a new agency, Curtis Brown, where he would be represented by a dynamic agent of a younger generation, Jonny Geller. This brought to an end a working relationship that had lasted twenty-two years. ‘I shall never forget all the wonderful
work you did, and the splendid deals you brought off, & the loyalty you showed, throughout nearly all our years together,’ David wrote to Hunter; ‘and I hope that our recent disagreements will never overshadow that memory, or dim my appreciation.’9 Hunter wrote David an equally gracious letter in return.
An ‘exclusive interview’, given to the Sunday Times journalist Rod Liddle in the run-up to the publication of A Most Wanted Man, stoked a blaze of perhaps unwelcome publicity. During their conversation David appeared to tell Liddle that while working for MI6 he had considered defecting to the Soviet Union. In the ‘gentle crepuscular gloom’ of dusk at Tregiffian, as he sipped his calvados, Liddle probed further.
‘You were genuinely tempted?’ I ask him, in some surprise.
‘Yes, there was a time when I was, yes,’ he says.
‘For ideological reasons, like the rest of them – Blunt, Philby, Maclean?’
‘God, no, no, no. Never for ideological reasons, of course not …’
‘Then why?’ Not money, surely, I think to myself.
‘Well, I wasn’t tempted ideologically,’ he reasserts, in case there should be any doubt, ‘but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to the border … it seems such a small step to jump … and, you know, find out the rest.’10
The revelation was the subject of a separate news story in the Sunday Times and was subsequently picked up by Associated Press and reported across the world.11
In a letter published on The Times’s website, David claimed that he had been misrepresented, stating that Liddle had made ‘no visible use of a tape recorder, preferring, he assured me, to take written notes’.
He must be forgiven therefore if, while he too was sipping post-prandial Calvados in the evening darkness he describes, he failed to encompass or indeed record the general point I was making about the temptations of defection …
I painted for Mr Liddle the plight of professional eavesdroppers who identify so closely with the people they are listening to that they start to share their lives.
It was in this context that I made the point that, in common with other intelligence officers who lived at close quarters with their adversaries, I had from time to time placed myself intellectually in the shoes of those on one side of the Curtain who took the short walk to the other; and that rationally and imaginatively I had understood the magnetic pull of such a step, and empathised with it.12
A Most Wanted Man was published simultaneously around the world on 2 October 2008. Most reviewers welcomed it as a return to form by le Carré. Alan Furst, himself a highly praised author of historical spy thrillers set in and around the Second World War period, lauded the book in the Sunday edition of the New York Times as ‘one of the best novels he’s ever written’.13 Another spy writer, the young Scot Charles Cumming, praised A Most Wanted Man in the Daily Telegraph as ‘a first-class novel about the most pressing moral and political concerns of our time, not least the scandal of extraordinary rendition’.14 The novelist Hari Kunzru, reviewing the book for the Guardian, rated it ‘one of the most sophisticated fictional responses to the war on terror yet published, a humane novel which takes on the world’s latest binarism and exposes troubling shades of grey’, though he found it ‘uneven’.15 For the critic and writer Andrew O’Hagan, writing in the New York Review of Books, ‘le Carré continues to be the world’s most reliable witness to the vicissitudes of international paranoia; his books conceive of a Western world that has a costly obsession with its possible enemies; he shows you this world’s secret missions; its botched jobs, its manifold attempts to thwart the corrupting and sometimes terrifying idealism of others, while keeping the reader close to the exact lineaments of the way we live now’.16
A Most Wanted Man came in for special praise in Germany. Die Zeit hailed it as ‘a literary masterpiece’. A contributor to Süddeutsche Zeitung argued that ‘no other writer’ had captured Germany’s ‘blend of idiosyncratic provincialism and world stage, of marginalization and centrality’ like le Carré: during the Cold War he had captured like no one else ‘the pathos and introspective nature of the political situation of the two Germanys’.
The main review in the New York Times came once again from Michiko Kakutani, and once again she wielded her stiletto …
the novel is flawed, like his 2004 book, ‘Absolute Friends’, by an overly schematic narrative devised to drive home the author’s contempt for the take-no-prisoners methods employed by the United States in the war on terror. As a result, the moral chiaroscuro and nuanced ambiguities that distinguished his cold war novels give way, in these pages, to a blunter, more predictable story line that lurches, at times, into sentimentality and contrivance …
For that matter, Mr. le Carré’s contempt for the United States’ post-9/11 approach to the war on terror not only makes for a story told in blacks and whites – with none of the grays that distinguished his famous Smiley novels – but also results in an ending that the reader can see looming a mile off.17
In the UK and Germany A Most Wanted Man was a no. 1 bestseller. It was four weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, rising to no. 4.
David received a letter commenting on the issues raised by A Most Wanted Man from the German intelligence chief August Hanning, who had served as head of the BND from 1998 until 2005. It had been during Hanning’s term of office that testimony provided to the BND by an Iraqi agent had been used by the American administration to bolster their case for the 2003 invasion, despite warnings from his German handlers that the agent, codenamed ‘Curveball’, could not be trusted.*
David had met Hanning at a dinner in Bonn almost twenty years earlier, given by the British Ambassador to mark the closing of the Embassy before the move to Berlin. The Ambassador had taken it into his head to invite the equivalents of every German official who had been featured in A Small Town in Germany; Hanning took the role of Ludwig Siebkron, head of the German Ministry of the Interior. Guests had to read the book in advance, and during dinner identify themselves in a short speech. David and Hanning warmed to each other and had meetings thereafter: Hanning brought his wife and daughter to Tregiffian for a couple of weeks, and David visited Hanning’s headquarters in Pullach (Martin Bormann’s old country house) and received a ‘breakfast briefing’ from his staff, largely about the Middle East. David resisted attempts by Hanning’s head of training to persuade him that he should address the BND spy school in Munich.
In February 2008 Hanning had been invited by his friend the Prince of Oettingen to speak to a select audience of mainly aristocratic Bavarians and Austrians, and David had been invited to reply. The subject of Hanning’s talk was the population problems arising from immigration: and most notably the effect of three million, mostly non-integrated Turks living in Germany. David advocated sympathy for and understanding of ‘the Muslims that live among us’. He spoke of their sense of collective humiliation, of the radicalising effect of Western foreign policy on young Muslims.
Hanning had been one of the most prominent of those resisting the return of Murat Kurnaz from Guantánamo, arguing that he should be deported to Turkey rather than to Germany. Thus he and David found themselves on opposite sides on this issue. ‘It is my fortune and misfortune to live in an imaginary parallel universe to the realities of your profession,’ David wrote to him, ‘to twist it and shape it until it does the work of the wider world in which the reader can find himself. In consequence, I take my criticism and compliments from two fronts; from those who know the real world, and are incensed that I have misrepresented it; and those who take my parallel universe at face value.’18
Some months after the publication of A Most Wanted Man, David was again invited to speak at Thames House, as part of a programme of events to commemorate MI5’s centenary. His host was the Director-General, Jonathan Evans. David spoke in the atrium of the central courtyard, standing beside the statue of MI5’s founding Director-General, Sir Vernon Kell. He reminisced about his own career within the Service. ‘If I’d known
as much about myself then as I know now,’ he told his audience, ‘I wouldn’t have cleared myself for secret work.’
His next book could be seen as a state-of-the-nation novel, showing the corruption of British society by greed. A Russian wheeler-dealer, under threat from his confederates, wishes to defect: in return for protection and resettlement in Britain with his family, he offers details of a vast money-laundering operation involving a prominent politician* and other influential individuals in British society. At one point in the book, intelligence officers examine amateur film footage showing the politician and his associates enjoying a party on board an oligarch’s luxury yacht moored off the Dalmatian coast – a scene reminiscent of a party that actually took place off the coast of Corfu in 2008, aboard a yacht belonging to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, attended by both the Conservative shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, and the EU Trade Commissioner and architect of New Labour, Peter Mandelson. For David, the pernicious effect of laundered money went far beyond the venal instincts of a few individuals; it penetrated deep into the institutions of government, the civil service and indeed the intelligence services. He was appalled by the alacrity with which the City of London accommodated the rewards of crime; and by how little, if anything, the supposed regulators did to stop the practice.
