What MI6 really thought of John le Carré

John le Carré in his time wrote great spy novels, among the best of the genre. He captured the mood of Cold War Europe and, in the character of George Smiley, created the ultimate spy master – clever, self-deprecating, riven with self-doubt, always questioning the morals of his profession, but absolutely dedicated to getting the better of his adversary, the elusive Karla. Smiley’s Cold War was as much personal as it was political.

Those of us who practised the same dark arts around the same period read and enjoyed the books enormously; but we were not uncritical. Le Carré’s espionage novels were so widely read and had such influence that they came to define reality. They filled a gap in public knowledge. They were written at a time when very little that was authoritative was published about espionage and the public was starved of information. Those were the days when the existence of MI6 was not even officially acknowledged, and GCHQ never spoken of. “It is not the custom of Her Majesty’s Government to comment on such matters” was the response to an awkward parliamentary question.

But the public knew enough to understand instinctively that an important dimension of the Cold War was being fought out in the shadows. To be offered a window that gave an apparently authentic view into the secret world, or the deep state as it is known today, was very enticing. Le Carré bridged the gap between fact and fiction, but not in a pretentious way, as The Crown now seems to be doing. His skillful creation of the ‘Circus’ filled the void for true spy stories.

Le Carré never claimed to be writing anything but fiction, but because he was a great storyteller, inevitably his pen enhanced the mystique of MI6 but also stained its reputation – and there was a large dollop of vitriol in his ink for MI6.

I only met le Carré once, but it was clear that he disliked, perhaps even detested, the Service that was the source of his inspiration, as his partial memoir Pigeon Tunnel suggests. He only served in the Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, for a couple of years, but something about his experience entered his soul and never left it.

His best espionage stories are about betrayal, but he goes as far as making the ‘Judas factor’ the currency that defines the Service’s professional relationships. The impression that he leaves, and it lingers to this day, of the workings of MI6 is corrosive. Le Carré enjoyed the detachment that the writer of fiction can always claim, but there was evident satisfaction too that in the public eye he had successfully tarred the moral reputation of his former colleagues: and the moral theme in his writing is strong.

The truth about MI6, and le Carré would have known this very well, is that between and among colleagues, it functions on very high levels of trust, a fact self evident to those whose daily concern is to protect the security of spies they have recruited. Keeping secrets on which lives depend in turn is founded on trust. Le Carré flipped that coin; and of course stories about trust may be uplifting, but they do not make a good spy thriller. The licence that le Carré allowed himself is, therefore, understandable – but his perversion of reality was also extreme.

When I made the same point about le Carré at a recent literary festival, his immediate riposte was that the betrayal of his SIS identity to the Soviets by Kim Philby had marked him for life and engendered his disappointment with his career. To an extent, that may have been true, but being “blown” to the KGB was hardly a career-defining event in the depths of the Cold War. Every active operational officer on both sides suffered a similar fate, sooner or later. With le Carré, something much more visceral and personal was in play. It is possible that the ghost of his conman father Ronnie enters the equation.

Whatever the explanation, we celebrate a great writer of espionage fiction and a complex creative mind. As for MI6, his literary achievements both burnished and tarnished its reputation. Few can claim that distinction.

Sir Richard Dearlove is a former head of MI6