The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré

Meanwhile, British intelligence was rocked by the revelation that it was harboring two high-ranking Soviet double agents: George Blake and Kim Philby. The Cold War was at its apex, at the moment of the Berlin Wall’s construction and the Cuban missile crisis. Still, it was an auspicious and life-changing period. His own service as a spy was short-lived-including a few years undercover in Germany with a cover identity as a junior diplomat in the early 1960s. “Evasion and deception were the necessary weapons of my childhood.” “Spying did not introduce me to secrecy,” le Carré wrote in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. He entered the secret world early, engaging in deceptions on behalf of his father but also to protect himself against a man who drank, gambled, and wasn’t above beating his son.

His mother left them when he was 5 years old, so young David Cornwell, as was his birth name, was enlisted as his father’s accomplice. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was an inveterate con man, in and out of money and trouble with the law.

By the time he joined MI5 in 1958, his biography read, well, like a lot of other recruits’. He served in the British army’s Intelligence Corps. On the surface, he progressed naturally from his youth to the inner sanctum: His adolescence was spent in English public schools immediately after World War II, where the boys did military training in uniform, jingoism was the norm, and-at least for one final generation-empire was an inheritance. So it was in his own life, as we learn in a recently published book of his letters. In the worlds le Carré created, truths are rarely self-evident. Far more than knowledge of tradecraft, this status-at once outsider and insider-enabled him to uncover truths about the corrupting nature of power: His novels are infused with the honesty of an outsider, but they could only have been written by a man who knows what it is like to be inside the tent. He brought a novelist’s eye into the secret world, and the habits of espionage to his writing. Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it.” Le Carré’s enigmatic gift as a writer wasn’t simply that he could draw on his experience of having once been a British spy. “Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal. “S pying and novel writing are made for each other,” John le Carré once wrote.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré