John le Carré was interviewed for the Mail by Pip Ayers.

‘In my day, MI6 – which I called the Circus in the books – stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn’t even show passes to go in and out of the building. Our faces were known and I don’t remember ever being stopped. The janitors at the entrance would merely say, ‘Good morning.’ In a way, the trust invested in us was charming, a remnant of the war. And then it completely busted.

I’d go out to shop at lunchtime, bring parcels back, shove them beside my desk and take them out in the evening. That was part of the comedy with Kim Philby, who was exposed in 1963. He came into the building on a Friday morning carrying a suitcase, as did half the people there. They were going off to the country for the weekend with their dinner jackets. But Philby had other plans. He piled bunches of documents into his suitcase and took them out, spending the weekend photographing the papers with his Soviet controller and coming back on the Monday looking as though he’d been away. It was a riot.

The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in Tinker, Tailor, was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I’m such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days. I also gave Smiley my social ineptitude, my lack of self-respect and my fumblings in love.

Because I came from a dysfunctional background, I made home the most dangerous place for Smiley. Home is where he lets himself in cautiously. Home is where he sees the shadow of his adulterous wife in the window and wonders who she’s with.

I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. […]

Smiley is played by Gary Oldman in the new film, a role Alec Guinness took in the 1979 television adaptation. People will ask, but I wouldn’t for one minute allow myself to compare Guinness with Oldman. Gary has an extraordinary command of himself as an actor. I’m hypnotised by his performance: he steps right outside himself. With Oldman, you share the pain and the danger of life more, the danger of being who he is. It’s a much tougher Smiley, with – here and there, as it is in most of us – a little cruelty.

That’s not in any way to diminish Alec: they’re just different beasts in different products. The original story was adapted for television in seven episodes. The film has to tell the story again with a great deal less sentiment. The ethics and the affections have shifted: it’s sexier, grittier.

Once you’ve lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It’s a mentality, a double standard of existence. You probably have it before you enter, which is what makes you attractive – you have a bit of larceny, you have a double way of looking at people, you instinctively manipulate. […]

There’s huge money in the secret world now, too – money for fabricators who put together brilliant pieces of intelligence. We saw that with the forged documents suggesting Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. Somebody was paid a fortune for that nonsense. Huge money is now being paid out to informants, a lot of it for hokum. I hear on the grapevine that the spooks are getting productivity payments. I find that pernicious.

The proximity now to the corporate world and the contracted world of private security is alarming. The bubble is getting bigger and bigger. In Washington DC there are now nearly a million people with security clearance to view top-secret material. What the hell is going on?

Power expands through the distribution of secrecy. We saw at the time of the Iraq war what it means to be in the know and the games people play when they say they’re in the know. So in the lobby of the House of Commons before the Iraq-invasion vote you had whips saying to the MPs, ‘If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d know how to vote!’ There are wonderful people in the secret services. They’re still recruiting the brightest and the best, but we’re going to end up with too many spies and too few people to spy on. […]

You’ve got to have spies, but the important thing is that you’re not enchanted by them. Use them and don’t let them use you. If you employ people to be larcenous, you’ve got to be careful. Who, after all, will spy on the Smileys?’

Read the full interview at the Mail here

Visit site