How I met the spy who went out into the cold

Of all the deaths of prominent figures in 2020, the one that I felt somewhat personally was the death of John le Carre, the celebrated Cold War-era spy novelist. le Carre has died just as the world is returning to Superpower competition, a new Cold War – this time between America and China, but with Russia playing a key role in it. Russia, indeed, was back on le Carre’s mind after a long, post-Cold War gap, in Agent Running in the Field (2019). One can almost hear him sneering at Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in the novel, in which his characters call Putin a “fifth-rate spy” who ruled Russia with a “gang of unrepentant Stalinists,” and Trump “Putin’s shithouse cleaner” who “does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself.”

le Carre has left behind a body of work, even if it is fiction, and opinion that should warn us of the dangers – both internal and external -- facing liberal democracies. His novels do not detail the technology and machinery of war and espionage, as those of, say, a Tom Clancy. His novels are full of the human side of the grand plots of governments and nations – the flaws and frailties, the intentions and motivations, the behaviours and maneuvers of individuals, what those grand plots do to them, and what they, in turn, do to the grand plots. That’s because while a Tom Clancy revelled in the thrill of technology and warfare, le Carre was a former spy (a junior-level officer in British intelligence, as he dismissed himself offhand) who had come to loathe his own profession, and war – cold or hot.

To anybody who cares to listen, I boast that I’m the only Indian journalist to have met and interviewed le Carre. Truth is, it happened by chance. I briefly met le Carre and his wife in Oxford eight years ago – on June 20, 2012, to be precise. I was a Chevening fellow at Oxford University, and le Carre was there, along with Aung San Suu Kyi and five others, to receive an honorary doctorate at Oxford University’s annual Encaenia garden party. As he walked onto the gardens after the ceremony, I ran up to him and said the cliched “I’m a big fan” and how thrilled I was to meet him, to which he said he was himself rather more pleased – in fact, “personally blessed” were his words – that he was receiving the honour alongside Suu Kyi.

He was also pleased that he had just that morning finished writing his newest novel, A Delicate Truth (2013). I asked him about his writing technique and habits. It’s now well-known but back then it was a revelation to me when le Carre said he had never used a typewriter, much less a computer; that he always wrote by hand. He told me later in our interview, “…But I am comforted by the knowledge that the great legacy of English writing was done by hand, and we have yet to see how the ease of a computer affects the process of thoughtful composition.” Yes, thoughtful composition – le Carre’s hallmark can be seen in the ‘pen portraits’ of his characters, not just George Smiley and Karla, but also a Toby Esterhase, a Connie Sachs, even the dead Control, and how the plot moves through all of them.

His wife, Jane, said he wrote in the mornings, went for a walk in his estate in the afternoon, and returned to make corrections in the evening. She typed it all up for him. “My role is to enable him to write his best,” she said. They were a team, indeed. When I asked for a more leisurely interview with him, he wrote down his email ID on a piece of paper: [e-mail] (David and Jane, of course; his real name was David Cornwell). He wrote down his address, too, (gosh, I still have that piece of paper! …Tregiffian, St Buryan, Penzance, TR19 6BG) and invited me to his sea-side estate – he owned a mile of the cliff on the coast in Cornwall. However, would I allow him a few weeks’ time to unwind, after having completed writing A Delicate Truth? Unfortunately, I was to fly back to India the day after.

I mailed him greetings on October 19, his birthday, and reminded him of the interview promise. Ever courteous, he wrote back saying he had very much enjoyed our conversation at Oxford and he was looking forward to my questions. I sent him 16, going all over the place – from his spy days (I knew he wouldn’t answer those, but I had to try); the controversies over his view of the world of spies and spy agencies, and so on. He answered eight. If he tried to answer the others, he said, he would end up writing another book.

le Carre has left us with many prescient warnings. In 2003, he had warned that George Bush’s Iraq war, based on faulty intelligence, would in the long run prove far more disastrous for the US than the Vietnam War had. How true it has proved! America now finds itself up against a China that grew into a geopolitical challenger while the US was distracted by the ‘War on Terror.’

His last warning: How the revival of nationalism is pushing the world towards the situation he had seen prevail in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. “A patriot can criticise his country, stay with it and go through the democratic process; a nationalist needs enemies,” he said in a 2019 CBS News interview. These warnings come from someone who knew. It is for us to either pay heed or pay the price.