INTRODUCTION

Now that the cold war is over and the Communist tyrannies are largely done for, our country still awaits a real national debate on the means and ends--and the costs--of our national security policies. [Aldrich H. Ames, former CIA officer and convicted Russian spy]¹

Espionage has been called the world’s second-oldest profession.² That spying has a venerable legacy is well documented. The Bible describes Moses, following the Lord’s instructions, sending spies to make a reconnaissance of the land of Canaan (Numbers: 13).³ John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenberg (1987:3, 37) cite spying in the Iliad and in the Odyssey. They also mention Delilah and Judas as archetypal spies in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Certainly since ancient times and in every civilization, rulers have used spies to gather intelligence on foes and friends alike. Even (or perhaps especially) after the end of the Cold War, we can expect the business of espionage to continue to thrive.

The primary goal of this book is to illuminate and evaluate key political and ethical themes raised in the novels of the preeminent spy writer of our time.⁴ Perhaps more than any other contemporary novelist, John le Carré confronts important personal and collective dilemmas that arise when liberal democracies engage in spying, counterspying, and covert operations. Le Carré’s exploration of central political ethical dilemmas of our time elevates the significance of his work well beyond the limitations of the conventional spy genre. I interpret le Carré’s world of espionage both on its own terms and as a metaphor for much larger moral problems and political issues, an approach consistent with le Carré’s intent. As he told Melvyn Bragg (1976:90), "at the moment, when we have no ideology, and our politics are in a complete shambles, I find it [the espionage novel] a convenient microcosm, to shuffle around in a secret world and make that expressive of the overt world."⁵

Although there is clearly a political tone to his work, le Carré’s political message is deliberately ambiguous. His moral message, if possible, is even more ambiguous.⁶ The tension between ethics and politics, central to le Carré’s work, constitutes the focus of my analysis. Like James Boyd White (1994:271; emphasis in original) "I am trying to work out a set of questions that will connect texts, and their readers, across the lines of professionalism."⁷

Because many current trends in literary criticism tend to treat almost every novel as political,⁸ I clarify my approach to the analysis of the political importance of le Carré’s novels as distinct from others who have analyzed his work.⁹ I use the term political novel as an approach to interpretation, not as a means of categorization. From this perspective, the political novel does not constitute a fundamentally distinct literary form. A political novel is characterized by internal tensions between the immediacy of human experience and the general inclusiveness of the underlying political ideology.¹⁰ The conflict between the two constitutes the drama of the political novel. Irving Howe (1992:21) suggests that "at its best, the political novel generates such intense heat that the ideas it appropriates are melted into its movement and fused with the emotions of its characters . . . to create the illusion that they [the ideas] . . . seem to become active characters in the political novel." This perfectly describes le Carré (although Howe never wrote about him).

The political novelist sets his own ideas and fantasies against opposing opinions and against the imperative of political necessity: "In the political novel, then, writer and reader enter an uneasy compact: to expose their opinions to a furious action, and as these melt into the movement of the novel, to find some common recognition, some supervening human bond above and beyond ideas. It is not surprising that the political novelist, even as he remains fascinated by politics, urges his claim for a moral order beyond ideology; nor that the receptive reader, even as he perseveres in his own commitment, assents to the novelist’s ultimate order" (Howe, 1992:24). Abstract ideology confronts the rich diversity of human experience and motive. The imperative of politics confronts the temptation of the apolitical, a pastoral element, which provides the polarity and tension of the political novel. In le Carré, the pastoral elements are personal sentiments and relationships of love and hate, loyalty and betrayal. The imperative of politics is raison d’état (political necessity or expediency).

John le Carré is one of our most preeminent contemporary political novelists. He deals with very serious ideas--including the consequences of the dominant international political myth of our era, the Cold War, and more recently with the sense of disorientation in the aftermath of its demise.¹¹ Perhaps one reason why critics like Howe ignored le Carré is because of condescension toward the spy genre which is considered not sufficiently "serious."¹² This book strongly argues against such judgments. Although le Carré is a great story teller, his novels constitute more than mere "entertainments," as Graham Greene (self-deprecatingly) labeled his own novels dealing with intrigue, to distinguish these from his so-called more "serious" fiction.¹³ Another reason is that le Carré’s political ideology is subtly understated and ambiguously presented. In contrast to novelists like Orwell, Malraux, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, who articulated clear political positions,¹⁴ Tony Barley (1986:22-3; emphasis added) notes, "Le Carré’s political novels depart from this convention by refusing to make ultimate evaluations on their readership’s behalf. The political in le Carré’s fiction inheres not in ‘message’, . . . nor even in the presence of political statements, but in the enactment of political encounter, and enactment which involves readers as much as characters."

STUDIES OF LE CARRÉ

Although several studies of le Carré’s work were published prior to this one, the approaches differ significantly from this one. Peter Lewis (1985:112) notes that the Schillerian distinction between the naïve and the sentimental, "between trusting the impulses of the heart and complying with the dictates of the intellect" is a central motif in le Carré’s work. Similarly, David Monaghan (1985) makes the impossible goal of the human aspiration to realize complete humanity by seeking to resolve this tension between the poles of nature and art, and feeling and reason (or reflection) the central theme in his analysis The Novels of John le Carré: "The central problem in all le Carré’s novels is how to be fully human in a society whose institutions have lost all connection with human feeling"(11).

Cawelti and Rosenberg (1987:183) point out that this "underlying theme of le Carré’s portrayal of the aforementioned human dilemmas of the mid-twentieth century is stated most obviously in his one novel without espionage as an explicit theme, The Naive and Sentimental Lover" (1972). They suggest that this tension between reason and emotion is a problem that le Carré has personally deeply experienced:¹⁵ "he yearns to unite in himself the naive-sentimental division, yet as a product of modern experience he is keenly aware of the impossibility of establishing a lost harmony between man and nature" (186). None of these critics focus on the uniquely political form in which le Carré poses the modern dilemma, nor do they stress its ideological undertones and implications.¹⁶ Where they are interested in style as it relates to genre and other literary influences, my interest in style is confined to its relation to le Carré’s ideological temperament.

STYLE AND IDEOLOGY: AMBIGUITY AND THE LIBERAL TEMPERAMENT

Many of le Carré’s readers are confused by this indirection and ambiguity in his novels. It has also led to contradictory critical interpretations of the meaning and significance of his work. This book clarifies and explains the pattern and the significance of le Carré’s ambiguity and elucidates the vague and sometimes seemingly contradictory political or ideological undertones of his work.

Le Carré’s ambiguity serves various purposes and can be understood from three different vantage points: ideological, personal (psychological), and stylistic. Le Carré’s political teaching is indirect, ambiguous, allows the politics to emerge from an encounter between the confrontation of protagonists, and reflects a sense of humor, sadness, and sympathy for the human condition.¹⁷ It shares many of the properties ascribed by James Boyd White (1994:40) to Plato’s Crito: "The effect of this dialogue . . . is not to offer the reader a system, a structure of propositions, but to disturb and upset him in a certain way, to leave him in a kind of radical distress." According to White (1994:42), Plato’s literary technique reflects his philosophical stance: "This text offers us the experience of incoherence partly resolved, then, but resolved only by seeing that in our own desires for certainty in argument, for authority in the laws--or in reason, or in persuasion--are self-misleading; that we can not rest upon schemes or formulae, either in life or in reading, but must accept the responsibility of living, which is ultimately one of establishing a narrative, a character, a set of relations with others, which have the kinds of coherence and meaning it is given us to have, replete with tension and uncertainty."¹⁸ Le Carré’s use of this literary style reflects a similar stance.

It is a feature of his liberal temperament. In fact, high tolerance of ambiguity is one of the defining features of the liberal temperament. Wilson Carey McWilliams (1995) discusses the ambiguous relation between temperaments as "dispositions of the soul" and ideology as doctrines. Although there is an affinity between the two, they are not identical. Among other traits, McWilliams suggests, liberal temperaments presume open minds; they are giving, generous-spirited, prone to look for the possibility of improvement and therefore embrace change, deprecate form in favor of substance, and are inclined to see most social relationships in terms of their utility to the individuals.¹⁹ Their greatest vice is a tendency to love mankind but to neglect their own.²⁰ At the same time that le Carré, through central characters like George Smiley, expresses a revulsion against doctrines and ideologies, this disposition actually reflects his underlying liberal temperament.²¹

Although a liberal, le Carré subjects liberalism to considerable criticism. Politics in le Carré’s fiction are not conveyed overtly through ideological statements but are expressed through the actions and inactions of the characters. The ideal of liberalism is tested against political realities. Therefore, the reader must extrapolate le Carré’s vision from his portrayal of the contradictions between ideas expressed and actions. Barley (1986:24-5) observes: "Despite his own preference for a liberal worldview--he nonetheless treats this ideology to severe dissection which glaringly demonstrates its inadequacies when confronted by the reality of political events and by more hard-headed ideologies. . . . Morally attractive and completely untenable, liberalism and individualism are dramatized as contradictory, confused and feeble--’flabby’ is the adjective Smiley chooses to describe his liberal behaviour."

Moreover, the shaping of the author’s personality and character also helps to explain the chameleon-like quality through which he appears to change political colors and reveals a variety of frequently contradictory viewpoints. Le Carré, in interviews and essays, frequently refers to his own fragmented personality and that of other artists.²² Le Carré told Miriam Gross (1980:33); "If I knew exactly where I stood I wouldn’t write." He told Thom Schwarz (1987:20); "When you have done all your thieving and put your character together, you’ve got fill him with your own breathe. That’s what makes the character play . . . you speak through him and give him life, which is the narcissistic part of writing. When you really hear the right voice speaking through him, you know you have another fragment of yourself moving through the book."

Finally, in addition to reflecting ideological temperament and a personality trait, ambiguity is also an effective literary technique to disguise a moral critique or a political message. Without ambiguity, le Carré’s art would appear to be much more polemical.²³ Barley (1986:22) notes that politics in le Carré’s novels are the reverse of propagandistic. Whereas he sees this "ambivalence as problematic,"²⁴ I interpret this ambiguity as emblematic of a liberal temperament. Le Carré’s literary style relates to the liberal temperament, which clearly informs his work and makes it particularly well suited for political interpretation.

Le Carré reveals to James Cameron (1974:68; emphasis added) that "there’s one thing the books have in common. They almost all begin and end at odd hours of the night. That’s to say--it all never began and it never finished. After the resolution comes the resumption. Just as every revolution leaves a prerevolutionary condition. The whole thing is a continuum. It’s open-ended."

The political significance of le Carré’s work, because it is subtly embedded in actions that apparently lack political implications, must be extracted and interpreted by the reader. This ambiguity is a challenge, but it does not mean that le Carré finds all options equally valid. Le Carré does not condescend to his readers. Rather, he expects them to think independently. He told Pierre Assouline (1986:60), "I am convinced the reader likes to work a little and at the end is happy to have resolved a somewhat complex story."

My political interpretation of le Carré’s novels builds on yet expands in significant areas the analyses of my predecessors. For example, the two scholars who have written most extensively on political aspects of le Carré’s work disagree in categorizing it. Having identified the underlying liberal nature of le Carré’s novels, Eric Homberger (1986:14) suggests that "it would be misleading to call him a political novelist; he is rather a novelist for whom meaningful experience and moral life are not disengaged from politics." Barley (1986:25), however, opines that "political novels" is the more appropriate term. Rather than debating the appropriate label for le Carré, in the spirit of Howe, I clarify the political nature of his literary art.

Because certain aspects of le Carré’s biography are essential to understand his viewpoint, I compare key events in his life with the alter-ego he created in his most autobiographical novel. This brief comparison provides a context for interpretations of the author’s work.

DAVID CORNWELL AND MAGNUS PYM

John le Carré was born David John Moore Cornwell on October 19, 1931 in the coastal town of Poole in Dorset, England. The younger son of a Nonconformist (Protestant, but not Church of England) family, Cornwell was raised in a religious, extended family and a chaotic and unstable nuclear family. The many parallels between the lives of Cornwell and his fictional surrogate, Magnus Pym, reveal important insights into le Carré’s formative years. Tom Maddox (1986:161) observed that "if, in a heartless mood, one were to design a life for a writer of spy fiction, one might create Cornwell’s." In 1986 he published his most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy (hereafter referred to in this chapter as Spy).

Magnus Pym, in a testament written to his son before committing suicide, begins his story six months before his birth, when his father, Richard (Rick), marries his mother, Dorothy (Dot), in order to avoid being prosecuted by her father, a minister (justice of the peace and Liberal member of parliament) from whose church Pym senior has embezzled funds. He traces the parallel lives of his father and himself: both spend their lives trying to put right pivotal betrayals to significant others in early adulthood that result in lives characterized as chain reactions of multiple betrayals.

Cornwell’s father, Ronnie, served his first prison term for fraud in 1936--the same year his mother, Olive (nicknamed Glassy), deserted her family. David only learned of his father’s imprisonment when he was eighteen and was reunited with his mother at twenty-one. Rick Pym was also a con man who served time in prison. Both fathers (real and fictional) ran unsuccessful campaigns as Liberal candidates for parliament in an attempt to escape active military service during World War II.

Psychological profiles dispersed throughout the text of Spy produce composite portraits of the highly disturbed mother, who is institutionalized in a mental hospital when Pym is young, and of the pathological father and son. "I have one photograph of her and there have been times--though no longer, I swear it, she is dead for me--when I would have given my soul for just one more" (2:29). Given the similarity in their backgrounds, one can only surmise that some of the personal anguish of the author is reflected in the pathos of Pym’s recollection of his mother. David Cornwell eventually located his mother, bought her a house, and still visits her.²⁵ Pym, later in life, arranges to meet his mother. When he sees her and she fails to conform to his image of her, he leaves without having spoken to or made any contact with her.

Pym remembers discovering coloring books used by his mother, in which the faces of the religious figures were scribbled out with crayon. Pym interpreted the act as symbolizing her inability to identify with normal people and to live in the real world. His summary portrait of his mother, Dorothy Watermaster, reads: "An abstraction. Mine. An unreal, empty woman permanently in flight. If she had her back to me and not her face, I could not have known her less or loved her more" (2:30). This portrait is a psychological projection by Pym of his personality onto that of his mother. It may also be interpreted as an aspect of the author’s self-portrait.

In different interviews, le Carré has characterized himself as a "bolter" who attached himself to individuals and institutions only to feel trapped by them, so he abandons them:

Ironically (and self-referentially), le Carré has Pym write, "A writer is King. He should look down with love upon his subject, even when the subject is himself" (4:69). Pym’s great love, after his mother, is his nanny, Lippsie: "Life began with Lippsie. . . .Before Lippsie all Pym remembered was an aimless trek. . . . After her everything seemed to flow in the one unstoppable direction. . . . From Lippsie to Poppy, from Rick to Jack, all one jolly stream. . . . And not only life but death began with her as well, for it was actually Lippsie’s dead body that got Pym going, though he never saw it" (4:69). Annie (Lippsie) Lippschitz, a German Jewish refugee who was his father’s mistress, became an adoring surrogate mother to Pym. The novel is so replete with moving references to her, including his last thought before Pym ends his life, that this reader wondered whether there was a person who played such a pivotal role in the author’s life. David Cornwell confirmed my hunch, explaining that he and his brother had a German Jewish nanny "around 1937-38" (which would have been when he was six to seven years old). He reports that she returned to Germany during the war and that he searched in vain to discover her fate when he served in the British army in Austria after the war (1949-50), where he interviewed many refugees.²⁶ Both experiences might partly account for the empathetic treatment of the large number of Jewish characters in his novels.

Lippsie’s suicide was driven by guilt at having survived the Holocaust, by her guilt about her relationship with Pym’s father, and by her guilt over having given in to the pressure from Rick to steal checks from the school where she was employed and where Pym was a student. Her suicide represented for Pym betrayal and abandonment by a second mother. Lippsie’s death confirmed "his knowledge that women were fickle and liable to sudden disappearances" (4:99). Betrayal is a major theme in Le Carré’s work in general and especially in his treatment of women. He has admitted: "I find it hard to write about women; although I can understand intellectually why they act as they do I find it difficult to imagine myself acting in that way" (Wakeman, 1975).

In addition to feeling responsible for her death, Pym blamed his father, who had cynically used her and pushed this already psychologically fragile woman over the brink, as he had done to his wife, Pym’s biological mother, as well.²⁷ Pym’s two mothers were but two of the many victims of Rick’s betrayal. His son, Pym, was yet another.

Ronnie Cornwell was the single most important influence on David’s life.²⁸ Similarly, Rick Pym plays an overbearing role in his son’s life and in this novel. "All he demanded was the totality of your love. The least you could do in return was to give it to him blindly. And wait for him, as God’s Banker, to double it over six months" (2:45). Pym’s resentment against his father is so great that he refuses to allow Rick to meet his grandson. His ambivalence is conveyed by the combined "loathing and devotion" he feels at remembering the touch of his father (2:33). Pym is literally haunted by Rick’s ghost (6:127). He refuses to visit his father on his deathbed and is racked with guilt because he had fervently wished him dead (6:127, 10:270).

Vivian Green (1988:33), who has known David Cornwell since his youth, states: "There was in fact no real escape from the father’s consuming affection and pervasive influence." Although he paid for the cremation and memorial service of his father who died in 1975, Cornwell refused to attend the service.²⁹

Mary, the second wife of Magnus, blames Rick for her husband’s situation. She speaks of his empty look--"Like an actor without a part" (3:60). She realizes that "all his life he’s been inventing versions of himself that are untrue. Now the truth is coming to get him and he is on the run" (5:120). On another occasion she says, "I sometimes think he is entirely put together from bits of other people, poor fellow" (4:382). All these are descriptions le Carré has used at various times to characterize himself.

If the family backgrounds of the author and his fictional alter-ego are virtually identical, so were their educational backgrounds. Cornwell attended St. Andrew’s Preparatory School and Sherborne School, which he left in 1949 to spend a year studying German at the University of Berne. Pym followed an identical path. Both author and his fictional character began their careers in intelligence during their respective year in Switzerland as students by reporting on the activities of their peers.

In an early biographical statement in John Wakeman (1975:841), le Carré denies having belonged to the Secret Service. But, after many credible reports contradicting him were published over the years, he finally admitted to having been in the Secret Service. In response to a direct question from George Plimpton (1997:55), he related that he was "first picked up when I was a young student in Bern, having run away from my first school, I retained a reporting responsibility."³⁰ This directly corresponds with Magnus Pym’s career.

He also told Plimpton that he was engaged in espionage while serving in the army intelligence corps in Austria. "That was a very formative time, because one of my jobs was trolling through the displaced-persons camps, looking for people who were fake refugees, or for people whose circumstances were so attractive to us from an intelligence point of view that we might consider returning them, with their consent, to the countries they came from." Pym also served in military intelligence in Austria.

Just as Pym was recruited by British internal security while at Oxford (where he, like Cornwell, graduated with first honors in modern languages, majoring in German), Gelber and Behr cite an intelligence source who claims that upon entering Oxford, from which Cornwell graduated in 1956, he compiled reports on left-wing student groups. In response to a direct question from Joseph Lelyveld (1986:79) whether he had done so, le Carré replied: "I don’t think it would have been a respectable thing to have done." Lelyveld says, "He replied on a note of such exquisite, not to say hilarious ambiguity that the truth of the matter, I thought, stood out clearly."³¹ Pym also spies on his peers at university.

Cornwell taught German at Eton, England’s most famous "public" school, from 1956 to 1958. After leaving Eton, he worked as a freelance illustrator before entering the Foreign Service. Gelber and Behr cite former British intelligence sources who claim that in the two-year gap between his taking the Foreign Service exam and his Foreign Office posting to Bonn, Cornwell served under Maxwell Knight in MI5, after which he transferred to Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) under cover as a junior diplomat.³² Magnus Pym also transfers from MI5 to MI6 after graduating from Oxford.

Cornwell spied from 1959 to 1966, first under cover as a second secretary at the embassy in Bonn and subsequently as a consul in Hamburg. He was serving in Germany during the erection of the Berlin Wall, which is the central symbol in his first major successful novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). Le Carré told Plimpton (1977:55) that "after teaching at Eton, I went into the cold-war setup properly. In all I don’t supposed that I spooked around for more than seven or eight years, and that’s forty years ago, but that was my little university for the purposes that I needed later to write."³³

Both Cornwell and Pym were married twice. Cornwell has three sons (Simon, Stephen, and Timothy) from his first wife, Alison Ann Veronica Sharp, whom he married in 1954 and divorced in 1971. He has one son (Nicholas) from his present wife, Valerie Jane Eustace, to whom he has been married since 1972. Pym had only one son.

Cornwell became the successful novelist John le Carré, whereas Pym became a double agent and a suicide. Le Carré has suggested on several different occasions that had he not found a creative outlet through literature, he might have become a neurotic or possibly even a double agent. Comparing the similarity of his background with the infamous Cambridge spy Kim Philby, he told Plimpton (1997:66) that "there could have been a time when I, if properly spoken to by the right wise man or woman, could have been seduced into some kind of underground act of revenge against society."

MAJOR THEMES

Chapter 1 examines the role of George Smiley, le Carré’s most intriguing and enduring character, who appears in eight novels. Smiley symbolizes the dilemma of the liberal in confrontation with more dogmatic foes. Smiley’s moral conscience constantly questions the price paid by democracies for attempting to protect political freedoms through the covert world of espionage. He consistently questions the assumptions that those around him take for granted. The exploration of Smiley’s role in chapter 1 highlights le Carré’s position on several issues, particularly the confrontation between the individual and institutions. This characterization of Smiley develops the notion of the liberal sentiment and introduces the concept of a skeptical balance.

The discussion of Smiley also examines contentions by other authors, such as whether Smiley should be regarded as a developing character, whether Smiley resolves the modern dilemmas that haunt le Carré’s mature work,³⁴ whether le Carré resolves the liberal dilemma,³⁵ and whether le Carré’s political vision develops in the course of his writing career. Their conclusions are the point of departure for my exploration of the nature and implications of le Carré’s ethical and political stands.

Chapter 2 explores the theme of loyalty and betrayal. In a variety of contexts, le Carré explores the chronic ambivalence of notions like loyalty and duty, showing that "loyalty can be disloyalty and duty a crime" (Lewis 1985:33). He poses the dilemma that betrayal of either an individual or institution is the inevitable result of to loyalty the other. Loyalty to class provided protection for the infamous Cambridge spies on whom le Carré modeled the Soviet "mole" (double agent) in Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy. An analogous phenomenon helped protect Aldrich H. Ames, the convicted Moscow spy, and second-generation CIA officer, who spent most of his adult life in the agency.³⁶ The conflict between personal and institutional loyalties, which I introduce in chapter 1, is further elucidated in this chapter. I also introduce the notion of ambiguous moralism.

Deception is the basic tool of the spy, just as the creation of illusion is a key instrument of the novelist. The discrepancy between appearances and reality, a central motif of le Carré’s work, I explore in chapter 3. With great artistry, he reveals the processes through which actors create collective myths to imbue their lives with meaning and, simultaneously, by which they deceive and are deceived. Le Carré indicates that self-deception is a trap to which members of the intelligence community are especially susceptible. The attraction of the "tradecraft" of intelligence can be enthralling. Therein lies one of its great dangers, however, because enchantment with the means may cause loss of sight of the ends.³⁷ The scenario of a masterful espionage deception becomes a metaphor that speaks to much broader and more universal phenomena, such as the mythical aspects of the Cold War and of the new world order. This central theme is uniquely appropriate for analysis from the phenomenological approach I employ in this chapter.³⁸ In addition, I clarify the notion of skepticism.

Le Carré’s novels reveal the major moral and political dilemmas confronting contemporary Western democracies, especially the conflict between liberal democratic principles and political necessity (or expediency). The preliminary background for the discussion of this issue first presented in chapter 1, is more fully explored in chapter 4 where I examine the relationship between means and ends. Le Carré asks how far a democracy can go in protecting itself against the aggressive espionage efforts of a relentless, nondemocratic foe. If it must resort to means identical to those of a nondemocratic opponent, does it not threaten to undermine the values and principles that it is attempting to protect?³⁹ The threat, however, goes beyond the viability of democracies. "Do the ends of human survival and peace require such means that humanity will be destroyed in its effort to save itself?" (Cawelti and Rosenberg 1987:183). This chapter explores the limits of raison d’état, or political expediency.

Eschewing the possibility of ever fathoming the mystery of human motivation, le Carré explores in elaborate detail the confluence of biography, socialization, culture, and happenstance that lead his characters to reveal their flawed humanity. Le Carré’s unique approach to the complex confluence of personality and politics--the tension between the private and the public (or political)--provides the theme of chapter 5: the inherent ambiguities in personalities and the inherent problems of human communication and mutual understanding. Michael J. Hayes (1990:115) even suggests that "David Cornwell’s [John le Carré’s] novels explore the awful possibility that to use language is inevitably to deceive."

Le Carré depicts British intelligence organizations in the context of and as a metaphor for the decline of Great Britain as a major world power and the rise of the United States as the new hegemon, which is the focus of chapter 6. In the developing relations between the two, bureaucratic politics and interagency rivalries, both within and between each state, play significant roles. The larger international political environment and the more specific micropolitical settings of cooperating and competing intelligence agencies frame my analysis of these themes.

Chapter 7 explores the culture and craft of espionage as seen through le Carré’s work. I discuss the recruitment, training, and handling of agents, the attributes of an effective case officer, and techniques of interviewing and interrogation. Discussion of such examples of tradecraft helps to establish the credibility, if not the authenticity, of le Carré’s fictional world. Chapter 8 examines the relationship between fiction and the real world of espionage. Some current problems of American intelligence as the United States attempts to adjust to dramatic changes in international politics are compared with le Carré’s fictional treatment of the United Kingdom in analogous circumstances.⁴⁰ The activities of intelligence agencies (including, but by no means exclusively, covert operations) raise serious questions, the implication of which go to the heart of the core democratic values of Western democracies. Openness, the essence of democratic government, blatantly contradicts secrecy, upon which espionage depends.

The concluding chapter articulates the need to strike a balance between ethical and political imperatives. Through this work, I hope to generate greater awareness and general public discussion of these themes. The political and ethical implications for Western democracies of the enormous power of the secret world of espionage has received inadequate attention in the scholarly literature.⁴¹ Such discussion has been even more conspicuously absent from public debate.

The high expectations raised in anticipation of a peace dividend that failed to materialize in the aftermath of the Cold War has led to considerable public disappointment. Gross incompetence bordering on criminal negligence allowed the Russian mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames, to do incalculable damage to U.S. national security. The failure of the director of the CIA to swiftly undertake serious steps to reform the agency make conditions particularly propitious for public discussion of these issues in the United States.

Such discussions are no less important, however, for other democracies--especially for the nations of Central and Eastern Europe, which are struggling to overcome the legacies of their recent past and to find their new democratic forms and practices.⁴² I sincerely hope that this analysis of major themes in the work of John le Carré will contribute to informed public debate as well as to scholarly discussion of these and related issues.