John le Carré, MI6 and the fact and fiction of British secret intelligence // 'My ties to England have loosened': John le Carré on Britain, Boris and Brexit
Sir Richard Dearlove,
a former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service - SIS or MI6 - recently
launched a critical broadside at John le Carré, accusing
the acclaimed author of award winning spy fiction of producing “corrosive”
novels that “are exclusively about betrayal”. The blurring of
intelligence fiction and intelligence fact has long been a double-edged sword
for the real world of British intelligence , particularly in terms of its
impact upon recruitment.
Sir Colin McColl, chief of SIS from 1989 to 1994, once
described the most well-known fictional secret agent, James Bond, as “the best recruiting sergeant in the world”. But it’s
likely that the image of the martini-drinking, fast car driving Bond was
attracting the wrong type of applicant. More recently, SIS has made efforts to
distance itself from the fictional secret agent. In October 2016, the current
chief of SIS, Sir Alex Younger, explained that James Bond: wouldn’t get
through our recruitment process … whilst we share his qualities of patriotism,
energy and tenacity, an intelligence officer in the real MI6 has a high degree
of emotional intelligence, values teamwork and always has respect for the law…
unlike Mr Bond. Bond’s 'severe chronic
alcohol problem', recently diagnosed by the Medical Journal of
Australia, probably wouldn’t help his case, either....
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/john-le-carre-mi6-and-the-fact-and-fiction-of-british-secret-intelligence/John le Carré on Trump: ‘Something seriously bad is happening’: “I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it’s contagious, it’s infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There’s an encouragement about.” Even today, Le Carré said, Ang Sang Suu Kyi is speaking of “fake news” in Burma. “These are infectious forms of demagogic behaviour and they are toxic.”
The United States of America Has Gone Mad (2003)
John le Carré to tackle 'division and rage' of 2018 in new novel
'My ties to England have loosened': John le Carré on Britain, Boris and Brexit
I have always admired John le Carré. Not always without envy – so many bestsellers! – but in wonderment at the fact that the work of an artist of such high literary accomplishment should have achieved such wide appeal among readers. That le Carré, otherwise David Cornwell, has chosen to set his novels almost exclusively in the world of espionage has allowed certain critics to dismiss him as essentially unserious, a mere entertainer. But with at least two of his books, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and A Perfect Spy (1986), he has written masterpieces that will endure.
Which other writer could have produced novels of such consistent quality over a career spanning almost 60 years, since Call for the Dead in 1961, to his latest, Agent Running in the Field, which he is about to publish at the age of 87. And while he has hinted that this is to be his final book, I am prepared to bet that he is not done yet. He is just as intellectually vigorous and as politically aware as he has been at any time throughout his long life. In the new book there is a plotline that is predicated on covert collusion between Trump’s US and the British security services with the aim of undermining the democratic institutions of the European Union. “It’s horribly plausible,” he says, with some relish when we meet in his Hampstead home. ..
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/11/john-le-carre-truth-was-what-you-got-away-withHow the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper. By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis
