John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
bbc.com
bbc.com
My wife and I just finished watching all of The Americans on Hulu, and this really resonates with me. Somehow, I managed to completely miss the show when it ran from 2013-2018, and was only reminded of its existence after watching and enjoying The Diplomat on Netflix, which also features Keri Russell in a starring role.
The Americans is about pair of deep cover KGB agents living in the United States in the 1980s. It's very loosely based on real events, and it was created by a former CIA agent.
I really liked The Americans, too.
Right down to the local ambassador (I think it was) who wanted to stop the operation but it was escalated all the way to Thatcher who was at Balmoral at the time and who was outraged at the idea that the UK wouldn't try and rescue him.
Whether Gordievsky was a triple agent or not, it's clear that the KGB desperately needed a conduit to convey useful (true) information to the West in a form that Western intelligence agencies would find credible. Western intelligence (particularly the UK) also desperately needed an asset who could produce that sort of intelligence. Gordievsky just happened to be a perfect conduit for this communication, and may have helped avert a truly stupid nuclear war.
If you assume this was an "op" then it would have to end somehow. Ideally it would end in a way that left Gordievsky alive and in the West, where he could continue to deliver his message to politicians. In order to keep Gordievsky's past information credible, he would either need to (1) be caught and tried/imprisoned, (2) defect. But I would imagine that the best case for his credibility would be some amazing combination of (1) and (2), especially a situation that would force the West to commit resources to a heroic escape that took him right out from under the KGB's nose in Moscow. This would make his handlers look brilliant, and it would make Gordievsky the kind of hero that politicians would take seriously. It would also be politically almost impossible for anyone in US/UK intelligence to ever (publicly) voice skepticism about Gordievsky.
Gordievsky's escape from Russia also seems extremely bizarre. Remember this is a man who has miraculously survived chemical interrogation, is liable to be shot at any moment, but has somehow slipped his KGB tail and traveled halfway across Russia to a border town. Whatever doubts the KGB had before, he is now a dead man if they catch him. Yet instead of hiding in the woods waiting for his rescue, he heads into town, gets drunk, falls asleep in a restaurant and nearly misses the appointment to escape to the West? I guess people behave strangely under stress, but there's strange and there's "death wish." Perfectly reasonable, though, if the whole thing was fake.
Finally there's the fact that Gordievsky's arrest story was almost immediately verified by Vitaly Yurchenko, whose "defection" is utterly bizarre. Yurchenko just happened to be an expert in "special drugs" who defected right after Gordievsky escaped, basically for the sole purpose of solidifying Gordievsky's story and drawing attention away from Aldrich Ames. Then, literally weeks after delivering his confirmation to US intelligence, Yurchenko walks out of a Washington, DC restaurant and heads straight back to the USSR where he is awarded the Order of the Red Star for "a successful infiltration operation."
What is the theory of the case here? I'm not following what this KGB need/matching British intelligence need was and how it was met through Gordievsky's defection.
MI6 suffered a string of defections to the USSR in the 50s and 60s, which hurt the organization and put it in a "defensive crouch." Since intelligence production was very important to the US/UK relationship, this put MI6 in a position where it would be relatively eager to accept the bonafides of a new UK-based KGB "double agent" that dropped into their lap. And so dropping one into their lap in the 1970s would make plenty of sense.
But this does not mean anyone had a real plan on how to use Gordievsky at the time. And in fact, he's immediately recalled back to Moscow on some pretext.
In the 1980s, Andropov begins running around looking for a pretext to launch a nuclear war. He can't do this as KGB chief, but he's doing everything he can to assemble the evidence for it. And the writing is on the wall by 1981: soon Andropov will become to General Secretary, where he will have the authority to launch missiles. Somebody needs to defuse this situation, but you can't tell Andropov he's insane and there's no official channel to warn the West.
Coincidentally, and about four months before Andropov becomes General Secretary, Gordievsky re-appears. But now he's been turned into an irresistible dream asset, maybe the best human intelligence asset the UK could ask for: a high-ranking intelligence officer at the KGB station in London, clearly on his way to running the place. He should be able to produce all kinds of information that would immediately shut down all kinds of operation.
Except curiously, Gordievsky produces almost no really valuable information that would hurt the USSR. The intelligence he carries with him is described as a "trove", but on closer inspection, this stuff is juicy but utterly worthless: just a bunch of aging lefty political figures who aren't producing useful intelligence for the KGB and probably never did. But surely Gordievsky will expose dozens of London-based KGB spy networks? Except weirdly he doesn't do that, either; conveniently the main "intelligence" finding he delivers is that there are no KGB spy networks in London, so there is nobody to burn.
In fact, almost the only real piece of intelligence Gordievsky ever offers is the fact that Andropov is panicking and trying to assemble the case for a pre-emptive strike. He delivers this information instantly, and then delivers it again and again. When Able Archer happens, he rings the alarm even louder. This doesn't compromise the KGB one bit: in fact the result is entirely advantageous to the USSR, since it convinces Western militaries to back off.
He then gets promoted to an even more important position, where he basically becomes a political go-between transmitting information from the Russian leadership to the West. At one point he's basically writing Gorbachev's speeches, while convincing the West that Gorbachev is legitimate. The result is also not harmful to the USSR: indeed, it ensures that Gorbachev's visit is a resounding success.
My point here is that if the USSR wanted to deliver a high-level agent that could provide "useful" information (from the perspective of the USSR) while doing minimal damage to the USSR itself, they would have had a hard time doing better than Gordievsky. And it makes plenty of sense to exploit the UK's desire to be the conduit for such information, rather than sending Gordievsky to Washington where he would be one source among many.
In the 1980s, Andropov begins running around looking for a pretext to launch a nuclear war.
is at odds with everything we know about Soviet doctrine and intent, both from the period itself and the voluminous info that's come out subsequently. The bar to hang a serious (or even plausibly fictional) theory on this is very, very high. I'm not suggesting you did, of course - you qualified it as 'spitballing and counterfactuals'. But it's a really long spitball, to my mind at least!
Edit: if you happen to speak Russian a recent interview with Soldatov/Borogan covers some of the interesting differences between outward projection and insider culture regarding defections in the Soviet security services.
https://meduza.io/episodes/2023/08/17/kak-ustroena-rossiyska...
1. The Wire
2. Breaking Bad
3. DarK (German)
4. Halt and Catch Fire
5. Bosch
Others- True Detective S01, S03, Westworld S01, Generation War (German), Happy Valley, Mindhunter, Mad Men, Silicon Valley, The Sopranos, The Fall, Band of Brothers, Rick and Morty, Veep, Babylon Berlin (German), Arrested Developtment, The Americans, Narcos (Spanish), Fauda (Hebrew-Arabic), Black Mirror, Bojack Horseman, Vinland Saga (Japanese, Anime), Fargo S01, S03, Kleo (German), Freaks and Geeks, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Mozart in the Jungle, Tales from the Loop, Panchayat (Hindi), Paatal Lok (Hindi), Broadchurch, Yellowstone, Tales from the Loop, and Charite (German).
Emails for new episode reminders of shows you think may or may not be cancelled. Top 10 show/movies list for networks.
Syncs automatically to trakt.tv.
There's also Letterboxd.
I am thinking of just moving to a G-Sheets document.
One of my favorite le Carre tidbits - apparently in the UK and US versions of “Tinker, Tailor,” a character in one version takes a ferry in Hong Kong, but takes a tunnel in another version.
Apparently after the original UK release, one of the readers asked le Carre why the character didn’t just take the (relatively recently opened) tunnel between Kowloon and the mainland, le Carre went white in the face and promptly rewrote that part in the forthcoming US version for its subsequent release and had the character take the tunnel instead (as anyone would have done in those circumstances, given the two options).
Terrific writer and storyteller. Must have had a hell of a life.
Probably not comparable, but Frederick Forsyth's novels are great. He wrote The Day of the Jackal, The Fourth Protocol, etc. If you want a taste for his books, I would suggest The Devil's Alternative.
No Comebacks:
1. Are all short stories, so good for the reader who is not yet invested in Forsyth
2. Starts with the titular story, which (IMO) is a pretty good capture of Forsyth plot and story-telling.
David Morrel also had some good ones. Brotherhood of the Rose was great.
Also Le Carre's "The Russia House" is my favorite, and has such great prose. More of a love story maybe, but the subtexts are really a thing of beauty in that work.
Even now they stamp his name on games and series he had nothing to do with. I wish that would be illegal, writing a book under the name of someone who had nothing to do with it.
Ps the second Bourne book was soooo much better than the movie and so completely different. From the major events with characters (not wanting to spoil) to the setting in Hong Kong.
The books after he died were pure drivel. Like they were secreted by the authors from some kind of gooey gland in their brain. All kinda the same, like that op center and rainbow six stuff.
The reason I read a few of them was that I didn't realise they were not written by him at the time and I thought they'd get better. But they didn't of course, they only got worse.
It was actually kind of a surprising turn, because Tom Clancy on TV on the day of 9/11 was one of the most level-headed commentators about the vast majority of Muslims (i.e., not terrorists). And there’s a video of him presenting at the NSA in the mid ‘80s that shows him to be a very bright, very funny, very personable guy. Got the sense that in his later years, American politics just started to make him angry, and in my view it adversely affected his work.
But at his peak, he was damn fine at his craft.
But yeah his politics oozing through everything in later books (even written by him) also put me off.
While a spy novel, it’s almost more of dark comic tragedy on the power of nostalgia. I easily find the storyline transferrable to some of the “established” organizations I’ve done work for.
Aging is hard. I wish there were Ben more books and stories like this one.
A story I read as a kid, The Positronic Man, by Asimov, really revealed this to me. Because the protagonist lives a long time, it covers a few different human characters, and his final words in the book really hit home.
Edit: Also, Mick Heron's Slow Horses series, based on a group of outcaste MI5 spies in London. (The first book was made into a TV series on Apple TV).
There have now been 2 seasons of Slow Horses (apple TV series) and more are planned.
I haven't read the books, but this is a good series.
Sometimes autobiography, sometimes fiction.
(the guy literally had a hell of a life)
https://books.google.de/books/about/My_Silent_War.html?id=du...
Quammen has become well known as a writer on nature and the environment, but he started his career writing spy novels.
His earlier novel The Zolta Configuration (1983) is set in the atom bomb project during WWII. I recall Oppenheimer and his circle are characters.
I don’t think I finished reading Zolta, though. I should pick that back up.
She was heavily pregnant when shooting the night manager and nobody noticed.
Cormac McCarthy I'd start with Blood Meridian. But le Carre, I'd start with "Spy".
Blood Meridian is a heavy and dense book that is a difficult enough read even after you are somewhat used to his unique style and tone (desolate, gut-wrenching, violent, quasi-mythical, beautiful). I also think it somewhat undeservedly overshadows his other work when it comes to internet discussions.
But. For anyone who was me. I went so many years not getting the Tinker Tailor reference. I “read” the book years ago after seeing the movie. Yep.
It’s a variation of the rhyme we learned as “eenie-meenie miney-mo.” It names jobs, and replaces the schoolyard rhyme’s 4th job with “spy.”
That version actually makes sense, while the version I grew up with sounds like the gibberish of which we accuse the brits ;)
(I’m sure all of that was clear in the book and the movie. But I know I just helped at least one other person with ADD!)
Edit: I’ll save you the google. It’s “tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor” in 1930’s UK schoolboy parlance. That’s the clever bit that wooshed me
Both Fleming and Le Carre had experienced real-world spycraft, and so their competing visions of fiction both had the pedigree of realism, but applied in different ways and with different worldviews.
There's something of a sweet spot for some of this as well. Too old and it's well appreciated as a progenitor of a trope - Checkov, Shakespeare, Beowulf. There's a chunk of things in the last century that haven't quite reached canonical status in that way, but almost definitely will in the next 50-100 years, so people don't quite realize how influential they are yet.
I've noticed that I myself cannot stand games significantly older than my own coming-of-age era. So anything less than VGA is hard for me to appreciate, despite an interest in learning about such things. Let's Plays and video reviews by more patient and tolerant players is how I appreciate them now.
It almost invented the Fantasy genre as we know it today.
It is still very much appreciated, but I've found that some people think it is boring.
Examples given were the Mona Lisa painting and the yin-yang symbol.
IIRC, I read a bunch of this media criticism (alarmism) stuff during dial-up era (post PC, pre Web). Their warning was that digital reproduction would accelerate the process, up-end our notions of intellectual property, swap all the gatekeepers for a new set of goons, etc.
I'm ambivalent. The more things change, the samer they get.
For my part, I sort of adapted, adopting a pseudo Beginner's Mind viewpoint, to accept and sometimes embrace a creative work both for what is and what it was.
One example.
I try to remain ignorant before viewing art and then back filling the context afterwards. I was totally unimpressed by Rothko. Then got into a (friendly) debate that revealed my puerile closed-mindedness. Then binged on his ideas and works. Now I think he was and remains brilliant.
Also, I don't think the replication banality apocalypse actually happened. Just the opposite. Contemporary music (for one) has never been more exciting to me. Today's artists are creating works my generation only fantasized about.
Sure, Sturgeon's Law is timeless. But today's best works are just as good or better than ever. And we somehow both lowered the barriers to entry and raised the ceiling. (There's probably a bigger lesson in there somewhere.... Hmmm.)
Any way. Thanks for reading this far.
TLDR: Arguments about culture are unending. Just roll with it.
What I'm thinking of is more like records in athletics. It's hard to appreciate how good a sprinter was in 1950 when their world record time wouldn't even qualify for a college track meet these days. Even if you mentally understand how good they were, and how what got them to that level set the groundwork for what's making people so much faster now, it still looks like someone running fairly slowly.
In some ways, it's a sort of artistic Eternal September.
So it's not surprising that quite a bit of common espionage vocab was popularised by him - e.g. "mole", "honey trap", "intelligence customer"
It’s what got me into cryptography many years ago - only two people ever completed ‘in from the cold’ if I remember correctly, and nobody completed ‘torment’ but the creator grngecko got hacked/doxed by someone trying to solve ‘torment’ and took them both offline :(
It chastises the behavior of those people while praising their own behavior, even though it's essentially the same.
It sees heroes in spies, even though they are villains.
Each side thinks, that they are on the right side.
Edit: Even though the novel tries to point this out a little, it still uses all of the above to great effect.
All governance systems are imperfect, but some are more imperfect than others.
I am one of those people. We didn't get to choose, but most of us hated the regimes that ruled us. I am fine with their portrayal as prisons of nations, because that is what they were. No need to whitewash Communism.
The Soviet empire was brutal and evil, and I am not at all surprised that a former KGB thug now started the biggest land war in Europe since 1945. It perfectly fits the imperial mentality of the Siloviki [0], who all made their early careers in Soviet armed forces and secret police.
Although he is fascinated by the craft of spying (and I can see why some people might find that objectionable or regrettable) Le Carre does not engage in the moral stereotyping or moral certainty you describe.
Also, spies probably save lives: if for example the Kremlin had been more skilled at collecting and analyzing information about Ukraine's military capabilities, they probably wouldn't have invaded.
Gerald Seymour
Charles Cumming
Mick Herron
Simon Conway
David Ignatius
David McCloskey
Charles McCarry
Robert Littell
Brian Freemantle
Paul Vidich
I do not agree with the review though. Spoilers ahead. The novel isn't about "about a lasting, even defiant humanism in the face of battling ideologies". The humanism wasn't very lasting or defiant. The most likeably and humanist character -- the pretty jewish girl, was brutally murdered at the berlin wall after all of her dreams were mercilessly destroyed. The other character figured out what was happening to him, but wasn't much defiant, he just played his part like a good soldier even after he knew he was being betrayed and used to kill innocent people. It is a good book, but a very sad one, with a brutal unhappy ending.
But the really scary thing about this novel is something I understood only after reading it for a second time. While the ending was horrible and unhappy from the point of view of ordinary people like me, it was really meant to be a happy ending from the point of view of people that matter -- i.e., Le Carre's bosses at the various spy agencies and the English upper class.
After all it has England winning. And England wins in a very English way, by being smart, calculating, duplicitous, nasty and ruthless and completely free of any higher principles. And especially free of humanism. In other words, very similar to the way England conquered and ruled half the world.
I bet the English upper classes loved to see how nasty and ruthless their spy agencies were and the spy agencies loved how they were portrayed in the novel.
Even the death of the pretty girl is justified if one looks upon it with the logic of the English ruling class. She was after all, a traitor. She was born and raised in England and yet was a communist. Le Carre portrays her very sympathetically as a misguided idealist, but kills her off after all.
Thus I do not agree with the other part of the review, and the usual treatment Le Carre gets. And that is that Le Carre is some kind of dissident showing the bad side of intelligence services against their wishes. I am sure, the book got the full blessing of Mi 6 top brass, if it was not directly ordered by them.
Don't get me wrong, I think Le Carre was a brilliant writer, but on more careful consideration I am pretty sure some of his early works were not the dissident works the entire literary community pretends them to be but straight up public relations for the MI 6.
His next novel, the looking glass war, confirms my suspicions. It is about some government department other than the Circus (which is Le Carre's code name for MI 6) tries to do some spying for themselves independently of the Circus. The upper levels of government fund them because they do not want all the spying competence to be concentrated in one department. Well, that other department fails utterly because of lack of experience, professionalism, training, etc. The moral of the entire story is that the government should not let other departments do any spying, but they should give all the spying missions and all the money to the Circus (i.e., MI 6).
To Le Carres credit, his later novels that I read are genuinely subversive, revealing some uncomfortable truths about power. It seems that after the iron curtain fell, he had much more freedom of speech.