‘Don’t you think it’s time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?’ Smiley asks Karla, the man who will become Moscow’s chief spymaster, in a prison in Delhi in the 1950s, when trying to persuade him to defect to the West.Īnother paradox of Cold War espionage is that it wasn’t in the interests of spies on either side actually to win, because they’d be doing themselves out of a job. There are no goodies and baddies: or rather, there’s no correspondence between whether someone’s a goodie or a baddie and which side he’s on. Le Carré’s overripe language is suited to the decrepit world he describes.
One of the things that’s so good about John le Carré’s Cold War thrillers is their moral murkiness, as they explore what happens when the people playing the game lose sight of its ultimate purpose, as they all inevitably do, and begin to play for the game’s own sake. Their activities are defensible only on the grounds that the end, to paraphrase the 17th-century Jesuit theologian Hermann Busenbaum, justifies the means.īut it’s very easy to lose sight of the end, especially when it’s something as remote and abstract as winning the Cold War, or the ‘war on terror’. Or to any spy: Smiley and his kind perpetrate all sorts of illegal, immoral and anti-democratic acts in the name of democracy – theft, blackmail, extortion, kidnapping, murder. The aphorism, or at any rate Bland’s paraphrase, applies just as well to a double-agent.
‘An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?’ Roy Bland asks George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).
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