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142-419: David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré ( / l ə ˈ k ær eɪ / lə- KARR -ay ), was a British author, best known for his espionage novels , many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. A "sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer", he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During

284-429: A "mob orator"), Dominic Cummings and Nigel Farage in interviews, claiming that their "task is to fire up the people with nostalgia [and] with anger". He further opined in interviews: "What really scares me about nostalgia is that it's become a political weapon. Politicians are creating a nostalgia for an England that never existed, and selling it, really, as something we could return to", adding that, with "the demise of

426-479: A "total war" campaign to mobilise society for the war. As part of the "total war" campaign, the state warned people to be vigilant at all times for spies; alongside this campaign went a mania for spy stories, which likewise warned people to be vigilant against spies. Novels and films with a counterespionage theme became ubiquitous in Manchukuo from 1937 onward. Despite the intensely patriarchal values of Manchukuo,

568-499: A 'Service' (rear support). Intelligence Corps personnel wear a distinctive cypress green beret with a cap badge consisting of a union rose (a red rose with a white centre) between two laurel branches and surmounted by a crown. Their motto is Manui Dat Cognitio Vires ("Knowledge gives Strength to the Arm"). The corps' quick march is The Rose & Laurel while its slow march is Henry Purcell 's Trumpet Tune & Ayre . Within

710-579: A MI6 agent's attempts to uncover a mole in apartheid -era South Africa . Greene had worked as a MI6 agent in Freetown, an important British naval base during World War Two, searching for German spies who would radio information about the movements of ships to the Kriegsmarine , experiences which inspired The Heart of the Matter . Greene's case officer during World War Two was Harold "Kim" Philby, who

852-470: A Mossad spy in Greece. The book was published as a novel, but Roth insisted that the book was not a novel as he argued that the book was presented only as a novel in order to give it deniability. At the end of the book, the character of Philip Roth is ordered to publish the account as a novel, and it ends with Roth the character saying: "And I became quite convinced that it was my interest to do that...I'm just

994-753: A Pale Horse (1984). Manning Coles published Drink to Yesterday (1940), a grim story occurring during the Great War, which introduces the hero Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon . However, later novels featuring Hambledon were lighter-toned, despite being set either in Nazi Germany or Britain during the Second World War (1939–45). After the War, the Hambledon adventures fell to formula, losing critical and popular interest. The events leading up to

1136-598: A Spy (1938), The Mask of Dimitrios (US: A Coffin for Dimitrios , 1939), and Journey into Fear (1940) feature amateurs entangled in espionage. The politics and ideology are secondary to the personal story that involved the hero or heroine. Ambler's Popular Front –period œuvre has a left-wing perspective about the personal consequences of "big picture" politics and ideology, which was notable, given spy fiction's usual right-wing tilt in defence of establishment attitudes. Ambler's early novels Uncommon Danger (1937) and Cause for Alarm (1938), in which NKVD spies help

1278-613: A book editor with Hodder & Stoughton who collaborated with him behind the scenes. They had a son, Nicholas, who writes as Nick Harkaway . Le Carré lived in St Buryan , Cornwall, for more than 40 years; he owned a mile of cliff near Land's End . The house, Tregiffian Cottage, was put up for sale in 2023 for £3 million. Le Carré also owned a house in Gainsborough Gardens in Hampstead in north London. Le Carré

1420-699: A book later in 1969. In Seventeen Moments of Spring , the story is set in the Great Patriotic War as Isayev goes undercover, using the alias of a Baltic German nobleman Max Otto von Stierlitz to infiltrate the German high command. The plot of Seventeen Moments of Spring takes place in Berlin between January–May 1945 during the last days of the Third Reich as the Red Army advances onto Berlin and

1562-524: A fall at his home. His wife Valerie died on 27 February 2021, two months after her husband, at age 82. In 2023, biographer Adam Sisman in The Secret Life of John le Carré identified 11 women with whom le Carré had affairs during his second marriage. Le Carré's son Timothy died on 31 May 2022 at the age of 59, shortly after he finished editing A Private Spy , a collection of his father's letters. In 2010, le Carré donated his literary archive to

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1704-578: A field agent; he reprised the role in the sequel The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1987). Other important American authors who became active in spy fiction during this period include Robert Littell , The Defection of A. J. Lewinter (1973); James Grady , Six Days of the Condor (1974); William F. Buckley Jr. , Saving the Queen (1976); Nelson DeMille , The Talbot Odyssey (1984); W. E. B. Griffin ,

1846-466: A full-time author. His other novels that have been adapted for film or television include The Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), The Russia House (1989), The Night Manager (1993), The Tailor of Panama (1996), The Constant Gardener (2001), A Most Wanted Man (2008) and Our Kind of Traitor (2010). Philip Roth said that A Perfect Spy (1986)

1988-532: A good Mossadnik". Intelligence Corps (United Kingdom) The Intelligence Corps ( Int Corps ) is a corps of the British Army . It is responsible for gathering, analysing and disseminating military intelligence and also for counter-intelligence and security. The Director of the Intelligence Corps is a brigadier . In the 19th century, British intelligence work was undertaken by

2130-619: A journalist, le Carré wrote The Unbearable Peace (1991), a nonfiction account of Brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire (1911–1992), the Swiss Army officer, who spied for the Soviet Union from 1962 until 1975. Credited under his pen name, le Carré appears as an extra in the 2011 film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , among the guests at the Christmas party in several flashback scenes. He also appears, in uncredited cameo roles, as

2272-468: A le Carré story, although he brought the character back in The Secret Pilgrim and A Legacy of Spies . A Perfect Spy (1986), which chronicles the boyhood moral education of Magnus Pym and how it leads to his becoming a spy, is the author's most autobiographical espionage novel, reflecting the boy's very close relationship with his con man father. Biographer LynnDianne Beene describes

2414-642: A long-haired, hashish -smoking fop in the novels The Dolly Dolly Spy (1967), The Great Spy Race (1968), The Bang Bang Birds (1968) and Think, Inc. (1971); James Mitchell 's 'David Callan' series, written in his own name, beginning with Red File for Callan (1969); William Garner 's John Morpurgo in Think Big, Think Dirty (1983), Rats' Alley (1984), and Zones of Silence (1986); and Joseph Hone 's 'Peter Marlow' series, beginning with The Private Sector (1971), set during Israel's Six-Day War (1967) against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In all of these series

2556-404: A memorial funeral service but did not attend, a plot point repeated in A Perfect Spy . Cornwell's schooling began at St Andrew's Preparatory School , near Pangbourne , Berkshire, and continued at Sherborne School . He grew unhappy with the typically harsh English public school regime of the time and disliked his disciplinarian housemaster. He left Sherborne early to study foreign languages at

2698-444: A mixed Russian-Han heritage; the implication being that people of "pure" descent from one of the "five races" of Manchukuo would not betray it. In "A Mixed Race Woman", the villain initially appears to Mali, the eponymous character who has a Russian father and a Han mother, but she ultimately is revealed to be blackmailed by the story's true villain, the foreign spy Baoerdun, and she proves to be loyal to Manchukuo after all as she forces

2840-580: A moral human being, who remains sociable and kind to all people, including the citizens of the state that his country is at war with. Unlike Bond, Isayev is devoted to his wife who he deeply loves and despite spending at least ten years as a spy in Germany and having countless chances to sleep with attractive German women remains faithful towards her. Through Isayev is a spy for the NKVD as the Soviet secret police

2982-749: A more popular level, Leslie Charteris ' popular and long-running Saint series began, featuring Simon Templar, with Meet the Tiger (1928). Water on the Brain (1933) by former intelligence officer Compton Mackenzie was the first successful spy novel satire . Prolific author Dennis Wheatley also wrote his first spy novel, The Eunuch of Stamboul (1935) during this period. In the sham state of Manchukuo , spies often featured in stories published in its government-sponsored magazines as villains threatening Manchukuo. Manchukuo had been presented since its founding in 1931 as an idealistic Pan-Asian experiment, where

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3124-524: A murder at a boys' public school . Although Call for the Dead evolves into an espionage story, Smiley's motives are more personal than political. Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works; following its publication, he left MI6 to become a full-time writer. Although le Carré had intended The Spy Who Came in from

3266-561: A museum usher in the 2016 movie, Our Kind of Traitor , and in the 2016 BBC TV production, The Night Manager , as a restaurant diner. In 2017, le Carré expressed concerns over the future of liberal democracy , saying: "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

3408-578: A nation in the process of re-assembling itself from the shards of its past, now Oriental, now Western, now secular, now religious, but always anxiously moralizing about itself, criticizing itself with Maoist ferocity, a nation crackling with debate, rediscovering its past while it fought for its future." He declared: "No nation on earth was more deserving of peace—or more condemned to fight for it." In 1954, Cornwell married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp. They had three sons: Simon, Stephen and Timothy; they divorced in 1971. In 1972, Cornwell married Valerie Jane Eustace,

3550-729: A newspaper correspondent where he met Lansdale who appears in The Quiet American as Alden Pyle while the character of Thomas Fowler, a cynical, but goodhearted British journalist in Saigon was partly based on himself. MI6 was outraged by Our Man In Havana with its story of James Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba, recruited to work for MI6 who bamboozles his employers by selling them diagrams of vacuum cleaners, which he persuades MI6 are really diagrams of Soviet missiles. MI6 pressed for Greene to be prosecuted for violating

3692-449: A novel and the TV mini-series that has offended Westerners who are more accustomed to seeing spy stories via the prism of the fast-paced Bond stories is the way that Isayev spends much time interacting with ordinary Germans despite the fact these interactions do nothing to advance the plot and are merely superfluous to the story. However, the point of these scenes are to show that Isayev is still

3834-403: A perception for the colour of human beings: a swift, feminine sensitivity to their characters and motives. He knew mankind as a huntsman knows his cover, as a fox the woods. For a spy must hunt while he is hunted, and the crowd is his estate. He could collect their gestures, record the interplay of glance and movement, as a huntsman can record the twisted bracken and broken twig, or as a fox detects

3976-733: A sad kind." In January 2003, two months prior to the invasion, The Times published le Carré's essay "The United States Has Gone Mad" criticising the buildup to the Iraq War and President George W. Bush 's response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks , calling it "worse than McCarthyism , worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War " and "beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams". Le Carré participated in

4118-518: A spy novel review column. Nevertheless, counting on the aficionado, publishers continued to issue spy novels by writers popular during the Cold War era, among them Harlot's Ghost (1991) by Norman Mailer . In the US, the new novels Moscow Club (1991) by Joseph Finder , Coyote Bird (1993) by Jim DeFelice, Masquerade (1996) by Gayle Lynds , and The Unlikely Spy (1996) by Daniel Silva maintained

4260-579: A thinly disguised version of the CIA while posing as a journalist. Writing under the pen name Trevanian , Roger Whitaker published a series of brutal spy novels starting with The Eiger Sanction (1972) featuring an amoral art collector/CIA assassin who ostensibly kills for the United States, but in fact kills for money. Whitaker followed up The Eiger Sanction with The Loo Sanction (1973) and Shibumi (1979). Starting in 1976 with his novel Saving

4402-434: A tiny scale, at close range" and complained that he has seen too many "people cheated and misled, whole lives thrown away, people shot and in prison, whole groups and classes of men written off for nothing". Le Carré's middle-class hero George Smiley is a middle-aged spy burdened with an unfaithful, upper-class wife who publicly cuckolds him for sport. The American scholars Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen described Smiley as

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4544-565: A very low status. One consequence of the French influence on Russian culture was that the subject of espionage was usually ignored by Russian writers during the Imperial period. Traditionally, the subject of espionage was treated in the Soviet Union as a story of villainous foreign spies threatening the USSR. The organisation established to hunt down German spies in 1943, SMERSH, was an acronym for

4686-543: Is a metaphysical thriller ostensibly based on the infiltration of an anarchist organisation by detectives, but the story is actually a vehicle for exploring society's power structures and the nature of suffering. The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes , created by Arthur Conan Doyle , served as a SpyHunter for the British government in the stories " The Adventure of the Second Stain " (1904), and " The Adventure of

4828-504: Is an overweight, bespectacled bureaucrat who uses cunning and manipulation to achieve his ends, as an accurate depiction of a spy. Le Carré's "writing entered intelligence services themselves. He popularized the term 'mole'...and other language that has become intelligence vernacular on both sides of the Atlantic — 'honeytrap', 'scalphunter', 'lamplighter' to name a few." However, in his first tweet as MI6's chief, Richard Moore revealed

4970-501: Is going on in the "secret world" of intelligence-gathering affected both non-fiction and fiction books about espionage. The Cold War and the struggle between Soviet intelligence-known as the KGB from 1954 onward-vs. the CIA and MI6 made the subject of espionage a popular one for novelists to write about. Most of the spy novels of the Cold War were really action thrillers with little resemblance to

5112-505: Is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonymity and his safety. His fear makes him servile—he could embrace the shoppers who jostle him in their impatience and force him from the pavement. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes. But this fear, this servility, this dependence had developed in Smiley

5254-524: Is moving "backwards into her dark, delusional past", with Britain following a short way behind. Le Carré later said that he believed the novel's plotline, involving the U.S. and British intelligence services colluding to subvert the European Union , to be "horribly possible". Le Carré was an outspoken advocate of European integration and sharply criticised Brexit . Le Carré criticised Brexit advocates such as Boris Johnson (whom he referred to as

5396-633: Is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There's an encouragement about". He later wrote that the end of the Cold War had left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the "notion of individual freedom , of inclusiveness, of tolerance – all of that we called anti-communism " prevailing during that time. Le Carré opposed both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin , arguing that their desire to seek or maintain their countries' superpower status caused an impulse "for oligarchy ,

5538-439: Is usually considered the first American modern (glamour and dirt) spy thriller weighing action and reflection. Richard Helms , the director-general of the CIA from 1966 to 1973 loathed le Carré's morally grey spy novels, which he felt damaged the image of the CIA, and encouraged Hunt to write spy novels as a rebuttal. Helms had hopes that Hunt might write an "American James Bond" novel, which would be adopted by Hollywood and do for

5680-735: Is without doubt the greatest catastrophe and the greatest idiocy that Britain has perpetrated since the invasion of Suez ", le Carré said of Brexit . "Nobody is to blame but the Brits themselves – not the Irish, not the Europeans." "The idea, to me, that at the moment we should imagine we can substitute access to the biggest trade union in the world with access to the American market is terrifying", he said. Speaking to The Guardian in 2019, he commented: "I've always believed, though ironically it's not

5822-562: The Men at War series (1984–); Stephen Coonts , Flight of the Intruder (1986); Canadian-American author David Morrell , The League of Night and Fog (1987); David Hagberg , Without Honor (1989); Noel Hynd, False Flags (1990); and Richard Ferguson, Oiorpata (1990). The culture of Imperial Russia was deeply influenced by the culture of France, and traditionally spy novels in France had

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5964-581: The Bodleian Library , Oxford. The initial 85 boxes of material deposited included handwritten drafts of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Constant Gardener . The library hosted a public display of these and other items to mark World Book Day in March 2011. In addition in 2008, The Times ranked le Carré 22nd on its list of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945". Espionage novel Commentator William Bendler noted that "Chapter 2 of

6106-489: The Cold War (1945–91) and portray British Intelligence agents as unheroic political functionaries, aware of the moral ambiguity of their work and engaged more in psychological than physical drama. While "[espionage] was the genre that earned him fame...he used it as a platform to explore larger ethical problems and the human condition". The insight he demonstrated led "many fellow authors and critics [to regard] him as one of

6248-592: The Irish Republican Army . On Bloody Sunday (1920) 15 British Military Officers and civilians were shot and killed during multiple attacks in Dublin. Of the 15 killed six were Army Intelligence Officers, two were Courts Martial Officers, one was a senior Staff Officer serving with Irish Command ( Brevet Lieut-Colonel Hugh Montgomery ), three policemen (all former British military), two civilians (all former British military) and one local civilian. Following

6390-511: The Iron Curtain in 1989, le Carré's writing shifted to the portrayal of the new multilateral world. His first completely post-Cold War novel, The Night Manager (1993), deals with drug and arms smuggling in the world of Latin American drug lords , secretive Caribbean banking entities and corrupt Western officials. His final novel, Silverview , was published posthumously in 2021. Most of le Carré's books are spy stories set during

6532-669: The Special Operations Executive (SOE). Intelligence Corps officers were involved in forming the highly-effective Long Range Desert Group , and Corps officer Lt Col Peter Clayton was one of the four founders of the Special Air Service (SAS). Around 40 per cent of British Army personnel at Bletchley Park were in the Intelligence Corps. The Combined Allied Intelligence Corps as it was known in Malta, began recruiting in 1940 following Italy's entry into

6674-790: The University of Bern from 1948 to 1949. In 1950, he was called up for National Service and served in the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Allied-occupied Austria , working as a German language interrogator of people who had crossed the Iron Curtain to the West. In 1952, he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford , where he worked covertly for the Security Service, MI5 , spying on far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents . During his studies, he

6816-514: The "secrets" that he was selling them was merely information culled from the newspapers. The bumbling vacuum cleaner salesman Wormold in Our Man in Havana seems to been inspired by Herbert Greene. In The Human Factor , Greene portrayed MI6 again in a highly unsympathetic light, depicting the British government as supporting the apartheid regime of South Africa because it was pro-Western while

6958-492: The 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service ( MI5 ) and the Secret Intelligence Service ( MI6 ). Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen. Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller, was adapted as an award-winning film , and remains one of his best-known works. This success allowed him to leave MI6 to become

7100-455: The 1950s, inspired an even more popular series of films starting in 1962. The success of the Bond novels and films has greatly influenced popular images of the work of spies even though the character of Bond is more of an assassin than a spy. Despite the commercial success of Fleming's extravagant novels, John le Carré , himself a former spy, created anti-heroic protagonists who struggled with

7242-833: The Affair, which involved elements of international espionage, treason , and antisemitism , dominated French politics. The details were reported by the world press: an Imperial German penetration agent betraying to Germany the secrets of the General Staff of the French Army ; the French counter-intelligence riposte of sending a charwoman to rifle the trash in the German Embassy in Paris, were news that inspired successful spy fiction. At least two Sherlock Holmes stories have clear espionage themes. In The Adventure of

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7384-625: The Allied Screening Commission. The commission was established by Field-Marshal Sir Harold Alexander a few days after the fall of Rome in June 1944 to identify and reimburse Italian civilians who had assisted Allied escapees. Throughout the Cold War , Intelligence Corps officers and NCOs (with changed insignia) were posted behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany , to join in the intelligence-gathering activities of

7526-915: The Anglo–American theft of a superior Soviet jet aeroplane. Other important British writers who first became active in spy fiction during this period include Ian Mackintosh , A Slaying in September (1967); Kenneth Benton , Twenty-fourth Level (1969); Desmond Bagley , Running Blind (1970); Anthony Price , The Labyrinth Makers (1971); Gerald Seymour , Harry's Game (1975); Brian Freemantle , Charlie M (1977); Bryan Forbes , Familiar Strangers (1979); Reginald Hill , The Spy's Wife (1980); and Raymond Harold Sawkins , writing as Colin Forbes, Double Jeopardy (1982). Philip Gooden provides an analysis of British spy fiction in four categories: professionals, amateurs, dandies and literary types. During

7668-738: The British Army, soldiers of the Intelligence Corps are often referred to as Green Slime, or sometimes simply 'Slime', due to the colour of their beret. Their headquarters, formerly at Maresfield Camp, East Sussex , then Templer Barracks at Ashford, Kent , moved in 1997 to MOD Chicksands in Bedfordshire along with the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre (DISC). DISC was renamed as Joint Intelligence Training Group in January 2015. The Intelligence Corps Museum

7810-441: The British Commanders'-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany ( Brixmis ). Many members of the Intelligence Corps served in Northern Ireland during " the Troubles ". Units such as the Military Reaction Force , Special Reconnaissance Unit , Force Research Unit and 14 Intelligence Company contained Corps soldiers and officers. On 1 February 1985 the corps was officially declared an 'Arm' (combat support) instead of

7952-399: The Bruce-Partington Plans " (1912). In " His Last Bow " (1917), he served Crown and country as a double agent , transmitting false intelligence to Imperial Germany on the eve of the Great War. The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) by Baroness Orczy chronicled an English aristocrat 's derring-do in rescuing French aristocrats from the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution (1789–99). But

8094-425: The Cheka. The frequent name changes for the secret police made no impression with the Russian people who still call any secret policeman a Chekisty . Semichastny felt that the legacy of the Yezhovshchina ("Yezhovz times") of 1936-1939 had given the KGB a fearsome reputation that he wanted to erase as wanted ordinary people to have a more favorable and positive image of the Chekisty as the protectors and defenders of

8236-425: The Cold as an indictment of espionage as morally compromised, audiences widely viewed its protagonist, Alec Leamas, as a tragic hero . In response, le Carré's next book, The Looking Glass War , was a satire about an increasingly deadly espionage mission which ultimately proves pointless. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People (the Karla trilogy) brought Smiley back as

8378-424: The Dead (1961). Cornwell identified Lord Clanmorris as one of two models for George Smiley , the spymaster of the Circus , the other being Vivian H. H. Green . As a schoolboy, Cornwell first met the latter when Green was the Chaplain and Assistant Master at Sherborne School (1942–51). The friendship continued after Green's move to Lincoln College, where he tutored Cornwell. In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6 ,

8520-457: The FBI was as "coolly efficient super-cop" who always successful in performing his duties. The FBI director, J.E. Hoover , had long cultivated the American press and Hollywood to promote a favorable image of the FBI. In 1955, Edward S. Aarons began publishing the Sam Durell CIA "Assignment" series, which began with Assignment to Disaster (1955). Donald Hamilton published Death of a Citizen (1960) and The Wrecking Crew (1960), beginning

8662-405: The Hebrew Bible's Book of Joshua might count as the first Spy Story in world literature. (...) Three thousand years before James Bond seduced Pussy Galore and turned her into his ally against Goldfinger , the spies sent by General Joshua into the city of Jericho did much the same with Rahab the Harlot. " Spy fiction as a genre started to emerge during the 19th Century. Early examples of

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8804-584: The Intelligence Department of the War Office . An important figure was Sir Charles Wilson , a Royal Engineer who successfully pushed for reform of the War Office's treatment of topographical work. In the early 1900s intelligence gathering was becoming better understood, to the point where a counter-intelligence organisation ( MI5 ) was formed by the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DoMI) under Captain (later Major-General) Vernon Kell ; overseas intelligence gathering began in 1912 by MI6 under Commander (later Captain) Mansfield Smith-Cumming . Although

8946-569: The London protests against the Iraq War . He said the war resulted from the "politicisation of intelligence to fit the political intentions" of governments and "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history". He was critical of Tony Blair 's role in taking Britain into the Iraq War, saying: "I can't understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretences has committed

9088-407: The Naval Treaty , Holmes recovers the text of a secret Naval Treaty between Britain and Italy, stolen by a daring spy. In His Last Bow , Holmes himself acts as a double agent , providing Germany with a lot of false information on the eve of WWI . The major themes of a spy in the lead-up to the First World War were the continuing rivalry between the European colonial powers for dominance in Asia,

9230-414: The Nazis grew more desperate. In 1973, Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny was turned into a television mini-series, which was extremely popular in the Soviet Union and turned the Isayev character into a cultural phenomena. The Isayev character plays a role in Russian culture, even today, that is analogous to the role James Bond plays in modern British culture. As aspect of Seventeen Moments of Spring , both as

9372-421: The Official Secrets Act, claiming that he revealed too much about MI6's methods in Our Man in Havana , but it decided against charging Greene out of the fear that prosecuting him would suggest the unflattening picture of MI6 in Our Man in Havana was based on reality. Greene's older brother, Herbert, a professional con-man had briefly worked as a spy for the Japanese in the 1930s before his employers realised that

9514-441: The Palestinians, against the backdrop of continuing Cold War tensions, and the increasing use of terrorism as a political tool. The end of the Cold War in 1991 mooted the USSR , Russia and other Iron Curtain countries as credible enemies of democracy, and the US Congress even considered disestablishing the CIA . Espionage novelists found themselves at a temporary loss for obvious nemeses . The New York Times ceased publishing

9656-489: The Queen , the conservative American journalist and former CIA agent William F. Buckley published the first of his Blackford Oakes novels featuring a CIA agent whose politics were the same as the author's. Blackford Oakes was portrayed as a "sort of an American James Bond" who ruthlessly dispatches villainous KGB agents with much aplomb. The first American techno-thriller was The Hunt for Red October (1984) by Tom Clancy . It introduced CIA deskman (analyst) Jack Ryan as

9798-467: The Red Menace, which was perceived as another "clash of civilizations". Spy fiction was dominated by British authors during this period, initially former intelligence officers and agents writing from inside the trade. Examples include Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928) by W. Somerset Maugham , which accurately portrays spying in the First World War, and The Mystery of Tunnel 51 (1928) by Alexander Wilson whose novels convey an uncanny portrait of

9940-544: The Second World War, and the War itself, continue to be fertile ground for authors of spy fiction. Notable examples include Ken Follett , Eye of the Needle (1978); Alan Furst , Night Soldiers (1988); and David Downing , the Station series, beginning with Zoo Station (2007). The metamorphosis of the Second World War (1939–45) into the Soviet–American Cold War (1945–91) gave new impetus to spy novelists. Atomsk by Paul Linebarger (later known as Cordwainer Smith ), written in 1948 and published in 1949, appears to be

10082-429: The Soviet Union instead of torturers and killers. As such, Semichastny encouraged the publication of a series of spy novels that featured heroic Chekisty defending the Soviet Union. It was also during Semichastny's time as KGB chairman that the cult of the "hero spies" began in the Soviet Union as publications lionised the achievements of Soviet spies such as Colonel Rudolf Abel, Harold "Kim" Philby, Richard Sorge and of

10224-598: The Soviet writer Yulian Semyonov published a novel set in the Russian Civil War featuring a Cheka agent Maxim Maximovich Isaуev as its hero. Inspired by its success, the KGB encouraged Semyonov to write a sequel, Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny ("Seventeen Moments of Spring"), which proved to one of the most popular Soviet spy novels when it was serialized in Pravda in January–February 1969 and then published as

10366-639: The United States, where the achievements of Anglo-American intelligence during the Second World War were to a certain extent publicized soon after the war such as the fact that the Americans had broken the Japanese naval codes (which came out in 1946) and the British deception operation of 1943, Operation Mincemeat (which was revealed in 1953), there was nothing equivalent in the Soviet Union until

10508-482: The Western powers were betraying their values by supporting the white supremacist South African government. Much controversy ensued when shortly after the publication of The Human Factor it emerged that such a plan had in fact been carried out, which led to much speculation about whether this was a coincidence or whether Greene had more access to secret information than he let on. There was also much speculation that

10650-470: The actual work of spies. The writer Malcolm Muggeridge who had worked as a spy in World War Two commented that thriller writers in the Cold War took to writing about espionage "as easily as the mentally unstable become psychiatrists or the impotent pornographers". The city that was considered to be the "capital of the Cold War" was Berlin, owing to its post-war status as the city was divided between

10792-438: The agency's "complicated relationship with the author: He urged would-be Smileys not to apply to the service." Le Carré records a number of incidents from his period as a diplomat in his autobiographical work, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016), which include escorting six visiting German parliamentarians to a London brothel and translating at a meeting between a senior German politician and Harold Macmillan . As

10934-532: The amateur protagonist survive, are especially remarkable among English-language spy fiction. Above Suspicion (1939) by Helen MacInnes , about an anti-Nazi husband and wife spy team, features literate writing and fast-paced, intricate, and suspenseful stories occurring against contemporary historical backgrounds. MacInnes wrote many other spy novels in the course of a long career, including Assignment in Brittany (1942), Decision at Delphi (1961), and Ride

11076-473: The book's protagonist, the MI6 officer Maurice Castle, married to a black South African woman, provides information to the KGB to thwart MI6 operations. Much of the plot of The Human Factor concerned a secret plan by the British, American and West German governments to buy up South African gold in bulk in order to stabilise the economy of South Africa , which Greene presented as fundamentally amoral, arguing that

11218-455: The central figure in a sprawling espionage saga depicting his efforts first to root out a mole in the Circus and then to entrap his Soviet rival and counterpart, code-named 'Karla'. The trilogy was originally meant to be a long-running series that would find Smiley dispatching agents after Karla all around the world. Smiley's People marked the last time Smiley featured as the central character in

11360-741: The character of Maurice Castle was inspired by Philby, but Greene consistently denied this. Other novelists followed a similar path. Len Deighton 's anonymous spy protagonist of The IPCRESS File (1962), Horse Under Water (1963), Funeral in Berlin (1964), and others, is a working-class man with a negative view of " the Establishment ". Other notable examples of espionage fiction during this period were also built around recurring characters. These include James Mitchell 's 'John Craig' series, written under his pseudonym 'James Munro', beginning with The Man Who Sold Death (1964); and Trevor Dudley-Smith 's Quiller spy novel series written under

11502-424: The conflict is internal, rather than external and visible. The recurring character George Smiley, who plays a central role in five novels and appears as a supporting character in four more, was written as an "antidote" to James Bond , a character le Carré called "an international gangster " rather than a spy and who he felt should be excluded from the canon of espionage literature. In contrast, he intended Smiley, who

11644-487: The counter-spy campaign targeted women who were encouraged to report anyone suspicious to the police with one slogan saying, "Women defend inside and men defend outside". The spy stories of Manchukuo such as "A Mixed Race Woman" often had female protagonists. In "A Mixed Race Woman", it is two ordinary women who break up the spy ring instead of the Manchukuo police as might be expected. The South Korean scholar Bong InYoung noted stories such as "A Mixed Race Woman" were part of

11786-738: The dismissal of the truth, the contempt, actually, for the electorate and for the democratic system ". Le Carré compared Trump's tendency to dismiss the media as " fake news " to the Nazi book burnings , and wrote that the United States is "heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism ". In le Carré's 2019 novel Agent Running in the Field , one of the novel's characters refers to Trump as "Putin's shithouse cleaner" who "does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can't do for himself". The novel's narrator describes Boris Johnson as "a pig-ignorant foreign secretary". He says Russia

11928-687: The early 1960s. Soviet novels prior to the 1960s to the extent that espionage was portrayed at all concerned heroic scouts in the Red Army who during the Great Patriotic War as the war with Germany is known in the Soviet Union who go on dangerous missions deep behind the Wehrmacht's lines to find crucial information. The scout stories were more action-adventure stories than espionage stories proper and significantly always portrayed Red Army scouts rather than Chekisty ("Chekists") as secret policemen are always called in Russia as their heroes. The protagonists of

12070-489: The espionage novel are The Spy (1821) and The Bravo (1831), by American novelist James Fenimore Cooper . The Bravo attacks European anti- republicanism , by depicting Venice as a city-state where a ruthless oligarchy wears the mask of the "serene republic". In nineteenth-century France, the Dreyfus Affair (1894–99) contributed much to public interest in espionage . For some twelve years (ca. 1894–1906),

12212-431: The ethical issues involved in espionage and sometimes resorted to immoral tactics. Le Carré depicted spies as living a morally grey world having to constantly make morally dubious decisions in an essentially amoral struggle where lies, paranoia and betrayal are the norm for both sides. In le Carré best known novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963), the hero Alec Leamas views himself as serving in "...a war fought on

12354-428: The fictional spy most likely to be successful as a real spy, citing le Carré's description of him in A Murder of Quality : "Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colorful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation

12496-486: The film ended with disillusioned British spy Alec Leamas and his lover, the naïve young woman Liz Gold being shot down while trying to cross the Berlin Wall from East Berlin into West Berlin. With Secret Ministry (1951), Desmond Cory introduced Johnny Fedora , the secret agent with a licence to kill , the government-sanctioned assassin . Ian Fleming , a former member of naval intelligence, followed swiftly with

12638-453: The finest English-language novelists of the twentieth century." His writing explores "human frailty—moral ambiguity, intrigue, nuance, doubt, and cowardice". The fallibility of Western democracy – and of its secret services – is a recurring theme, as are suggestions of a possible east–west moral equivalence. Characters experience little of the violence typically encountered in action thrillers and have very little recourse to gadgets. Much of

12780-408: The first espionage novel of the dawning conflict. The "secret world" of espionage allowed a situation when writers could project anything they wanted onto the "secret world". The author Bruce Page complained in his 1969 book The Philby Conspiracy : "The trouble is that a man can hold almost any theory he cares to about the secret world, and defend it against large quantities of hostile evidence by

12922-537: The first head of the Secret Intelligence Service , Mansfield Smith-Cumming , the original 'C'. In the book Literary Agents (1987), Anthony Masters wrote: "Ashenden's adventures come nearest to the real-life experiences of his creator"'. John Le Carré described Ashenden stories as a major influence on his novels as praised Maugham as "the first person to write anything about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality". At

13064-589: The first proposals to create an intelligence corps came in 1905, the first Intelligence Corps was formed in August 1914 and originally included only officers and their servants. It left for France on 12 August 1914. The Royal Flying Corps was formed to monitor the ground, and provided aerial photographs for the Corps to analyse. During the Irish War of Independence , Intelligence Corps operatives were used to monitor

13206-499: The foreign-intelligence service, and worked under the cover of Second Secretary at the British Embassy in  Bonn . He was later transferred to Hamburg as a political consul . There, he wrote the detective story A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), as "John le Carré"—a pseudonym required because Foreign Office staff were forbidden to publish under their own names. The meaning of

13348-659: The glamorous James Bond , secret agent 007 of the British Secret Service, a mixture of counter-intelligence officer, assassin and playboy. Perhaps the most famous fictional spy, Bond was introduced in Casino Royale (1953). After Fleming's death the franchise continued under other British and American authors, including Kingsley Amis , Christopher Wood , John Gardner , Raymond Benson , Sebastian Faulks , Jeffery Deaver , William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz . The Bond novels, which were extremely popular in

13490-650: The growing threat of conflict in Europe, the domestic threat of revolutionaries and anarchists, and historical romance. Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling concerns the Anglo – Russian " Great Game ", which consisted of a geopolitical rivalry and strategic warfare for supremacy in Central Asia , usually in Afghanistan . The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad examines the psychology and ideology motivating

13632-401: The gun out of Baoerdun's hand at the story's climax. However, Ding's story also states that Baoerdun would not dare to have attempted his blackmail scheme against a Han woman and that he targeted Mali because she was racially mixed and hence "weak". When Japan invaded China in 1937 and even more so in 1941, the level of repression and propaganda in Manchukuo was increased as the state launched

13774-594: The heroic Scotsman Richard Hannay . In France Gaston Leroux published the spy thriller Rouletabille chez Krupp (1917), in which a detective, Joseph Rouletabille , engages in espionage. After the Russian Revolution (1917) , the quality of spy fiction declined, perhaps because the Bolshevik enemy won the Russian Civil War (1917–23). Thus, the inter-war spy story usually concerns combating

13916-495: The image of the CIA what Fleming's Bond novels did for the image of MI6. In the 1970s, former CIA man Charles McCarry began the Paul Christopher series with The Miernik Dossier (1973) and The Tears of Autumn (1978), which were well written, with believable tradecraft. McCarry was a former CIA agent who worked as an editor for National Geographic and his hero Christopher likewise is an American spy who works for

14058-478: The local concerns in order to defeat the Communists until the modernization process was completed. The Nick Carter-Killmaster series of spy novels, initiated by Michael Avallone and Valerie Moolman, but authored anonymously, ran to over 260 separate books between 1964 and the early 1990s and invariably pitted American, Soviet and Chinese spies against each other. With the proliferation of male protagonists in

14200-585: The men and women who served in the Rote Kapelle spy network. Seeing the great popularity of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels in Britain and the United States, Soviet spy novels of the 1960s used the Bond novels as inspiration for both their plots and heroes, through Soviet prurience about sex ensured that the Chekisty heroes did not engage in the sort of womanising that Bond did. The first Bond-style novel

14342-532: The most widely read and most successful British writers of spy fiction, especially of invasion literature. Their prosaic style and formulaic stories, produced voluminously from 1900 to 1914, proved of low literary merit . During the War, John Buchan became the pre-eminent British spy novelist. His well-written stories portray the Great War as a "clash of civilisations" between Western civilization and barbarism . His notable novels are The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916) and sequels, all featuring

14484-424: The novel La Mal Jaune (1965) by the French writer Jean Lartéguy . The Ugly American was written as a rebuttal to The Quiet American under which the idealistic Colonel Barnum operating in the fictional Vietnam-like Southeast Asian nation of Sarkhan shows the way to defeat Communist guerillas by understanding local people in just the same way that Lansdale with his understanding and sympathy for ordinary Filipinos

14626-407: The novelist's own father, Ronnie Cornwell, as "an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values". Le Carré reflected that "writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised". He also wrote a semi-autobiographical work, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), as the story of a man's midlife existential crisis. With the fall of

14768-408: The officially designated "five races" of the Japanese, Han Chinese, Manchus, Koreans and Mongols had come together to build a utopian society. Manchukuo also had a substantial Russian minority who initially been considered as the "sixth race", but had been excluded. The spy stories of Manchukuo such as "A Mixed Race Woman" by the writer Ding Na often linked the willingness to serve as spies with having

14910-1076: The pseudonym 'Adam Hall', beginning with The Berlin Memorandum (US: The Quiller Memorandum , 1965), a hybrid of glamour and dirt, Fleming and Le Carré; and William Garner 's fantastic Michael Jagger in Overkill (1966), The Deep, Deep Freeze (1968), The Us or Them War (1969) and A Big Enough Wreath (1974). Other important British writers who first became active in spy fiction during this period include Padraig Manning O'Brine , Killers Must Eat (1951); Michael Gilbert , Be Shot for Sixpence (1956); Alistair MacLean , The Last Frontier (1959); Brian Cleeve , Assignment to Vengeance (1961); Jack Higgins , The Testament of Caspar Schulz (1962); and Desmond Skirrow , It Won't Get You Anywhere (1966). Dennis Wheatley 's 'Gregory Sallust' (1934-1968) and 'Roger Brook' (1947-1974) series were also largely written during this period. Notable recurring characters from this era include Adam Diment 's Philip McAlpine as

15052-557: The pseudonym is ambiguous: he sometimes said he had seen "le Carré" on a storefront, and later said he couldn't remember an origin. When translated, "le carré" means "the square". In 1964, le Carré's career as an intelligence officer came to an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents' covers to the KGB by Kim Philby , the infamous British double agent , one of the Cambridge Five . Le Carré depicted and analysed Philby as

15194-497: The scout stories always almost ended being killed at the climax of the stories, giving up their lives up to save the Motherland from the German invaders. In November 1961, Vladimir Semichastny became the chairman of the KGB and sent out to improve the image of the Chekisty . The acronym KGB ( Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti -Committee of State Security) was adopted in 1954, but the organisation had been founded in 1917 as

15336-731: The series featuring Matt Helm , a CIA assassin and counter-intelligence agent. Major General Edward Lansdale , a charismatic intelligence officer who was widely credited with having masterminded the defeat of the Communist Huk rebellion in the Philippines inspired several fictional versions of himself. Besides for The Quiet American , he appeared as Colonel Edwin Barnum in The Ugly American (1958) by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick and as Colonel Lionel Teryman in

15478-573: The signs of danger". Like Le Carré, former British Intelligence officer Graham Greene also examined the morality of espionage in left-wing, anti-imperialist novels such as The Heart of the Matter (1948), set in Sierra Leone , the seriocomic Our Man in Havana (1959) occurring in Cuba under the regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista before his deposition in the Cuban Revolution (1953–59), and The Human Factor (1978) about

15620-465: The simple expedient of retreating behind further and further screens of postulated inward mystery. Secret services have in common with Freemasons and mafiosi that they inhabit an intellectual twilight-a kind of ambiguous gloom in which it is hard to distinguish with certainty between the menacing and the merely ludicrous. In such circumstances the human affinity for myth and legend easily gets out of control". This inability to know for certain about what

15762-676: The socially marginal men and women of a revolutionary cell. A diplomat from an unnamed (but clearly Russian) embassy forces a double-agent, Verloc, to organise a failed attempt to bomb the Greenwich Observatory in the hope that the revolutionaries will be blamed. Conrad's next novel, Under Western Eyes (1911), follows a reluctant spy sent by the Russian Empire to infiltrate a group of revolutionaries based in Geneva . G. K. Chesterton 's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

15904-476: The spy fiction genre, writers and book packagers also started bringing out spy fiction with a female as the protagonist. One notable spy series is The Baroness , featuring a sexy female superspy, with the novels being more action-oriented, in the mould of Nick Carter-Killmaster. Other important American authors who became active in spy fiction during this period include Ross Thomas , The Cold War Swap (1966). The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971) by Robert Ludlum

16046-461: The spy novel in the post– Cold War world. Other important American authors who first became active in spy fiction during this period include David Ignatius , Agents of Innocence (1997); David Baldacci , Saving Faith (1999); and Vince Flynn , with Term Limits (1999) and a series of novels featuring counter-terrorism expert Mitch Rapp. In 1993, the American novelist Philip Roth published Operation Shylock , an account of his supposed work as

16188-458: The state's campaign to take over "...the governance of private and family life, relying on the power of propaganda literature and the nationwide mobilization of the social discourse of counterespionage". At the same time, she noted "A Mixed Race Woman" with its intelligent female protagonists seemed to challenge the patriarchal values of Manchukuo which portrayed women as the weaker sex in need of male protection and guidance. However, Bong noted that

16330-558: The term "spy novel" was defined by The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Irish author Erskine Childers . The Riddle of the Sands described two British yachtsman cruising off the North Sea coast of Germany who turned amateur spies when they discover a secret German plan to invade Britain. Its success created a market for the invasion literature subgenre, which was flooded by imitators. William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim became

16472-471: The true heroine of "A Mixed Race Woman", Shulan is presented as superior to Mali as she is Han and the story is one "...of female disempowerment in that Mali is completely subordinate to the racial order Shulan sets". The growing support of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain , and the imminence of war, attracted quality writers back to spy fiction. British author Eric Ambler brought a new realism to spy fiction. The Dark Frontier (1936), Epitaph for

16614-411: The two German states while Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States all had occupations zones in Berlin. As a result, Berlin was a beehive of espionage during the Cold War with the city full of American, British, East German, French, Soviet and West German spies; it was estimated that there was an average of about 8,000 spies in Berlin at any given moment during the Cold War. Because Berlin

16756-463: The ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed." Le Carré was critical of Western governments' policies towards Iran. He said that Iran's actions are a response to being "encircled by nuclear powers" and by the way in which "we ousted Mosaddeq through the CIA and the Secret Service here across

16898-488: The upper-class traitor, codenamed "Gerald" by the KGB, the mole hunted by George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). Le Carré's first two novels, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962), are mystery fiction . Each features a retired spy, George Smiley , investigating a death; in the first book, the apparent suicide of a suspected communist, and in the second volume,

17040-570: The war E. Howard Hunt wrote his first spy novel, East of Farewell (1943). In 1949 he joined the recently created CIA and continued to write spy fiction for many years. Paul Linebarger , a China specialist for the CIA, published Atomsk , the first novel of the Cold War, in 1949. During the 1950s, most of American spy stories were not about the CIA, instead being about agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who tracked down and arrested Soviet spies. The popular American image of

17182-589: The war on the side of Germany. Among its many responsibilities in the Mediterranean Theatre were debriefing and interrogation of high-ranking prisoners of war in East Africa following Mussolini 's invasion of Abyssinia ("Eldoret" P.O.W. Camp no. 365 being one example), counter-intelligence operations following Operation Husky the Allied invasion of Sicily in August 1943, and implementation of

17324-531: The war the Intelligence Corps was gradually scaled down and disbanded entirely in 1929; intelligence matters were left to individual unit officers. On 19 July 1940 a new Intelligence Corps was created by Army Order 112 and has existed since that time. The Army had been unprepared for collecting intelligence for deployment to France, and the only intelligence had been collected by Major Sir Gerald Templer . The Corps trained operatives to parachute at RAF Ringway ; some of these were then dropped over France as part of

17466-444: The wartime slogan Smert shpionam! ("Death to Spies!"), which reflected the picture promoted by the Soviet state of spies as a class of people who deserved to be killed without mercy. The unfavorable picture of spies ensured that before the early 1960s there were no novels featuring Soviet spies as the heroes as espionage was portrayed as a disreputable activity that only the enemies of the Soviet Union engaged in. Unlike in Britain and

17608-534: The way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret police force in all the black arts, the SAVAK ". Le Carré feuded with Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses , stating: "Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity". In a 1998 interview with Douglas Davis, Le Carré described Israel as "the most extraordinary carnival of human variety that I have ever set eyes on,

17750-405: The way I've voted, that it's compassionate conservatism that in the end could, for example, integrate the private schooling system. If you do it from the left you will seem to be acting out of resentment; do it from the right and it looks like good social organisation." Le Carré also said: "I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years. And it's a kind of liberation, if

17892-481: The working class we saw also the demise of an established social order, based on the stability of ancient class structures". On the other hand, he said that in the Labour Party "they have this Leninist element and they have this huge appetite to level society." On Brexit, le Carré did not mince his words, comparing it to the 1956 Suez crisis , which confirmed post-imperial Britain's loss of global power. "This

18034-472: The writer had researched his family roots in Inchinattin, near Rosscarbery , County Cork, and that he had applied for an Irish passport, to which he was entitled having completed the process of becoming an Irish citizen and having Irish ancestry through his maternal grandmother, Olive Wolfe. His neighbour and friend Philippe Sands recalled: He became an Irishman through his maternal grandmother. And it

18176-543: The writing is literary and the tradecraft believable. Noteworthy examples of the journalistic style and successful integration of fictional characters with historical events were the politico-military novels The Day of the Jackal (1971) by Frederick Forsyth and Eye of the Needle (1978) by Ken Follett . With the explosion of technology, Craig Thomas , launched the techno-thriller with Firefox (1977), describing

18318-651: Was The Zakhov Mission (1963) by the Bulgarian writer Andrei Gulyashki who had commissioned by Semichastny and was published simultaneously in Russian and Bulgarian. The success of The Zakhov Mission led to a follow-up novel, Zakhov vs. 007 , where Gulyashki freely violated English copyright laws by using the James Bond character without the permission of the Fleming estate (he had asked for permission in 1966 and

18460-459: Was "the best English novel since the war". David John Moore Cornwell was born on 19 October 1931 in Poole , Dorset, England, son of Ronald Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1905–1975), and Olive Moore Cornwell (née Glassey, 1906–1989). His older brother, Tony (1929–2017), was an advertising executive and county cricketer (for Dorset), who later lived in the United States. His younger half-sister

18602-411: Was a center of espionage, the city was frequently a setting for spy novels and films. Furthermore, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 made the wall into a symbol of Communist tyranny, which further increased the attraction for Western writers of setting a Cold War spy novel in Berlin. Perhaps the most memorable story set in Berlin was The Spy Who Came In From The Cold which in both the novel and

18744-837: Was a member of The Gridiron Club and a college dining society known as The Goblin Club . When his father was declared bankrupt in 1954, Cornwell left Oxford to teach at Millfield Preparatory School ; however, a year later, he returned to Oxford, and graduated in 1956 with a First-Class degree in Modern Languages with a German Literature concentration. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, becoming an MI5 officer in 1958. He ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines and effected break-ins. Encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels as "John Bingham"), and while being an active MI5 officer, Cornwell began writing his first novel, Call for

18886-426: Was continually in debt. The father–son relationship has been described as "difficult". The Guardian reported that Le Carré recalled that he had been "beaten up by his father and grew up mostly starved of affection after his mother abandoned him at the age of five". Rick Pym, a scheming con man and the father of A Perfect Spy protagonist Magnus Pym, was based on Ronnie. When his father died in 1975, Cornwell paid for

19028-615: Was created in 1969, and later renamed as the Military Intelligence Museum, now also at Chicksands. Because the museum is on a working military base, it can be visited by appointment only. The corps has a particularly high proportion of commissioned officers , many of them commissioned from the ranks, and also a high percentage of female members. Non-commissioned personnel join as an Operator Military Intelligence (OPMI) or Operator Military Technical Intelligence (OPTI). They do basic 14-week military training at either

19170-438: Was credited with defeating the Communist Huk guerrillas. The Ugly American was greatly influenced by the modernization theory, which held Communism was something alike to a childhood disease as the modernization theory held that as Third World nations modernized that this created social-economic tensions which a ruthless minority of Communists exploited to seize power; what was required from the United States were experts who knew

19312-513: Was denied). In Zakhov vs. 007 , the hero Avakoum Zakhov defeats James Bond, who is portrayed in an inverted fashion to how Fleming portrayed him; in Zakhov vs. 007 , Bond is portrayed as a sadistic killer, a brutal rapist and an arrogant misogynist, which stands in marked contrast to the kindly and gentle Zakhov who always treats women with respect. Zakhov is described as a spy, he more of a detective and unlike Bond, his tastes are modest. In 1966,

19454-592: Was known from 1934 to 1946, it is stated quite explicitly in Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny (which is set in 1945) that he left the Soviet Union to go undercover in Nazi Germany "more than ten years ago", which means that Isayev was not involved in the Yezhovshchina . The June 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its neighbours introduced new themes to espionage fiction - the conflict between Israel and

19596-477: Was later revealed in 1963 to be a long time Soviet spy, who had been recruited by Soviet intelligence in the early 1930s while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Greene's best known spy novel The Quiet American (1955), set in 1952 Vietnam featured a thinly disguised version of the real American intelligence officer, Major General Edward Lansdale as the villain. Greene had covered the Vietnam war in 1951-52 as

19738-468: Was living; mother and son reunited at Ipswich railway station, at her written invitation, following Cornwell's initial letter of reconciliation. Cornwell's father- who escaped from his "orthodox but repressive upbringing" as son of "a respectable nonconformist bricklayer who became a house builder and mayor of Poole"- had been jailed for insurance fraud and was a known associate of the Kray twins . The family

19880-431: Was so disillusioned by the 2016 Brexit vote to leave the European Union that he secured Irish citizenship. In a BBC documentary broadcast in 2021, le Carré's son Nicholas revealed that his father's disillusionment with modern Britain, and Brexit in particular, had driven him to embrace his Irish heritage and become an Irish citizen. At the time of his death, le Carré's friend, the novelist John Banville , confirmed that

20022-477: Was the actress Charlotte Cornwell (1949–2021), and his younger half-brother, Rupert Cornwell (1946–2017), was a former Washington bureau chief for The Independent . Cornwell had little early memory of his mother, who had left their family home when he was five years old. His maternal uncle was Liberal MP Alec Glassey . When Cornwell was 21 years old, Glassey gave him the address in Ipswich where his mother

20164-466: Was very, very moving, I have to say, to arrive at the place of the memorial to find an Irish flag and only an Irish flag. He had really in the last years, grown very disillusioned with what had happened to Britain and the United Kingdom. Le Carré died at Royal Cornwall Hospital , Truro , on 12 December 2020, aged 89. An inquest completed in June 2021 concluded that le Carré died after sustaining

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