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117-537: The Secret Pilgrim is a 1990 episodic novel by British writer John le Carré , set within the frame narrative of an informal dinner talk given at the spy-training school in Sarratt by George Smiley . As Smiley talks, the first-person narrator, whom readers know only as "Ned", recalls his own experiences in a long career in the service. The various episodes are triggered by comments from Smiley, which send Ned into tangential memories. The individual stories together create

234-695: A British passport . In the middle of the night, Ned is called to Teodor's home and introduced to a Hungarian man named Latzi, who says he has been sent by the Hungarian secret service to assassinate Teodor, but has refused out of admiration for the Professor and wants to defect. Before long, Esterhase and the American CIA are lauding the two Hungarians for their courage and arranging for Teodor's honourable retirement from intelligence work, including issuing passports. Ned's protests that "the whole thing's

351-506: A KGB mole . Ned himself was in Rome , in the middle of a celebratory dinner after installing a wiretap against a Roman Catholic cardinal suspected of involvement with arms dealers , when he received the telex from London with the shocking news. With Haydon's exposure, every Circus officer's identity must be considered compromised, and Ned is told that he cannot be posted anywhere outside of Western Bloc countries. Smiley muses that

468-429: 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

585-620: 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

702-593: A con" are ignored. Aside, Teodor's long-suffering wife confesses that Latzi is a " bad actor " and an old friend of Teodor, whom Teodor used as a go-between when he wanted to inform on his students to the Hungarian authorities. When Ned vents his outrage to Smiley back in London, Smiley regards the incident as an amusing farce, initially only remarking, " Oh, Toby ." As Smiley later explains, " all churches need their saints ... and saints, when you get right down to it, are

819-528: 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

936-419: A famous Knightsbridge store, Ned becomes alarmed when he sees a suspicious Arab closely following the prince's wife at a distance. Ned prepares to incapacitate him with a martial arts blow, but his supervisor Monty grabs Ned and holds him back. Ned learns that the wife is a compulsive shoplifter and the man is not a fanatic assassin, but instead assigned by the prince to pay compensation and hush money to

1053-586: A harsh master of his Order, Hansen later went berserk on his colleagues due to his confinement and disappeared in Southern Asia . After a certain period, he presented himself to the British authorities, offering his vast knowledge of the Orient for espionage. Due to the unconventional and unmotorised guerrilla tactics of locals, Hansen's services were invaluable to the British, who had no material presence in

1170-620: 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

1287-471: 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

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1404-406: 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

1521-525: 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

1638-616: 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

1755-581: 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,

1872-570: A part of an intelligence delegation. During their guided tour in Moscow Centre headquarters, they run into a familiar figure who is none other than Captain Brandt. It was Brandt who had betrayed the previous network, as well as the new one. Ned reflects that every employee of the Circus of a certain generation can recall where he or she was at the time of "The Fall" – Bill Haydon 's exposure as

1989-567: A phone call from an American woman who flirts with him but remains unknown despite Ned's inquiries to the hotel clerk. Ned's Lebanon trip ends with his encounter with a young American student, who was the sole survivor of a car bombing on a downtown restaurant in Beirut. The student, Saul, in his shell-shocked state of delirium , had written a call for peace. Ned sees whether he could find something sensible, but in his own state of personal crisis, scribbles his own thoughts as well and ends up burning

2106-515: A portrait of Ned himself, moving from the start of his career at the beginning of the novel to his retirement in the final chapter. Several of the episodes are recognisable anecdotes or urban legends from the British intelligence community . Smiley reflects on the end of the Cold War, and makes a rueful joke that, in one way, the world has changed, but in another, it has always been the same and

2223-528: A pretty bogus lot ." Later, Teodor and Latzi are the "stars" of a highly publicized book tour throughout the United States, detailing Teodor's courageous work against communism and his harrowing escape from death. After delighting Ned's students with a lighthearted story about how the Circus recruited a South American diplomat with a secret passion for British model trains , Smiley sobers and reflects that intelligence officers usually remain aloof from

2340-501: A reasonable amount of seniority and prestige, thanks to the kudos accruing from his productive running of Colonel Jerzy, Ned is appointed as a sort of roving troubleshooter, hopping around the globe to investigate random leads or smother minor crises. One of his assignments takes him to Beirut , where the chaos of the latest fighting seems to mirror his own inner turmoil. While tracking a German militant named Britta, who had been involved with an Irish terrorist called Seamus, his first stop

2457-619: A result of Frewin's participation in the Radio Moscow's Russian language course. After writing to the Radio Moscow programme a veiled account of his life, Sergei Modrian had shown up at Frewin's house as a "gift" for Frewin's "success" in his Russian language progress. Eventually, Modrian manipulates Frewin's solitude into betrayal as Modrian "regretfully" asked for intelligence material from Frewin's access to top secret and above. However, shortly before Frewin's denunciation, Modrian returns to Moscow and reveals to Frewin that their relationship

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2574-575: A result of the Miranda v. Arizona ruling, police are required to read aloud to suspects under interrogation their Miranda Rights afforded to them by the Fifth Amendment, such as the right to remain silent and the right to seek counsel. If the police fail to administer the Miranda rights, all statements under interrogation are prohibited from being used as evidence in court proceedings. By

2691-736: 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

2808-476: A subject is lying and they begin to experience guilt, they will shift their gaze. The second approach is the cognitive approach, which suggests that lying requires more thought than telling the truth, which in turn, may result in a liar making more errors in speech. Lastly, the attempted control approach suggests a subject who is lying will attempt to be seemingly normal or honest, and will try to adjust their behaviors to make themselves believable. Good cop/bad cop

2925-404: Is a brief research post with a well-mannered officer named Giles Latimer. Despite his good nature and popularity, it is revealed that Giles had suffered a nervous breakdown and hid dozens of confidential files out of shame and guilt he felt towards a young girl he had fallen in love with. Following this episode, Ned flies to Beirut in search of an informer and checks into a hotel, where he receives

3042-610: Is a psychological tactic used in negotiation and interrogation, in which a team of two interrogators take apparently opposing approaches to the subject. One adopts a hostile or accusatory demeanor, emphasizing threats of punishment, while the other adopts a more sympathetic demeanor, emphasizing reward, in order to convince the subject to cooperate. In the People's Republic of China , the "wheel battle" ( chelunzhan ) tactic involves "unrelenting continuous interrogation by multiple rotating interrogators". The use of drugs in interrogation

3159-506: 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

3276-424: Is becoming less and less common, statutes and scholars are referring to the process as "electronically recording" interviews or interrogations. Alaska, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are the only states to require taped interrogation. New Jersey's taping requirement started on January 1, 2006. Massachusetts allows jury instructions that state that the courts prefer taped interrogations. Neil Nelson of

3393-678: Is both ineffective and illegal. The Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment (adopted by the UN General Assembly as resolution 43/173 of 9 December 1988) forbids "methods of interrogation which impair the capacity of decision of judgment." Furthermore, the World Medical Association and American Medical Association , for example, both forbid participation by physicians in interrogations. The history of

3510-505: Is important for spies to feel conflicted about their own actions – and if any of them in the midst of an operation feel the impulse to act humanely, he hopes they will give it a fair hearing. After being relieved of his position as head of the Russia House, Ned is sent to the "Interrogators' Pool," a division not held in high regard within the service. In addition to supplying interrogators to debrief defectors or captured enemy agents,

3627-527: 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

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3744-411: Is no longer a nation which openly admits to deliberate abuse of prisoners for purposes of interrogation. Statutory law and regulatory law, various legal precedents called ' case law ' also impact interrogation techniques and procedures. One of the first attempts by British Courts to guide and set standards for police officers interrogating suspects was the declaration of the ' Judges' Rules ' in 1912 by

3861-682: Is ordered to travel to Saigon to track down a Circus agent who has gone missing, a lapsed Catholic missionary named Hansen. Also half-Dutch, Hansen was born to an English mother who had provided him with Jesuit education. An accomplished polyglot from an early age, he had received religious training and was sent to the East. Along with his many accomplishments in the fields of archaeology , linguistics and various branches of humanities , Hansen also harboured an open secret about his sexuality, bedding young girls and boys alike. Having been recalled to Rome for indoctrination and subsequently sent back to

3978-443: Is over. Frewin becomes despondent and depressed, leading him to denounce himself in hopes of getting in touch with somebody who would replace Modrian in his life. Frewin reveals to Ned all his equipment provided by Moscow Centre, including a custom-made pair of opera binoculars that doubled as a covert camera. Smiley completes his lecture, preparing to take his leave from Sarratt, along with the secret world as well. His last advice to

4095-486: Is posted to Hamburg in Western Germany to run a network of Baltic sailors, led by a passionate Latvian smuggler named Brandt. Though surprisingly efficient, Ned is wary of his position due to his predecessor's hushed up departure after embezzling massive amounts of Circus funds and settling to Southern Spain with his boyfriend. In the course of their operations, Brandt reveals his new girlfriend, Bella, who

4212-470: Is said to be the daughter of a friend of Brandt's. Head of London Station, Bill Haydon orders Ned to inquire about Bella's credentials due to the fact that her sudden appearance in the network's inner circle appears suspicious. Ned eventually seduces (or rather, is seduced by) Bella and they begin an affair during Brandt's absence. Later, Brandt's men walk into a trap at the coast of Narva in Estonia and

4329-441: Is to Munich , as the Circus's liaison with various Eastern Bloc exile communities, quietly discouraging their crackpot schemes to foment anarchy in the Soviet Union, or encouraging whatever legitimate intelligence sources they have in their home countries. According to Toby Esterhase , the "star" of the Circus's Munich arm is Professor Teodor, a fugitive Hungarian academic. At first, Ned is dazzled by Teodor's passionate lectures on

4446-635: 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 ,

4563-738: 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

4680-589: Is working as the bouncer in a brothel . Hansen recounts that he learned that he had an illegitimate daughter who was captured by a revolutionary band in Cambodia . Hansen allowed himself to be taken prisoner as well, intending to rescue her, but was horrified when she was genuinely converted to their ideals, and denounced him as a spy and a traitor. After a hellish journey through the Cambodian jungle, Hansen eventually escaped after his daughter went missing from

4797-644: Is yourself." Ned returns to his flat in humiliation after the episode in Knightsbridge, and finds Smiley and the Circus's head of Personnel going through his belongings. Smiley informs him that Ned's best friend from Sarratt , Benjamin Arno Cavendish, disappeared just after starting his assignment in Berlin , and the East German network he was supposed to be running has collapsed. In Ben's flat,

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4914-598: 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". Interrogation Deception can form an important part of effective interrogation. In

5031-490: 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

5148-473: The United States , there is no law or regulation that forbids the interrogator from lying about the strength of their case, from making misleading statements or from implying that the interviewee has already been implicated in the crime by someone else. See case law on trickery and deception ( Frazier v. Cupp ). As noted above, traditionally the issue of deception is considered from the perspective of

5265-912: 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

5382-539: The evils wreaked on Hungary by the Allied Powers after World War I , but finds his opinions shallow when the Professor is quizzed on more current events. Giving Teodor the benefit of the doubt, Ned corresponds to his associates in the American intelligence fraternity, only to learn that they had come to realise that Teodor's intelligence work is completely worthless. Ned begins to see that the Circus has good reason for denying Teodor's repeated requests to be issued

5499-432: The 2000s, a growing movement calls for the mandatory electronic recording of all custodial interrogations in the United States. "Electronic recording" describes the process of recording interrogations from start to finish. This is in contrast to a "taped" or "recorded confession," which typically only includes the final statement of the suspect. "Taped interrogation" is the traditional term for this process; however, as analog

5616-542: The 20th century authoritarian states such as Mussolini's Fascist Italy, Hitler's Third Reich, and Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union once again resumed the practice, and on a massive scale. During the Cold War , the American Central Intelligence Agency was a significant influence among world powers regarding torture techniques in its support of anti-Communist regimes. The CIA adopted methods such as waterboarding , sleep deprivation, and

5733-715: The CIA, the US military, and their contract employees tortured untold thousands at Abu Ghraib , Bagram , and other secret CIA black site prisons scattered around the globe, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture and the bipartisan U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee report Whether these interrogations under torture produced useful information is hotly disputed . The administration of President Barack Obama prohibited so-called enhanced interrogation in 2009, and as of March 2012 there

5850-479: The Circus found a love letter written to Ned. Ned is shocked, as he had no idea that Ben was homosexual, much less so passionately attached to him. After Smiley leaves, Ned tracks down Ben, hiding with his German cousin, Stephanie, in the Western Isles of Scotland. Ben confesses that, beneath his confident, derring-do exterior, he is always terrified of failure, especially when he feels he has to live up to

5967-654: The Circus, for further information on Frewin. After learning of Frewin's annual vacations (and his constant disappearances from his hotel in Salzburg , Austria ) Ned confronts Frewin. Ned edges up Frewin's radio language courses in Russian and his Eastern Bloc contacts, attempting to verify the contents of the letter of denunciation he had received, aided by the findings of Toby Esterhase and Monty Arbuck, whom Ned had requested to make inquiries. After much deliberation, Ned has Frewin admit his collaboration with Sergei Modrian as

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6084-479: The Circus. While one of Ned's students is quizzing Smiley about the 'secret' of conducting an interrogation , Smiley frowns and says that recognising the truth is far more difficult than spotting a lie. After all, spies are naturally suspicious people, and nothing is more suspicious to them than a completely innocent man who has nothing to hide. After his unwitting exposure of his friend Benjamin Cavendish, Ned

6201-582: The Circus. However, after Alleline's disgrace and demise, Bradshaw began ferrying weaponry to various regions, such as the Balkans and Central Africa , to profit from the conflicts there. Ned makes his way to Bradshaw's sumptuous country estate and politely warns him to desist from his war-profiteering activities. Bradshaw is unfazed, as he knows more about the workings of the government than he's supposed to know. He defends his ferocious profiteering policies and Ned regretfully realises that despite his years in

6318-652: 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 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)

6435-478: 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

6552-534: 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 ,

6669-525: The Interrogator's Pool, Ned receives an anonymous letter of denunciation against Cyril Arthur Frewin, a Foreign Office cipher clerk who had allegedly been keeping company with Sergei Modrian, a Soviet handler with whom Ned had a brush in the Russia House. After being briefed by Leonard Burr, the new Chief, Ned interviews Frewin's section head at the Foreign Office, alongside his associates from

6786-627: 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

6903-463: The Pool acts as a clearing-house for suspicious members of the public who believe they have relevant information for the government. While browsing through the Pool's old files, Ned is excited to find an old record from Smiley's tenure there (after being relieved of his position as Chief at the end of The Honourable Schoolboy ). Smiley interviewed a retired British Army sergeant who wanted to know if it

7020-455: The United States, police interrogations are conducted under an adversarial system , in which the police seek to obtain material that will aid in convicting a suspect rather than discovering the facts of the case. To this end, a variety of tactics are employed. The Reid technique is widely used by U. S. law enforcement officers for interrogation purposes. It involves steps to obtaining a confession and methods for detecting signs of deception in

7137-441: 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

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7254-587: The agent went perfectly, but after he crossed back into West Germany , he realised he'd lost the crib sheet somewhere. Unable to warn the network before it collapsed, Ben secretly fled Germany and sought shelter with Stephanie. It takes a moment for Ned to absorb the "appalling banality" of Ben's story; "that you could lose a network in the same way you might lose a set of keys or a pocket handkerchief." Smiley has had Ned followed, and Circus agents arrive to take Ben in for questioning, shortly after he finishes his story. Ned later hears that he has been dismissed from

7371-461: The band. She is now a prostitute in the brothel, her psyche damaged by her experiences in the jungle. Hansen wants nothing more to do with the Circus, with England, or with any political cause – his sole purpose in life is to watch over her. Despite Ned's offer of gratuity of $ 50,000, Hansen turns it down and chastises Ned – and by extension, all representation of Western imperialism – for their treatment of Asia. On his way back to London, Ned fancies

7488-514: The bloody Phoenix Program , and throughout Latin America during Operation Condor . In some Asian and South Pacific nations, such as Malaysia and the Philippines, torture for interrogating and terrorizing opponents became widespread. "In its pursuit of torturers across the globe for the past forty years," writer Alfred McCoy notes, "Amnesty International has been, in a certain sense, following

7605-421: The boy's story. After an exhaustive search through the records of the Circus and other British government agencies, and a review of the boy's extensive criminal record, Smiley is forced to conclude that the boy was " an irredeemable and habitual monster ," that his sordid death was no more than he deserved, and he has never had the slightest connection with the Circus or any other government service. However, when

7722-657: The cardinal, who had wavered through an instinctive fear, and receives his blessing. Ned realises that the cardinal must have been one of Jerzy's many torture victims. Smiley warns Ned's students that spies can encounter a mid-life crisis the same as any others do, and sometimes the effects are more severe, given the nature of their work and their inclination to keep their true feelings concealed from everyone, including themselves. Ned remembers his own middle-age crisis, in which his marriage had grown stale and he began to feel that he had reached his forties without any clear idea of what he had accomplished in his career. After gaining

7839-402: 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

7956-426: 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

8073-413: The course of repeated interrogations. It has shown that liars display significantly fewer smiles, self-manipulations, pauses, and less gaze aversion than truth-tellers. According to Granhag & Strömwall, there are three approaches to non-verbal deceptive behavior. The first is the emotional approach, which suggests that liars will alter their behaviors based on their own emotional feelings. For example, if

8190-457: The crew are taken by the Soviets. Brandt is taken to Sarratt for interrogation while Ned is summoned to London for debriefing. He is interviewed by Haydon, who was accompanied by his lieutenants, Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase along with George Smiley. Ned is interrogated about Bella's background and her story about being the daughter of a German soldier who had raped her mother when her "father"

8307-590: The cufflinks were an anniversary gift from Smiley's wife, Ann. At first glance, George's motives seemed clear: sentimentality, or spitefulness towards his unfaithful wife and the Circus that was rejecting him. But Ned's private theory is that Smiley, who was ambivalent at the best of times about the usefulness of the Circus's work, wanted to carry out an "intelligence operation" that clearly succeeded in achieving something good. Smiley likens some interrogations to communions between damaged souls, referring to his debriefing of his old nemesis, Karla . During his tenure at

8424-741: 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

8541-588: The end of the penultimate chapter, Smiley instructs them not to invite him again. The final chapter is unconnected with Smiley; Ned recollects Leonard Burr, who appears in the novel The Night Manager , foreshadowing, in retrospect, the development of that story. The themes of the book are Smiley's sense of the moral ambiguity of spying, and Ned's growing self-awareness. John le Carr%C3%A9 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 ),

8658-411: The events of The Russia House ), when "Barley" Blair betrays the Circus to save a Russian woman he has fallen in love with, Ned is unable to muster the same outrage as his superiors. One of Ned's more amoral students is trying to get Smiley to agree that espionage gives its practitioners license to do anything, if it is necessary to get the job done. Smiley refuses to be pinned down, remarking that it

8775-800: The example of his father, who had an illustrious career during the Second World War as a mathematician, devising the Double-Cross System . While in Berlin, Ben was constantly harassed and patronised by his immediate superior, Haggerty, who despised Ben for replacing him due to his clean reputation. Before his first meeting with the lead agent in East Germany, Ben wrote a crib sheet with the agents' names and contact procedures, and took it with him when he crossed into East Berlin. As it turned out, he didn't need it, and his meeting with

8892-465: The fall of 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

9009-456: 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

9126-502: 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

9243-420: The harsher realities of their work, but sometimes they are forced to confront it, and become a little more humble about the risks they ask their agents to take. The Circus receives a surprise message from a Polish agent who was thought to have been killed in the aftermath of Haydon's exposure. Despite the risks, Ned is sent to re-establish contact, posing as a Dutch businessman. Once he arrives, he finds that

9360-444: The idea of sending Rumbelow, and in fact the whole Circus, Smiley included, on Hansen's trail for them to witness true and unfaltering devotion, as he regarded Hansen as the champion of his ambiguous and conflicted emotions about his calling in life. Ned returns to London, having set his own misgivings to rest, finding them insignificant next to Hansen's suffering, and his single-minded devotion to his daughter. A few years later (during

9477-487: The interrogator engaging in deception towards the individual being interrogated. By the 2000s, information began appearing in research studies on effective interview methods used to gather information from individuals who score in the medium to high range on measures of psychopathology, and who exhibit deception with interrogators. The major aim of this technique is to investigate to what extent verbal and non-verbal features of liars' and truth-tellers' behaviour change during

9594-760: The judges of the King's Bench Division in England. These rules, although not law, still have weight in the United Kingdom and Canada. British military personnel were found to have misused a number of techniques during the detention of suspects in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. Police deception in interrogation was banned in the UK in 1984 with the passage of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE). In

9711-641: The mole and Ned is ordered to bring her in to be interrogated in Sarratt. Eventually, the inquiry stagnates and both Bella and Brandt are released to settle in Canada and to resume smuggling , respectively. Brandt refuses to take Bella back for then-unknown reasons, which gives Ned the impression that Haydon informed Brandt of Bella's infidelity, out of mischief. In 1989, during a lunch with Toby Esterhase, Ned learns that Esterhase and Peter Guillam were in Moscow as

9828-526: The most vulgar thing about the Cold War was that the Western societies learned to "gobble up [their] own propaganda ." The West became so convinced of the righteousness of its own cause, and the evil of the Soviets', that it never stopped to examine the ethics of its actions. In the name of expediency, the Circus opened its arms – and its purse – to every petty thug and two-bit con man who called himself an anti-Communist . Ned's first post-Haydon posting

9945-411: The new recruits is to leave the old timers – like Smiley himself – and find new people to look up to. A few days before his retirement from his tenure as Chief Leonard Burr's Secretary, Ned is given a last assignment. Burr orders Ned to negotiate with Sir Anthony Bradshaw, a venture-capitalist who had been enabled by former Circus chief, Sir Percy Alleline, to expand his financial empire while helping

10062-399: 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

10179-561: 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

10296-642: The region, and sold his intelligence to the Americans who were knee-deep in conflict against the Viet Cong . However, at some point Hansen disappears without notice and is later given up for dead, in view of the total eradication of hill villages in the region. Later, local residency catches sight of Hansen through one of their informants who had been working closely with the local head of station, Rumbelow. Despite his distaste for Rumbelow, whom he views as sleazy and thoroughly perfidious, Ned tracks down Hansen, who

10413-464: The right man as his handler. Over the next five years, Ned runs Jerzy, who provides copious amounts of information about the Polish intelligence . Throughout their correspondence, Ned tries to uncover Jerzy's motive for helping the British, eliminating many known motives such as money, disillusionment, and change of heart, but Jerzy remains opaque to Ned's prying. Ultimately, Jerzy reveals that his "motive"

10530-631: The rise of Christianity since it was considered "antithetical to Christ's teachings," and in 866 Pope Nicholas I banned the practice. But after the 13th century many European states such as Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, and Spain began to return to physical abuse for religious inquisition , and for secular investigations. By the 18th century the spreading influence of the Enlightenment led European nations to abandon officially state-sanctioned interrogation by torture. By 1874 Victor Hugo could plausibly claim that "torture has ceased to exist." Yet in

10647-524: The secret services are gradually waking up from their own deluded perceptions of it, and themselves. After a couple of years of training at the Sarratt Nursery, in the glens of Argyll and battle camps of Wiltshire , Ned is looking forward to his first overseas posting and is disappointed to be kept in London , as part of a team of watchers keeping an eye on a Middle Eastern royal family . In

10764-579: The secret world, he was not prepared for this " wrecking infant in our midst ". Ned closes his life in the Service in a kind of retirement in the country with Mabel. " I think a lot. I’m stepping out with my reading. I talk to people, ride on buses. I’m a newcomer to the overt world, but I’m learning ." Smiley's sections of the book are quite brief; the bulk of the book consists of Ned's reminiscences, prompted by his interpretation of tangential comments made by Smiley and illuminated from his own experiences. At

10881-471: The sergeant and his wife return for a second interview with Smiley, he tells them that, officially, the British government denies any knowledge of his son, while unofficially he gives them a set of superb gold cufflinks – one of the fanciful details of the son's story was that he and other top class agents were issued with special cufflinks instead of medals. The elderly couple departs the office, swelling with pride at their son's heroism. Ned later learns that

10998-549: The state use of torture in interrogations extends over more than 2,000 years in Europe. It was recognized early on that information extracted under duress was deceptive and untrustworthy. The Roman imperial jurist Ulpian in the third century AD remarked that there is "no means of obtaining the truth" from those who have the strength to resist, while those unable to withstand the pain "will tell any lie rather than suffer it." The use of torture as an investigative technique waned with

11115-419: The stores she steals from. Monty comments, "That's the trouble in our job, Ned. Life's looking one way, we're looking the other." Smiley informs Ned's students that no one on Earth is more adept at hiding his true feelings than the privately educated Englishman – "which is why some of our best officers turn out to be our worst, and our worst, our best, and why the most difficult agent you'll ever have to run

11232-614: The suspect's body language. The technique has been criticized for being difficult to apply across cultures and as eliciting false confessions from innocent people. An example is described in the analysis of the Denver police's January 2000 interrogation of 14-year-old Lorenzo Montoya, which took place during its investigation of the murder of 29-year-old Emily Johnson. The Fifth Amendment, which states that one cannot be made to be "a witness against himself", prohibits law enforcement from forcing suspects to offer self-incriminating evidence. As

11349-702: The trail of CIA programs." After the revelation of CIA sponsored torture in the 1970s and the subsequent outcry, the CIA largely stopped its own interrogations under torture. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it "outsourced" such interrogation through renditions of prisoners to third world allies, often called torture-by-proxy . But in the furor over the September 11 attacks , American authorities cast aside scruples, legally authorizing some forms of interrogation by torture under euphemisms such as " enhanced interrogation techniques " or "interrogation in depth" to collect intelligence on Al Qaeda, starting in 2002. Ultimately

11466-464: 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

11583-539: 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,

11700-651: The use of electric shock, which were used by the Gestapo , KGB , and North Koreans from their involvement in the Korean War . The CIA also researched 'no-touch' torture, involving sensory deprivation, self-inflicted pain, and psychological stress . The CIA taught its refined techniques of torture through police and military training to American-supported regimes in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia during

11817-536: 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,

11934-405: 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

12051-470: The whole thing is a trap; the agent is long dead, and Ned is arrested and brutally tortured by the Poles' ruthless counterintelligence chief, Colonel Jerzy. Despite this, he refuses to abandon his cover story or reveal any information. Then Jerzy takes Ned to the countryside and tells him that he wishes to spy for the Circus, but will work only through Ned – Ned's interrogation was a test, to make sure Jerzy had

12168-460: The whole thing. One of Ned's students argues to Smiley that professional journalists do the same job as spies do, and may even do it better, so why bother with intelligence services at all? Instead of disagreeing, Smiley says she has an excellent point – the trouble is, no government will ever trust advice from a journalist, no matter how sound. Smiley assures these future agents that their jobs will always be necessary, and always in demand. Ned

12285-484: 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

12402-475: 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

12519-466: 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

12636-554: 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 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

12753-841: 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

12870-428: 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

12987-467: Was fighting in the Second World War . Though Ned answers reasonably, Haydon counters him with a photograph, depicting Bella as a language student in a Moscow Centre linguistics school that trains prospective undercover agents. Haydon's coterie, barring Smiley, take the photograph as genuine, as its source is London Station's Witchcraft Project. Ultimately, it's decided that Bella must have been

13104-473: 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

13221-448: Was simply the element of danger it introduced to his profoundly cynical and nihilistic outlook to life. Years later, several weeks before the graduation dinner, Ned sees Jerzy on the television while watching the evening news about a Polish cardinal blessing his flock. Ned observes Jerzy, who seems physically drained and haggard after the collapse of the Soviet Union , is then summoned to the cardinal. To Ned's surprise, Jerzy kneels before

13338-431: 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

13455-480: 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

13572-478: Was true that his recently deceased son was actually a top-class undercover agent in Russia? The sergeant and his wife always believed their son was just a convict, but during the father's last visit, shortly before his son's death (apparently in a prison riot), the son claimed that his criminal identity was just a cover for his secret agent work. Despite his inner scepticism, Smiley does his best to verify or disprove

13689-456: 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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