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Spymasters.The.Great.Spy.Writers.S01E02
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00:00.
00:16World War II provided the setting for many novels and films
00:20that appeared after the war.
00:22Come on. Come on.
00:24They were significant as a means of exploring commercially
00:27some of the struggles that lay behind the battlefields of Europe
00:31and beyond.
00:32The British war movies made of these novels
00:35achieved great success in the 1970s and 1980s.
00:40Formulaic, in Roger Ebert's account,
00:42they nevertheless attracted large and appreciative audiences.
00:54These books and films include Alice's
00:57author MacLean, who combines both the Second World War
01:00and the Cold War.
01:02His key espionage novel is Where Eagles Dare,
01:07exploring themes of patriotism, courage
01:10and the cost of espionage.
01:13Broadsword calling Danny Boy.
01:15Broadsword calling Danny Boy.
01:17Over.
01:21Broadsword calling Danny Boy.
01:23Broadsword calling Danny Boy.
01:24Over.
01:27Broadsword, sir.
01:29Danny Boy calling Broadsword.
01:31Come in, Broadsword.
01:32Over.
01:34Macpherson murdered.
01:35Thomas Christensen and Barclay captured.
01:37I'm affecting entrance within the hour.
01:39Please have transport standing by.
01:41Over.
01:42Pull out now, Broadsword.
01:44Save yourselves.
01:45Over.
01:46You must be joking.
01:47Over and out.
01:48That is an order, Broadsword.
01:50Over.
01:52Broadsword.
01:53Broadsword.
01:54His theme of the secret traitor is seen again in The Guns of Navarone.
02:12And in all Maclean's espionage novels, it features prominently.
02:18Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle tells of the thwarted plans of a ruthless Nazi spy whose downfall is brought
02:26about by his falling in love.
02:30The wind howled against the windows as the storm intensified.
02:36In the dim light of the study, the radio crackled to life.
02:40A voice, steady but urgent, spoke of an impending invasion.
02:46The war was coming closer, and for the first time, Faber realised just how much was riding on him.
02:56The Nazis needed him to get a message through.
02:59The Allies needed him to fail.
03:02But in the end, it would be his own choice, his own survival, that would determine the course of the
03:09war.
03:11And the stakes had never been higher.
03:19Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, published in 1975, was made into a film starring Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland
03:27in 1976.
03:29By the way, have you found out who Starling is yet?
03:32Of course I have. Why?
03:35Because I am hoping it is not him.
03:38It isn't. I want him buried right away.
03:44The causes of the Cold War, or more importantly, who caused the Cold War, is the subject of continuing controversy.
03:51Was it the Americans, or was it the Russians?
03:58Espionage was not really something exclusive and clandestine.
04:03It was actually the currency of the Cold War.
04:08Spies were the poor bloody infantry of the Cold War.
04:15For the West, notwithstanding the debate, the Truman Doctrine of 1947 was a prime cause.
04:22The Truman Doctrine was designed to prevent the spread of aggressive communism in Europe.
04:27It was created from the long telegram by American diplomat George Kennan in 1946.
04:34Kennan wrote that the battle between these two centers for command of world economy will decide the fate of capitalism
04:42and of communism in the entire world.
04:46George Kennan argued for a form of warfare through espionage, and in particular through adversarial spying.
04:54The atmosphere of this world of partition and division and conflict is evoked in Carol Reid's film of Graham Greene's
05:02novella, The Third Man.
05:04Who are you looking for now?
05:06Stop.
05:07Stop.
05:07Don't.
05:07Please stop.
05:10You silly-looking bunch.
05:11Spies moved center stage during the Cold War, where everything was concealed, where those hostilities between nations and ideologies moved
05:26underground.
05:27And the period of the Cold War was where the development of spy fiction, spy films, begins, I think, to
05:37exhibit a certain kind of coherence.
05:51From the anarchists of Tsarish Russia to the IRA of 1916, from the Ergen and the Stern Gang to the
06:02Ioka in Cyprus, from the Baden-Meinhof Group in Germany, the CCC in Belgium, the Action Direct in France, the
06:11Red Brigades in Italy,
06:12the Red Army faction again in Germany, the Rengosa Geekin in Japan, through to the shining path in Peru, to
06:24the modern IRA in Ulster, or the ETA in Spain, terrorism came from the minds of the comfortably raised, well
06:36-educated, middle-class theorists with a truly staggering personal vanity.
06:42And a developed taste of self-indulgence.
06:48Frederick Forsythe
06:50Frederick Forsyth was among that group of writers who had some direct experience of the world of espionage.
06:57And that feeds in to his fiction.
07:01There is a sense of felt detail in the intricacies of his plots that arise from experiences that he had
07:12had.
07:14The man in the grey suit walked into the hotel lobby, calm and unhurried. He had done this a thousand
07:20times before. He wasn't just any assassin. He was a ghost, a shadow in the night. He didn't have a
07:28name, only a number.
07:31His past was a blank slate, erased for his own safety. His future, a single mission, to kill a man.
07:41He had been trained for this, honed like a blade. And now the time had come.
07:46As he approached the desk to check in, the bellboy didn't look up. He didn't need to. The jackal was
07:56already a ghost in his mind. There would be no trace left, no sign of his passing.
08:07If we take the Odessa file as an example, this is a novel that describes the relentless pursuit of an
08:20SS officer after the end of the war by a young German.
08:26It turns out that this officer has been central to the development of the Odessa organization.
08:35Those who had not abandoned Nazi ideology and were working for the overthrow of the state of Israel.
08:45The Odessa organization was described in such detail that many readers thought that Forsyth was talking about something that had
08:56historical existence, that it was real.
08:59So the organization is dismantled, but the villain escapes. There's an interesting contrast between that escape and what happens in
09:10the film version.
09:11In the film version, there is a dramatic confrontation between Miller and the villain, Rushman, at the end of the
09:19film, and the villain is shot dead.
09:23The SS officer does not escape and does not survive.
09:27I didn't do it. I couldn't even shoot straight. If you kill me, you would be killing the wrong man.
09:33You're disgusting.
09:34But I tell you it was Kurt Krause.
09:38You can tell that to the German people, Rushman.
09:41I will. I will tell them.
09:42You are not even worth a bullet to fire.
09:44I even have letters to prove what I say a woman wrote to me from New York.
09:48I was only 11 months there in charge. There was not one hanging or shooting during that time.
09:53I was really considered a joke.
09:56So both book and film are raising difficult moral questions about what it means to forgive or to forget betrayal
10:07in a historical perspective.
10:12To understand everything is to forgive everything.
10:17When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance
10:28and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive.
10:37Yes, one can forgive even what they did, but one can never forget.
10:52Whether we can forgive, whether we can forget, but they do so in a different cultural context.
11:00And I think you see that repeatedly in film versions of spy stories.
11:18It is cold at 6.40 in the morning on a March day in Paris.
11:24It seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.
11:38Robert Harris's fatherland, made into a film in 1994, is set in post-war Europe and imagines what the consequences
11:47of a Nazi victory might have been.
11:50It was an influential example of alternative history.
11:57The room was oppressive.
12:00The air thick with the smell of old paper and dust.
12:05Xavier March stared at the files in front of him, a chilling realisation dawning on him with each page he
12:13turned.
12:15The world was not what he thought it was.
12:18History had been rewritten and now it was up to him to uncover the truth.
12:27As a member of the Nazi party, March had always followed orders.
12:35But now, as he dug deeper, he realised that the very foundation of his beliefs were built on lies.
12:46The Cold War shifted the focus of spy fiction from resistance to Nazi Germany to the conflict between communist powers,
12:56primarily the Soviet Union, and the capitalist West in the decades following World War II.
13:03Anthony Horowitz's long-running television series Foil's War, which began with episodes featuring Christopher Foil as a high-minded police
13:12detective uncovering various crimes during World War II,
13:16ends with a much darker series of plots based on his involvement with ethically questionable MI5 operations after the end
13:25of the war.
13:26It's a telling illustration of a cultural shift.
13:29If there was a traitor in SOE...
13:32SOE is finished, disbanded.
13:33The traitor could have moved on.
13:36It could be in intelligence, it could be in government.
13:39Sir Ian Woodhead is my counterpart at MI6.
13:42Eric Kaplan is a member of the Gen 75 committee.
13:46It is inconceivable that either of them could have divided loyalties.
13:52Graham Greene's Catholicism led to him consistently interpreting international affairs within an ethical way.
13:59Graham Greene's Catholicism led to an ethical framework.
14:01Every novelist has something in common with a spy.
14:05White Hart Hotel?
14:07Yes?
14:08Colonel White is staying here.
14:12I'm afraid he's fast asleep at this time, sir.
14:16Very good.
14:17I will.
14:19He watches.
14:30White here.
14:31You're through, sir.
14:35Oh, hello, David.
14:37This is a hell of a time to ring up.
14:40I'm sorry, sir, but it's urgent.
14:41He overhears.
14:42We're going to be inspected on Friday by Earth.
14:44A very important personage.
14:46About as important as anybody can be in this country.
14:50He seeks motives and analyses character.
14:56His The Quiet American, written in 1955, had film versions in 1958 and 2002.
15:05They address American policy in Indochina, rather than the Communist bloc, and predict the later destructive tangles of American involvement
15:15in Vietnam.
15:16Something that could really help these people.
15:19You have a gun, either of you?
15:21No.
15:23They shall attack again tonight.
15:25You don't want to be taken alive.
15:27Believe me.
15:31Shoot yourselves.
15:35Thanks.
15:36It was a dangerous belief.
15:40And it would be his undoing.
15:44He didn't understand the complexities of the world, nor the true cost of his interference.
15:55I had tried to warn him, but like all the others, he wouldn't listen.
16:04He thought he could control things, but the world didn't work that way.
16:10In the end, he would learn the hard way.
16:15If he lived to learn it.
16:17At all.
16:21Graham Greene's introduction to Kim Philby's memoirs was regarded as worse than equivocal by some.
16:27No place here for the importance of the defense of the realm.
16:31An unanswered question that runs through the history of spies and spy masters alike is heard also in E.M.
16:39Forster's comment.
16:39If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts
16:46to betray my country.
16:50Old man, you never should have gone to the police, you know.
16:55You ought to leave this thing alone.
16:57Have you ever seen any of your victims?
17:00You know, I never feel comfortable in these sort of things.
17:04Victims?
17:05Don't be melodramatic.
17:08Look down there.
17:10Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?
17:15If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep
17:20my money?
17:21Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford the spear?
17:25Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax.
17:29Another way you can save money now, dear.
17:31Lot of good your money will do you in jail.
17:33That jail's in another zone.
17:35There's no proof against me.
17:38Besides you.
17:40Our Man in Havana, set in Cuba, mocks some of the absurdities of MI6.
17:47Absurdities that Green had experienced personally.
17:51The film version in 1959, though set as a comedy, had serious undertones.
18:00Perhaps they're using this as bait.
18:02Of course, if the bait's no good, you throw it away.
18:06The film of The Third Man caught in its visual styling of a shadowy Vienna, the threat and menace of
18:15the pervasive atmosphere of the Cold War.
18:22The Third Man was a masterpiece based on a screenplay by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reid, shot by cinematographer
18:31Robert Krasker and underlain by the zither music of Anton Karras.
18:37It was the surprise number one hit in 1950 and was on the Billboard chart for 11 weeks in the
18:44USA.
18:46We had a day and a night unit.
18:49We worked from 8pm until 5am, then went to bed, got up at 10am, worked with the day unit until
18:574pm and then went back to bed until 8pm.
18:59It's a bit of a rush, but it's better to rush than not get it at all.
19:09When people think of the Cold War, they think of it as a struggle between East and West.
19:17What wave after wave of declassification over the last 10 to 20 years has really shown is that there was
19:23a global Cold War going on.
19:25When we think of the Cold War, we think of the snowy, windswept streets of Berlin and Vienna and Prague,
19:32but actually the clandestine Caribbean, Africa, Latin America.
19:38These were all places that saw a lot of intelligence activity.
19:42The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was the most dangerous moment in British history and in world history.
19:50But because we're a small offshore island, if nuclear warfare had broken out, we would by now simply be a
19:57hole in the North Sea.
20:00Whereas there would be bits of the United States and bits of Russia surviving.
20:05Acting therefore in the defense of our own security and of the entire Western Hemisphere,
20:12and under the authority entrusted to me by the Constitution, as endorsed by the resolution of the Congress,
20:19I have directed that the following initial steps be taken immediately.
20:23All ships of any kind bound to Cuba, from whatever nation or port,
20:28where they found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back.
20:32In terms of intelligence collection, I think the biggest single success of our Stalin's Russia was getting the secrets of
20:41the atomic bomb.
20:45The biggest British intelligence failure that we know about in the 21st century is without doubt the belief that Saddam
20:54Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,
20:57which was a terrible, but I think understandable error.
21:01It is absolutely essential that we ensure that Saddam Hussein cannot go back to developing weapons of mass destruction, weapons
21:12of nuclear, chemical, biological warfare.
21:15What was he saying in public?
21:17What was he saying in public?
21:17We don't have any weapons of mass destruction.
21:19What was he saying in private?
21:21Of course we have weapons of mass destruction.
21:23But why was he saying that?
21:26Not because it was true, but he knew that if he told it to his advisers, it would get through
21:32to Iran.
21:34What about the Israelis?
21:35He was afraid the Israelis might attack him, but he thought they would be deterred if they thought he had
21:42weapons of mass destruction.
21:44So there we are.
21:45It was an understandable, but nonetheless a humiliating failure on the part of British intelligence.
21:52But the upfront reason is that he was reclaiming rightful Iraqi territory.
21:58Look, it happens all over the world.
22:02India took Goa.
22:03China took Tibet.
22:05Indonesia has taken East Timor.
22:08Argentina tried for the Falklands.
22:11Each time the claim is retaking a chunk of rightful territory.
22:17It's very popular with the home crowd, you know.
22:20You know.
22:24Knowing about one's successes and failures is quite fundamental for any intelligence and security service.
22:31And I think it's also important for people to know, because based on that they can judge the capability of
22:36their governments and their government spies.
22:39When we look at 20th century history, there's quite a lot of intelligence failures that governments have been learning from.
22:45One of them was the failure to see the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979.
22:51That was a big one.
22:52Then it was also the failure to see the fall of the Soviet Union.
22:58In some ways, an intelligence failure was also not really seeing that the Arab Spring will kick off in 2011.
23:06And then there's other failures that have occurred, such as the invasion of the Falkan Islands.
23:12But also other types of failures, analytical failures.
23:15For instance, in the run-up to the Iraq War, there was clearly a failure in the West to understand
23:21that Saddam Hussein did not have the WMD capability that many Western services, not all, but many did think he
23:28have.
23:29The CIA, in accounts like Hugo Wilford's The CIA and Imperial History, is described as a quasi-imperial organisation, following
23:40the policies of the empires of Britain and France, engaging in everything from regime change to having thoroughly mistaken the
23:49assessment of many political situations.
23:51Not least, that of the intentions of Saddam Hussein, though they were not alone in that.
23:58Steve Cole, in his book, The Achilles Trap, additionally writes,
24:02Like many people in the Middle East and elsewhere, Saddam Hussein thought of the CIA as all-knowing.
24:09Saddam Hussein assumed that the US was fully aware of his plans to invade Kuwait.
24:15He mistook President Bush's lack of objection for permission.
24:19Cole further writes, Years later, while imprisoned, Saddam confronted a CIA officer about this.
24:28You didn't want me to go in, the officer recalled Saddam, asking, Why didn't you tell me?
24:35When it comes to thinking about the war on terror, and it comes to thinking about the 9-11, what
24:43I'll call the 9-11 wars, the period after September 2001 where you see Western intervention across the globe, these
24:50are stories, framing stories, that perhaps offer a more conflicted ethical dimension.
24:58Whereas in the Cold War, MI6 is often for individuals on the side of the good guys, so there is
25:06clear good guys, bad guys elements to framing here.
25:11When you get to the post-9-11 wars, there is, in the real world, this morally ambiguous area when
25:18it comes to real world episodes such as hostile interrogation, rendition.
25:24The Iraq war creates this politically divisive period of British political history where there are those for the conflict and
25:34those against.
25:36It's really interesting to see how this understanding of intelligence being a secret business has changed in the past 20
25:44years or so.
25:44When you think of the way the Iraq war was sort of built on this amount of classified information and
25:53justified on very secret information which were of course a lie.
25:58But then you have the events leading up to this Russia's invasion of Ukraine where you have an extraordinary amount
26:07of information being declassified by President Biden in order to deter Russia's action.
26:13And it says a lot about this sort of tension of how much information should remain classified.
26:22Because secrecy is about temporality. Having a secret, having a state secret is a question of time because this is
26:30what gives you the strategic advantage.
26:34John le Carre was the most successful spy writer and indeed author of books which have also been the best
26:44spy films of the last 50 years.
26:46One of the unusual things about his novels derived from the fact that he was the only example I can
26:56think of of a major spy novelist who worked at different times for both MI5, the British Security Service, and
27:04MI6, the Foreign Intelligence Service.
27:10John le Carre redefined the literary ambitions of the genre.
27:16I was immediately charmed by him.
27:18I mean, he was the most delightful company.
27:21He rapidly became to me not John le Carre as he had been up until that point, but David Cornwall,
27:27his real name.
27:29He had lived through all these lies, these betrayals, and yet there was nothing but a kind of tired cynicism
27:38left.
27:39He had forgotten how to be shocked, how to be outraged.
27:45The game was the game, and in the end it would swallow them all.
27:51He had been a soldier once, fighting in a war he didn't believe in, and now he was a spy,
27:59trying to fight a battle no one had ever explained.
28:07But what does he do in his novels?
28:08He amalgamates MI5 and MI6 into a single British intelligence service, which he calls the circus.
28:18Why spy?
28:23For as long as rogues become leaders, we shall spy.
28:29For as long as there are bullies and liars and madmen in the world, we shall spy.
28:37For as long as nations compete, politicians deceive, tyrants launch conquests, and consumers need resources, and the homeless look for
28:52land.
28:54And the hungry for food, and the rich for excess, your chosen profession is perfectly secure, I can assure you.
29:08And from time to time, you suddenly realised that beneath this relaxed, charming exterior, there was an interior which was
29:18bubbling with raw emotion, with unhappiness, with rage even.
29:26So you knew the names of British agents all over the world?
29:30No, I signed a blank cheque. The name of the payee was secret.
29:34Who knew then? Who kept the names?
29:36Special dispatch. They added the name and mailed the cheque.
29:41So you just provided a signature?
29:43A false signature. After 18 years in the service, my sole contribution.
29:50Shall we continue indoors?
29:52You want to write it down, don't you? Don't know what you're looking for.
29:55Scratching around in the dust.
30:01I think one of the things about him is that he was an actor.
30:05I think he could have been a very successful actor had he chosen to take that path.
30:11And he took on roles.
30:14I mean, as a spy, as most people know, he worked for, first of all, for British intelligence,
30:21as a civilian, but then later on joined MI5, and then transferred MI6.
30:29He did have these different identities.
30:31And he did have different identities, for example, as loyal husband, but as serial adulterer.
30:37as affectionate friend and as betrayer.
30:44He spied on his friends as devoted father, but someone who leaves his children behind.
31:00In John Le Carre's novel Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, and you see this, too, in the television version,
31:08and in the film version, there is a close approach between the mechanisms of the classic espionage novel story,
31:20and those of the classic detective story.
31:24But it also functions as detective fiction, as, in fact, a classic piece of detective fiction,
31:33where the investigator, Smiley, George Smiley, in this case, is not looking for a murderer,
31:41though there is murder within this world.
31:44He's looking for a mole.
31:48David was fascinated by Kim Philby and wrote a very interesting piece about Philby when Philby's memoirs were published,
31:58and always thought that he recognised some kind of bond with Philby,
32:04that he could have been Philby himself.
32:07When Philby defected, you know, there was an attempt to minimise his role
32:12and suggest that he hadn't been very important,
32:15and it was only considerably later that it was revealed that he really had been at the top level
32:21and could have risen to the very top itself.
32:26Halleline.
32:29Tinker.
32:31Aidan.
32:34Taylor.
32:37Land.
32:39Soldier.
32:42Hester House.
32:45Poor man.
32:53Obscurity was his nature as well as his profession.
32:57The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction.
33:05A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies,
33:11learns only one prayer,
33:14that he may never, never be noticed.
33:23I think one of the things about David's great success is it does conceal the nature of his art.
33:29I think because his books sell so many copies and they were made into big feature films,
33:35people assumed that he was a genre writer, perhaps a pulp writer.
33:40I think he's better than that.
33:42I think he's a major writer.
33:44I think he's a major writer.
34:10The book is a complete relationship.
34:12I think he's a very close relationship.
34:12And Le Carre's persistent preoccupation with betrayal, abandonment, and isolation in difficult circumstances,
34:23circumstances does, I think, bear a very close relation with those experiences, as is so often
34:31the case with those who have been abandoned. In his later life, he himself turned into someone who
34:40abandoned others. Though John le Carre did not go to his father's funeral, he nevertheless paid for
34:48it. He doesn't trust human relations, he's cynical, he's often really quite bitter. John le Carre's
34:58life is at the heart of his narrative. The sheer human power at le Carre's disposal evokes the
35:07desperate insecurity of individuals caught up in state secrets. Today, I don't remember feeling any
35:16affection in childhood, except for my elder brother, who for a time was my only parent.
35:22If there remains one great conundrum in my life, it is my father, who seems to me to inspire also
35:30some of the worst or best characters in me. He had a wonderful brain. Everybody who worked for him
35:35was in awe of his intellect. But if there was a bent way of doing something, he took it. Wonderful,
35:43wonderful, rich vein of material and very painful. He'd done quite a lot of jail. And he spent some
35:51years of his life on the run in late middle age. So it was a mess, just a bloody mess.
35:58But
35:59surviving it, it was also a privilege to be part of it in some strange way. We taught you a
36:05lot about
36:06life, lowered your expectations, raised them in other ways. It was Ronnie who did the hugging. Never
36:12Olive. She was the mother who had no smell, whereas Ronnie smelt of fine cigars and pear droppy hair
36:20oil from Taylor of Old Bond Street, the court hairdressers. John le Carre evokes the presence of his
36:28father. The effect of a sometimes cruel presence of surviving in a world where he was abandoned by
36:35his mother, but remained fond and admiring of the father, who sometimes seemed to love him, yet beat
36:42him. Ronnie's violence was not news to me, because he'd made a habit of beating up his second wife as
36:50well. Walter Isaacson, in his review of Le Carre's memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, captures the poignant
36:58essence of such haunting by quoting Barack Obama. Someone once said that every man is trying to either
37:07live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes. Richard Nixon put it more
37:15succinctly. I was born in a house my father built. Macare remembers his father gambling in Monte Carlo.
37:24Beneath the lawn of the sporting club were small tunnels from which trapped pigeons were ejected
37:31over the sea as targets. The ones that survived returned to the place of their birth where the
37:38same traps awaited them. There's hundreds of policemen in the garden, thousands of them. I saw them through the window.
37:48What are you doing? What are you doing?
38:00I don't think you can understand John le Carre without understanding the childhood of David Cornwall.
38:06David's father was a serial con man who spent two terms in prison and who cheated people out of
38:15large sums of money. David's mother had left the family home. She left in the middle of the night
38:22without saying goodbye to her sons when David was only five years old. As a little boy, he used to
38:28go up
38:28to women who arrived at the house and quite a number of women did arrive at the house because
38:33his father, Ronnie Cornwall, had many, many girlfriends. David would sidle up to these women
38:42and say, are you my mother? He learnt to spy because no one told him what was going on. When
38:48his father was
38:48taken off to prison, no one explained where his father was. No one explained where his mother was.
38:54These things just happened. He wanted to have a normal family life. He wanted to be a good father
39:02to his children. And he used this curious expression. He said, I am the bridge that my children must walk
39:08across in order to have normal lives. We know from recent biographical research that during his second
39:15marriage, he had as a minimum, 11 affairs. John le Carre's interpretation of the world of espionage
39:25is very personal. And it is in part a reaction against what he thought was a dangerous falsification
39:34of the world of espionage, really through the power of the image of James Bond. So in novel after novel,
39:46you see him challenging that glamorisation. And you certainly see it in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,
39:55which was his breakthrough novel.
40:15Pull up that man. Try it! Try it!
40:29Jump, Alec! Jump, man! Jump, man! Jump, man!
40:40In both the book and the film, the way in which those operatives out in the field are exposed to
40:48injury or death, you see that particularly in the devastating final sequence in the film.
40:57That is not something that you would witness in a Bond film.
41:23David's cover role was working as a second secretary in the British Embassy in Bond. But The Spy Who Came
41:30In From The Cold just hit a nerve at the right moment. It was the moment when the Berlin Wall
41:35went up,
41:36when Kennedy came to Berlin, when suddenly that seemed the centre of the world. I think also he is the
41:44writer about the post-colonial experience, about Britain trying to come to terms with its much
41:54diminished role. After The Spy Who Came From The Cold, he wrote a book called The Looking Glass War.
41:59It upset a lot of people in the intelligence world because it made them appear incompetent,
42:05and that was the thing that they didn't like.
42:08Perhaps if you're looking at SIS through the Le Carre prism, a lot of Le Carre's post-Cold War writing
42:15is often about how the Secret Intelligence Service are doing things that are not ethically good.
42:24So, for example, the backdrop to the concert that Gardner is, SIS are, along with the British
42:29government supporting big pharma in post-colonial Africa.
42:39My continent, Africa, is staggering under the weight of not one, but three plagues. Yet still the
42:46governments of the USA and Europe, at the behest of the pharmaceutical companies that seem to control
42:52them, drag their feet, and continue to give us endless reasons why we should buy your branded drugs
43:00at five, ten, twenty times the price. Sweetheart, don't bother to see us off. It could be ages.
43:05OK, well, if you're sure.
43:09John Le Carre's close friend, Yvette Peer-Piouly, was a French humanitarian who lived in Cambodia and
43:16throughout the world. He dedicated his novel, The Constant Gardener, to her and based his main
43:22character, Tessa Quayle, upon her. Yvette, like almost no one else, had opened my eyes to constructive
43:31compassion, to putting your money and your life where your heart was, and I was not alone in this.
43:38When you look at the backdrop to some other Le Carre novels, SIS are involved and complicit
43:46in illegal arms trafficking, so the story of the night manager. SIS is an organisation that is
43:53breaching arms embargoes and supporting international military trade. So there's a
43:59variance here between popular perceptions and reality. What led you to believe that British
44:05arms are being exported under the counter through Trade Pass? I was shown fake MOD end-user
44:10certificates for seven different arms companies, UK and US. Do you mean these?
44:24Yes. Those are genuine MOD export certificates for Bulgaria and Italy. That's not true. I have
44:32signed letters from both Italian and Bulgarian governments confirming the sales.
44:36This is the cover-up. Angela, are you accusing me of lying?
44:41Yeah.
45:08That's really very simple.
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