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Spymasters.The.Great.Spy.Writers.S01E02
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00:00The End
00:00The End
00:02The End
00:03The End
00:11The End
00:14World War II provided the setting for many novels and films that appeared after the war.
00:22Come on, come on.
00:24They were significant as a means of exploring commercially some of the struggles that lay behind the battlefields of Europe
00:31and beyond.
00:32The British war movies made of these novels achieved great success in the 1970s and 1980s.
00:40Formulaic, in Roger Ebert's account, they nevertheless attracted large and appreciative audiences.
00:54These books and films include Alastair MacLean, who combines both the Second World War and the Cold War.
01:02His key espionage novel is Where Eagles Dare, exploring themes of patriotism, courage and the cost of espionage.
01:13Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Over.
01:22Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Over.
01:27Broadsword, sir.
01:29Danny Boy calling Broadsword. Come in, Broadsword. Over.
01:34Macpherson, murdered. Thomas, Christensen and Barclay captured.
01:37I'm effecting entrance within the hour.
01:39Please have transport standing by. Over.
01:42Pull out now, broadsword. Save yourselves. Over.
01:46You must be joking. Over and out.
01:48That is an order, broadsword. Over.
01:52Broadsword. Broadsword.
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
02:23of a ruthless Nazi spy whose downfall is brought about
02:27by 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.
02:41A voice, steady but urgent, spoke of an impending invasion.
02:46The war was coming closer, and for the first time,
02:50Faber 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,
03:07that would determine the course of the war.
03:11And the stakes had never been higher.
03:19Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, published in 1975,
03:24was made into a film starring Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland in 1976.
03:29By the way, have you found out who Starling is yet?
03:32Of course I have.
03:34Why?
03:35Because I am hoping it is not him.
03:38It isn't.
03:40I want him buried right away.
03:44The causes of the Cold War, or more importantly, who caused the Cold War,
03:49is 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,
04:19the 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 centres for command of world economy
04:40will decide the fate of capitalism and of communism in the entire world.
04:46George Kennan argued for a form of warfare through espionage,
04:51and in particular, through adversarial spying.
04:55The atmosphere of this world of partition and division and conflict
04:59is evoked in Carol Reid's film of Graham Greene's novella, The Third Man.
05:04Who are you looking for now?
05:06Shh, don't. Don't, please, don't.
05:09You're a silly-looking bunch.
05:13Spies moved centre stage during the Cold War
05:16where everything was concealed,
05:20where those hostilities between nations and ideologies moved underground.
05:28and the period of the Cold War was where the development of spy fiction,
05:35spy films, begins, I think, to exhibit a certain kind of coherence.
05:51From the anarchists of Tsarish, Russia, to the IRA of 1916.
05:58From the Ergen and the Stern gang, to the EOKA in Cyprus.
06:04From the Baden-Meinhof Group in Germany, the CCC in Belgium, the Action Direct in France,
06:10the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction again in Germany,
06:16the Rengos-Ageken in Japan,
06:20through to the Shining Path in Peru, to the modern IRA in Ulster.
06:29Or the ETA in Spain, terrorism came from the minds of the comfortably raised,
06:35well-educated, middle-class theorists with a truly staggering personal vanity
06:41and a developed taste of self-indulgence.
06:48Frederick Forsyth was among that group of writers who had some direct experience of the world of espionage.
06:56And that feeds in to his fiction.
07:01There is a sense of felt detail in the intricacies of his plots
07:08that arise from experiences that he had had.
07:14The man in the grey suit walked into the hotel lobby, calm and unhurried.
07:19He had done this a thousand times before.
07:22He wasn't just any assassin.
07:24He was a ghost, a shadow in the night.
07:27He didn't have a name, only a number.
07:31His past was a blank slate, erased for his own safety.
07:36His future? A single mission. To kill a man.
07:41He'd been trained for this, honed like a blade.
07:44And now the time had come.
07:47As he approached the desk to check in, the bellboy didn't look up.
07:51He didn't need to.
07:54The jackal was already a ghost in his mind.
07:58There 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
08:18of an SS 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.
08:34Those who had not abandoned Nazi ideology and were working for the overthrow of the state of Israel.
08:46The Odessa organization was described in such detail that many readers thought that Forsyth
08:53was talking about something that had historical existence, that it was real.
08:59So the organization is dismantled, but the villain escapes.
09:04There's an interesting contrast between that escape and what happens in the film version.
09:11In the film version, there is a dramatic confrontation between Miller and the villain,
09:18Rushman, at the end of the film, 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.
09:30If 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.
09:50There 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.
10:34One can forgive.
10:37Yes, one can forgive even what they did.
10:42But one can never forget.
10:52Whether we can forgive, whether we can forget, but they do so in a different cultural context.
11:01And 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, the air thick with the smell of old paper and dust.
12:05Xavier March stared at the files in front of him.
12:09A chilling realisation dawning on him with each page he turned.
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, ends with a much darker series of plots based on his involvement
13:20with ethically questionable MI5 operations after the end of the war.
13:25It'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.
13:36Could be in intelligence, could be in government.
13:39Sir Ian Woodhead is my counterpart at MI6.
13:42Eric Kaplan is a member of the Gen 75 committee.
13:45It is inconceivable that either of them could have divided loyalties.
13:51Graham Greene's Catholicism led to him consistently interpreting international affairs within an ethical framework.
14:01Every novelist has something in common with a spy.
14:05White Hart Hotel?
14:07Yes, Colonel White is staying here.
14:12I'm afraid he's fast asleep at this time, sir.
14:16Very good. I 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.
14:39I'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 analyzes 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,
15:10and predict the later destructive tangles of American involvement in 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.
15:50Nor the true cost of his interference.
15:55I had tried to warn him.
15:57But like all the others.
16:01He wouldn't listen.
16:04He thought he could control things.
16:07But 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.
16:24Was regarded as worse than equivocal by some.
16:27No place here for the importance of the defense of the realm.
16:31An unanswered question.
16:33An unanswered question that runs through the history of spies.
16:35And spy masters alike.
16:37Is heard also.
16:38In E.M. Forster's comment.
16:40If I had to choose between betraying my country.
16:43And betraying my friend.
16:45I hope I should have the guts.
16:47To betray my country.
16:50Old man.
16:51You never should have gone to the police.
16:53You 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 on these sort of things.
17:04Victims?
17:06Be 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 pounds for every dot that stopped.
17:19Would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money?
17:21Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?
17:25Free of income tax, old man.
17:27Free of income tax.
17:29Another way you can save money now, dear.
17:31A lot 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,
17:44mocks some of the absurdities of MI6.
17:47Absurdities that Green had experienced personally.
17:51The film version in 1959, though set as a comedy,
17:56had serious undertones.
18:00Perhaps they're using this as bait.
18:01Of 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,
18:13the threat and menace of the pervasive atmosphere of the Cold War.
18:22The Third Man was a masterpiece based on a screenplay by Graham Greene,
18:28directed by Carol Reid, shot by cinematographer Robert Krasker
18:32and underlain by the zither music of Anton Karras,
18:37a surprise number one hit in 1950,
18:40and was on the Billboard chart for 11 weeks in the USA.
18:47We had a day and a night unit.
18:49We worked from 8pm until 5am,
18:52then went to bed, got up at 10am,
18:55worked with the day unit until 4pm,
18:57and then went back to bed until 8pm.
19:00It'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
19:22is that there was a 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,
19:55we would by now simply be a hole in the North Sea.
20:01Whereas there would be bits of the United States and bits of Russia surviving.
20:05Acting, therefore, in the defence of our own security,
20:08and of the entire Western Hemisphere,
20:12and under the authority entrusted to me by the Constitution,
20:15as 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,
20:35I think the biggest single success of our Stalin's Russia
20:39was getting the secrets of the atomic bomb.
20:45The biggest British intelligence failure that we know about in the 21st century
20:51is without doubt the belief that Saddam Hussein 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
21:10weapons of mass destruction, weapons of nuclear, chemical, biological warfare.
21:15What was he saying in public? We don't have any weapons of mass destruction.
21:19What was he saying in private? Of course we have weapons of mass destruction.
21:23But why was he saying that? Not because it was true, but he knew that if he told it to
21:29his advisers, it would get through to Iran.
21:34What about the Israelis? He was afraid the Israelis might attack him.
21:38But he thought they would be deterred if they thought he had weapons of mass destruction.
21:43So there we are. It 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.
21:59Look, it happens all over the world.
22:02India took Goa, China took Tibet, Indonesia has taken East Timor, Argentina tried for the Falklands.
22:10Each time the claim is retaking a chunk of rightful territory.
22:18It's very popular with the home crowd, you 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.
22:46One of them was the failure to see the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979. That was a
22:51big 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 Falcon 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, not least that of the intentions of Saddam Hussein, though they were not alone in
23:57that.
23:57Steve Cole, in his book, in his book, The Achilles Trap, additionally writes,
24:02Like many people in the Middle East and elsewhere, Saddam 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.
24:28If you 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
24:49are stories, framing stories, that perhaps offer a more conflicted ethical dimension.
24:59Whereas 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.
25:10When 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, the Iraq War.
25:26It creates this politically divisive period of British political history, where there are those for the conflict and those 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.
25:45When 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. I 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.
27:28He 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. The game was the game, and in the end,
27:48it 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,
27:58trying to fight a battle no one had ever explained.
28:06But what does he do in his novels? He amalgamates MI5 and MI6 into a single British intelligence service, which
28:16he calls the circus.
28:19Why spy?
28:24For 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, and the hungry for food, and the rich for excess, your chosen profession is perfectly secure.
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 check. 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.
30:10And he took on roles. I mean, as a spy, as most people know, he worked for, first of all,
30:19for British intelligence as a civilian, but then later on joined MI5 and then transferred MI6.
30:29He did have these different identities, and he did have different identities, for example, as loyal husband, but as serial
30:36adulterer, as affectionate friend, and as betrayer.
30:45He 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 and in
31:10the film version, there is a close approach between the mechanisms of the classic espionage novel story and those of
31:22the classic detective story.
31:24But it also functions as detective fiction, as, in fact, a classic piece of detective fiction, where the investigator, Smiley,
31:37George Smiley, in this case, is not looking for a murderer, though 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, and
31:59always thought that he recognised some kind of bond with Philby, that he could have been Philby himself.
32:06When Philby defected, you know, there was an attempt to minimise his role and to suggest that he hadn't been
32:14very important, and it was only considerably later that it was revealed that he really had been at the top
32:21level and could have risen to the very top itself.
32:24Aliline, Tinker, Aiden, Taylor, Land, Soldier, Hester House.
32:45Poor man.
32:53Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession.
32:58The 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, learns only one prayer.
33:15That he may never, 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, people assumed that
33:36he was a genre writer, perhaps a pulp writer.
33:40I think he's better than that.
33:42I think he's a major writer.
33:44So if we think of John le Carré as a central example, his mother left the family when he was
33:53five years old.
33:54That, I think, left a permanent mark on his nature, on his imagination, his sense of the world.
34:03He was on poor terms with his father.
34:07And so it really was a difficult relationship.
34:11And le Carré's persistent preoccupation with betrayal, abandonment and isolation in difficult circumstances does, I think, bear a very close
34:27relation with those experiences.
34:29As is so often the case with those who have been abandoned, in his later life, he himself turned into
34:39someone who abandoned others.
34:42Hello.
34:43Though John le Carré did not go to his father's funeral, he nevertheless paid for it.
34:48He doesn't trust human relations, he's cynical, he's often really quite bitter.
34:57John le Carré's life is at the heart of his narrative.
35:02The sheer human power at le Carré's disposal evokes the desperate insecurity of individuals caught up in state secrets.
35:13Today, I don't remember feeling any affection in childhood, except for my elder brother, who for a time was my
35:21only 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.
35:33He had a wonderful brain. Everybody who worked for him was in awe of his intellect.
35:37But if there was a bent way of doing something, he took it. Wonderful, wonderful, rich vein of material and
35:45very painful.
35:47He'd done quite a lot of jail and he spent some years of his life on the run in late
35:54middle age.
35:55So it was a mess, just a bloody mess. But surviving it, it was also a privilege to be part
36:03of it in some strange way.
36:04It taught you a lot about life, lowered your expectations, raised them in other ways.
36:09It was Ronnie who did the hugging. Never Olive. She was the mother who had no smell.
36:16Whereas Ronnie smelt of fine cigars and pear droppy hair oil from Taylor of Old Bond Street, the court hairdressers.
36:24John le Carré evokes the presence of his father, the effect of a sometimes cruel presence, of surviving in a
36:33world where he was abandoned by his mother,
36:36but remained fond and admiring of the father who sometimes seemed to love him, yet beat him.
36:44Ronnie's violence was not news to me because he'd made a habit beating up his second wife as well.
36:52Walter Isaacson, in his review of Le Carré's memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, captures the poignant essence of such haunting by
37:01quoting Barack Obama.
37:04Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for
37:11his father's mistakes.
37:12Richard Nixon put it more succinctly. I was born in a house my father built.
37:20McCarré remembers his father gambling in Monte Carlo. Beneath the lawn of the sporting club were small tunnels from which
37:29trapped pigeons were ejected over the sea as targets.
37:33The ones that survived returned to the place of their birth where the same traps awaited them.
37:41There'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? What are you doing?
38:00I don't think you can understand John Le Carré 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 large
38:16sums of money.
38:17David's mother had left the family home. She left in the middle of the night without saying goodbye to her
38:24sons
38:24when David was only five years old. As a little boy, he used to go up to women who arrived
38:29at the house.
38:30And quite a number of women did arrive at the house because his father, Ronnie Cornwall, had many, many girlfriends.
38:40David would sidle up to these women and say, Are you my mother?
38:43He learnt to spy because no one told him what was going on.
38:48When his father was taken off to prison, no one explained where his father was.
38:53No one explained where his mother was. These things just happened.
38:57He wanted to have a normal family life. He wanted to be a good father to his children.
39:03And he used this curious expression. He said, I am the bridge that my children must walk across in order
39:09to have normal lives.
39:11We know from recent biographical research that during his second marriage, he had, as a minimum, 11 affairs.
39:19John le Carré's interpretation of the world of espionage is very personal and it is in part a reaction against
39:30what he thought was a dangerous falsification of the world of espionage.
39:38Really through the power of the image of James Bond.
39:43So in novel after novel, you see him challenging that glamorization.
39:51And you certainly see it in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which was his breakthrough novel.
39:58He tried to go in the direction.
40:12Keep the best of anything.
40:14Get into the room.
40:15Come on.
40:17Come on.
40:18Come on.
40:21Come on.
40:29Jump, Alec! 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,
40:50you see that particularly in the devastating final sequence in the film.
40:57That is not something that you would witness in a Bond film.
41:22David, his cover role, was working as a second secretary in the British Embassy in Bond.
41:29But the spy who came in from the cold just hit a nerve at the right moment.
41:33It was the moment when the Berlin Wall went up, when Kennedy came to Berlin,
41:38when suddenly that seemed the centre of the world.
41:40I think also he is the writer about the post-colonial experience,
41:49about Britain trying to come to terms with its much diminished role.
41:55After 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 are looking at SIS through the Le Carre prism,
42:12a lot of Le Carre's post-Cold War writing is often about how the secret intelligence service
42:19are doing things that are not ethically good.
42:24So, for example, the backdrop to the concert that Garner is, SIS are, along with the British government,
42:31supporting big pharma in post-colonial Africa.
42:39My continent, Africa, is staggering under the weight of not one, but three plagues.
42:46Yet still the governments of the USA and Europe, at the behest of the pharmaceutical companies
42:51that seem to control them, drag their feet,
42:54and continue to give us endless reasons why we should buy your branded drugs
42:59at five, ten, twenty times the price.
43:02Sweetheart, 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 Perpiaoli,
43:13was a French humanitarian who lived in Cambodia and throughout the world.
43:18He dedicated his novel, The Constant Gardener, to her,
43:21and based his main character, Tessa Quayle, upon her.
43:26Yvette, like almost no-one else, had opened my eyes to constructive compassion,
43:32to putting your money and your life where your heart was,
43:35and I was not alone in this.
43:38When you look at the backdrop to some other Le Carre novels,
43:43SIS are involved and complicit in illegal arms trafficking,
43:48so the story of the night manager.
43:50SIS is an organisation that is breaching arms embargoes
43:55and supporting international military trade.
43:58So there's a variance here between, you know, popular perceptions and reality.
44:02What led you to believe that British arms are being exported under the counter through Trade Pass?
44:08I was shown fake MOD end-user certificates for seven different arms companies, UK and US.
44:15Do you mean these?
44:24Yes.
44:25Those are genuine MOD export certificates for Bulgaria and Italy.
44:30That's not true.
44:32I have signed letters from both Italian and Bulgarian governments confirming the sales.
44:36This is a cover-up.
44:38Angela.
44:39Are you accusing me of lying?
44:47You?
44:48Yes.
44:49Mm-hmm.
45:08You?
45:11Yes.
45:16It's only been a clear country and 2021
45:16You're not gonna be petersed.
45:16So there's no way.
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