C6| Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Missing
Eddie’s
birthday
is worth
it if
I don’t
have to
see his
Basset
hound all
the time.A COLLEGE FRIENDrecently
had a birthday, a not-insignifi-
cant one, and I forgot it. I for-
got it primarily because I am
an idiot, a lousy friend, and
also an aging paranoiac who
likely subconsciously wants to
avoid the discussion of all
birthdays, including my own.
But as another pal who forgot
the birthday pointed out, I
also blew it because I’m very
seldom on Facebook anymore.
Say what you will about
Facebook—it has not turned
Earth into a close-knit digital
wonderland; abetting global
dystopia is still in play—but it
was super-duper-good at re-
minding me of birthdays. The
Journal’s resident tech genius
Joanna Stern captured the
phenomenon last year: The
social-media platform was, ifREVIEW
JUDE EDGINTON FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNALformer Soviet Union or for that matter to the Trump
administration. In the inmost room of the secret ser-
vice, it is impossible to assess policy. No secret ser-
vice can work properly for an incompetent, direc-
tionless government. Your agency is having the
exact same problem,” he adds, referring to the CIA.
“When it does obtain stuff, you have such an unreli-
able, leaky chain of command to address it to, I can-
not imagine how you function.”
At 88, Mr. le Carré is as sharp and engaged in
world affairs as ever. He opposes Brexit (“I’m an im-
passioned European”), which he calls the culmina-
tion of efforts by successive British governments to
blame the European Union for the U.K.’s problems,
and he scorns the country’s current leadership.
“This is a boys’ game they’re playing,” he says,
pointing to the influence of the “hugely competitive”
culture of private schools like Eton, which have edu-
cated much of the country’s political elite.
Mr. le Carré, born David
Cornwell in 1931, had a
“torrid childhood.” His fa-
ther, Ronnie, was a charis-
matic con artist, in and
out of jail, and his mother
left when he was 5. Those
formative years primed
him for both espionage
and fiction.
“From an early age, I
was pretending to be who
I wasn’t,” Mr. le Carré says. “I was pretending to be
a normal kid like all the other kids in the boarding
school, pretending to go back to a settled household
and pretending to have a mother.” Later, when work-
ing for MI6 in West Germany, he discovered that his
father was negotiating an arms deal with the Stasi,
the dreaded East German secret police. Well into his
career as a best-selling novelist, he was still fetching
his father from foreign prisons. “The golden lesson”
of his childhood “was that people don’t have a cen-
ter. Performance is everything. Charm is everything.
Persuasion is everything,” he says.
At 16, Mr. le Carré fled his boarding school for
Switzerland and fell in love with German literature.
(“It was a kind of revenge against being English,” he
says.) Studying German in the late 1940s was a
shocking thing to do, but the language turned out to
be unexpectedly useful. By age 20, Mr. le Carré was
using his German skills while working for British in-
telligence in the Soviet zone of postwar, Allied-occu-
pied Austria. When he returned to England in 1952,
he worked for MI5, posing at Oxford as a communist
to inform on left-leaning students.
After university, he went abroad again with MI6,
working under diplomatic cover in West Germany,
where he began publishing under his now-famous
pseudonym. Mr. le Carré still has hard feelings about
Kim Philby, the notorious double agent who passed
British secrets to the KGB. Philby went undetected
for so long because he had a “perfect pedigree,” says
Mr. le Carré. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1974),
about an upper-class traitor spying for Moscow, was
inspired by Philby’s betrayals.
Mr. le Carré’s early novels drew on his experi-
ences for their verisimilitude, but to describe today’s
spycraft, he says, “It’s a world that I just imagine
now.” He has been asked back to speak with Britain’s
new, far more diverse generation of spies. He enjoys
reminiscing with fellow MI6 veterans: “It was the
best company. It was real fun,” he says, nostalgically.
Sometimes, he talks to old foes, like Mikhail Lyu-
bimov, a former KGB station head who has also
turned to writing. He says Yevgeny Primakov, a for-
mer Russian prime minister and foreign minister,
once confessed over vodkathat Mr. le Carré’s novels
were required reading for the KGB’s England desk.
(Primakov asked Mr. le Carré to send him hardcover
editions of all the novels.)
Some of the cloak-and-dagger slang that Mr. le
Carré created—terms such as “mole” and “pavement
artist”—has been adopted by real spies. “They love
their work being mythologized,” he says. But they
also appreciate his determination to chronicle the
boredom and moral ambiguity of real-world espio-
nage, “because the Bond stuff was all glitter and
sex.” His books, he says, “made doubt respectable.”
Today, Mr. le Carré is clearly worried. What does
Britain stand for? What do its spies have to proffer
when recruiting foreign agents? “We used to be able
to approach people and offer something very admi-
rable,” he says. “So what do we offer now? God
knows. Money, I suppose.”‘From an
early age,
Iwas
pretending
to be who
I wasn’t.’WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL|ELIZABETH WINKLER
S
pying gives you “an extraordinary insight into people,” says
John le Carré, the former British intelligence officer turned
novelist, over tea at his home in North London. “I don’t think
we ever know very much about one another, but it gives you
the habit of considering the possibilities of people. Is she
this or that? And if you’re acquisitive as an intelligence officer, how
would I use her? You think of all these wayward possibilities. It’s a kind
of inside-out thinking that never leaves you.”
He gives me a hard look. “You haven’t been recruited, have you?”
Mr. le Carré started turning such habits of thought to fiction in the
early 1960s, writing about the Cold War and its betrayals, compromises
and conflicts. After the Soviet Union collapsed, he went on to explore
the arms trade, the post-9/11 war on terrorism, shady banks and more.
Yet the undercurrent of his fiction has always been Britain—the atti-
tudes and vanities of its ruling class, the complexities of patriotism in
a fading empire. Mr. le Carré served in both MI5 and MI6 (Britain’s do-
mestic intelligence agency and its international counterpart), and he
has long seen them as “microcosms of the British condition.”
With his first novel, “Call for the Dead” (1961), he introduced thesmall, worried, self-effacing master-spy George Smiley, an inconspicu-
ous anti-James Bond who reappears in later books. Mr. le Carré’s third
novel, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1963), became an inter-
national best seller. Philip Roth called “A Perfect Spy” (1986) “the best
English novel since the war.” Novels including “The Little Drummer
Girl,” “The Constant Gardener” and “The Night Manager” have been
adapted for television and film, with more in the works.
In “Agent Running in the Field”—Mr. le Carré’s unmistakably political
25th novel, to be published Oct. 22—a veteran of MI6 named Nat returns
from adventures abroad to run one last operation: smoking out a Ukrai-
nian oligarch in London with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The
bureaucracy mysteriously shuts the mission down. Through the course
of much badminton, scotch and club banter, Nat stumbles on another op-
eration: covert talks between MI5 and the Trump administration that
threaten to undermine the European Union. While Mr. le Carré’s books
have long been political, the new novel’s plot is more specifically barbed
about current events than many of his best-known past works.
“What is fascinating at the moment,” says Mr. le Carré, “is that we
do not know as a nation what our alignments are—to Europe, to theJohn le Carré
The spy novelist sees a Britain adrift
JASON
GAYnothing else, a
mindful nag,
creating the
charming illu-
sion that I was
someone who actually paid at-
tention to the lives of other
people, even strangers.
Facebook reminded me not
only of my mother’s birthday
but the birthdays of cousins
I’ve never met, of childhood
friends I haven’t seen since we
got the mumps in second
grade. The ritual was simple
and easy. I would get a notifi-
cation: EDDIE HAS A BIRTH-
DAY TODAY, and I would peck
out an “H.B.D!” on Eddie’s
Facebook page. What a gra-
cious gesture! What a friend I
was! I would feel a burst of
magnanimity, as if I’d left a
new Lexus in Eddie’s driveway,knew he had
strongly held
takesonNancy
Pelosi and even
figured out how
to post a GIF
meme from
“South Park.”
None this
was useful to
my life—Eddie’s
postings were
the very defini-
tion of ephem-
era—and yet they took up
space. It was as if I’d decided,
for no reason whatsoever, to
memorize the statistics of a
semiprofessional Scottish vol-
leyball team.
(I should clarify that there’s
not actually an “Eddie.” I’m
making this up, which turns
out to be a totally acceptable
practice in social media. I am
also afraid the real-life “Eddie”
might turn up in my bedroom
with a shovel and a large can-
vas bag.)
So I stopped spending so
much time on Facebook. I
wound it down. This was be-
fore the national outcry overfakery and disinformation, the
regulators, legislators and
whatever Mark Zuckerberg is
doing with Tucker Carlson. I
am a simple man, and my ob-
jections aren’t so highly
pitched. I know there are peo-
ple who believe Facebook is
pernicious. But me? I just
want to know less about Eddie.
To be clear: I’m not stop-
ping completely. I did not quit
tequila after that time I had
too much tequila, and I’m still
going to wander over to Face-
book now and again. Some-
times, when I’m bored, I won-
der what’s happening in there
—whether I’ve left my page
too unattended, like an old
barn in the Vermont country-
side. I wonder if there are fe-
ral cats in there, spiders, and
maybe an old Pontiac GTO up
on blocks. Then I go back and
see it’s just Eddie, who’s now
got sharp takes about im-
peachment and the 2020 elec-
tion.
I’m OK about missing that, I
really am. Still, I apologize in
advance for forgetting your
birthday. I hope it was a blast. ZOHAR LAZARand not merely spent .08 sec-
onds typing three letters.
Of course, besides birth-
days, Facebook was also su-
per-good at reminding me of
Eddie’s political views, his
yard sales, his finicky Basset
hound Elmer, the zip line he
rode in British Columbia and
the disappointing chicken en-
chiladas he ordered in the
Phoenix airport. I started to
know more about Eddie than I
did my own children. My brain
collected Eddie’s observations,
experiences and photos as if
they were essential materials.
I knew that Eddie adored Bas-
set hounds and Metallica; IOK, So Without
Facebook I’m a
Rotten Friend