The Secret Centre (2000) - full transcript

A man who plays a role
not to others, but alone,

is exposed to obvious
psychological dangers.

In itself, the practice of deception
is not particularly exacting -

it's a matter of experience,
of professional expertise.

It's a facility most of us can acquire.

But while a confidence trickster,
a play actor or a gambler

can return from his performance
to the ranks of his admirers,

the secret agent enjoys no such relief.

For him, deception is first
a matter of self-defence.

No, I wasn't a spy,
and I didn't meet spies.

Of course, to a novelist,



making fact into fiction
is simplicity itself.

Interviewers trying to get
the truth out of John le Carré

need to keep all their wits about them.

He's not only the man who turned
the spy story into high art -

he was actually a spy.

And spies, of course,
are not meant to tell the truth.

Le Carr's classic
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, however,

is a critique
of a very different kind of liar -

a double agent
who betrayed us to the Russians.

In his isolated house,
le Carré carefully guided me through

the deceptions which have
affected his life from childhood.

What Philby
and I had in common was

immense, immeasurable,
terrifying, irrational fathers -

men who would tell you anything,



lie about themselves, make themselves
really unreachable to children.

And Philby's father
was the most dreadful fellow -

a kind of conman

who worked the Middle East

and became a Rolls-Royce representative,

wormed his way into
the Saudi Arabian court circles

and converted to Islam
for reasons of convenience.

And I always felt with Philby

that he took the path I might have taken
if I'd been a different animal.

I learned first to be a chameleon.

The technique is based on the theory
that the interviewer,

loving no-one as well as himself,
will be attracted by his own image.

You therefore assume the exact
social, temperamental, political

and intellectual colour
of your inquisitor.

Sometimes this method founders
against the idiocy

or ill-disposition of the inquisitor.

If so, become an armadillo.

Place the interviewer
in a position so incongruous

that you are superior to him.

Turn him into an ape,

send him naked to Masonic banquets,

condemn him, like the serpent,
to go about on his belly.

When I was five,
my mother simply packed up and disappeared

and I have no memory of
mourning my mother at all.

And so my dad
was the only parent I knew.

He was a man of no political education -
no education at all.

Tremendous fluency.

A wonderful...

...kind of sponge for picking up
attitudes and manners

and voices and things.

And he stood as a Liberal candidate
for a Great Yarmouth constituency.

We can't put our ideals
in the collection box.

We can't pay for
our sons' education with ideals.

You have to realise that he was
proposing himself to the people

of this constituency as a Baptist -
which he wasn't -

as a teetotaller - which, my God,
he wasn't!

And as a man of the people,
which he certainly was.

And we would stop between meetings,

and he had a Bentley,
and Mr Nutbeam was the chauffeur.

And Mr Nutbeam would whip round,
open up the boot of the Bentley,

and there was this little dovecote
with splits of champagne in it.

And...
And he would whack one home

and then into the next schoolroom
in some benighted broad or other.

Ladies and gentlemen...

He had one speech

and the speech went...
"So, people of Yarmouth,

"I want you to remember this.

"People come up to me in the road
and they say to me,

"'Ronnie, you're a man of ideals -
what place have ideals in politics?'

"And I say to them..." -
very Churchillian -

"And I say to them that
ideals are like the stars -

"we cannot reach them,
but we profit by their presence.

"And thank you very much,
people of Yarmouth."

And every damn speech ended
with this piece of nonsense.

Then we got to Acle Broad
out on the Norfolk Broads.

He delivered his speech, and...

...a woman got up at the back and said,

"Is it true the candidate's
been in prison?"

And there was a silence.

And Ronnie, my father, moved
to the front of the little podium,

and said, "I see here
people of a certain age -

"mothers, fathers and grandparents.

"And I want to ask them this question."

If one of these children -

like this son of mine,
sitting here behind me,

poised to collect some of the highest
prizes the law of this country can offer -

if one of these children
should ever make a mistake...

...and pay the price society exacts...

...and come home and say, "Mum, it's me...

"Dad... it's me..."

...which one of you sitting here tonight
would slam the door in his face?

In the car, as we whizzed off
to the next meeting, I said...

... "What's that about?"

And he said, "Oh, many years ago
I was in the position of an office boy

"who took a few bob
out of the stamp-money box

"and was caught before I had
a chance to put it back."

Well, I learned later
that he was sentenced, I think,

to four years in prison.

As I became more... more grown-up,
he began to use me

to go and deliver messages
of the most frightful kind.

Like, "My father just rang.

"He's terribly sorry to say
the cheque's in the post," or...

...or... "He can't make it home
this evening."

And then... before the big crash, we were
hiding the cars in the back garden

and so on, so that
they couldn't be repossessed

and probably also so that people
didn't know he was there.

He was tremendously warm, sentimental.

He got you in a great big bear hug
and would...

"Ah, come on -
don't look like that!

"Don't be like that."

Come on, dry those old peepers of yours.

Give your old dad a hug.

There was absolutely
no way you could relate

face to face, truth for truth.

Never lie, son.

No Pym was ever a liar.

See how I told them the truth tonight?
God heard me.

Always does.

Really, the only retaliation was...

...was...

...the secret path.

I think I learned to give myself
very rarely to people

and enormously treasured -
as I still do - my secrecy.

I invested institutions
with those qualities

I hoped to find in parents.

But I received a savagely orthodox
and brutal early education

from the private and public school
systems of those days

and then went
to the holiday schools between.

So I... invested institutions

with very cruel and unpredictable powers.

His relations
with his housemaster were not good.

He was in Westcott House.

The housemaster, which was
a man called Stanley Thompson,

was a rigid, rather narrow man.

Kind, but...

...er...

...morally very different from...

...the Cornwell background.

Thompson had really
a very poor view of Mr Cornwell Senior.

Understandably.

So...

...really, Sherborne
was very much a mixed blessing.

The actual
gulf between Sherborne -

this very high-church orthodoxy
as it then was -

and the chaos of domestic life

and the... the terribly funny,
rackety scenes we lived-

that gulf became
unbridgeable and absurd.

And I found myself
tending to both extremes,

so that I went off and stayed with
the Anglican Franciscans in Cerne Abbas

for one bit of the holiday

because I really wanted to immerse
myself in the meanings of Christianity

and I wanted to commit
to the extremes of the teachings

of the school I was in.

On the other hand,
I then suffered a complete revulsion

from the Christianity
and the orthodoxy

and I began to think that I was
the plaything of ridiculous forces -

on the one hand, this rackety criminality,

on the other,
this toffee-nosed high-school stuff.

Um... And I fled it, really.

Well, the room has changed,
as rooms do.

I don't remember any books around here.

What I remember is
a great long table

and the professor sitting up at the end

and, I suppose, about 20 students
or so arranged either side.

You have to understand that in the German
and, indeed, in the Swiss ethic,

the professor has a tremendous authority -
far greater than one could imagine

in any English teaching institution
these days.

And he sat here looking tremendously
venerable in his silver hair

and I was really an escapee from England

and... I was a 16-and-a-half-year-old kid.

It went right over my head -
the complete discussion.

He talked about...

He kept talking about "die fliegenden
Blätter der Art und Kunst".

These were the... the terms
of reference of the Goethean period.

And I couldn't understand
how you translate

"flying leaves of art and culture".

And he must, after a while,
have identified me

as some kind of stowaway,

because he asked me to stay behind
at the end of the seminar

and so I remained behind.

I looked half the age
of anybody else there.

And, really, if the discussions
had been in English,

I wouldn't have understood them,

but they were in
very, very cultural German

and about people I'd never heard of

and I was sitting there
with my thumb in my mouth, practically.

And... he said, "What are you doing here?"

And I said, "Well...
I'm a refugee from England."

And he said,
"Well... then you'd better stay."

Charlemagne said to possess another
language is to possess another soul.

And I wanted that other soul.

I felt that my English one
had been sufficiently battered

and I would prefer to change it
for a different one.

And it was here, really, that,
in a curious way, I said goodbye -

I think forever - to my sense
of integration of English life.

And I returned and I remain
devoted to my own country

in lots of ways.

But I've always retained
that distance from it.

I was completely lonely,
and although I'd cut off from England

I terribly missed the company
of English people.

I missed, above all, my school friends
and that kind of thing.

And so I went and attached myself
to the English community

by going to the little English church
up by the embassy.

And...

...I was picked up.

Well, I was taken into
people's homes and...

One diplomat - who I expect
was attached to the intelligence section -

asked me to do jobs
so trivial and minuscule

that they're really of
no account whatever.

But I trolleyed off thinking I was
the greatest spy in the world

and hung around in Geneva
and gave a gentleman a parcel

and, you know, looked for somebody

carrying a copy of last week's
Time magazine - whatever it was.

And I thought I was absolutely
the male version of Mata Hari.

And the clandestine nature of it
became me -

it absolutely fitted
with my nature at that time.

If we get interrupted by some
chance encounter, Magnus -

friend of yours, friend of mine,
but not in the family,

I'm sure you understand me -

you and I are embroiled in the affairs

of the British Embassy's
Anglo-Swiss Christian Society.

I'm the new secretary.

You're my missioner at the university.

Just in case.

He was a child agent,
graded "semi-conscious" -

which is our sweet way of saying

he sort of knows what he is
sort of doing and sort of why.

He was 17 years old
and if he needed you urgently

he was to ring Felicity
and say his uncle was in town.

If you needed him you'd phone
the Ollingers from a callbox and say

you were Mac from Birmingham
passing through.

"Float, Magnus," you said.

"Get in there and be your own
charming self, Magnus, "you said.

"Keep your ears and eyes open -
see what sticks.

"But, for God's sake, don't get
into trouble with the Swissies."

I'd done a run to Geneva
or wherever it was,

and I came back to Länggassstrasse,
number 45, where I lived in a tiny attic -

all alone, obviously -

and my landlady said,
"The Fremdenpolizei want to talk to you."

Now, that's the Special Branch -

the people who look after
undesirable foreigners in this country.

So I was absolutely terrified.

I thought, "My God, this is it -
I'm going to be shot at dawn."

And I also noticed that my
beloved English Raleigh bicycle

that I'd brought with me
from England had disappeared.

So I went down
to the police headquarters

to what seemed to be

a formless but formidable,
deeply threatening interrogation

about where did I come from,
had I got a student's card?

Yes, I had.

And finally he said,
"And do you know about the law

"relating to bicycles in Switzerland?"

And I said, "No."

And he said,
"They should all be registered

"and you have been informed against

"because your bicycle does not carry
an official licence, so get one."

Father decided
that David must go to Oxford.

So, in a Cornwell sort of way,

one of his pals was a man
called Sir James Barnes,

who was a civil servant

and interested - as Father Cornwell was -

in the fortunes
of the Arsenal Football Club.

And he said to Sir James Barnes,
"I want to get my son into Oxford."

Sir James Barnes said,
"Well, I know another civil servant -

"Folliott Sandford" -
later registrar here.

Um.. And Folliott Sandford
was approached and he said,

"Well, try Keith Murray,
the Rector of Lincoln."

That's in the first instance.

And Keith - knowing that
I had been at Sherborne

and had only recently come here -

said to me, "What do you know
of David Cornwell?"

I said, "I think he's a very nice,
intelligent chap."

So we brought him up,
interviewed him in the next room.

He did some sort of exam
and passed with colours

and, in spite of...
a sort of somewhat grumpy letter

from his housemaster at Sherborne,
was admitted.

Well, he was sort of diffident,

and he was very English and a bit
military and very, very withheld.

He kept a very low profile.

He didn't in fact engage
very much in...

...in... in... conversation.

And I think the fact that he contributed
to the magazine Oxford Left

as an illustrator meant that,
in a way, he could hide.

I mean, he didn't have to discourse.

I mean, all he had to do was to draw,
and therefore he didn't, in a sense,

have to engage conversationally.

I did notice him... hanging around -

I think one has to say -
a number of meetings,

and loosely and rather mysteriously
associated with the left in Oxford.

There is this bloke
who says you were busy spying

when you were at Oxford.

Yes. Um...

Is that true?

Yeah, it's true.

It's true in the sense that...

...there was a conviction then that...

...the Russians, the Soviets
and their allies would be recruiting

from the ranks of Oxford,
middle-class Oxford undergraduates

in the late '40s,

in the same way that they had done
in the '30s at Cambridge.

That was the terror.

Father went bankrupt

and, really, there was no money
to pay David's fees

and I think he just got desperate.

Had no money, he had debts. Um... he...

...asked me, he said, "Let's get married."

We'd been going to get married
the following year

and I was going to continue working.

And by that time I'd been told that
he was going to work for MI5.

- Told? Somebody came to the house?
- Somebody came to the house

and we had dinner
and he told me, you know,

said, how did I feel about it?

They'd obviously checked me out
and I was OK.

They didn't do any further vetting
that I was aware of

but they warned me all about,
you know,

how he would be called off on jobs
that I wouldn't know about.

Did you gradually form an ideological
notion of what being a spy might be...

- Well...
- ...and then sort of join up?

Was it just that you were recruited by the
army when you did your national service?

Well, I was recruited...

...both by the army and by the...

...by the civilian branches of
intelligence at different times.

I think when the option
was presented to me,

it was immensely attractive.

It really was as if the whole of my life
had prepared me for this moment.

It was entering the priesthood
and it was the call.

I really believed at last that

I had found a cause I could serve,

that I had, by instinct,
the methodology to serve it well.

And I also longed for the dignity
which great secrecy confers upon you.

He had various informers,
I think. He was running various informers.

I'd say trades unionists,
but I don't know if it was only that.

But the ones I knew about were sort of
very often long-term communists

who, after '56, got fed up
with the whole thing...

...and got worried about
the way things were going.

That is my assumption.

I'm not sure. But I know, you know,
there was one rather sweet man

you felt terribly sorry for.

It felt like betrayal.

But it had a voluptuous quality,
as it did for my character.

A voluptuous quality in the sense

that this was a necessary
sacrifice of morality.

And that is a very important
component

of what makes people spy -
what attracts them.

There is something delicious
about being told now,

"We're going to have
to burgle that house tonight."

And... "So we must do this.
We must do this.

"We must get the drawing,
we must get the plans.

"And what we'll do is we'll have
a policeman outside.

"And while the owners of the house
are away, in case they come back,

"the policeman will say,
'I'm sorry, you can't come in.

"'We've had a burglary report
on your premises.'"

And these larcenous instincts, which are
put to the service of the Crown,

do give a kind of buzz, without doubt.

That's the delight of the game.

He was obviously brilliant there
from the start,

and I think 5 thought
they'd got quite a catch with him.

That's my impression now-

I mean, I didn't necessarily
think it at the time.

Until that time, we thought he could
make a bit of extra money

for us by his painting.

Then he had this long train journey
going up and down to London

every day from Missenden -
well, an hour's train journey.

And so he started to write.

"Smiley, Marsden speaking.

"You interviewed Samuel Arthur Fennan
at the Foreign Office on Monday.

"Am I right?"

"Yes. Yes, I did."

"What was the case?"

"Anonymous letter alleging
party membership at Oxford.

"Routine interview authorised
by the Director of Security."

"Fennan can't have complained,"
thought Smiley.

"He knew I'd clear him. There was
nothing irregular - nothing."

"Did you go for him at all?
Was it hostile, Smiley? Tell me that."

I loaded upon Smiley's shoulders

the responsibility of having gone
to interrogate a man - you -

and I'm saying to you now,
in a rash moment,

"I think, according to our records,
you joined the Communist Party

while you were at university," and you're
saying, "Yes, but that lasted six months

"and I realise it was a load of bunkum.

"Anyway, I fell in love
with this girl and I gave it up."

And I'm saying, "Fine, well, it's good
that you've got that off your chest."

And I go back to London
and you shoot yourself.

And I'm called to account
in the middle of the night.

"Did you bully Nigel?

"What did you do to him?

"I mean, Christ, can you imagine
what this is going to do for us?"

You know, "We hold you
personally responsible for this."

So Smiley began in that situation
where he almost felt set up

and everyone was accusing him
of causing a scandal.

He says you cast doubts on
his loyalty - that his career

in the FO is ruined, that he is
the victim of paid informants.

He said, "What? He must
have gone stark mad!

"He knows he's cleared.
What else does he want?"

"Nothing. He's dead.
Killed himself at 10:30 this evening.

"Left a letter to the Foreign Secretary.

"The police rang one of his assistants
and got permission to open the letter.

"Then they told us
there's going to be an inquiry.

"Smiley... You're sure, aren't you?"

Our second son
had just been born at home,

and he came back that morning and told me
that he'd moved from 5 to 6...

...which he'd done
sort of out of the blue,

and told me, "Well, that will mean we will
go abroad, which will be quite fun."

6 had a certain glamour
because it was attached

to the Foreign Office and you did
travel with it much more

and he was in deep cover there.

When you say deep cover,
you mean sort of...?

Well, he wasn't... Some officers
are declared to the country

if it's a friendly country.

- Right.
- Some aren't.

The central government
of the Federal Republic of Germany

is situated at Bonn.

Berlin is separated from
the West by the Soviet Zone

and is not, in full,
part of the Federal Republic.

My stamping ground was Bonn,

and the larger sort of
West German political scenes

as exemplified in meetings in
Hamburg or Munich or Frankfurt

or wherever, and getting to know
German politicians was my stuff.

But when the Berlin Wall went up...

...I happened... I'd been in Nuremberg...

...and there'd been a great
SPD German Socialist rally

addressed by Willy Brandt,
and Willy Brandt said,

"Wir haben Fingerspitzengefühl" -
we feel in the tips of our fingers -

that there'll be a crisis
in Berlin very soon.

And I went back to Bonn.

I thought, "Well, I'll just...
I'll do a little telegram."

Just as a journalist would -
"I'll file this one."

I had an uneasy feeling.

And by the time I got to the embassy,

people were running around
the corridors and all the lights were on.

The news was coming in

of the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint
going up, and the fun had started.

It happened in series, as it were.

First it was barbed wire,

then it was extended barbed wire,
then the ploughed strip came -

that was mined.

And I was looking for the new book.

And I think for 48 hours
I didn't sleep at all.

When I got back to Königswinter,
where we lived,

I was in a state of what I think
shrinks call fugue.

I was tremendously high

and in five weeks I wrote a huge, overlong
version of what became

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

and I cut it down to about 55,000 words
and bunged it in.

I think I knew then that I'd had
one of those moments of...

...what I think of now in retrospect
as literary maturity, if you will -

a moment when material and subject
come together and you feel,

"Yeah, this one's really right."

And I was pretty sure
that I had said something...

...that was important about...
the idiocy of the situation, really,

and the human cost of it.

"Get back!" Leamas hissed.
"Get your hand away!

"How the hell can I see if you wave
your hand around like that?"

Slamming the car into first gear,

he drove fast across the wide road.

Glancing to his left,
he was astonished to glimpse

the plump silhouette
of the Brandenburg Gate 300 yards away,

and the sinister grouping
of military vehicles at the foot of it.

"Where are we going?" he asked suddenly.

"We are nearly there.
Go slowly now, left. No, no - left, left!

"Go left!" he cried.

And Leamas jerked the wheel
in the nick of time.

"Through there,"
came the whispered command.

"Then hard right.
You'll see a street lamp on your right.

"The one beyond it is broken.

"When you reach the second lamp,

"switch off the engine and coast until
you see a fire hydrant. That's the place."

"Why the hell didn't you drive yourself?"

"He said you should drive.
He said it was safer."

"Look." The man pointed
down a side street to the left.

At the far end, they saw a brief stretch
of wall, grey-brown in the weary arclight.

Along the top
ran a triple strand of barbed wire.

"How will the girl get over the wire?"
"It is already cut where you climb.

"There's a small gap. You have
one minute to reach the wall. Goodbye."

I knew -just from
the papers that had crossed my desk -

the imminence of world war.

And when the Berlin Wall went up,

some of us at least thought that
the end of the world was quite close.

And so I wrote a book
in great heat which said,

"A plague on both your houses."

I read it in German, of course.

And for a long time it was
the only book I read.

This was, I think,

in beginning or middle of the '60s.

How did you get hold of it?

Because it wasn't published,
I suppose, in... in the DDR, was it?

Ja...

You see, in my position,
I was responsible for...

...foreign intelligence work,

and so I had the West German
magazines and papers,

and I'm not sure whether I give an order
to bring me this book or one of my spies

brought it as a present.

I was surprised how he described
the contradiction

between Mundt and Fiedler

because I saw them as a representative
of intelligence and counter-intelligence.

And the contradictions...

...were close to our reality at that time

and I was astonished because...

And I would like to
ask John le Carré now

because I have...
Until now I haven't an answer

Had he... Had he that time some
information about the situation

inside of our Ministry of State Security?

I think the techniques of interrogations

are not too different in the whole world.

The police methods,
the methods of the secret services...

If an interrogator in our ministry

has to interrogate an arrested man,

he had on his table the files
from the operative service

with all facts, observation,

information of other agents,
and so on and so on, about this man

and why he was suspected.

Usually one interrogator,
he had some sympathy

for the interrogated person
and understand them,

understand their motives and so on.

And then another one - his way
of interrogation is really hard.

In GDR, physical methods
of interrogation were forbidden.

This psychological...
torture, if you want,

was the most successful and painful method

for the arrested people.

I don't think it actually
was an ideological standoff in many ways.

I think the information was
available to both sides,

but whatever the causes,

one system was a great deal
more benign than the other one.

It took from...
When did it get published?

It got published about autumn '63.

Just at the time Kennedy
was assassinated - I remember.

Just come out sometime around then.

And by January...

...'64...

..people like Life were after him
and photographing him in Hamburg.

And we were all prancing around
in the garden

being photographed peering
out of bushes and looking like spies!

It was all tremendously exciting for him.

I was there with three children
and being rather dreary.

My demands of the service, my expectations
were too many and too great.

I wanted to enter
heroic status immediately.

And when it turned out to be -
as any large outfit will -

it turned out to be a partly incompetent
bureaucracy and so on,

and the banality of much that it did

and the ineffectiveness of much
that it did really came home to me,

that began to coincide
with a period of parturition separations.

Things hotted up so quickly.

So many people ringing up,
so much photography,

so much lionising

became very difficult for the office
to handle, I think, quite easily.

You know, they were terrified his cover
was going to be blown any moment

and the whole thing would go.

So he... So they asked him
to leave - very politely.

What was really working full-time...

...overtime, I suppose they would say,

was the literary response
to the environment I found myself in.

I mean, mine was a worm's-eye view
of the whole institution of spying

and British intelligence.

And I didn't really develop that view
until I left the secret world -

which happened in my early 30s -

and began to use it as my...

...my... metaphor for
the human condition, if you will.

It is a little difficult to know when
to trust you people and when not.

You do live by rather different
standards, don't you?

I mean, you have to - I accept that.

I'm not non-judgemental.
Our aims are the same, after all,

even if our methods are different.

I once heard somebody say
morality was method.

Do you hold with that?

I suppose you wouldn't.

You would say that morality
was vested in the aim, I expect.

Difficult to know what one's aims are,
that's the trouble.

Especially if you're British.

I'd not been in the secret world long

before George Blake was
unmasked as a defector.

I'd not arrived in Bonn as a young
diplomat for more than a few months

before Kim Philby was also exposed.

So I observed the impact of this
upon the services themselves.

It was much deeper than,
"Christ, which operations are blown?"

It was, "These were gentlemen.
These were us."

For the first time, it became apparent
that Etonians

were not necessarily by definition secure.

When you think of the duality
of Philby's life as a double agent...

So there he is setting up
the Albanian operation

and he's saying, "Right, you boys,
we'll take you off and train you.

"It's going to be terribly dangerous

"but it's for a free Albania,
and you know what you stand for."

And then sneaking round the back
and saying to his people,

"They'll be landing
on this-and-this night."

They landed one by one into
reception parties launched by the KGB.

And those people
died horrible deaths under torture.

He was in the front line
of the intelligence world.

He knew what kind of country
he was serving secretly.

He knew about the deportations,
he knew about the corruption.

He knew about the bad stuff.

He knew about the planned genocide
of the Soviet middle class.

And yet he went on working against us.

Now, our shortcomings are manifest
and we are not a perfect democracy,

but, my goodness,
we do allow people to protest in public.

And Philby therefore carried to the grave,
as far as I was concerned,

my unqualified contempt.

He is a man
whom you can give great respect

because he did it as a man with conviction

very close to my own conviction.

And he did it not because of money

or under pressure,
or because of lovers and so on.

He was a man of great intelligence.

Philby betrayed
David - gave his name to the Russians

when he was working as an MI6 agent
in Bern,

a young man at the university.

So Philby gave his name,
among other names, of course, to us.

Of course, Philby was very English.

And it may sound paradoxical,
but he reminded me of David.

Dignity...

...er, dry humour...

...er, soft when necessary,
hard when necessary...

...reserved.

It's a vanishing type of an Englishman,
but Philby was very much like David.

And like Sir Alec Guinness
when he played Smiley.

It's absolutely typical
of Smiley

that in a sense
he loves an England that doesn't exist.

He loves standards of human behaviour
which are unfindable.

And therefore he is
some kind of disappointed romantic

who has to accept compromise
as a kind of personal pain.

"An artist is a bloke who can hold
two fundamentally opposing views

"and still function."
Who dreamed that one up?

Scott Fitzgerald.

Well, Fitzgerald knew a thing or two.

And I'm definitely functioning.

As a good socialist,
I'm going where the money is.

As a good capitalist,
I'm sticking with the revolution

because if you can't beat it, spy on it.

Don't look like that, George!

It's the name of the game these days.

You scratch my conscience,
I'll drive your Jag, right?

No.

Did you get that from Haydon? Is that one
of Bill's jokes about materialist England?

The pigs-in-clover society?

- Don't you like it?
- Not much.

Of course there are competitive

and acquisitive instincts
in Western society,

but they are offset against
other concerns which you won't find in...

Poznan, Budapest, Kiev, Sofia...

Tell me all about it, George.

I'm just saying that's England now, man.
All you have to do

is look out the bloody window.

I tried to write Tinker,
Tailor without Smiley to begin with.

And I had a pictorial opening,
which I always have,

just as I have the final frame
of the book, if you like, in my mind,

and know nothing of
what is going to lie between the two.

But what I couldn't do
was get into the past

without the authority
of Smiley's own memory.

And once I brought him back,

er, I realised that, in fact,
he was a man with unfinished business.

The restless retirement.

When he sees Peter Guillam
coming to him at the beginning,

I think he knows
what Guillam's come about, really.

Just as when he goes to Connie,
Connie knows what he's come about.

He loved the service,
the spirit of the service.

The sense of self-sacrifice
and dedication and comradeship

which, without doubt, that world imparts.

Smiley was my secret-sharer
through a whole lot of early books

when I was very scared of emotion.

Emotion was filtered through Smiley.

For as long as he was there,
he, in a sense,

stood between you
and the feelings you might have.

He was a comforter.

Vivian Green was
the strong moral intellect in my life.

And you might say the good side,
the strong conscience of Smiley

is from Vivian.

David himself,
as it were, revealed this

in a newspaper article in 1980, was it?

He used the words, "My mentor
at Sherborne, who later moved to Oxford."

I said, "What do you mean by this?"
He said, "I've always been secretly amused

"that you never saw that you had
some of the qualities of Smiley."

"An understanding of human nature,

"a sympathy for human frailty...

"...and a capacity for listening."

But really, the
rumpledness, the sense of not belonging,

the sense of being a misfit,
the sense of being personally ugly -

these derive so much
from the humiliations of childhood.

Even at prep school,
my dad didn't pay the fees

and you began to feel that in the way
you were segregated and spoken to

and, "Have you heard from your father?
Do you know where he is?" and so on.

And when Lord Iliffe wanted beaters

to come and raise the pheasants
for him to shoot,

I was one of the boys
who was never chosen

because it wasn't seen to be right in
some way - I wasn't quite a gentleman.

I took all those things very personally

because I expected so much
of the institution.

I wanted it to replace parenthood,
and I wanted it to embrace me.

And the rejection that I suffered somehow
went into the misfit that is Smiley,

er, the outsider that is Smiley,

er, the very...

...the skilful observer that is Smiley.

And any child who actually believes
that home is a terribly dangerous place

becomes, in self-defence,
a very acute watcher and listener.

George Smiley is a real
hero and a man of great intelligence

who did his work with full conviction.

I think, of course, it's the result

of le Carr's inside knowledge,

these, er, partly real methods
of interrogation,

of intelligence work.

And so I can recognise them.

Markus Wolf says
you portray the GDR as the evil empire.

Does that square with
your creation of Karla,

Smiley's opposite number
in Moscow Centre?

Karla is drawn, really,
from those '30s Comintern figures

where the spirit of self-sacrifice
on behalf of the revolution is absolute.

Bakatin, who was head of the KGB,

said to me, "What you must understand
is that this was the popular revolution.

"This would free the world.

"And we accepted as the bitter pill
that we had to swallow

"the mistakes,
the acts of inhumanity along the way."

And I think it was that kind of
actually very admirable commitment

to the communist cause
that I wanted to dignify in Karla.

What Smiley knows is that in luring Karla
away to the West, he, Smiley,

has deployed the methods of the East.

And what Karla knows is that
in giving way to his human compassion...

...he has broken with his own ethic.

George, all your life, fantastic!

Take care, George.

Go well, hear me.

So both of them feel, in a sense, that
they've betrayed the code they lived by.

And Smiley feels unclean
at having blackmailed Karla...

...having discovered that
Karla had a mentally defective daughter

whom he's accommodated in Switzerland.

Come on, old friend, it's bedtime.

George!

You won.

Did I?

Yes...

Yes, I suppose I did.

I waited,
at the end of the Cold War,

for something to tell us
the world can now be reshaped.

That endless standoff,
as it seemed to us,

between the two great
economic monoliths of the Western world

and the communist world was over.

The excuses for exploiting
the Third World,

for imposing dreadful little dictatorships
on them provided they were anti-communist,

all those excuses had gone. Now something
decent could be put together.

A real act of global perestroika
could occur.

Nothing happened. We went into
a kind of collective Western atrophy

of isolation and self-indulgence.

Our response was
to make ourselves fatter and richer

and not to take on the world at large.

Er, and so I felt that a great moment
in history had simply gone by default.

Still we're involved
in the ethnic wars.

See Yugoslavia,
you see Chechnya here in Russia.

And what change?

Of course Russia is now democratic

and a member of some European society,

but still espionage is on.

Military competition is on.

The CIA has more money than it had before.

What...? Who are they spying on,
by the way?

On Poland?

I take it that in the end
being a spy is such a rotten thing to be

that you have to find ways of feeling good
about it,

and some of those ways
may be quite genuine.

I think he must have felt in the past,
at least with part of him,

that he was defending an order
which was defensible.

The interesting change is manifested,
I think, in this new novel of his,

because here he has
as his central figure Justin,

who does belong to an older order,
the old imperialist order,

whose values I imagine
David might once have upheld

and thought that he was defending
in the best way he could,

who moves quite radically
in the course of the novel

to a much more open position.

In fact, I would say a radical position.

We meet him really
as a kind of unawakened conformist

who's contracted a rather romantic
marriage with a very young girl

who is outspoken, a young lawyer,
Oxbridge, rich,

er, and she's very zealous and idealistic.

When they get to Africa, she peels off

and gets into aid work,
where she's happy. Very happy.

She gets pregnant, loses her baby,

and that in a sense intensifies
her sense of human responsibility.

And she throws herself into the aid work

and comes upon very alarming secrets
about the pharmaceutical world.

Then we have Justin,
after her death, picking up the trail

and putting on her mantle.

And it becomes, I suppose,
a novel of education,

as the Germans would say,
a Bildungsroman,

where he learns humanity on the hoof.

Active, contributing humanity,
constructive humanity,

and an intense sense of responsibility
towards the wretched of the Earth,

who were Tessa's concern.

Drugs have got to be tried on somebody,
haven't they?

I mean, who do you choose,
for Christ's sake?

Harvard Business School?

I mean, Jesus. Foreign Office isn't in
the business of passing judgement

on the safety of non-indigenous drugs,
is it?

It's supposed to be greasing the wheels
of British industry,

not going round telling everybody

that a British company in Africa
is poisoning its customers.

You said something
very interesting when we started

doing these interviews -
that you'd forgotten how to lie.

Yes, that's how I feel now.
I have, I simply have.

I mean, I grew up with two big lies.

Er, three, really.

Er, the one that I've always denied
to myself,

which was simply the disappearance
of my mother

and the lies that were told to us
about her.

Then, for the tiny time
I spent in the secret world,

for years after writing
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

and leaving the service,
I went on denying it.

Then the final big lie was
while my father was alive,

I just couldn't talk about him.

My sister Charlotte rang from London
to say that he'd dropped dead.

It was a Sunday evening
and he'd just had a massive heart attack.

And...

...I... I simply noted it.

I had no feeling of anything at all.

It was as if that part of me
had been removed.

And I guess from then on,

it's been appraisal rather than mourning.

And fits of tremendous admiration
for the juggling act,

however many times it failed.

I mean, I've stood alone
on a New York street...

...trying to imagine,
"What's it like to be in this city,

"on the run, without a penny
in your pocket?"

And all you've got to do

is make sure you've got a clean shirt
and a pressed suit.

And that was really all the equipment
he had.

And somehow or another, he survived.

They did this to me,

but I've remained who I am.

I'm tempered, I'm able.

Inside myself,

there's an untouched man.

If they came back now
and did everything to me again,

they would never reach
the untouched man.

I've passed the exam
I've been shirking all my life.

I'm a graduate of pain.