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By Murray Polner
John Le Carre's forceful and
absorbing book "The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life" is a
quasi-memoir and predecessor to a possible future and fuller version. In a
series of recollections he says virtually nothing about his two wives and
four sons while leaving his last chapter, the longest in the book, to the
people who have colored his life, his con man, thief and twice-convicted father
Ronnie, and Olive, his mother, who fled her abusive husband, and abandoned
five year old David (Le Carre's real name is David Cornwell), leaving
reviewers and critics to analyze forever the psychological price of parental
desertion and absence of love.
Devotees
of his unique genre of novels, as I am, admire Le Carre for his exemplary spy
stories that evoke the lies and myths of our ambiguous, confrontational and bewildering times, Here he writes about men and women, ordinary and Very Important,
like Yasser Arafat, Andrei Sakharov
and Elena Bonner, Rupert Murdoch, Josef Brodsky, Nicholas Elliott, Le Carre's
fellow spy and double agent Kim Philby's best friend, a Major Kauffmann, the
woman warden of an Israeli supermax prison for convicted Palestinians and
their allies, Alec Guinness, his brilliant if diffident and reticent George
Smiley in "Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy" who detests "flattery
and mistrusts its praise," and Hollywood's Richard Burton, Martin Ritt, Sydney Pollack
and Fritz Lang.
"Men
and women of power drew me because they were here, and because I wanted to
know what had made them tick.... 0nly afterwards, back in my hotel bedroom,
did I fish out my mangled notepad and attempt to make sense of what I had
heard or seen."
Murat
Kurnaz a Turkish-German raised in Germany was no-one special and quite
powerless except he was a classic victim of the disastrous American invasion
of Iraq. Accused without trial or
evidence of being a terrorist, he was shipped to Guantanamo, held for five
years, and Le Carre writes,"electrocuted, beaten senseless, waterboarded
and hung from a hook" by low-level American thugs acting on orders from
American thugs in high places. With German help Kurnaz was eventually proven
innocent. Le Carre spent time in Bremen with Kurnaz and describes how he was
finally freed with only a pair of jeans, underwear and a T-shirt, guarded in
the flight home by ten US soldiers who then offered handcuffs to the Germans
who met their plane, "to which," comments Le Carre, with obvious
pleasure, "the German officer, to his eternal glory, replied: 'He has
committed no crime. Here in Germany he is a free man.'"
For
three years LeCarre served in Britain's spy service during the Cold
War, mainly in Austria and Germany."Having made a negligible
contribution" he resigned to write full-time after the extraordinary
success of his third novel, "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold."
Looking back, now well in his eighties, he offers his personal "Rule 0ne
of the Cold War," just as true in today's emerging New Cold War:
"Nothing, absolutely nothing, is what it it seems. Everyone has a second
motive, if not a third."
Spies,
he tells us, "spy because they can," whether Putin's Russia or
0bama's US, and their spy agencies love seeing themselves mythologized, which
is something Le Carre avoids. Neither the British nor the Americans predicted
the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the USSR. But he reserves a special dig
at his own country, "But the Brits are a class apart. Forget our dismal
showing in the Cold War when the KGB out-witted and out-penetrated us at
every turn."
Having
served in Bonn and Hamburg, he wrote "A Small Town in
Germany" which criticized the
British Embassy and the Bonn interim government but admits
to having mistakenly predicted the emergence of a far-right post-Nazi Germany. Still, he captures the post-WW
II Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union when the US welcomed Nazi war
criminals. Hitler's former military
intelligence Chief General Reinhard Gehlen was embraced by the CIA, "the
pampered favorite of his new best friends, the victorious Americans."
And more. "0ld comrades from Nazi days form the core of his staff.
Controlled [American] amnesia relegates the cost to history." The US
housed Gehlen in Martin Bormann's mansion and "gave him his rations, and
clean bedding, and his Nazi-era files and card indices, and his old Nazi-era
staff, while uncoordinated teams of Nazi hunters chased around after Martin
Bormann, and the world tried to absorb the indescribable horrors of Belsen, Dachau,
Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and the rest."
He
turns his attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which resulted in a
cinematic mishmash of "The Little Drummer Girl," and where the
film's Diane Keaton's character was inspired by his radical younger
half-sister Charlotte Cornwell. He interviews some regional specialists and
then Yasser Arafat invites him to visit at a meeting where he is scheduled to
speak but never does and he never gets to interview him. It's 1982, Israel has invaded Lebanon, Arafat
and the PLO have been expelled from Lebanon, and their next refuge is Tunisia
where Le Carre chases after him for that interview but never gets to talk
with the hard to pin down Palestinian.
Still
looking for background material for "The Little Drummer Girl," he
returns to Israel and because of his acquaintance with a high-ranking
general, is allowed to visit a top secret prison in the Negev desert to
interview Brigitte, a radical young German woman, who with a group of
Palestinians tried and failed to shoot down an El Al plane as it neared
Nairobi's Kenyatta airport. Possibly taken with her, he describes her as a
"tall, beautiful woman in prison tunics...her long blonde hair combed
freely down her back. Even her prison tunic becomes her." He says he wanted
to talk about her motives, none of which she cared to share with him save to
denounce Germany, some of her family
and the US, while mentioning the influence of Jurgen Habermas , Herbert
Marcuse and Frantz Fanon.
After
Brigitte is returned to her cell, Major Kauffmann, perhaps, he suggests, an
assumed name, asks him, "Did you get what you came for," and then
adds, "I only speak English with her. German, never. Not one word. When
she speaks German, I cannot trust myself. You see, I was in Dachau.'"
And
then on to post-Communist Russia, "The Wild East,"
about which he will write "The Russia House." Invited to speak at
Moscow State University, the questions from students are about spying, the
Cold War, ratting on one's colleagues .(Le Carre mentions early on that when
he was with M-15 they had him spy on left wing 0xford students). A final
question comes from a woman student. "Please, Mr. Le Carre, What do you
think of Marx and Lenin, please? Greeted with laughter, he comes back,"I
love them both."
"It
doesn't strike me as my best line, but the audience treats it with prolonged
applause and howls of merriment." Later, students ask about the
once-banned "Spy Who Came in from the Cold," which many tell him
they had read. But, he asks, weren't they scared reading forbidden books, and again howls of
laughter. (When I visited my WWII
surviving family in Russia in the sixties, my two uncles,
former Red Army conscripts, stood on their barely standing balcony and loudly cursed Lenin and Stalin's
memory. "Are you scared," I
asked. My surviving family members just laughed).
Back in
London, he lunches with the exiled
Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky, thought of by admirers as "the very soul of Russia." Brodsky, who was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature once wrote an appreciative essay about Anna
Akhmatova, the great Russian poet who Andre Zhdanov, the Leningrad Party
boss, once called "a cross between a nun and a whore" but who has
left nothing of note for future Russians to remember him by except repression
and cruelty.
Obsessed
with spies and spying he sends time with Nicholas Elliott, Kim Philby's best
friend. Elliott had worked for the British spy service until 1969. About Philby, Le Carre writes: "The
scale of Philby's betrayal is barely imaginable to anyone who has not been in
the business. In Eastern Europe alone, dozens and perhaps hundreds of British agents
were imprisoned, tortured and shot." (There were other British double
agents he omits, especially George Blake). While LeCarre recommends Ben
Mcintyre's first-rate account of
Philby in "A Spy Among Friends," he reminds readers of another famous spy, James Jesse Angleton, the
"delusional alcoholic head of the CIA's counter-intelligence arm, who
convinced himself that the red web of the KGB had spread itself into every
corner of the Western world. While stationed in Washington, Philby had counseled him, over
liquid games of chess, introducing him to the art of running double
agents."
He
travels to Dublin where "Spy" is being
filmed. Hollywood director Martin Ritt, once
blacklisted by American Torquemadas in Washington and Hollywood preferred hiring former
blacklisted actors Sam Wanamaker and Claire Bloom. Mention anyone's name from
that mad and ugly era and Ritt instantly responds, "Where was he when we
needed him?" About Richard
Burton, the film's star, LeCarre is generous, portraying him as "a
literate, serious artist, a self-educated polymath with appetites and flaws
that in one way or another we all share."
But for
me the most meaningful part of "The Pigeon Tunnel" occurred after
he joined a group celebrating François Bizot, "the only Westerner to
have been taken prisoner by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and survive" and whose
memoir, "The Gate" Le Carre drew on in part for "The Secret Pilgrim." It was
there he met Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a French journalist, who had written
"The Dark Room at Longwood," about Napoleon's years of exile.
Kauffmann
had been grabbed in Beirut by Hezbollah gunmen he
described as "conceited fools, brutal cynics who used religion and the
credulity of young militants to satisfy their appetite for power." In
three years of captivity Kauffman had been tortured, feared for his life,
felt deserted by all. He wrote Le Carre that he had found a tattered paperback
copy of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" in one of his secret
prisons. In that book Kauffmann said he "found reasons to hope. The most important is a voice, a presence.
Yours. The jubilation of a writer who describes a cruel and colorless world
and delights in rendering it so grey and hopeless. You feel it almost
physically. Someone is talking to you, you are no longer alone. In my jail, I
was no longer abandoned. A man came into my cell with his words and his
vision of the world. Someone shared their power with me. I would make it
through...."
No more
powerful and praiseworthy words about a writer and his book were ever
written.
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