John le Carré — the pen name of David Cornwell — was a British Secret Service officer who became the defining novelist of espionage. John Kiriakou devoted an episode of his podcast to a single question: whether le Carré invented the modern spy.[1]
Career and departure
Kiriakou’s account has le Carré writing The Spy Who Came In From the Cold — a bestseller and a feature film starring Richard Burton — “while still working as a spy”, and leaving the Secret Service in 1964 after being outed by Kim Philby.[2]
The reaction from former colleagues, Kiriakou notes, was personal rather than professional, and directed at the unflattering portrait rather than at any disclosure. In an article titled Don’t Be Beastly to Your Secret Service, le Carré described being buttonholed by a former MI6 colleague at a diplomatic function: “You bastard, Cornwell. You utter bastard.” Kiriakou’s gloss: “not very constructive criticism.” He adds that le Carré himself always felt he had painted British intelligence as more competent than the service he had actually experienced.[3]
The verdict Kiriakou finds most striking came from the man who had ended le Carré’s career. In a letter to the wife he left behind in Beirut when he defected to the Soviet Union, Philby confessed to “admiring the sophistication of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold after all that James Bond idiocy.” “That’s high praise indeed.”[4]
The vocabulary claim
Kiriakou’s central argument is that other novelists wrote about the trade while le Carré altered it. “Plenty of writers write about spies, including lots of ex-spies, but none of them actually impacted the business of spying — its vocabulary, its recruitment — even the way John le Carré did. He literally introduced vocabulary to spying the way Shakespeare introduced new words into the English language.”[5]
He grounds it in his own professional experience: “before John le Carré, I don’t know of any intelligence officer who referred to the agents working for him as his ‘Joes’.” He credits le Carré with coining lamplighters for surveillance officers, honey traps for the use of sex to compromise a target, and laundries for locations used as cover for a base of operations — and notes that while le Carré did not create mole for a deeply embedded enemy agent, he popularised it enough that the Oxford English Dictionary records that “it is generally thought that the world of espionage adopted it from le Carré rather than vice versa.”[6][1]
Why the books lasted
Kiriakou attributes the durability to characterisation rather than to plot or authenticity. “Le Carré’s other strength was his ability to see his spies as people first and foremost. His heroes often did things they believed for the best of reasons, only to learn they’d been betrayed somewhere along the way, undermining the thing they believed.” Betrayal — “especially where love is concerned” — is the constant: characters can betray or be betrayed by love of a person, of a country, or of an ideal.[4][5]
He wrote 26 novels, “among them some of the best books about spies and spying ever written.”[4]