The Spy ...

Yours truly discovered John Le Carre via the superb The Spy who Came in From the Cold film staring Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, a senior spy tasked with one more mission of sowing damaging disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer. Done in black and white with Claire Bloom and Oscar Werner as co stars, Le Carre's work depicts a world of ambiguity and betrayal played by both the east and west, a dark reality totally opposite of the faux world of James Bond, beautiful women and gadgets to kill for. In learning about this extraordinary writer, one finds his take on the world to be nuanced and realistic to a fault, something readily seen by a wonderful 2010 interview with Le Carre, conducted by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan of Democracy Now.

 

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We are on the road in London, just along the Thames, not far from Parliament, not far from MI5 and MI6, the international and domestic spy agencies here, so it is most relevant to bring you John le Carré, this hour we spend with the foremost spy writer of our time.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Now, it might confuse our audience when I say, “Welcome to Democracy Now!, David Cornwell.” Explain where John le Carré came from.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Well, I’ve told a lot of lies about that in my time, I have to confess. I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name. So the fact that I was in a secret department does not play a part.

Then, I think I decided that I needed three pieces to a name, that they would arrest the “I” and put an accent on the last part. Then the word carré in French has a bunch of ambiguous meanings. A balle carrée, for example, is a dance where the ladies ask the men to dance. Carré at roulette, if you put a numéro carré, you put a counter on each corner of a number. And so it goes on. And I think an homme carré is a little bit a dubious guy. That seemed to me to suit me perfectly at that time.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, in the interests of transparency, we’ll just call you David Cornwell, if that’s OK.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Just David will do fine.

The cash nexus ...

Now, this isn’t fiction. That part of it isn’t fiction. Money laundering is simply everywhere. On the grand scale, it’s endemic to banking. You have to bear in mind that when Lehman Brothers wasn’t going to function anymore and the big banks weren’t lending to one another, back at that terrible time, $352 billion of illegal money were then tacitly released upon the market, and that was about the only money people were lending to one another. So, money laundering is not some distant fantasy. It’s actually how you handle the profits of extortion, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy and huge quantities of drug money, how you get that into the white sector. And what we are gradually learning from these little exposés that come to light is that there is almost no way of denying people, in the end, the profits of their crime, which is a tragedy. And it’s also a frightful annoyance, because we pay vast sums of money across the way here to agencies that are supposed to stop money laundering. Doesn’t happen.

The corruption of intel ...

And I suppose that if I could generalize about my work in intelligence in those days, for better or worse, we counted ourselves an elite with a very considerable responsibility: to speak truth to power, like good journalists, that whatever we came upon, however offensive it was to those in power, we told it straight. And what I fear I have seen in the run-up to the Iraq War in this country is the politicization of intelligence to fit the political intentions of our masters. And to my mind, that was a terrible moment in the history, the visible history, of intelligence work in this country, where the intelligence service itself became effectively co-author and signatory to the so-called dodgy dossier, which — on the strength of which Colin Powell was able to present a dire picture of the threat from Iraq, which turned out to be untrue.

On corporate power ...

AMY GOODMAN: — whether we’re talking The Constant Gardener, which took place in Kenya, or we’re talking The Mission Song, which took place in Congo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

JOHN LE CARRÉ: Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Well, it’s where I have seen globalization at work on the ground. It’s a pretty ugly sight. It’s a boardroom fantasy. What it actually means is the exploitation of very cheap labor, very often the ecological disaster that comes with it, the creation of mega-cities, the depletion of agrarian cultures and tribal cultures. It’s about — the effect of globalization, again, where I have seen it, has been negative, as far as the local population is concerned. It’s enriched the very few in the country where it takes place. And it has totally dismayed the inhabitants otherwise. So, ask me what corporate power means to me, it means the ability of the individual to sacrifice his own instincts, his own decent instincts, in the name of the corporation, that people will do things to — on behalf of the corporation, to a group of people, which they would never do to their next-door neighbor, so that all the decent humanity seems to be set aside the moment they walk through the corporate doors.

Read the Democracy Now piece in its entiriety. Long, detailed and totally spot on as BRT has talked about these issues for a long time. Glad to see I'm in good company without question.