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In 1967, four years after Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union, the Sunday Times of London shocked the British public with their multi-part expose on the high-ranking British intelligence officer turned spy, complete with a photo of him standing in Red Square. The headline: “I Spied for Russia since 1933.” Since 1933 Philby had been trusted implicitly by the British Foreign Office. He was almost appointed as Chief of the British Secret Service and had developed a close friendship with the CIA’s James Jesus Angleton. Since the late 1940s, multiple sources within British and American intelligence knew that Soviet spies had infiltrated their governments. However, notwithstanding the sound and fury of US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against Communist infiltrators, many of these spies remained undetected until the 1960s.
In his biography of Philby published in 2016, A Spy Among Friends, Ben Macintyre asserts that Soviet spies were protected by the “mutual trust” that reigned in Britain’s ruling class, a trust “so absolute and unquestioned that there was no need for elaborate security precautions.” British intelligence saw themselves as the masterminds behind the defense of the West during the Cold War, bound together like “family.” Naturally, Philby’s betrayal broke that trust. The result was “horror,” that left, as one of Philby’s proteges remembered, “a perennial cloud of doubt hanging over the present, the past, and the future.”
David Cromwell was working in British intelligence when the Philby scandal first broke in 1963, and his intelligence career was cut short in the upheaval that followed. He was already a well-known mystery and spy novelist under the pseudonym John Le Carré, so he decided to turn the Philby story into a novel. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, published in 1974, spent multiple weeks on best-seller lists in Britain and the United States. Though Tinker was based on the Philby affair, Le Carré did not make a fictional Philby into the center of his story. The charming, well-born Philby would have made a fascinating protagonist – a sort of James Bond gone bad. Le Carré could have fictionalized Philby’s work training saboteurs during World War II, his cocktail parties and tennis matches in exotic locales, his serial adultery, and, for even more lurid detail, the rapid descent into madness of Philby’s long-suffering wife.
Instead, Le Carré chose George Smiley, the main character in some of his previous novels, as a kind of anti-Philby. George Smiley is pale, short, “podgy,” adorned with poorly tailored suits and thick-lensed glasses. He does not play tennis, or drink cocktails with the smart set – he is neither witty nor charming. No adulterer, he is a victim of the adultery of his beautiful and well-connected wife, and given the description of his looks and character, the reader can only marvel that he had such a wife at all. By the time we meet him, he has been forcibly retired from the British Secret Intelligence Service, known best by its pointedly chosen nickname: “the Circus.” Smiley spends much of the novel lonely, either quietly listening as others recount tales of defections, infiltrations of enemy territory, torture, and assassination, or silently poring over piles of documents. The novel so closely follows Smiley that the Philby character, Bill Haydon, is thinly sketched and pale by comparison.
Tinker places the fate of Cold War British and American intelligence on the shoulders of this absolutely unlikely character. Tasked with unearthing the “mole” in the “Circus” (invented terms that later entered real-life spycraft), Smiley discovers (and reveals to us) the dark Machiavellian heart of the ostensible Cold War battle between good and evil. Smiley discovers just how casually both sides engaged in conspiracy, huckstering, betrayal, torture, and murder, all at the behest of shadowy figures, Karla (for the Soviet side) and Control (for the British side), whose real names were unknown. Tinker repeatedly implies that British intelligence after World War II was an effort to shore up a declining empire, propped up by agents who ran criminal enterprises, infiltrated newsrooms, and, when necessary, unhesitatingly betrayed fellow agents to torture and death. The Soviet side was more coldly cruel, more heedless of human life. But there was no doubt for Le Carré -- both sides had lost their way. Halfway through the novel, we hear Smiley say this to the mysterious (and silent) Karla himself:
“Look,” I said, “we’re getting to be old men, and we’ve spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another’s systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war….Don’t you think it’s time to recognize that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?”
In the 1960s, the exposure of Philby was a dramatic revelation, within British intelligence and without. In the novel, the exposure of Bill Haydon is an unsatisfying denouement. Tinker gives us no grand confession of and no reckoning with the awful consequences of Haydon’s betrayal, personal or political. Smiley feels none of the “horror” of his real-life counterparts. Instead, Smiley feels only pity, and there is even “a part of him that rose already in Haydon’s defense.” For Smiley, Haydon’s betrayal was mitigated by the lack of anything worth betraying.
After 50 years, the entire novel reads differently. Le Carré’s searing revelations of the sinister amorality at the heart of politics and intelligence seem old hat, almost charmingly naïve. Was there a time when people trusted their government and had no inkling of secret operative training sites, clandestine detention centers, government run smuggling operations, and criminal enterprises? Today, a casual glance at any form of social media will reveal any number of supposed “moles” who work at the behest of China or Russia, the Heritage Foundation or the World Economic Forum. On Twitter and on Facebook, candidates for Karla-like shadowy figures who control the levers of power include the Koch brothers, the Soros family, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. Armed merely with an internet connection, anybody can become George Smiley -- “reading, comparing, annotating, cross-referring” -- all with a few clicks of a mouse.
In 1991, after the end of the Cold War, Frances Fukuyama dared to suggest that “History” was over – we had reached the “the universalization of Western liberal democracy,” and humanity had every reason for “optimism.” History, he asserted, was “a record of accumulating knowledge and increasing wisdom, of continual advancement from a lower to a higher platform of intelligence and well-being.” But we now know that Fukuyama was wrong: “knowledge” did not result in “wisdom,” but rather in a Western society in which each of us has turned against our institutions and our neighbors. The more we know, the more we see deceit, deliberate disinformation, sabotage, and treachery. Philby’s world was one of trust, ours is of distrust.
How did we all become George Smiley? We could start with “Russiagate,” the accusation that the victory of Donald Trump in 2016 was caused by the efforts of Vladimir Putin. The lurid tales of prostitutes, wiretapping, and Russian internet memes that arose out of that conspiracy theory were a caricature of 1950s McCarthyism, bringing to mind the Marxist dictum of history repeating itself, “first time as tragedy and second time as farce.” In 2020, the Covid epidemic polarized Western society, each side accusing the other of working for China or “Big Pharma,” plotting world government or supporting fascism. By 2024, it was possible for a single event, such as the assassination attempt against Trump on July 13, to engender two well developed and entirely opposite conspiracy theories: that it was carefully plotted by the “deep state” to eliminate Trump or was entirely staged by the Trump campaign to engender popularity. A casual glance at Twitter will reveal social-media rabbit-holes that would make Smiley’s head spin.
None of this is at the heart of our present conspiracy-mindedness. Instead, the source is much deeper, one that can be found in a prescient chapter of Robert Putnam’s now mostly forgotten Bowling Alone. Social trust, Putnam tells us, is seen to be the glue of society. People who trust, are “more engaged in community life.” Those who are “disengaged,” by contrast, “believe themselves to be surrounded by miscreants.” Putnam charts the steady decline of trust in American society, showing that year after year, fewer and fewer Americans trust society and its members. Decline in trust was downstream of the decline in communities (such as bowling leagues). It turned out, Putnam theorized, that we needed community in order to trust each other. Is it any wonder, then, that as bowling leagues decline, conspiracy theories grow?
It is easy to diagnose mistrust, but very hard to cure it. But perhaps a way forward is found, surprisingly, in an off-handed comment made to Smiley in the novel: “You’re not responsible for everyone, you know, George.” Smiley seems to absorb this lesson when he reflects on a moment in the past, when he finally got the chance to speak face to face with the shadowy Karla himself, to get him to defect to the West. Smiley remembers the hot, stuffy prison cell, the silent Karla a prisoner before him. This was Smiley’s first realization that, “in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.” At that moment, he first realized that his sole responsibility was perhaps to save a single life, and this was “more important—morally, ethically more important—than the sense of duty, or obligation, or commitment.” Conspiracy mindedness is the sense of a terrible burden to reveal the entire truth to an unbelieving mass, to turn humanity away from its unwitting path to destruction. Turning away from this, a person can notice the “particular” and pay attention to the human being next door, on the street, or sharing your prison cell. Trust can never be rebuilt by governments or political parties. It must be painstakingly constructed out of interpersonal relations with spouses, neighbors, and bowling leagues.
And what can we make of Le Carré’s full quotation from a note written by Irina, the Soviet operative who sets the plot of the novel in motion by revealing the existence of the Soviet mole? As she writes to her handler, the man she knows only as Thomas:
You have seen only the bad things in me—the drink, the fear, the lies we live. But deep inside me burns a new and blessed light… God has shown me that it is here, right in the middle of the real world, all round us… Thomas, you must always long for the light which I have found. It is called love.
Is love the only path to trust? It is hard to know, because Le Carré has “Thomas” tell Smiley: “Like I told you…She was crazy.”