The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John le Carré

Former Nazis with attractive qualifications weren’t just tolerated by the Allies, they were positively mollycoddled for their anti-Communist credentials. Who was America’s first choice to head West Germany’s embryonic intelligence service? General Reinhard Gehlen, former chief of Hitler’s Foreign Armies East (Russian theater) where he had made himself a corner in the Soviet order of battle.

George Blake,

how far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way?

“We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That’s impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really, I mean . . . one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold . . . d’you see what I mean?”

“What else have men done since the world began? I don’t believe in anything, don’t you see—not even destruction or anarchy. I’m sick, sick of killing but I don’t see what else they can do. They don’t proselytise; they don’t stand in pulpits or on party platforms and tell us to fight for Peace or for God or whatever it is. They’re the poor sods who try to keep the preachers from blowing each other sky high.”

“That is the price they pay; to despise God and Karl Marx in the same sentence. If that is what you mean.”

But it’s the world, it’s mankind that’s gone mad.