The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John le Carré

“I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?” Today, the same man, with better teeth and hair, and a much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic illegal war in Iraq, or justifying medieval torture techniques as the preferred means of interrogation in the twenty-first century, or defending the inalienable right of closet psychopaths to bear semiautomatic weapons and the use of unmanned drones as a risk-free method of assassinating one’s perceived enemies and anybody who has the bad luck to be standing near them.

What have I learned over the last fifty years? Come to think of it, not much. Just that the morals of the secret world are very like our own.

“it is not fashionable to quote Stalin—but he said once ‘half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.’

Now it is always possible—and this is the worrying thing, Leamas—it is always entirely possible that in a month or two we shall unexpectedly and quite desperately need to know about the pins and paper clips.

“Some people keep canaries, some people join the Party,” he’d said once, and it was true.