A Perfect Spy

by John le Carré

His stride was agile, his body forward-sloping in the best tradition of the Anglo-Saxon administrative class. In the same attitude, whether static or in motion, Englishmen have hoisted flags over distant colonies, discovered the sources of great rivers, stood on the decks of sinking ships.

Nevertheless the burgeoning spy had acquired an early lesson in the dangerous business of intelligence: everybody talks.

He catches Brotherhood’s eye and stares at him with a long and unexpected fearfulness, the way we look at monuments and find ourselves contemplating our own mortality.

He doesn’t have affairs. He has lives. We’re on separate planets for him.

What Lederer did next should go into history, if not into the larger history of the Pym affair then at least into his own exasperating personal chronicle of seeing everything with perfect vision and being repeatedly dismissed as an unwelcome prophet.

In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.

Love is whatever you can still betray, he thought. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

“Sir Magnus, you have in the past betrayed me but, more important, you have betrayed yourself. Even when you are telling the truth, you lie. You have loyalty and you have affection. But to what? To whom? I don’t know all the reasons for this. Your great father. Your aristocratic mother. One day maybe you will tell me. And maybe you have put your love in some bad places now and then.” He leaned forward and there was a kindly, true affection in his face and a warm long-suffering smile in his eyes. “Yet you also have morality. You search. What I am saying is, Sir Magnus: for once nature has produced a perfect match. You are a perfect spy. All you need is a cause.

All the junk that made you what you are: the privileges, the snobbery, the hypocrisy, the churches, the schools, the fathers, the class systems, the historical lies, the little lords of the countryside, the little lords of big business, and all the greedy wars that result from them, we are sweeping that away for ever. For your sake. Because we are making a society that will never produce such sad little fellows as Sir Magnus.”

No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so openhearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, share them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it.

Everything he still contrived to love in himself was here to love in the people round him. A willingness to open themselves to strangers. A guile that was only there to protect their innocence. A fantasy that fired but never owned them. A capacity to be swayed by everything, while still remaining sovereign.