A Legacy of Spies

by John Le Carré

What follows is a truthful account, as best I am able to provide it, of my role in the British deception operation, codenamed Windfall, that was mounted against the East German Intelligence Service (Stasi) in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties, and resulted in the death of the best British secret agent I ever worked with, and of the innocent woman for whom he gave his life.

In the school holidays I ran barefoot in the fields and cliffs around our farmstead, harvested buckwheat for my mother’s crêpes, tended an old sow called Fadette and played wild games with the children of the village.

feeling of coming home, even though my home was across the Channel in Brittany. ‘We were wondering, you see,’ he said in a faraway voice, ‘whether you’d ever considered signing up with us on a more regular basis? People who have worked on the outside for us don’t always fit well on the inside. But in your case, we think you might. We don’t pay a lot, and careers tend to be interrupted. But we do feel it’s an important job, as long as one cares about the end, and not too much about the means.’

back

And anyway you’d rather lose yourself in the labyrinth of corridors and dead ends that is the physical embodiment of the world you’ve chosen to live in, with its worm-eaten wooden staircases, chipped fire extinguishers, fish-eye mirrors and the stinks of stale fag smoke, Nescafé and deodorant.

football. Then it turns out he’s got four tickets.

ALEC JOHANNES LEAMAS, washed eerily white by the rain. No dates, no job description, and a full-length mound to indicate a body where only ashes lay. For cover? All those years of knowing you, I thought, and you never told me about the Johannes: typical. I hadn’t brought flowers; I thought he’d laugh at me. So I stood under my umbrella and had a sort of internal dialogue with him.

Nobody ever lost a fight by preparing for it, did they, son? No, staff, they never did.

goes international, patriotism as a justification will not fly. Patriotism in mitigation

I paid the people, I got the files. I went to her, I gave her the good news, told her where to find her mother’s grave. We go to the lawyers. Her lawyers.

Millie as I knew her then: bride of the Service, devout daughter of a

He has grumbled loudly about what a shitload of weirdos the Circus is these days, and where are all the good guys from the war, and how the only thing the top floor

cares about is kissing the American arse.

This joke you all had. How the Circus owned these crappy safe flats in a place called Hood House. We’re all hoods, so that’s where they put us.’ The smile

Cambridge may have educated him, but it never tamed him. When he joined the Circus, even Sarratt’s close-combat instructors learned to be wary of him.

From the darkening world outside, just the rustle of trees and the moan of cattle. And

‘Not a natural player of the spying game, George. Don’t know how he got himself into it. Took it all on his own shoulders. Can’t do that in our

trade. Can’t feel all the other chaps’ pain as well as your own. Not if you want to carry on. That bloody wife of his had a lot to answer for, my view. Hell she think she was up to?’ he demanded, and once again fell silent, grimacing, daring me to answer his question.

Well, now for the reckoning at last. Now for some straight answers to hard questions, like: did you, George, consciously set out to suppress the humanity in me, or was I just collateral damage too? Like: what about your humanity, and why did it always have to play second fiddle to some higher, more abstract cause that I can’t quite put my finger on any more, if I ever could?

Or put another way: how much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel either human or free? Or were we simply suffering from the incurable English disease of needing to play the world’s game when we weren’t world players any more?

It was the same George, just grown into the age he had always seemed to be: but George in red pullover and bright-yellow corduroys, which startled me because I’d only ever seen him in a bad suit. And if his features in repose retained their owlish sadness, there was no sadness in his greeting as, with a burst of energy, he bounded to his feet and grasped my hand in both of his. ‘So whatever are you reading there?’ I protest erratically, keeping

voice low because silence was the rule. ‘Oh my dear boy, don’t even ask. An old spy in his dotage seeks the truth of ages. You look disgracefully young, Peter. Have you been up to your usual mischief?’

A former Head of Covert in the dock? Admitting he sacrificed a fine agent and an innocent woman in a cause the world barely remembers?

witnesses was simply too much for him.’ ‘But George,’ I protest. ‘Windfall was Control’s operation. You just went along with it.’ ‘Which is by far the greater sin, I fear. I may offer you the sofa, Peter?’

‘We were not pitiless, Peter. We were never pitiless. We had the larger pity. Arguably, it was misplaced. Certainly it was futile. We know that now. We did not know it then.’

‘Was it for the things we did, would you say? Or why we did them at all?’ he enquired in the kindliest of tones. ‘Why did I do them, which is more to the point. You were a loyal foot soldier. It wasn’t your job to ask why the sun rose every morning.’

There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will be left standing, as our Russian friends used to say.’

If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.’

A silence, deeper, longer than any I remembered, even from the worst times. The fluid contours of the face frozen, the brow tipped

forward, shadowy eyelids lowered. A forefinger rises absently to the bridge of his spectacles, checking that they are still in place. Until, with a shake of the head as if to rid it of a bad dream, he smiled. ‘Forgive me, Peter. I am pontificating. We have...