The Honourable Schoolboy

by John Le Carré

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. W. H. Auden

For it was this same Haydon who, while still at Oxford, was recruited by Karla the Russian as a ‘mole’, or ‘sleeper’, or in English, agent of penetration, to work against them.

To less flowery minds, the true genesis was Haydon’s unmasking by George Smiley and Smiley’s consequent appointment as a caretaker chief of the betrayed service, which occurred in the late November of 1973.

One scholarly soul, a researcher of some sort, in the jargon a ‘burrower’, even insisted, in his cups, upon January 26th 1841 as the natural date, when a certain Captain Elliot of the Royal Navy took a landing party to a fog-laden rock called Hong Kong at the mouth of the Pearl River and a few days later proclaimed it a British colony.

Whereas the hard men – the grounded fieldmen, the trainers and the case officers who made their own murmured caucus always – they saw the question solely in operational terms.

Perhaps a more realistic point of departure is a certain typhoon Saturday in mid-1974, three o’clock in the afternoon, when Hong Kong lay battened down waiting for the next onslaught.

Which left old Craw. Though a mere sideshow by comparison with the thrust of the main action, the timing of what Craw did, and did not do, remains to this day impressive. He filed nothing for three weeks.

‘Right across the Far Eastern chequerboard,’ he wrote, ‘the Circus is performing what is known in the spy-trade as a duck-dive.’

Which merely proved, if proof were ever needed, that journalists are no quicker than anybody else at spotting what goes on under their noses. It was a typhoon Saturday after all.

Only those at the inmost point saw things differently. To them, old Craw’s article was a discreet masterpiece of disinformation: George Smiley at his best, they said.

Only George Smiley, said Roddy Martindale, a fleshy Foreign Office wit, could have got himself appointed captain of a wrecked ship. Only Smiley, he added, could have compounded the pains of that appointment by choosing the same moment to abandon his beautiful, if occasionally errant, wife.

Between the villagers of Whitehall and the villagers of Tuscany, there was sometimes surprisingly little to choose.

There were cases, it seemed – poor Tufty Thesinger in Hong Kong once more supplied the readiest example – where Bill Haydon had deliberately encouraged the over-promotion of burnt-out officers who could be counted on not to mount private initiatives.

The philosophy was simple. The task of an intelligence service, Smiley announced firmly, was not to play chase games but to deliver intelligence to its customers.

His premise was, that in briefing Haydon, Karla was exposing the gaps in Moscow Centre’s knowledge; that in ordering Haydon to suppress certain intelligence which came the Circus’s way, in ordering him to downgrade or distort it, to deride it, or even to deny it circulation altogether, Karla was indicating the secrets he did not want revealed.

That in the end-analysis, it was not Haydon’s paperwork which had caused his downfall, not his meddling with reports, nor his ‘losing’ of inconvenient records. It was Haydon’s panic.

When Haydon came to power in the slipstream of his protector Alleline, one of his first and most prudent moves was to have Connie put out to grass. For Connie knew more about the byways of Moscow Centre than most of the wretched brutes, as she called them, who toiled there, and Karla’s private army of moles and recruiters had always been her very special joy.

To read Sam’s moves, Smiley knew that he must stay alert to these and countless other options. A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.

There is a particular intensity about clever men whose brains are under-used, and sometimes there is no way they can control their emanations. In that sense, they are a great deal more at risk, under the bright lights, than their more stupid colleagues.

‘Three years at the mast,’ said Sam. ‘And good,’ added the fieldman in him, for whom all his geese are swans.

mean who wants one’s child brought up with a lot of Persians when they all have six wives apiece?’ she said.

‘Aloud,’ she ordered, in a booming, theatrical voice, and in no time they were wandering together through the insoluble complexities of trusts that endowed grand-children, educated nephews and nieces, the income to this wife for her lifetime, the capital to so-and-so on death or marriage; codicils to reward favours, others to punish slights.

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they’re nowhere. No battle was ever won by spectators, was it? We understand that in this service. We’re lucky. Our present war began in 1917, with the Bolshevik Revolution. It hasn’t changed yet.’

In the beginning was the deed.

As to organised crime, the investigation turned up nothing. It was a matter of history that Shanghai, by the time it fell to Mao in forty-nine, had emptied three-quarters of its underworld into Hong Kong; that the Red Gang and the Green Gang had fought enough battles over the Hong Kong protection rackets to make Chicago in the twenties look like child’s play.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘this is Westerby, whose famous father, the Lord, had a lot of very slow horses. He also bought several racecourses for the bookmakers.’

He was an entirely English child, and the inscription read Nelson Ko in loving memory. A lot of dates followed, and it took Jerry a second to understand their meaning: ten successive years with none left out and the last 1968. Then

‘We consider the precedents here very enlightening indeed,’ he began aggressively. ‘Moscow Centre’s previous attempts to gain a toehold on the Colony have been one and all, without exception, abortive and completely low grade.’ He reeled off a bunch of boring instances. Five years ago, he said, a bogus Russian Orthodox archimandrite flew in from Paris in an effort to make links with remnants of the White Russian community:

‘One, we need rights and permissions to operate in the South-East Asian theatre – deniably. So that the Governor can wash his hands of us’ – a glance at the Parliamentary Under-Secretary – ‘and so can our own masters here. Two, to conduct certain domestic enquiries.’

The Treasury had entered a serious protest, on the record, regarding the misuse of Smiley’s management account. Smiley should also bear in mind that any requirement for domestic rights and permissions should be cleared with the Security Service in advance and not ‘sprung on them like a rabbit out of a hat in the middle of a full-dress meeting of the committee’.

The Superintendent’s embattled face had one expression only and that was of a bottomless cynicism. If man had a choice between good and evil, his baleful scowl said, he chose evil any time: and the world was cut down the middle, between those who knew this, and accepted it, and those long-haired pansies in Whitehall who believed in Father Christmas.

The lesson is clear: long before anyone else, except perhaps Connie Sachs, Smiley already saw the girl as a potential lever and, as such, the most important single character in the cast – far more important, for instance, than Jerry Westerby, who was at any time replaceable.

One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon’s chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene.

Longwindedness, as Smiley knew, creates in those who must put up with it an almost unbearable urge to speak. If they do not interrupt directly, they at least counter with pent-up energy: and as a schoolmaster, Peter Worthington was not by any means a natural listener.

‘He is really dead,’ Smiley assured her, and she believed him gratefully. He forbore from adding that Control’s wife had gone to her grave eleven years ago, still believing her husband was something in the Coal Board.

Another of the charges later levelled against Smiley was that he wasted time on menial matters, instead of delegating them to his subordinates.

Talking of others, old men talk about themselves, studying their image in vanished mirrors.

In this life you can give yourself or withhold yourself as you please, my dear. But never lend yourself. That way you’re worse than a spy.”

Since the fall, these niceties had for a while stopped dead. Under orders from Martello’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, the ‘British liaison’, as they knew the Circus, was placed on the arm’s-length list, equating it with Jugoslavia and the Lebanon, and for a while the two services in effect passed each other on opposite pavements, scarcely lifting their eyes. They were like an estranged couple in the middle of divorce proceedings.

Martello was quick to translate. ‘Error, George. Human error. Happens to all of us. Snafu. Even you, okay?’

a footnote to all this, a couple of days later Sam Collins vanished. Everyone was very pleased. He ceased to come in and Smiley did not refer to him.

It has been whispered once or twice by certain trivial critics of George Smiley that at this juncture he should somehow have seen which way the wind was blowing with Jerry, and hauled him out of the field.

Westerby was very angry. He demanded to know what the hell Sam Collins was doing in Hong Kong and in what way Collins was involved in the Ko case.

That Smiley was seriously concerned about this incident goes without saying. Only four people knew of the Collins ploy: Smiley, Connie Sachs, Craw and Sam himself.

is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume they have no counterparts.

From an early age, once more according to official records, the Doc continues, Nelson secretly devoted himself to seminal revolutionary reading and took an active part in clandestine Communist groups, despite the oppression of the loathsome Chiang Kai-shek rabble.

‘What about Leningrad?’ Smiley asks, from his desk, while he jots the occasional note. ‘Nineteen fifty-three to six.’

Of Nelson’s fall, few details are available, the Doc proclaims, speaking louder in response to Connie’s outburst. ‘One must assume that it was violent, and as Connie has pointed out, those who were highest in Russian favour fell the hardest.’

Told ’em,’ she repeats, hauling at the mongrel’s ear in her emotion. ‘Put it all in a paper, “Threat of deviation by emerging Socialist partner”. Circulated every little brute in Moscow Centre’s Collegium. Drafted it word for word in his clever little mind while he was doing a spot of bird in Siberia for Uncle Joe Stalin, bless him. “Spy on your friends today, they’re certain to be your enemies tomorrow,”

Six months later, di Salis continues, Nelson is seen to be acting in an unknown capacity with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.