A Discreet Source
An overlooked tale of unremitting failure with a surprising impact – Jeremy Duns goes behind the lines of John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War
Part I
Few would deny that John le Carré’s third novel changed the face of espionage fiction. Published in 1963, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was an international cultural phenomenon, sitting on top of the US bestseller list for a whopping 35 weeks[1]. In contrast to the glamorous depiction of the intelligence world in the James Bond books and films, the novel ushered in a new tone to the genre: downbeat and stark, it depicted spies as lonely grey men in the great unseen battles of the Cold War. In the following years, many other writers tried to emulate various aspects of the book’s plot and tone. In 1974, le Carré broke the mould again with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was arguably more influential still: in its wake, scores of spy novels were published featuring ‘mole-hunts’ inspired by its plot.
Le Carré’s fourth novel, The Looking Glass War, published between them in 1965, is not a book most would single out as being especially influential. Despite it featuring his best loved character, George Smiley – albeit in only a few scenes – the book is one of his least celebrated, and is barely remembered today. In 2020, I wrote an essay for The Times re-evaluating it, but I didn’t have space there to discuss a key element of it that I feel has been missed: although the novel has largely been forgotten by readers, I think it has had a direct but unacknowledged influence on several writers, both in terms of the kind of organisation it depicts but more specifically in its development of a precise plot archetype. And while The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’s impact on the genre are both well established and have been explored in depth, the surprising influence of The Looking Glass War has remained virtually undetected.
The novel centres around a British intelligence agency known as ‘The Department’, which we learn was highly active in the Second World War from headquarters in Baker Street but is now a shadow of its former self, and housed in a ‘crabbed, sooty villa of a place’ in Southwark. The agency has a remit to gather military intelligence, but no longer has any trained operatives or equipment to do so effectively. When the agency decides to send Fred Leiser, a naturalised British Pole who worked for them in the war, into East Germany to check on intelligence about a new missile site in the country, they secure the loan of a wartime radio set by lying to their rival agency, the Circus, that they are conducting a training exercise. The operation, given the codename MAYFLY, ends in catastrophe: Leiser kills a sentry as soon as he crosses the border, and is rapidly located by East German security police via his radio transmissions.
The book is a savage indictment of British intelligence, the country’s establishment class, and its nostalgia for the Second World War, as le Carré explained in a 1966 interview:
‘A group of people were led gradually to a point where they recognized the futility of their position in the Cold War, and from then on they act out left-over lives to kill, sustained by the image of the hot war, and yet acting out the hot war attitudes in the Cold War, until finally from their dream they select a man, train him, sustain him with images of the past, and then send him away into the cold reality of his mission, where he dies. He is their sacrificial victim.’[2]
The main characters are all drab men leading lives of quiet desperation, most of whom repeatedly break security with their wives or girlfriends to assuage their own insecurities. The Department’s director, Leclerc, is an abysmal intelligence officer: complacent, quick to leap to conclusions that confirm his biases, and careless when planning even the simplest of tasks. However, in a key scene he persuades the Under Secretary of his Ministry to fund MAYFLY, and we realise that he does have one area of mastery: the ability to manipulate the bureaucratic machinery around him.
Le Carré based The Department’s Second World War background on reality. Just as the Circus was his fictionalised stand-in for the Secret Intelligence Service, The Department is a version of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), as seen in the tasks its research specialist Adrian Haldane recalls it carried out in the war: ‘rubber boats on a moonless night; a captured enemy plane; wireless and all that’. SOE had also been headquartered in Baker Street and was often entangled in bitter rivalry with SIS. It was dissolved in 1946, with elements of its role and personnel subsumed into SIS, but le Carré imagined that instead the agency had staggered on into the Cold War.
He was also inspired by recent events: the Soviets’ capture of U-2 pilot Gary Powers in 1960, the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The stakes of the novel’s operation are that a repeat of the Cuba crisis might take place, but its disastrous conclusion echoes the previous two incidents. Le Carré seemed to be suggesting that if anyone thought the Americans had made a mess of these events, they paled in comparison to what might happen if Britain were to face anything similar.
The psychology and workings of the intelligence world are closely observed from real life – le Carré had only left SIS a few months before he started work on it – but his broader target was Britain’s delusional self-image in a world now ruled by the Americans. When Leclerc presents the nature of the intelligence in East Germany to his colleagues, he almost relishes the potential threat to Britain, because it increases the chance of his agency playing a leading role:
‘The country which comes under maximum threat from these rockets – they have a range of around eight hundred miles – might well be our own. It is certainly not the United States. Politically, this would be a bad moment to go hiding our faces in the Americans’ skirts. After all, as the Minister put it, we still have one or two teeth of our own.’
~
The book was also inspired by fiction, particularly the work of Graham Greene. Not only had Greene given a quote for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – ‘the best spy story I have ever read’ – but he had then tried to poach le Carré to write his next novel for The Bodley Head, the publisher for whom he then worked as a director. In August 1964, le Carré wrote to Greene to say that he was in negotiation with another publisher, but thanking him profusely:
‘You have given me an opportunity to write to you, which I have long wanted to do, to thank you most sincerely for your support: I do not need to tell you what this has meant to me, both practically, since it contributed immeasurably to the success of my last book, and morally, because there are few writers, living or dead, whose support I would appreciate more.’ [3]
By now, he had already finished writing The Looking Glass War. Almost everything about the book feels Greene-ish, but Our Man In Havana, published in 1958, is its most obvious precedent. A satire of the espionage world, the first time le Carré saw a copy was in the hands of an MI5 lawyer who was investigating whether to prosecute Greene for breaking the Official Secrets Act in writing it [4].
The novel tells the story of Jim Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana who convinces British intelligence he is running a ring of spies and that one of them, a pilot named Raul Dominguez, has caught sight of what seems to be a secret military installation in the mountains on one of his flights over the terrain. Wormold has invented all of this, including the existence of Raul, and the drawings of the ‘installation’ are copied from the parts of a vacuum cleaner. When his lies become increasingly difficult to sustain, Wormold decides to ‘send’ Raul on an overflight over the area with the intention of reporting shortly afterward that his plane has crashed and he has been killed – only to be told shortly after that a real pilot named Raul has been killed in a car accident at the airfield. This turn of events gives Wormold’s invented intelligence more credence, as it appears an opposing agency has killed Raul to silence his secrets.
The plot of The Looking Glass War contains several echoes of this: fabricated intelligence points to a secret military installation, and when a courier is killed in a car accident outside an airport after picking up film from a pilot who has flown over the area, his death is misinterpreted by British intelligence as enemy action confirming the value of the intelligence. Le Carré would later be inspired by Greene’s novel even more closely for The Tailor of Panama.
‘Himmler likes cats’: Paul Massie as Gene and Irene Worth as Léonie in Orders to Kill (1958)
Another influence for this novel, although I don’t think it has been acknowledged, was Orders to Kill, also from 1958.
For decades after the Second World War, Britons were fed a diet of war films, many of them with spy themes: Odette, Carve Her Name With Pride, Against the Wind, and many others. The tradition continued into the Sixties and Seventies (The Heroes of Telemark, Operation Daybreak, The Guns of Navarone, The Sea Wolves), while TV showed older films alongside new series about the war such as Moonstrike, Colditz, and Secret Army. Le Carré sounded off about this phenomenon in an article for The New York Times in 1977: ‘Come and see the latest war‐nostalgia drivel on our television set, hours and hours of beating the same beastly Huns.’[5]
However, Orders to Kill, le Carré reflected in a 2008 interview, was ‘a very good small film about espionage’ [6]. It’s easy to see why he liked it, as it offered a much more downbeat and realistic approach than most films about wartime spying.
Co-written by Paul Dehn, who had been an agent and then a senior instructor for SOE during the war (and who shortly after le Carré finished The Looking Glass War would start writing the screenplay for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), it starred Alan Massie as Gene Summers, a grounded American pilot trained by the British to cross into Nazi-occupied Paris to kill Marcel Lafitte, who has been identified as a traitor within the Resistance. On arriving in Paris, Summers observes and interacts with Lafitte, a gentle-seeming man who cares for his cat, and starts to worry that he’s been sent to assassinate an innocent man. He kills him nevertheless and successfully evades captures by the Nazis, but turns to drink in an attempt to drown out his guilt. Recovering in a military hospital, he learns that, as he had suspected, Lafitte had been innocent all along.
Orders to Kill and The Looking Glass War run along similar lines: both feature a long training session for an agent to head into enemy territory, and both missions have a tragic end. Unlike in most depictions of espionage, the spy chiefs have got their basic facts wrong, causing a needless death. Tonally, they are both bleak, cynical portraits of the spy game gone awry.
There are many differences between them, but several scenes in le Carré’s novel read like permutations of ones in Orders to Kill. Both agents are trained extensively, including in unarmed combat; in both cases it is decided that they can’t take a gun with them so are given knives; and both subsequently kill behind enemy lines and become fugitives from German security forces as a result. Leiser’s training includes a refresher course on the use of a radio set; Summers is given a set of radio crystals to hand over to Léonie, his Resistance contact in Paris. In the film’s most effective scene, Léonie (played by Irene Worth) tears into him for telling her the purpose of his mission and confessing his doubts to her about Lafitte’s guilt: ‘Things must be very bad when they send us a child to do a man’s job.’ When Summers asks if she can arrange for a message to be sent to London asking them to double-check their intelligence on Lafitte, she reacts with barely controlled fury:
‘LEONIE
Were you taught at school that every time a radio operator sends a message it makes it that much easier for the Germans to get a fix on his transmitter and ferret him out?
SUMMERS
Yes.
LEONIE
And torture him.
SUMMERS
Yes.
LEONIE
And then kill him.
Summers nods.
LEONIE
And yet after six days in France you have the impertinence to suggest that we fritter away our precious time on the air to London by drafting and ciphering and transmitting a personal message from you. Asking your people to disbelieve evidence which has been gathered against Lafitte by real agents who have been working here for years. It’s not your business to sit in judgement on Lafitte. It’s your business to kill him. Dozens of Frenchmen have risked their lives, receiving and guiding and hiding and clothing you, only to have you go to pieces over a stinking cat which should have been carved up and eaten months ago! Himmler likes cats. Goering likes pictures. Hitler likes music. Goebbels is a wonderful father. What of it? Did they order you to come to Paris, kill Lafitte, and clear out?
SUMMERS
Yes.
LEONIE
Then why don’t you obey orders and do it?’
The ending of The Looking Glass War hinges on the East Germans getting a fix on Leiser’s location precisely because he spends too much time on air sending his messages from a wartime radio set, but this scene is also notable in that Léonie’s insistence that Summers is being impertinent in questioning the intelligence put together by ‘real agents’ turns out to be misplaced.
There is an echo of this scene in The Looking Glass War when Avery, like Summers a novice to the spy world, tells his superiors that he doesn’t believe in the intelligence supporting the operation and wants out of it. In response Leclerc, like Léonie, alludes to others involved in the operation having far more experience than he does in judging such matters. And just as Léonie shames Summers by reminding him of all the brave Frenchmen who have risked their lives to support his mission, Leclerc shames Avery by reminding him of the noble sacrifices made in the Second World War, as well as suggesting that by dismissing the intelligence he might end up bearing responsibility for the death of millions of innocent victims in a Soviet attack: ‘Now, John, if you want to wait until the bombs are falling, till people are dying in the street…’ Echoing Léonie’s comments about sending ‘a child to do a man’s job’ and that he should simply do his duty, Haldane adds that ‘if you wish to stay in the Department and do the job, do it. If you wish to cultivate your emotions, go elsewhere and do so in peace. We are too old for your kind here.’ Like Summers, Avery backs down and commits to the operation anew against his own instincts.
Of the two, Orders to Kill is the less bleak work, partly because there is a smidgeon of hope in its resolution: Summers comes to a kind of terms with his guilt over killing Lafitte by visiting the man’s widow and young daughter and telling them they should be proud because he had been a great hero of the Resistance. ‘He was a brave and important agent, Madame,’ he informs the widow before presenting her with an envelope filled with his accumulated back pay as a gift from a grateful America and France. ‘I know it won’t make up for his loss, but it will show you that we share it.’ The widow, stunned by the revelation that her unassuming husband had been a hero, accepts the gift. Summers shakes hands with her and her daughter and leaves, concluding the story with a return to some semblance of dignity and honour.
In The Looking Glass War, Leclerc visits the widow and daughter of the dead courier, Taylor, to break the news, but meets a very different reception:
‘‘Your husband did a very good job,’ Leclerc was saying, ‘I cannot tell you the details. I am sure that he died very gallantly.’
Her mouth was stained and ugly. Leclerc had never seen anyone cry so much: it was like a wound that would not close.
‘What do you mean, gallantly?’ She blinked. ‘We’re not fighting a war. That’s finished, all that fancy talk. He’s dead,’ she said stupidly, and buried her face in her crooked arm, slouching across the dining-room table like a puppet abandoned. The child was staring from a corner.’
Leclerc later tries to secure her a widow’s pension, but fails. In this novel, the spy world has no redeeming features and no humanity, only false sentiment and ‘fancy talk’.
While it was far from a commercial disaster on its publication in 1965, The Looking Glass War didn’t have anything like the impact of The Spy Who Came in from The Cold. Some of this is likely due to the difficulty in meeting expectations following the success of its predecessor, and some of it to its uncompromising nature. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block is the novel’s conclusion, which is devoid of any solace. While stories of missions behind enemy lines were commonplace, they rarely failed, and if they did were usually accompanied by some measure of victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, as in Orders to Kill. Here, the whole affair is not only tragic, but utterly futile. Le Carré subverted readers’ expectations throughout his work, and had done so in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which had also depicted an intelligence mission in East Germany ending in tragedy. But even that downbeat conclusion pales in comparison to this. The Looking Glass War fails to honour the unstated pact with the reader that, even if there are high costs involved, there will at least be some element of a positive outcome in the resolution of events.
Le Carré wrote it this way in large part because he felt he had romanticised the espionage world in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: Alec Leamas and Liz Gold die, but the Circus’s operation is nevertheless a success, and we marvel at how elaborate and ingenious it was in conception. To le Carré’s surprise and alarm, the novel was widely taken to be a realistic depiction of espionage. The world’s press, he wrote half a century after its publication, ‘with one voice decided that the book was not merely authentic but some kind of revelatory Message From The Other Side, leaving me with nothing to do but sit tight and watch, in a kind of frozen awe, as it climbed the bestseller list and stuck there, while pundit after pundit heralded it as the real thing.’ Over time, this left le Carré with ‘a kind of impotent anger’ that he would always be seen as a spy who had become a writer rather than a writer who, ‘like scores of his kind, had done a stint in the secret world and written about it’:
‘But journalists of the time weren’t having any of that. I was the British spy who had come out of the woodwork and told it how it really was, and anything I said to the contrary only enforced the myth. And since I was writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote, the myth stuck. Meanwhile, I was receiving the sort of attention writers dream of. My only problem was, I didn’t believe my own publicity. I didn’t like it even while I was subscribing to it, and there was in the most literal sense nothing I could say to stop the bandwagon, even if I’d wanted to. And I wasn’t sure I did.’[7]
The desire to pull down the myths he had himself unwittingly enforced in the public consciousness became a major motivation when writing his next book. While The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had been seen as an antidote to the spy fantasies of Ian Fleming, in The Looking Glass War le Carré presented an antidote to… John le Carré. Traces of the novel’s nihilism found its way into novels following it, but he never again presented the espionage world in an entirely negative light as he did here, stripped of virtually any warmth or human comfort.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had shown British intelligence as a somewhat decrepit outfit: when we first encounter Control in his office, he’s wearing a shabby cardigan and complaining of the cold as he rubs his hands together over an electric fire. It’s a struggle for the head of this organisation to have coffee brought in because his usual assistant is on leave. But this was all part of an underdog tradition. This small group of unassuming but eccentric men are gradually revealed to be ruthless chessmasters secretly winning the Cold War. In The Looking Glass War, we meet characters from identical backgrounds, similarly eccentric and similarly stuck in loveless marriages, but there is no pay-off revealing them to be more than they initially seem, geniuses beneath the unassuming exteriors. Instead, they are outright failures, gullible, incompetent and callous as a result of their yearning for greater influence and to relive past glories.
In doing this, le Carré abandoned many of the established premises and dynamics of genre fiction. In crime stories, for example, Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Father Brown, Harry Bosch, Kurt Wallander and Endeavour Morse all have one thing in common: they are brilliant at detecting crimes. To highlight this, they are generally in conflict with peers and/or superiors who are unimaginative, rule-bound and not nearly as good at the job. Very few people would be interested in following the adventures of their mediocre colleagues, even though we know that those characters are truer to real life. In The Looking Glass War, the mediocre colleagues have become the protagonists, and as a result its ending is rather akin to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy concluding with George Smiley identifying the wrong man as the mole – or figuring out that there had never even been a mole in the first place.
In 1986, the French writer Pierre Assouline interviewed le Carré and put to him that some readers considered his plots too complicated. ‘I do not agree,’ le Carré replied: ‘The people who offer that complaint are not prepared to make any intellectual effort […] I am convinced that the reader likes to work a little and at the end is happy to have resolved a somewhat complex story’.
This is a fascinating response. It has a whiff of intellectual snobbery about it, as well as circuitous logic: he was convinced that readers want to work a little, yet knew that some don’t, as they aren’t prepared to ‘make any intellectual effort’. But for readers who do put the work in, there is salvation at the end of the tunnel: the resolving of the story. When reading a le Carré novel, then, some measure of struggle with it is deliberate, and even good for you; it’s good for your brain, and you know there’s a reward coming at the end of it. This is, to say the least, a highly unusual approach for a writer of commercial fiction. He was using a lack of suspense as a form of suspense in itself: not ‘What will happen next?’ but ‘When will something happen?’.
In The Looking Glass War, he took this even further. It is not a complex plot, but we have nevertheless expended intellectual effort on it in the expectation of being happy to have it resolved. After a long build-up the story does reach a definitive conclusion, but it’s a long way from a traditionally satisfactory resolution: there are no victors, and barely even any sides. So in this book le Carré was stretching an already rather radical method for a thriller-writer to breaking point. The novel is an anti-Spy Who Came in from The Cold, but more generally an ‘anti-thriller’.
Le Carré was wrestling with the fact that he now had a huge audience who wanted to be thrilled by the machinations of clever spies, when his own experiences ran counter to this. In a 2008 essay, he reflected on the difficulty of conveying spies’ incompetence to a public that doesn’t share that view:
‘I tried it long ago in “The Looking Glass War,” and my readers hated me for it. I tried it again in “The Tailor of Panama,” this time as comedy, and I was more or less forgiven. The trouble is that the reader, like the general public to which he belongs, and in spite of all the evidence telling him that he shouldn’t, wants to believe in his spies…’[8]
The dismantling of the mythological power of spies he had himself established in his previous novel was one of le Carré’s aims with The Looking Glass War, and this aspect of the book was not influential on the genre for the reasons he gave: readers generally want to believe in the competence of the protagonists, at least if they stay with them for any length of time. A series of novels about The Department rather than The Circus would have surely sunk his career for good.
But while the book’s central message had little influence, beyond perhaps a little more emphasis on the word ‘bleak’ in the cultural consciousness surrounding espionage, the precise framing of it – the more traditional meat of the novel’s plot, the basic storyline, if you like – has had a much longer, and rather surprising afterlife.