Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader’s daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
In every war zone that I’ve been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.
I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.
I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.
I don’t know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.
If you’re growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back.
SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.
The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James’s Park Tube station in London.
I’ve had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.
‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.
My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak.