[dramatic music]
[Errol Morris] Usually, I have absolutely no idea of where to begin,
but you gave me an idea of where to begin.
And what was that?
[Errol] You asked me about the nature of our relationship.
It went further than that, I think. It said, "Who are you?"
Because, I've looked at much of your work.
Sometimes, you're a spectral figure, sometimes you're God.
And sometimes you're present.
I needed to know who I was talking to. Were you my friend across the fire?
Were you a stranger on a bus?
Who are you?
This is a performance art.
You need to know whether you're performing to a trade union, an elite audience.
You need to know something about the ambitions of the people you're talking to.
[Errol] And if I can't answer that question?
Not that I won't, but maybe I can't.
Then we'll struggle on and find out who you are.
[chuckles]
[wings flapping]
[David] When I was first in Army Intelligence,
I'd conducted a lot of interviews, which were also interrogations.
Immediately, in the relationship, there is a dependence upon me, the interrogator.
"Is your mother okay? Do you want me to make a call to your home?"
It's the bonding, real or artificial, that opens the discussion.
First of all, a statement that I'm the only person you've got.
[Errol] Establishing a dependence?
Establishing their dependence on the interrogator, yes.
When you want something to be expressed that may not be true,
and you know it's not true, that's a beginning.
[David] "There's scarcely a book of mine that didn't have The Pigeon Tunnel
at some time or another as its working title."
[muffled thud]
[David] "Its origin is easily explained.
I was in my mid-teens when my father decided to take me
on one of his gambling sprees to Monte Carlo.
Close by the old casino stood the sporting club."
[wings flapping]
[David] "At its base lay a stretch of lawn
and a shooting range looking out to sea."
[gunshot]
[David] "Under the lawn, ran small, parallel tunnels
that emerged in a row at the sea's edge.
- Into them were inserted live pigeons..." - [pigeon coos]
"...that had been hatched and trapped on the casino roof.
Their job was to flutter their way along the pitch-dark tunnel
until they emerged in the Mediterranean sky
as targets for the well-lunched sporting gentlemen..."
[Russian soldiers] "Halt! Halt!"
"...who were standing in wait with their shotguns."
[gunshot]
"Pigeons who were missed or merely winged
returned to the place of their birth on the casino roof,
where the same traps awaited them.
Quite why this image has haunted me for so long
is something the listener..."
[gunshot]
"...is perhaps better able to judge than I am."
[gunshot]
[Errol] The name David Cornwell is probably unfamiliar to most of you.
He's an expert on secrets, a former spy himself,
and the author of two dozen books, virtually all of them best sellers,
written under the pen name of John le Carré.
[Errol] Cornwell has been living this double life for more than 50 years now
and rarely gives interviews.
- [intriguing music] - [David] Betrayal fascinates me.
I've lived through a period of endless betrayal.
When I went into the secret world, I served in two successive services,
both of which were betrayed to the hilt.
I felt betrayed as a child, if you like.
I felt that I had betrayed people myself.
Like many artistic people,
I have lived from early childhood inside an imaginative bubble.
When I was in the secret world, it wasn't enough for me.
I did very little of it. I was very junior, I wasn't told much.
So, what I did was reinvent the secret world and fill my own people with it.
[Errol] In many of the stories, there are dupes and string pullers.
Those in control and those controlled by others.
[camera shutter clicks]
[David] Well, now we're talking about my childhood.
[projector slide changes]
My father was a confidence trickster.
Life was a stage.
Where pretense was everything.
Being off stage was boring.
And risk was attractive.
But above all, what was attractive was the imprint of personality.
Of truth, we didn't speak.
Of conviction, we didn't speak.
[Errol] So, you felt like a dupe?
No, I joined. I joined.
You polish your act, learn to tell funny stories. Show off.
You discover early that there is no center to a human being.
I wasn't a dupe. I was invited to dupe other people.
If we moved from one place to another, didn't pay the bills.
If we had to put the lights out on the house
because somebody was after my father, Ronnie,
that seemed at the time, the way people lived.
Now, these are not hard luck stories.
Graham Greene said, and I quote him often,
"Childhood is the credit balance of the writer."
It's not a lament, it's just a self-examination.
[intriguing music]
[David] "I have seen the house where I was born,
but the house of my birth that I prefer
is a different one built in my imagination.
It's red brick and clattery and due for demolition,
with broken windows, a 'For Sale' sign and an old bath in the garden.
A place for kids to hide in rather than be born.
But born there I was, or so my imagination insists."
- [woman cries and pants] - "I was born in the attic
among a stack of brown boxes
that my father always carted round with him when he was on the run."
[birds tweet]
"My mother lies on a camp bed, pitifully doing her best,
whatever her best may entail."
[David's mother pants]
[David's mother wails]
- "So, I am born..." - [baby cries]
"...and packed up with my mother's few possessions,
for we have recently suffered another bailiffs' visitation
and are travelling light."
[baby gurgles]
"The lid of the boot is locked from the outside."
[engine starts]
"I'm already on the run. I've been on the run ever since."
[distorted flapping wings]
[pigeons coo]
[David] My mother disappeared when I was five.
I had no relationship with her at all.
There were many substitute mothers who passed through my father's hands.
One particular stepmother, who in her own way was heroic,
steadied the ship for a while.
[dramatic music]
[David] My mother was a mystery.
Because it was never properly revealed what had happened to her.
Was she dead, was she alive?
Ronnie didn't like hard truths.
I met her again at 21.
I wrote to her brother, he wrote back, saying,
"Here's her address. Never tell her that I told you."
So, I wrote to my mother, said, "Your brother tells me..."
So, I felt completely unbound by this injunction.
[Errol] Did you imagine her having regrets about leaving you and your brother?
[David] Well, when I met her, [laughs] I asked how she felt about it.
And she replied, and it was always her reply,
that my father had been intolerable to live with,
that she got sick of the trail of mistresses he was bringing to the house.
That there was never any money passing through.
And she didn't like all these crooks coming through his life.
She said, if, if she had attempted any other measure,
he knew so many wonderful lawyers, which indeed he did,
that she would never have had a chance in the marital court.
So, she gave up all that stuff and thought she'd just push off.
[pigeons coo]
[Errol] Do you remember the day she left?
[David] No.
If you are going to leave your children, that night,
with your white suitcase packed,
do you kiss them goodbye?
[door creaks]
Did she come into the room where we slept? Take a last look at us?
[she sighs gently]
[David] So, I imagine it. I imagine that she did.
[she exhales]
[door closes firmly]
[footsteps echo]
[Errol] You came into possession of this suitcase.
[David] When she died,
I spotted this beautiful white hide suitcase from Harrods
lined with silk inside.
With her initials on the outside, "O.M.C.," Olive Moore Cornwell.
That must have been the suitcase into which she packed her clothes.
I imagined the amazing flimsies that it would have contained.
And the most exquisite clothes.
She took it into a kind of poverty.
She ran away with a chap who had no money.
I imagined the suitcase being unpacked
and the last of the luxury gradually fading away.
I kept the suitcase. It's the only relic I have of her.
Physical evidence that that thing happened.
[Errol] What did the suitcase mean to you? Why keep it?
I accused it in my mind of being, as it were, a conspirator
in her secret departure from the house one night.
[vehicle passes faintly]
To me, it's historic.
She was impenetrable emotionally.
I never heard her express a serious feeling.
But when she went to nursing home for her last year or so,
then she created a fantasy with the nurses.
She had painted to the nurses a picture of maternal loyalty to us.
The long lives we had shared, all the fun we'd had.
So, she'd filled in the gap years, if you like.
And when I attended her dying,
the irony of the moment was she mistook me for my father.
[foreboding music]
[David] She said, "You never brought me orchids."
I think it was a reference to some other amour he had.
I will never know.
And I said, "What color do you like?"
She said, "I don't care. I've never seen them. Bring me an orchid."
[mysterious music]
[David] People loved Ronnie to the end of his days, even people he'd robbed.
[David] When he was on stage beguiling people,
he absolutely believed in what he was doing and saying.
These spasms of immense charm
and persuasiveness were his moments of feeling real.
"Son? When I'm judged, as judged I shall surely be,
I shall be judged on how I treated you and your brother Tony.
That will be God's will."
God was a big pal of his. [laughs]
Whether he believed in God is mysterious, but he was certain God believed in him.
[pigeons coo]
These extraordinary, ingenious, confidence tricks
were part of a conversation he was having with God.
"If I do this, can I get away with it? If I do that, can I get away with it?"
[Errol] Bargaining with God.
Yeah, I think more betting with God. [laughs]
"If I put this much on the table, how about that?"
Ronnie always, whether he had to steal or borrow or bribe the headmaster,
wanted me to have the posh education.
I learned the manners and the attitudes of a class to which I did not belong.
I studied and I frequently felt slighted.
There were times when I hated the class to which I had been assigned.
I was on enemy territory.
But I learned to dress properly. I learned to speak properly.
I turned myself into one of them, but I never felt like one of them.
[David] From a very early age I was a little spy.
Whenever Ronnie left the house, I investigated.
I did not know what the world held.
When the debt collectors came in, my toys disappeared.
The furniture disappeared. Women disappeared.
Mothers disappeared.
When Ronnie was really frightened,
and it was, "Black the house out, put the lights out,
put the cars in the back garden."
He wasn't afraid of the law, he was afraid of the mob.
["Jealous Heart" by Al Morgan]
♪ Jealous heart Oh, jealous heart ♪
♪ Stop beating ♪
♪ Can't you see the damage You have done... ♪
[David] When he died, he had offices in Jermyn Street.
On the top floor lived ladies of the night.
Who, as he put it, were always ready to cook some sausages for him.
[woman laughs]
He had two Ford Zephyr cars,
a house in Henley, a house in Tite Street, Chelsea.
For what purpose, I know not.
And he had these offices.
We could not find on his person, in the drawers of his desk,
enough money to pay the staff until the end of the week.
There was no money.
[horse neighs]
There was a horse in France at Maisons-Laffitte,
a couple of horses in Ireland.
[hooves pound]
[Errol] You called them, "the never-was-ers."
[David] The never-was-ers.
He had a world champion jockey, Gordon Richards.
When Gordon retired, he agreed to select horses at auction for Ronnie,
and, at some point, he must have paid for them.
His great joy was to appear at Ascot and have a horse in a race.
[indistinct race track announcements]
[bell rings]
[indistinct race commentary]
[David] Ronnie clearly reached a point where the fraternity of bookmakers
would not have him on the course anymore,
and they had enforcers that made that clear.
[crowd cheers]
[David] And you better look out if you show up at a race course,
and you haven't paid your debts.
I was dispatched with a suitcase full of money
to distribute among the bookmakers.
[commentator] Wow! It's Rupert. He's pulling away now!
[David] He had a horse named after my half-brother,
and it ran in the Cesarewitch.
[indistinct commentary]
[crowd chatter]
[David] All of a sudden, we had a real harvest of cash.
Thank you, boys.
[David] I sat on the train with it.
[footsteps]
[David] A big man came up to me.
You're Ronnie Cornwell's son, aren't you?
Don't do that again, sonny.
[David] And he just touched my nose.
And when I got back, Ronnie was waiting.
And he counted and counted,
and he couldn't believe I hadn't kept some.
[Ronnie] Come on, boy.
Show me your pockets.
Come on, show me what you've done.
[David] Then I think I got a fiver at the end of it for being a good boy.
[Errol] Was this a disappointment to your father, this lack of larceny?
It was puzzlement that... [laughs]
"You can't be that good," he thought. [laughs]
"No one is. This isn't human nature."
[Errol] But this is such a romantic childhood, is it not?
Well that... yes. I-I really need to get that across,
that whatever revelations came to me later,
and whatever deprivals I seem to have suffered, mothers and things,
it was terribly exciting.
[suspenseful music]
[projector slide changes]
[David] We haven't mentioned the fact that I was destined to become a barrister.
And my elder brother was destined to become a solicitor.
I was determined to go to Oxford, and they offered me a place.
Ronnie demanded to know what he was paying for.
In cowardice, I said that I would be studying Law.
And when he heard on the grapevine that I was reading Modern Languages,
he descended on my tutor and demanded to know how the hell this had happened.
Was it their fault or mine?
My mentor, Vivian Green, showed him the door.
So, I went on reading Modern Languages.
And in the middle of the second year, he made a really dramatic bankruptcy.
It was massive, for a million and a quarter pounds.
The Westminster Bank in Oxford, then, for reasons of its own,
refused to keep my account and closed it.
I had been very close to my girlfriend at the time, so we decided to marry.
I went and taught at a low life private prep school.
And that was the same preparatory school which, in my mind,
I put at the beginning of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
We lived in real poverty
with an outside loo and that stuff, and a tin bath.
And then, to my mind, heroically,
Vivian Green inspired the college to call me back.
And they would somehow find the money for me.
So, we went back and they found us a grand flat to live in.
Life had changed completely.
The institutional allure returned
when Eton invited me to come and teach the top class.
I thought I'd be an Eton schoolmaster for the rest of my life.
Then, after two years, I was fed up with it.
And the spies lured me, and I thought I would be a spy for the rest of my life.
[mysterious music]
[David] It's terribly difficult to recruit for a secret service.
In the end, you're looking for somebody who's a bit bad,
but at the same time, loyal.
There's a type they were looking for in my day, and I fit it perfectly.
Separated early from the nest.
Boarding school.
Early independence of spirit.
But looking for institutional embrace.
I can see my own life still as a succession of embraces and escapes.
[wings flutter]
[David] I joined one intelligence service, went sour on it.
Moved to a second, went sour on it.
I was disenchanted by the Cold War itself, which was easy to be
when you saw all those Nazis wandering around in West Germany.
And indeed in East Germany.
What had we really fought for?
[Errol] As if the war had never happened?
It felt like that.
The power of enforced forgetting was extraordinary.
I was posted under diplomatic cover to West Germany.
And it was one of the great good fortunes of my life,
because I was there for the erection of the Berlin Wall.
The standoff between East and West was exemplified in Berlin.
Tension was constant. It affected everybody.
[jet engine whines]
[male announcer] The attention of an anxious world is focused on Berlin.
The last great exodus of refugees from the East is processed
as the Communist German regime moves to close their border.
The flow of those seeking asylum here on the fringe of freedom
has reached 1,500 a day.
[David] I went to Berlin and saw for myself what was going on.
The big dramas occurred before the wall was built.
West German firemen were spreading their trampolines below the building.
People were jumping into these things.
Sights which were heart-breaking.
[roaring]
[muffled explosion]
[Errol] What was your emotional response to seeing this thing?
A mixture of anger, disgust and empathy.
It was for me a milestone.
It was the impetus that produced The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
[Errol] A crucible for your understanding of the world?
[David] More like confirmation of my understanding of the world.
[David] This was the most obscene symbol of the insanity of the human struggle.
[gunshot]
I felt that on both sides, East and West,
were inventing the enemy that they needed.
The seamless transition from anti-Nazism to anti-Communism.
[David] I came back from Berlin.
I knew that I wanted to write a strong novel about the thing.
It was summer. I think I worked mainly in the garden.
The kids were around.
I would maybe start at four or five in the morning.
And I had this rush of blood and anger.
Found, as it were, a fable that served my purposes
and that was, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
[Richard Burton] What the hell do you think spies are?
Moral philosophers measuring everything they do
against the word of God or Karl Marx?
They're not. They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me.
Little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands,
civil servants playing Cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.
Do you think they sit like monks in a cell balancing right against wrong?
The author who is the biggest sensation right now,
his real name is David Cornwell,
but he's much better known to us as John le Carré.
How many did The Spy Who Came in from the Cold sell?
I think in all editions, book club, paperback, all over the world,
they say somewhere around twelve, fifteen million.
[whistles]
[mouthing]
[audience laughs]
[Errol] I take it that the success of Spy was a surprise.
[David] I think it was no surprise to me in the sense that I felt
that when I'd finished it, I'd written something
that was profoundly expressive of my own feelings,
and that it might have legs.
The early rumbles from agent and publisher suggested it really did have legs.
You have to remember the context in which it was published.
We were sated with James Bond at that time.
I admire your luck, Mister...
Bond. James Bond.
The reality that had been offered by the news
and by all the events that were happening around us
was spies as a shabby army of lonely deciders.
I happened to deliver the antidote.
What was wrong about it, and I lived with that problem still to this day,
was that it painted the secret services as so bloody brilliant.
Whereas, by that time, we were a crippled organization
that could very well have been scrapped to begin again.
[David] "If your mission in life is to obtain traitors,
to win them over to your cause,
you can hardly complain when one of your own
turns out to have been obtained by somebody else.
When I came to write Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,
it was Kim Philby's murky lamp that lit my path."
[camera shutter clicks]
"MI6's brilliant former head of counterintelligence.
Once tipped to become chief of the service, who was also a Russian spy."
[David] Halfway through my tenure in West Germany,
Philby's defection was announced.
His disappearance from Beirut and his appearance on the Moscow stage.
That was shocking to the ethic of the secret services at that time.
[suspenseful music]
[in Russian] Someone is following.
[David] The question is whether MI5, MI6 wanted him to go.
Nobody wanted that exposure. You have an extraordinary problem.
Very substantial former spy coming up for trial.
It would do great national damage and achieve very little.
In sober reflection, the powers that be said, "Thank God."
[Errol] "Thank God"? So, they let him escape?
[David] Yeah.
[muffled ship's horn]
[in Russian] Thank you, comrade.
[David] Philby's defection went straight to the heart
of the establishment of the day.
He was a Westminster boy.
Part of the inner circle of English society.
[slurps]
[David] People kind of overlooked, on those grounds,
the rather evident past that Philby had.
It would not have been difficult to establish
that he had early associations with Communist people.
He'd married a Communist woman in Vienna.
Those things could be swept aside because he's... he's one of us.
He's one of us.
So, if you'd really gone into Philby's background,
you would have said this chap is...
He's a bit sniffy. We don't want that.
But quite the contrary, he was Mister Charm,
and he loved to deceive.
[camera shutter clicks]
[David] "Enter now, Nicholas Elliott, Philby's most loyal friend, confidant,
devoted brother-in-arms in war and peace. Child of Eton.
Son of its former headmaster, adventurer, alpinist and dupe."
[elevator squeaks]
"Among the many extraordinary things that Elliott had done in his life,
and undoubtedly the most painful, was to sit face to face in Beirut
with his close friend, colleague and mentor, Kim Philby,
and hear him admit that he had been a Soviet spy
for all the years that they had known each other."
Nick Elliott told me that when he went out to interview Philby in Beirut
and to obtain from Philby the confession.
He said that really, when he wasn't playing a double game,
that he was extremely lonely.
He found life had gone flat for him,
so the addiction to betrayal was essential to him.
And he betrayed everybody, really, from childhood onward.
[Nicholas Elliott] There's an awful lot of misuse of the word "double agent."
Philby is often described in the press as a double agent.
In point of fact, Philby was a straightforward,
high-level, disreputable traitor.
What's the difference, exactly?
Well, I mean, he was a straightforward spy for the Russians.
If he'd been a double agent, he'd have been a spy for the Russians.
But we'd have been playing back against the Russians.
[David] I knew Elliott pretty well. And he was this tall figure.
The hollowed-out body, waistcoats, spectacles.
An Etonian voice, the son of an Etonian headmaster,
long line of Etonians behind him, very aristocratic.
[Errol] Can you do his voice?
Yes. I said to him, "Nick,
when you went to see Kim, what kind of sanctions did you have?"
[as Elliott] "Sanctions, old boy? What do you mean by that?"
[normal] "How could you threaten him?
Could you have him sandbagged and brought back to London?"
[as Elliott] "Oh," he said, "my dear chap, nobody wanted him in London."
[normal] I said, "Well, what could you threaten him with?
Nick, come on, come clean." He said,
[as Elliott] "I told him, if he didn't come clean,
there wouldn't be a legation, an embassy,
a business, or a club in the whole of the Middle East
who'd have a first damn thing to do with him."
[normal] So, I said, "Well, that must have frightened him."
[as Elliott] "It did." [laughs]
He played the English bloody fool,
whether he was one, as many maintain, I don't know.
[Errol] You do have that line in what you wrote.
"Philby was adept at deceiving others.
Elliott was equally adept at deceiving himself."
[David] I'm glad I said that.
It was always my argument
that it was instinct rather than reason that drove Philby to do what he did.
That thrill of stepping into the street knowing what you know and they don't.
It's the joy of self-imposed schizophrenia that the secret agent loves.
[Errol] "Self-imposed schizophrenia."
[chuckles gently] The duality all the time.
Of being the opposite of your outward self.
[Errol] But isn't there some joy that you are actually making policy?
Yes, I think the joy is voluptuous.
A sensual journey
of constantly challenging your luck and surviving.
Making a real difference too, absolutely.
To feel you're the hub of the universe is wonderful for the vanity.
To be passing that, that pure gold, to the Soviet Union, to your masters.
"Now, do you love me? If I give you this, will you love me?"
I can imagine that voluptuous instinct very well.
Not in myself, but in him.
Mister le Carré, you've described Kim Philby as,
"The avenger who destroyed the citadel from within."
Well, I think he's one of those strange people who was born into privilege
and, in some way, resented the advantages with which he was born.
A person who, on the one hand, felt that he was better than society
and, on the other hand, couldn't forgive society for putting him in that position.
He was very much at war with himself, I think.
[suspenseful music]
When I finally went to Moscow in 1988,
I was at a party given by the Union of Soviet Writers.
There was a big man called Genrikh Borovik.
Borovik came up to me and said,
[as Borovik] "David, I would like you to meet a very good friend of mine.
Keen admirer from your books.
Kim Philby."
[normal] I replied, sick to the heart as I felt,
that I'm soon to have dinner with our ambassador,
and I can't see myself having dinner with the Queen's representative one night,
and dinner with the Queen's traitor the next.
I just thought there is such a thing as evil.
Somebody who had blindly served Stalin for so long.
How he could go on serving such a person, such a cause,
as Soviet communism, was beyond me.
He knew better than anyone what he was doing.
It was the addiction, it was the fun of betrayal that got to him.
It was the feeling that he was playing both ends against the middle.
He was the center of the earth. He was playing the world's game.
It had precious little to do, in the end, with ideology.
It may have begun as ideology.
After that, it became an addiction, the betrayal.
If you'd given him your cat to look after for a couple of weeks,
he'd have betrayed the cat somehow.
I had some inner relationship with Philby.
The temptation, somehow,
to turn your back on everything you've been taught and picked up
and go your own route.
I can understand how that happened to Philby.
And I've felt that thank God I never went in that direction.
But there came a point in my life where I seemed to be offered the crossroads.
I could have become a really bad guy.
And mercifully, I found a home for my larceny.
[David archive] A writer is slightly out of tune. He is different.
His methods of creation are the methods of a lonely person
who is borrowing, abstracting experiences here and there,
and putting them together and trying to make a parcel, if you like,
which you can then offer to the public.
In that sense, he's an illusionist.
And if people are constantly trying to look up his sleeve,
then he's going to spoil his trick.
[camera shutter clicks]
For me, writing is a journey of self-discovery every time.
How characters behave, how they emerge, who they are,
what appetites they have,
they deliver themselves on the blank page
and they tell me a little bit about who I am.
In writing about George Smiley, of course,
I'm writing about the ideal father I never had.
These are attempts at self-knowledge.
Little glimpses along the way of who one really is.
I have never submitted to analysis.
I feel if I knew any secrets about myself, I'd deprive myself of writing.
[chuckles gently]
[Errol] What did you learn about yourself from Bill Haydon?
[David] Well, that was something I guess I already knew.
It was something I knew of Philby, too.
And obviously Haydon is to some extent modelled on Philby.
An instinct that is latent in me,
which I have never to my knowledge deployed, used, fallen for,
it's to be king of the world, as Haydon thought he was.
There was a time when the very pleasure of being in the secret world
close to what was going on, what was really going on,
filled me with a sense of exultation.
This is, in the Faustian sense, what the world contains at its inmost point.
[mysterious music]
"Was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält", is the line.
[Errol] Then there's that despairing line in The Secret Pilgrim,
"Knowing that the inmost room..."
"...doesn't contain anything." Yes.
Somehow, we believe that there is an inmost room
where policy is being conceived.
I think it's being played completely ad hoc,
from day to day, from hour to hour.
[Errol] History is chaos!
History is chaos, and therefore to imagine, as I might have done
in my perpetual innocence,
that there was some great secret to the nature of human behavior.
There is none.
[David] "'Spying is eternal, ' Smiley announced simply.
'There's no career on Earth more cockeyed than the one you've picked.
You'll be at your most postable while you're least experienced.
And by the time you've learned the ropes, no one will be able to send you anywhere
without a trade description round your necks.
Old athletes know they've played their best games when they're in their prime.
Spies in their prime are on the shelf.'"
[slow, echoing footsteps]
"'And then, at a certain age,
you want the answer.'
'You want the rolled-up parchment in the inmost room
that tells you who runs your lives and why.
The trouble is, that by then,
you're the very people who know best...
...that the inmost room is bare.'"
[Errol] When I read it, I took it as more deeply existential.
Is the inmost room ourselves? Maybe there's nothing there?
In my case that is true, yes. I can't speak for everybody else.
[suspenseful music]
[David] I think we, all of us, live partly in a clandestine situation
in relation to our bosses, in relation to our families, our wives, our children.
We frequently affect attitudes to which we subscribe,
perhaps intellectually, but not emotionally.
We hardly know ourselves.
The figure of the spy does seem to me
to be almost infinitely capable of exploitation,
for purposes of articulating all sorts of submerged things in our society.
[Errol] The experience that I have reading le Carré is,
"Am I in a world of fiction? Am I in a world of fact?
Am I in some strange blend of the two?"
[gunshot]
[David] I really don't think any artist, whether he's a writer,
a painter, or anybody else,
I don't think he has to explain his work beyond a certain point.
If it's raised those questions in you, you're already having a good time.
I have tried, over these conversations,
to talk about the process of abstraction from real life.
Now, I very consciously wrote a book,
A Perfect Spy...
...which gave a parallel version, if you like, of much that had happened to me.
For Ronnie, read Rick, for me, read Magnus.
I cannot define for you
where reality goes through the secret door into fiction.
I would much rather go back to the notion that I painted of,
"I live in that bubble, and I import stuff."
It is a kind of solitude in the sense that
you're not sharing your thoughts with anyone.
[page turns]
You're composing in secret from the elements you see around you.
A fictional entity which is rational, which makes order out of chaos.
I think that's such a normal process.
If I were a painter, I'd be feeling the same way.
I'd be taking the light, the window
and I would try to make an image of how I feel now.
[Errol] I was going to ask you how you do feel now, but that seems silly.
Errol, I feel very comfortable.
I enjoy very much talking about things I haven't talked about before.
I saw this prospect, at my great age, as something definitive.
I knew that I was not going to lie. I wasn't going to fabricate.
I'm not even interested in self-defense,
because I really don't know what the accusation is in the air.
[David] "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?" - [Axel echoing] To what? To whom?
I don't know.
One day, maybe you will tell me.
What I am saying, Sir Magnus, you are a perfect spy.
[faint chatter]
[David] Characters don't actually work until they've got a bit of you in them.
They're just paper men.
I voice my characters. I read them to myself.
That's terribly important, how they speak.
After that, they kind of tell you who they are, how they dress, how they move.
[David] That's the emergence of character as you write, page after page.
Gradually, this fellow emerges and is yours.
My natural instinct when I meet people
is to consider the possibilities of their characters.
I begin to invest them with things they probably don't possess.
Curiously, in the end product, those features may not be there anymore.
But that's the beginning of the story.
And then I discuss, what do these people want?
And out of discerning contrary appetites, you get the essence of conflict.
[Errol] You've written, "The cat sat on the mat is not a story,
but the cat sat on the dog's mat is."
That's right.
[Errol] And then I have my le Carré version.
[they laugh]
[Errol] "The cat betrayed the dog by sitting on his mat."
I think the cat was a double. [laughs]
[Errol] Why is betrayal an important concept to you?
[David] Well, it has a long family background.
Reality did not exist in my childhood, performance did.
I felt, observing life, that much of what people said overtly
was not what they thought inwardly.
You have to remember that in each of the secret services
where I was ineffective but employed.
[David] They were the decades of betrayal.
You just wondered who was gonna pop out next.
We received, at MI5, very strong representations from the Americans
to clean up our act and get rid of the communists in our midst.
A man appeared
and he had some kind of authority, which he made clear to you,
and he would say, "Come around, have a drink."
[birds tweet]
And he had a most extraordinary wall with live birds behind it.
They silently flitted about.
I think he was a fool, I may add.
Must have been some kind of analyst, psychologist.
He would question you in a sort of fatuous schoolmasterly...
"Getting on all right with your wife, are you?"
We were all being examined as potential communist spies.
The comedy in my case was that I had, for MI5,
entered the communist community at my university at Oxford.
I was picked up and wooed, sat in the Soviet embassy,
watched the Battleship Potemkin about six times,
was fed with vodka and then dropped.
[Errol] It's a good movie.
It's a good movie, except that it has no happy ending. [laughs]
[gunshot]
[Errol] Wait a second. Is the desire to be a double agent from the very beginning?
Yes.
It was an extremely exciting thought at the time.
[Errol] It's not just an agent, it's a double a...
It happens all the time with every security service
and every offensive intelligence service.
That you put people up alongside the recruiter,
hope he will recruit, and then you own the person he has recruited.
That's, as the Germans would say, normal.
Out of that came the very painful relationship
with the secret head of the communist group at Oxford at the time,
a most innocent man, Stanley Mitchell.
We were in the same college, he was reading Russian and German.
He was of Russian-Jewish extraction.
And we went on a walking holiday together in Dorset.
He had all the names of students
who were members of the Communist Party at that time.
My job for MI5 was to identify these people.
And of course, it's horrific. I was betraying Stanley.
[Axel shouts in distance]
Although, I squirm and I'm horrified by my behavior now,
I still think it had to be done.
Stanley, in later years, made the very simple deduction
that I was that person in his life.
It upset him terribly. "It was you, Judas. You swine.
How could anybody do it? How could anybody be as foul as you?"
[Errol] And your defense?
Was, "Well, sorry, Stanley, but you belong to a revolutionary movement
which was determined to destabilize our country.
We were, at that time, technically at war with the Soviet Union.
You were on the wrong side."
[Errol] Can you be so sure that you're on the right side
- as opposed to the wrong side? - Of course not. No. Of course not.
[Errol] In A Perfect Spy, why the need to have the son kill himself?
[David] Firstly, because he knew that as a double agent, he was rumbled.
He could have cut a deal, I suppose, in the real world.
I think he also found life insupportable.
And he was ashamed in the eyes of his child.
[Errol] Did Ronnie have a sense of shame?
I really don't believe so.
I've heard him do it, kind of through the keyhole,
to the first of my stepmothers.
Howling he would never do something again.
I don't know that he did shame,
I don't know how he could live with himself.
Living with his fantasies,
which didn't necessarily begin as criminal plans
but it... it was like writing a novel,
in the sense that he would hear the right line,
or spot in the crowd some clue.
And that would be the beginning of a scam.
[pensive music]
[David] "I am in the city of Exeter, walking across a patch of wasteland.
I'm holding the hand of my mother, Olive.
As she was wearing gloves, there is no fleshly contact
and indeed, so far as I recall, there never was any.
At the far side of the wasteland is a grim, flat-fronted building
with barred windows and no light inside them."
[pigeon coos softly]
"And in one of these barred windows,
looking exactly like a Monopoly convict, stands my father.
I wave at Ronnie high up in the wall
and Ronnie waves the way he always waved."
[young David] Daddy, Daddy!
[David] "On Olive's hand, I march back to the car,
feeling thoroughly pleased with myself.
Not every small boy, after all, has his mother to himself
and keeps his father in a cage."
[cell door slams]
"But according to my father, none of this happened.
The notion that I might have seen him in any of his prisons
offended him very much."
[Ronnie] Sheer invention from start to finish, son.
Anyone who knows the inside of Exeter jail
knows perfectly well you can't see the road from the cells.
[cell door clanks, slams]
[David] "And I believe him.
I'm wrong and he was right.
He was never at that window and I never waved to him.
But what's the truth? What's memory?
We should find another name
for the way we see past events that are still alive in us."
[Errol] I don't think confronting you is the right way to put it.
But there was something that you said that I found curious
and worth further examination.
Maybe this is an interrogation. Maybe I am self-deceived.
I can't imagine that as an interrogator or an interviewer,
you aren't also in part looking for yourself.
I don't think that we really can penetrate people very much,
but we can form imaginings about them and then we relate to them.
[Errol] You hired private detectives [laughing] to investigate your father.
[David] One fat, one thin. I asked my solicitor,
"How can I get hold of these people?"
He said, "Well, don't tell them I told you,
but these are about the most ruthless men [laughing] I know."
I hired them, at an absurdly large sum of money.
[David] Really, they came on very little.
A much more reliable source for Ronnie's first criminal case and imprisonment
is the local press of the day.
He got, I think, a four-year sentence for fraud at a very young age,
but then he was taken out in mid-sentence
and given a second sentence, uh, with hard labor.
I once said, "How bad was it?"
He said, "Well, the Gypsies were the worst."
And he's talking about handicuffs.
Ronnie had a big chest. I think he was capable of being very physical himself.
[David] I was in Chicago promoting a British week, riding on London buses,
pretending to make phone calls from telephone kiosks.
The British consul-general then handed me a telegram
he'd received from the embassy in Jakarta.
Saying Ronnie was in prison, it would take so much money to get him out.
Would I agree to pay it?
It wasn't an enormous sum, but it was quite painful all the same,
and that got him out.
And we never talked about it until I did much later and he said,
"Oh, it was nothing, just currency stuff."
We now know that he was engaged in arms dealing
at a time when Indonesia was just recovering from a huge genocide.
But then the last time, to my knowledge, that he was in prison,
he was in the Bezirksgefängnis, the district prison in Zurich
for swindling hotels.
He was allowed a reverse charge call to me.
He said, "I can't do any more jail, son. Get me out."
And that was money again.
I mean, it wasn't big money, but it was extremely painful to me.
[cell door slams]
I still have nightmare visions of this hugely active physical man, caged.
In the aggregate, I don't know how much prison he did.
Probably altogether no more than six or seven years.
But what effect it had on him, I can't imagine.
[unsettling music]
[indistinct prisoners chatter]
[Errol] By the way, Ronnie sued you!
[David] Yes, he did. I gave an interview to London Weekend Television.
I omitted to say that I owed everything to him.
I didn't want to give Ronnie the credit.
Why should I find a line that said I owed it all to my father?
But the reality probably is, in many ways, that I do.
[David archive] I've never felt I belonged anywhere,
I've been very lucky in that respect.
I've had a very rich life.
And I've seen a lot of institutions and a lot of things.
I've led a lot of lives, in an odd way.
I don't feel that I belong to any of them.
What I am left with is a sense of being on my own.
[Errol] Was your father tortured by the fact
that you became rich and successful and he did not?
[David] I don't know.
The principal effect of my success upon him
was to create in him a sense of entitlement.
He bought huge quantities of my books, usually on credit, signed them,
"From the author's father."
Gave them around like confetti.
I met the hard-edge, the real edge, I suppose, when he summoned me to Vienna.
"Son,
I've worked out what your education cost me.
And I have some idea of the kind of money you're making."
And then he went on to make a pitch.
"Son, all I've ever wanted in my life is pigs and cattle,
and then a little piece of Dorset. Pigs and cattle.
Somewhere nice to live, nice lady to live with, and I'll be all right.
So, what I need is..." And he named an enormous sum of money.
"Father, I can't do that. It makes no sense to me.
What I will do, if that's really what you want, with your pigs and cattle,
is I will buy a house and own it and put you into it.
I will make an allowance to you for running your farm.
I don't trust you for one second."
He actually had appointed me a mark. He was going to con me.
And I'd join the club of people on the roadside.
And I wasn't going to let that happen.
We were in Sachers, in Vienna,
the most refined, excellent restaurant in those days.
He let out the most awful feral howl.
And shouted, "You're paying your own father to sit on his arse!"
In a voice that could have been heard across the street.
And then he emitted this howl, howl, half rose to his feet,
and I put my arm round his very ample back,
and we hobbled to the front door of the... of the hotel,
down some steps, then there was a cab and he looked up at me in supplicant's face,
"How am I going to pay for this cab?"
And I gave the driver some money.
And off he went.
I could've accepted his pitch, at least given him some money.
But I was so angry that it was a pain to pay for the cab.
[Errol] But it's a feeling of being betrayed.
Yes, it is. There was quite a bit of that in it. "How can you do this to me?"
[melancholy music]
[Guillam] Come on, old friend. It's bedtime.
George? You won.
[Smiley] Did I?
Yes.
Yes, I suppose I did.
[Errol] Did you love Ronnie?
I really don't know what love is.
I must have loved him as a child.
But then, the consequences of his life became clear to me.
Later in life, when he wanted everything I had, like my money.
I was able to pull out the necessary stops.
I could do affection with him.
I could do indifference and, secretly, I could do hatred.
Those things exist, actually,
in any father-son relationship at different times.
They're like seasons. I had to muster hatred in order to escape him.
[David] They had three funerals for him.
I went to the first one.
I was urged to make a speech and declined.
And then there was another funeral
and then, God help us, there was a memorial service.
But I didn't go to either of those.
I wanted to believe that my feelings were dead.
And I've never seen his grave.
[birds sing]
[Errol] But you paid for the funerals.
I'm sure I did, yes.
I paid for everybody's funerals. [chuckles]
I paid for my mother's funeral. I mean, I paid for them.
What... What the hell does that mean? I'm well off, I paid.
The most loyal of his servants,
who had done jail for him, was a man called Arthur Lowe.
All these people have monosyllables as surnames.
There was a Mister Bent, believe it or not.
I went to Jermyn Street immediately upon hearing of his death
to see whether there was anything there to be redeemed and to be present.
Arthur said, "Let's all go and have a bit of a blowout. Do us good.
Let's go to Jules Bar across the road."
So, about eight of us went, and Arthur presided.
We had champagne and oysters, w-w-whatever the hell we wanted.
We thought we'd cheer ourselves up. Or Arthur did.
Very graciously, he paid. And it was his party, it was fine.
It's my party, George. I'll get the bill when I'm ready.
Two days later, I got the receipt in the post.
"Will I please [laughs] adjust as soon as possible?"
Ronnie never had money.
He made killings, but as soon as he made a killing, on the... the sound principle,
that expenditure always exceeds income... it was gone again.
He was some kind of crisis addict.
I think he had to be living on the edge all the time.
And I think he certainly persuaded himself
that this was an honorable and valuable contribution to the community
and they would be happy and he would be mountainously rich.
And mind you, he was within a whisker of that happening.
I'm not making a case for him, I'm just trying to tell you
how close he was to being a successful man.
And how absolutely absurd were his fantasies.
- [slamming] - [pigeon coos]
[Errol] But the world runs on fantasy.
[David] I agree. The membrane between what he does or failed to do,
and enormously wealthy and successful and honored people
that membrane was very, very feeble.
[traffic hums]
[David] "Ronnie is dead and I am revisiting Vienna
in order to breathe the city air
while I write him into the semi-autobiographical novel
I am at last free to ponder.
Not the Sacher again.
I have a dread that the waiters will remember
Ronnie crashing down onto the table and me half carrying him out.
My plane into Schwechat is delayed
and the reception desk of the hotel that I have chosen at random
is in the charge of an elderly night porter.
He looks on silently as I fill in the registration form.
Then he speaks in soft, venerable Viennese German.
'Your father was a great man, ' he says.
'You treated him disgracefully.'"
[Errol] I keep hearing again and again and again
that I have not pressed you hard enough about betrayal.
I have failed in my interviewer's or interrogator's job.
Well, I feel that you got the last drop out of the sponge on that subject.
But I'll answer any question you wish me to answer, as truthfully as I can.
[Errol] Do they want you to break down and sob?
And weep? Yeah. I... I can do that.
Like I can do bird noises. [chuckles]
I'm not going to talk about my sex life, any more, I trust, than you would.
It seems to be an intensely private matter.
My love life has been a very difficult passage, as you would imagine,
but it's resolved itself wonderfully, and that's enough on that subject.
[Errol] So, what do people want?
They want to think that I am duplicitous,
false-tongued,
that I use my charm as a wreckers' light
and probably that I torture my children.
They want to unmask me as something,
but I need to know what is behind the mask first.
You have all I am, as far as I know.
[Errol] In your memoir, you say none of it's true, it's as I imagined it.
[David] Inside the bubble, I am abstracting from non-fiction
and fictionalizing it.
I want to take tidy stories out of the perceived reality around me.
But I didn't do any of that derring-do stuff that is reported in my books.
[Errol] But why tell people that a story is false right at the very beginning?
[David] If you and I had witnessed the same car accident,
each would have his version of what had happened.
So, what is truth?
Objective truth is perceived by some absent third party,
but otherwise, truth is subjective.
[Errol] Who is that third party? God?
There is some kind of factual record which we'll never get our hands on.
[footsteps echo]
My business has been to try to make credible fables
out of the worlds that I visited or visited me.
The journey for me has been one of the imagination.
The imaginative refuge from reality.
The recreation of chaos.
Not in an orderly way, but in a comprehensible, individualized way
that makes people feel not à la James Bond,
"I wish this was me."
But more kind of, "Jesus, I hope this isn't me."
[mysterious music]
[David] "When I was a young and carefree spy,
it was only natural that I should believe that the nation's hottest secrets
were housed in a chipped, green Chubbsafe
that was tucked away at the end of a labyrinth of dingy corridors...
on the top floor of 54 Broadway...
...in the private office occupied by the Chief of the Secret Service.
I had heard that there existed documents so secret
that they were only ever touched by the Chief himself.
And now the sad day is upon us
when the final curtain will be run down on Broadway Buildings.
Is the Chief's safe exempt?
Will cranes, crowbars, and silent men convey it bodily
to the next stage along its life's long journey?
It is reluctantly ruled that the safe will be opened."
[keys jingle]
[shouts] So, who's got the bloody key?
[David] "Not the reigning chief, apparently."
[Chief] Ah!
[David] "He has made a point of never venturing inside the safe.
What you don't know, you can't reveal."
[Chief] Useless!
Send for Burglar Bill.
[David] "The Service has picked a few locks in its day,
so it looks like time to pick another."
[lock clunks]
[dial clicks]
[David] "The lock yields."
[lock clunks]
[David] "The safe is empty. Bare.
Innocent of even the most mundane secret."
Wait!
Is it a decoy safe to protect an inner sanctum?
[David] "The safe is gently prized from the wall.
The Chief peers behind it."
[Chief grunts]
[David] "And extracts a very thick, very old pair of trousers,
with a label attached to them.
The typed inscription declares that these are the trousers worn by Rudolf Hess..."
[thunder]
"...Adolf Hitler's deputy when he flew to Scotland
to negotiate a separate peace with the Duke of Hamilton.
In the mistaken belief that the Duke shared his fascist views."
[aircraft engine thrums]
[engine rattles]
[David] "Beneath the inscription runs a handwritten scrawl."
[aircraft roars]
"Please analyze.
May give an idea of the state of the German textile industry."
[Chief laughs]
[he continues to laugh]
[David] That was a story about men from a diminished imperial power
looking into a false reflection of themselves.
Still guarding a great nation, still playing the world's game.
And in fact, they were a tragically reduced crowd
driven by their own nostalgia.
[Errol] And when you look in the mirror?
Now? Today?
I'm much more at ease with myself now, in age.
More reconciled to who I was. And who I was not.
So, I'm not too unhappy when I look in the mirror,
unless I've got a dreadful hangover.
[Errol] I look at you as an exquisite poet of self-hatred.
Yeah, I would go with that. [laughs]
I think that it's only in the last few years that I feel I've found my freedom,
and I love being what I am best at.
Not just being a writer, that's incidental, but writing.
Without the creative life, I have very little identity.
I'm like an actor without a part.
With the work, I am as near as I get to being a happy man.
And I love, I love writing.
So, I am that animal.
And I dare hardly use the claim, but I'll make it here, I'm an artist.
[somber music]
[pigeons coo]