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 II
(Read Part I here.)
John le Carré was not the only one to realise that his acerbic view of spies in The Looking Glass War was not widely shared by the public – so did several other writers. As a result, the framework he pinned his satire on has had a much more lasting impression on the genre than the satire itself, through its adoption – with some significant tweaks – by others.
That framework runs something like this:
‘Against a background of inter-agency rivalries and machinations in the corridors of power, a branch of British intelligence identifies, recruits and trains an operative to send behind enemy lines alone on a desperate, off-the-books mission. The agent succeeds in infiltrating enemy territory, but things rapidly go badly wrong and a man-hunt is launched by the country’s secret police. Cut off from his handlers, who are as close to the border as possible trying to monitor the situation, the agent finds somewhere to hole up but is soon discovered, and dies.’
Let’s break this down into the key elements to make things a little clearer:
Against a background of inter-agency rivalries
and machinations in the corridors of power,
a branch of British intelligence
identifies,
recruits
and trains an operative
to send behind enemy lines
alone
on a desperate, off-the-books mission.
The agent succeeds in infiltrating enemy territory,
but things rapidly go badly wrong
and a man-hunt is launched by the country’s secret police.
Cut off from his handlers,
who are as close to the border as possible trying to monitor the situation,
the agent finds somewhere to hole up
but is soon discovered,
and dies.’
So let’s say there are 17 separate elements to the template. Plenty of spy fiction features some of these, of course – many include the first six elements, for example – but if the work features more than a dozen or so of the above, I would say that you’re then dealing with a very specific thing: The Looking Glass War template.
I think this template was taken on and developed by at least three very well-known writers in the genre. They differentiated it from the novel in significant ways. In all cases, the intelligence being sought is not fabricated but genuine. The operation to verify this intelligence is not run by someone trying to leverage institutional power and relive past glories but by someone highly competent acting in good faith. And finally, the agent still dies, but before they do they manage to retrieve the intelligence and get it out, so that the mission is a wider success. In short, imagine a version of The Looking Glass War in which there really is a rocket site in East Germany, that Smiley runs the MAYFLY operation seeking to confirm intelligence about it, and that Leiser manages to find the site and transmit its precise location moments before he is captured. The whole novel would change complexion – and yet you could still have all 17 of the elements listed above.
I think the first writer to use this template was Gerald Seymour. His debut novel Harry’s Game, published in 1975, is a classic thriller, and a landmark in the development of what would eventually become a sub-genre: the ‘black ops’ military action thriller. The bare bones of its set-up nods to The Looking Glass War: British intelligence finds, recruits, trains and sends an agent behind enemy lines on a doomed mission. Here, the enemy territory is an IRA-controlled area of Belfast, and the agent, Harry Brown, is trained in a country house in Surrey rather than Oxford. This includes pistol training from a ‘grey-haired, hard-faced’ man in a blue boiler suit and unmarked beret. In The Looking Glass War, after Leiser is trained in unarmed combat, Haldane asks the instructor for his verdict:
‘What’s he like?’
‘I’d say he was quite a fighter in his day. Nasty. He’s a good build. Fit too, considering.’
In Harry’s Game, we have the following variation of this:
‘What’s he like, Chief ?’ Davidson said to the instructor.
‘We’ve had better through here, sir, and we’ve had worse. He’s quite straight but a bit slow as of now. I wouldn’t worry about that. If he has to use it he’ll be faster. Everyone is when it’s real.’
The novel ends with Harry dead, and the British prime minister taking credit for the operation:
‘The whole concept of this intelligence operation really goes back to the last war. My family were involved in Special Operations – you know, the crowd that put agents into the occupied countries. I had a hell of a job getting the military and police to agree to it. But it just shows, you sometimes need a fresh approach to these things.’
The operation is judged to have been worthwhile because Harry managed to kill his target before being killed himself. However, just as The Department is rolled up at the end of The Looking Glass War, this also marks the end of a failed experiment, as the Under-Secretary reveals to Harry’s handler:
‘‘Of course the mission was a success, but it’s put a great strain on inter-service and inter-department co-operation. The feeling at MOD is that a similar operation would not be mounted again. That means, I greatly regret to say, that the team we set up to direct our man will have to be dismantled.’ There was no change in his voice as he delivered the hammer blow.’
Harry’s Game was a dry run for Seymour’s use of le Carré’s novel. He has written over 30 thrillers since, and the DNA of The Looking Glass War runs through many of them. Some of the key elements of the book Seymour has drawn on are its emphasis on inter-agency rivalry and political machinations – there are scores of spooks tangling with Under-Secretaries in Seymour’s work – the recruitment and extensive training of an operative for the mission, and the detailed and nerve-wracking description of the man finally crossing into enemy territory and things going wrong.
A good example of this is Seymour’s novel The Contract, published in 1980. Disgraced soldier Johnny Donoghue is recruited by SIS to enter East Germany to persuade an elderly Soviet missile expert and his daughter to come with him back over the border to the West. He is trained for the mission in a country house, also in Surrey, which here closely mirrors the Oxford house in The Looking Glass War and where, like Harry Brown, he is given shooting training, after which the instructor is asked for his verdict by Henry Carter, who is running the operation.
‘What’s he like?’ Carter asked with diffidence.
‘If it’s one to one then he’d survive, perhaps with a bit to spare. I’m taking it that this isn’t just a refresher, I’m reckoning that the next time would be for broke. Well, he’d be all right. It would be an unlucky bastard that faced him.’’
In The Looking Glass War, Leiser has a near-unshakeable faith in his instructors, and even yearns to be a permanent part of their number, an impossibility because he is not the right class, a foreigner:
‘‘Tell me something else, John. I don’t want to rock the boat, see, but tell me this … Would I be any good on the inside?’
‘The inside?’
‘In the office, with you people. I suppose you’ve got to be born to it really, like the Captain.’
‘I’m afraid so, Fred.’’
After being given forty-eight hours’ leave from his training, Leiser returns to the house in Oxford after midnight:
‘His eye ran fondly over the heavy furniture, the tallboy elaborately decorated with fretwork and heavy brass handles; the escritoire and the bible table. Lovingly he revisited the handsome women at croquet, handsome men at war, disdainful boys in boaters, girls at Cheltenham; a whole long history of discomfort and not a breath of passion. The clock on the chimney-piece was like a pavilion in blue marble. The hands were of gold, so ornate, so fashioned, so flowered and spreading that you had to look twice to see where the points of them lay. They had not moved since he went away, perhaps not since he was born, and somehow that was a great achievement for an old clock.’
Like Leiser, Johnny Donoghue is in awe of his surroundings and the men training him for his mission, and wishes to be part of their number:
‘He let himself out of the bedroom and went carefully down the stairs. A wide, curved staircase with a polished wooden banister. He walked around the hall, and his feet sank into the pile of the carpet, his eyes on the pictures that were strewn over the timber panelling. They’d have plotted the subverting of the Bolshevik revolution in a place like this. Nothing would have changed. Extraordinary people, these hidden creatures of the Service. Perhaps the pond they now looked into was too filthy, too slimed for their own hands, and so they needed a contract man to do their work, they’d have an outsider in for the job. And afterwards they’d let him wash and perhaps they’d wave a polite farewell and perhaps they would say he had done well and let him stay for more.’
As with Leiser, this will not come to pass. Donoghue and Leiser are both doomed outsiders, albeit ones placed on a pedestal by their handlers. In The Looking Glass War, Leiser forms a somewhat strange bond with John Avery:
‘He liked to talk to Avery. He talked about his women or the war. He assumed – it was irritating for Avery, but nothing more – that a man in his middle thirties, whether married or not, led an intense and varied love life. Later in the evening when the two of them had put on their coats and hurried to the pub at the end of the road, he would lean his elbows on the small table, thrust his bright face forward and relate the smallest detail of his exploits, his hand beside his chin, his slim fingertips rapidly parting and closing in unconscious imitation of his mouth. It was not vanity which made him thus but friendship. These betrayals and confessions, whether truth or fantasy, were the simple coinage of their intimacy. He never mentioned Betty.
Avery came to know Leiser’s face with an accuracy no longer related to memory. He noticed how its features seemed structurally to alter shape according to his mood, how when he was tired or depressed at the end of a long day the skin on his cheekbones was drawn upwards rather than down, and the corners of his eyes and mouth rose tautly so that his expression was at once more Slav and less familiar.’
Avery and Haldane act as Leiser’s baby-sitters, worrying about his psychological state before the mission. In The Contract, Seymour presents a more conventional and comforting spin on the handler-agent relationship, but the similarities are unmistakable:
‘The days at Holmbury had slipped, tumbled, fallen away.
It was as Johnny would have wished and Carter was sensitive to the needs of his man. The final days for Johnny and the moments when he might brood in solitude were denied him. Pace and camaraderie were the order of the moment.
For Carter the atmosphere stretched back his memories to the days when he had been young and a new recruit of the Service and attached to Special Operations Executive in the last years of the war, when he had worked with men to be parachuted into occupied Europe. Thirty-five years later, thirty-five years of continental peace and nothing changed. The same tensions, the same belly flutters and loud laughter, the same fear of failure and the willing hopes of success. That was how Carter had learned to cosset and protect an agent, that was how he had acquired the knowledge of when to pamper and when to bully. They were all frightened, the young men who would suffer the abrupt snapping of the umbilical link, they all wanted their hand gripped by Henry Carter. This lad would not be pitched out of a swaying, slow running Mosquito bomber on a clouded night. He would take the train at two in the morning from Hannover… Didn’t matter a damn, didn’t alter the basics of the mission. Whether by parachute, whether by second class rail ticket, Johnny was going into enemy territory.’
There are even closer similarities in the novel’s conclusion. Because The Looking Glass War is widely seen as a novel about dismal spies in Whitehall, the ‘black ops’ nature of it has not generally been noticed. This passage in which Leiser crosses the border gives an idea of how influential this aspect of the book was on this branch of the genre:
‘He pressed his face to the ground. Arching his body, he slid his hand beneath his belly and tightened the belt of his rucksack.
He began crawling up the hill, dragging himself forward with his elbows and his hands, pushing the suitcase in front of him, conscious all the time of the hump on his back rising above the undergrowth. The water was seeping through his clothes; soon it ran freely over his thighs and knees. The stink of leaf mould filled his nostrils; twigs tugged at his hair. It was as if all nature conspired to hold him back. He looked up the slope and caught sight of the observation tower against the line of black trees on the horizon. There was no light on the tower.
He lay still. It was too far: he could never crawl so far. It was quarter to three by his watch. The relief guard would be coming from the north. He unbuckled his rucksack, stood up, holding it under his arm like a child. Taking the suitcase in his other hand he began walking cautiously up the rise, keeping the trodden path to his left, his eyes fixed upon the skeleton outline of the tower. Suddenly it rose before him like the dark bones of a monster.
The wind clattered over the brow of the hill. From directly above him he could hear the slats of old timber banging, and the long creak of a casement. It was not a single apron but double; when he pulled, it came away from the staves. He stepped across, reattached the wire and stared into the forest ahead. He felt even in that moment of unspeakable terror while the sweat blinded him and the throbbing of his temples drowned the rustling of the wind, a full, confiding gratitude towards Avery and Haldane, as if he knew they had deceived him for his own good.
Then he saw the sentry, like the silhouette in the range, not ten yards from him, back turned, standing on the old path, his rifle slung over his shoulder, his bulky body swaying from left to right as he stamped his feet on the sodden ground to keep them from freezing. Leiser could smell tobacco – it was past him in a second – and coffee warm like a blanket. He put down the rucksack and suitcase and moved instinctively towards him; he might have been in the gymnasium at Headington. He felt the haft sharp in his hand, cross-hatched to prevent slip. The sentry was quite a young boy under his greatcoat; Leiser was surprised how young. He killed him hurriedly, one blow, as a fleeing man might shoot into a crowd; shortly; not to destroy but to preserve; impatiently, for he had to get along; indifferently because it was a fixture.’
In The Contract, Donoghue has to come over the border from East Germany through the sentries and watch-towers, and he is accompanied by the missile expert and his daughter. However, the meticulous, almost hallucinogenic description of their crossing owes a lot to le Carré’s novel:
‘Sometimes a twig cracked under his foot, sometimes a dried leaf rustled beneath his boot, sometimes a low branch clutched at his clothing.
Impossible to be truly quiet, to maintain absolute stealth. And all the time the throbbing thought that they would be waiting, listening and concealed, ready to spring, hands on the flashlights, fingers on the rifle triggers. All the time they could be there, and the only way for him was forward.
In the daylight, during his foraging exercise for food and timber, he had rediscovered the trip wire that last night’s boy and girl had skirted. He had paced out the distance between the wire and the hide; 224 paces, and then the diversion into the trees for the bypassing of the danger strand, and Otto Guttmann and Erica followed him blindly and would not know why at this particular place his muffled counting stopped and they must stumble on rough ground for a few yards before returning to the ease of the path.
Johnny ahead of them again, ahead and alone . . .
There was an explosion of movement not five yards from him. Johnny froze. The crashing roar of escape away from him, and pigeons in the high branches clattered into flight. The sounds of desperate, clumsy escape, echoing into the dark distance of the woods. All the bloody world would hear it . . . Johnny’s heart pounding, his breathing petrified. The hand that did not hold the pole was clasped on the butt of the Stechkin.
Bloody pig. The woods were packed tight with them. Not hunted here. Too close to the frontier. Fucking game reserve… A full minute Johnny stood rock still and as the fear slipped so came a sprinkling of confidence. If the pig had been browsing in the leaf-mould for young roots and had been disturbed by him then there was no other interloper in its territory. The immediate path was clear.
Six times Johnny ventured forward, retraced his steps to Otto Guttmann and Erica, advanced with them, and then set off again on his own. He had known it would be slow, but there was no call for hurry and he must stifle the desire to rush. An hour and a quarter after they had set out, Johnny saw in front of him the shadow of the woodman’s hut and the clear ground beyond and the silvery brightness of the Hinterland fence.’
Scenes like this abound in Seymour’s work. It’s clear that he’s studied le Carré’s novel closely over the years, dipping into different aspects of it. A more recent example is Beyond Recall, published in 2019. Here, the mission mounted by British intelligence is the assassination of a Russian intelligence officer in Siberia, and the man sent in to do it is ‘Gaz’ Baldwin, a former ‘watcher’ for the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. The storyline again follows a familiar pattern to The Looking Glass War, but the book draws on it in other ways, too. For example, le Carré’s novel features a club in the basement of an 18th-century house in London in which current and former members of various intelligence and special forces outfits meet:
‘You reach it by descending a curving stone staircase. The railing, like the woodwork of the house in Blackfriars Road, is painted dark green and needs replacing.
Its members are an odd selection. Some of a military kind, some in the teaching profession, others clerical; others again from that no-man’s-land of London society which lies between the bookmaker and the gentleman, presenting to those around them, and perhaps even to themselves, an image of vacuous courage; conversing in codes and phrases which a man with a sense of language can only listen to at a distance. It is a place of old faces and young bodies; of young faces and old bodies; where the tensions of war have become the tensions of peace, and voices are raised to drown the silence, and glasses to drown the loneliness; it is the place where the searchers meet, finding no one but each other and the comfort of a shared pain; where the tired watchful eyes have no horizon to observe. It is their battlefield still; if there is love, they find it here in one another, shyly like adolescents, thinking all the time of other people.
From the war, none but the dons were missing.
It is a small place, run by a thin, dry man called Major Dell; he has a moustache and a tie with blue angels on a black background. He stands the first drink, and they buy him the others. It is called the Alias Club, and Woodford was a member. It is open in the evenings. They come at about six, detaching themselves with pleasure from the moving crowd, furtive but determined, like men from out of town visiting a disreputable theatre. You notice first the things that are not there: no silver cups behind the bar, no visitors’ book nor list of membership; no insignia, crest or title. Only on the whitewashed brick walls a few photographs hang, framed in passe-partout, like the photographs in Leclerc’s room. The faces are indistinct, some enlarged, apparently from a passport, taken from the front with both ears showing according to the regulation; some are of women, a few of them attractive, with high square shoulders and long hair after the fashion of the war years. The men are wearing a variety of uniforms; Free French and Poles mingle with their British comrades. Some are fliers. Of the English faces one or two, grown old, still haunt the club.
When Woodford came in everyone looked round and Major Dell, much pleased, ordered his pint of beer. A florid, middle-aged man was talking about a sortie he once made over Belgium but he stopped when he lost the attention of his audience.
‘Hello, Woodie,’ somebody said in surprise. ‘How’s the lady?’’
In the first chapter of Beyond Recall, we are taken into a London club that serves a very similar function:
‘‘Morning, Knacker.’
‘And morning to you too, Boot. Keeping well?’
‘Not too bad, thank you.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
Knacker gave his coat to the long-retired company sergeant major of the Coldstreams who did duty at the door of this upper-floor dining-room where intelligence officers, past and present, gathered to swap tales. He handed over his phone and accepted the receipt for it, and registered the respect in which the NCO held him, and then had turned to face old Boot, a long-time colleague and now said to be in poor health. He gazed inside the room, started to nod greetings and let go of Boot’s limp hand. Gerard Coe – rather good in the Gulf, once – was at the bar and had lost too much weight and too quickly – and saw others that he’d want to talk to. Just in time, not late because that would have been an act of disrespect, and he was rewarded with eye contact from Arthur Jennings, low down and bowed in his wheelchair but who maintained an unimpaired mind. It was the first Tuesday of the month, a locked-down date, when the Round Table met.
Knacker eased away from Boot but gave him a soft smile as a parting gift. He thought, Boot was on borrowed time and might not be long with them, but his reputation was well burnished, as bright as Coe’s, as were the credentials of all of them, veterans of espionage, who came – by invitation only and access jealously guarded – to the upstairs room in the Victorian building on the Kennington Road. They were part of the Secret Intelligence Service, with good links but still regarded with well-founded suspicion, kept at arm’s length, funded by proxy, rarely seen in the building at the top of the road and overlooking the Thames. He reached Arthur Jennings whose parchment-textured skin seemed to crack in pleasure, his eyes rheumy in delight. Knacker crouched beside the wheelchair and allowed the talons of Jennings’ hand to grip his shoulder.
They were there, at least a dozen of them that day, because of Jennings. He was their founding father: had made his name (to the select few who knew anything of him) while working out of Beirut. He had become a legend of manipulation and success and extraordinary bravado melded with a ruthlessness that would have seemed brutal to anyone of a squeamish nature – and was a deity in the life of Knacker. There would have been no Round Table but for an evening of binge drinking led by Jennings – an endless supply of brandy sours. The refrain was that their Service had lost its edge, was no longer a risk taker, had ditched the role of playing the desperado. The Service, they said, was ‘withering on the vine’, and something must be done to rectify the weakness. An association of like-minded men, and a few women, was built around an image of a table, round, and on that table – sketched by an old China hand – was a ‘bloody great sword, sharp blade, unsheathed’. [...] The upstairs room with its nicotine-stained prints and panelling, and tackily painted woodwork at the windows was not Camelot, but did the job for them and would have been well swept for recording devices by the Coldstreamer and his people. At face, their coming together was of little more significance than a Rotary or Probus group in a small market town, but such a view would have sold short the expertise of those who would take their place at the table where the sword – bought on the cheap from a theatrical costumier in Greek Street – dominated the centre. [...] All of their membership, with their cover names of Tennyson’s knights, would have seemed to an outsider to behave like schoolboys, but a point would have been missed. Or several points.’
The Round Table is clearly inspired by the Alias Club in The Looking Glass War, both in its functions but also in its setting and the way in which this clannish group of spooks and ex-spooks are portrayed: they are shabby yet noble figures in their own world. Seymour plays up their legendary status much more than le Carré, whose view is more jaundiced, but the tone is nevertheless very similar. It’s also striking how heavily Seymour draws on le Carré’s prose style, for example in his use of old-fashioned English phrasing and vocabulary (‘Gerard Coe – rather good in the Gulf, once…’ ‘At face…’. ‘an old China hand’); the rhythm of clauses that build on one another that is a hallmark of le Carré’s writing (‘his reputation was well burnished, as bright as Coe’s,’); the use of grandiloquent language to describe mundane details (the sword ‘bought on the cheap from a theatrical costumier in Greek Street’). There are other similarities: members of the Alias Club are likened to ‘men from out of town visiting a disreputable theatre’, while the Round Table’s denizens superficially seem ‘of little more significance than a Rotary or Probus group in a small market town’.
The plot, ethos, and prose style of The Looking Glass War have run through the work of Gerald Seymour for over four decades. However, he’s not the only eminent writer in the genre to draw from this well, as I’ll explore in the final part of this essay.