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
Another writer who drew on le Carré’s novel was Ian MacKintosh, the creator of The Sandbaggers. This acclaimed TV series has often been compared to le Carré’s work, but it is The Looking Glass War that is its guiding light, and MacKintosh returned to it repeatedly.
As with Seymour, he changed several key elements. One was the politics: in The Looking Glass War and elsewhere, le Carré depicted Britain as being in hock to the power and resources of the United States, but MacKintosh, while keenly aware of realpolitik, broadly subscribed to the plucky Brit of tradition, taking at face value Leclerc’s assertion in the novel that Britain still had ‘one or two teeth’ of its own and could outmanoeuvre the Yanks.
The Sandbaggers centres around Neil Burnside, head of the fictional Special Operations Section of SIS, which includes a small group of operatives known as ‘the Sandbaggers’. Like The Department, the section echoes SOE, both in its name and its work, which largely consists of placing operatives behind enemy lines. Also like the Department, it has a small staff: we only ever encounter Burnside, three Sandbaggers, a secretary, and a few backroom fixers. It is also similarly underfunded, something Burnside complains about constantly. The scene in The Looking Glass War in which Leclerc reveals himself to be a master of manipulation when persuading the Under Secretary to give The Department increased funding to put an agent behind enemy lines becomes a hallmark in The Sandbaggers, with Burnside repeatedly manipulating and deceiving his superiors, most notably the Permanent Under Secretary, Wellingham, who also happens to be his former father-in-law. Unlike Leclerc, Burnside does at least already have his own operatives, who are all highly trained and competent. However, they also quite frequently die, usually when an operation has gone wrong behind enemy lines.
Machiavellian machinations aside, Burnside is much more akin to Smiley than Leclerc. He is cunning, sometimes shockingly ruthless, and efficient. If Burnside had run MAYFLY, Fred Leiser might still have died, and the operation might have involved some elaborate quadruple-bluff – but we can be sure that it would have succeeded.
MacKintosh’s first crack at a Looking Glass War-style plot was the series’ first episode, ‘First Principles’, broadcast in September 1978. Norwegian intelligence asks the British for assistance after it crashes a spy plane in Russian territory. Burnside is persuaded to send two Sandbaggers on a ‘suicide mission’ to help, but they are beaten to the plane by the Americans due to behind-the-scenes machinations. The Sandbaggers escape safely, but the Americans don’t. So we have a few key elements similar to the novel: a futile mission, cynical power ploys, and agents cut adrift behind enemy lines.
The influence is more explicit in ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’, from October 1978. This episode opens with two Sandbaggers in unnamed enemy territory, and we learn that they are the subject of a man-hunt by the secret police and are there unsanctioned, with no departmental or political clearance. As a result, when one of the men is just about to be captured Burnside orders the other to shoot him dead in order to avoid a show trial and the publicity that would come from it. This is an even bleaker twist than Smiley’s instruction to abandon Leiser at the close of The Looking Glass War.
‘Special Relationship’, the series’ best-known episode, is perhaps the most explicit variation of the novel’s events. Burnside informs his political masters that a developer in the Stasi’s photo processing laboratory in East Berlin who SIS has cultivated as an agent, codenamed MITTAG, claims to have prints of ‘aerial photos of the new missile complex’ in the country. This is thought to be vital because British intelligence knows nothing about the complex except that ‘the missiles are of a new type, probably targeted on RAF bases in Germany’. This, of course, closely recalls the intelligence in The Looking Glass War – photographs of a new missile site in East Germany that could target British interests – but, crucially, is in this case real.
MITTAG has become paranoid that he is under surveillance, so SIS decides to put in ‘a suitably trained officer’ who is able to pass as an East Berliner to retrieve the photographs. But when that officer is involved in ‘a car crash on the way to Bonn airport’, Burnside reluctantly decides to send in Laura Dickens, a Sandbagger who also happens to be his girlfriend. The mission goes wrong, with Laura apprehended by the Stasi almost immediately. Burnside, fearing that she will give up years of intelligence material under interrogation, makes a deal with French intelligence: in exchange for SIS giving them a year’s worth of the material that is shared with them by the Americans, the French will hand over a Soviet defector in their custody, thereby facilitating a spy swap with Laura in Berlin. However, the episode ends with the CIA shooting her as she is crossing over, and we realise that Burnside has ruthlessly calculated that the ‘special relationship’ with the Americans is more important, and that only her death can save it.
Once again, we have a replay of Smiley’s intervention to abandon Leiser to the East Germans, only this time the handler all but pulls the trigger himself, and does so on the woman he loves. The setting and doomed romance are also heavily influenced by The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but it’s primarily a variation of The Looking Glass War plot. British intelligence has sent an agent into East Germany to retrieve valuable intelligence about a missile site, the agent is captured and killed – but the mission was a success.
Finally, we have ‘At All Costs’, the first episode of the second season, broadcast in January 1980. The head of the Bulgarian secret service wants to hand SIS top secret documents, but only if a particular Sandbagger, Tom Elliot, collects them that same night in Sofia. Elliot manages to make the rendezvous and retrieve the intelligence, but is immediately ambushed by the secret police and is shot in the spine as he climbs over a wall to escape. Burnside and Sandbagger One, Willie Caine, then enter Sofia themselves to retrieve the packet of intelligence from him. They find him in the agreed bolt-hole, but partially paralysed and begging to be put out of his misery. Burnside eventually decides to do this, but by the time he has decided to act Elliot has already killed himself. A British agent has died behind the Iron Curtain, but the intelligence was retrieved so the mission was a success.
The final writer I want to look at is Frederick Forsyth. His book The Deceiver, published in 1991, consists of four linked novellas. One of these, ‘Pride and Extreme Prejudice’, tells the story of a British intelligence mission into East Germany.
In 1985, Yevgeni Pankratin, a long-term Soviet agent-in-place for SIS, claims he has crucial intelligence – the Soviet army’s entire battle order – and that he is prepared to hand it over to his former handler, Sam McCready, at a given time and place in East Germany in eight days’ time. As McCready has previously been identified by the Stasi, he cannot risk going in himself, so he asks a long-standing small-time agent he runs inside the BND, Bruno Morenz, out of shape and the wrong side of 50, to go in his place: one last mission ‘for old times’ sake’. Things soon go wrong and Bruno is subject to a man-hunt before eventually dying – but not before McCready has gone in and retrieved the intelligence from him.
Forsyth was a much more conventionally commercial novelist than le Carré, but The Deceiver owes more to le Carré in subject matter, plotting, and even prose style than any of his other work. For ‘Pride and Extreme Prejudice’, he drew on the structure of The Looking Glass War but, like Seymour and MacKintosh before him, took steps to try to avoid the factors that had led to it being close to forgotten. Unlike the self-deluding and self-important protagonists of The Looking Glass War, Sam McCready is a highly efficient, decent and courageous agent handler. He is also an outsider, resenting his superior officer, the wealthy, upper-class Timothy Edwards, who is closer to the protagonists of The Looking Glass War. Above all, McCready is likeable.
Forsyth also heads off any possibility in readers’ minds that the intelligence being sought here could be a fabrication through the use of several prompts. He has it come from a highly prized long-time agent who is a Major-General in the Soviet Army and who is also under growing suspicion from his own side, providing an additional layer of suspense while also suggesting further he is the genuine article. In the opening scene, set in 1983, McCready meets Pankratin for a hand-over of intelligence in a brown envelope. Pankratin asks for two hundred thousand pounds and a guarantee of a block of apartments in California once he has defected. The size of the request supports the idea that this intelligence is dynamite, thus raising the stakes, while Pankratin’s evident self-motivation to make himself richer also suggests it is true. When Edwards says the price is too high, McCready is incredulous, objecting that Pankratin’s intelligence is ‘a motherlode of pure platinum’, and it’s that judgement we trust.
So Forsyth sets the reader up with several strong assumptions: McCready is competent and decent, Pankratin’s intelligence is genuine and crucially valuable. If any of these had been revealed in a twist to be incorrect, we would have been plunged into The Looking Glass War’s abyss. Forsyth wasn’t interested in overturning the genre like that.
The opening meeting between McCready and Pankratin takes place in an abandoned railway yard in the outer suburbs of East Berlin. This has an echo of the location of the fabricated intelligence in The Looking Glass War; as has the intelligence he is about to be handed:
‘The key, of course, was what Pankratin had to say about the SS-20, the terrible Soviet mobile-launched medium-range missile, with each of its independently guided triple-nuke warheads targeted on a British or European city. According to Pankratin, they were moving into the forests of Saxony and Thuringia, closer to the border, able to range in an arc from Oslo through Dublin to Palermo.’
This is a close cousin of the intelligence sought in The Looking Glass War, but again here it is true. We learn later in the story that it was passed to the Americans, stymying the Soviets’ efforts.
The opening scene of the story, then, is a heroic version of The Looking Glass War: instead of a desperate and untrained agent creeping into East Germany, a highly competent handler does it, retrieves the correct intelligence, and acts on it. The rest of the story – the operation to meet Pankratin and receive his new intelligence on the Soviet order of battle – follows le Carré’s novel more closely, although it still retains the heroic element, the snatching of victory from the jaws of defeat. We have the out of shape veteran operative headed for inexorable failure behind enemy lines, but instead of a murdered guard triggering the man hunt Forsyth creates a back story of murder after a honey trap goes wrong that comes crashing in on our man.
The conclusion of the story also resembles The Sandbaggers episode ‘At All Costs’, because McCready goes in once it’s clear things have gone wrong to find his agent and retrieve the package of intelligence, just as Burnside did in that episode. Like Burnside, he succeeds, but the price is also a dead operative. McCready gives the wounded Bruno whisky laced with cyanide so that he dies before being discovered by the Stasi.
I hope I have shown how The Looking Glass War inspired Gerald Seymour, Ian MacKintosh, and Frederick Forsyth in varying ways. It’s an unusual example of a novel’s influence largely not being about what the author saw as its grand themes, but more peripheral elements being given centre-stage by others. Remixed, repackaged, redrawn and reconsidered, this overlooked satire went on to have a significant impact on the development of the Cold War spy thriller.