Spooks in the Mirror
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can read on this website or download here.
Read any list of great thrillers and you will usually find John le Carré’s third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, somewhere on it. Published in 1963, it has sold millions of copies and was adapted into one of the decade’s most successful films. Le Carré’s next book, written in the unexpected glare of fame, is usually overlooked.
And yet The Looking Glass War is his most underrated novel, its themes resonating especially sharply in today’s climate of distrust and disinformation. Penguin is reissuing it in paperback this month as part of its “Smiley Collection”, providing the perfect opportunity to investigate this forgotten gem if you haven’t already, or revisit it if you have.
George Smiley’s role in the book is small, but crucial; he acts as the deus ex machina to an operation run not, as in most of le Carré’s novels, by the Circus, his MI6 stand-in, but a rival agency known as the Department. This half-forgotten group, housed in a “crabbed, sooty villa of a place with a fire extinguisher on the balcony” in Southwark, is staffed with veterans from the Second World War who obsess over their status in the Whitehall hierarchy—are they entitled to an office car?—and are desperate to recapture their glory days.
The Cold War has left these spies behind and they now barely function. Until they catch a glimpse of an operation; an agent informs them that the Soviet Union has established a medium-range ballistic missile base near Rostock, close to the border with West Germany. A man is dispatched to Finland to collect overflight photographs of the area, but is killed in a car crash when he gets there.
In London this is taken as evidence that the Soviets murdered him because he was on to the truth. In fact, as the reader knows, it was a purely accidental hit-and-run—and the tip-off about the missile site is fabricated.
Such a plot could have provided the basis for a dark satire of the espionage world, but le Carré, writing in the wake of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis, instead played the absurdities straight, giving it the quality of tragedy. The Department, convinced its moment has come again in what could be “a sort of Cuba situation” only “more dangerous”, re-recruits one of its agents from the war to cross into East Germany and locate the missiles. We watch in horror as the deluded operation stumbles inexorably towards disaster.
The novel was panned on its publication in 1965, seen as a flop after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It is an austere, uncompromising book; le Carré felt his breakthrough had glamourised the spy game (not a charge many would level at it) and so decided to tell a story in which everyone is deceived—by themselves, others, or both.
Despite the critical drubbing, its influence has quietly spread through the genre in the intervening decades, and echoes of it—the unsanctioned operation behind enemy lines, the expendable agent, the shabby, underfunded rival agency—can be seen in the work of Gerald Seymour, The Sandbaggers TV series and, more recently, Mick Herron’s Slough House novels and Luke Jennings’s Villanelle novellas (adapted into the TV series Killing Eve).
The book angered some in the intelligence community. One MI6 officer, furious that le Carré had painted British spies as “heartless incompetents” in it, bellowed, “You utter bastard,” at him at a diplomatic reception. The CIA’s John Stockwell recounted that he was reprimanded by superiors for using the novel to teach case officers because its bungled operation was too close to reality.
It had its admirers, though, among them Allen Dulles, who was forced to resign as CIA director after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He wrote in 1969 that the novel’s “jumble of unusual personalities, their speech and behaviour, their daily business, and even the awful scheme which carries them in their enthusiasm far from reality—all ring true”.
More than half a century later, The Looking Glass War feels refreshingly sharp, with prose at least the equal to le Carré’s more famous work, especially in the virtuoso opening sequence. Le Carré was writing with the awareness that the book would have a global audience, but refused to pander to expectations by redeeming his characters’ flaws or softening blows with anything but the driest wisps of irony. Smiley’s final intervention is no bittersweet triumph, as it would be in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but merely bitter defeat masked by British restraint, all blame left unsaid.
The former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove recently lambasted le Carré for his “nihilistic” and “corrosive” depictions of British intelligence. This is the most nihilistic and corrosive of all his books, and yet its portrayal of how influential men end up taking decisions with terrible repercussions through faulty intelligence and delusions of grandeur doesn’t feel excessive today. We live in a time in which bluff and deceit are rewarded, disinformation and incompetence are rife, and Pentagon officials anxiously check their screens to learn whether the president of the US has provoked a nuclear war on Twitter.
The Looking Glass War is a bleak and devastating read, but few other novels have so brilliantly described how a thirst for power breeds worlds of fantasy and failure.