Spies hold a privileged space in the popular imagination – they are keepers of the kind of terrible secrets that are necessary to sheild our peace of mind (or so we assume), and they take on the characteristics of the inscrutable, unreachable American hero – part cowboy, part ninja, part wraith. But there’s something else, a quality of hiddenness, the fact of having a secret identity that is deeply appealing. It’s as if, by going underground, spies live without limits – they can assume any cloak and thereby move unimpeded through the chaos and treachery of the world. In an intensely fragile and pleasurable way, they are immune.
This week’s issue of the New Yorker has in it an essay by John Le Carre called “The Madness of Spies,” (unfortunately not online) which labors, with Le Carre’s characteristic light touch, abundant humanity, and wry tone, to disabuse the reader of the very fascination with spooks that has made him the most famous spy novelist of all time (and presumably, a very rich man). He begins:

I carried my first 9-mm. automatic Browning when I was just twenty years old.

I was a National Service second lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps in Austria. It was my first clandestine mission, and I was in heaven. The year, I think, was 1952, and I was stationed in Graz, the hub of the British Occupied Zone in the early cold war years. The gun was loaded. On the advice of the Air Intelligence Officer, or A.I.O., in charge of the operation, I wore it jammed into my waistband against my left hip with the butt foremost, allowing for an easy draw across the body. Over it, I wore a green loden coat, borrowed under a pretext from one of our Field Security drivers, and, for additional cover, a fetching green Tyrolean hat, bought at personal expense. Such was my disguise of choice for a top-secret night trip through sparsely populated countryside to Austria’s border with Communist Czechoslovakia.

His A.I.O. is an unknown kind of man. 

He was said to be much decorated, but we never saw him in uniform. In short, he was the real McCoy. His work might look as boring as ours, but in reality he was an undercover Friend, meaning a member of M.I.6, the highest form of Intelligence life known to man.

Le Carre’s first assignment ends uneventfullly – their contact doesn’t show and they spend all night shooting pool and drinking. Only years later does the purpose of his first foray into the intelligence underworld seem clear:

Nevertheless, with the ripening of years, I think I have hit upon an answer to the questions that have troubled me for so long. There was no Czech officer crossing the border that night. The briefcase did not contain ten thousand dollars; at best, there was an old pair of pajamas and a reserve bottle of Scotch. The A.I.O. was not the favored son of Int. Org., he was not an undercover officer of M.I.6, his work was just as tedious and useless as ours. He was one of those forgotten soulds whom military bureaucracies dump on distant shores and forget about for years on end. 
He was, in addition – if discreetly – mad, and living in a sercret bubble all his own, a condition that in the spook world, rather like a sugerbug in a hospital, is endemic, hard to detect, and harder still to eradicate. 
I can also hazard a guess about the nature of his madness, since from time to time I have experienced simliar symptoms. The A.I.O., like the rest of us, dreamed the Great Spy’s Dream. He imagined himself at the Spies’ Big Table, playing the world’s game. Gradually, the gap between the dream and the reality became too much for him to bear, and one day he decided to fill it. He needed a believer, so I got the job. I was well cast. Years later, for a short time, I did actually become an insider in the world that the A.I.O. pretended to inhabit, but it wasn’t long before I, too, was fantasizing about a real British secret service, somewhere else, that did everything right that we either did wrong or didn’t do at all. 
My solution was to invent a spook world better suited to my needs, just as the A.I.O. had done. It was only our methods that were a little different. 

Le Carre goes on to trace the paranoid delusions of spies and spy agencies, from the witch hunts of the 1950s, when the halls of british intelligence agencies were as hushed and drab as funeral homes, to the more recent flights of imagination that have landed us squarely and semi-permanently in Iraq. And this is what I love about Le Carre as a writer – he allows me to indulge my proclivity for spy fantasies with a cold-eyed infusion of reality. His third novel, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” is his best and most tragic work, a taut, quick-paced study in the use of human emotion as a tool of the trade. 

If you’re looking for a good autumn read, something that will nicely complement the streets of the city on a windy evening and turn every man in a trenchcoat into an enemy agent, pick up a Le Carre novel. If, on the other hand, you’re looking to understand a little of the human drama that created the Mobile Biolabs and Yellow Cake that built the case for war in Iraq, find a newstand and read “The Madness of Spies,” you won’t be disappointed.