Le Carre breaks a long silence

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, DEC. 25. John Le Carre, the doyen of modern spy fiction and admired around the world by some very Leftish crowd, has denounced another darling of the very same Leftish crowd, Kim Philby who got some of the best Cambridge intellectuals to work for the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

Le Carre, whose real name is David Cornwell and who himself was a British intelligence officer in the Fifties, has called Philby a traitor for spying for the Soviet Union in an interview to BBC2 ahead of the release of his latest novel, ``The Constant Gardener,'' an expose of the greed of multinational corporations and their nexus with the ruling elite in the Third World. ``He (Philby) knew what kind of country he was serving...He knew about the deportations, the corruption...the planned genocide of the Soviet middle classes and yet he went on working against us. Philby carried...to the grave...my unqualified contempt,'' Le Carre says in the interview to be broadcast on Tuesday, extracts from which have already appeared in newspapers.

For the author of ``The Spy who came in from the Cold,'' this is his first major T.V. interview - a conscious decision, he says, to break his silence and get out of the shadow of self-imposed secrecy at the age of 70. ``I have changed my attitude. I know who I am now...I will talk about what I want to talk about,'' he told The Times before the BBC interview.

Le Carre himself is regarded as being on the Left and is critical of the Labour Government for not being socialist enough but clearly he draws a line when it comes to choosing between the flag and ideology. The flag comes first. In fact, being on Her Majesty's Service meant a great deal to him and, looking back, he admits to the ``thrill'' he got out of breaking the law in the name of the Queen. ``...it had a voluptuous quality in the sense that this was a necessary sacrifice of morality'', he says.

Issues about morality also lie at the heart of his new novel in which he questions the idea or what he calls, in a newspaper interview, the ``extraordinary belief that at the centre of corporations lies a moral purpose...it's nonsense.'' He is angry that newspapers swallow the ``lies'' told by big companies. ``They lie about everything...It's astonishing to me how little opposition journalism raises to the activities of corporations.''

The novel is set in Kenya where the wife of a British diplomat and her friend, a local doctor, are murdered when they discover that a new TB drug supplied by an international pharmaceutical company is killing people. The cycle of events triggered by the murders and the moral choices that confront the diplomat and the British diplomacy itself sound like vintage Le Carre, according to advance reviews. It is a big publishing event and Le Carre' is having a field day giving interviews - talking about his depressing childhood, the disappearance of his mother, the ``con'' tricks of his father, his days in the intelligence service and how he came in from the cold to penetrate the world of letters. As for Kim Philby, it was another story and he didn't like it.

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Section  : International
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