John Le
John Le
age british came diplomat embassy extreme guise intelligence junior officer personal secret spy time wrote
I wrote 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.
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SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.
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It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is. It will never cease. It's absolutely essential that we have it. At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy governmental curiosity. It brings to a strong government what it needs to know. It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.
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The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James's Park Tube station in London.
intelligence since
I've had nothing to do with the intelligence world since I left it, in any shade or variety.
came spy
The spy who came in from the cold.
dangerous desk watch
A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world
war literature shade
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
movie book reading
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
held impunity
Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.
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In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building.
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I suffer from the same frustration that every decent American suffers from. That is, that you begin to wonder whether decent liberal instincts, decent humanitarian instincts, can actually penetrate the right-wing voice, get through the steering of American opinion by the mass media.
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The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for just such a high-ranking mole in 'Tinker, Tailor,' was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I'm such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days.
men writers
Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within.