The Madness of Spies

By John le Carré
Issue: Sept 29

This article starts with the story of le Carré's first mission as a spy in which he follows around an experienced A.I.O. (Air Intelligence Officer) and then drops his hidden gun from his chair which ends the mission early. They drink from a flask in a car instead.

Looking back on the incident, le Carré decides that there probaby was no mission to begin with and that the guy was probably just a lonely former spy who missed the excitement and pretended to be more important than he was.

Next we hear about Arthur, who worked at M.I.5 with le Carré during a time when everyone was suspicious of Russian spies infiltrating their group. Arthur started stealing files and was convinced that he was being persecuted. He started believing that he could himself be a secret communist. "In a world that was almost as paranoid as ours is now, the security-risk assessor had become a security risk to himself."

The story ends with an explanation of why this happens and why people, including spies, want to believe in the secret world. "The trouble is that the reader, like the general public to which he belongs, and in spite of all the evidence telling him that he shouldn’t, wants to believe in his spies: which, come to think of it, is how we went to war in Iraq."