"The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life"

Without the audiobook read by John le Carré himself, I wouldn't know he has a talent for mimicry like his estranged mother. ("I learned recently from one who knew her better than I did, she was a mynah bird, instantly adopting the vocal effects of whoever she was with, even if it took her all the way down the social scale.")

• The legacy of that early immersion in things German is now pretty clear to me. It gave me my own patch of eclectic territory; it fed my incurable romanticism and my love of lyricism; ... when I came to study the dramas of Goethe, Lenz, Schiller, Kleist and Büchner, I discovered that I related equally to their classic austerity, and to their neurotic excesses. The trick, it seemed to me, was to disguise the one with the other.
• To the lawyer, truth is facts unadorned. Whether such facts are ever findable is another matter. To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing. Real truth lies, if anywhere, not in facts, but in nuance.
• If you’re ever lucky enough to score an early success as a writer, as happened to me with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, for the rest of your life there’s a before-the-fall and an after-the-fall. You look back at the books you wrote before the searchlight picked you out and they read like the books of your innocence; and the books after it, in your low moments, like the strivings of a man on trial.
• There are times, usually at night, when I wish I’d never given an interview at all. First, you invent yourself, then you get to believe your invention. That is not a process that is compatible with self-knowledge.
• With the passing of time some of the encounters I describe have acquired to my eye the status of tiny bits of history caught in flagrante, which I suppose is what all older people feel.
• Spying on a decaying British Communist Party twenty-five thousand strong that had to be held together by MI5 informants did not meet my aspirations.
• Spying and novel writing are made for each other. Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal.
• Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it.
• the politically erratic British ballerina Margot Fonteyn, when she was fighting the doomed cause of her paralysed and faithless husband, Roberto Arias.
• Under Globke’s New Law, as I shall call it, civil servants of the Hitler regime whose careers had been curtailed by circumstances beyond their control would henceforth receive full restitution of such pay, back-pay and pension rights as they would have enjoyed if the Second World War hadn’t taken place, or if Germany had won it.
• Johannes Ullrich, who for ten years had seen nothing of the world beyond the walls of a Siberian cell, was deemed to have spent the entire period of his incarceration as an aspirational diplomat.
• there were the hawk-eyed Foreign Service wives, who maintained as beady a watch on their husbands’ rivals for promotion, medals and eventual knighthoods as any KGB researcher. One look at my credentials and they knew they needn’t worry about me any more. I wasn’t family. I was a Friend, which is how respectable British foreign servants describe the spies they are reluctantly obliged to count among their number.
• how General Reinhard Gehlen, chief of Hitler’s military intelligence staff on the Eastern Front, had at some unclear point towards the end of the war spirited his precious Soviet archive to Bavaria, buried it, then cut a deal with the American OSS, forerunner of the CIA, whereby he handed over his archive, his staff and himself in return for instatement as head of an anti-Soviet spying agency under American command,
• Gehlen, always a poseur and something of a fantasist, contrived to sit tight until 1968, at the end of which time 90 per cent of his agents in East Germany were working for the Stasi, while back home in Pullach sixteen members of his extended family were on the BND payroll.
• Nobody can do corporate rot more discreetly than the spies. Nobody does better mission creep. Nobody knows better how to create an image of mysterious omniscience and hide behind it. Nobody does a better job of pretending to be a cut above a public that has no choice but to pay top price for second-rate intelligence whose lure lies in the gothic secrecy of its procurement, rather than its intrinsic worth.
• As to Gehlen, also a wartime traitor, it is hard to know in the cold light of history what is left to admire in him beyond deviousness, plausibility and a con artist’s powers of self-persuasion.
• And probably by the time you read this, yet more complexities will have emerged, and fresh ambiguities, and nobody will be held to blame except history.
• That none of the ticked boxes produced a terrorist is a matter of history. Kurnaz committed no crime, and suffered unspeakably for his innocence.
• You drank the soup, then you broke a thumbnail-sized piece off the lip of the cup and hoped the guard wouldn’t make anything of it. Then with your fingernail, which you had let grow for the purpose, you made an indentation in Arabic from the Koran. You kept back a bit of your bread, chewed it into a pellet and let it harden. You pulled a thread out of your jump suit, bound one end of the thread round the pellet of bread, and the other round the piece of polystyrene. Using the pellet as a weight, you tossed it through the bars to your neighbour, who then drew the cotton thread and the piece of polystyrene into his cage. And, in due course, you’d get a letter back.
• A dictum of Graham Greene’s was ringing somewhere in my ear: something to the effect that if you were reporting on human pain, you had a duty to share it.
• Or maybe I am just one of those people who are unable to accept the inevitability of human conflict.
• in Phnom Penh’s final days she marched a troop of orphaned Khmer children into the French Consulate and demanded passports, one for each child. ‘But whose children are they?’ the besieged consular official protested. ‘They are mine. I am their mother.’ ‘But they’re all the same age!’ ‘And I had many quadruplets, you idiot!’ Defeated, perhaps complicit, the Consul demanded to know their names. Yvette reeled them off: ‘Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi . . .’... The title in English was Woman of a Thousand Children.
• Afterwards, at Cambridge University, Simms studies Sanskrit and falls in love with Sanda, a beautiful princess from the Shan States who in childhood has sailed the Burmese lakes in a ceremonial boat shaped like a golden bird.
• he’s going to slip Madame Lulu a twenty-dollar bill and have himself a three-minute phone call to the Café de Flore in Paris. And when the waiter at the Flore picks up the phone, he’s going to ask to speak to Mademoiselle Julie Delassus, which is a made-up name so far as he knows, not one he’s used before. Then he’s going to listen to them yelling for her all across the tables and out on to the boulevard: Mademoiselle Delassus . . . Mademoiselle Julie Delassus . . . au téléphone s’il vous plaît! And while they call her name, over and over till it fades into the ether, or his time is up, whichever is the later, he’ll be listening to twenty dollars’ worth of Paris.
• ‘You are human zoologist?’ I’m a novelist.
• ‘Mr David!’ he cries. ‘Why have you come to see me?’ ‘Mr Chairman,’ I reply in the same high tone. ‘I have come to put my hand on the Palestinian heart!’
• Rashidieh is famous for its football team. The pitch, which is of dust, has been bombed so often that matches can be arranged only at short notice.
• emplacement. Its most revered resident was an elderly parrot named Coco that ruled over the cellar bar with a rod of iron... As the techniques of urban warfare became ever more sophisticated – from semi-automatic to rocket-propelled, from light to medium, or whatever the correct vocabulary is – so Coco updated his repertoire of battle sounds to a point where the uninitiated guest grazing at the bar would be roused by the whoosh of an incoming missile and a shriek of ‘Hit the deck, dumb bastard, get your ass down now!’
• Try to describe Russia without vodka in those days, you might as well describe a horse race without horses.
• Ilya Kabakov, who purge it at one blow of its autocratic tendencies and deliver a new, sanitized, socially aware spy service fit for purpose in the reconstructed democratic Russia that Gorbachev dreamed of.
• All the best interrogators have a certain way with them, some personal characteristic they have learned to turn into a weapon of persuasion. Some present themselves as the soul of sweet reason, others strive to scare or unsettle; others to overwhelm you with their frankness and charm. But big, very tough, utterly inconsolable Issa Kostoev, from the moment you meet him, instils in you an urge to please.
• lets me see the tears forming in (Brodsky's) eyes. ‘Now for a year of being glib,’ he declares, then obediently allows himself to be taken off to face his interrogators.
• He’d been reading the station codebook and found that the Service actually had a code group for eunuch. Must have been from the days when we were running eunuchs in the harems as agents.
• one of the near-misses of interminable adolescence.
• The United States had already achieved the remarkable feat of invading Panama while it still occupied the country. ‘Tailoring is theatre,’ Doug tells us over lunch. ‘Nobody comes to me because they need a suit. They come for the buzz.
• The more chaotic a country, the more intractable its bureaucracy.
• A Congolese priest in brown habit is lamenting how his fellow African Brothers are at risk from penitents who confess their ethnic hatreds too eloquently. Inflamed by passionate rhetoric they are supposed to assuage, he says, they are capable of becoming the worst extremists of them all.
• For the very celebrated, being manipulative goes with the territory.
• Day and night he studies and stores away the mannerisms of the adult enemy, moulds his own face, voice and body into countless versions of us, while he simultaneously explores the possibilities of his own nature – do you like me better so? – or so? – or so? – ad infinitum. When he is composing character, he steals shamelessly from those around him. Watching him putting on an identity is like watching a man set out on a mission into enemy territory.
• most important is a voice, a presence. Yours. The jubilation of a writer who describes a cruel and colourless world and delights in rendering it so grey and hopeless.
• Ronnie’s entire life was spent walking on the thinnest, slipperiest layer of ice you can imagine. He saw no paradox between being on the Wanted list for fraud and sporting a grey topper in the Owners’ enclosure at Ascot. Graham Greene tells us that childhood is the credit balance of the writer. By that measure at least, I was born a millionaire.
• Sometimes I walk round him, sometimes he’s the mountain I still have to climb. Either way, he’s always there,
• Today, I have no god but landscape, and no expectation of death but extinction.
• Goethe’s Eternal Feminine prevailed in him till the end.
• what’s the truth? What’s memory? We should find another name for the way we see past events that are still alive in us.
• my readers will see for themselves to what extent an old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination.
• when I am tired and my memory is out foraging for itself,
• Ronnie the conman could spin you a story out of the air, sketch in a character who did not exist, and paint a golden opportunity when there wasn’t one. He could blind you with bogus detail or helpfully clarify a non-existent knotty point if you weren’t quick enough on the uptake to grasp the technicalities of his con first time round. He could withhold a great secret on grounds of confidentiality, then whisper it to your ear alone because he has decided to trust you. And if all that isn’t part and parcel of the writer’s art, tell me what is.
• and all that stands between you and perdition is your animal wit and a double-breasted pinstripe from Berman of Savile Row that you home-press every evening. It’s the kind of situation they dream up for you at spy school: ‘Now let’s see how you talk your way out of this one.’ Allowing for the odd lapse now and then, Ronnie would have passed that test with flying colours.
• His name is Issa, meaning Jesus, and he is a Muslim, not a Christian. His one ambition is to study to become a great doctor and cure the suffering people of his homeland, children a speciality. Imprisoned in the attic of a Hamburg warehouse while the spies fight over his future, he fashions paper gliders from a roll of unused wallpaper and makes them fly across the room to freedom.
• the trousers worn by Rudolph Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy, when he flew to Scotland to negotiate a separate peace with the Duke of Hamilton in the mistaken belief that the Duke shared his fascist views.