Author John Le Carre, who probed murky spy world, dies aged 89

LONDON: John Le Carre, the author of spy thrillers like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, has died aged 89.

David Cornwell, known to the world as John le Carre, died after a short illness in Cornwall, south-western England, on Saturday evening.

He is survived by his wife, Jane, and four sons. The family said in a brief statement he died of pneumonia.

“Very sad to hear the news about John le Carre,” said Richard Moore, the chief of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence agency. “A giant of literature who left his mark on MI6 through his evocative and brilliant novels.”

Le Carre, who grabbed readers’ attention by casting flawed spies on to the bleak chessboard of Cold War rivalry, explored treachery at the heart of British intelligence in his novels.

He challenged Western assumptions about the Cold War by defining for millions the moral ambiguities of the battle between the Soviet Union and the West.

Unlike the glamour of Ian Fleming’s unquestioning James Bond, Le Carre’s heroes were trapped in the wilderness of mirrors inside a British intelligence reeling from the betrayal of Kim Philby, who fled to Moscow in 1963.

“It’s not a shooting war anymore, George. That’s the trouble,” Connie Sachs, British intelligence’s resident alcoholic expert on Soviet spies, tells spy catcher George Smiley in the 1979 novel Smiley’s People.

“It’s grey. Half angels fighting half devils. No one knows where the lines are,” Sachs says in the final novel of Le Carre’s Karla trilogy.

Such a bleak portrayal of the Cold War shaped popular Western perceptions of the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States that dominated the second half of the 20th century until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Cold War, for le Carre, was A Looking Glass War (the name of his 1965 novel) with no heroes and where morals were up for sale – or betrayal – by spy masters in Moscow, Berlin, Washington and London.

Betrayal of family, lovers, ideology and country run through Le Carre’s novels which use the deceit of spies as a way to tell the story of nations, particularly Britain’s sentimental failure to see its own post-imperial decline.

Such was his influence that he was credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with introducing espionage terms such as “mole”, “honey pot” and “pavement artist” to popular English usage.

British spies were angry that Le Carre portrayed the MI6 secret intelligence service as incompetent, ruthless and corrupt. But they still read his novels.

Other fans included Cold War warriors such as former US president George H. W. Bush and former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

David John Moore Cornwell was born on Oct 19, 1931, in Dorset, England, to Ronnie and Olive, though his mother, despairing at the infidelities and financial impropriety of her husband, abandoned the family when he was five years old.