Tag Archives: John Le Carre

Spies Suck

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This first appeared on The Dissolve.

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Spy narratives as a genre usually involve über-competent assassins performing death-defying feats in exotic locales with advanced weaponry and smoldering sex appeal. Even supposedly realistic takes like John le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold present spies as grimly competent soldiers occupying a moral universe that’s glamorous in its grayness. Spies, popular culture insists with almost one voice, are cool.

The spies in Bethlehem aren’t cool, they’re a combination of bureaucrats and thugs. Razi (Tsahi Halevi), an Israeli intelligence officer dealing with Palestinian terrorist threats, doesn’t have neat gadgets or exciting missions like James Bond. He just has a list of contacts he pumps for information, using a combination of bribery and bullying. One of those contacts is a teenager named Sanfur (Shadi Mar’i), whom Razi recruited by threatening his father when the boy was 15. Razi doesn’t have cleverness or martial-arts skills. Instead, he has a shameless, amoral willingness to take advantage of those with less power. In fact, to the extent that Razi attempts to protect Sanfur and treat him as a human child rather than as a thing, he ceases to be good at his job.

Sanfur, for his part, is effectively a spy as well. He passes information to Razi, and he also secretly works to funnel money from Hamas to his brother, resistance fighter Abu Ibrahim (Tarek Copti). Though in some sense he’s Razi’s double agent, that doesn’t indicate any particular competence on his part—just confusion and divided loyalties. He’s a kid who loves his brother and wants his dad and friends to admire him, but he’s also an undercover agent. The contradictions are insupportable; everything starts to fall apart when Sanfur is injured after daring a friend to shoot him while he’s wearing a bulletproof vest. He’s living a life of incredible risk, danger, and deception, but he needs to prove his manliness through idiotic swagger.

He isn’t alone, either. The Palestinian resistance is presented less as an organized battle against the oppressor, and more as a fragmented, endless pissing match—in one emblematic scene, two rival factions almost shoot each other over which of them gets to bury a martyr. In another sequence, rebel leader Badawi (Hitham Omari) challenges a rival to run up several flights of stairs in boyish horseplay, then, when the guy is exhausted, cold-bloodedly pushes him over a railing. There’s no heroism here, just petty betrayal and banal violence. That goes for the Israelis as well. The one big blow-out fight scene occurs in some poor Palestinian family’s home, after Ibrahim flees there. Razi saves the day not with derring-do, but by discovering that the wife has cancer, and using that to blackmail her for the floor plan.

“There’s nothing I hate more than dishonesty,” Razi’s spymaster boss Levy (Yossi Eini) tells him. The irony is that it’s Razi’s job to lie; that’s what spies do. But the further irony is that the boss is right; dishonesty is unforgivable. But in a police state like Palestine, it’s also inescapable, corroding everything it touches: relationships between brother and brother, between neighbors, between friends. In a spy story, Bethlehem insists, there are no good guys or bad guys, and no victor—just day-in, day-out deceit and betrayal, the weary work of hate.

The Spy Who Waded About in the Bullshit

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This ran a long ways back at Splice Today.
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200px-JohnLeCarre_TheSpyWhoCameInSomehow, I had thought that John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was an unflinching look at the idiocy of the cold war era — a spy novel for people who hated not just James Bond, but John F. Kennedy.

Alas, the book in my head was far, far better than the book that ended up in my hands. I had hoped for acerbic wit; what I got instead was maudlin tripe.

Admittedly, Le Carré’s book has superficial differences from Fleming’s here-I-come-to-save-the-world! cheerleading. Alec Leamas is not your typical manly-man. Basically a rumpled bureaucrat, he spends most of the book semi-undercover as a no-account boozing wastrel. His main spy skill is not fighting powers or seductive charm, but the ability to lie convincingly for surprisingly extended periods of time.

And yet, on closer look, Leamas starts to seem not so different from Bond after all. It’s true that he only gets into one or two fights — but the book details his brutal competence in those encounters with crisp, matter-of-fact smugness. And yes, he only sleeps with one girl — but that relationship is wearisomely familiar. Liz, library assistant and idealistic Communist party member, is pure and good and loving, and she falls in love with Alec instantly and for no reason except that he’s so darn deep. Leamas loves her too, and the book pivots around that mutual love without ever providing one iota of evidence that it exists. Declarations of eternal devotion come out of nowhere and are attached to nothing. Liz and Alec are in love not because they like each other, or make each other laugh, or even know jack shit about each other. Rather, they’re in love because Le Carré has a plot to push along, and this is the best he could do.

Thematically, Liz is supposed to contrast with the evil machinations of the spy network. She’s sentimental and good; the service is realistic and bad. The final pages of the novel (following the Shocking Twist Ending that I figured out halfway through the book) are given over to a heartfelt argument between Liz and Leamas. “[T]hey…find the humanity in people…and…turn it like a weapon in their hands, and use it to hurt and kill—“ Liz fulminates with naïve moralism. “What else have men done since the world began?” Leamas responds with world-weary cynicism. “I don’t believe in anything don’t you see — not even destruction or anarchy.”

Thus are the battle lines laid down…though, appropriately for a spy novel, I suppose, it’s pretty much impossible to tell the one side from the other. Liz and Leamas are equally earnest, equally humorless, and equally committed to vapid Hollywood philosophizing. Ostensibly their conversation reveals the evils of spying and exposes the despicable practices of the Cold War warriors. In fact, though, their sodden disillusionment is indistinguishable from slack-jawed reverence. “The spies…,” they seem to cry in unison, “oh, Lord, they’re so diabolical, so vicious! They do such dirty work out there beyond the bounds of morality, use such subtle tricks, that normal people just fall to pieces before them. How can we parse the questions they raise? How can we live in this horrible world? What, oh what, shall we do?”

Back in the real world, of course, most major espionage activities look more like farce than anything else. I mean, the Bay of Pigs? Oliver North? Accidentally murdering suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and then removing the corpses’ throats because, hyuk! hyuk!, gee nobody’ll notice that? Clearly, the real secret of intelligence is that these people aren’t Machiavellian geniuses. They’re bumbling shitheads, just like most government functionaries — or, for that matter, most people.

Joseph Conrad had this figured out in The Secret Agent. Not Le Carré though. He believes in the hard truths, which is the same thing as saying that he’s a credulous sucker for melodrama. Leamas sacrifices himself for love, because, damn it, that’s what spies do. Le Carré’s heroes care so much they barter their souls, a formulation which cleverly elides the fact that in truth said heroes couldn’t find their own asses, much less their souls, with both hands and a $50,000 government-procured state-of-the-art GPS tracking system.