The Pigeon Tunnel

Errol Morris’ documentary on the life of John le Carre – The Pigeon Tunnel was a peek into the life of the probably the greatest spy novelist of all time. After watching it, I revisited my notes from his 2016 memoir of the same name, which I read three years back. The title refers to a grotesque shooting range Le Carré witnessed as a boy in Monte Carlo, where pigeons were released from a tunnel to be shot, with any survivors returning home only to be targets once again

The book is not a typical autobiography but a series of vignettes from his life. The defining event of le Carre’s career was the unmasking of Kim Philby as a Soviet double agent. Philby, the head of MI5’s counter-espionage division and a future MI5 chief in waiting was discovered to be a Russian spy all along. The case remains one of the most infamous espionage scandals in history till date. More than a hundred agents were imprisoned, tortured or shot as a fallout of his betrayal. It was this act of treachery, and its moral reverberations, that inspired le Carre’s ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’. Philby defected to the USSR in 1963 and lived there until his death in 1988. He was buried with full honours by the KGB. le Carre, during his maiden visit to the USSR in ’88 was also offered the possibility of meeting Philby, which he flatly refused.

On the role of MI5 in honing his literary skills:

But let me in parting acknowledge one debt of gratitude to MI5 that I can never sufficiently repay. The most rigorous instruction in prose writing that I ever received came, not from any schoolteacher or university tutor, least of all from a writing school. It came from the classically educated senior officers on the top floor of MI5’s headquarters in Curzon Street, Mayfair, who seized on my reports with gleeful pedantry, heaping contempt on my dangling clauses and gratuitous adverbs, scoring the margins of my deathless prose with such comments as redundant – omit – justify – sloppy – do you really mean this? No editor I have since encountered was so exacting, or so right.

Re-reading his encounter with Arafat, in the backdrop of the ongoing conflict in Gaza was surreal. In 1982, as part of his research for ‘The Little Drummer Girl’ le Carre manages to fix a meeting with Arafat – at a time when he was the undisputed leader of the PLO. Months before being expelled from Beirut, Arafat grants him an audience. Le Carre is taken to his secure office after negotiating multiple gun-toting bodyguards.

We’re an instant hit. We enter an Arab embrace, left, right, left. The beard is not bristle, it’s silky fluff. It smells of Johnson’s Baby Powder. Releasing me, he keeps a hand possessively on my shoulder as he addresses our audience. I may walk freely among his Palestinians, he declaims – he who never sleeps in the same bed twice, handles his own security and insists he is married to nobody but Palestine. I may see and hear whatever I wish to see and hear. He asks me only that I write and speak the truth, because only the truth will set Palestine free. He will entrust me to the same chief of fighters that I met in London – Salah Tamari. Salah will provide me with a hand-picked bodyguard of young fighters. Salah will take me to South Lebanon, Salah will instruct me in the great struggle against the Zionists, he will introduce me to his commanders and their troops. All Palestinians I encounter will speak to me with total frankness. He asks me to be photographed with him. I decline. He asks me why. His expression is so radiant and teasing that I risk a truthful answer:

‘Because I expect to be in Jerusalem a little before you are, Mr Chairman.’

He laughs heartily, so our audience laughs too. But it’s a truth too far, and I’m already regretting it.

What a life!

In April this year, as part of my Berlin Wall reading project, I had raced through his Karla trilogy and had written about it here.