Director-General's speech
to the Sydney Institute
"Spy Fiction: Then and Now"
4 September 2008

• Thanks Gerard for this invitation for Bob Carr and myself to talk about and critique spy fiction.
• It's worth saying that the spy fiction we read is only one slice of spies and spying in popular culture.
• Popular fascination with espionage and counter-espionage is borne out in films, TV series (The Avengers, The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Spooks), comics, and, now, video games.
  • Not to mention spoofs like Get Smart and the Austin Powers series that send up spying, spy fiction, and our fascination with it.

Varieties of spy fiction

• I enjoy reading spy fiction, but it pays to discriminate.
• There is literary fiction with spies and spying in it. Think Conrad's The Secret Agent, Greene's The Quiet American, McEwan's The Innocent, Norman Rush's Mortals, Christopher Koch's The Memory Room.
• There is spy fiction as written by the likes of Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy and Daniel Silva, with its thrills and intrigues, half-truths and caricatures, and, above all, gripping plotlines.
• Spy fiction also has a grown-up cousin: the 'adult spy fiction' of writers such as John Le Carre, Len Deighton, Alan Furst.
• The boundaries, of course, aren't always so neat. Adult spy fiction often has all the twists and turns of the classic spy thriller. And the themes of trust, loyalty, betrayal are common to all types of spy fiction:
  • whether as part of an exploration of character, morality and power; or more as a narrative device used to build intrigue and suspense, as plots twist and turn to some labyrinthine resolution.
• Perhaps what sets adult spy fiction apart is the ambition - one might even say the pretence - to transcend the limits of genre and stereotype. The focus is less on the 'tricks of the trade' - although there is usually plenty of this,
  • albeit mostly as a metaphor for dissecting the meaning of spying as a vocation; and, in so doing, exploring deeper questions of politics, history, morality and identity.
• John Le Carre looms large here. He has said, and I quote: 'For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.'
• Readers familiar with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - the first of Le Carre's 'Smiley trilogy' - will remember also, that Bill Haydon, the British blue-blood turned Soviet mole, takes 'it for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nation's political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.'

Early spy fiction

• Contemporary spy fiction has a history. It emerged around the turn of the last century, about the same time that spying began to be organised professionally in the form we know it today.
  • I'm grateful, by the way, to Stephen Loosely for giving me a copy of Hugh and Graham Greene's The Spy's Bedside Book, which has excepts from some of these early spy stories.
• As with early crime fiction, and its part-time sleuths, early spy fiction was the province of the amateur - the remarkable 'gentlemen' of William Le Queux's stories, who, as patriots, protected their compatriots, drawing in large measure on reserves of raw courage and native intellect.
• Readers of Phillip Knightley's, The Second Oldest Profession, will recall he in fact argues that early spy fiction, particularly Le Queux's writings, had some influence on the British decision to establish its first formal civilian intelligence service.
• With the institutionalisation of espionage and counter-espionage as aspects of modern statecraft during the twentieth century, the exploration of the relationship between individual, organisation and society has been grist for the mill in spy fiction.
• Plots and situations vary.
• Some are vehicles for the heroic individual to save the day, just in time, once again, against the odds.
• More sinisterly, there is a sub-genre of spy fiction that embodies deep-seated suspicions about the corruptibility of power.
• This is a world where the enemy is within; a world where nasty organisations, or a cabal within, turn on the individual - wantonly and without prejudice, as with the Jason Bourne series.
• Some, like Greene's Our Man in Havana or Rush's Mortals, find comedy or irony in the discordance between context and purpose.
• Why on earth would that spy be there?
• Others strands of spy fiction are deeply pessimistic, committed to exploring the way spying ultimately grinds down or destroys its protagonists.
• In the face of secrecy, suspicion, moral relativities and betrayal, there are no heroes left standing, only hollow, dejected, seriously compromised, individuals.
• It's as though, in the professional world of spy versus spy, the values of commitment, patriotism and higher purpose would render the protagonists as innocent as Le Queux's spies are amateur.
• 'We're all the same, you know, that's the joke,' says Fiedler to Leamus in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

007

• No-one personifies the heroic individual as boldly, as brashly, as downright sumptuously, as 007.
• As we know, he's a composite figure: one part dandy, one part deadly assassin, one part derring-do, most part fantasy. Shaken, not stirred.
• However, the Bond we know in Fleming's novels is more complicated, less likeable, than the Bond we know in the films.
• On the job, Bond's a consummate professional. Well, mostly.
• He'll take on all comers, and just as well, because in Fleming's world, the threats to Western democracy and global order are polymorphous.
  • 'SMERSH' - the Soviet agency whose names means 'Death to Spies' - is recognisably Cold War.
  • Others, such as 'SPECTRE', a syndicate of international criminals, led by Blofeld, or the diamond smuggling 'Spangled Mob', don't fit neatly into any frame or epoch - one reason, maybe, why Bond endures.
• As an employee, Bond is something of a mixed blessing. He's loyal, but in dispatching with enemies, can be insubordinate. He does his paper work; but seems willing to fudge the record.
• In the novels and the films, there is the strange, relentless juxtaposition of danger and pleasure; discipline and luxury; focus and appetite.
• Sometimes these blend into one another; at others times, they clash. As when Bond, longing for his lunch, is desperate to wrap-up an important briefing on Sir Hugo Drax with M - who, Bond can't help by notice, 'never seemed to be interested in food or sleep'.
  • A strange quality for the head of an intelligence service, I agree.
• Fleming's Bond fears; suffers; has doubts, dark thoughts. He acknowledges, at least to himself, his foibles and hypocrisies. And, on occasion, he admires traits in those he must defeat.
• There are double entendres galore, albeit more so in the films. All part - with notable exceptions, like Miss Moneypenny - of the inevitable conquest:
  • not just by Bond; but of Bond, in a classic 'honey trap' orchestrated by one of his many enemies.
    • After all, he may not be quite the polymath, but he is a 'cunning linguist'.
• There is a sheer exuberance of 'tradecraft': involving physical prowess, tricks of the trade and, especially in the films, gadgets.
• So entrenched has this last metaphor for the spy world become, it is easy to forget that if Bond can do it all - and it seems he can - this has less to do with 'Q', than with 007's discipline, training, and focus.
• There's none of the predicament of Colonel Mercier, the French military attaché-cum-spy in Alan Furst's, The Spies of Warsaw, who is sent to Poland with just six weeks of training under his belt, just one of which covered 'the management of espionage'.

Identity

• Readers of Fleming sense that Bond has no real identity beyond his job; beyond his status as 007.
• It's almost as though the very openness and optimism of the Bond identity - and his phoenix-like indifference to setbacks - forestall the deeper questions that infuse more serious spy fiction writing.
• This is probably why he's been mimicked, spoofed, deconstructed, and, particularly by writers of adult spy fiction, strongly reacted against.
• So much so that one could plausibly argue that 'realism' in spy fiction has defined itself as much against Bond as the actual world of espionage.
• It is precisely the question of identity, and its implications for values like loyalty, courage, honesty, friendship, belief, that fascinates serious writers of spy fiction, as well as the literary interlopers who occasionally tackle the genre.
• Who is this spy who lives secretly, lives a double-life, assumes various identities? And what are the psychological and moral effects of managing assumed and covert identities?
• It occurs to Khristo, a character in Furst's Night Soldiers, 'that if you had nothing else in the world you could at least have a secret.'
• But can the spy in fiction have that secret and other things too? Can the spy maintain his or her normal identity? Can the spy balance work and domestic life? And what of friendships? Commitments? Trust?
• Leonard Marnham, in McEwan's novel, The Innocent, is deployed to work on the Berlin tunnel operation in the early 1950s, where he strikes up a love affair with a German woman, Maria.
• New both to espionage and love, he struggles to reconcile his two worlds:
  

  'He had spoken to no one about [Maria] at work, and he could not talk to her about what he did. He was not certain whether this time spent travelling between his two secret worlds was when he was truly himself, when he was able to hold the two in balance and know them to be separate from himself; or whether this was the one time he was nothing at all, a void travelling between two points.'

• Others, like Len Deighton's unnamed spy, who calls himself 'crafty, nasty, suspicious and irritable', has no-one to come home to; but when he does come home, it's a kind of anchor, as he takes 'strange pleasure in handling well-known implements in a well-known place'.
• If identity begins with a name, won't spies have as many identities as pseudonyms? And in all this confusion, ambiguity, and deceit won't they lose themselves, their sense of purpose, their values? Is spying inevitably cynical?
• Dealing with others on the basis of pseudonyms, and assumed identities, Deighton's unnamed spy tells one of his agents, 'Johnnie Vulkan': 'The moment that you think that you know who your friends are is the moment to get another job.'
• To which Vulkan replies: 'You've become so good at pretending to be different that you have lost contact with your identity.'

Pessimism

• This brings us close to spy fiction as pessimism, of which Le Carre is the master.
• In his fiction, spies struggle to identify, and identify with, a cause - 'everything is maybe' - and if they did, what would be the point anyway, because spies, we are told, 'abandon first what [they] love the most'?
• His characterisations have pushed the world of spy fiction into a darker, bleaker landscape.
• Where Bond is seriously haute couture, Leamus, the spy who came in from the cold, is haughty, has a utilitarian approach to clothing, and most other things.
• Soviet spy master, Karla, is a 'little wiry chap', who appears 'modest' and 'avuncular', lacking the scars, the cruel smile, the very physiognomy of evil one might expect to find in such a character.
• Bill Haydon is winning, but of course he's also the traitor.
• George Smiley, Le Carre's most famous character, is anything but (smiley). He is podgy, absent-minded, late middle-aged, seemingly always coming back from retirement. His powers, like an old-lover, are inexorably deserting him.
• And his one touch with beauty is his wife Ann, who is notoriously unfaithful, and in a cruel twist collapsing the boundaries between the personal and the professional, has been seduced by Bill Haydon - all part of Karla's scheming to put Smiley off his game, and off Karla's scent.
• Le Carre can write. And some of his set pieces dazzle:
• Fiedler's debriefing of Leamus in The Spy who Came in from the Cold;
• Smiley's interview of Grigoriev in Smiley's People; and
• the scenes, as Bob mentions, involving the likes of Connie Sachs.
• What I find particularly interesting, though, is the nature of Le Carre's pessimism.
• The layers of cynicism and betrayal in the Spy Who Came in from the Cold have an iron-clad logic.
• As Leamus falls to the ground, shot in no-man's land, that cruel and grisly space dividing east and west, he sees innocence and humanity, waving cheerfully, childlike, whilst being crushed like 'a small car' between the 'great lorries' of Cold War politics.
• As Leamus doesn't really believe in anything, has no friends, and is duped by his superiors, his fate both echoes and subverts the maxim expressed by E.M. Forster:
  

  'I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts the betray my country.'

• If Le Carre pulls back from this bleak vision in the Smiley trilogy, then it's not by much.
• Consider Smiley himself. At the end of the trilogy, Smiley's 'defeat' of his long-time nemesis, Karla, seems to be worse than meaningless.
• Watching the lonely figure of Karla shuffle across that bridge in Berlin, from east to west, 'an unholy vertigo seized [Smiley] as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and possess him and claim him despite his striving'.
• At this moment, Smiley can't escape the thought,

  'I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other's frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man's land.'

• A cautionary lesson for the spying business? Perhaps. Or has Smiley tricked himself with what James Bond - of all characters - would call 'his own little sophistries'?
• After all, Karla has left a trail of dead bodies, and would likely have killed many more. And he is, as we've learnt throughout the Smiley trilogy, a fanatic 'who would rather die than disown the political system to which he was committed'; an absolutist 'for whom killing had never been more than the necessary adjunct of a grand design.'
• Smiley knows first hand, from his earlier, unsuccessful attempt in that prison in Delhi to lure Karla to West, that Karla has none of those usual fears or foibles of character by which men might betray or be pressured to betray their country.
• If Karla was ever to be defeated, Smiley had always thought it would be because of, not despite, his fanaticism.
• Smiley, it turns out, was wrong. And here's the killer blow, Karla's perverse revenge on Smiley, if you like, Le Carre's surprise assault on the citadel of Western values.
• Rather than his fanaticism - the only victory, Le Carre seems to say, that would reconfirm Smiley's already tepid belief in the political system he serves - Karla's undoing begins in the least expected place.
  • That is to say, in his love for a daughter who suffers from advanced schizophrenia, and can't be helped by a punishing system that diagnoses her disease politically, rather than medically.
• So Karla risks everything to shepherd covertly his daughter into the West to receive the care she needs.
• As Smiley slowly unpicks Karla's unauthorised operation, and his murderous attempts to cover his tracks, Smiley realises that Karla's 'downfall, if Smiley chose to bring it about, would be caused by nothing more sinister than excessive love, a weakness with which Smiley himself from his own tangled life was eminently familiar.'
• Using this intelligence, Smiley reluctantly 'pressures' Karla, an adversary who has all of a sudden 'acquired a human face', to defect.
• Not the most pleasant of tasks, but hardly the moral equivalence Le Carre implies.
• So as a reader I ask: all of this merely to insinuate, wrongly, that liberal democracy might be as bad as Soviet dictatorship?
• If this is Le Carre's conclusion, and I think it is, then I can't help but recall, tongue only slightly in cheek, the character, Mathis, Bond's French liaison, in Casino Royale.
• After patiently hearing out Bond's doubts about their profession, Mathis comments:
  

  'Englishmen are ... like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the centre of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining.'

Post Cold War spy fiction

• Spy fiction became so closely associated with the Cold War, how has it fared since its end?
• Some of writers have struggled to come in from the cold.
• Le Carre's ambivalence has blossomed into full scale cynicism, and his later novels, The Constant Gardener, Absolute Friends, The Mission Song, condemn more than reveal.
• The cleverness of Rush's Mortals, set in the early 1990s, is that he makes the seeming hiatus in global power structures caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union - its meaning for the world of spying, and, by extension, for spy fiction itself - into the predicament of his central characters and their lives.
• Ray, anticipating a recurring argument with his wife, Iris, 'knew all the questions that were looming up':

  'Why were they still in Botswana or anywhere in Africa, for that matter? ... things were cyclical and got more harrowing each time, but undoubtedly the collapse of Russia, the astonishing collapse of all that power, was telling her it was the moment to dismiss what he did, did for the agency.'

• Despite Iris' concerns, spy fiction does track geopolitics, at least in its broadest shape, and there is an emerging genre of spy fiction dealing with the rise of authoritarian nationalism, like Daniel Silva's Moscow Rules, and Alex Dryden's Red to Black.
• Nevertheless, among the string of works attempting to take on 21st century terrorism, I'm yet to read one that rises to previous heights, or quite grasps the significance of this global threat.
• Maybe this is why the best contemporary spy fiction is found, I think, and I agree with Bob's judgement, in the historical spy novels of Alan Furst.
• Full of atmosphere, suspense, courage, people already battered, bruised, scarred by the Great War, his books take readers into a Europe on the precipice of World War II.
• We already know the ultimate outcome of the coming conflict. But Furst has us suspend disbelief, as we inhabit an uncertain, gritty world, where the best intelligence requires great patience, and may only provide partial insights.
• Significantly, spying in Furst's universe, despite the many disappointments, thwarted efforts, failures, doesn't equate to cynicism.

Some final remarks

• This year sees the release of the 22nd Bond film, the most famous spy franchise, as well as the new Bond novel, penned by Sebastian Faulks.
• With the resurgence of Bond movies, and of popular spy thrillers, spy fiction still seems to ask readers to choose: Fleming or Le Carre? Bond or Smiley? Gloss or grit?
• In terms of my own preferences, if I'm reading for literary merit, for tradecraft, for careful and patient analysis, as much as I enjoy Alan Furst, it's still the Smiley trilogy. If I'm reading for a rollicking good yarn that helps sustain faith in liberal democracy, then it's probably Ian Fleming.
• But I'm sure you want to know which is closest to the challenging and important work we do at ASIO to protect Australia from espionage and terrorism?
• Work, which, as Ray says of himself in Mortals, involves:
  

  'bringing out into the light designs that for their own usually bad reasons certain people wanted kept hidden.'

• Whether in doing this, ASIO is located in a kind of space between an upmarket casino called 'Royale' and a dilapidated training facility called 'Sarratt' ... well, you'll just have to apply to find out.
• Short of that, you could read our unclassified Annual Report to Parliament. The narrative may not be quite as gripping, but it's definitely fact, not fiction.