The Effective Spy?

Adam Curtin: BUGGER

… The spy world became a fascinating other universe that was full of layer upon layer of deception, where the men who inhabited it spent their time trying to penetrate through the circles of falsehood to the inner sanctum of truth.

It was an image that was powerfully helped by John Le Carre's novels - and his anti-hero George Smiley. Le Carre's novels were a clever piece of PR - because they appeared to be more gritty and realistic than the glamourised James Bond image.

But it was just another layer of deception - because Smiley and his search for a hidden mole expressed powerfully the paranoid and unfounded fantasies of the dissident MI5 agents.

But it was a world that was all made-up. Le Carre - who had himself been a spy - admitted this, and described what the true reality of the spy world was:

For a while you wondered whether the fools were pretending to be fools as some kind of deception, or whether there was a real efficient service somewhere else.

Later in my fiction, I invented one.

But alas the reality was the mediocrity. Ex-colonial policemen mingling with failed academics, failed lawyers, failed missionaries and failed debutantes gave our canteen the amorphous quality of an Old School outing on the Orient express. Everyone seemed to smell of failure.