“Spying and novel writing are made for each other,” John le Carré once wrote. “Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal. Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it.” Le Carré’s enigmatic gift as a writer wasn’t simply that he could draw on his experience of having once been a British spy. He brought a novelist’s eye into the secret world, and the habits of espionage to his writing. Far more than knowledge of tradecraft, this status—at once outsider and insider—enabled him to uncover truths about the corrupting nature of power: His novels are infused with the honesty of an outsider, but they could only have been written by a man who knows what it is like to be inside the tent.

In the worlds le Carré created, truths are rarely self-evident. So it was in his own life, as we learn in a recently published book of his letters. On the surface, he progressed naturally from his youth to the inner sanctum: His adolescence was spent in English public schools immediately after World War II, where the boys did military training in uniform, jingoism was the norm, and—at least for one final generation—empire was an inheritance. He studied foreign languages. He served in the British army’s Intelligence Corps. He attended Oxford. He taught German at Eton. By the time he joined MI5 in 1958, his biography read, well, like a lot of other recruits’.

The deeper truth is more interesting. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was an inveterate con man, in and out of money and trouble with the law. His mother left them when he was 5 years old, so young David Cornwell, as was his birth name, was enlisted as his father’s accomplice. He entered the secret world early, engaging in deceptions on behalf of his father but also to protect himself against a man who drank, gambled, and wasn’t above beating his son. “Spying did not introduce me to secrecy,” le Carré wrote in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. “Evasion and deception were the necessary weapons of my childhood.”

His own service as a spy was short-lived—including a few years undercover in Germany with a cover identity as a junior diplomat in the early 1960s. Still, it was an auspicious and life-changing period. The Cold War was at its apex, at the moment of the Berlin Wall’s construction and the Cuban missile crisis. Meanwhile, British intelligence was rocked by the revelation that it was harboring two high-ranking Soviet double agents: George Blake and Kim Philby. The British elite were scandalized. MI6’s networks were decimated. The British secret services were discredited in the eyes of the Americans.

During this period, Cornwell rose early and wrote three novels under the pseudonym John le Carré: Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, and, in 1963, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. This last book, which turns 60 this year, recast the Cold War: The conflict was not a morality play of good versus evil, as leaders of both sides presented it; rather, it was an ambiguous addendum to World War II waged by gray men in the shadows, broken by their own betrayals and the bureaucracies—capitalist and Communist—that treated them as expendable. The novel became a global best seller, making his (invented) name. In any case, David Cornwell’s career as a spy ended the year after his breakthrough novel was published: Philby, it is widely believed, blew his cover.

[Read: The singular achievement of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”]

For the rest of his life, he would be John le Carré the writer. Despite his accurate protestation that he “was a writer who had once happened to be a spy, rather than a spy who had turned to writing,” le Carré never really separated himself from his time on the inside. He was not a genre writer. He was motivated less by portraying cloak-and-dagger conceits and more by a searching need to understand the overreach of empires, be they British, Soviet, or American. He wove stories of how individuals and nations reveal themselves through the secrets they carry. In a way, every book he wrote is a symphonic variation on The Spy Who Came in From the Cold—in which a British agent poses as a Communist defector in order to take down a brutal East German foe, only to learn that his own service has betrayed him and the innocent are left to suffer the consequences. It is an unsparing look at the cost of moral compromise in pursuit of so-called national interests.

Two years after his death, we now have a voluminous collection of le Carré’s letters, assembled by his son Tim Cornwell and published late last year: A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré. Through his correspondence, we learn a lot about le Carré’s habits as a writer. There are literary feuds, frustrations with critics, and glimpses into how some of his books became successful film and television productions (and how some didn’t). Despite his success, you get the sense that le Carré never let go of his insecurities about being taken seriously as a novelist; we see him seeking—and reveling in—the approval of writers such as Graham Greene, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard. Clearly, he wanted to be known as more than a spy or a spy novelist.

There is less material that reveals le Carré’s secret lives. The correspondence during his time as a spy often reads like an opaque curtain veiling his cover—a litany of logistics and family updates. Le Carré had numerous infidelities during his two marriages, a habit that doubtlessly benefited from his experience in subterfuge. According to his son, le Carré “covered the tracks” of his infidelities—but there are occasional revelatory exceptions. “Dear heart, try to understand a mole too used to the dark to believe in light,” he wrote in one letter to Susan Kennaway, with whom he began an affair in 1964. “If you live, as I have, so long in the dark, you can’t always, if you are me, have faith in the light.” Clearly, le Carré felt the burden of living secret lives, which must have contributed to his capacity to conjure characters who feel the agony of betraying loved ones while hiding away their truest selves.

His letters also reveal a man who cared deeply about how his work was consumed by the wider world. In 1966, he wrote an open letter to a KGB-controlled literary journal that had critiqued The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. In it, he acknowledged drawing equivalences between the Soviet Union and the United States, but not between communism and Western democracy—the issue, instead, was how the West betrayed its own ideals in the methods it used to wage the Cold War. To le Carré, the real tragedy was the wreckage of human lives all around: “The problem of the Cold War is that, as Auden once wrote, we haunt a ruined century. Behind the little flags we wave, there are old faces weeping, and children mutilated by the fatuous conflicts of preachers.”

The letter can be read as a mission statement for le Carré’s politics at the time. Notably, though, it was published in Encounter, a magazine funded by the CIA—le Carré was expressing his outsider’s viewpoint in a publication that was very much a part of the inside, the same machinery that he was critiquing. This irony recurs in his letters: Le Carré repeatedly offers withering indictments of the powers he served, but he never seems to cast them aside. Later in life, he wrote nostalgically to Alan Judd, a fellow novelist who once served as a soldier and diplomat, of his time at MI5 and MI6: “I miss the Office … In a sense, they are the only places, apart from writing.”

Yet, in other places, he could be withering about the people who become spies, himself included. He explained himself to a friend who learned that le Carré spied on him at university: “I was a nasty, vengeful little orphan with a psychopathic liar for a father and a boy-scout self-image as an antidote.” The description is eerily similar to one le Carré offered of Philby in a letter to a journalist: Philby was “a nasty little establishment traitor with a revolting father, a fake stammer and an anguished sexuality who spent his life getting his own back on the England that made him.” But again, there’s that tension—le Carré was no romanticist for England, but he maintained a righteous rage at Philby for betraying it. Ahead of one of his trips to Russia, le Carré was approached about meeting Philby to hear his side of the story. Most writers would have jumped at the chance; le Carré refused.

What he did do was travel the world researching the settings, characters, and themes of his novels. Many of his letters testify to his doggedness. He pursues guides to far-flung places like a spy recruiting sources, and reports back his findings through novels—often by putting us inside the experiences of those on the wrong end of power. He understood this as a key to his own success—a mixture of empathy and exactitude—which depended upon other people trusting him. “Each novel I have written has been a complete life,” he writes to Vladimir Stabnikov, a Russian literary figure who was le Carré’s guide on trips to Moscow. “The novels I wrote about Russia were lives that you enabled me to lead. And when I moved on to other lives: to the Middle East, to Africa, and to Latin America, other people opened doors for me and I was again the beneficiary of kind strangers who became kind friends.”

Although he wandered widely, he returned—again and again—to the profession he knew best. He produced a shelf of books about a British intelligence service whose concerns mirrored the nation’s struggle to determine what it was without an empire. Many of his later books act as broadsides against an American national-security apparatus filled with the hubris of an empire that didn’t know it was hastening its own decline. To le Carré, this wasn’t just a matter of writing what he knew; these books were a useful vehicle for telling the stories he wanted to tell. “If you are a novelist struggling to explore a nation’s psyche,” he wrote in his memoir, “its Secret Service is not an unreasonable place to look.”

His letters reveal just how much the United Kingdom and the United States had let him down by the end of his life. “My response to the political scene is vehement,” he wrote to a journalist in 2018. “I hate Brexit, hate Trump, fear the rise of white fascism everywhere and take the threat very seriously indeed; the craving for conflict is everywhere among our pseudo dictators.” Shortly before his death, he sought and received Irish citizenship. Finally, a cord was cut. To an Irish bureaucrat, he wrote, “You have given me back my long friendship with Europe.”

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Terry Fincher / Daily Express / Hulton Archive / Getty

In 2017, I finished eight years working at the center of American national-security policy in the White House. Exhausted by lack of sleep, haunted by world crises unresolved, disoriented at moving from the inside to the outside, and rattled by Donald Trump’s presidency, I sought out reasons to travel. In a bookshop in Hong Kong, I bought a set of le Carré’s first three novels—the ones written when he was on the inside. Near the beginning of the first, Call for the Dead, he introduces us to his finest creation, that owl-eyed observer within “the circus,” le Carré’s analogue for Britain’s secret services: George Smiley.

He learnt what it was never to sleep, never to relax, to feel at any time of day or night the restless beating of his own heart, to know the extremes of solitude and self-pity, the sudden unreasoning desire for a woman, for drink, for exercise, for any drug to take away the tension of his life.

I couldn’t stop reading. Here was a man working things out through his writing, trying to make sense of forces that could be soul-crushing—particularly, in this case, for people on the inside.

Something about being on the inside opened the floodgates that allowed le Carré to begin constructing his own canon. By the time I reached The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, I marveled at the immediacy with which le Carré was able to distill things that could never have been captured in an intelligence report or a diplomatic cable. Spies seek information to buttress national power; writers seek the truth of the human experience. Le Carré noted this reality in a 1974 letter to Graham Greene: On one of his many research trips, he traveled to Saigon toward the end of the Vietnam War. There, with the Vietcong winning the war, he reread The Quiet American, a 1955 novel that foreshadowed America’s defeat through a piercing story of American hubris. “The sheer accuracy of its mood, and observation, is astonishing,” le Carré wrote to Greene. Greene, like le Carré, had been a spy. Greene’s novels, like le Carré’s, convey truths that elude those who serve power.

[Read: John le Carré goes back into the cold]

On that trip to Southeast Asia, le Carré was researching what would become The Honourable Schoolboy, about a British agent named Jerry Westerby. In the process of unmasking a Soviet intelligence operation in Asia, Westerby’s loyalties shift from his government to a woman. Still, he does the work. Pulling a thread that leads him through war-ravaged Laos to Thailand, Westerby ends up at an American military base just as Saigon falls.

Le Carré describes an exhausted outpost of empire, a bookend to The Quiet American. Through Westerby’s eyes, we see how “a flow of air-force personnel was drifting in and out of the camp, blacks and whites, in scowling segregated groups … The mood was sullen, defeated, and innately violent. The Thai groups greeted nobody. Nobody greeted the Thais.” Westerby meets his contact, an American major drinking brandy while absorbing the news of his nation’s defeat. “I want you to extend to me the hand of welcome, sir,” the major says to Westerby. “The United States of America has just applied to join the club of second-class powers of which I understand your own fine nation to be chairman, president, and oldest member.” Westerby, who has traded dreams of empire for the pursuit of love, responds cavalierly: “Proud to have you aboard.” Later, though, he takes in his surroundings with the eyes of a spy and the insight of a novelist: “This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside sound-proof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm’s length. This is how they lost.”

In le Carré’s letters, he expresses flashes of anger at being slotted as either a Cold War writer or a former spy. There was, he knew, something more enduring about his work, even though it depended on the knowledge he’d acquired inside the secret tent: It was literature. So often, ambition in public life can be tethered to achievement in the moment—rising through the ranks, reaching the heights of bureaucracy or political office. But by melding his insider’s knowledge with his outsider’s perspective, le Carré ascended to a greater height. When empires die, the most powerful thing they leave behind are stories. David Cornwell told them.

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American intelligence officials are concerned that China is considering sending lethal aid to Russia. The West must increase the speed and scale of aid to Ukraine, to remind Beijing that it should stay out of a war Moscow is going to lose.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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More Than Warnings

Since the beginning of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against an innocent neighbor, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his diplomats have said many of the right things, warning against escalation in Ukraine, including the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, and reaffirming the principle of state sovereignty in international affairs. But China has also, of course, tried to provide support for a fellow authoritarian regime by continuing trade with Russia, criticizing Western sanctions, and in general pretending that Putin’s war of aggression—including his many crimes against humanity—is just another routine spat in the international community.

Now Beijing might be pondering a more aggressive move. CIA Director Bill Burns said over the weekend that China may be considering sending lethal aid (that is, artillery shells and the like rather than military gear or supplies) to Russia to help Putin’s forces, who are still floundering about in a bloodbath of their own making. Providing shells without more launchers might not help Russia very much in the short term, but it would be a provocative move meant to signal to the West that the authoritarians can and will support each other in attacks against their neighbors—an issue important to Beijing as it continues to covet Taiwan.

Burns indicated that the Chinese had not yet made a decision, and that the U.S. was discussing the possibility in public as a way of trying to warn them off. The Biden administration has been extremely savvy about releasing intelligence, and this seems to be yet another strategic leak.

We know what you’re thinking, the Americans are saying to China. Don’t do it.

It is time, however, for more than warnings.

A year ago, I was one of the more cautious supporters of aid to Ukraine. In those first chaotic weeks, I was heartened to see Ukrainian forces repel the invaders, but I knew that Russia had significant reserves. I was in favor of sending weapons, but I was mindful of the dangers of escalation, and especially the possibility that advanced Western weapons flooding into Ukraine would help Putin recast the conflict as a war between Russia and NATO. I worried, too, that Putin’s evident emotional state, characterized by delusions and rage, would lead him to take stupid and reckless measures whose consequences he himself would later be unable to control.

I think these were (and are) reasonable concerns, but Russia has escalated the violence despite the West’s measured approach. Putin remains as stubbornly delusional as ever, and he is sending thousands more troops into battles that have already killed or wounded some 200,000 men. A year of pretenses is over: The Russians themselves now know—as does the world—that this is Putin’s personal war and not, as he has tried to frame it, a campaign against neo-Nazis or shadowy globalists or militant trans activists. The West, meanwhile, has fully embraced its role as “the arsenal of democracy,” as it did against the actual Nazis, and Western arms, powered by Ukrainian courage and nimble Ukrainian strategy, are defeating Putin’s armies of hapless conscripts, corrupt officers, and mercenary criminals.

Now it’s time for the West to escalate its assistance to Ukraine, in ways that will deter China and defeat Russia. For example, the U.S. and NATO do not yet have to send advanced fighter jets to Ukraine—but they can start training Ukrainian pilots to fly them. To Russia, such a policy would say that things are about to get much worse for Putin’s forces in the field; to China, it would say that our commitment to Ukraine and to preserving the international order we helped create is greater than Beijing’s commitment to Moscow. As the Washington Post writer Max Boot noted last month, the Chinese president has an interest in helping a fellow autocrat, but he is also “an unsentimental practitioner of realpolitik” who “does not want to wind up on what could be the losing side.”

Putin thinks he can wear down the Ukrainians (and the West) through a protracted campaign of mass murder. The Biden administration has ably calibrated the Western response, and NATO has ruled out—as it should—any direct involvement of Western forces in this war. But if Putin remains unmoved and unwilling to stop, then the only answer is to increase the costs of his madness by sending more tanks, more artillery, more money, more aid of every kind. (We could also reopen the issue of whether we should provide longer-range systems, including the Army’s tactical missile system, the ATACMs.)

China must be warned away from assisting Russia, because so much more than the freedom of Ukraine is at stake in this war. Chinese aid would be yet another sign that the authoritarians intend to rewrite the rules—or at least the few left—that govern the international system of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation constructed while the wreckage of World War II was still smoldering. Many Europeans, who are closer to the misery Russia is inflicting on Ukraine, understand this better than Americans do.

Americans, for their part, need to think very hard about what happens if Russia wins—especially with an assist from the Chinese. They will be living in a North American redoubt, while more and more of the world around them will learn to accommodate new rules coming from Beijing and Moscow. The freedom of movement Americans take for granted—of goods, people, money, and even ideas—would shrink, limited by the growing power of the world’s two large dictatorial regimes and their minor satraps.

Some Americans may wonder why we should risk even more tension with Russia. The fact of the matter is that we no longer have a relationship with Russia worth preserving. We do have a common interest—as we did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War—in avoiding a nuclear conflict. We managed to agree on that interest while contesting hot spots around the globe for a half century, and we can do it again.

Americans who ask “What does any of this mean to me?” will find out just how much it means to them when things they want—or need—are provided only through the largesse and with the permission of their enemies. We knew this during the Cold War, and we must learn it again. We should ignore the pusillanimous Putinistas among the right-wing media. Instead, the United States and its allies must make the case, every day, for Ukrainian victory—and send the Ukrainians what they need to get the job done.

Related:

How China is using Vladimir Putin The war in Ukraine is the end of a world.

Today’s News

Britain and the European Union agreed to a deal that would end the dispute over post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland. Severe thunderstorms in the central U.S. caused tornadoes and extreme winds in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, injuring more than a dozen residents and leaving thousands without power. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that gives him control over Disney World’s self-governing district.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson shares the seven questions about AI that he can’t stop asking himself. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal examines what air travel reveals about humans.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job

By Ryan Bradley

I have a part-time job that is quite good, except for one task I must do—not even very often, just every other week—that I actively loathe. The task isn’t difficult, and it doesn’t take more than 30 minutes: I scan a long list of short paragraphs about different people and papers from my organization that have been quoted or cited in various publications and broadcasts, pick three or four of these items, and turn them into a new, stand-alone paragraph, which I am told is distributed to a small handful of people (mostly board members) to highlight the most “important” press coverage from that week.

Four weeks ago, I began using AI to write this paragraph. The first week, it took about 40 minutes, but now I’ve got it down to about five. Only one colleague knows I’ve been doing this; we used to switch off writing this blurb, but since it’s become so quick and easy and, frankly, interesting, I’ve taken over doing it every week.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I’ll be leaving you with my Atlantic colleagues here at the Daily for the rest of the week while I do some traveling. One of the places I am headed is Salem, Massachusetts, where I’ll be giving a talk. I have a sentimental attachment to the city because my Uncle Steve, whom I wrote about here, ran a diner there, Dot and Ray’s, that was a local institution for decades. (I think Dot and Ray were the previous owners.) For me, not only was Salem in the 1960s and ’70s a cool town with an amusement park; it meant all the fried chicken and clams and hamburgers and ice cream I could eat. To visit Uncle Steve and Aunt Virginia was always an epic outing, especially because they got all the Boston TV stations with stuff like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits on them.

But if you’re visiting New England and looking for places outside of the usual Boston tourist spots, you should visit the Witch City (not that there’s anything wrong with walking the Freedom Trail in Boston, which every American should do if the chance arises). Yes, the Salem Witch Trials kitsch can be a bit much, but the trials were an important part of American history, and the house where they took place is still there, along with a museum. There’s much more to Salem, however, including a fine maritime and cultural museum and a seaport. (And don’t forget the clams.)

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.