The Inside Man

John le Carre never wrote in black and white. The thinking man’s spy novelist was a master of grey, in its many shades and moods.  The grey of moral dilemma.  Of conscience-stricken betrayal.  Of ethical crossroads that cause protagonist and reader alike to hesitate and doubt the way onward.

The complex operation outlined in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (which, frankly, is an early work and one of his less accessible novels) is ultimately aimed at discrediting an idealistic, but efficient East German intelligence officer and replacing him with a brutal ex-Nazi war criminal, now willing to betray his masters to the British.  His novels, in fact, are less about spies than about the frailties of the human condition.

George Smiley, le Carre’s most famous character (he of tubby stature and mild manner, forever cleaning his spectacles with the broad end of his tie) is the antithesis of James Bond, but is perhaps more ruthless. Smiley ultimately defeats his nemesis, the Soviet spymaster Karla, by exploiting the Russian’s love for his schizophrenic daughter, who is in a private Swiss clinic.  The Smiley-Karla duel spans several  books – and the subtlety of le Carre’s writing is in Karla ordering traitor Bill Haydon (a thinly veiled Kim Philby) to begin an affair with Smiley’s wife, so that Smiley doubts his own motives for suspecting Haydon.

And le Carre had a fine sense of balance. In what I consider his finest novel, The Little Drummer Girl, the Israelis recruit a small time English actress to penetrate a Palestinian terror cell, but the book takes her from the Jewish victims of suitcase bombs to refugee camps which the Israeli Air Force is attacking.

Having worked for both MI5 and MI6 (before retiring when his name was revealed to the Soviets by Anthony Blunt, the Fifth Man), le Carre was unmatched in his Cold War atmosphere and descriptions of espionage tradecraft.  The chalk mark on the wall. The dead letter box.  The ‘lamplighters’ and their clandestine surveillance techniques.  

And le Carre was an Englishman with a capital ‘E’.  Born to the establishment, yet set apart by circumstance – abandoned by his mother at an early age and often let down by his father (who was an upper class conman, ultimately jailed for fraud) he was emotionally crippled by his childhood, but well suited to cast a jaundiced eye at the Oxbridge intelligence officers of the ‘Circus’ and their Whitehall compatriots.

And now an era of spy literature has come to an end.  I shall miss you, David Cornwell.  Rest assured that John le Carre will live on.

 

He has slipped the surly bonds of earth: RIP Chuck Yeager.

Yes, he was the first to break the sound barrier.

He was also an ace fighter pilot in WW II, was shot down over France and walked across the Pyrenees to Spain and freedom, was the first to test fly a captured MiG 15 during the Korean War, and did a hundred plus combat missions in Vietnam.  And he was The Voice of the Airline Pilot.

In the 1950’s and into the 60’s an audio phenomenon was noted by passengers and air traffic controllers throughout the United States. A great many airline pilots had started speaking with a West Virginia drawl.  Or as near to it as they could bend their native accents.   In his book, The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe called it ‘Pygmalion in reverse’.  It was the back country, ‘aw shucks, cairn’t hardly’ moonshine mellow tone that originated with the most righteous aviator of all, Chuck Yeager.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the airline pilots (who were almost all ex-military) were also trying to project an aura of cool – doesn’t matter how dire the emergency, we’ll deal with it in the split second available to us, don’t-you-worry-your-pretty-heads.   For that’s what Yeager was about – the ultimate test pilot who had the experience and instinct to make the right call when the chips were down...every time.

And that included some unorthodox moves.

A couple of days before his barrier-breaking flight in the Bell X1, Yeager took a tumble from horseback and broke some ribs.  Naturally, he couldn’t report it – he would lose the test flight.  The problem was, with taped-up ribs, he couldn’t reach across to close the aircraft canopy for the mission.  On the advice of his friend and programme engineer, Yeager carried a length of boom stick with him and used that to lever the canopy shut.  And he broke the sound barrier that day, with a little help from a broom stick.

He did fail once, in an attempt at the world altitude record. He had reached 104,000 feet (in an NF-104, a rocket assisted version of the Starfighter) and fell victim to ‘inertia coupling’ – where the aircraft is in a spin, but also tumbling end over end.  In an uncontrollable descent of 80,000 feet in one minute, Yeager was almost knocked unconscious, but managed to eject.  He separated from the ejection seat and the parachute deployed.  And then the free falling ejection seat tore through some of the parachute shroud lines and then collided with him, cracking open his faceplate, and the burning residue of the ejection charge entered his helmet where it was briskly fed by the chin-level oxygen nozzle that was still functioning.  Essentially, a fire inside his helmet while descending on a damaged parachute.

He survived. 

In later years, Yeager was, among other things, air attaché to Pakistan.  He got very upset when the Indian Air Force blew his personal Beechcraft to bits when they attacked Islamabad airport in the ’71 war.

Chuck Yeager was an aviator’s aviator, a boy from the boondocks without a college education, who rose high through stick ‘n’ rudder talent and sheer determination.  Now he has gone higher still, into the wild blue yonder, and if a requiem is to be sung it should be in the words of fellow aviator John Gillespie Magee...

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew –
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.