>> John Haskell: Good morning, everybody.
I'm going to try to start right on time.
I'm John Haskell from the Library of Congress.
We welcome you to the 18th annual National Book Festival.
It is because of contributors like Wells Fargo,
David Rubenstein, and many others
that this is now officially the best free event in Washington.
[ Applause ]
We're -- I'm going to turn it over to Carlos Lozada
and the program in a second.
I do want to remind you to turn off electronic --
you know, silence your electronic gadgets.
We're on TV so, you know, it won't be appropriate.
I'm going to say one thing about Carlos
and then turn it over to him.
As probably most of you know,
at an event like this Carlos is the nonfiction book editor
at the Washington Post.
He was also at one time the economics editor there
and national security editor and the Outlook section editor.
He was, just this year, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
for Criticism and, in 2015, was the winner
of the National Book Critics Circle citation
for excellence in reviewing.
Carlos, welcome.
[ Applause ]
>> Carlos Lozada: Good morning and welcome
to the National Book Festival.
It's my favorite event in Washington bar none.
So we're here to talk about spies and intelligence
and maybe hacking, who knows?
But it is quite an honor to introduce this morning's panel.
Our moderator is Kai Bird, the author of "The Good Spy:
The Life and Death of Robert Ames."
He's also the co-author of the Pulitzer-winning
"American Prometheus" on the life of Robert Oppenheimer,
which I must confesses is one
of the greatest biographies I've ever read.
No surprise, Kai is also director of the Leon Levy Center
for Biography at the City University of New York.
Our panelists are Washington Post columnist
and novelist David Ignatius, author of 10 novels,
most recently "Quantum Spy," spy novelist Joseph Kanon,
author most recently of "Defectors," and Adam Sisman,
whose latest book is a biography and he has explained
to me the proper way to pronounce it.
It is not le Carre it's le Carre [pronouncing].
We can have a debate about this later.
In addition to being part of the panel,
they'll be signing books at 1:00.
With that, I'm thrilled to handed over to Kai Bird.
[ Applause ]
>> Kai Bird: Good morning.
So I assume we're all here
because we love a good spy story.
But we don't really often admire spies
but we love a good spy story.
So that's what we're sort of here to discuss.
And we have on stage here, excluding myself, really three
of the world's foremost experts on the world of intelligence.
And I'm really delighted to be here.
My name is Kai Bird and I want to first make a plug
for my little biography center at City University.
It's called the Leon Levy Center for Biography,
funded by Shelby White for the last 11 years.
And it's a very special thing.
It promotes the art and craft biography
in a very specific way.
We hand out four $72,000 fellowships --
four of them every year and the deadline is in early January.
So if there any budding first-time biographers
in the audience, think about this fellowship.
I want to begin by talking a little bit about Robert Ames.
When I was 13 years old,
my next-door neighbor was Robert Ames, a spy.
I had no idea he was a spy.
And then years later, he was tragically killed in Beirut
in 1983 and I read a novel by David Ignatius called
"Agents of Innocence."
And David is not only the Washington Post's reporter
on the intelligence beat but he -- this was his first novel,
"Agents of Innocence," and he's now written, I think 10.
And that book got me interested in trying to figure
out who my next-door neighbor was.
And David encouraged me to do this book
and gave me many sources.
And the only reason "The Good Spy" happened is
because of David.
I first met Joseph Kanon in Los Alamos
and his first spy novel was called "Los Alamos" and he had
in it a lovely, just moving portrait of Robert Oppenheimer,
whom I later wrote a biography on.
And I had to tell Joe that his little portrait of Robert
"Oppie," as he was called, was the best I'd seen and better
than my 800 pages, which tells you, you know,
the power of the novel.
Finally we have, all the way from London, Adam Sisman,
who is a biographer's biographer.
Literally, he wrote a biography of the biographer --
i.e. "Boswell's Presumptuous Task."
And now, two years ago I guess -- three years ago,
he came out with this massive biography of John le Carre,
otherwise really known as David Cornwell.
And he rips off the mask from this very enigmatic man
that you all know as John le Carre.
Anyway, we're going to begin with le Carre.
And as some of you may already know, le Carre was himself a spy
for about 5 1/2 years.
And many of his novels draw upon that life.
But Adam, you explained, while he cooperated with you,
he refused to talk about his five years as a spy
and specifically what he was doing in Germany.
You found out a great deal about what he was doing with Germany,
but why the reticence even, you know, so many years later?
>> Adam Sisman: Well, there's his answer
and there's my answer.
I mean, a bit of background.
He, when he left Oxford, where he had in fact been reporting
on his fellow students,
including a fellow American student who --
to MI5, but he'd not come in from the cold as it were.
He was a schoolmaster at Eaton for a bit
but then he joined MI5.
And he worked for MI5 for two years before going
over to the dark side and joining MI6,
where he was posted to Germany.
He says that he made a commitment back then not to talk
about his secret work and he wants to keep to it.
He is -- I mean, le Carre for a long time pretended
that he wasn't involved in secret work.
He used to say, I'm just a simple civil servant,
that's all.
And he has gradually come out of the closet as it were.
But he's very much in control of that part of his story
but I found out from other sources what he was doing.
And essentially, in the British Embassy in Bonn as it then was,
in what was then West Germany, he was what's called undeclared.
That means he was posing as an ordinary diplomat,
a second secretary, but he was in fact reporting
to and working for MI6.
And his job really was to keep --
it wasn't running agents across the border into East Germany
or into the Soviet block, but keeping an eye
on political developments on both the extreme left
and the extreme right in Germany.
And one of his lesser-known books in fact, "A Small Town
in Germany," which is, I think, unrecognized --
I think it's much better than people realize --
is very much a portrait of what he was really doing.
>> Kai Bird: Joseph Kanon, turning to you, Joe you seem,
along with John le Carre, to have had an obsession
with Kim Philby in your work.
In your latest book, one of your characters, Frank Weeks,
is clearly modeled after Philby.
Explain your obsession.
>> Joseph Kanon: I think he's one
of the most interesting characters
who (or real-life characters) that anybody has run across.
And we had the great good fortune that, A,
he wrote memoirs, which are highly questionable
and self-serving.
But we also had the great good fortune he had four wives,
two of whom wrote memoirs about his time in Moscow.
So if you're an espionage novelist
who is not himself a spy.
Every time I come to DC, by the way,
on book tour there will be question
from the audience about, you know, the craft that's
in your books and it's always a coded, loaded question saying,
how long have been an espionage agent?
And I always say to them,
I have absolutely no idea really what it's like.
I just get it from other books.
I've never been approached.
I've never been recruited.
And someone said, well,
of course you would say that [laughter].
So it's a total no-win situation.
The serious answer to the Philby question --
and yes, the character is very much a kind of American Philby.
And in large part, that's because the number of details
about daily life there come from what we know about Philby
because there's more documentation about him.
But I think he's an exemplar of why I think we're all interested
in spies, which is one of the great questions in all
of literatures is who are we?
Who is that other person?
How knowable can anyone be to us?
And when you encounter a spy, it's someone
who is deliberately pretending to be someone else.
This is a crime if you're an undercover agent.
It doesn't have a narrative arc
like an armed robbery or something.
You're committing a crime 24/7, all the time, your whole life.
You're lying to your colleagues.
You're lying often to your spouse.
You are living a lie.
What could be more interesting to a novelist than to write
about someone who not only are we trying
to peel back the layers of that onion to know him
but he's resisting at the same time.
I think it's a push-pull that any fiction writer is drawn
to -- and readers I hope.
>> Kai Bird: So that reminds me, le Carre himself once wrote
that writers -- like a spy, his real work is done alone and,
like a spy, writers need secrecy.
Isn't there a sort of similarity between what we all do
and the world of spies?
>> Adam Sisman: I think you can convince yourself of that.
When I started working with David,
I started to imagine myself as an agent and think
of assignations and be checking out of the window whether
that person across the street wasn't there five minutes ago
and that sort of thing.
It is very seductive.
David himself -- David Cornwell, that's the real name
for John le Carre -- he plays a kind
of teasing game, as readers will know.
He wrote an autobiographical novel called "A Perfect Spy,"
which depicts someone whose early life is identical
to David's own early life
and whose father is a portrait of his own father.
And when his first wife -- his divorced first wife --
read the manuscript of "A Perfect Spy," she said,
I always wondered whether David was a double agent.
And I found myself wondering that too.
I don't think he was, actually, but he plays that tease
with his readers and carries on doing so.
>> Kai Bird: So David Ignatius, your 10 spy novels
of course draw on your own experience
as a foreign correspondent.
And I've always suspected
that the typical foreign correspondent --
you were stationed in Beirut at one point --
often has better sources than the average CIA officer.
Wouldn't you agree that that's true?
[laughter].
>> David Ignatius: I think one technique that I used
as a journalist for many years was to think
about who the CIA likely would've recruited in a place
and then take a run at those same people on the theory
that they'd begun to start talking and they'd, you know,
once the cake is cut, what's another slice?
I think that, in the time that I got started as a journalist,
which overseas was 1980, the United States had the wind
at its back and people all over the world were eager to work
for the United States, work secretly through the CIA,
work openly in other ways because it was good for them.
They'd get business, they'd make friends.
That was the way the world was going.
I think we're now heading into the wind rather than having it
at our back, and maybe it is easier
for journalists to approach people.
I'm just going to say briefly in response to the earlier theme
of the way in which being an intelligence officer is
like being a journalist -- and that's just obviously true
on one level, you know?
We're trying to pull people's stories from them.
We're trying to establish rapport.
We're trying to get people to say things
that they might not otherwise say.
But there's one huge difference that you just have
to underline right now, which is
that journalists (if they're doing their job) don't lie,
you know?
We're about telling the truth and we work for our readers.
[ Applause ]
And you know, it's obvious that we're in a moment
where that role, that understanding
that that's what we do and that we're not in the business
of lying is being challenged.
So I get a little nervous when I hear people say, well,
it's just like being an intelligence officer.
It's a little bit like it but, ideally,
there's that fundamental split that makes it very different.
>> Joseph Kanon: There's also a dark side to this,
the le Carre statement.
Yes, it's like being a spy but it's also a question
of are you betraying people as you're doing this,
as a spy inevitably does.
There was a famous journalist who once said that, ultimately,
we're always selling somebody out,
which means that you're drawing material for them and using them
as copy or the basis for whatever you're writing
without really going to them for the source.
You know, one tries to do that as little
as possible but it does happen.
>> Adam Sisman: May I -- I mean,
I completely applaud what David said.
I mean, that's absolutely right and principled.
But novelists, as opposed to journalists,
they are making things up.
And often they are betraying in the sense of using people
that they know, people close to them as models
or using the experiences that they've had with people,
maybe very intimate experiences,
to construct the plots of their novels.
So I don't think the distinction is completely clear-cut
in that sense.
I think that David Cornwell's parallel between spying
and writing novels holds in that sense.
And there is an -- I mean, Cornwell's novels are full
of betrayal and they're not just spies betraying each other,
they're people betraying each other
in their personal relationships.
And of course Philby did this himself with his wives
and many other people but he wasn't just betraying people
for intelligence reasons.
He was betraying people -- he was an extraordinary,
duplicitous character, wasn't he?
>> Kai Bird: Well, but you know, as a biographer,
I find I'm constantly trying to seduce my sources
in the same way sometimes that a spy does, I guess,
to cultivate a source.
You're trying to -- it's not --
you're not lying but you're trying to get people to talk.
And you had to do this with, I'm sure,
many of Cornwell's friends and.
>> Adam Sisman: I tried to do this with David.
I tried to -- I'd often think, oh, I know.
I know a way to get through, you know, his defenses.
And I'd arrive and start talking to him
and I'd put the killer question and then I'd realized
that he'd anticipated the question and prepared an answer.
He's a very, very skillful and very clever man,
and I often felt that he was playing me rather
than me playing him [laughter].
>> Kai Bird: So, in a larger sense,
I've always wondered whether spies are a little overrated,
you know?
They -- and that is actually one of the themes
in some sense of le Carre's novels.
They are either failures or, if they actually uncover, you know,
valuable, actionable intelligence --
and David Ignatius, maybe you can speak to this in your work
as a reporter covering the intelligence world --
even when a good spy comes along
and offers valuable intelligence,
no one in positions of power wants to hear it.
It doesn't fit with the conventional wisdom.
It's awkward.
It's -- so in history, I see examples again
and again of this happening.
So again, I'm wondering while we all love a good spy story,
aren't they a little overrated?
>> David Ignatius: Well,
if you mean they overrate the importance
of the intelligence that's obtained in the flow of history,
I think that's probably right.
You know, I think of the story, Kai, that you and I spent
so much time thinking about.
For me, it began on a morning in February of 1983 when I want
to the US Embassy in Beirut and about 12:30 I leave,
seeing the military attache,
and at 1:05 this enormous car bomb detonates,
kills Robert Ames, one
of the great intelligence officers the United States has
produced, kills everybody
in the CIA station who's in Beirut that day.
A kind of searing memory for me is running back
and seeing the ruins of the embassy,
the dead bodies everywhere.
And there was subsequently a CIA officer who was determined
to find out how that bomb got there that morning.
He just made it a passion at a time when it was very dangerous
for Americans even to be in Beirut.
But he went person to person.
Who recruited the Shia Hezbollah officer in the south?
Who met the one in Beirut who rented the car, you know, etc.?
And he gathered all this intelligence,
thinking people must know.
All these people died.
All these American heroes died -- got to find out.
And guess what?
He finished that reporting and, so far as I know,
nobody ever did a damn thing about it.
So, you know, there's an example where, you know, the truth --
you shall seek the truth and the truth doesn't set you free.
It doesn't -- it's not really all that efficacious.
So I -- he's a fascinating character.
I wish he was here to join our panel
because he'd be pretty angry about that question.
>> Kai Bird: And you can't reveal his name?
>> David Ignatius: Well, another time [laughter].
>> Kai Bird: No, that's a story, you know,
that is still a mystery.
Who organized and executed this car bomb attack
on the first US Embassy?
And it's a story that I try to dig into in "The Good Spy,"
but it remains a mystery.
And as you say, no,
the US government really didn't take any action
to try to figure it out.
>> Adam Sisman: But taking your larger point,
I think there is room for a lot of skepticism
about the value of intelligence.
I mean, if you think of many of the most important episodes
in recent history, from Pearl Harbor through the attack
on the Twin Towers through to the failure --
the concocted story that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,
etc., etc., again and again these are intelligence failures.
And they may be failures of CIA or MI6.
I mean, I think we should regard intelligence skeptically.
And often, the intelligence is there
but it just hasn't been recognized or properly analyzed.
That's really, I think, as far as I understand it,
the root of the problem is --
I mean, the CIA obviously has much greater -- and the NSA --
much greater resources than any other intelligence agencies.
And in a sense, they gather too much intelligence.
There's so much that you can't see the wood for the trees.
There's just a vast mass of material
and not clear what the shape is.
>> Kai Bird: Ah, Adam, that reminds me of a story.
When I was doing my biography of McGeorge and William Bundy,
the two Bundy Brothers, William Bundy had worked in the CIA
for a long time in the 1950s,
working under a man named William Langer,
who was a Harvard professor who had been recruited
to become head of the Office of National Intelligence in 1952.
And when he was recruited, he told Allen Dulles, well,
I can't possibly do the job if you give me more --
more than 25 analysts [laughter].
He wanted it small and lean
and he recruited Bill Bundy as one of those 25.
But of course today, we have an intelligence bureaucracy
that numbers -- David, how many?
>> David Ingatius: Oh, my gosh.
It's -- you'd need to count all of the agencies.
It's many, many tens of thousands, it's crazy.
We're not getting our money's worth.
>> Adam Sisman: I mean, a good example of the failure
of British intelligence came in 1940 where British
and French intelligence failed to predict
where the Germans were going to attack.
And they cut through the Allied armies and caused the fall
of France, caused the British to withdraw,
ignominiously leaving all their equipment behind at Dunkirk.
It was a disaster.
And afterwards, when the intelligence was analyzed,
it was shown that there were indications
of where the Germans were going to attack.
They should have known.
They should -- if it had been properly analyzed,
they would have -- they should have known that.
But they just -- there weren't the mechanisms in place.
>> Joseph Kanon: And Stalin famously was told
that Hitler was going to invade.
>> Adam Sisman: Yes, yes.
>> Joseph Kanon: And decided to ignore it.
>> Adam Sisman: Again and again -- by us.
>> Kai Bird: So maybe our fascination
with spy stories comes from the fact
that these stories are metaphors for human failure.
We're all human, we all fail, we all make mistakes.
And spy stories are a particularly vivid vehicle
for showing how this happens.
>> Joseph Kanon: I think it's fair
to say the better spy stories do that
but most spy stories are triumphant, you know?
They're about derring-do and people who succeed
at whatever task they're succeeding.
You know, when people say that we're all working in the shadow
of le Carre, A, I think that's true,
I think he invented the modern espionage novel as we know it.
But one of the great innovations and what makes it a vehicle
for exploring character is that essentially he took it away
from those lampposts and trench coats
and he brought it into the office.
I think all of his novels, one way or another,
are about office life.
This particularly true of "A Small Town in Germany."
And if you notice, there's very little violence.
There are very little actual secrets.
What the plot usually involves is an intelligence agency
discovering each other and who's betraying whom?
And in a sense, this is very accurate because he was looking
to be at the apogee of the Cold War which,
from a fiction writing point of view,
was a wonderful source material, a great subject.
Because what you had was a war
in which the ground troops were the intelligence agencies.
You know, combat troops did engage time to time but,
all during the Cold War, it was the intelligence agencies
who were really on the front line.
And so he had, you know, a wonderful subject,
all of which we could relate to.
Very few of us are ever going to live like James Bond but all
of us have worked in an office
where there's an impossible person controlling the files
and, you know, a boss who turns up late
and never answers you and, you know, all of those things.
If you remember in "Spy Who Came in from the Cold,"
what presumably precipitates his disaffection is a quarrel
over the pension payment, you know,
it's all very bureaucratic.
>> Adam Sisman: In "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,"
there is a scene in which Peter Guillam steals a file
from the Circus archive and he's carefully --
has manufactured a dummy file to put in its place.
And it's described to me as one
of the most exciting scenes ever set in an archive [laughter].
And it is in fact extraordinary tense and very dramatic and --
but it is really just a man going into a room of files,
taking one file out and putting another in its place.
That's what happens.
>> David Ignatius: You know the thing, I think,
that makes John le Carre's novels unforgettable
that marks all of us in some sense marked
and limited him later in his career was the creation
of the character, George Smiley.
George Smiley embodies the sense of the ambiguity,
the moral uncertainty, the kind of, you know, routine nature
of intelligence work at its best.
And just getting ready for our discussion,
I went back in my library and went back
to the very first John le Carre novel, which was published
in 1962 called "Call for the Dead"
and the first chapter is called
"A Brief History of George Smiley."
And it opens with a description of exactly the character
that we then lived with in so many novels.
This is his very first book and he already sees Smiley,
describes him as breathtakingly ordinary.
And in the first paragraph of that book, his wife, Lady Ann,
runs off with a Cuban race car driver.
You know, Lady Ann in the books is always betraying him
with somebody, famously Bill Haydon in "Tinker Tailor."
But that's, to me, the genius of le Carre.
He lived a lot of real life.
He has all this real-life espionage to draw on,
but he had the brilliance to see this character.
He said that it was drawn from a rector of Lincoln College
at Oxford and his first boss at MI5.
So it's drawn from real people but there's George Smiley.
There's his wife.
There's this sense of betrayal.
Peter Guillam is in that first book,
the Special Branch Inspector Mendel,
if you know these books, they're all there.
And then he just -- he has that deck of cards from the start
and then he just keeps playing them through his career,
right down to "Legacy of Spies," the most recent book,
which I loved, which has Guillam and has Mendel,
all these same people who were in the first book -- amazing.
>> Adam Sisman: I'd like to echo that.
I mean, I think that the thing about George Smiley is
that he is a complete contrast with James Bond.
James Bond never questions what he's doing is right.
James Bond is an action man and he has no real inner life.
Smiley is all the time troubled,
anxious that the human damage being caused
to all these little people, ordinary individuals,
is worth the game -- he's troubled all the time.
And he's even worried about this archenemy, Karla.
At the conclusion of "Smiley's People," Karla comes across
and Peter Guillam says to him, George, you won.
He's not sure that he did win and he's sort of hoping
that Karla will actually go back because he feels sorry for him.
So Smiley is a man with a conscience.
He's not -- he's full of ambiguity.
He's not an out-and-out Cold War warrior.
>> Kai Bird: So Adam, that brings back
to your biography which, as I said earlier, you know,
you sort of rip the mask off this guy.
He is an enigma and you get very close to him.
You tell very intimate stories about his love affairs,
mistresses, wives, his betrayals of his wives,
his troubled childhood, his crazy con man father.
It's very revealing.
And so I wonder, how did he -- and you had his cooperation.
How did he react to the book
and why did he publish his own memoir,
"The Pigeon Tunnel," in 2016?
I guess he must have been working on that
when you were working on your biography, no?
>> Adam Sisman: Well, to answer the first part of your question.
>> Kai Bird: How did he react?
>> Adam Sisman: How did he react --
he reacted with a 22-page email [laughter]
with 200-and-something numbered points.
And as you can imagine, when I received this,
this is when I'd sent him --
I had an agreement that he would be the first person
to read the manuscript before my editor, before anybody else.
And so I sent it to him and, a few days later,
this email came thudding into my inbox.
And my first reaction was dismay but when I started to go
through it, in fact, the points were generally points of fact,
constructive, thoughtful.
And we only really locked horns over perhaps a dozen of them.
And he gave way on half a dozen and I gave way on half a dozen,
so it wasn't really a problem in that sense.
On the other hand, I won't pretend that he's entirely happy
about my book and he seems to have gotten more grumpy about it
as time has gone past.
But you know, I feel if he had been entirely happy
with it then perhaps it wouldn't have been --
I wouldn't have done my job properly.
I had to not be too friendly --
and he recognized that too, I think.
I mean, he's a very thoughtful man about biography
as well as everything else.
I mean, his editor at Knopf, long-term editor, Bob Gottlieb,
who's dealt with a great many fine authors
and very clever people said to me
that David is the cleverest man I ever met.
>> Kai Bird: Whoa!
>> Adam Sisman: Bar none.
And I would put him up there too.
>> Kai Bird: So did your work inspire his memoir?
>> Adam Sisman: No -- well, he'd -- it's described as a memoir.
In fact, it's a collection of pieces,
most of which have been published before and, indeed,
the longest piece appeared in the New Yorker
in two parts back in, I think it was 2000 and 2001.
So it's really not quite a memoir in that sense.
There are only, I think, two or three chapters that are new.
He told me that he wanted to publish this quite early
on in the process and told me to hurry up because he said,
I'm not getting any younger.
And that's fine.
I mean, you know, I don't own his life.
It's his life and he can --
I mean, if he wanted to write a full autobiography,
that would be fine with me and I'd be the first person
to be queuing up to read it.
>> Kai Bird: So le Carre's books, as Joe just explained,
are all about the human side, the ordinariness,
the little human foibles about human intelligence.
But David Ignatius, your last spy novel is called
"The Quantum Spy" and it's about quantum computers
and it's a look into this high-tech world
that we're living with all today in the age of social media
and such -- very timely.
And yet, even in this story,
the role of human intelligence is central
to understanding the plot.
So can talk a little bit about your book
and your thinking about.
>> David Ignatius: I think one challenge
for spy novelists is that, increasingly,
spying is about computers and the Internet.
I mean, covert action is, as we've seen with the Russians,
the planting, amplifying of information
through computer networks, the classic penetration stories,
mole stories that John le Carre wrote about,
these days involve electronic means of contact, compromise.
And so the last five or six years, I've been trying
to figure out as a novelist how you can be faithful.
I like to write realistic spy novels.
You can be faithful to the reality that it's
about the intersection of computers, machines,
and human beings and also write something that doesn't feel
like the extra credit problem that nobody wants to answer.
And believe me, if you --
writing about quantum computing was right on the borderline,
it's really complicated.
But it is, you know, it's sort of like the Manhattan Project.
This is a machine that, if they can build it, will be able
to decrypt anything that's ever been encrypted --
that's the theory -- and lay open every secret
that anybody has.
So it's of enormous value.
It's sort of like the Manhattan Project.
If you get it first, you have a huge advantage
for a long time -- for a while.
And it's a race between us and China.
The Chinese know how important it is and have said,
we're going to capture this technology.
So it's -- you want to write about it.
How do you make it real?
And I'll just say, the challenge
in this book was inventing interesting Chinese
intelligence officers.
I think, for me, in all of my books, you know,
the things that I'm proud are the Jordanian intelligence
officer in "Body of Lies" who dominates that book,
the Pakistani head of ISI who is interesting in "Bloodmoney."
And in this book, there's a character named Li Zian who is,
I think, an interesting subtle person.
it's hard to make American intelligence officers
as subtle as you want.
It just sort of goes against our grain, you know?
So I have fun often with the foreign characters
in these books.
>> Joseph Kanon: Another way to deal
with this issue is just to go to the past.
You know, someone said to me,
why do you write historical novels?
And I said, well, I think of it as the recent past
and it's just pre-digital.
I find it so much more interesting to meet somebody
on a park bench and, you know, pass some newspaper than --
whenever anybody says to me,
upload onto your server, I go [laughter].
Whatever that means, you know.
So I think it's very hard.
>> Kai Bird: So Joe and David, the two novelists
on the panel here, why have you never been tempted
to do biography?
>> Joseph Kanon: It takes too long
and there's too much work [laughter].
>> Kai Bird: Well, that's true.
It takes longer to write a biography
than a novel most of the time.
>> Joseph Kanon: But I think there are many similarities
between the forms.
And look, you know, we've been talking a lot about le Carre
and the legacy, etc. and I think that the most profound legacy,
aside from just adding good writing to the genre, has been,
you know, to me one of the great things that literature can do is
to operate as an agent for moral inquiry and I think
that le Carre did that.
What he was exploring was not simply the character
of these people but how they were going to deal with morality
of the actions that they were asked to participate in.
You know, it's --
the fundamental question should always be, how do we live
and how should we live?
I don't mean that writing should be prescriptive
and no novel can actually answer that, but I think novels need
to ask it or otherwise they really are just James Bond,
which are perfectly fun and it's nothing against that
and God knows we'd all like his success and his money.
But I think that, you know,
what le Carre did was open this whole field
up to moral questions, and I think ultimately
that makes for literature.
>> Kai Bird: So, Adam, coming back to le Carre --
oops, I'm sorry, David?
>> David Ignatius: No, no, I just -- I was going to --
my answer would be just like Joe's.
It's too hard to write nonfiction, too many footnotes.
And I have to -- I live in the world of fact twice a week.
I have to write -- I get to write columns
for the Washington Post [laughter].
I want to say you have read them
but then you don't have to read them either.
So, you know, I'm immersed in the world the fact.
And to be able to escape it for this big canvas
where you don't have to at the end say,
this is precisely what you should think.
This is precisely how it turned out.
You can let all the ambiguities exist in the characters.
I mean, I'll write one nonfiction book
and that'll be my memoirs but, until then, I don't think so.
>> Kai Bird: Okay.
We look forward to the memoirs.
So Adam, finally, many of le Carre's novels are --
the early ones are rather critical of the Cold War --
that's a sort of message you get from them.
And his later novels become increasingly,
I think some critics have said bitter and anti-American.
Can you explain his politics?
>> Adam Sisman: I'm actually giving a talk on this subject
on Wednesday at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
I mean, his -- most people in general,
and I think this is a generalization,
become more conservative as they get older, but David has gone
in the opposite direction, he's become more radical
and more angry and I personally think
to the detriment of his fiction.
I think his best work was in the period when he was writing
about George Smiley when he deals with the ambiguities
of the Cold War and the fact
that neither side was completely right
and neither side was completely wrong.
Now his novels appear to me to be much more black-and-white.
They are goodies and baddies.
In fact, they're more like the "James Bond" books.
And I'm afraid all too often the baddies are American,
although some pretty nasty Brits too.
And I think there's a certain strain in David of --
well, actually, I think it's a slightly old-fashioned chippy
attitude that some Englishmen of an older generation feel
about America, resentment of America taking
over from our role, our predominant role,
which was not only exemplified in the events
of the Second World War and the aftermath
but also was very much there in the minds
of the intelligence officers, I think,
at the time that David went into MI5 and MI6.
I think that was very much in the culture and also a feeling
of bemusement by the fact that they'd been betrayed by Burgess,
Maclean, Philby, etc. So yes, I agree.
His politics have become more one-dimensional
and I think less interesting, myself.
>> Kai Bird: So I think we have time for five or six minutes
of questions, if there are any, from the audience.
Aviva -- there's one right behind you, I think.
>> Aviva Kempner: So I'm making a documentary on a spy named
"Moe Berg: American Spy, OSS, baseball player."
I've already filmed David and, hopefully,
I will be filming Kai.
What I'm realizing is Hollywood, which I'm not a part of,
I think has contributed to the glamorization and the violence
of what a spy's life is like.
And it's more the more detailed work, the intelligence work,
certainly someone like Moe Berg did, especially in terms
of getting Italian scientists out.
And they really did him injustice in the feature film
that Hollywood just made with all these shootouts
that had nothing to do with his career.
So I'm just asking you, do you agree --
two questions, that Hollywood I think has,
especially the "James Bond" -- I like the early "James Bond" --
has contributed to taking away really the hard work a spy does.
And second of all, I think we need the OSS back in terms
of the cybersecurity -- I wonder what David thinks
because this -- we don't need military parades.
We don't need to go to the Moon.
We've got to figure this out.
[applause].
>> David Ignatius: Well, we need the OSS back.
We need, you know, the sorts of presidents
who chartered the OSS -- that would be nice too [applause].
So Aviva, you know, I think --
I can't wait for your documentary on Moe Berg.
Because we're talking about John le Carre, you'd have to say
that Hollywood has been faithful to the essence
of what those books are about.
They didn't screw 'em up.
They didn't put a gun in Smiley's hand or even really
in Peter Guillam's, although his job was, you know,
the scalphunter, the tough guy stuff.
The movie that was made of one of my novels, "Body of Lies,"
was faithful to the texture of it.
They didn't -- so I think Hollywood gets
that the more realistic accounts of espionage are things
that people want to see.
>> Joseph Kanon: The movie they made
out of my novel was just terrible and, actually,
if they would've added some gunplay it might've
helped [laughter].
>> Audience Question: Good morning and thank you
for the discussion today.
One of the motivating factors of spy novels, as I've seen it,
is the clash of civilizations.
How do -- how will the novel genre emerge over time
with a change in clash of civilizations
from between the US and the Soviet Union to the US
and China, to other venues of conflict and how is that going
to change how spy novels are both written and understood?
>> Joseph Kanon: I think that's a really interesting question.
And at the moment, we are in a state of hiatus.
I think that, obviously, the interesting clash
of the century we're now in is going to be Chinese.
There's a great question of how much do fiction writers know
about Chinese culture?
How much do they know and can access Muslim culture
or Middle Eastern culture?
It's more difficult because it's, I think, a rarer knowledge
on our part, whereas Russia is definitely the devil we know
and the devil we've been writing about for decades.
And to be -- I suppose how frivolous,
one of the things they've done is to give all
of fiction writers a kind breathing space
because they're insisting on being center stage yet again.
I mean, just when you thought that Russia was going to have
to withdraw from this role, there they are.
They just will not be shunted aside, at least in espionage.
This is, you know, the great advantage they've always had.
So I think, for a while, we're going to continue
to have post-Cold War Cold War kind of fiction being written.
But ultimately, people are going to have to adjust and have --
because what's really important is what -- is going to be China.
>> Kai Bird: Okay, we have two minutes left.
>> Arnold Zeitlin: Quick question.
My name is Arnold Zeitlin and I've reported abroad
for Associated Press and United Press International and this is
for Mr. Ignatius, whose columns indicate you have access --
considerable access to the intelligence community.
Now we have a situation where the president
of the United States is very antagonistic toward the
intelligence community and I'm wondering
if you see any pushback from the intelligence community,
a situation that could be quite dangerous.
>> David Ignatius: You know, there is this argument
on the right that the Deep State,
the intelligence agencies is doing just that,
it's pushing back.
I don't see that.
You know, I have limited visibility.
I always need to say, most of the stuff about how much I know
about the intelligence agencies is nonsense -- I wish I did.
But from what little I know, it's mostly what I think
of as the Richard Helms philosophy,
let's get on with it, let's do our jobs.
And I think, both in terms of recruiting sources,
in terms of liaison relationships, in terms of all
of the humdrum activities around the world,
people just keep doing them.
They have, at the top of the pyramid, a White House that,
as we all know, is kind of unpredictable.
But my sense is that the pushback you're thinking about,
that I've thought about, every time I ask, I'm told,
not really happening -- and not just by Americans,
but by people overseas.
>> Arnold Zeitlin: Thank you.
>> Kai Bird: Okay, the last question here.
>> Audience Question: There's a recent novel written
by Daniel Silva called "The Other Woman" in which he talks
about Kim Philby quite a bit in the novel.
In that, he talks about the tension between espionage
and politics and basically damns Britain
because they allowed politics to get involved
in the Philby situation.
Can you address the tension between politics
and espionage [laughter]?
>> Joseph Kanon: Except to say that it always exists,
in Philby's case, look, I think what obviously he's referring
to is the fact that the establishment circled the wagons
and decided to protect him.
There is the theory that they were having conversations that,
in code, said to him, for God's sakes, defect and get
out of here so that we don't have to have a trial
and expose everything to the public,
which would be embarrassing, much in the same way
that Anthony Blunt was protected,
etc. I don't know that for a fact.
I mean, I think it's one of those wonderful tropes
that everybody uses in writing novels about that period.
How can you separate them though?
I mean, the espionage is a function of the politics
and we are, you know, it may be true
that it's the world's second oldest occupation,
as everybody likes to say, but the kind of espionage
that we're talking about,
which is a vast government bureaucratic enterprise,
is a relatively recent phenomenon.
I mean, in America we didn't have the Central Intelligence
Agency until '47.
That's, you know, within our lifetimes.
That's really short.
And what we're now facing is,
how do you marshal these vast bureaucracies?
How do you control them?
Are they going to be self-operating?
Are they going to be responsive to government directives?
Who knows?
These are, you know, really interesting questions.
>> Adam Sisman: And one other word.
I mean, the Cold War was about politics, wasn't it?
I mean, it was a political argument between West and East,
between communism and the free will.
I mean that, in essence,
was what it was supposed to be about.
So I don't see how you can separate the two.
>> Kai Bird: Okay, one final anecdote I can't resist.
In 1964, -- in the 1990s, I interviewed a CIA analyst who,
in 1964, wrote the World Intelligence Report.
And very controversially, he predicted
that the Soviet Union was facing economic collapse
and internal ethnic tensions and he predicted that,
sometime in the 1980s, it would collapse.
He was allowed to put this into the report,
but no one believed it, no one acted upon it, and no one wanted
to believe that the major adversary was actually a weak
paper tiger.
And that, I think, says something about the world
of intelligence, the ambiguity --
which le Carre wrote about all throughout his novels.
Anyway, thank you very much for coming [applause].
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