The man who cold-shouldered the spy

THE spy who came in from the cold comfort of a London-Glasgow express

which was many hours late insists that he was never anything but a

low-level agent.

But David Cornwell's experience as a British diplomat nevertheless

gave him enough insight into that mysterious world to set him en route

to high-level writing, indeed as the most successful novelist of his

genre in the world.

With his kind of talent and imagination, all he needed was an alias.

John le Carre seemed as good as any.

He was working at the British Embassy in Bonn 30 years ago, deep in

the chill of the Cold War and its major symbol, the Berlin Wall, when he

felt the urge to expand from the two modest novels which had already put

him into print. ''It was my experience of Berlin which gave me the buzz

to do something more ambitious,'' he told me in the quiet tones of his

gentlemanly manner.

That ambitious something, which he penned on his daily ferry crossing

to Bonn, turned him into an overnight success under the title of The Spy

Who Came In From The Cold.

''I didn't know what money was coming in from the book,'' he says,

''but at that time my salary was #1600 a year. I asked my financial man

to let me know when I was worth #20,000, which was a lot of money then.

He was soon informing me that I was worth well over that. So I resigned

from the Foreign Office.''

It was the real beginning of an incredible romance in publishing,

which would take him from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to Smiley's

People and his latest offering, The Night Manager.

Yet there were even more dramatic happenings in the early days of the

writer's own life in Poole, Dorset, when his mother ran off with an

estate agent. The world was more concerned with the crisis of the Duke

of Windsor and Mrs Simpson when the man we now know as le Carre was

facing life as a six-year-old without a mother.

''I don't remember any sense of loss,'' he says, looking back. ''But I

do remember feeling resentful towards the other women who came to

replace her in the home.''

The boy had been left to the mercy of a highly colourful father,

Ronnie Cornwell, who would be living like a millionaire when he wasn't

''away on business''. That was a euphemism for the variety of prison

sentences he served across the world when his fraudulent schemes came

home to roost.

The roguish Ronnie became Rick Pym in A Perfect Spy, which gave some

hint of le Carre's early life, a therapeutic exercise he was glad to see

behind him. A psychologist would no doubt have much to say about the

effect of all this on the child mind.

''My father's schemes were often brilliant,'' he acknowledges. ''But

there was always a subtext. We had a nomadic life with no mother, no

constant friends.

''I was away at boarding school from an early age so I suppose I was

quite grown up by 16, except that I knew nothing about women. It was a

kind of unbalanced maturity.''

By 16, however, le Carre was a student in Berne, already gaining an

early contact with the world of espionage, as revealed in A Perfect Spy.

From there it was back to Oxford, via National Service, and on to

teaching at Eton before finding his way to the Foreign Office.

On the daily trip to London, he engaged in that exercise of many a

commuter -- scribbling towards the dream of a literary escape. For le

Carre it happened in a big way.

It was onwards to Bonn and Berlin, Paris and Vienna, where he met

Graham Greene, who took a keen interest in the young writer. That was,

until le Carre wrote an introduction to a book on Kim Philby, who had

been unveiled as a spy.

GREENE was displeased with the stand he took against Philby. Le Carre

was unrepentant. ''My position on Philby was simply that I felt there

was something in him which made him an avenger. His Communism was merely

a way of expressing his vendetta against society. If he had been a

Jesuit, he would have shafted them as well.

He added: ''I never met him but I heard all the tales. There was this

excessive charm, as well as a rather weird stammer, which I believe was

a tactical thing, used to gain sympathy. When he held a press conference

disowning the stories, he didn't stammer once.

''Philby was very ill when I was in Moscow and he wanted to see me. I

suppose I missed a scoop but I refused to see the Queen's greatest

traitor. It apparently annoyed him and when he was asked what he had

against me, he said 'Nothing. But I think he knows something about

me.'''

Le Carre claims that his only intelligence on Philby concerned his

flamboyant father, St John Philby, a great explorer but also a crook who

became quite anti-British in his later years. With their common ground

of eccentric sires, le Carre felt that perhaps he understood something

of the moulding of Kim Philby.

But if he spoke out against Philby, he is scarcely more a supporter of

Salman Rushdie, currently under threat of death from the Islamic world

for his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses.

While he sympathises with the writer's plight, he points out that the

book is already in print for all to read and that the blurred notion of

free speech is not the issue. It is about a re-run of the paperback

edition.

''There have already been 17 deaths related to the Rushdie affair and

I believe there is a limit to the amount of innocent death you can

cause,'' he tells you. ''There was the case of the teenage girl in the

Toronto mail-room who had her hands blown off opening a parcel. How

could Rushdie face her parents?''

Believing that the Islamic view needs more consideration, he says:

''They are a people who care ter-

ribly. And what's more, from the title downwards, The Satanic Verses

is an immensely offensive book.''

On le Carre's own morality, he doesn't shirk the question of those

adulterous days of the Swinging Sixties, when his affairs included one

with Susan Kennaway, wife of his friend, Scots writer James (Tunes of

Glory) Kennaway, who was later killed in a car crash.

''I have never made any secret of the fact that I have led an untidy

life,'' he makes clear. ''Most writers have. I was terribly fond of

Susan and that was part of my life.''

But he did come out fighting when a prominent journalist recently

struck a deal to write an unauthorised biography, with the implication

that le Carre's first wife was promiscuous and that the writer himself

might have been homosexual.

The #75,000 deal was evidently for the British publication only.

Covering all le Carre territory, he reckons the man could have earned #1

million. Apologies have now been offered and writs withdrawn.

Le Carre's latest novel, The Night Manager, is proof that he didn't

need the Cold War to sustain his art. There's enough intrigue in the

jungles of Whitehall, Washington, Panama and the Bahamas. Indeed he is

relieved the Cold War is over.

''I had tried to get rid of the damned thing three times before,'' he

laughs. ''Yet I hadn't thought it possible the eastern bloc would

disintegrate so rapidly. It was most astonishing to find that our

propaganda was actually an understatement of the awfulness of the

regimes.

''It just became impossible to run a closed society, where people

couldn't even phone abroad. The fax machine destroyed everything! And

despite all that is happening, I do believe the world is a much safer

place.

''From the western point of view, the crime of Bosnia is not only that

we failed to intervene very early, as we should have done, but that we

sent signals to any future adventurer that there is no bite to our bark.

''What has happened in Iraq should have happened in Bosnia. We

defended mankind against Communism. So we cannot say the next chapter is

not our responsibility.'' John le Carre laments the lack of European

leaders and feels it will fall to America to show the way.

Back home in Cornwall, the man who sells by the millions still writes

his books in longhand, starting at 5am and feeling a good day's work has

been accomplished by 11am.

There is lunch, a glass of wine, a walk and, before evening, his

second wife Jane will have it all typed up for his revising eye. Around

2500 words of it. By nine o'clock, the creator of George Smiley is all

tucked up in bed, the man of fiction who will surely delight us one day

with another gripping tale -- the factual one about his real-life

adventures.