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 David Cornwell, known to the
world as John le Carre, died after a short
illness in Cornwall, southwestern England, on
Saturday evening.
He is survived by his wife, Jane, and four sons.
The family said in a brief statement he died of
pneumonia.
"Very sad to hear the news about John le Carre,"
said Richard Moore, the chief of Britain's MI6
foreign intelligence agency. "A giant of
literature who left his mark on MI6 through his
evocative and brilliant novels."
By exploring treachery at the heart of British
intelligence in spy novels, le Carre challenged
Western assumptions about the Cold War by
defining for millions the moral ambiguities of
the battle between the Soviet Union and the
West.
Unlike the glamour of Ian Fleming's
unquestioning James Bond, le Carre's heroes were
trapped in the wilderness of mirrors inside
British intelligence which was reeling from the
betrayal of Kim Philby, who fled to Moscow in
1963.
"It's not a shooting war anymore, George. That's
the trouble," Connie Sachs, British
intelligence's resident alcoholic expert on
Soviet spies, tells spy catcher George Smiley in
the 1979 novel "Smiley's People".
"It's grey. Half angels fighting half devils. No
one knows where the lines are," Sachs says in
the final novel of Le Carre's Karla trilogy.
Such a bleak portrayal of the Cold War shaped
popular Western perceptions of the rivalry
between the Soviet Union and the United States
that dominated the second half of the 20th
century until the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991.
The Cold War, for le Carre, was "A Looking Glass
War" (the name of his 1965 novel) with no heroes
and where morals were up for sale - or betrayal
- by spy masters in Moscow, Berlin, Washington
and London.
Betrayal of family, lovers, ideology and country
run through le Carre's novels which use the
deceit of spies as a way to tell the story of
nations, particularly Britain's sentimental
failure to see its own post-imperial decline.
Such was his influence that le Carre was
credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with
introducing espionage terms such as "mole",
"honey pot" and "pavement artist" to popular
English usage.
British spies were angry that le Carre portrayed
the MI6 Secret Intelligence Service as
incompetent, ruthless and corrupt. But they
still read his novels.
Other fans included Cold War warriors such as
former U.S. President George H. W. Bush and
former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
SOLDIER, SPY
David John Moore Cornwell was born on Oct. 19,
1931 in Dorset, England, to Ronnie and Olive,
though his mother, despairing at the
infidelities and financial impropriety of her
husband, abandoned the family when he was five
years old.
Mother and son would meet again decades later
though the boy who became le Carre said he
endured "16 hugless years" in the charge of his
father, a flamboyant businessman who served time
in jail.
At the age of 17, Cornwell left Sherborne School
in 1948 to study German in Bern, Switzerland,
where he came to the attention of British spies.
After a spell in the British Army, he studied
German at Oxford, where he informed on left-wing
students for Britain's MI5 domestic intelligence
service.
Le Carre was awarded a first-class degree before
teaching languages at Eton College, Britain's
most exclusive school. He also worked at MI5 in
London before moving in 1960 to the Secret
Intelligence Service, known as MI6.
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Posted to Bonn, then capital of West Germany,
Cornwell fought on one of the toughest fronts of
Cold War espionage: 1960s Berlin.
As the Berlin Wall went up, le Carre wrote "The
Spy Who Came in from the Cold," where a British
spy is sacrificed for an ex-Nazi turned
Communist who is a British mole.
"What the hell do you think spies are?," asks
Alex Leamas, the British spy who is finally shot
on the Berlin Wall.
"They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards
like me: little men, drunkards, queers,
hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing
cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten
little lives."
By casting British spies as every bit as
ruthless as their Communist foes, le Carre
defined the dislocation of the Cold War that
left broken humans in the wake of distant
superpowers.
'MOSCOW RULES'
Now rich, but with a failing marriage and far
too famous to be a spy, le Carre devoted himself
to writing and the greatest betrayal in British
intelligence history gave him material for a
masterpiece.
The discovery, which began in the 1950s with the
defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean,
that the Soviets had run spies recruited at
Cambridge to penetrate British intelligence
hammered confidence in the once legendary
services.
Le Carre wove the story of betrayal into the
Karla trilogy, beginning with the 1974 novel
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and ending with "Smiley's
People" (1979).
 George Smiley seeks to track down a Soviet mole
at the top of Britain's secret service and
battles with Soviet spy master Karla, ultimate
master of the mole who is sleeping with Smiley's
wife.
Smiley, betrayed in love by his aristocratic
wife Ann (also the name of Cornwell's first
wife), traps the traitor. Karla, compromised by
an attempt to save his schizophrenic daughter,
defects to the West in the last book.
ABSOLUTE FRIENDS?
After the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving
Russia's once mighty spies impoverished, le
Carre turned his focus to what he perceived as
the corruption of the U.S.-dominated world
order.
From corrupt pharmaceutical companies,
Palestinian fighters and Russian oligarchs to
lying U.S. agents and, of course, perfidious
British spies, le Carre painted a depressing -
and at times polemical - view of the chaos of
the post-Cold War world.
"The new American realism, which is nothing
other than gross corporate power cloaked in
demagogy, means one thing only: that America
will put America first in everything," he wrote
in the foreword to "The Tailor of Panama".
He opposed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq
and his anger at the United States was evident
in his later novels, which sold well and were
turned into popular films but did not match the
mastery of his Cold War bestsellers.
But in a life of espionage how much was true?
"I am a liar," le Carre was quoted as saying by
his biographer Adam Sisman. "Born to lying, bred
to it, trained to it by an industry that lies
for a living, practised in it as a novelist."
(Additional reporting by Kanishka Singh in
Bengaluru, Editing by Ed Osmond, Frances Kerry
and Angus MacSwan)
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