Opinion A spy has no friend

Leamas and Gold in this book,Smiley in the le Carré canon,questioned the mismatch between the West’s democratic ideals and the operational methods of its intelligence machineries at a very difficult moment in the Cold War — showing there wasn’t a hair’s breadth between them and the KGB. But in portraying that machinery as a law unto itself and the moral dilemmas of those giving and obeying orders,writers like le Carré were also humanising the spy through psychological and circumstantial realism. The judgment? Real-life,big-time spies professing admiration (albeit qualified) for sometime colleague le Carré,including the most (in)famous of them all — Kim Philby.

Philby,as the enormity of his identity and role — some years after he escaped to the Soviet Union in 1963 — gradually unravelled,was an enigma. Those who knew Philby,those who studied him,knew the paradox — a man on the Russian payroll long before he joined British intelligence,who apparently never suffered the guilt of betrayal because he didn’t believe he betrayed anybody,who was always ideologically loyal to the Soviets but never appeared to be a believing/ committed Marxist,who was the “epitome of Britishness”,subscribing to the London Times in Moscow,perhaps pining for Test cricket scores and “a cottage in Sussex with roses around the door”.

Phillip Knightley,the only Western journalist Philby ever saw in his Moscow apartment,shortly before his death in 1988,describes in Philby: KGB Masterspy (1988) how Philby lived in style,tastefully,with a library of 12,000 books. Knightley came away with the impression of an “Establishment Englishman who betrayed the West,who decided to go against his class and his upbringing for what he believed to the last were impeccable motives,and who then spent most of his life cultivating two separate sides to his head.” Even Knightley couldn’t ultimately answer why. There’s no last word on Philby. But the contradictions,or opposing truths,paint him as the archetype of the spy as an exile.

Reported details from Madhuri Gupta’s interrogation repeatedly point to her “disgruntlement” with the IFS officialdom. However,real-life espionage stories often,also,bust the synthetic loneliness of fictional spies. Gupta may have borne a grudge against an institution of the country her passport claims she swears allegiance to. But she has been anything but an exile in a real or metaphoric foreign land,or unwelcome in her own.

Our ambivalence about espionage is caught in a phrase (attributed to Murray Sayle) in Knightley’s book: the spy is a “semi-criminal but with official backing”. With our own spies,although our moral ambivalence is often repressed by a pragmatic code of imperatives,the inability to wholeheartedly embrace them (partly also because s/he will not have a face or name) remains. But what of the semi-criminals working for the other side? Why is condemnation so quick when one of our own defects or goes rogue? Is the set of imperatives (national security,continuity of life as we know it),no matter how tenuously linked to the traitor/ infiltrator,automatically dominant in the latter case?

Nevertheless,the impulse to condemn the traitor/ infiltrator is understandable. But that we don’t,or can’t,go out of our way to call our own unnamed spies on foreign soil “heroes” (no matter how readily we laud counter-espionage success against foreign spies or terrorists on our own soil) is the socio-psychology behind the spy’s loneliness.

The morality of espionage received greater philosophical depth and literary engineering in,say,Conrad’s The Secret Agent or the spy oeuvre of Graham Greene (incidentally,a friend of Philby). But le Carré’s image of Leamas climbing down the eastern face of the Wall to be shot at the command of the Stasi officer-British double agent who oversaw his escape,collapses at once all layers of deceit,double lives,inhuman unconcern characterising espionage machineries. The chaos is closure for the spy who finally comes in from the cold.

Setting aside the involuntary or “trapped” spy,voluntary spies are,broadly,either ideological or mercenary. If the traitors among our midst are mere mercenaries,it’s a relief since it’s easier to explain away. But if ideology motivates them,are they worthy of an ounce of respect as,say,Klaus Fuchs or Richard Sorge would be from those they betrayed?

sudeep.paul@expressindia.com