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East German checkpoint. Only a few yards separate him from the West. He mounts his
bicycle.
Then. Totally unexpected. The searchlights went on, white and brilliant, catching Karl
and holding him in their beam like a rabbit in the headlight of a car. There came the seesaw
wail of a siren, the sound of orders wildly shouted. In front of Lemas the two policemen
dropped to their knees, peering through the sandbagged slits, deftly flicking the rapid
load on their automatic rifles.
The East German sentry fired, quite carefully, away from them, into his own sector.
The first shot seemed to thrust Karl forward, the second to pull him back. Somehow he
was still moving, still on the bicycle, passing the sentry, and the sentry was still shooting
at him. Then he sagged, rolled to the ground, and they heard quite clearly the clatter of the
bike as it fell. Lemas hoped to God he was dead. 214
We see those images, whether from spy novels or films of the era in black and white
for those are the colors of the Cold War, philosophically as well as geographically. The
scenes of fiction fuse in our mind with Cold War images from nightly TV news and
together they shaped our reality of a Cold War from the end of World War II until November
1989 when the Wall came crashing down. And it is no longer clear which was fiction
and which was reality for Le Carre and Deighton, undisputed masters of the genre of spy
literature became also instructors in our spy reality.
SPY FICTION, SPY REALITY
Shortly after joining the faculty of the Joint Military Intelligence College, I proposed
teaching a seminar on spy fiction. “Bunkum!” said my colleagues. “It is not a fit subject
for serious study let alone professional education of the contemporary military intelligence
officer.” I suspect many of you would agree.
Let me argue that this fictional milieu has, in a very real and pervasive way, shaped the
reality of intelligence officers in a variety of circumstances. To begin with, has it not
shaped your very identity? For example, who among you have not had a parent or a friend
describe your work as “James Bond” like? Ian Fleming’s swashbuckling James Bond has
become a more or less accepted synonym for our work, a shorthand way of saying everything
about the secret life without saying anything? The name is a perfect symbol, conveying,
without explaining, a sense of the intelligence professional. I think for all of us
the James Bond image has more facility to symbolize positively our sense of self than
many other spy fiction characters. Certainly better known that Alec Lemas or George
Smiley, the James Bond image is also more embraceable with his dashing infallibility and
worldly knowledgeability. Admittedly, within the profession the James Bond label can be
apply derisively to an officer too caught up in the Bondian role but even in this use it is the
spy fiction that informs our reality.
214 Le Carre, 8-9.
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