There is a passage more than halfway through The Honorable Schoolboy which discusses the reading material that Jerry Westerby—the “schoolboy” of the t There is a passage more than halfway through The Honorable Schoolboy which discusses the reading material that Jerry Westerby—the “schoolboy” of the title, about to embark for Phnom Penh—has brought with him on the plane.
He read the Jours de France to put some French back into his mind, then remembered Candide and read that. He had brought the book-bag, and in the book-bag he had Conrad. In Phnom Penh he always read Conrad; it tickled him to remind himself he was sitting in the last of the two Conrad river ports.
I smiled when I read this, for I had been thinking of Conrad for the last hundred pages or so. Most of Le Carre makes me think of Conrad. A career in espionage is—in its way—as isolating and maddening for the spy as the sea is for the sailor, as a far-flung colonial outpost is for the civil servant. Each of these remote milieux calls forth the uniqueness—and the oddness—of the lone individual, who, deprived of society’s customary comforts and restraints, may be seduced into making rash, irretrievable choices. This is perhaps doubly true of the secret agent, whose tasks require a counterfeit identity, the maintenance of which demands some degree of self-deception. Such a double life intensifies loneliness and may well lead the agent to disaster.
Thus it is for Jerry Westerby, the “honourable schoolboy” of the title. In 1974,George Smiley, spymaster of “The Circus,” intent on rebuilding the agency’s reputation after the discovery of a highly placed mole, believes the exposure of the purposes of a recently detected “gold seam”—a laundering operation of money through Laos in which the Soviets have a hand—may be just what the Circus needs to restore credibility. So Smiley sends Westerby—under cover as a sportswriter—to track the “gold seam,” determine its route of travel, its beneficiary, and its purpose. Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Laos provide Westerby with the answers, but they also change him personally, profoundly, leading him toward his own Conradian tragedy.
This is a rich, unsettling novel. Like Conrad’s heroes, Le Carre’s Westerby faces ambiguous moral choices, but in a post-Vietnam world filled with machinations and deceptions—both between and within governments—Smiley’s and Westerby’s moral charts seem more convoluted, less navigable—if it be possible—than Marlow’s and Lord Jim’s....more
Okay, so I’ve read The Mueller Report, every blessed word, including the footnotes, the appendices, the speaking indictments, Trump’s written answers Okay, so I’ve read The Mueller Report, every blessed word, including the footnotes, the appendices, the speaking indictments, Trump’s written answers to Mueller's list of questions, and all the supplementary materials included in this helpful edition issued by The Washington Post. Then I thought about it for almost a week. Here are my conclusions.
Yes, yes, yes!—on all three counts. Interference, Interference, Interference! Collusion, Collusion, Collusion! And Obstruction, Obstruction, Obstruction! What is more, almost all of the obstruction was instigated or personally executed by President Donald J. Trump—continually, maliciously, actionably—in a myriad of ways.
First of all, interference in the 2016 election. The Russian government interfered—in what the report deems a “sweeping and systematic fashion”—in two principal ways: 1) by hacking into computer systems hosted by Democrats (DNC, DCCC, Hillary for America), leaking damaging Democrat emails at crucial moments in the campaign, and penetrating state and county computer election systems (Illinois and Florida), and 2) by disguising themselves as Americans and manipulating social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) in order (at first) to damage Hillary’s presidential prospects and (later) to help elect Donald J. Trump. The hacking was done by the GRU—the Russian equivalent of our CIA—and the media manipulation by the IRA (International Research Agency), a company owned and operated by Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prighozhin, a multimillionaire restauranteur and caterer sometimes known as “Putin’s Chef.”
So did all this Russian help win Trump the presidency? There are too many variables to say for certain, but the election was close (Hillary would be president today if a mere 107,000 Trump voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would have just stayed home), and the Russians were good at what they did: they exploited America’s racial, economic and cultural divisions, worked hard to suppress the black vote, and specifically targeted the crucial swing states that tipped the election toward Trump.
And collusion? Lots of collusion. Russians continually reach out to Trump's people, and Trump's people obliging reach back. For example, on August 2nd, 2016, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his assistant Robert Gates met with Konstantin Kilimnik—a “former” Russian intelligence agent with close ties to Putin’s friend the oligarch Deripaska—at Manhattan’s posh cigar bar The Club Havana. There they discussed the internal campaign polling data that Gates, instructed by Manafort, had been sending Kilimnik for the last three months, emphasizing the importance of the “battleground” states Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota. Hmm. Manafort sends swing-state polling data to Russia, Russia targets swing-states on social media. Sure sounds like collusion to me.
The kind of collusion indicated above, however, is not what Mueller was looking for. Collusion, as the report is careful to point out, is not a legal term. What Mueller was searching for instead was the evidence of a criminal conspiracy, and for that you must be able to prove coordination—an actual agreement, whether tacit or expressed—between the Russians and the Trump campaign. Although I believe the above encounter between Manafort and Kilimnik implies this sort of coordination, and certainly led me to infer that it existed, it could not be used in a court of law to prove a count of criminal conspiracy. And that goes for Donald Jr. in the Trump Tower meeting, Carter Page in Moscow, and Pappadopolous in London too.
Also, it is only fair to say that none of these incidences of collusion can explicitly be tied to President Trump. Not only is there no proof he instigated them, but there is not even any evidence that he knew about them beforehand. There is, though, sufficient reason to suspect that if Trump instigated collusion or had any foreknowledge of it, we would still not be able to discover any evidence because of the way Trump has persistently, blatantly, unethically obstructed every legitimate attempt to examine his conduct from mid-January 2017 up to the present day.
Volume II—where Mueller treats obstruction of justice—is clearly the most damning section of the report. From Trump’s initial cover-up of the Flynn affair; through his termination of FBI director Comey; his attempts to force McGahn to fire special counsel Robert Mueller; his scheme to limit the scope of the special counsel's investigation by excluding all past events (including Russian tampering) and concentrating exclusively on future elections; his personal concoction of a false "adoption" cover-story to account for the "dirt on Hillary" Trump Tower meeting; his efforts to force Attorney General Sessions to "unrecuse" himself and take charge of the investigation; his attempts to force McGahn to lie about Trump's attempts to force McGahn to fire Mueller; his efforts, personally and through his lawyers, to induce Cohen to lie before Congess; up to his continual efforts to dangle pardons before Manafort and Cohen, followed by threats against Cohen and his family. All of this--complete with footnotes--has an persuasive cumulative effect.
I believe the following excerpt from the Mueller report communicates the president's state of mind:
[W]hen Sessions told the president that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said, "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."
The president clearly acts like a guilty man, and, in his attempts to keep his crimes hidden, he has committed—and continues to commit—other crimes in plain sight: each a clear, actionable instance of obstruction of justice.
Mueller makes all this clear in Volume II. At least it’s clear to me.
If you wish to learn Mueller’s rationale for not making “a traditional prosecutorial judgment,” I’ll let you explore the Special Counsel’s fine legal reasoning for yourself. But I will share with you Robert Mueller’s last words on the matter:
[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
So what's next? I don't know. The rest is up to Congress. Or, failing that, the American electorate in the year 2020.
I must admit, though, that the following questions continue to haunt me: What is Donald Trump so afraid of? What exactly is it that he is so determined to hide?...more
This is an old review--pre-Mueller report--but I'm going to let it stand as it is. I have read the Mueller report carefully--see my review--and I foun This is an old review--pre-Mueller report--but I'm going to let it stand as it is. I have read the Mueller report carefully--see my review--and I found no reason to change substantially anything I said.
“No collusion, no collusion, no collusion!” Our president may repeat it as many times as he chooses, but anyone with a brain—anyone who strives to be objective—can see that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians. Just look at DJT Jr.'s Trump Tower “adoption” meeting: collusion is evident there. But is it criminal collusion? Does it rise to the level of conspiracy? Is the web of conspiracy confined to the president’s campaign manager, his son-in-law, his eldest son? Or do the spider-silk filaments of conspiracy stretch further, as far as the president himself?
The evidence, often fragmentary, is voluminous and complicated, stretching back forty years, when the Donald, having married Ivana Zelnickova, accompanied her on visits home to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. It almost certainly escalated thirty years ago, when, in 1987, the forty-year-old Trump—who had already begun to talk politics—was given the Soviet red-carpet treatment during his visit to Moscow, where he stayed at “Lenin’s Suite” (which certainly would have been bugged) at the National and visited various sites in the city for a possible Trump hotel. Although the hotel itself was never built, Trump said, in his The Art of the Deal, published later the same year, that “he was impressed with the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal.”
Soon the evidence becomes murkier, but more interesting, with the crash of 1987, the failure of Trump’s New Jersey casinos, the bankruptcies, the connections with oligarchs, the money laundering charges, and the extraordinary—indeed, statistically remarkable—number of wealthy Russians who purchased the top-floor suites in Trump’s high-end properties throughout the nineties and into the 21st century.
Luke Harding outlines it all for you, in a straightforward fashion, and he is equally good on the campaign itself, from the curious changes to the Republican Platform Committee’s position on Ukraine, through the mysterious dealings with Deutsche Bank, to the recent revelations about “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos. And of course, Harding deals extensively with Christopher Steele and the “dodgy dossier.”
Although I read The Times, The Post, and "Talking Points Memo," and watch Rachel Maddow almost every night, I not only discovered new things, but also found things I thought I knew—particularly about money-laundering and the banks—explained with greater clarity here. (On the other hand, Harding’s ordering principle--which I eventually came to like--can be confusing, for he organizes events not according to when they occurred but according to when they first began to be revealed to the public.)
Unfortunately, though, Harding is better at explaining processes than exploring human character. The definitive account of these fascinating misfits still remains to be written: Carter Page, the hapless Fredo, hopelessly naive and possibly the only real spy in the bunch; Mike “General Misha” Flynn, a bitter Benedict Arnold, a genius at on-the-ground intelligence gathering but also a crackpot conspiracy theorist; and Paul Manafort, a Mephistophelean lobbyist whose specialty was aiding and abetting the worst kleptocrats on earth (Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, and Zaire’s Mobuto Sese Seko, to name just a few.)
This is, however, a minor criticism. If you are more interested in facts than personalities, if you want to find out more about Trump, collusion, Chistopher Steele and the Fusion GPS “dossier,” this is a good place to start.
I’ll end with an anecdote about Jared Kushner and his meeting with Gorkov, head of the VEB bank. It’s not that important really, but I like it, and it shows that the most cynical Russian operative has more poetry in his soul than the president’s son-in-law will ever have:
Gorkov was well prepared for his meeting with Kushner, as befits a graduate of what was known in KGB times as the Dzerzhinsky Higher School. He flew in from Moscow. On the plane were gifts. There was a piece of art and some earth carefully dug up and transported from the town of Novogrudok in northwest Belarus.
The town was where Kushner’s paternal grandmother, Rae Kushner, grew up. In 1941 the German army arrived. The town’s Jewish inhabitants were rounded up...half were executed. The survivors dug a tunnel...fleeing into the forest.
...Gorkov’s presents were chosen to remind Kushner of his origins...and of his spiritual roots. This subtlety was wasted. In evidence, Kushner said Putin’s messenger had given him “a bag of dirt.” It came from “Nvgorod,” he wrote, spelling his grandmother’s birthplace incorrectly.
This is one of Graham Greene’s thrillers which he labeled as “entertainments” as a warning to his audience not to take these books seriously. Our Man This is one of Graham Greene’s thrillers which he labeled as “entertainments” as a warning to his audience not to take these books seriously. Our Man in Havana definitely needs such a warning. There is no reason to take the book seriously at all.
The plot is promising. Havana vacuum cleaner Wormold, owner of an Havana vacuum cleaner shop, hard-pressed to satisfy the expensive tastes (horses, country club) of his beautiful, manipulative (and motherless) teenage daughter, decides—when recruited by MI6—to pad his espionage expense account by inventing agents and mysterious government installations. This works well for him, until the real-life model for one of his imaginary agents is found shot to death. Suddenly, his serviceable fictions have become unfortunately real.
The book has other pleasures or virtues in addition to its clever plot.. The Havana atmosphere is vivid, particularly the tawdry parts of the city, the dialogue is witty and diverting, and the climax—in which our hero stalks a killer who has been assigned to kill him—is not without excitement. Many of the scenes are funny, and the way Greene presents his hero as simply another variety of fiction provides opportunity for revealing observations and asides.
But an entertainment, however unserious, demands some sense of danger, and whatever dangerousness the first part of the book created for me, the latter part of the book dissipated. Although this is a curious thing to say, I believe the sense of danger began to dissipate as soon as the bodies began to fall.
Part of the reason for this is that Our Man in Havana is set in the sunset days of Batita's Cuba. Castro and his rebels were already in the hills (although Greene does not mention this), and one of the characters, Captain Segura, who is known to be one of Batista’s torturers, seeks Wormold’s daughter Milly in marriage. Thus Wormold playing at spies—particularly in this place, at this time—seems like an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do, both for himself and for his daughter. Yet not long after the first “agent” is killed, Greene begins to exploit the situation for romance, laughs, and adventure. It was then I realized that Greene took his plot much less seriously than I did, and I began—little by little—to lose interest in the book.
Still, the book was entertaining, with some laughs, some thrills, and an interesting discussion of what are good reasons for engaging in violence (hint: working for Batista or for MI6 are not acceptable choices). All, in all, a good way to spend a couple of hours or so--provided you are willing (at least for brief while) not to take dictatorships, torture, revolution, and murder too seriously....more
Whenever I think of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I inevitably think of love: love that grants fortitude, love that clouds judgment, love that scars t Whenever I think of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I inevitably think of love: love that grants fortitude, love that clouds judgment, love that scars the soul and roots the heart. Although it is my experience of the book that guides me, it perhaps also has to do with the 1979 BBC miniseries, with the way Alec Guinness appears stolid and wounded, like an animal to the slaughter hit in the head with a hammer, with each inevitable mention of his wife’s beauty, each smirking hint at her chain of adulteries.
Of course the book is about many other things besides love: it is about the mysterious nature of allegiances and the way they change over time; about social class as an inescapable system of markers and man’s bathetic attempts to emphasize or erase them; about how the look of a system subtly changes when it begins to betray itself; about how the illusions which make a man vulnerable also help him survive.
Still, though, the book is about love: George’s love for Ann of course, but Roach’s love for his teacher too, Jim’s love for Bill Haydon, Bill’s love for himself, the outsider Percy’s love for the insider's power, barren Connie’s love for all her “boys.” Yes, on this much Karla and Smiley may agree: it is “last illusion of the illusionless man,” love.
Above all the other loves in the book, though, there is one love who binds closest to herself those whom she betrays, the compromised goddess who requires devotion most particularly from her disillusioned devotees. Smiley, true to Ann, is true to her as well: Brittania, old England herself....more
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was praised for its harsh realism, but le Carre believed it was not harsh or realistic enough. On the contrary, he c The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was praised for its harsh realism, but le Carre believed it was not harsh or realistic enough. On the contrary, he considered it unrealistic and romantic, what with its nearly omniscient intelligence agency, the agency's extraordinarily complex yet flawless plan, and the novel's melodramatic conclusion: the death of star-crossed lovers at the foot of the Berlin Wall.
For this next book, le Carre chose to abstain from grand dramatic gestures and instead describe the intelligence service as he had experienced it in the '50's, filled with aging English Public School types hampered by nostalgia for the days of The War and Merrie Old England, holding a prejudiced view of everything not “British,” and harboring the self-delusion that after countless compromises and betrayals they still possessed honor and commanded respect.
The photographic evidence of a missile placement in East Germany leads the foreign branch of military intelligence (“The Blackfriars Boys”), a ghost of its wartime self now reduced to gathering remote intelligence and conducting research, to once again--like in the good old days of The War—actually “put a man in,” that is, place a live agent on the ground for reconnaissance.
Thirty-two year old Avery, the only man in the whole operation who seems to be under fifty, is put in charge of re-training and handling Leiser, a Pole in his forties, who worked with the agency in the war and is now a British citizen and London auto-mechanic. We observe the training operation in detail, and those details reveal the snobbery, antique attitudes, and general incompetence of an agency still convinced it can do great things, in spite of the fact that it is poorly funded and on the losing end of almost every inter-agency squabble. Then Leiser is “put in” on the East German side, and the reader follows his movements, absorbed, to the suspenseful and dismaying conclusion.
This is a very good book, filled with incisive portraits and cutting irony. I thought, however, that Avery got just a little too preachy at the end. What he says is apt, and, since he is the youngest, most idealistic and least deluded of the bunch, he is certainly the right man to say it. But such preaching is unnecessary, since Carre's portraits and ironies have already done their work.
Not as powerful as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but in its own way even more disturbing and devastating....more
I am of two minds now that I have finished The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for the first time: I am irritated at myself for having postponed the ple I am of two minds now that I have finished The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for the first time: I am irritated at myself for having postponed the pleasure of reading this magnificent book for so many years, and yet I am exhilarated and excited too, marked by this unqualified encounter with greatness.
I certainly was stupid all these years, for I did not read this book—at least in part--because I considered it “just a spy novel” (albeit a superb one), and the “spy novel"—at least since Ian Fleming ruined it—is not one of my favorite genres. But The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is only “just a spy novel” in the sense that Moby Dick and “The Secret Sharer” are “just sea tales” or “The Turn of the Screw” and “Afterward” are “just ghost stories." Sure, they fulfill the requirements of their genres. But they are much—oh, so much—more.
In the course of this tale of a complex double-agent operation, which he tells in a style that somehow combines both cold rage and white heat, Le Carre reveals the heartlessness of British Intelligence—and, by implication, of all intelligence systems—which will not hesitate to crush the innocent and betray its own in pursuit of secrecy and success. No matter whose side they are on, or what their particular goals may be, there can be no heroes in this dirty, duplicitous game.
I do not think of other spy novels when I think of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Instead I think of the great writers of the English language: Conrad (the bitter isolation of the characters), Koestler (the fierce subtlety of the interrogations), and Orwell (the bleak vision of the state).
And yet—this is part of what makes the book great—The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is an excellent spy story too, with an intricate plot which will keep you guessing all the way to the end. Yes, Le Carre offers the reader of spy stories everything he could wish for.
This first George Smiley novel—also the first for John le Carre—is not a spy novel really, but more like a murder mystery with spies in it.
You see, Sm This first George Smiley novel—also the first for John le Carre—is not a spy novel really, but more like a murder mystery with spies in it.
You see, Smiley is ordered to conduct a routine security check on Samuel Fennan, and, since he sees no serious concerns in Fennan's past—just a little harmless wartime flirtation with communism—he reassures Fennan and they part in friendly fashion. But soon Fennan is pronounced a suicide, and Fennan's wife Elsa claims that, after his interview with Smiley, her husband was unusually despondent. The higher ups want to stick Smiley with the blame for a botched interview and move on, but Smiley, who is not convinced this is a sucide, becomes even less convinced when he answers the phone in Fennan's flat and receives a “reminder call” Fennan arranged with his service. It just doesn't make sense. Why would a person who intends to commit suicide one a specific night arrange for a reminder call for the morning after?
Since this is a first novel, it has its flaws. For example, Smiley and Police Inspector Mendel are both used as third-person viewpoint characters, but Mendel's first appearance as viewpoint is disorienting, since it is far enough into the novel that we have identified ourselves with Smiley completely, and le Carre has not used any of the novelistic tricks that would make such a transition less confusing and more effective. Also, although le Carre's acerbic descriptions of many of the streets of London are precise and entertaining, they are sometimes too long, and thus retard the action and dissipate the suspense.
Still, Smiley is an intriguing narrator, the characters of Elsa Fennan, Inspector Mendel, and the shady car dealer Adam Scarr are lifelike and convincing, and the final confrontation and chase, in a small London theatre and in the surrounding streets, is suspenseful and exciting....more
Thirty pages in, and I was delighted. A plot not just complex but deep: layer beneath layer of stratagem and objectives, and--underneath that—a myriad Thirty pages in, and I was delighted. A plot not just complex but deep: layer beneath layer of stratagem and objectives, and--underneath that—a myriad of agendas, fueled by wounds and desire.
It starts with an apparent coincidence: when Artie Wu, pretender to the Chinese throne, trips over a dead pelican while jogging, he is helped, limping, to his friend Quincy Durant's place, assisted by wealthy entrepreneur Randall Piers, who had been walking his six greyhounds on the beach. The three men have what appears to be a casual conversation: about commodity futures, the fall of Saigon, millions of dollars in abandoned American currency, etc. Soon we learn the dead bird was placed on the beach: part of a plot, with Piers as a target. But it turns out that Piers has his own plans too, and they involve Wu and Durant.
An intricate, coherent plot realized in efficient, witty prose—that is enough to satisfy me all by itself. But Thomas also does something new here. Thomas unites the uneasy morality of LA detective fiction with the merry stratagems of the novel of international intrigue, and makes them work together harmoniously amid the chaos and disillusionment of the post-Vietnam era.
But he could not do it without the brilliance and cynicism of his two heroes, the part-time spies and full-time rogues Artie Wu and Quincy Durant. These two do not merely wade into the ocean of pollution and corruption, they take to it like ducks, as if they were the vanguard of an aquatic species, a new evolutionary experiment....more
I love genre fiction written by a master, one who can command its memes and not be controlled by them, who can shift—with apparent effortlessness—in a I love genre fiction written by a master, one who can command its memes and not be controlled by them, who can shift—with apparent effortlessness—in and out of subgenres, provoking yet fulfilling our expectations with such assurance that he can craft an exciting entertainment and still have room left over for a few of the higher pleasures of literary fiction. Eric Ambler is a master of the genre of international intrigue, and Epitaph for a Spy (1938) —even with its flaws— is this sort of entertainment.
The action begins with our hero on holiday, Josef Vadassy—amateur photographer and teacher of languages—snapping photos on the patio of his modest hotel, photos of lizards basking in the sun. Later, when he goes to collect his prints, he finds himself detained by the police. It seems there were other pictures on the roll—including a few of military installations--and French intelligence wishes to have a word with Monsieur Vadassy.
But what begins as the “regular guy when mistaken for spy spies on spies” meme shifts quickly into something more closely resembling the traditional English country-house who-dunnit, for Vadassy must discover which resident of his hotel inadvertently exchanged cameras with him. If he can find who has his camera, he can discover the spy.
The novel remains in country-house mode for at least half its length. Ambler, however, is less interested in detection—Vadassy is after all a naif and an amateur—than in listening to the stories of his hotel guests: the English colonel and his Italian wife, the wealthy French manufacturer, the fat smiling middle-class Germans, the upper class British brother and sister, the hotelier with a secret destination, the mysterious “Swiss” with an assumed name.
Evenutually, though, the subgenres shift again, and we are rewarded not only with an exciting chase in which the identity of the spy is revealed, but with an ironic coda in which we discover a few more things about our guests—nothing more about spies and spying, but a few things about lies and love, and the smiling masks of evil.
This early Ambler novel is filled with many delights, but some of the travellers' stories—although interesting--are longer and less compelling than they should be. Even here, though, Ambler deftly manipulates us through genre: we still listen to each guest's every word, because we know that any one of them may be our spy.
All in all, this is an able entertainment, a good companion for a long plane trip or a cold winter night....more
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