... well, not Smiley, but his creator, John le Carré.
I posted a comment to the effect that it seems the spooks edited the Spook on the programme site (although, as a trained interrogator, he was hardly likely to give anything away) online here, but it didn't get passed the editor, it seems ...
... what was included was le Carré's firm opinion that members of both Houses of Parliament are wedded to the crime syndicates currently running Russia, but the interviewer/journalist obviously thought that snippet was not worth picking up.
Nor that, in his view, not one single piece of useful material was obtained by covert means throughout the entire Cold War that could not have been obtained by conventional, 'overt' means, by which I assume he means paying attention to events ...
... perhaps that was the point. I got more about what he's about by reading his books than by watching this interview.
Thomas
Actually the interview, heralded as the last interview he will ever give, ran a little over 20 minutes, which seems a bit mean for someone of his stature, and who put his imprint on a genre of literature?
I watched the interview ... no, I must have missed that bit. No comment about his view, aired elsewhere, of the complete and utter moral failure of the West to honour the promises made to East European states and the many hundreds of agents they sent to their death (thanks to Kim Philby, George Blake, and utter incompetence) by standing back as Communism collapsed, and allowing the various mafias to take over.
Not in the programme I saw.
Well, he read the first paragraph that introduced George Smiley, but that's all.
I posted a comment to the effect that it seems the spooks edited the Spook on the programme site (although, as a trained interrogator, he was hardly likely to give anything away) online here, but it didn't get passed the editor, it seems ...
... what was included was le Carré's firm opinion that members of both Houses of Parliament are wedded to the crime syndicates currently running Russia, but the interviewer/journalist obviously thought that snippet was not worth picking up.
Nor that, in his view, not one single piece of useful material was obtained by covert means throughout the entire Cold War that could not have been obtained by conventional, 'overt' means, by which I assume he means paying attention to events ...
... perhaps that was the point. I got more about what he's about by reading his books than by watching this interview.
Thomas
