Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (novel, miniseries, and forthcoming film to be directed by Tomas Alfredson)

i did not realise btw that paul greengrass cowrote spycatcher

via

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/55264000/jpg/_55264721_28-32.jpg
"A book called Spycatcher written by the former Assistant Director of MI5 Peter Wright, reveals intelligence secrets and is banned in the UK. Entrepreneurs get a ticket to Calais, a boxful of books and a pitch in the street."

Saw the film this morning. Very good in parts. Inevitably loses much of the book's essence - the revealing of the story through lengthy conversations disappears, of course. What's slightly irritating is that while this is fine when you go to, say, Ricki Tarr in Istanbul actually being in Istanbul, it's a bit jarring when Smiley says something, he gets a reply, and you (and he) are then left to infer the rest of it all ...

Also, opening scene in Budapest has passers by going into the metro. They are black. Does anyone know if Budapest had a sizable black population in 1973? It stuck me as a bit unlikely. And, as with all films set in the early 70s, the wigs are terrible.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/135000/images/_139152_peter_wright300.jpg

p.wright's tradecraft^^^ would give toby esterhase the horrors

has anyone actually read spycatcher? it's out of print afaict

it's on amazon for a penny (well, +p&p heh heh)

Peter Wright was mad, of course. Part of the Anglo wing that supported James Jesus Angleton's paranoid tendency in the CIA.

Wow, Chapman Pincher is still alive (he's 97) and still publishing (as of 2009)!

haha. i have a book by him. for a project like. unread. a long-fermenting project.

"suspected Harold Wilson of having been a Soviet agent"

wtf. what's the story there?

caek your local bookshop will probably give you a copy of spycatcher for free if you inquire pleasantly

caek, the story is that people who work for intelligence are many of them MASSIVE IDIOTS.

Nothing is more dispiriting hilarious than the gap between Le Carre's portrayal of the spy world, as full of tormented craftsmen of watchful intelligence (in all senses) and the actual oafish twerps and lunies that inhabit the service: how far distant do you have to be from common sense, the real world, actual history as it actually unfolded and etc to remain committed to the belief that Wilson was in the pay of the Soviets.

isn't that story backwards? i thought it was the case that wilson was convinced of a vastm subterraneanm & largely nonexistant mi5 conspiracy to discredit him

ctrl-h 'm' ','

people like bron waugh not entirely ironically kept that rumour going

xxp ha yes it sounds pretty much delusional cranky stuff rather than "truth is stranger than fiction" stuff

unfortunately my local bookshops all sell books in german but i will find it somewhere.

max ty for the nyer link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_conspiracy_theories

got his own wiki category

The vastness was mistaken, it was a small aggressive faction, and it was MI6 not MI5, but the fact of it was real. There's a pretty good book about it all by Robin Ramsey and Stephen Dorril called Smear!, also long out of print. Good source also for the general cluelessness of the intelligence services in relation to Northern Ireland in the late 60s and early 70s.

great sub head

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/01/ian-jack-chapman-pincher-fleet-street

it's from e p thompson, the urinal line

oh he says that

On the madness of a real spy, this is a good read by a good journalist:
http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Warrior-Angleton-Master-Hunter/dp/0671662732

caek i can send a copy if you want? i just found three in the back room + i am pretty sure there is a whole box of them somewhere

Much has been written about Harold Wilson and MI5, some of it wildly inaccurate. But as far as I am concerned, the story started with the premature death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963.

this man is a marvelous bibble.

Here's how the Wilson theory came about, from Philip Knightley's LRB review of the Mangold biog of Angleton:

In 1962 Angleton’s office family was joined by Anatoly Golitsyn, a KGB officer who had defected the previous year in Helsinki. The two men quickly formed a professional rapport. Golitsyn, a heavy Ukrainian, had hard-line views about the ruthlessness, single-mindedness and Machiavellian cunning of the KGB, against which the flabby Western intelligence agencies were doomed. These views coincided with those of Angleton and when Golitsyn eventually revealed the KGB’s master conspiracy plan, Angleton was all too ready to believe it.

There were two KGBs, Golitsyn said. The West was doing battle with the external one and thought it was coping. But there was another, deeper KGB which was running a long-term operation to destroy the West. The reasoning of the second KGB went as follows. It was useless to devote resources to detecting and catching Western spies sent against the Soviet Union. The West would simply send more. A much better way was to gain secret control of the West’s major intelligence service, the CIA, by recruiting moles among its officers and by sending false defectors. These false detectors could feed the CIA wrong information about the Soviet Union and the moles could report on how this information was being received. Gradually the CIA’s perception of reality could be distorted to suit Soviet aims and the CIA would, in effect, come under Moscow’s control. Once this happened, all the Western spies in the Soviet Union would be of no use whatsoever. The KGB would be running the intelligence world.

Golitsyn claimed that this operation was already under way and that Western intelligence was riddled with Soviet moles. He was too clever to claim that the limited access he’d had to KGB archives before he defected enabled him to name these traitors, but, he said, if allowed to look at the CIA’s files he would be able to identify suspicious characteristics which would point to possibly guilty men. Angleton was convinced, and over the years, thanks to Angleton’s influence in the Western intelligence community, Golitsyn saw the files of the CIA, Britain’s SIS and M15 and France’s SDECE and DST. It must be said that Golitsyn had some successes in providing clues that helped identify such spies as the Admiralty clerk William John Vassall; Georges Paques, a French officer in Nato; and Hugh Hambleton, a Canadian professor. But although he insisted that there must be moles in the CIA, he never found one. Instead, over the years, his list of suspects in the West became more and more outrageous. They included Harold Wilson, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, Armand Hammer, Averell Harriman, Lester Pearson and Henry Kissinger. They also included every Soviet defector who had come after him. These men had been sent, Golitsyn said, to discredit him because the KGB knew how dangerous he was to their master plan.

Karla's deployment of Golitsyn was masterly.

The vastness was mistaken, it was a small aggressive faction, and it was MI6 not MI5, but the fact of it was real. There's a pretty good book about it all by Robin Ramsey and Stephen Dorril called Smear!

Ramsay/Dorril a funny pair - I called up a stack of Lobster magazine from a library once - odd combination of slightly flakey mind-control cia stuff with super-detailed Clockwork Orange plot tracing, and odd analyses of 70s/80s policy. Wouldn't mind going through them again - & I keep meaning to read books by one or the other of them.

oh, just ordered Knightley's The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist and Whore. Looked like it might be interesting.

one of the Lobster guys used to be Hull-based iirc - never sure how much was brilliant investigative reporting and how much was internal psycho-geography at its furthest out

thomp have messaged you via ilx

Rikki "caek" Tarr has sent a field report and needs debriefing.

uncensored liveblog now posted over at freaky trigger: do not read if you want to remain a molevirgin

the TTSS film would intrigue me more if it was done closer in tone to Burn After Reading

following up the "oafish twerps and loonies" angle

http://www.popstarsplus.com/images/DonAdamsPicture.jpg

in fact a searing expose^^^

as witness: p.wright's hat at last explained

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/135000/images/_139152_peter_wright300.jpg http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/135000/images/_139152_peter_wright300.jpg

sigh, i mean:

http://0.tqn.com/d/diyfashion/1/0/e/T/-/-/Spy_vs_Spy_Cosplay_Comic-Con.jpg http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/135000/images/_139152_peter_wright300.jpg

Meantime:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/15/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-film-review

Agree with the Graun's review. Also, the film is very grainy a la Black Swan, which eccentuates the stifling fag-ash greyness of it. Having never read the book nor watched the TV adap, I had no cue about the outcome going in, but I was able to guess the mole purely by the casting.
Liked it though. It captures the 1970s well and without resorting to smother everything in brown, as so often happens.
Tom Hardy's wig deserves a Bafta for Best Supporting character.

saw it this afternoon, without having read the book or seen the miniseries - but i think i'd been somehow spoiler'd into knowing who the mole was already? it didn't matter much to my enjoyment, but i did wonder how the subtlety of the film would come across to someone with no foreknowledge.

tom hardy's wig was a marvel and a wonder; the national anthem scene was rather excellent.

the earlier scenes were for me slightly overshadowed by simon mcburney's nose in sharp profile, which made him seem like a character drawn by a cartoonist.

the national anthem scene was rather excellent

The Christmas party? That was amazing.

that bit of the christmas party - i hope it isn't SPOILERS to say that I rather admired the economy of the use of the christmas party flashback.

that scene was as deft as the film got, to me; i wasn't bowled over by its economy elsewhere, really, but it was v confident & graceful in plotting the few significant exchanges in that scene

wasn't impressed at all :(

best thing about it was the BLOKES in the row in front, who had obviously turned up expecting the new bond film, bellowing WHAT THE FUCK WAS THIS FUCKING SHIT I'M GETTING MY FUCKING MONEY BACK as the credits rolled

Agree with the comments re: dinner party as the highlight. It was worth doing (re-arranging to what I guess is a more faithful versh re: chronology) but mostly fell off when I got to comparing certain scenes to the BBC series: Smiley and Connie in the film has some nice comedy tinged w/sadness but I prefer the Beeb's versh in which Smiley dishes out roughly to snap her out of nostalgia for 'her lovely boys'. Weird bcz you could get that kind of perf out of Oldham but he was directed to be more stiff - not sure how the bk wd have it, wouldn't say I care.

Saw it this evening. Thought it was a bit mannered and heavy handed and Gary Oldman's acting self-consciously a performance.

Despite that I quite enjoyed the film because I enjoy watching performances.

The script is awful though.

pointless and popular feeling I'm sure and not really a complaint but preferred the telly cast and the v different tone of some sections and characters - particularly tarr and connie. seems a funny thing to say too since the telly one must have been drawn out at least as much as the movie but it did feel to me like it dragged rather more - maybe just means the story better suits a serial to spread the slow pacing which of course is fundamental out a bit. it was always going to be compared to the telly one though. funny that smiley's trusted coterie was made up of two of the modern era's greatest fictional minds: sherlock holmes and trigger. colin firth's zoo enclosure was weird. was relieved we didn't see smiley's nipples during the pond-swimming scenes.