Drama of perfidy

BOOKMARK

The Cold War is over, the Circus has been packed up, Comrade Karla dead and gone but John le Carre's genre remains much the same: the world of disloyalty and betrayal that was the ultimate crime.

Unlike Graham Greene for whom betrayal is just what men do characteristically "" sometimes badly, sometimes well. The imaginative interests of both writers are focused on the drama of perfidy, le Carre censorious in his attitude, Greene impassive "" Bill Hayden betrays and is a repugnant figure, Maurice Castle betrays and is a good man in a repugnant world.

Both le Carre and Graham Greene used the spy world "to make a political point" in a conspiratorial and clandestine world and hence their enduring interest as le Carre did with his The Constant Gardener and now with his latest novel, Absolute Friends (Coronet paperback, £ 2.50).

The story is spun around two friends: Ted Mundy, a British soldier's son born in 1947 in newly independent Pakistan and Sasha whose father was a Lutheran minister with a Nazi background and was "a double, possibly triple agent", who, le Carre describes as "a chaos addict who will probably never be satisfied with any social structure".

Their lives as friends, agents and idealists (read: anarchists) have been intertwined for nearly 40 years. They first meet in riot-torn West Berlin of the late 60s when freedom meant "you've nothing to lose", again in Cold War espionage and now in the unipolar world of terror, counter-terror and the war of lies and anti-Communist disinformation. The background is post-September 11, terrorism, war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What do Ted Mundry and Sasha do for a living as a cover-up for undercover agents? Obviously both are outsiders: Mundy, when we meet him is a tourist guide in Bavaria showing tourists around the castles.

As he takes his guests around he has constant digs at Blair and Bush (more Blair than Bush) as he makes it clear that both were exporting democracy by military means.

Earlier, after a battered home life he goes to an English boarding school and then to Oxford. (It is funny that the top British spies "" Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, Jim Cairncross had public school and Oxbridge backgrounds.) There, he remains an outsider except for an affair with Ilse.

Mundy travels to The Wall in Berlin where he is joined by intellectuals who have rejected the bourgeois way of life, one of whom is Sasha. A dwarf, Sasha has a huge chip on his shoulders, but is adored by the girls.

The German riot police catch up with him before Ted carries him to safety. "You are a hero of the revolution," Sasha tells him before Ted returns home to marry Kate who becomes one of the modernisers of the Labour Party. Ted starts working for the British Council and escorts a theatre group on a trip through eastern Europe.

Here Ted runs into Sasha again. " I'm working for the Stasi," he says. "I did it to spite my father but he too, is a Stasi hero. So I am going to be a double agent. You will be my agent. You must pretend to want to spy for the DDR." Ted meets Amory, his British control, and the deal is on.

For years Sasha passes on information to the West, while Ted gives away nothing at all to Stasi. Ted's marriage hits the rocks, but he is happy with his work. The Wall comes down and Ted and Sasha are left with no work, nowhere to go.

"Meet the people who want to set up a counter-university with a counter-culture, free of western dogma." Ted smells something fishy because the money is coming from Riyadh that could well be an al-Qaeda front.

Amory warns him that it could be a CIA covert operation. But Ted visits the university and he and Sasha are shot by German and US Special Forces. The West calls the murders a victory against the terrorists!

The moral: nothing is as it appears to be. The so-called war against terrorism is a new kind of global concept backed by the massive machinery of misinformation of the West.

If you have been a le Carre fan, this is as good as the rest before but as Allen Dulles, the former head of the CIA, said of The Looking Glass War, it is "the only damned double-agent operation that came closest to the reality". It all seems so uncomfortable for those on the periphery of Pax Americana.