Smiley's People: Spy Who Inspired George Smiley Accused John Le Carre Of 'Giving Comfort' To Britain's Enemies

Jasper Copping at the British newspaper the Telelgraph offers another piece on the late MI5 officer John Bingham and his views of spy thriller writer John le Carre.

The man who inspired George Smiley, one of Britain’s most celebrated fictional spies, accused his creator John le Carré of giving “comfort, pleasure and glee” to the country’s Cold War foes in his depiction of the secret service. 
 

John Bingham, who was le Carré’s former mentor in MI5 and model for Smiley, wrote to the author to express himself “puzzled” at what he saw as his disloyalty to the intelligence agencies, in his cynical portrayal of their activities and agents. 
 

Bingham wrote: “You are far from being pro-Soviet or pro-Communist, but I would think the attacks gave comfort and even pleasure and glee in some places.”
 

He added that he had “often been puzzled as to why you have so frequently attacked” the security services, adding “troops don’t normally improve by, in effect, being called a lousy lot of bums, and inefficient or ineffective to boot”. 
 

The letter was written in October 1979, the same month that a television adaptation of le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was broadcast on the BBC, with Alec Guinness starring as Smiley.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10678879/Spy-who-inspired-George-Smiley-accused-John-le-Carre-of-giving-comfort-to-Britains-enemies.html

You can also read an earlier post on Bingham/le Carre via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/03/british-mi5-officer-who-inspired-george.html

Note: John Bingahm is the subject of Michael Jago's book, The Man Who Was George Smiley: The Life of John Bingham.   

British MI5 Officer Who Inspired George Smiley Character Dispised John Le Carre's Portrayal Of Spies

Kieran Corcoran at the British newspaper the Daily Mail offers a piece on the MI5 officer who reportedly inspired John le Carre's character George Smiley.

A Second World War intelligence agent who inspired fictional spy George Smiley 'hated everything' about how John le Carre portrayed the secret services, it has been claimed. 

John Bingham, an MI5 agent, exposed nazi sympathisers in Britain by convincing them he was a German double agent. After gaining the trust of undercover fascists, he convinced them to reveal secrets which were fed back to the intelligence services. Mr. le Carre, whose works include The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, revealed in 1999 that Smiley was inspired by Bingham, who had been his boss at MI5.

 ... But the spy, who went on to become a celebrated author himself, turned on his former colleague and friend Mr le Carre and grew to detest what he wrote about the British intelligence services, it was claimed today.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2572768/British-spy-duped-Nazi-sympathisers-revealing-secrets-WWII-inspired-John-Le-Carr-s-character-George-Smiley-despised-authors-portrayal-spies.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

You can also read my column on John le Carre and Ian Fleming, Spy Writer Vs. Spy Writer, via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/08/spy-writer-vs-spy-writer-john-le-carre.html 

Note: John Bingham is the subject of Michael Jago's book, The Man Who Was Smiley: The Life of John Bingham (Biteback). 

John Bingham: The Spy Who Turned Hitler’s British Supporters Into Unwitting Double Agents

Hayley Dixon at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on John Bingham.

A “genius” spy who pretended to be a German agent duped British Nazi sympathisers into revealing their secrets during the Second World War, newly released documents show.

The deception by John Bingham, the MI5 agent who partly inspired John le Carré’s character George Smiley, is disclosed in National Archive files released 25 years after his death. He fed the sympathisers’ secrets back to MI5 so it could prepare for acts of sabotage.
 

The documents also show that MI5 drew up plans to issue the sympathisers with badges of the Union flag to be worn in the event of an invasion; supposedly to identify them as friends to the Germans, but, in fact, to enable them to be swiftly rounded up by the police.
 

Prof Christopher Andrew, the former official historian of the Security Service, said: “This is a revelation that, alongside the extremely well known double cross system in which we actively sent false information to the Germans, there was a small but interesting way of preventing accurate information getting to them.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/10665482/The-spy-who-turned-Hitlers-British-supporters-into-unwitting-double-agents.html

You can also read an earlier post on the late John Bingham and Michael Jago's book on him via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/03/journalist-novelist-patriot-spy-john.html 

Journalist, Novelist, Patriot, Spy: The Life of John Bingham, Role Model For John Le Carre's George Smiley

Stella Rimington, the former director of the British security service MI5, reviewed Michael Jago's biography of John Bingham for the Spectator.

John Bingham joined MI5 before the war from Fleet Street, recruited by Maxwell Knight, a maverick but brilliant agent runner. Bingham worked on the Double X operations then, when the Service cut its staff after the war, took a post in the Allied Control Council in Hanover, trying to detect Soviet infiltrators among the flood of refugees seeking asylum in the Western zone. It was an experience which convinced him of the fragility of the security of Western Europe.

In 1950, at a time of increased focus on communism and Soviet espionage, following some sensational spy cases, the Service was recruiting again and Bingham rejoined. It was then that he began his parallel career as a crime writer, with the publication in 1952 of his first, partly autobiographical, novel, My Name is Michael Sibley.

When the much younger David Cornwell joined MI5 in 1958, Bingham became his professional mentor and also helped start him on his writing career by introducing him to his literary agent. Bingham’s son Simon records that Cornwell’s pen name, Le Carré, came from the office nickname for his father, ‘The Square’. In a radio interview in 1999 Cornwell revealed that Bingham was a model for Smiley, though in the following year, in an introduction for the re-publication of some of Bingham’s early novels, he says that Bingham was one of two men who went into the making of George Smiley.

But the John Bingham who emerges from the pages of Michael Jago’s book seems, in everything but appearance, to be about as far from Smiley as you could get. Certainly F4, with its nurturing relationship with its agents, many of whom worked for the Service for years and ended with a pension, was a very different place from the nuanced, ethically ambiguous world of Smiley and his colleagues. Le Carré wrote that Bingham felt betrayed by his cynical portrayal of the intelligence services. Bingham himself went on to write a considerable number of successful crime stories, but though he carried on writing until his old age, he never achieved his ambition of producing a spy story to rival the success of Le Carré’s books.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8852241/journalist-novelist-patriot-spy/