Life emulating art

I have been rereading John LeCarre’s wonderful book The Tailor of Panama. I think LeCarre has a wonderful talent for developing characters, even though many of his characters lead somewhat tortured internal lives. George Smiley, his quintessential spy character, mixes brilliance in his work with a quiet desperation in his home life. In the Tailor of Panama, a small-time British con man and ex-convict who has reinvented himself as a high-class gentlemen’s tailor in Panama is recruited (or rather blackmailed) by an ambitious British Secret Service agent into spying. Since he really knows no secrets, he is forced to invent his intelligence product, and his network of sources. As a good con man, he invents what his masters want to hear, so of course they believe him. In LeCarre’s novel, as in life, such a situation doesn’t end well.

By chance I am reading this just as the news breaks about the administration’s primary source of information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction; the source upon whom they relied in launching the invasion of Iraq and embroiling us in the current tar pit there. Rafid Ahmed Alwan (codename “Curveball”) turns out to be, in essence, a small-time Iraqi con man who made up a lot of stuff to make himself more attractive to the German intelligence agencies, and to improve his chances of winning asylum in Germany. The German intelligence agencies passed along his stories to the US intelligence community, but refused to let anyone but their own German intelligence agents interview him directly. And since his stories supported what the Bush administration wanted to hear and already believed, few questioned his reliability. Those few in the intelligence community who pointed out that there was little or no corroborating evidence to support his stories were pointedly ignored, just as they are in LeCarre’s story.

Many of LeCarre’s stories are about the workings of a bumbling, incompetent, even immoral intelligence agency staffed with self-serving career bureaucrats and presided over by not-very-intelligent political masters who hold their positions by virtue of belonging to the ruling class, and because of who they know rather than what they know. One cannot but wonder how far life in the present American administration mirrors the art in LeCarre’s novels.