The man who was Smiley

Journalist, novelist, patriot, spy

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.

(HT: Paul Davis)