George Smiley

The premise is just iconic.

George Smiley, this quiet, aging, retired intelligence officer, is secretly brought back in to find a Soviet mole operating at the very highest levels of British intelligence

You might picture Gary Oldman from the film adaptation

Yes, perfect casting.

Sure enough, Tim discovered that Alexander Wilson was, in fact, a prolific writer of some renown.

I discovered that the Wallace of the Secret Service character and novels were multifarious and large in number.

And within 24 hours I was able to order on the secondhand market books for Mike.

I found five, six, and there are more and more of them.

He was alive in 1944.

As you might imagine, Mike did not take this news well.

Did his mother lie? Did Uncle Reg lie? Did his grandparents lie? What was the extent of this deception? There was a rise and fall of emotions that for a man in his 70s had to show enormous individual courage and strength of character to deal with.

The investigation had been a real roller coaster for poor Mike.

It's got those kind of like those drums that don't have bottom drum heads.

You know what it really reminds me of? Another episode of the Full Cast and Crew podcast, Smiley's People.

There's a scene, a brilliant sequence in Smiley's People, which it must be noted is a sequel of sorts in a limited series fashion to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

the brilliant Alec Guinness, John Le Carre adaptation.

Smiley's people, less successful, but very, very worthy for many, many reasons.

And I've got episodes that I've done about each episode of both Tinker Tailor and Smiley's, if you're interested in those episodes.

I'm not sure that they're available on the podcast feed, but you can email me through Instagram or the podcast.

If you're interested, I will send you those episodes directly.

And I think we can all think of probably three or four of that type of, of character.

Uh, and Smiley, of course, George Smiley, was probably the, the original in that particular, uh, archetype.

Right.

And I'm trying to move away from that.

MI5, the British Security Service, was founded in 1909 in the nervous run-up to the First World War and its motto, Regnum Defende, defend the realm.

James Bond and George Smiley are the fictions, but this is the real thing.

Thanks to the extraordinary declassified files held at the National Archives, we can now at last read over its shoulder.

My two guests today have done exactly that with unparalleled access and turned it into a remarkable book.

So the forward to the book is written by Nick Harkaway.

He was a novelist and the son of John Le Carre.

Now writing as George Smiley himself, spy fiction and MI5 have always kind of fed off of each other.

Having lived in the real files, how close does the fiction get? What do Le Carre and Fleming get right? And what do they get badly wrong? And both of you could answer this one.

I kind of know where I want her to go personally, where I want Emma, how I want her to mature.

When I started writing the Emma books, my whole idea was Smiley at 27, who was George Smiley from the John le Carre novels.

We first meet him when he's in his 50s and he's bitter and he's beaten and he's angry.

And that's a beautiful character.

I didn't read that.

It has nothing to do with George Smiley.

It's about a British foreign office factotum who goes to Germany to investigate the disappearance of an officer from the British embassy.

And it's various kind of...