The writer David Cornwell, who used the nom de plume of John le Carré, has died in Cornwall, England at the age of eighty-nine. He was a writer of Cold War thrillers which were read across the globe and which inspired many films. He painted an ambiguous world filled with complex characters whose activities were never seen through a black and white lens - ‘good men serving bad causes and bad men serving good’ as the writer Timothy Garton Ash described.

Here is an interview I conducted with him in November 2008 on the publication of his book A Most Wanted Man, in which the man in question appears in Hamburg one day, a strange, thin young Russian-speaking fellow claiming to be a Chechen Muslim. His father was a man who secreted millions of Soviet rubles into a secret account at a private bank. Add a young passionate human rights lawyer, a 60-year-old Scottish banker with a cooling marriage and an estranged daughter, a German spy and his female sidekick who have been in the game for a long time, and the hunt for the young, thin man in order to connect him with a super terrorist network. Well, that doesn't do the book or the plot justice, but it's a thriller and you'll have to read it for yourself to get the thrills.

The transcript appears below:

It's my great pleasure to speak to the author John le Carré, the nom de plume for Mr David Cornwell who joins us on the phone from his house in Cornwall in England. Welcome to The Book Show David.

David Cornwell: Thank you very much, thank you.

Ramona Koval: You've said for years that you think that people take your books too seriously, that they're not necessarily blueprints for the intelligence networks as they operate, and that you're a storyteller and you make things up. So I thought we should begin with the idea of a story. What is it about telling a story that gives you pleasure?

David Cornwell: I'm very glad you began that way because it is, to me, the most important thing. I want to be like Ford Madox Ford, I want to be sure that the person I'm talking to, the person I'm telling the story to is sitting tight in his chair and is going to stay there. I don't think that any message that I have to impart is going to get over unless I really can tell a compelling story. In this case I did want to use the contemporary background of the terror scene. I wanted to raise the issue of how much we need to be afraid and what we are giving up in protecting ourselves in what I begin to feel has been an exaggerated threat, and I wanted to get into that.

I always begin with a central character that I can identify with. In this case I had a kind of amiable fellow, a Brit, a banker who was roughly based on someone I knew in Vienna 45 years ago, a kind of dear, sweet Scottish guy, no stranger to the bottle, who was always trying to persuade me to open a numbered account with him. It was, you know, 'You and me, old boy, we'll just keep it to ourselves, no authority needs to be involved here.' And then what he really wanted was my friendship, my affection, I think, not my money. So I had him, so to speak, as a secret sharer from the start.

But I also had an amazing piece of luck. I was in Hamburg, I wanted to write the story in Hamburg because Germany is, so to speak, on the cusp of giving up the civil rights which Britain has long given up in the so-called war on terror, and I thought Germany was a very interesting blueprint for the moral dilemma that we're in. I was in Hamburg on the anniversary of 9/11 2001, the fifth anniversary. I was invited to meet a man who had been in Guantanamo for four and a half years, and had been declared, after less than a year, by both the CIA and the German intelligence service as completely innocent of anything. He should not have been there. He was a German Turk born in Bremen, educated in Bremen, never been outside Germany until he was picked up in Pakistan, as if being in Pakistan was itself a crime.

He'd just been released, and I sat with him for a couple of days and listened to his story. A big, big, physical fellow, very, very powerful, and to think of him being caged up...he was kept in Guantanamo effectively for four more years after he'd been found innocent by his interrogators and by the respective judicial systems, but nobody would have him back. The Germans didn't want him back, the Turks wouldn't have him, and so it went on. The guards didn't know he was innocent and he received the same treatment everybody else did.

Murat Kurnaz sort of put me in mind of a young Chechen group that I'd stayed with in Moscow when I was researching an earlier book which is set partly in the North Caucasus, and there was among that group...there were fairly lonely, frightened kids, very much taking refuge from the extremely racist atmosphere that pertained in Moscow in those days and indeed still does. You could almost be arrested for looking like an Asian. There was this one kid who was half Russian and half Chechen. The Chechen did not trust or respect him because he was half Russian, and it operated the other way round too. He was alienated but proud, and for love of his mother, a very devout Muslim.

So I had these prototype characters washing around in my head, and as the story began to come together I pulled them out of the green room, as it were, and put them on stage. It seems to me to be how it happened.

Ramona Koval: You set it in Hamburg. It's a city that you once lived in and worked in. I'll come back to that in a second, but one of the characters says something very interesting about Hamburg, saying, 'Hamburg smells right to the wrong people, a guilty city making amends for past sins.' And this is to do with the fact that why would some terrorist cells actually decide that Germany is the place to go to do the plot before they flew to 9/11. Could you talk a little bit about that whole sense...I mean, Germany is a place that you know, you've been a German scholar, tell me what is it about Germany at the moment that is the right place for the wrong people?

David Cornwell: First of all, Hamburg is a character in the book and this man was really speaking to that character. It's a character because it's had an extraordinary history. It's kind of done everything and kept it to itself. It was a Napoleonic colony for a short time. After WWI it became a communist-run city state. In 1933 it was taken over by the fascists. There were around 20,000 Jews living in Hamburg in 1933 and there were less than 1,000 living there in 1945. Hamburg also took a terrific hammering, an unspeakable hammering in 1943 from the allied forces' bombings. More people died in one week than died in Nagasaki later; 45,000 people in one week.

And then in a great kind of burst of new liberalism after the war, Hamburg became the spiritual home for the Baader-Meinhof Gang. That was absolutely weird, and they all settled there, Ulrike Meinhof and her boys and girls, that was her spiritual home. And then it turns out that Mohamed Atta and his fellow conspirators worshipped their savage god in Hamburg and plotted the assault on the Twin Towers from there.

My question was, is there something about now the almost guilty liberalism which Hamburg was exhibiting which sent out signals of excessive tolerance, if you will, to these groups? I said that I think Hamburg is loved for the wrong reasons, and this is a reference to the extremely uncomfortable life that many Germans live in relation to the Arab world, that there are some, not a huge number but there are enough Arabs who feel the Germans did the right thing about the Jews. And that is of course an awful and embarrassing thing the Germans live with, but it's also, in the amoral world of intelligence, it's a useful tool for the recruitment of Arabs by Germans. So that was the background.

You asked me what I think of Germany now. I think first of all it's probably the best democracy in Europe, and that includes my own country. It has the best constitution, written after the 1945 war by very wise people who didn't ever want it to become a very centralised country, which means it got a bunch of capital cities and it also means that each part of Germany, each state is responsible for its own security, and in turn produces the most frightful muddle when it comes to trying to organise a national homogenous security service.

Ramona Koval: I think it's said now with all these different security groups, they're all fighting the same enemy; one another.

David Cornwell: I think we tend to forget what turf wars are fought between intelligence services according to whatever target is there. In my own country at the end of the Cold War there was an absolute bloodbath of a turf war between MI5 and MI6 and Special Branch and the police about who would get the Irish target to deal with. And so it goes on. In this situation, in Germany, what you've got is a kind of building site of an intelligence structure which is never going to be finished, that the struggle between central control and regional control will continue all the time. And having established these little separate individual security services scattered around the country, you've also established people who are extremely keen to protect their turf.

Ramona Koval: The story, as we said, is set in post 9/11 in the war on terror, and as one of your characters, Bachmann, says, 'There's a big difference between fighting the Cold War and fighting radical Islam. The rules had changed, our problem was we hadn't.' What are the differences, do you think?

David Cornwell: There are many. The Cold War that was fought as we remember it now, the Cold War that was fought in Europe was in effect a European war and it was fought between people of Christian tradition; whether they were communists or not, that's where they came from. And there were, at least in my very limited experience of it, there were ground rules of a sort. We were not, for instance, fighting people or in conflict with people who were prepared to die instantly for their cause. We weren't in conflict with people whose idea of victory was to kill as many of us as they could. We were in conflict with people whose culture, even if we didn't share it, we understood. It seemed to us to have a rational basis.

In the present war on terror we did just about everything wrong that we could have done, the affected countries did everything wrong. They turned an ideological war, if you like, into a regional one. You can't make war on terror, terror is a technique on battle, it's a tactic which has been employed from time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine operations against terrorists, that's quite a different matter, and that must be done and vigorously, but actually to operate intelligence networks against the Islamist terror is terribly difficult because they don't communicate the way people communicated during the Cold War, that is to say by the signals that you might break. They don't have a central command and control structure as we would understand it. Therefore you can't penetrate at the top and home to find out what's going to happen on the ground. They operate in tiny cells, and without central planning many of the cells go off on their own. So again, it's very hard to intercept the instructions or to anticipate an act of terror.

But I think we really shouldn't exaggerate this too much in our minds. If I think of the worst times in Britain when we were being blown up by the IRA and other extremist bodies, I think the general feeling then was in order to remain a decent democracy you've got to take some stuff on the chin. You can't simply dismantle your democratic system because then you're playing the enemy's game. You've got to hold still and take it and do whatever you can to stop it, obviously.

I think in this case, the present war on terror, because we're so unfamiliar with the motivations behind the people we're dealing with, we're much more afraid than we should be, much more apprehensive.

Ramona Koval: David Cornwell, is it true that, as one of the characters in this book says, 'Western intelligence has failed to recruit a single decent live source against the Islamist target'?

David Cornwell: I think that there's every evidence that is the case. In the case of Iraq itself of course it was always going to be frightfully difficult to recruit anybody close to the top who would survive because Saddam had occasional culls of his own closest nearest and dearest, and your man or woman could go down with that without anybody realising that he was your asset. Beyond that, I think we simply were not prepared. There's ample evidence that the CIA didn't have anything like the requisite numbers of Arabic speakers, it was very low on experts in the areas we suddenly became interested in.

The whole target of Islamists became so dramatically alive that...people before 9/11...many people were saying 'this is going to happen' but the preparations were not realistic and the recruitment policy was not realistic in anticipation of these things happening. It was only afterwards that there was this huge scrabble to get people together. I have no particular access to these organisations but the gossip that reaches me is that nobody had anyone of any value. There were plenty of little potentates we could put in at one time or another, and we did that, but this was not the same as having ears on the ground telling us what was going to happen.

Ramona Koval: David, how prescient of you to set part of your story in a private bank.

David Cornwell: I must say, that was sheer luck. I did of course have a feeling by then, I think as most of us did, that the banking system was altering and all those chichi little banks tucked away in the city and tucked away around European cities, private banks, they were likely to fade away. Because it suited my man, the banker himself who was 60 years old, last in the line of family banking, it suited me that this ancient Scottish institution should be gently going into the ground. But we'd had private banks going under by then. We'd had Barings Bank going under in Singapore, and a bunch of other small private banks that used to basically make their money out of insider dealing and they made money for ancient institutions and smart families. And that just faded away and I thought it was nice, so to speak, to catch that wave and put my banker on it.

Ramona Koval: One of the characters talks about the clichés of private banking and says, 'So, if you didn't happen to like living in a state of unremitting siege, the odds were that private banking was not for you.'

David Cornwell: Yes, that's right. I think if you deal in private clients, as private bankers do, very rich individuals is what they like best and preferably people who don't know a lot about financial dealings, people who say, 'Here you are, look after it, get me what you can, I need 8% this year.' And in fact those individuals become extremely clamorous. While on the one hand pretending they know nothing about finance, they keep a close eye on the stock exchange prices. They're very cross when they seem to be losing money, and very insistent. Those were things at least that people in the private bank world told and they were uniform to the several people I spoke to from that world.

Ramona Koval: Your private banker has a very cool marriage to Mitzi, his second wife, and you've written about these kinds of marriages before, I suppose so did Graham Greene in a way. Is this what happens in this world, nobody is terribly in love with their wives?

David Cornwell: I suppose it's...you're absolutely right, it's a strain that I identify in my books now, and sometimes it's not until you set up a relationship like that that you realise either you're repeating yourself or you're saying something about yourself unconsciously. So I have to say of myself that I came from such a dysfunctional background that I had to kind of learn love and learn parenthood, I had to invent the wheel a bit. So I'm one of those awful British middle-aged late developers. I suppose that particular experience of life leaves you with a kind of nostalgia for the unlived or wasted years. There's something of that in me, and I suppose there's also something of the romantic in me.

In the particular case here we have three people, we have a triangle really of three people who are in one way or another sizing up to live each other. Issa, this poor immigrant who comes into Hamburg has an impossible vision of marrying his civil rights lawyer. The young civil rights lawyer is an object of impossible love for the 60-year-old banker. And so we move around the clock with nobody ever quite connecting, nobody consummating, however it should be, the love they feel. I think also for me there's always that strain in the stories about where you draw the line somehow between love and duty.

It's usually...someone like George Smiley, for instance, was really in love with the service, that was the secret service, and kept for himself also a kind of pure and hopeless love for his...actually in his case for his wife who constantly deceived him. But beyond her, above her in the sky, if you like, there was always the romantic vision of how it should be. I think in the case of, for example, the banker Brue and his affection for somebody half his age, there is a kind of love of the past, a memory of love that he never fully exorcised, and of course he loves her also because in his imagination she's something of a clone of his estranged daughter.

Ramona Koval: I'd like to tell you who my favourite character in your book was, and that's...Gunter Bachmann is my favourite.

David Cornwell: I like him very well. I think you'd find him in the middle ranks of any decent aggressive intelligence service. He's a good field man, he likes to have his ear to the ground. He lives, as those people do, in a state of constant tension with his masters, he doesn't like the desk side of the work. In this case it seems to me that he makes the right perception about the operation that they're conducting against this suspected Islamist terrorist and financier of the terror network who is the ultimate target of the story. I think he wants to make the right play, he wants to obtain this man and woo him and relieve him, if you like, of the dark side of his life, and at the same time score a huge intelligence dividend. And he sees that in tactical terms as a considerable expert, he knows he can get there, he knows he can do it. And then the problem is of course that he falls foul of the system and he's not able to carry this through.

He reminds me a bit of Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. In other novels I have three or four...also Israeli guys, there's a Mossad man in The Little Drummer Girl who is also comparable with Bachmann, really good field men who can roll up their sleeves and do the work on the ground, are not naturally violent, are not naturally psychopathic, and are not at all comfortable at the committee table, they're just very good practitioners of the necessary process of finding out intelligence and doing it however you can; by manipulating people, by penetrating organisations and so on. And that was his skill.

I think deep down also Bachmann stands for something else in the story, that while on the one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find and we penetrate it, we frustrate it, we find out about it. On the other hand, in his own head he sees a much bigger need for a political solution, and the two things must go hand in hand in his own mind. But the higher he goes up the scale of the intelligence bureaucracy the less sympathy he meets with.

Ramona Koval: I think listeners can see how real these people are to you. You seem to know these characters from every angle. Do you feel that, that you really have to know them well before you write about them?

David Cornwell: Yes, I feel that of course. I also feel I've reached a very good age for writing. I'm terribly old but I am now...after 50 odd years of writing, I know exactly what instruments I've got in my orchestra, and I think I can go much more quickly, much more directly to character than I used to be able to. And I love doing that. It's very like drawing. When you start drawing you make thousands of lines on the page and gradually as you get older and wiser you reduce all that to simple, effective lines, and that's what I've been trying to do these years. And at the moment I think I have it...not for long. I mean, I can do the arithmetic, I'm 77, but I just felt writing this book that I was in command of my stuff, which isn't always the case, but it was this time around.

Ramona Koval: While we're talking about what your maturity as a writer has brought you, does each story require a completely different telling, even when you're writing thriller again, or are the structural issues that you have to think about, are they now intuitive to you?

David Cornwell: Even with really complex plots like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, I have never done the writing school stuff of making a chart of where I'm going. I think I've always gone into a book with a character or two and a premise, an idea of how it would proceed. Usually the premise is about conflict; who's after who, who wants whose patch or whatever it may be. And then at the other end of the story...it's all fog for a while, but the other end of the story there's a little clear patch, and it's like a film screen, and what I'm seeing, what I imagine, is the final frame of the story in film terms. That is, how the reader will feel if he gets up out of his seat and walks out...the flavour of the book overall as represented in the final scene. And apart from that, I flounder. I do a lot of re-writing, but these days less re-writing, and I can never go forward until I feel my back is completely secure. But I do, as it were, deliberately flounder and I try and make the characters drive the scenes and tell me which way the book is going.

Ramona Koval: In The New Yorker magazine some weeks ago you write an intriguing article about your time as a spy in the 1950s in Hamburg. You haven't really commented on that time really up until now. Why did you revisit that time at this moment?

David Cornwell: Well actually, Ramona, it was about my time in military intelligence when I was in the British occupying army in Graz, in Austria, and that was right back in '49, '50. In terms of the piece we're referring to, it tells the story of the first time I carried a gun.

Ramona Koval: That's the one, yes.

David Cornwell: And I made a fool of myself. Yes, I think that I kind of allowed myself the 50-year rule, and anyway nobody is identifiable in the story, and I told it as comedy, which it was. Part of intelligence work is just terribly funny because all the time it's so close to cock-up, and people make all the human mistakes, which I made in that story. The man I was accompanied by who got me into this ridiculous operation was himself a fantasist, he just made up a story and involved me in what was supposed to be a big clandestine operation. Those things are much more about the flavour of the intelligence world.

I would love to write about that one day, the level of cock-up, the amount of false information you buy, the wonderful charlatans who would take you to the cleaners with pieces of information. We saw that in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. There were two wonderful stings. There was the yellowcake in Niger which was supposed to be the fissile material that somebody was obtaining for Saddam so he could blow us all up. It was all nonsense.

And then the other one presented by Colin Powell at the United Nations, the celebrated United Nations presentation was about the mobile bio-labs which were the invented children of an Iraq defector's imagination, as told to the German intelligence authorities in Munich and then conveyed to the Americans who promptly took off all the health warning labels and gave the stuff to Colin Powell telling him it was absolutely 'slam dunk' and he had to accept that. And he presented all this fake information as the perfect truth, the pure wine of intelligence, and it was nothing of the kind, it was junk.

So if I'm ever going to come clean about spying, it wouldn't be about the heroic deeds of the great, it would be about the extent to which this huge bureaucracy, this secret bureaucracy reflects the follies of the ordinary world.

Ramona Koval: But we're desperate to believe it though, aren't we. We really want somebody to be in charge and to really know what's going on.

David Cornwell: Yes, I'm afraid it's a bit like religion in that way.

Ramona Koval: So you write, 'Never mind how many times they trip over their cloaks and leave their daggers on the train to Tunbridge, the spies can do no wrong.' And do you think this is why America prosecuted war in Iraq?

David Cornwell: I think it's how we persuaded ourselves, yes. My personal view, which I have not kept to myself, is that if we'd had real intelligence, which was available but it wasn't popular and people weren't processing it and passing it up properly...if we had had that most difficult kind of intelligence that says 'there's nothing there', that takes real courage to say, and if Tony Blair had not thought he could walk on the water between Europe and the United States and somehow bring everybody together, if Tony Blair had at that time had the courage to mobilise the dissenting people, of whom there were very, very many in the whole of Europe, for instance, I think we would never had gone to war in Iraq.

It was a combination of confecting the intelligence we wanted in order to persuade ourselves and anyway the fact that the decision had been taken before the fake intelligence was assembled. I think the real truth is Blair went over there to America, listened to the talk, listened to his ambassador, concluded they're going to go to war in Iraq anyway, and thereafter there was a struggle to put together the legal justification which we now know really did not exist. It was a very, very strange time, and I think when tempers have cooled and historians get to work on this, they will take a very different and very negative view of the Anglo American manoeuvres at that time.

Ramona Koval: Finally, what's your sense of the new Obama administration?

David Cornwell: Well, I am cautiously...with all the caution of my age, I am deliriously happy that he's been elected. I think that if we take the very worst case and he's not a great president, I think the symbolic effect of having black African Americans in the White House is something that the world was desperately craving for. I think it takes the heat out of all sorts of racial prejudices. I think that in terms of, if you will, if there is such a thing, of global psychology, the rest of the world is going to be a more comfortable place. If you think about Africa, if you think of the Middle East, I believe that the perception there also is that somehow things are going to lighten up now, that the stock positions that were driven really by white middle aged men in power are going to give way to something new and more positive.

So at the moment, with all the caution that I know we should be exercising and all the recognition that Obama's choices now are about who he's going to have to disappoint first, with all that aside, I still think it's an absolutely wonderful moment in history. It's a moment that should have taken place at the end of the Cold War when the wall came down, but then there was no great statement. There was no voice which said 'this is a moment in history when we can redesign the world'. But now we do have, I believe, a great orator and a very serious deeply, deeply intelligent man, and we have actually have chaos, we have financial chaos, we have discredited banking systems...these things can actually be constructive aids for reform in all sorts of areas because in many areas we're building from the ground up. In that sense I think Obama has exactly the right atmosphere, exactly the right conditions in which to exercise the change he promises.

Ramona Koval: Well, David Cornwell, thanks so much for being on The Book Show today.

David Cornwell: Thank you very much.

Ramona Koval: The book is called A Most Wanted Man. It was written by David Cornwell, and he uses the nom de plume John le Carré, and it's published in Australia by Hachette Livre.