John le Carré’s latest collaborator is taking me deep undercover. ‘Imagine we’re agents in a foreign country, and we think their security services might be on to us,’ says Charles Cumming. ‘You still need the old-fashioned way of spying – chalk marks on the walls, signals on balconies, what’s known as Moscow Rules. You have to suspect everything. Maybe there is a microphone in that lampshade. See that woman over there who was pretending to be a mother with her baby? She is actually a surveillance officer.’
As we’re in Cumming’s swish London members’ club, I’m pretty sure the only agents in here are with the actors, musicians and film-industry figures around us, but the 47-year-old Scot knows his stuff. Cumming has just published his ninth espionage thriller, The Man Between. He is also part of the four-strong team working on the sequel to the 2016 television adaptation of The Night Manager, based on le Carré’s 1993 novel featuring Richard Roper, an utterly amoral arms dealer who comes into conflict with British intelligence.
Elizabeth Debicki as Jed Marshall in The Night Manager. Le Carré didn’t write a sequel
Charles Cumming (left) is writing a follow up to the TV adaptation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager, in an unprecedented move for the legendary author
Cumming was himself approached by British intelligence in his 20s. ‘I was at dinner at my mother’s house,’ he says. ‘An old friend of my late stepfather was there and we got talking. Shortly afterwards, a letter arrived and I began my interviews in London.’ The courting was worthy of a le Carré novel. ‘I was invited to an ornate Regency building a stone’s-throw from Buckingham Palace and asked to sign the Official Secrets Act,’ he says. ‘The atmosphere was formal. One of the documents I was shown said, “Officers are certainly not licensed to kill.” I don’t remember feeling particularly nervous, but I didn’t think I was cut out for that kind of work. My dream was to be a novelist.’
Cumming had entered the world of espionage, and although he didn’t become a spy, he remains well connected: ‘There are people I can talk to.’ The experience led him to write his first book, A Spy By Nature. The eight that have followed include the acclaimed Thomas Kell trilogy A Foreign Country, A Colder War and A Divided Spy (which he’s developing as a film with Colin Firth), and now The Man Between. It’s set in the near future, when a terrorist group is attacking right-wing journalists and populist politicians.
This newspaper declared Cumming ‘the master of the modern spy thriller’, but for any British espionage writer, there can only ever be one true master. ‘Meeting le Carré was a wonderful moment,’ says Cumming. ‘He was incredibly charming, funny and interesting. For a man of 86, he’s very strong, very quick and very sharp. He’s still writing brilliantly, at an age when most men have put on their slippers.’
Le Carré didn’t write a sequel to The Night Manager which, in the past, would have been a problem. ‘Le Carré has never allowed one of his stories to have a [film or TV] sequel that is not based on a novel,’ says Cumming. ‘So our job is to write a season that’s going to be even better than the first one, but also stay faithful to the tone of the world that was created by le Carré and to the characters.’
Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pike (with Debicki) in The Night Manager. ‘All I am permitted to say is that le Carré has given his blessing to the project,’ Cumming says
And what of those characters? We know Tom Hollander’s Corky, killed by Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), won’t be coming back. Hugh Laurie’s Roper was last seen in the company of some very disappointed arms buyers, but you’d have backed him to talk his way out of it. Olivia Coleman’s Angela Burr will have finished breast-feeding by now, and Pine and Elizabeth Debicki’s Jed have a romance to finish.
‘All I am permitted to say is that le Carré has given his blessing to the project,’ Cumming says. ‘The four of us in the writers’ room are sworn to silence. Some characters that the audience know and love will be returning, other will not. The locations will be sumptuous, the plot as thrilling and as thematically complex as a le Carré story should be. We are all aware that the bar has been set very high in terms of audience expectations. The challenge facing us is to meet those expectations, hopefully even to surpass them.’
His novel The Man Between is set in North Africa, London and Spain, and, like the TV version of The Night Manager, there is a luxury yacht and an unfeasibly beautiful woman who fascinates the main male protagonist. Christopher ‘Kit’ Carradine is a 36-year-old writer of espionage novels, who jumps at the chance when a stranger invites him to undertake an assignment for British intelligence. But things are not what they seems, and Carradine finds himself in a world where no one can be trusted, least of all the British secret services, and an old enemy – the Kremlin – is working behind the scenes.
lec Guinness as George Smiley. ‘Meeting le Carré was a wonderful moment,’ says Cumming. ‘He was incredibly charming, funny and interesting’
Le Carré built his career on the rivalry between the spies of Moscow Central and the ‘Circus’ (MI6) in London. Today, even after the Skripal poisoning, the threat of an Isis-style terror campaign remains the abiding fear of British intelligence, but the old rivalry never fully fades. ‘There is still an institutionalised hatred of Russia within MI6, and MI5 to a certain extent,’ says Cumming. ‘It’s a hangover from the Cold War and a consequence of the way Putin and his cronies have been conducting themselves in the past few years. The Litvinenko assassination, then what happened to Sergei and Yulia Skripal, it puts everybody’s backs up.
‘It’s like two alpha male gorillas wrestling for primacy: it doesn’t have very much to do with keeping you or me safe; it’s more to do with pure spying and who is better at the game of spying.’ In the new book, the Russians are willing to employ an extreme level of violence. ‘You could say that there is a sadism in the Russian character,’ says Cumming. ‘Not in the behaviour of ordinary Russians, but at an espionage level. Control, torture, disappearing people and threats to family.’
Are we being naive to think that Western intelligence services don’t do bad things as well?
‘I don’t think the Americans are as squeaky-clean as we are in that respect,’ says Cumming. ‘But I don’t think they go after their own and I don’t think we’ve ever gone as dark as that. To my knowledge, MI6 doesn’t bump people off. If they are in a conflict zone and they feel that someone needs to be removed, they would get the SAS to do it – but that would be in a war scenario. If we had an MI6 officer who defected to Moscow or China, we wouldn’t bump him off on the Moscow Metro – and the Russians do that. But then we don’t have as many defectors going the other way.’
There was a time when defectors did go the other way – most famously the spies Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, all three educated at Cambridge and public schools.
‘Historically MI6 has employed boys from boarding-school backgrounds,’ says Cumming, who was at Eton with actors Damian Lewis and Dominic West (‘Tom Hiddleston was a bit younger than me.’) ‘Public school breeds an ability to survive and navigate your way through different social circumstances. But the intelligence services are no longer packed with Old Etonians; few people now have my sort of background.’
Technology has changed the nature of surveillance, he says. In The Man Between, Carradine is in the field in North Africa and receives instructions from his handler by Snapchat, because messages disappear after being read. ‘It’s very hard to get off that grid,’ says Cumming. ‘Even if we both left our phones downstairs in reception, so there was no possibility that our phones were being used to record our conversation, the metadata still puts us in the same location. If I’m not supposed to be talking to you, then we’re bang to rights. Number-plate-recognition technology, iris scanners – it all makes things very difficult for people.’
It has made things harder for Cumming too. No longer can he simply have a character adopt a new identity. ‘In the old days, you would go to East Berlin in disguise as an accountant,’ he says. ‘And if somebody was questioning you about that you would say, “Here’s the phone number for my company.” Somebody would ring up and there would be a backstop ready in London. “Yes we know Mike, he’s been working for us for years.” Now, there’s LinkedIn, Facebook, online banking records…’
So, is le Carré still relevant in the age of high-tech espionage? ‘Absolutely. People said he was finished when the Cold War ended, but I think he’s proven that things like Moscow Rules are eternal. If you need to give me a piece of information, you could give it to me in a brushed contact, so you and I walk past each other in a bar and somehow you put a memory stick in my jacket pocket.
‘My understanding is that a lot of the Isis-type guys use those techniques, because telephones and the internet are so penetrated that they can’t guarantee security of communication. If we were passing information without meeting, then we would have a pre-arranged dead letter box, in a vase for example. That kind of spycraft still works.’
As we get up to leave I notice the woman with the baby is watching us. ‘Remember,’ says, Cumming. ‘Moscow Rules.’
‘The Man Between’, by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins), is out now in hardback, ebook and audio
Clockwise, from far left: John le Carré; Elizabeth Debicki as Jed Marshall in The Night Manager; Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pike (with Debicki) in The Night Manager; Alec Guinness as George Smiley; Charles Cumming