The bureau: outstanding. And a tribute to a master

In the Acknowledgements to his novel The Tailor of Panama, Le Carré included a charming nod to the masterpiece among tales about peddlers of false intelligence:

Without Graham Greene this book would never have come about. After Greene’s Our Man in Havana, the notion of an intelligence fabricator would not leave me alone.

This kind of link between one fine work and another is always a pleasure to meet. Intertextuality, we used to call it, in the days when I was a student of literary criticism, and hours of amusement it gave us to track it down.

That makes it all the more gratifying to see a TV series that in turn takes a bow to Le Carré. Especially so when it is imbued with the spirit of Le Carré’s spy novels at their best, by which I mean the ones about the Cold War or, to include The Little Drummer Girl, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What’s perhaps unusual about this Le Carré spirit, and indeed the tribute itself, is that the series is French. Indeed, it’s probably the best TV produced by the country for many years.

Le Carré is a French name, but the author behind it – David Cornwell – is as English as they come. On the other hand, The Bureau as the series is called in its English-subtitled release on Amazon, really is French – Le Bureau des Légendes in the original. It tackles the central themes of Le Carré’s best spy stories: deception, betrayal, even backfiring loyalty – and above all and at length, the labyrinth of conflicting imperatives and spiralling tension into which the double agent blunders.

The Bureau: remarkable filming, a fine story, great performances

In place of the Cold War, the series focuses on the Syrian Civil War and the battle against ISIS, keeping it right up to date.

It handles all its themes skillfully. Occasionally, it seems to drift into implausibility – “how could she have known that?” I found myself sometimes wondering, or “why would he have done that?” – only to present a perfectly rational explanation a few scenes later, when you learn a new piece of information about what lay behind the character’s behaviour.

Nor is there any lack of humour, even, on occasions, of the laugh-out-loud kind. I enjoyed the moment when a character described the immediate future in terms of an extended metaphor: a bumpy ride, turbulence ahead, hoping for a safe landing, but with the potential for a crash. Just as I was beginning to feel a little airsick, the woman he was talking to, looking slightly nauseous herself, asked whether they could perhaps continue the conversation without the aviation references.

Excellent performances from a star-studded cast only enhance the experience. Mathieu Kassovitz gives a mesmerising portrayal of the poker-faced spy who never shows the emotions that deeply affect him. It’s worth watching Sara Giraudeau going through her exhausting training as a spy, coping with the difficulties of living outside anything like a normal human existence, and above all, on the run and mastering the terror of being hunted. Jean-Pierre Darroussin is outstanding as the ageing spy chief who’s never been in the field himself and suspects his colleagues think less of him for it; he doubts his own qualities but realises that he’s right in suspecting the presence of a mole and has to track it down. But these are only the most remarkable performances by a cast none of whose members turns in a bad one.

At all times, The Bureau is gripping, tense, compelling viewing. Ideal for a series binge if you have the time and energy. With a storyline that holds your attention, makes you beg for more and never lets you down. 

And what’s particularly surprising is that it achieves all this with minimal violence. What little there is fits the plot perfectly and carries the story forward. It’s never gratuitous or out of place.

What about the tribute to Le Carré?

That, or rather they, come in season 2. The first takes the form of the spy chief coming to terms with his growing suspicion that there is a double agent at work in his organisation. He retreats into his office, relying on the assistance of only a small number of collaborators, sworn to secrecy. He has a list of names, one of whom must be the double. Feverishly, in isolation, and suspected by others, he sets to work to narrow down the list and find the rotten apple. Anyone who knows and loves Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will recognise the parallel with Control working against the clock and wrecking his health as he tries to unmask a mole.

The second tribute to Le Carré is even clearer. Both seasons of the series use a curious but effective device: from time to time, we hear a voiceover from the protagonist, explaining what he has done and why he did it. A diary or a confession? There comes a moment when we see how he started on this narration and, in both seasons, there is enough time left to show us why. That takes us to a semi-conclusion, semi-cliffhanger for the next season. It’s a neat ploy and highly effective.

In season 2, the narration is in a letter to the protagonist’s daughter. Just as in A Perfect Spy the story is told through the letters Magnus Pym writes to his controller, his wife and to his son. Another attractive resonance between masterpieces.

Above all it underlies the way The Bureau itself fully lives up to its predecessor. Eric Rochant has given us an outstanding spy tale. And more than that, he’s given us TV series creation at its best.

Well worth watching if you haven’t already seen it.

Friends spying on friends: as Obama says, we all do it

John Le Carré is the outstanding writer of spy novels of the Cold War, and one of his best came unbidden to my mind in the middle of the febrile, spook-filled atmosphere of the Edward Snowden scandal this week.

Peter Egan as Magnus Pym
in the excellent BBC adaptation of the Le Carré masterpiece

Do you know A Perfect Spy? If not, I can’t recommend it too warmly. To give you a small taster, it contains what must be about the most upfront pickup line you’ll ever read. A Czech interpreter, who we later discover has more to her than meets the eye – and she has plenty to meet the eye – asks the protagonist Magnus Pym:

‘You want I give you Czech lesson on Saturday?’

When he tells her that he would like that very much, she continues, severely:

‘I think we make love this time. We shall see.’

The driver of the car they are travelling in nearly takes it into a ditch.

The novel charts the progress of Pym from his childhood with his father, a professional embezzler, into a series of betrayals of increasing severity, until he gravitates into British intelligence and the greatest treason of them all.

At one point, the CIA are closing in on him and Grant Lederer, the man leading the hunt, attends a meeting with senior agency operatives at the US Embassy in London. He announces with pride that he has just had a phone call, in the Embassy, from his wife in Vienna, where she has spotted Pym’s wife being contacted by a known Czech spy.

Sadly, Lederer does not receive the congratulations he expects for this dramatic news. In the first place, involving his wife was a breach of his orders for the operation against Pym. But there's a second reason for the dissatisfaction of his superiors, which emerges at the end of the discussion. One of them asks:

‘Next question, what the hell do we tell the Brits and when and how?’

And another replies:

‘Looks like we told them already. That’s unless the Brits have given up tapping US Embassy telephone lines these days, which I tend to doubt.’

That last line came back to me as I followed the row over the latest stage in Snowden’s revelations. It seems that the US has its agents gathering intelligence on many of its ostensible allies. They spy on the French. They spy on the European Union, a dear old institution which surely has barely a secret that can’t be found out in a Brussels bar or that’s worth knowing anyway. Worst of all, they spy on the holy of holies in Europe today, the Germans. 

Everyone’s scandalised.

Obama’s response has been highly instructive. 

‘Every intelligence service, not just ours, but every European intelligence service, every Asian intelligence service, wherever there’s an intelligence service, here’s one thing they’re going to be doing: they’re going to be trying to understand the world better and what’s going on in world capitals around the world from sources that aren’t available through the New York Times or NBC News.

‘If that weren’t the case, then there would be no use for an intelligence service. And I guarantee you that in European capitals, there are people who are interested in, if not what I had for breakfast, at least what my talking points might be should I end up meeting with their leaders. That's how intelligence services operate.’

Yep. Spy agencies exist to spy. Obviously, first and foremost on their enemies but, hey, why not on their friends too? After all, a country may well be an ally, but it’s a competitor as well, and it’s always worth knowing what the competition’s up to.

So I’m sure Le Carré’s right. British intelligence must routinely bug the US Embassy – I really can’t believe they’d pass up such an opportunity.

So why all the anger? 

Some of it’s synthetic, no doubt. Some of it’s routine: you have to protest if someone’s found to have been spying on you. But I wonder if some of it’s not just plain envy. The US has such technology, and such a well-resourced intelligence community, they’re much better at spying than the others. 

Isn’t the problem that the Germans, the EU and above all the French, are just annoyed as hell to discover that US spies on them far more effectively than they can spy on the US?