New Sandman

“Karla is not fireproof because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.”

John le Carré had a way with words. And he was the great chronicler of the skulduggery of the Cold War. I know that he wrote novels not histories, but I would say to him what the French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote to the English novelist Samuel Richardson, “history is often a bad novel, and the novel, as you write it, is a good history”. 

Though Karla is a woman’s name, behind that code stands a man. In the world of George Smiley, le Carré’s extraordinary creation of an outstanding British spy, Karla is the shadowy, dangerous, effective senior figure in the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, where he heads Directorate XIII, also known as the Karla Directorate. He’s Smiley’s antithesis in the series of novels that have come to be known as The Quest for Karla, and it’s Smiley who swore to take him down if he could.

Alec Guiness as Smiley, Patrick Stewart as Karla
A chance meeting before the Quest for the KGB man had even started

We never learn Karla’s real name. But we do learn a nickname, given him, it seems, by General Vladimir, the courageous Russian defector to the British who, even in old age, continues his battle against the KGB chief. The nickname is ‘the Sandman’. You may know the fairy tale, rather a sinister one, in which the Sandman arrives to scatter sand in your eyes so that you fall asleep.

The story behind the nickname is told in Smiley’s People.

“Why did Vladimir call him the Sandman?” Smiley asked, knowing the answer already. 

“It was his joke. A German fairy tale Vladi picked up in Estonia from one of his Kraut forebears. ‘Karla is our Sandman. Anyone who comes too close to him has a way of falling asleep.’”

A way with words, as I said. Gently, almost by implication, le Carré gives us the portrait of a sinister figure. Because this Sandman, of course, puts you into a sleep from which there’s no waking up. 

It seems the KGB was good at producing Karlas. 

One of them, as deadly as le Carré’s creation, has risen to the top of the country he once served. Vladimir Putin is far from being a perfect copy of the original Karla. But he certainly shares some notable characteristics with him.

He has the same deviousness as Karla, so you never know what he’s doing or planning. The difference though, is that when you finally find out what he’s up to, you’re not always left feeling wry admiration for his ingenuity. On the contrary, you’re often left wondering what on earth he was thinking of, since far from improving circumstances he complains about, so many of his decisions make them far worse.

He was terribly upset about the possibility of NATO stationing US missiles on Ukrainian territory, at a time when there were none, and no plans to send any. After invading the country, however, he now faces a Ukraine bristling with such missiles.

He also reacted furiously to NATO expansion that brought the alliance’s borders far too close to his own. But the invasion of Ukraine ensured that Finland joined. As a result, NATO has added 1340 km to its joint border with Russian territory. 

Most self-destructive of all, he complained about NATO when the organisation was at a low ebb, with numerous European countries losing their enthusiasm and the then US President, Donald Trump, publicly declaring it obsolete. The Ukraine invasion has reawakened the alliance and given it a new dynamism. Why, even Trump now says it isn’t obsolete any more.

Putin lacks Karla’s intelligence. Equally he lacks his subtlety. His subtlety is that of an armoured division crossing your border, a gunman standing on your doorstep, or a missile slamming into a crowded theatre.

What he certainly shares with his fictional counterpart, though, is his Sandman qualities. People getting too close to him tend to fall asleep. And their sleep isn’t the kind you wake up from.

Boris Nemtsov had been Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and an early supporter of Putin as President. But, as he saw civil rights being rolled back and the state returning to its old authoritarian ways, he spoke out against him. In February 2015, hours after calling for people to join a march against Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, into Crimea, he was shot four times in the back. Putin announced that he would take personal control of the investigation into the killing, but no one has ever been brought to justice for it.

Alexander Litvinenko was a former agent of the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB. Living in London, he believed for his safety, in 1999 he denounced the service, then run by Putin, for a series of bombings in Russia that prepared the ground for military action against Chechnya later that year. That action was the springboard for Putin’s rise to the presidency. In 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium by visitors from Russia and died three weeks later. The UK authorities have identified two agents from the security service as suspects for the murder, but Russia refuses to extradite them. Putin even decorated one of them for services to the motherland.

Anna Politkovskaya was an outstanding investigative journalist working for one of the few truly independent newspapers in Russia, Novaya Gazeta. She became increasingly convinced that Putin was turning Russia into a police state, and said so in her book Putin’s Russia. She wrote extensively about the abuse of Chechens during the particularly brutal and dirty war the Russian authorities waged against them. In 2006, she was shot dead in a lift in her apartment building. Five men were later convicted of the murder, but the judge said it was a contract killing and at least $150,000 of the fee was paid by someone whose identity remains undiscovered to this day.

This is just a partial list of the people who’ve been put to sleep when they got too close to the Sandman. And now, of course, we can add one more.

A latter day incarnation of Karla
Putin, the new Sandman (l), and Prigozhin, the latest to fall asleep

If Putin is none too subtle, Yevgeny Prigozhin showed what it is to part company with subtlety altogether. His Wagner group has mercenaries in various African nations, where they’ve been accused of murder and torture. In Ukraine too, Wagner soldiers are believed to have taken part in the murder of civilians though, there, it sadly seems that regular Russian soldiers were engaged in the war crimes with them. Not a lot of subtlety among any of this sorry crew, to be honest.

Well, Prigozhin also got too close to the Sandman. And now a plane crash has closed his eyes. He mounted an aborted coup against Putin, which he should never have started unless he was going to see it through: a frightened cobra is even more dangerous than a resting one. A surprising length of time has passed since that bizarre uprising, but it’s possible that the two-month gap was just what it took to lull Prigozhin into an entirely unjustified sense of security.

Putin may not be as clever as le Carré’s Karla. But he’s certainly as dangerous. And, sadly, he too often gets his way.

Like Karla, Putin’s a fanatic, even if he’s only a fanatical Putinist. Let’s hope that Smiley’s view of Karla applies to him too, and his lack of moderation will lead to his downfall. And that we can find a Smiley to make it happen.